Journal articles on the topic 'The Floating Opera'

The repurposed metaphor “floating worlds,” from Japanese woodblock prints, highlights political junctions when transcultural American and Japanese dance collide and reconfigure. The first “floating world” is an “Ethiopian Concert” presented by Commodore Matthew Perry's Japanese Olio Minstrels in celebration of The Treaty of Peace and Amity (1854). The second challenges nostalgic Western notions of an “Old Japan” through the aggressively westernized Tokyo School of Music, where modern dancer Michio Ito trained for an opera career. Third, a post–World War I Peace Festival in Washington, DC, which included Ito's “eccentric dances,” documents an early Japanese diaspora within mainstream America. The final “floating world” conversely locates transcultural America outside of the United States through Ito's “Spirit of ’76” spectacle, staged for Occupied Forces following his unjust deportation to Japan. I apply analytical concepts of transcultural historians to imagine a global past that is less recognized, but no less nuanced, than the global present.

Творчество Луиджи Даллапикколы 1950-1960-х годов отмечено активными экспериментами в области метра и ритма. У композитора сложилась концепция так называемого плавающего ритма (schwebender Rhythmus). В статье данное понятие интерпретируется как связанное со свободной метрикой, ритмической нерегулярностью, безакцентностью. К комплексу приемов, способствующих нарушению метроритмического равновесия, автор относит вуалирование сильных долей, использование внутритактовых и межтактовых синкоп, добавочной длительности, полиметрию. Принципы композиторской работы с ритмом демонстрируются на примере отдельных сочинений 1950-1960-х годов: Музыкальной тетради Анналиберы , вокальных циклов Песни на стихи Гёте и Пять песен , концерта для виолончели с оркестром Диалоги , оперы Улисс . Даллапиккола синтезирует достижения старых мастеров полифонии и композиторов новой венской школы. Он автономизирует звуковысотные и ритмические каноны, оперирует длительностями как конструктивными элементами, работает с ритмическими ячейками как синтаксическими единицами, ищет эквивалент звуковысотной инверсии в ритмическом параметре путем обращения долгих длительностей в короткие и наоборот. Автор проводит параллели между ритмическим мышлением Даллапикколы и ритмическими идеями Мессиана, Булеза, других сериальных композиторов. Прослеживается тенденция к усложнению ритмических структур: Даллапиккола обращается к разнообразным способам числовой организации ритма и наделяет его образно-символическим смыслом. The work of Luigi Dallapiccola of the 19501960s is characterized by active experiments in the field of meter and rhythm. The composer has developed the concept of the socalled floating rhythm (schwebender Rhythmus). In the article, this concept is interpreted as associated with a free metric, rhythmic irregularity, and lack of focus. The complex of techniques mentioned by the author as contributing to violation of the metro-rhythmic equilibrium, includes the veiling of accented beats, the use of in-bar and inter-bar syncopes, additional duration, polymetry. The principles of composers work with rhythm are demonstrated by particular compositions of the 19501960s: Quaderno musicale di Annalibera Musical Notebook of Annalibera, the vocal cycles Goethe-Lieder and Cinque canti, Five Songs, the concert for cello and orchestra Dialoghi Dialogues, and the opera Ulisse. Dallapiccola synthesizes the achievements of ancient polyphony and composers of the new Viennese school. It autonomizes pitch and rhythmic rules, operates with du-rations as constructive elements, works with rhythmic cells as syntactic units, searches for the equivalent of pitch inversion in the rhythmic parameter by converting long dura-tions into short ones and vice versa. The author draws parallels between the rhythmic thinking of Dallapiccola and the rhythmic ideas of Messian, Boulez and other compos-ers-serialists. There is a tendency toward complication of rhythmic structures: Dallapiccola re-fers to various methods of numerical organization of rhythm and gives it figurative and symbolic meaning.

Artykuł skupia się na omówieniu semiotycznej wyrazistości hieratycznych znaczników judaizmu w postaci Menory i Gwiazdy Dawida. Są one z konieczności pozycjonowane wobec ogółu symboliki judaistycznej, jak na przykład semiotycznej obecności Hamsy, która nie jest jednak znacznikiem hieratycznym Analiza opiera się na dwóch (iluzorycznych) przeciwstawnych siłach, które były już również szeroko stosowane do analizy zjawisk językowych: odśrodkowej i dośrodkowej. Ujmując je jako preferencje implikacyjne operujące na badanych obszarach semiosfery, proponuję odpowiednio funkcjonalną i strukturalną kategoryzację badanych znaków. Korpus analityczny do badań został zebrany w różnych krajach Europy i Maroku w latach 2010-2022 i składa się z cyfrowej dokumentacji setek egzemplarzy napotkanych judaików oraz konkatenacji symboli judaizmu w kontekstach pragmatycznych. Dyskusja jest również indeksowana przez kulturową diadę sacrum/profanum. Wyniki wskazują na pewne synchroniczne procesy, którym poddawany jest ten rodzaj znakowości, m.in. proces usilnienia Magen David (kierunek odśrodkowy – dyfuzyjny), z jednoczesną lenicją menory (kierunek dośrodkowy - konfuzyjny, wiążący). Jako próba interpretacji postuluję Gwiazdę Dawida jako pływającą(‘floating’) semiotaktyczną pierwszą.

Maha Appraisal Hits Gas for Eni in Indonesia Eni encountered natural-gas-bearing sands with its Maha 2 well in the West Ganal Block offshore Indonesia. Drilled to a depth of 2970 m in 1115 m water depth, the well encountered 43 m of gas-bearing net sands in levels of Pliocene Age, according to the operator. A production test, which was limited by surface facilities, recorded a gas deliverability of the reservoir flowing at 34 MMscf/D. The opera-tor collected data and samples during the test, to study in preparation of a field development plan for the Maha field. Two additional appraisal wells are planned for the discovery. Eni, along with partners Neptune West Ganal BV and P.T. Pertamina Hulu West Ganal, expect the field to be developed subsea and tied back to the nearby Jangkrik floating production unit (FPU), about 16 km to the northwest. Eni has been operating off Indonesia since 2001. Its current equity production in the region is around 80,000 BOE/D. Shell Sells Out of Philippines Gas Field Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to sell its stake in the Malampaya offshore gas field in the Philippines for $460 million. The major sold its 45% stake in Service Contract 38 (SC38), a deepwater license which includes the producing gas field, to a subsidiary of the Udenna Group, which already holds a 45% stake in the project. The divestment is part of the company’s strategy to narrow its oil and gas operations. The base consideration for the sale is $380 million, with additional payments of up to $80 million in 2022 and 2024 contingent on asset performance and commodity prices, according to Shell. The deal is due to complete by the end of 2021. The Malampaya gas field, discovered in 1991, currently supplies fuel to power plants that deliver about a fifth of the country’s electricity requirements, based on energy ministry data. Equinor Green Lights First Phase of Bacalhau Development Off Brazil Equinor, along with partners ExxonMobil, Petrogal Brasil, and Pré-Sal Petróleo SA, will move forward with a planned $8-billion Phase 1 development of the Bacalhau field in the Brazilian pre-salt Santos area. The Bacalhau field is situated across two licenses, BM-S-8 and Norte de Carcará. The target resource is a high-quality carbonate reservoir containing light oil. The development will consist of 19 subsea wells tied back to a floating production, storage, and offloading unit (FPSO) located at the field. The vessel will be one of the largest FPSOs in Brazil with a production capacity of 220,000 B/D of oil and 2 million bbl of storage capacity. The stabilized oil will be offloaded to shuttle tankers and the gas from Phase 1 will be re-injected in the reservoir. The FPSO contractor will operate the FPSO for the first year. Thereafter, Equinor plans to operate the facilities until the end of the license period. The development plan was approved by the Brazilian National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas, and Biofuels (ANP) in March 2021. First oil from the field is slated for 2024. Wintershall Strikes Gas at Dvalin North An exploration well drilled by Wintershall on its Dvalin North prospect in the Norwegian Sea has encountered a significant gas reservoir. The discovery at Dvalin North is estimated to hold to hold 33–70 million BOE and is just 12 km north of the company’s operated Dvalin field and 65 km north of the operated Maria field. The well also encountered hydrocarbons in two shallower secondary targets, with a combined resource estimate of 38–87 million BOE, making the potential for the field in excess of 150 million BOE. The well, drilled by the Deepsea Aberdeen rig, encountered gas, condensate, and oil columns of 33 m and 114 m in the Cretaceous Lysing and Lange formations, respectively. In the primary target in the Garn Formation, the well found a gas column of 85 m. The license partners, including Petoro and Sval Energi, are evaluating development options for the discovery, which could include a tieback to the Dvalin field. Third Odfjell Rig Tapped by Equinor Odfjell has been awarded a three-well, $40-million drilling contract for its semisubmersible drilling unit Deepsea Stavanger by Equinor. The rig will join sister units Deepsea Atlantic and Deepsea Aberdeen under contract with the Norwegian operator. The rig is scheduled to start drilling the first of three planned exploration wells in the North Sea in February 2022. The wells are expected to take about 4 months to complete. The contract includes continuing options after the initial phase. South Africa Shale Tests Encounter Gas at Karoo Pockets of shale gas were encountered during test drilling in the semi-desert Karoo region of South Africa, according to the nation’s energy ministry. A total of 34 gas samples had been bottled and taken to laboratories after the government’s Council for Geosciences set out to drill a 3500-m stratigraphic hole in the Karoo to establish and test the occurrence of shale gas. “The first pocket of gas was intercepted at 1734 m with a further substantial amount intercepted at 2467 m spanning a depth of 55 m,” said Gwede Mantashe, South African energy minister, during his budget vote in parliament on 18 May. In 2017, geologists at the University of Johannesburg and three other institutions estimated the gas resource in the Karoo was probably 13 Tcf. Earlier, the US Energy and Information Administration estimated the Karoo Basin’s technically recoverable shale-gas resource at 390 Tcf, then making it the eighth largest in the world and second largest in Africa behind Algeria. Seadrill Venture Nets New Drilling Contract Seadrill’s Sonadrill Holding Ltd., the 50/50 joint venture with an affiliate of Sonangol, has secured a 12-well contract with one option for nine wells and 11 one-well options in Angola for drillship Sonangol Quenguela. The $131-million contract before options is inclusive of mobilization revenue and additional services with commencement expected in early 2022 and running through mid-2023. The contract is contingent on National Concessionaire approval. Sonangol Quenguela is the second of two Sonangol-owned drillships to be bareboat-chartered into Sonadrill. The drillship is a seventh-generation, DP3, dual activity, e-smart ultradeepwater drillship delivered in 2019, capable of drilling up to 40,000-ft wells. A further two Seadrill-owned units are expected to be bareboat-chartered into Sonadrill. Seadrill will manage and operate the four units on behalf of Sonadrill. Shell Makes US Gulf Discovery at Leopard An exploration well at the Shell-led Leopard prospect in the deepwater US Gulf of Mexico encountered more than 600 ft net oil pay at multiple levels. Leopard is in Alaminos Canyon Block 691, approximately 20 miles east of the Whale discovery, 20 miles south of the recently appraised Blacktip discovery, and 33 miles from the Perdido spar host facility. Evaluation is ongoing to further define development options. According to Shell, Leopard is an opportunity to increase production in the Perdido Corridor, where its Great White, Silvertip, and Tobago fields are already producing. Meanwhile, the Whale discovery, also in the Perdido Corridor, is progressing toward a final investment decision in 2021. Shell operates Leopard with a 50% working interest. Partner Chevron holds the remaining 50% stake. Shell Could Leave Tunisia in 2022 Shell informed Tunisian authorities in May it will hand back upstream concessions and leave the country next year as it turns its focus to renewable energy, according to a Reuters report sourcing a senior official in the country’s energy ministry. The license in question is the Miskar concession in the southern city of Gabes. The operator has also requested the early hand-back of the Asdrubal permit, which expires in 2035. Recent reports suggest the operator may be looking for the Tunisian government to extend its permit on the field under more favorable terms ahead of its planned departure.

SUMMARY Old Japanese, the language of 8th-century texts, frequently displays voicing dissimilation of certain consonants in successive syllables, a phenomenon sometimes (but incorrectly) deemed to have been sporadic, but now understood to have operated according to a rigid pattern of regular phonological constraints ('Lyman's Law") strikingly analogous to Grassmann's Law in Indo-European and Dahl's Law in Bantu. Evidence is offered in this paper, chiefly through the analysis of twenty-seven Japanese-Altaic etymologies (and mostly published for the first time), that argues for interpreting this Old Japanese phenomenon as a direct inheritance from Proto-Altaic, hence also as a further example of a specific variety of deeply-embedded phonological-historical rule variously termed 'floating', 'persistent', or 'permanent' in the recent literature, i.e., as a long-standing internal rule inherited by Japanese from Altaic, but until now recognized solely in the surface manifestations through which this rule was externalized in our Old Japanese texts. RÉSUMÉ Le vieux japonais, la langue des textes du VIIIe siecle, montre souvent la dissimilation du voisement de certaines consonnes dans des syllabes consecutives, phenomene qui parfois (mais a. tort) a ete juge sporadique, mais qui est maintenant entendu d'avoir opere selon un mo-d¸èle rigide de contraintes phonologiques regulieres (la 'lois de Lyman') qui est analogue, d'une facon saississante, aux lois de Grass-maim (pour 1'indo-europeen) et de Dahl (pour le bantous). L'article fournit de 1'èvidence, surtout a travers 1'analyse de 27 etymologies japonaises-altaïques (dont la plupart sont publiees ici pour la premiere fois), en faveur d'une interpretation selon laquelle ce phenomène du vieux japonais represente un heritage direct du proto-altaique, d'ou egalement un exemple supplementaire d'une espèce specifique d'une regie phonologique historique profondement enfoncee qui a ete appelee, dans la litterature recente, 'flottant', 'persistant' ou 'permanent' — en autres mots, comme une règie interne heritee par le japonais de 1'altaique, mais qui n'a ete reconnue que dans ses manifestations de surface par lequelles cette règie a ete exteriorisee dans nos textes du vieux japonais. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Das Altjapanische, d.h. die in Texten aus dem 8. Jahrhundert ver-wendete Sprache, zeigt häufig die Dissimilation bestimmter stimmhafter Konsonanten in aufeinanderfolgenden Silben, ein Phanomen, das manchmal (jedoch zu unrecht) als sporadisch angesehen wurde. Heute jedoch weißt man, dafi dieser Erscheinung ein festes Muster aus regelmafiigen phonolo-gischen Zwangen zugrundeliegt ('Lymansches Gesetz'), das den Gesetzen von Grassmann (fur das Indogermanische) und Dahl (fur die Bantuspra-chen) auffallend analog ist. Gegenwartiger Aufsatz liefert den Nach-weis — hauptsachlich durch die Analyse von 27 japanisch-altaischen Etymologien (zum großten Teil hier zum ersten Mal veroffentlicht) — daft dieses altjapanische Phanomen als direktes Erbe des Proto-Altai-schen anzusehen sei, von daher als ein weiteres Beispiel für die spe-zifische Vielfalt tief verwurzelter phonologisch-historischer Regeln, die zeitweilig in der jüngeren Literatur wechselnd als '(an der Ober-flache) schwimmend', 'persistent' oder 'permanent' bezeichnet worden sind, d.h. als ein schon seit langem vom Japanischen dem Altaischen er-erbten Gesetz, das bisher nur als eine Oberflachenerscheinung angesehen worden ist, durch die diese Regel in unseren altjapanischen Texten zum Vorschein gekommen sei.

Recenti innovazioni riguardanti la documentazione della performance e i new media hanno rilevato l’importanza della documentazione del percorso di vita di questo tipo di opere. Per opera complesse come The Floating Museum di Lynn Hershman Leeson questo vuol dire considerare l’opera come un ibrido assemblaggio formato da documenti, record e documentazioni storiche e dalle loro rielaborazioni nel corso del tempo.

In a recent "Arts & Leisure" feature in a national Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail (5 June 1999), music critic Robert Everett-Green muses on the invention by the pop music industry of Andrea Bocelli as an opera singer: "call him an airborne virus or a gift from God ... . He is the voice you are most likely to hear while waiting for a double latte." The pop sentimentality industry fast-tracked Bocelli (a pop singer who "sounds" operatic) and created a global entertainment product. In a masterful stroke of high pop spectacle, the holy trinity of musical melodrama joined together -- Bocelli and Céline Dion gush out David Foster's "The Prayer", the theme for the movie Quest for Camelot -- to create an exquisite pop moment. The massive reach of the mainstream; the resonant power of vocal turgidity and excess; the pop diva who never met a song she couldn't oversing -- this is the pop often neglected in critical forays into the nature of the popular that search for the active and the participatory dimensions of popular culture. Yet pop both plunders and perpetuates popular culture; it contains and dramatises the social possibilities of popular culture, and at the same time, spreads out like a great theme park of trivia. Let's pick through the trash. If nothing else, the contemplation of the "question" of pop is an enterprise which often begins with the issue of redemption for popular culture. Even the cultural populist wrestles with the anxiety that much of what we understand as "pop" in culture constitutes the detritus, the ephemera, a repository of the trivialities of society in all of its contemporary moments. The best critical insights into the nature and substance of popular culture (studies in cultural geography and perspectives on history and collective memory, for examples), recognise that what they are considering, describing, and analysing in the spaces and experiences of the popular is at the very least deeply and irrevocably contradictory. The cool, renegade, and enormously creative cultural excursions and general messing about of turntablism and drum'n'bass, for examples, are democratic, active, even "heroic" by some critical discourses, where, say, the maudlin "pop diva" is forgettable at best, and unworthy of an analytical encounter at worst. There is a haziness to the concept of "pop", and more broadly, "popular", and the definitional defiance among the numerous and varied theorists of this energetic practice and/or genre of cultural form and production produces a rather decentred, if not indeterminate object of study. Bill Readings's critique of Cultural Studies offers the relevance of analogy here. Readings notes the "second moment" in the progress of Cultural Studies (around 1990), and the publication of a number of works at the time "that seem to mark the acquisition of professional disciplinarity of Cultural Studies". His excavation of these works reveals a characteristic theoretical element or two -- the suspicion of "the exclusionary force of certain boundaries: female/male, north/south, center/margin, high culture/low culture, western/other, heterosexual/homosexual" (97) -- and some of the authoritative antecedents of these theories against exclusion (Williams, Foucault, Gramsci, Hall, and others). Yet he notes that the striking characteristic of Cultural Studies is the thinness or even absence of theoretical definition or specificity -- "how little it needs to determine its object. Which does not mean that a lot of theorising doesn't go on in its name, only that such efforts are not undertaken in a way that secures the relation of an observer to a determinate set of phenomena or an autonomous object" (97). There is then, a frustration in providing an account of what it means to "do" Cultural Studies, or, more glaringly, what exactly the promised political interventions of Cultural Studies are in the context of hazy objects, floating themes, and sketchy "projects", all of which are products of the declared refusal by Cultural Studies to submit to definitional constraints. Pop suffers from a similar indeterminacy in its object of study, but interestingly because its tends to be over-defined rather than under-defined. Figuring out the object of study in pop is not unlike attempting to parse the object(s) of study in Cultural Studies -- a frustration ultimately, but for very different reasons. Pop is a universe of "anything and everything", and incomprehensible not because it is conceptually challenging (like a universe), but because its geography stretches across so much cultural space. In critiques, pop takes on the torque of the critic, a necessary strategy to somehow delimit its space, and make it graspable, if not meaningful. Encounters with pop (as in "pop art" and "PoMo pop") mine for signs of life among the trash, and have come up with a heartbeat or two on occasion. This geography of trash is in need of some attention. For conceptual guidance in this task, or at least for some respite from the arguments about the "projects" and "interventions" of pop and popular culture, I turn to Don DeLillo's seminal critique of media, consumerism, and the bizarre dislocations and bewildering drift of contemporary social life in his 1985 novel, White Noise (a book that should be required reading for undergraduate courses in media and communication). Murray Jay Suskind, an ex-sports writer and émigré from New York City has come to University-on-the-Hill in Blacksmith, somewhere in middle America, and has assumed his position as visiting lecturer in the Department of American Environments. He becomes a kind of participant-observer and quasi-family member in the household of Jack Gladney, the narrator of the novel and Chairman of the Department of Hitler Studies at the university -- a field he invented in 1968. Murray expresses his desire to establish an "Elvis Presley power base in the department of American Environments", to "do for Elvis" what Jack has "done for Hitler". Murray is engaged in a debate with his students on the true substance and significance of television, and the media-saturated Gladney household serves as a laboratory. Murray argues that the medium is a "primal force in the American home ... a myth being born right there in our living room". Murray elaborates in a conversation with Jack: You have to learn to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens up ancient memories of world birth, its welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students, "What more do you want? Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of the darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. 'Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.' The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust. (51) His students disagree -- television for them is "worse than junk mail", it is "the death throes of human consciousness". Murray, however, finds vindication in the Gladney home where the children live lives of total consumer/television immersion to the extent that they eat, think, speak, and dream according to all things televisual and all things commercial. Jack and his wife Babette are fearful of TV, its "narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power", and Babette has developed a strategy to "de-glamorise" television for the good of the family by instituting a family ritual of watching television en masse every Friday night. Mostly numbed or bored, the family occasionally engages in the strangely pleasurable and thoroughly grotesque activity of watching catastrophes: "we were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advance lava". The family found itself wishing for more with each disaster on the screen, something more sensational, "something bigger, grander, more sweeping" (64). The popular life as depicted by DeLillo is gripping in its familiarity. It is a life that unfolds around and within the television screen; a life that unfolds beside chemical dump sites and industrial waste zones, where toxic fallout produces glorious sunsets as well as fruit that is bright and burnished and always appears to be in season; a life that unfolds in supermarkets and malls where shopping is automatic, somnambulant, and strangely comforting; a life grounded in, structured by, and rationalised within consumerism, media, and omnipresent technological forces that produce everything from dark and insidious pharmaceuticals to an airborne toxic cloud; a life in which families are fragmented and destroyed by the very institutions and pastimes (Disney World and shopping) that declare and promote the support of families and their "values". There is a refrain that emerges like some unconscious ritual chant in the novel, a refrain that has no context or exposition, and that moves through and around the dialogue and the text like a persistent advertising jingle that refuses to quit one's head: Dacron, Orlon, Lycra, Spandex Mastercard, Visa, American Express Leaded, Unleaded, Superunleaded And when children dream, they dream in the consumer-unconscious. Jack hears his child mumbling something in her sleep, and leans closer to hear. She says, "Toyota Celica". The utterance transports Jack, an utterance that was "beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform" (155). The brand name has come to have sacred resonance, supreme, transcendent, the stuff of dreams. This is a fiction about suffocating distractedly under the sheer weighty banality of popular trash. It offers a portrait of all of us deep in the commercial media swamp, flailing about in the flotsam and jetsam of all things commercial and popular. DeLillo's narrative moves towards its dark conclusion as the malevolent force of the toxic cloud brings the certainty of death in uncertain ways. The apocalyptic moment is evidenced by the sudden rearrangement of goods on the supermarket shelves. "Older shoppers" panic: "they walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they'd seen the Cream of Wheat" (325). DeLillo's version of life as we know offers some compelling signposts. Mainstream trash -- much of pop, if you will -- is toxic at many turns, and if not a great cloud, then infinitely more than a mere inflection. We desire that which we despise, and herein is the power of pop as a concept, a way of offering a critical trajectory. In a reflection on Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein once remarked that "What characterises Pop is mainly its use of what is despised" (qtd. in Barthes 22). The pop impulse in art has always suggested a useful ambivalence for addressing the contradictions of life in the maelstrom -- the artist as interventionist/renegade and as commercial hack/celebrity; artful plundering and artless reproduction; the simultaneity of the provocation and the tedium of art in the pop mode; the knowable faux finish of the commercial good look of things and falseness as the raw material of cultural production; bad taste and cool cultural assaults. Pop in art has been accused of constituting a kind of slick cultural finish over cheap particle board. Still, there is a modicum of subversive power in the reversal of values in Pop Art (and in its precursors and its legacies) -- the common, the vulgar, the garish, the boring, the mass produced, the consumable, the pure commodity, all reworked to reveal their common, vulgar, garish, boring, massified, consumable, commodity nature. There have been impressive pop stylistic aggressions carried out against the constipation of high tastes, immutable standards, seriousness, and the ideologies of artistic and cultural legitimacy. Yet at times pop has been blunted by its very self-conscious edge as it engaged in self-congratulations for its irony, pith, and hipness. For some critics, pop in art suffers the malady of most style statements in the postmodern plague -- statements with no convictions since such statements are served up in quotation marks; and a life in quotation marks is no life at all. Pop declares that it is the progeny of commercial technique, marketplaces, advertising, and the commodity environments of junk; and if it didn't exactly spring from the mall, it has come to reside there now between the fountain and the food fair. At its worst, pop appears to be a vaporescent activity, but this perspective neglects some fine and very active pop moments. Pop excursions are important because they can open up creative and critical responses to popular culture. There is pop practice that rises well above empty irony and the business of oversinging (as in some current and brilliant cut-ups and constructed sounds in performance that not only have emotional substance, but are also danceable). Sometimes, out of the trash heap of pop, there are spaces in which popular culture is regenerated. And it is only in this relationship to popular culture that pop matters. References Barthes, Roland. "That Old Thing Called Art." Post-Pop Art. Ed. Paul Taylor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Martin Laba. "Picking through the Trash." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/trash.php>. Chicago style: Martin Laba, "Picking through the Trash," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/trash.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Martin Laba. (1999) Picking through the trash. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/trash.php> ([your date of access]).

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.