Best Procrastination Ever

GemSimpson
Originally uploaded by gmblac.

Watching famous people become Simpsons characters always made me fantasise about having my own caricature made! So, when I saw Mel's entry today I was inspired to make my own self portrait at last.

Obviously (I'm holding a DVD and a remote), I have to have some kind of relationship with Comic Book Guy. Or with my side hair parting, I might be related to Dolph...

I'm thinking of my thesis too: there is an obvious connection to be drawn here with the potential motivations of some film-induced tourists - is drawing yourself as a Simpsons character similar to taking a photograph of yourself at a film location site? As James Preston has written about film-induced tourists:

"these tourists effectively integrate themselves into stories which already have collective capital, recognition, and understanding among their peer group and beyond. They in a way become a part of the film or television programme by visiting the locations where the film has been shot."

Both film-induced tourism and becoming a Simpsons character seem to represent ways of incorporating the spectator into the visual spectacle (and the narrative) of the moving image.

Computer Blues

Well, not computer blues, more like computer black[out]s. The video card on my laptop has died again, and only six months since the CSAA conference fiasco at Fremantle.* Back in those heady pre-back up days, it took over three weeks before I was able to get back to a current draft of my thesis (which ultimately gave me a relatively stress-free Christmas, for a change). This time I'm safe, but while I wait for it to be fixed I am basically in lock-down in the Mac lab at SGS. The Dean's office is being repainted on the floor below, so I think I might also be losing brain cells to the fumes, which might be a reason for why my writing is taking so long, and why it is so wacky. Anyway, now you know where I am if you need me...

* I discovered just after Mel's excellent paper that my own paper for that conference was irretrievable from the dead machine, and I had to give my paper the next day. The result was a long night at my hostel with a borrowed computer and an ancient draft on my pen drive. Oh, and I was also kept company by the bed flea/midge things that covered my arms and legs in bites by the end of the trip.

Deleuze and the Film Tour

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze writes that cinema can "with impunity, bring us close to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world." In this sense, he is writing about the cinema's capacity to allow the spectator to virtually travel, to sit in a movie theatre and allow the moving images before one to allow some kind of mental transportation, the so-called "magic carpet ride" of the cinematic and televisual moving image. And yet with the discursive rise of film-induced tourism at the end of the 1990s as a major new trend in global tourism, one might also argue that the virtual cinematic image can also allow the subject to actually travel, to bring him/her close to the landscapes shown in film, to have the ability to physically revolve around and tread in these spaces. In this type of actual travel, of course, the horizon of the world is brought somewhat closer than in the virtual travel that Deleuze delineates.