I’m writing this during this 3-hour block for my students to help them with their upcoming final exam. I’m using the time the institution gives me to write myself out of the institution! Sounds more powerful than it is. In truth, I scheduled this extra time myself to help my students. People in academia are either sadists or masochists, and I know which one I am! It’s probably my last time TAing; I’m surprised I even got this position, as I was only guaranteed 4 TA jobs when I joined the program and this is my fifth. If I get another one I think the other grad students will be up in arms, but I will be secretly (yet visibly) overjoyed.

It feels like the only blog posts I’ve mustered the will to write recently have been about teaching, so I promise this is the last one of that. I’m taking on a new optimistic tone! The back half of the blog will be my new normie repersonalization. Am I being ironic? Who knows, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Sincerity has always been harder than critique for me. But I read somewhere recently that whining/complaining used to be a character flaw, never felt more called out on it. I’ll say it’s from being half-German, as if that makes it any less annoying. Anytime I TA, I get too focused on it, and it distracts naturally from thesis work. I think it’s the immediacy of punishment that makes me focus on it, kind of like how it’s hard to work on that creative project when you’re working retail. But it feels good, and the experiences I’ve had teaching over the last 2 years definitely make me feel I want to have some kind of job where teaching is at the center of it. So good at my job that one student made a Reddit post about the excellence of my teaching ability (calling me attractive). All PR is good PR, and now the search engine displays that post when one googles my name.

The course has been on popular culture, finally I got a course that matches my research. And I’m incredibly happy with the direction/ethos the instructor has set, and allowed me to set. Which is: pop culture is a trap in terms of meaning-making. I remember taking this course in undergrad, and while Adorno and others would be in the first weeks, the moment we got to something about representation the tone would discard them for something more superficial, a take one would see on an Instagram story, i.e. Past Lives really spoke to me as an asian american who wants to psychologically torment my white significant other. I think having Debord in the syllabus helps with that, all life now is just a collection of images that we aim to see and model the meaning of life through. Forgot who said it, and it sounds incredibly easy to understand (which I don’t like), but the point is that we used to go to the aquarium to see the fish; now we’re going to the aquarium to take photos of us next to the fish! Totally sounds like something a grandfather would bitch about as he spits into a cup on his porch, as he monitors the non-white neighbours across the street.

In the final week I had a nice discussion with the students on reasons for not doing the readings, as I wanted to affirm the suspicions/beliefs I’ve always had: Fisher’s point on the “depressive anhedonic” subject of capitalism. There’s this section in Capitalist Realism where he’s talking about his students, how he sees them not paying attention, eating high-calorie food, and being distracted with headphones or something that’s not a note-taking app on their laptop. He diagnoses it as the inability to do anything without pleasure: “they want Nietzsche the same way they want a burger.” And apart from the odd striver (which in a class of 60 I can count on one hand), all of them agreed that doing the readings is boring. Why am I even doing a reading on the representation of colonialism in Red Dead Redemption. A point that, when spelled out, you can’t help but sympathize with the student. The reading looks for meaning in a meaningless place. While I tried to ask it in a way that wasn’t too forced so that they would just agree with what I said, it does feel genuine the way almost every student agreed with that. The ones that resonated the most with students were Adorno, Debord, and McRobbie’s piece on the commodification of feminism, all theories/arguments that they could see applied. Not necessarily helpful with job applications though, which really is the main understandable driver for these students.

It’s been tough over the years to teach a week on a reading I sort of disagree with. I feel cognizant enough to understand, however, when it is essential, and perhaps my personal dislike of it is due to the theoretical tradition I find myself in. And I am just an extension of what the prof for the course wants, so that triumphs over almost any problem I do have. But there are times when a reading feels CIA-planted, meant to sow division. Or ones that feel incredibly narcissistic from the academic, meant to signal how good of a person they were for discovering a new type of racism. There was this week a few terms ago where the reading was about this Japanese author, and she was writing about how there was a Vietnamese or Filipino grad student in her PhD cohort, describing how much the student (not her) struggled with catching up to the quality and quantity of the work expected. And it’s spun as a thing where she (Japanese) points out that non-Japanese students face more systemic disadvantages and face prejudice for that. To which the conclusion I feel is like, no shit? Japanese woman discovers Japan is kind of racist? The rest of Asia knows that! She talks about how the other student would always cite older texts, not updated to the current accepted canon of cultural studies literature. And it’s just a meandering ethnographic piece that ends with a sort of appeal to helping these students. It felt incredibly odd to teach, and was used for the course to be something to tell students that when they’re doing ethnography, they shouldn’t be racist. Which of course is like true lmao, but holy shit it’s tough to make tutorial slides for that.

But most students already detest the university, holding politics informed by what Reels they see, secretly harbouring criticisms of the university often lobbed at it by conservatives. Of which I find tend to have more than a kernel of truth in them. But you say the right talking points in class, and you become someone you’re not to get the grade. It’s tough to crack that dissociative block in students to get them to care, but when you do, it’s really rewarding. The goal of every TA should be first and foremost finding a way to get students interested. You have to entertainmentize yourself sadly, as only 3% of your students arrive with an interest in the course (of those 3% half are lying to impress you). A ban on AI for a class doesn’t work because the choice to use AI is informed by the student’s desire. Writing and reading aren’t fun! You can shrug off environmental harms because fuck it, it’s due tomorrow and I don’t want to do the work. But if you can get them to care a little bit, yeah maybe they’ll try to still use AI, but you get them to see the larger picture of who they can be, and what they can achieve. Desire is THE political terrain of any kind of action, I think that’s Fisher’s influence working through me.

But the problem is that half the TA’s are likely using AI for everything from teaching to writing their own dissertation. And more and more of faculty seem to be using AI for their own work and teaching. The focus group tasked with handling AI in the classroom seems to have capitulated to just asking for AI disclosure forms, which do the same amount of success as those question booths you get at the arrival terminal asking if you are part of a terrorist group. If I were in undergrad and cheating, I just wouldn’t sign it! Add some grammatical errors into the text, and get on with my task of getting to 10K ELO on CSGO.

It’s a fucking tragedy that the mishandling of AI within academia is truly the point of no return for any value the university claims to have. As if academia was a bastion of thought anyway, can you tell I’m not planning on doing a PhD? Not like I’d be missed anyways, as there is a long line of people wanting the chance to gamble on the 0.01% odds of finding a tenure-track position, cause what a life that could be!

In perhaps the most pivotal moment in technological history, it seems academia has faltered at the chance to stress your importance and what you stand for. Instead, out of fears of accessibility and pure laziness, you allow AI to be used, and you will face no punishment for it. It’s a spiritual loss, the technoghouls have won! AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, yes, are used in workplaces (for which I can stomach some definite uses for it), but the primary user base is people using it to cheat in high school and university. Every time exam season is over, the user base drops an insane amount. Recently it feels clearer and clearer that this want of the AI bubble to pop just will never happen. You literally do not have to be profitable to survive, the government will prop you up and bail you out. The whole fucking economy hinges on the bet that AI will continue to be profitable, and it’ll stay forever and ever because what choice do dissenters have against the government and the technofascists. And people ARE using AI, it’s not going away for any ethical reasons one should have. What a stupid Chungus life. What about Techno-Chungus? Maybe I could pivot my research into inventing a concept like that. Would describe Redditors who go on the r/technology subreddit pretty well.

The Importance of Being Sincere: Mad Men

But here is my pop cultural obsession! It’s always easier to write about something you hate than something you love, so I hope the new tone of sincerity doesn’t feel too striking, like bleach, to the content of this blog. But I feel this is necessary to the previous section of teaching popular culture. It’s easier to watch and judge than put up something you love for the panopticon. But I’m too insecure to have this section be its own post, for reasons I have spent my whole life wondering why. Anyone with an answer, please write in–you might just fix this weird shame complex I have, which I promise isn’t from catholicism (I’ve never been religious).

Anyways, been rewatching clips of Mad Men again recently. I’ve rewatched the show god knows how many times now, and ever since there’s been this hole in my heart when it comes to any new piece of television media. It truly doesn’t seem the case that any television studio would invest in a more than 3-season character-driven show, especially one where an episode would be marketed like “Don goes to the pool, Peggy talks to her neighbours, Pete talks to a Chinaman.”

Just imagine if they would show a trailer for the next Mad Men episode and it would be edited like how they do House of the Dragon on HBO. Just different shots collaged together of Don napping or Pete flailing his arms up. It is so juxtaposed to the current marketing meta. There’s always some hype of what’s coming next, like a gambler hoping that the next episode will actually be good. Mad Men throughout its run doesn’t really match that formula, which threw off a lot of viewers who would spend the run of the show theorizing that Don is actually DB Cooper, or how Megan will be murdered like Sharon Tate. It’s completely structurally and thematically opposed to so much of what TV is. The characters fully get to be expanded on in a way that feels realistic, while still being stylized.

A show with that level of care and detail, where so much is conveyed just through a look or silence, I don’t think will ever be made again. Especially since that story that came out a year or two ago about how Netflix demands their shows to be made with “second screens” in mind. Meaning that they feel most people are watching shows while being on their phone at the same time. It sucks cause Netflix is right, that is the majority of people who watch shit on their laptop/ipad, and of course they’ll follow the money. But it punishes the poor media snobs like me who want something of quality, something that speaks to you the only way that art can. Now, to completely sound snobbish: I’ve always held the belief that consuming poor-quality media or slop (slop which I swear I was using before it became mainstream!! check my blog for proof) leaves the viewer unsatisfied. Perhaps not consciously, but there is a part of your soul that craves art of value that goes unfed, and you are left with this hole of shame/time wasted that frustrates. This feeling eats at you and leaves you feel creatively unfulfilled, and you fill that hole with hyperstimulating shit like short-form content or slowed and reverbed music, numbing the pain of nothing.

But to that person, where would they even know to look? The problem with all the discourse around the importance of human-made art versus AI-made art is that it argues that human art is intrinsically more impactful, it’s made by a person who is trying to say something. While I do agree with that, that doesn’t work when you take a look at what are the most popular/held up pieces of art today. You cannot claim that human-made art is more meaningful when Avengers will make a few billion dollars, or Crying in H-Mart, Colleen Hoover, or Milk and Honey is stocking the shelves. We have lost the art of curation in favour of accessibility in the “let people enjoy things era,” and now we have to suffer through 10 superhero films every year. I don’t necessarily think they shouldn’t exist, but it’s the veneration and appeal those have that are strikingly frustrating when one wants something deeper. Those things do exist, but rarely is someone who uses social media or views mainstream publications able to find them. RIP gatekeeping, something that served an essential role in establishing standards of media, because there is a love there for things that have an impact on you. But for now I must continue to stomach adults who watch Bluey and Ted Lasso, endlessly trying to convince me to watch their favourite comfy safe media. The problem contemporarily seems to be adults still watching/consuming things that are meant for children, it truly boggles the mind the self-infantilization. I’m not saying that I think every adult should only be exclusively watching shit like Le Cercle Rouge or some Kurosawa film, but the inverse of that, an adult who still only watches Disney channel shows, signals a truly tragic end of humanity. Don’t even want to go into Booktok and the fad of YA. I saw it described somewhere as reading YA over the age of 20 means you are neither young or adult, you are an old baby.

And so my media consumption is forced to go backwards in time. Been watching The Sopranos with my girlfriend for the first time and it’s been fantastic. The same things I love in Mad Men are present here, it feels incredibly lived in and real, and there is a real story being written here, not a collection of spectacles that are stitched together through shoddy dialogue. Succession has certainly come close; it’s probably one of the few good modern shows, and it’s interesting that, similar to Mad Men, it takes a while to get/like it. For Succession, I think it takes until the boardroom scene halfway through season 1 for the show to win you over. Mad Men, it’s either the scene of Rachel describing the meaning of Utopia to Don, or the Carousel pitch at the end of the season. But man, I hope one of the writers of Mad Men will blackmail some studio exec into making a new show, cause there is no way the Culture Industry will pump that out. There is no money to be made, and an ever-dwindling audience receptive for it.

I keep rewatching the scenes in Season Six following Don, where his character begins the season reading The Inferno, his arc mirroring Dante’s journey. Death is constantly on his mind, he’s absentmindedly drawing nooses on little pieces of paper. The influences they weave into the show truly are why I will probably never be capable of loving anything (or anyone!) as much as I love this show (Meditations in Emergency in season 2 was also lovely).

He comes back from that trip in Hawaii barely having said a word the whole episode, only really talking to an American soldier, to whom he attends their wedding the morning after, with a very un-Don-like smile. I always love how much Don loves strangers, because he himself is nothing but the person he wants the person across from him to see. A pure empty self-destructive vessel. And the more someone gets involved in his life the more that veneer cracks, seeing him for the deeply broken man he is. Rachel Menken is the smartest character in the show for not choosing him. Faye Miller comes close. Both were good for him, but he’s not going to learn how to be “better,” so escape from the handsome clutches of Don is one of the best endings one can have.

He comes back from that Hawaii trip to pitch to their client, Sheraton, and it’s one that they really don’t like, because it reminds them of death. It’s footsteps leading into the water, with no person in sight. Everyone else thinks it looks like the guy killed himself. Don has the blindspots on, as he has subconsciously been thinking about that it manifested in his work. And then when Don asks Stan if it reminds him of death, Stan says, “Yeah, that’s what’s so good about it.” Season 6 was quite dark in that regard, and the show gets progressively darker and darker with its themes as the seasons go on. It really starts with the unravelling and frantic nature of season 4 where Don is post-divorce, and his alcoholism and debauchery has gotten out of control as he no longer has to maintain just the faint appearance of being a put-together married man.

The copy of the Inferno Don reads is, of course, given to him by Sylvia, the wife of perhaps his only non-office friend with whom he’s having an affair. Symbolizing this “dark wood,” of which midlife through his life’s journey he has led (himself) astray into.

This scene in particular is what I think of as the highest point of the Inferno influence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB10ULhZzwg

That American soldier whom he meets in the first episode appears again later in the season while Don is high at a house party in LA, appearing as a ghost who lights Don’s cigarette with the lighter they accidentally swapped. “My wife thinks I’m MIA.” he’s visited by these ghosts that represent his desires and his thoughts on himself and his past. Haunted by them. And his hallucination of Megan has this sort of nymph or siren-like hungry smile as she stares at him, almost looking to devour him. Leading him through the inferno.

I’ve completely detoured the topic of this blog, but this Mad Men segue is NECESSARY to get my writing back on track. I need to pivot this to a Mad Men specific blog, and then I can pretend I wasn’t so critical of people with media obsessions in every previous blog post. Maybe this is just a spiritual successor to that old blog I had in undergrad, postmodern temptations of irony.