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Saturday 26 April 2014

POMO Mix Tape

The Theme for my Mix Tape is football and the songs that I listen to on a match day either out of choice, or because they are played over the tannoy systems at grounds.


Side A



Mr Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra - A song that my Dad introduced me to an away game Vs Watford, I replayed it over and over..
Starman - David Bowie - A track I listened to after Leicester's shock FA Cup win at Norwich, I kept changing the lyrics to 'There's a starman, his name is David Nugent'. Much to my Dad's annoyance
Glad All Over - The Dave Clark Five - Played at Palace every game and in our car to most games
Tom Hark - The Piranhas - A famous goal celebration music up and down the country
L.S.F (Lost Souls Forever) - Kasabian - Used to be played at Leicster pre-match, also featured on aFIFA sountrack
Cigarettes & Alcohol - Oasis - Frequently played at away grounds, most memorably at Bolton away the night we won the league
Kernkraft 400 (Original Radio Edit) - Zombie Nation - By no means my favourite song, but  the tune to the Ryiad Mahrez chant
The Road Goes On Forever - High Contrast - A tune that featured on Match of the Days' goal of the month segment  a few years back
We are the Champions - Queen - Not played very often, but brings back memories of 2009 and last weekend



Side B


Beautiful Day - U2 - Frequently played at away grounds and in our car to most games, also used to be on the intro to Premiership highlights on ITV, in the early nougties
Club Foot  - Kasabian - Played before all home games
Waterfall - The Stone Roses - A song I listen to (as well as the album) on most trips to football
Last Forever - Fenech-Soler - A song that features on this years Match of the Day when introducing the schedule, it grabbed my attention
Pumped Up Kicks - Foster the People - Again featured on Match of the Day 2/3 years ago, introduced me to Foster the People
Hey Jude - The Beatles - Somewhat of an anthem at Leicester City
I Found Out - The Pigeon Detectives - No real connection to football, nonetheless a track I listen to on most matchdays
Be Somebody - The Enemy - featured on ITV's coverage of the FA Cup, leading to my own interest in the track
Chelsea Dagger - The Fratellis - Used to be played after each goal at Leicester and is played at Nottingham Forest every season before kick off, which brings some big memories flooding back









Thursday 6 March 2014

Found Footage - T Rex, Country House

Postmodern Audiences




The impact of postmodern media on audiences and the ways in which we think about texts.

How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world?

• have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?

• has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?

• in terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text. Think here about a film like Moulin Rouge where the plot is in some sense irrelevant to the overall impact of the film.

• has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts


• in its ‘waning of affect’, has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see. They are desensitised and unable to respond ‘properly’ to suffering and joy.


• has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to

Postmodernism and Audience Theory

Two commentators have developed some interesting ideas about postmodernism and audiences.


Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’ (157)

‘VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in relation to the moving image.’


Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to capture it.’


Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’


Postmodern & Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry.


Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy.

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms.