Sunday, October 25, 2015

Checklist for #psychedelicmirrors Required Books | English 220 | Professor William Nericcio


Below appears a guide to the editions that are required for #psychedelicmirrors, fall 2016 @ SDSU with Professor Nericcio.  This appears here as a handy guide! YOU ARE NOT required to purchase these books using these links!!!!!

Note that the LAST TWO BOOKS that appear below are NOT REQUIRED and only appear here for reference.  TO REPEAT: MAUS and LA FRONTERA CRYSTAL, in Spanish, are NOT REQUIRED AT ALL FOR THE CLASS!!!!

NOTE ALSO: DO NOT buy the Magnum POP 60s book here from AMAZON--I negotiated you a much much cheaper special rate at the Aztec Bookstore!!!

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race OR Further Visual Culture Adventures in a Optical Vein } repost 3/08

This originally appeared on March 2008 | updated November 2010! {source} | Reposted 4, October 2015.

Eyegiene is the working title of my next book now that I have just finished The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer's Early Works [+] PLUS for Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press--I hang my hat there as an editor when I am not slaving away on this blog, directing my beloved MALAS program, or shilling my book on the lecture trail.

In Eyegiene, I hope to weave together various and sundry visual cultural studies essays that have appeared here and there over the years (my Pee-wee Herman spectacle of masturbation essay; the artif[r]acture/graphic narrative piece that appeared in Mosaic, etc.)--plus others that have never seen the light of day ("Almost Like Laredo") and yet others to be pre-authored here on this blog.

The neologism "eyegiene," recently ripped off by a Euro toilet sanitation company (!), is a theoretical attempt to fuse together various interests and tendencies I have observed and written about with regard to late 20th- and early 21st-century culture. As I have tried to show in these pages, practicing proper eyegiene ("Lorenzo! Turn off the TV; Sofia! Get off that Gameboy) refers to a circuit of scenes, a matrix of spectacles wherein the logic and policing of seeing is meditated--imagine a cultural studies volume that fuses together an obsession for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a predilection for Man Ray's collaborations with Meret Oppenheim, dreams about Frida Kahlo's illustrated diary, and interrogations of Chris Ware's illustrated visions, and you begin to parse the myriad and electric bodies (both bodies of ink and bodies of light) that Eyegiene voyeuristically surveys.

For an example, let us take the case of a Pancho Villa votive candle I purchased at a H.E.B. grocery store in Laredo, Texas:


It is as if two spectral and spacial universes were conjoined in one artifact: first, and foremost, there is the universe of the votive candle in Mexican Catholic and Mexican spiritual culture--there, the shifting shapes of uncanny heated light moving through colored glass conjure the presence of saints, and God, and gods, and Jesuscristo for millions of believers; not for nothing are altars from Oaxaca to Monterrey, from East L.A. to Chicago, adorned with the colored lights of votive candles' orange tongues.

The other universe, also ubiquitous, also very "Mexican," is the cult of the revolutionary--the PatrĂ³n culture of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico is rife with tales of militant luminaries: cult figures with outsized personalities who through a combination of wit, savvy, strength, and luck, change the face of Mexico forever--Emiliano Zapata is one of these "saints," Pancho Villa, aka Doroteo Arango, another.

The syncretic fusion of Catholic spirituality with Mexican revolutionary iconography--not to mention the other "pagan" spiritual traditions of Mexico's rich cultural spaces--ends up on the shelf of a Laredo H.E.B. Proof positive that the gods have a rich sense of humor.

more soon...

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Blaxploitation Chapter in Eyegiene

A key bridge-chapter of Eyegiene delves into the blaxploitation rage in American cinema in the 70s epitomized by Super Fly in 1972 and  Mandingo in 1975--in any event, this is as good a time as any to archive here on the Eyegiene blog this priceless piece of graphic amazingness.