Taxi TV

It’s not that I don’t like seeing Al Roker occasionally, nor is it that I hate knowing weather forecasts. Rather, it’s that the installation of televisions into the back of taxi cabs across New York City is tantamount to the utter and immutable prostration of the individual to the totalitarian agenda of the bourgeois elite. The taxi, once a pleasant medium for urban perambulation, is now little more than the leather-clad site of ideological indoctrination. No longer do you look out at city’s sumptuous phantasmagoria. Instead you look down, consuming Bank of America ads and fluff pieces about pardoned thanksgiving turkeys. Oh sure, I know, you can “turn it off,” but only one in three consoles has a functional off button, and when you actually can silence the televised din, you’re left with the hollow glow of the Taxi TV’s self-advertisement.

Most of the time, the unassuming taxi patron is assaulted with a barrage of local news and corporate advertisements, items that over time seem to become interchangeable. To avoid this halfhearted gesture of “entertainment,” you can opt to watch a map depicting your journey instead, represented by a cute little red star slinking across the city grid. Choosing the map hardly connotes an articulation of individual agency however. Rather, this component of Taxi TV is an indication of your complete and ubiquitous subjection to surveillance, and of the ease with which you are convinced of your own star-worthy individuality. Thus the double ruse of Taxi TV: you watch when it is you who in fact is being watched, and you identify yourself with the little red star when you are in fact indistinguishable from the masses moving through the city. That Taxi TV is a fraudulent appendage of the culture industry is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in the commodification of this dialectic of observation for ‘entertainment’-value. I’m speaking, of course, of Cash Cab.

“We’re gonna take the money, because we’re poor.” That’s right ladies, good choice. Your illusions of success only serve to facilitate the very ideology which impoverishes you.

Taxi TV? That shit is fascist.

Beyonce's Single Ladies

While Beyonce's most recent video might seem like an innocuous ode to post-break-up female empowerment, beneath its riveting sexuality and supple skin lies an nefarious defense of the tyranny of traditional family forms. The synecdochic refrain that "if you like it than you should have put a ring on it" reaffirms Beyonce's commitment to a set of traditional gender roles for women, who, according to Beyonce, become a kind of property for their male counterparts only after the deployment of the institutionalist framework of marriage.

What’s more, the entire musical glorification of tradition is couched in a parallel aesthetic glorification of the bodily ideal that, in the very smoothness of its skin, the rhythm of its hips, the fullness of its lips, is forced into silence. The video achieves the absolute eradication of difference, as low-contrast lighting ensures that the actions of the three dancers truly becomes one.

Plus, that whole metallic hand thing is creepy.

Verdict: