Random Reflections | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Migrant Laborers as Tourists

September 28, 2016 by Museum Fatigue

A few days ago I was walking out of the subway station, when I became aware of a giant, dark blue bag in my field of vision. The bag was on the back of a person a few steps higher up the stairs, so it was directly in front of my face. For a few seconds I could see nothing else but the cheap piece of luggage—ubiquitous on trains and long-distance busses throughout China. The 1970’s-style font, with an image of […]

Categories: Random Reflections, Tourism • Tags: migrant worker

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The Split Presence of the Tourist: Battambang, Cambodia

January 18, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

While enjoying breakfast in a local restaurant on the street in Battambang, Cambodia, I captured a wonderful moment that highlights some of the contradictions of tourism. Two tourists, sitting in the comfortable posture of the lounge chair attached to the front of a sightseeing tricycle, passed by. Each wore dark sunglasses and large white headphones. They stare ahead watching the streetscape unfold to the personalized audio soundtrack of narration or music. They are in the city and yet distinctly apart from it—both […]

Categories: Photo Essays, Random Reflections, Tourism • Tags: Battambang, Cambodia

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Air France: Real Simple

January 10, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

In the summer of 2012 I wrote a short post about a breakfast that I was served on a United Airlines flight back from China—how the meal’s plastic beauty fascinated me and how intrigued I was about the mix of exotic processed proteins that had been used to create it. For me, the inflight fakery evoked comparisons to meals served in dystopic science fiction futures. Yesterday while on an Air France flight from Casablanca to Paris, however, I was served […]

Categories: Care, Food, Random Reflections • Tags: Air France, airplane food, breakfast, cheese, croissant, faux food, inflight meals, meal, real meal, United Airlines

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Shen Yun Performing Arts as Falun Gong’s “Wild East Show”

December 13, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

This past week I went to my mailbox in the social sciences divisional office and was surprised to find every faculty mailbox had been stuffed to overflowing with a 2014 calendar of the Shen Yun dance troupe. It would be treating the “calendars” with too much respect to call them junk mail—much more respect than was shown to our faculty by the person who dumped them there—despite our administrative assistant’s warning that most would end up in the trash. We […]

Categories: "Swords and Silk", China, Mythologies, Random Reflections, Representation • Tags: Buffalo Bill, Chinese Culture, dance, Falun Gong, Orientalism, Shen Yun

The Facebook Database Must Be Fed

May 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Most people around at the dawn of the public Internet might remember the brief period when important webpage addresses circulated by word of mouth, in emails among friends, and were even published in books. Back in 1994, for example, I remember buying a telephone book-sized tome hundreds of pages thick, packed with URLs broken down by type. I’d look in the book’s index, find what I wanted, and then type the unwieldy URL into the browser. Viola! Then came search engines— Yahoo!, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves!, Google and […]

Categories: Discipline, Internet, Random Reflections, Surveillance • Tags: Database, digital double, Facebook, internet, social web, technology

The Playtime of Surveillance

March 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.” —Gilles Deleuze “All play means something.” — Johan Huizinga When I was growing up, a boy in the upper midwestern United States in the final decades of the Cold War, I loved spies, secrets and the gear that when along with them. I locked what childhood secrets I had in a small […]

Categories: Gear, Play, Random Reflections, Surveillance, Toys • Tags: AR Drone, brookstone store, drones, johan huizinga, Jumping Sumo, Parrot Drones, Rolling Spider, Rover Spy Tank

God(zilla) Will Destroy L.A.

January 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Just a few days after the New Year, while in Los Angeles, we visited Hollywood Boulevard. While I don’t imagine the beautiful people do a lot of hanging around in that particular neighborhood, it is sacred ground for the global mythology of Hollywood. Visiting the “walk of fame” is, after all, what tourists are expected to do when they visit L.A. So we went to see the stars—more specifically the traces they have left behind—their handprints and their footprints and the concrete […]

Categories: End of Times, Movies, Mythologies, Random Reflections, Tourism, Video clips • Tags: Fundamentalism, hollywood, Religion

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How the Auggies Schooled Minnesota Higher Education on the Marriage Amendment

August 29, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Higher education in Minnesota has been schooled by the Auggies. Last Wednesday, Augsburg College publicly took a stand stating its opposition to the amendment to the Minnesota constitution that would only recognize marriage as “between one man and one woman.” Their university president, Paul Pribbenow, took the book on “best practices of ‘playing it safe’ in university management” and boldly threw it out the window. In one statement the school publicly asserted its values. It engaged the world. It refuted the homogenous […]

Categories: Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Politics, Random Reflections • Tags: Augsburg, community, current-events, leadership, marketing, Marriage Amendment, Minnesota, politics

“Take Up Arms and Get Rid of the Guy”: Tom Head and the Conspiracy of Opinions

August 23, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I’m not even sure what to do with this video clip. The first time I watched it I was just stunned. When it ended, I promptly watched it again three or four times. There was no Onion watermark in the corner. It didn’t appear to be a hoax. It appears to be real and valuable ethnographic material—documenting a folk mythology that I find academically fascinating, albeit if also a touch terrifying. In the clip from a Fox television newscast, Texas […]

Categories: Mythologies, Politics, Random Reflections • Tags: conspiracy theories, government, politics, Tom Head

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The Mona Lisa: Art in the Age of Digital Consumption

August 3, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

The Mona Lisa is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable images in the world. Perhaps second only to the Eiffel Tower, it is an icon of the tourist experience of Paris. So, when we arrived at the Louvre with thousands of other tourists, of course, the first thing we did was go to see it. I have heard that often when tourists first see the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre, the portrait is much smaller than they expect. The idea, […]

Categories: Museums, Random Reflections, Tourism, Video clips, Visual Anthropology • Tags: art, Mona Lisa, Photography, Pierre Bourdieu, tourism, visual anthropology, Walter Benjamin