WHO OWNS KAFKA?

Judith Butler, London review of books 2015
56 min, 49 sec

Judith Butler’s lecture looks at the conflicting claims of ownership of Kafka’s original writings, and considers the way states appropriate the works of writers for nationalistic purposes. Read the full lecture here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-b…​

The legal battle between the state of Israel and the German literary archive over the question of who owns Kafka’s work has prompted Israeli lawyers to argue that Kafka is an ‘asset of the Jewish people’ and hence, of Israel. At stake is Kafka’s own complex cultural formation as a Prague Jew writing in German who alternately praised and disavowed Zionism. Equally troubling is the assumption that Israel represents the Jewish people and that Kafka might be conceived as an ‘asset.’ Judith Butler proposes a reading of Kafka’s parables that quarrels with both sides of the legal case, seeking recourse to stories and fiction as a way of illuminating the limits of law and the diasporic (and messianic) alternative to Jewish nationalism. Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The lecture was delivered in the BP Lecture Theatre at the British Museum in January 2011 as part of the London Review of Books Winter Lectures series. ABOUT THE LRB Since 1979, the London Review of Books has stood up for the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay in English. Each issue contains up to 15 long reviews and essays by academics, writers and journalists. There are also shorter art and film reviews, as well as poems and a lively letters page. A typical issue moves through political commentary to science or ancient history by way of literary criticism and social anthropology. So, for example, an issue can open with a piece on the rhetoric of war, move on to reassessing the reputation of Pythagoras, follow that with articles on the situation in Iraq, the 19th-century super-rich, Nabokov’s unpublished novel, how saints got to be saints, the life and work of William Empson, and an assessment of the poetry of Alice Oswald.

INTERVIEW

Frank Zappa, MTV, USA
1984, 18 min 59 sec

MTV is helping with that syndrome because all video outlets and that’s basically the focus of the music today as whether or not what you do is video acceptable let’s let’s look at it realistically if a person likes music that is not enough in the 80s you can like music and you can play music you can sing you can dance you can have all these things going for you but you’re not even going to get to first base unless you have science fiction hair and diagonal zippers on your clothes forget it you go to a record company to make a deal and the first thing they’re going to do is look at your bubble isset a picture if they don’t like that they won’t even listen to the tape in fact they don’t even care about the tape because they can always get Trevor Horn to fix it and so after Trevor is fixed it and they’ve approved your publicity photo then you get the video treatment and everything gets formulated according to the Warner Brothers aesthetic it goes onto MTV and it goes on to any other competitor that hasn’t been bought by MTV yet and the group gets exactly one chance to do one thing and their musical lifespan is in direct proportion to the interest that the audience has in the way they look because the whole thing is based on a visual merchandising so what happened to music?

HELLO,
LYRICS RECREATED WITH EDITED MOVIES

Matthijs Vlot, Ant1mat3rie/ Mattie Harpes, USA
2012, 1 min 18 sec

Lionel Richie’s song, “Hello,” is the basis of the latest viral video making the rounds on the internet!The short video features clips of various films with actors speaking the lyrics of the song. The editing is genius, playing off of the awkward timing of Lionel Richie’s original music video. You’ll want to watch it more than once !!

1.ET 2.Bride o f Frankenstein 3.Braveheart 4.BeingJohnMalkovich 5.Back? to the future 6. Magnolia 7.ToyStory3? 8.Schindler’sList 9.JailhouseRock? 10.AnnieHall 11.TheBirds 12.Avatar 13.Lawrence of Arabia 14. Enter the Dragon 15. Big Lebowski 16. Airplane 17.NakedGun 18.Goldfinger 19. LA Confidential 20.Borat 21.YellowSubmarine 22.From Dusk till Dawn? 23.Back to the Future 24.TheMatrix 25.NakedGun 26.Singing in the Rain 27.PlanetOfTheApes 28. Goodfellas 29.Back to the Future 30.Ben Hur 31.Lethal Weapon. 32.Lawrence of Arabia 33.Easy Rider 34.Schindler’s list 35.Inception 36. Shaft 37.Rambo — First Blood 38. Shaft 39.A Few Good Men 40.Glengarry Glen Ross 41.Taxi Driver 42. Total Recall

HEADLESS DRUMMER

David Shrigley, 2012 1 min 06 sec

David John Shrigley OBE (born 17 September 1968) is a British visual artist. He lived and worked in Glasgow, Scotland for 27 years before moving to Brighton, England in 2015.

YEARS OF WORK PAID OFF

Pirate Party, RT, USA
2009, 2 min 13 sec

Swedens Pirate Party, which wants to legalize internet file sharing, has secured at least one seat in the European parliament. The partys campaign manager Jan Lindgren shared his delight with RT.

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

The Sex Pistols,
2012, 4 min 34 sec

The Sex Pistols famously played on the river Thames in London in 1977 before they were stopped by the police.

COPYRIGHTS

Henry Jenkins, Enterprise Forum, USA
2009, 4 min

Henry Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958) is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education. Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director.  Henry Jenkins, talks about copyrights in the age of the convergence media.

LAWS THAT CHOKE CREATIVITY

Larry Lessig, TED, Great Brittain
2007, 2 min 46 sec 

Larry Lessig, the Nets most celebrated lawyer, cites John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the “ASCAP cartel” in his argument for reviving our creative culture.

ACTA DEFEAT, A HUGE VICTORY FOR ONLINE FREEDOM & DEMOCRACY

Strasbourg, France
2012, 5 min 30 sec

The European Parliament has rejected ACTA, a controversial trade agreement, which was widely criticized over its likely assault on internet freedoms. Supporters of the treaty suggested postponing the crucial voting at the Parliament plenary on Wednesday, but members of the parliament decided not to delay the decision any further. MEPs voted overwhelmingly against ACTA, with 478 votes against and only 39 in favor of it. There were 146 abstentions. Citizen advocacy group founder Jeremy Zimmerman believes copyright laws must be reformed, but not at the expense of the online users. 

INSANE IN THE CHROMATOPHORES:
EXPERIMENT WITH THE SQUID CHROMATOPHORES

Larry Muggerud, Senen Reyes, Louis Freese, Backyard Brains
2012, 3 min 31 sec

During experiments on the axons of the Woods Hole squid (Loligo pealei), we tested our cockroach leg stimulus protocol on the squid’s chromatophores. The results were both interesting and beautiful. The video is a view through an 8x microscope zoomed in on the dorsal side of the caudal fin of the squid. We used a suction electrode to stimulate the fin nerve. Chromatophores are pigmeted cells that come in 3 colors: Brown, Red, and Yellow. Each chromatophore is lined with up to 16 muscles that contract to reveal their color.

Paloma T. Gonzalez-Bellido of Roger Hanlon’s Lab in the Marine Resource Center of the Marine Biological Labs helped us with the preparation.  Research paper