Monday, November 28, 2016

Boiled Leather Audio Hour #56

Election Special
Sean and Stefan discuss the election of white nationalist Donald Trump as President of the United States of America.

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 56

Additional links:
Our Patreon page at patreon.com/boiledleatheraudiohour.
Our PayPal donation page (also accessible via boiledleather.com).
Our iTunes page.
Mirror.
Previous episodes.
Podcast RSS feed.
Sean’s blog.
Stefan’s blog.

4 comments:

  1. Now that was an interesting episode to listen too -
    I hope you addressed the elephant in the room off air ;-)

    But do you see know what I mean with "people re-defining" words all the time? Socialism, revolution - Sean doesn't seem to have the knee-jerk/visceral reaction I was talking about (somewhere else :-), and I doubt that means he wants to change the US into a new CCCP or P.R. China either...

    Star Wars prequels, LotR novels, now Bernie - Sean and I just get it, you know ;-) And we both came out the APOIAF forums - OMG Mimi is Arnold, Amin is Ford theory! (I'm on the Nerd blog now, right ;-))

    By the way where I agree with Sean, with both of you I assume: There is the narrative of the author and the narratives of the readers... People are not more xenophobic because the watch Walking Dead, but maybe people who are Xenophobes find one (more) reason to like actually like that series :-) But as in Video Games, porn, literature etc. There are always more people into the (I subsidize under) "art" than lash out in one way or the other, because the consumer's narratives are their own and as diverse as humanity. Think about religion: you can take the bible literally or you don't. You can take it literally and do nice things, literally and do terrorism, figuratively and do good etc. The reason why "art" is often sexist, racist etc. is not to mastermind those things into us, but because WE (as a society) are all those things - including the artists/creators. The reason why I call it art is to distinguish from the word "culture" which is the entirety of human interaction. Culture is the problem - art (movies, TV, literature, Video games, porn etc etc etc) is not imho. You can make accurate predictions about theories in a book series based on a narrative analysis, sure. Because you try to analyze one person - the author. But the (sad?) truth is that while you can write and/or analyze a perfect narrative, every reader has their own mind. How many people read ASOIAF and think "that's an anti-war book" (which I agree it is [highly likely] meant to be by GRRM) compared to people who read it and think "that's right Ned's an idiot - trust nobody, that's the conclusion" or "damn right, just kill 20 people at a wedding to save thousands at war". Others may like the character of Tywin, even use him as an avatar ;-), without actually sharing his ideology...
    Too often critics that I respect, like AS, who on a regular basis criticize all kinds of art (magazines, video games [btw I'm NOT a gamer], TV shows etc), are having a conversation upwards from the bottom (consumers) to the top (creators) criticizing racism, diversity in general, cis-gender-normatism, sexism etc. But I think we need to have a conversation amongst each others (consumers) to actually change culture to then as a society produces the creators that create art that the new majority now enjoys. Disney doesn't include Rey in their toy collection because of protests - not if they're still convinced that they make more money letting her out than losing money by not including her. If they say "we hear your concerns, apologize and re-consider" it's their bottom-line that already got affected... Every time humanity tried to tell narratives and to put culture into people from the top to the bottom it ultimately lead to terrible results. Human beings will always find a chance to disrupt too broad/closed narratives, because our perspectives and life-experiences are so fundamentally different.

    Life is full of colors, shadows, nuances - others might call that chaos, I call it beauty!

    ReplyDelete
  2. What's wrong with me :-) Blunt misuse of words right at the beginning and 3 little letters missing at the beginning of the fourth paragraph: "where I DISagree with Sean, with both of you"...

    ReplyDelete