Subspace Radio

Part 2 of my guest spot on The Shabcast, hosted by my friend Jack Graham (of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph's Parodox) is now live!

Jack points out in the description and I second, that this is a bit of a disjointed one and mostly consists of him encouraging me to randomly leap from topic to topic in between audio and connection problems. I believe this installment looks more in-depth at my history with Star Trek, particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, my interest in aesthetics as a nonverbal language and philosophy and my concept of fanfiction as the way culture reappropriates its oral myths and histories that have been stolen from it by capitalism. Included in this is my gender studies influenced reading of slash fiction and my redemption and historical contextualization of the Mary Sue concept in regards to the 1970s female-driven Star Trek fandom. Dirty Pair of course remains a significant topic of conversation, primarily because I can never, ever shut up about Dirty Pair.

A few notes…

• The concept of the Singularity Archetype and the Glorified Body I use extensively throughout my recent Vaka Rangi work is pretty fundamental to how I read Dirty Pair, and is derived from the rhetoric of Jonathan Zap (in particular these two essays). As I discovered it rather late in the writing of volume three, it’s something I definitely need to flesh out and make a bit more central and clear in the revised edition. Zap has a tendency to be a bit too teleogical and reductive for my personal tastes, but I find his basic arguments and intellectual framework compelling.
• For those of you who didn’t see my original essays on the Mary Sue concept and slash fiction on Vaka Rangi, I’ve provided links for you all here. Furthermore, my essay on the first Dirty Pair novel, The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair, outlines how I feel Kei’s narration plays with the Mary Sue archetype and how her relationship with Yuri simultaneously inverts and elevates the structure of slash.
• If you missed part one of this interview, you can catch up here if you want.

You can listen to our conversation here. Thanks again to Jack for having me on, and to Kevin and James from Pex Lives for being so kind as to host us.

Subspace Radio

Hi Everyone!

My friend and colleague Jack Graham of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph's Paradox recently started his own podcast series The Shabcast (graciously hosted by Kevin and James from Pex Lives, another superb podcast y'all should check out. Jack and I were on this past December), and he was kind enough to invite me on as a guest this month!

Ostensibly, Jack wanted to interview me about this blog, but me being me the conversation inevitably spun off in a number of different directions. Fair warning, this is over two hours, most of which consists of me never, ever shutting up. And this is just part 1. In all seriousness though, we had a delightful conversation I was honoured and privileged to be a part of.

Some of the things we talked about were, naturally, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dirty Pair and how I fell into all three and came to be writing about them for the Internet. We also talked about my interest in Polynesian wayfinding, my training in cultural anthropology, philosophy and science and technology studies and my conception of reading derived from me reading someone else reading Jacques Lacan. There were also brief mentions of non-Dirty Pair anime and manga and how Japanese media was introduced to Western audiences, such as Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Urusei Yatsura, my other loves Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Project A-ko and my uneasy ambivalence about Sailor Moon.

A few housekeeping notes: This being a completely unscripted and largely directionless conversation, I caught myself after the fact in a few factual slip-ups. I’m not sure how much of this made it into the show, but I figured I should cover my bases either way:

• I believe at one point I called “Masks” from the seventh season of The Next Generation “Brannon Braga at his finest”. That’s a bit misleading-The episode was, of course, written by Joe Menosky, though Braga was, I believe, a producer and staff writer at the time.
• When I’m talking about Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, I’m refering to the Takarazuka Revue.
• Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers was written by David Turnbull. You should all still read it, though.

You can listen to the show here. Thanks again to Jack for the opportunity and to Kevin and James for hosting us! I hope all the listeners get as much a kick out of hearing this as I did recording it!

Star Trek in Sound and Not Vision

Hey all,

Back in June, I was a guest on the Pex Lives! podcast with my good friend Jack Graham (of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph's Paradox). The subject at hand was tacitly the Doctor Who movie starring Paul McGann, but we very quickly spiraled tangentially off into a great conversation that had perishingly little to do with Doctor Who. The details largely escape me now, but I seem to recall at least touching on topics as disparate as Sliders, Homicide: Life on the Street, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Melora", Super Sentai, capitalism and domesticity, capitalism and Pop Christianity, the difference between high fantasy and science fiction, the aesthetic of non-modern naturalistic generativity in sci-fi, Dirty Pair, Gothic cathedrals, fascism vs. anarchy, the origins of mainline fandom histories, radical politics and detournement in fanfiction and criticism, pop culture as western oral mythology, and Toho's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game for the NES.

Sadly, the recording and editing process was marred by a myriad of technical problems that can really only be described as "we fucked up big time", so the episode hasn't actually been able to see the light of day until now. But it's been entirely reconstructed and pieced back together thanks to the valiant efforts of the Pex Lives! boys, so I can finally share it with you all today! You can download or stream the podcast here or here, and you too can marvel as I stammer incoherently while people far more articulate and cogent than I say very clever and thoughtful things!

Big thanks again to Kevin and James for the opportunity, and a happy, albeit terribly belated, anniversary!