On Jons Mind

thenewinquiry:

Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.

by Max Fox

Last Thanksgiving, more men logged on to Grindr, the largest “all-male, location-based social network in the world,” than any other day of the year. Somehow, Grindr managed to tout this fact without mentioning stuffing. On its official blog, the makers of the app suggested a few possible holiday uses for Grindr: You could “find out where your crew is and dance off that gravy,” or, more strangely, you could “ask your neighbors on Grindr” to pick up a forgotten ingredient from the grocery store. No reminders were given to use protection, nor was there even an acknowledgement that Grindr is overwhelmingly used for hooking up for sex.

Grindr is an app you can put on your smartphone to find guys to fuck. It uses GPS-enabled smartphones to triangulate a potential mate’s location in real time, without requiring any eye contact. Since launching in 2009, it has claimed the title of largest gay social network from other contenders, mostly thanks to word of mouth, though it has enjoyed more than a few breathless trend articles. Joel Simkhai, Grindr’s youthfully handsome CEO, is as virginal as his company’s PR. In interviews, he demurs when pressed and insists that all his app wants is to help men find out who nearby is gay. This self-neutering is partly explained by Grindr’s need to conform to the decency guidelines of Apple’s walled garden. The user agreement for Grindr stipulates that no “offensive or pornographic” materials be included in a profile; violation leads to profiles being disabled.

But Grindr’s media celibacy, however, doesn’t stop the app from publicly identifying as a gay concern or from participating in gay politics as popularly understood. In a move that must have caught Chris Hughes’s eye, New York users were greeted with the telephone number of the state legislator for their GPS coordinates when they logged on early last June and were urged to place calls in support of marriage equality. (Other platforms for user-generated content, such as Tumblr, have made similar efforts to push political action, encouraging the idea that brand identification can also be a sort of de facto political subjectivity.) After a few decades of gay politics’ rightward-glancing sanitization — from closing the bathhouses to the current focus on children’s bullying — this development should not surprise anyone. With Grindr we see the conjunction of a gay political identity with a discursive rejection of the very aspect of gayness that is both most definitive and which the app mobilizes for profit: sex.

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thenewinquiry:

L to R: Shawn Spencer (Psych), Dexter Morgan (Dexter), Walt White (Breaking Bad)

As TV assimilates economic realities, a new genre rises: the consultant procedural

By Malcolm Harris

You’re a good cop, but a loose cannon. Give me your badge and gun.

Most Americans could write this scene and probably fill in the rest of the narrative while they’re at it. It takes place in the police chief’s office; he’s the one addressing a rogue cop. The cop is a good cop, he is courageous and resourceful with strong instincts and boundless determination. But the good cop has a problem—the letter of the law, the bureaucracy with its endemic corruption, the miles of red tape—all prevent him from doing his job. In striving to uphold the law, he stumbles over the threshold to the wrong side. The good cop is also a bad cop.

This is the classic antihero and his dilemma as it has played out in movies like Death Wish and Dirty Harry: Is he justified in using disorderly means to achieve orderly ends when orderly means are unavailable? Movies and TV shows have recycled this archetypal conflict so often that it belongs in the pantheon along with “I scheduled two dates for one night!” and “I’m supposed to marry rich guy, but I love poor guy.” As audiences got knowing and jaded, the scripts evolved. Cannons got looser and steps over the line went further and became more deliberate. In the past few years, we’ve seen a series of TV shows in which upping the antihero has crossed its own line, and the old questions about means and ends have ceased to apply. The old cop who chafed at institutional limits has undergone a neoliberal transformation: The result is a new kind of series that we might call the consultant procedural. A derivative of the cop and private investigator procedurals, the consultant procedural starts with some sort of institutional disqualification and follows the central character as he or she ports unmatched professional skills from job to job.

This shift from career-officer protagonists to mercenary contractors is so prevalent that the USA network has built its current identity out of it: Psych, Monk, Burn Notice, and White Collar all straddle the same public-private line between officially sanctioned law enforcement and guns for hire. The pattern has even spread to the “hot doctor” subgenre (“You’re a good surgeon, but a loose cannon. Hand in your scalpel.” ) with Royal Pains. And it’s not just USA, other networks’ recent shows, like The Mentalist, Bones, Lie to Me, Numb3rs, or even the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes miniseries, use the stability of public institutions to provide a consistent narrative base for exciting episodes that take place in the private sector. The new clichéd antihero can work with the government, but he or she must be entrepreneurial above all.

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thenewinquiry:

(via brtsergio)

Hollywood directors don’t produce a film’s meaning any more than McDonald’s managers produce a Big Mac’s taste

By Willie Osterweil 

What is Hollywood? Hollywood is a pool of money, power, and people. Hollywood is a monomaniacal schizophrenic, making films at the voices’ instruction. Each film represents a different voice in its head; some are violent, some frightening, some romantic, some beautiful. But all of them praise the perfect beauty of the commodified image.

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It’s news to no one that film production has changed radically since 1954, when François Truffaut and the writers at Cahiers du Cinéma created auteur theory. Yet film criticism, both academic and popular, usually maintains that the director is the paramount force behind the production of cinematic meaning. Though auteurs exist (e.g. Werner Herzog, Catherine Breillat, Wong Kar-Wai), for the vast majority of entertainment cinema, meaning is determined by a different force: a manufactured zeitgeist, a false urgency sustained by the barrage of advertisement, conversation, and criticism about a movie that creates a sense that films reflect their cultural moment. I call this the “film current.”

What makes so many mediocre, repressive, boring, or stupid films seem worth discussing? Why are movies like Crash, Juno, or Slumdog Millionaire treated as relevant, new, even subversive? The film current. For most major film releases, marketing costs a quarter to a third of the production budget; this money goes to establishing a film’s ubiquity and “cultural relevance” while masking its inadequacies, inviting critics to regard it as a window to the psychological state of the American people, and regard themselves as insightful for doing so.

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