the chutry experiment

« July 2004 | Main | September 2004 »

August 30, 2004

Return to the 9th Floor

George was passing through Atlanta this afternoon, so I met up with him and Mike at Mike's office at Georgia State University, where I received MA a few years ago. Even though I live in Atlanta, I rarely get the chance to spend much time on GSU's campus, so seeing all the changes to GSU's campus, especially the English department, was a little strange for me, too, especially the changes to the Writing Center where Mike, George, and I spent a lot of time when we were graduate students there.

But as I wandered through the English department and other parts of campus I hadn't seen in ten years, I found myself recalling events and people that I haven't thought about in a long time. David discussed this experience when he described returning to Georgia Tech after several years away.

By the way, I found Bush's Brain in a video store on North Highland, something I've been trying to see for a long time now. Nobody was using Bush's Brain at the time, so I took it home with me. I promise to return it to the proper authorities when I'm done with it.

Posted by chuck at 4:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 29, 2004

Bertolucci and Mann

I managed to see two movies by fairly acclaimed directors this week but didn't have the time to write reviews until now. I caught Michael Mann's Collateral (IMDB) last weekend (at the infamous midnight screening) and watched Bernardo Bertolucci The Dreamers (IMDB) on video earlier this week. Both films are certainly flawed but well worth seeing, and I'd be interested to hear the opinions of others on both films, especially The Dreamers, which has received mixed reviews. Oh, by the way, because I'm blogging while tired, there are some spoilers in this entry, but more than anything, I'm curious about other people's reactions, especially to The Dreamers.

Collateral

Collateral opens with a shot of Tom Cruise's Vincent, a sharply dressed professional hitman, walking through an airport, his normally youthful, dark hair colored platinum gray to make him appear older and slightly run-down. Another man hands him a briefcase in the airport, saying one line, "Welcome to L.A." With that introduction, Mann introduces Los Angeles itself as a character in the film. Against Vincent, Mann casts Jamie Foxx as Max, a slightly rumpled cab driver with a dream (another interesting casting choice). Max has the bad luck of picking up Vincent, who hires the cabbie to driv him around LA for the night while he makes several hits. Throughout the film, Vincent talks about his hatred for LA, characterizing the city as unfriendly and uncaring, an effect reinforced by the use of high-definition digital video. We also get several helicopter shots looking down on the city and Max's taxi from above while Max seeks to find a way to stop Vincent to reinforce the city's sense of anonymity. As usual, Mann includes several wonderful scenes, including a scene in which Vincent goes into a jazz club to murder the club's owner, a nostalgic moment that recalls some earlier version of LA. Note: for a great review, see phyrephox's review on Milk Plus. Like phyrephox, I liked the references to Lady from Shanghai during the climactic chase sequence.

The Dreamers

I have to admit I haven't been a big fan of Bertolucci's recent films, especially Besieged, which seemed to conform to the idea or fantasy of an older, white, liberal man rescuing the younger, African woman, without really criticizing that story at all. And, although I don't remember it well, I recall being dissapointed by Stealing Beauty as well, but my interest in May 1968 trumped my ambivalence about Bertolucci. And while I don't think The Dreamers was a bad film, it didn't seem like a terribly deep take on the insularity of the two French siblings and the American friend they seduce.

Yeah, I get that the brother and sister are naive, oblivious to the revolution that's happening around them, but like Cynthia Fuchs, I found the film to be little more than glossy nostalgia for the revolutionary excitement of May 1968 without really interrogating that history in any nuanced way. After reading Roger Ebert's praise of the film, though, I feel like I'm missing something. To be fair, I'm a huge cinephile and loved the references to French New Wave films and the history of the Cinémathèque Française, and other than Matthew's voice-over narration, really enjoyed the opening sequence. I may try to write a more focused review later, but after a late night last night (out until 3 AM, up until almost 4 AM) and a long day of writing, I'm feeling kind of lazy.

Posted by chuck at 1:08 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

More 9/11 Toys

It's old news by now, but here's a link to an article about the recall of bags of candy with 9/11 attack toys. The toy depicts an airplane flying into the twin towers (note: there's a slightly clearer image at Boing Boing). I've been trying to collect links to 9/11 toys whenever I find them, so here's another one for the list.

Posted by chuck at 12:18 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 28, 2004

Buffy the Corporate Vampire Slayer

Recovering from a late, late night last night. Things went well past 9 PM, the official end of the art opening, so late in fact that Pizza Hut seemed like a good idea toward the end of the night (and it's certainly a better idea than at least one other pizza chain). I like Mark's art quite a bit, so it was cool to see several pieces together in a single space. Also enjoyed catching up with old colleagues and meeting some new ones.

While getting my day started, I came across Shroom's review of Control Room (my review) and The Corporation on Milk Plus (and I liked the review even before I noticed that he'd mentioned me in the comments). As regular readers will know, I'm a big fan of documentary film, excited to see the number of critical documentaries that have been released in the last year or two, and I think that Shroom's discussion of The Corporation, especially, adds an important perspective on the film that I'd missed, at least on a conscious level.

In my review of The Corporation a few weeks ago, I made the initial observation that the film

is almost certainly the most intelligent documentary I've seen all year. More than any other oppositional or broadly political documentary I've seen, this documentary treats the corporation as a systemic problem rather than seeing corporate abuses as the bad behavior of a few "bad apples" who took their greed a little too far.

I'd still agree that the film's argument is far more rigorous than anything I've seen this year, but I'm a little less optomistic about the film's effect on its viewers. The Corporation ultimately overwhelmed me, and I'd guess that other viewers of the film might have the same experience. The music, graphics, and information verged on sensory overload in places, and as Shroom notes, the effect is strangely like watching a horror film:

The Corporation was a like a really long, really scary version of PBS’s Frontline. [...] Given the film’s implications, The Corporation is perhaps the most effective horror film I’ve seen in a long time.

I'd agree with him that The Corporation seems oddly linked to the horror film, although I'm not sure I realized that on a consious level immediately after watching it. In fact, while thinking about my orginal review, I actually imagined a fantasy sequel, "Buffy the Corporate Vampire Slayer," with various CEOs and corporation-friendly Congresspeople as villains. There was even a degree to which I felt physically affected by the images and sounds, and like a horror film monster, the psychopathic charatcer, "the corporation," stalks the entire film.

Whether this horror film effect is productive or not is another question. Shroom makes a powerful case for the pedagogical effect of the film, which challenged him to think critically about his own role in working for a corporation. Of course, it would be very easy to allow this stream of information to become too overwhelming to mount a clear response. I'd also be curious to hear from people who've seen the film about whether or not the film equips viewers with the critical thinking tools to critique for themselves or whether they feel as if the film is doing the critiqing for them, a distinction that I think is far from trivial, and one for which I don't have a clear answer.

Note: I've been thinking about these issues from a much different perspective because of my paper on Fight Club and pedagogy, which I'm currently writing and I'd rather not discuss in detail (I'd rather work out those ideas in the paper itself, but I'll keep you posted).

Posted by chuck at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 27, 2004

Art Opening at Eleven50

Just a quick note to mention that a friend of mine has an art opening tonight at Gallery Eleven50. The basics:

Mark Leibert, "Transgenic"
Paintings and Works on Paper
Curated by Dorothea Bozicolona-Volpe

Eleven50 is located at 1150 Peachtree St., but the entrance to the gallery is behind the nightclub on Crescent St. The event runs from 7-9 PM.

Posted by chuck at 11:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 25, 2004

Reservoir Blogs

Add Quentin Tarantino to the list of bogus celebrity bloggers (link via GreenCine, which I've been trying to avoid this week so I can get some work done). Roger Avary, who knows QT pretty well, confirms it's a fake.

Posted by chuck at 11:27 PM | TrackBack

Marxist Film Theorists Revisited

I was digging around in my blog archives tonight (looking for material for my Fight Club paper) when I came across an entry I wrote over a year ago on an LA Times Sunday Magazine article on film professors, and it reminded me of George's recent efforts to convey to public audiences how an English departments works.

I think the comments are more interesting than the original entry itself, which veers dangerously close to righteous indignation in places (and does little to positively define what we really do), but the essential point of my entry back then was similar to George's: academics do need to define themselves correctly or risk seeing public misrepresentations our work persist.

Posted by chuck at 10:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Being Karl Rove

Nope, this isn't a post about the not-yet-in-Atlanta documentary, Bush's Brain. I just got the scoop from Rusty about a new strategy-based computer game, Political Machine, which allows you to run a presidential campaign.

According to this SFGate article, players have the option of running the campaigns of current presidential contenders John Kerry and George Bush, or they can play with other favorites, including Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Bored with that, you can bring dead politicians back to life. Strategies include campaign speeches in swing states and appearances on such TV "news" shows as "Barry King Show," "Hard Hitter," and "The O'Malley Scenario." Your campaign hires figures such as consultants, smear merchants, and spin doctors, just like real presidential campaigns! According to the game's website, strategies are carefully calculated. For example, a Democrat who veers hard to the right may not win Republican votes and could alienate his or her base. After a speech or campaign appearance, you can watch as a blue state slowly turns red.

As Rusty points out, this game appeals to the inner-computer nerd and the inner-campaign strategist. Might be interesting to play, I mean, talk about this game with my freshman composition classes....

Unrelated Update: The director's cut of Donnie Darko is coming to the Plaza this weekend. Sounds promising. Hopefully I'll have time to check it out.

Posted by chuck at 11:26 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 24, 2004

The Tyranny of the Undecided Voter

Just a quick reference to an Alan Wolfe New York Times op-ed piece from the 2000 election, "The Tyranny of the Undecided Voter." I may ask my students to read this essay later in the semester, but not just yet.

Update: My colleague's monitor seems to be working fine for now (knock on virtual wood). I'm not sure I'll use the Wood essay in my class bceause it's talking about the 2000 election, but it's worth storing in my blog memory. Thanks to Amy Sullivan, guest blogger at Political Animal.

Posted by chuck at 4:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Puff of Smoke

Just a quick note to explain potential short-term silence on the blog and via email. Last night my monitor blew out (following in the foosteps of my modem, speakers, and DVD player). While I was writing my Fight Club paper, I heard a sudden popping sound, the image on the screen contracted, and then a puff of smoke rose out of the top of my monitor. Perhaps that's a sign that I shouldn't be talking about Fight Club after all.

I don't think this was an electrical problem, however. There were no storms last night, and nothing else on the computer was effected, as far as I can tell. Any guesses about what might have happened. Could a monitor just shut down like that (it is about three or four years old)? The good news: I may be able to borrow a monitor from a colleague for a while.

Posted by chuck at 11:55 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

August 22, 2004

Politics of Nostalgia

I went to see Collateral last night at one of those massive metroplexes last night. I'm planning to review the film later, but right now I just want to mention my curiosity about a new show, Jack and Bobby, that was advertised during the highly annoying pre-preview Regal Cinemas commercial fest, "The Twenty."

In an entry to Atlanta Metroblog, I discussed my initial reaction to the show. The title of the show initially led me to believe that the show is actually about John and Robert Kennedy as children. We know from the preview that one of the two boys grows up to become president. They grow up in a wealthy New England family. Even if the show is set in the present and is not based on the Kennedy story, it's impossible not to read their history into the show due to the show's title and the basic story of the series. In my original entry, I wrote:

Despite my aversion to "The Twenty," I did find myself intrigued by one of the shows they advertised, a new WB show called Jack and Bobby, made by the creative people behind Everwood and Dawson's Creek (I've never seen these shows, but I've heard they're pretty good). The show focuses on Jack and Bobby McCallister when they are children and seems to ask whether or not their future "greatness" can be seen when they are children, but of course, the family really repesents the Kennedys, something the preview clearly tried to gloss. It's an odd election-year fantasy, nostalgic for some ostensibly more innocent form of politics (which begs the question: how will it deal with Joe Kennedy's business connections?). The other notable creative decision was the choice to essentially write Ted (and half a dozen other brothers and sisters) out of the show. Based on the clips I saw and the promotional photo for the show, it's like Ted doesn't even exist. Now I don't expect TV shows to be historically accurate, and gauzy nostalgic shows about a more innocent past are always going to remember selectively. But it seems that for the premise of this show to succeed, it has to write Ted out of the picture. Otherwise we have a connection to the contemporary political scene, and the nostalgia concept would no longer be quite as possible.

Part of the sensation of nostalgia grew out of the show's aesthetics, which clearly tried to evoke a kind of timelessness, particularly through fashion and setting. In this context, there also seems to be some degree of nostalgia for a certain kind of economy that allows a "blue-blood" family like the Kennedys (in this case the McCallisters) to be portrayed without the ironic distance of someone like Paris Hilton (I may be guessing a bit here, after all it was a 2-minute preview). Finally, Jack and Bobby is told via flashbacks from the mid-21st century (via interviews with the future White House staff), which I imagine will structurally impose a nostalgic storytelling mode onto the show.

And of course the fact that the show is based on fictional characters allows them complete license to depart completely from the Kennedy myth if they choose. Even so, the complete erasure of Teddy from the story seems significant, and I think it's due almost entirely to the fact that he's still a public figure, and one who evokes a broad range of responses (oh, and I just realized that the show essentially will write Joe, Sr. out by giving Jack and Bobby a single mother). Jack and Bobby Kennedy have the "safety" of distance to make them more easily representable televisually. This speculation is not to suggest that I have already decided that Jack and Bobby will be a "bad" show. On the contrary, I'm very interested to see how it uses past political figures to navigate a contemporary political moment. I might even try to remember to watch it.

Update: I've been getting tons of hits for this entry, and it's not one of my best, so I'm changing the title of it.

Posted by chuck at 3:04 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

August 21, 2004

Promotion and Tenure

To answer George's call for blog entries explaining how an English department works, I'll start by pointing to Jimbo's entry, "The Tenure File." I'm not yet in a tenure-track position, but from my understanding, Jimbo's suggestions illustrate the factors that English departments use in determining whether or not to award tenure to a junior faculty member.

Tenure is important because it protects the academic freedom of the professor, preventing him or her from being fired for holding politically unpopular opinions (note: the Wikipedia explanations of tenure and academic freedom are also good starting points on this topic). The tenure system has often been criticized because it is believed that many professors become negligent or lazy once they have achieved tenure (which is probably part of a larger cultural perception that professors don't work very hard), but it's my observation that most tenured professors continue to work very hard to contribute to their field and to provide the best classroom experience possible for their students.

For readers who are less familiar with how English departments work, tenure-track professors are given from five to seven years, depending on the university, to earn tenure based on publications, teaching, and departmental service:

Publication expectations may vary based on the university's teaching requirements and national reputation, but most top research universities require that applicant publish a book (although this policy is the source of controversy right now because of tighter budgets at most university presses) and several articles in respected academic journals. Jimbo also suggests that junior faculty keep track of citations of their published work. If a tenure applicant can demonstrate that his or her work has been widely quoted or has become influential in some way, then that will help to support the tenure application.

Universities also require professors to demonstrate their effectiveness in the classroom. Strong teaching evaluations can be very helpful here (some professors who have a lighter publication portfolio often benefit here). This effectiveness can also be demonstrated through syllabi, sample assignments, and samples of graded work.

Service work is the final major factor and includes committee work (looking at grad student applications, etc) as well as participating in the intellectual life of the department by bringing in guest speakers, setting up a lecture or film series, and so forth.

Of course, as the Wikipedia entry on tenure points out, a large percentage of English department faculty positions are adjunct or non-tenure track professorships, most of which pay less, offer fewer benefits, and require a significantly larger teaching load than tenure-track faculty members.

Suggestions and clarifications to this explanation are welcome.

Posted by chuck at 12:41 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 20, 2004

Art and Politics in America

Bloggers and journalists are still talking about the number of political (read "liberal" or "left") documentaries and plays that have been making the rounds this year. The New York Times uses the upcoming release of John Sayles' latest film (IMDB), which I can't wait to see, as an excuse to revisit this topic one more time and to review many of the key films that comprise this cycle. For the most part, the article focuses on the documentaries, most of which were made and financed outside of Hollywood. At the same time, in the blogosphere, Chris of Left Center Left, reports that David Adesnik of Oxblog still seems to buy the myth of "liberal Hollywood." Chris then patiently explains why this characterization of Hollywood is wrong (note: Adesnik's comment was prompted by Kevin Drum's list of eleven anti-Bush or anti-conervative films that have appeared in the last year).

From Caryn James' Times article: Sayles' Silver City is a political satire, which focuses on a candidate running for governor Colorado who bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain former governor of Texas, and uses this framework, according to the article, to reflect on campaign finance, corporate corruption, journalistic responsibility, and other important political issues through a detective plot (while you're in the neighborhood, the film's official site, set up like a campaign home page, is lots of fun). Other upcoming explicitly pro-Kerry (or anti-Bush) films include Bush's Brain, a documentary about Bush strategist, Karl Rove, and the pro-Kerry doc, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, which honestly sounds less interesting.

James is no doubt correct to note that the degree of opposition to the president is due in large part to the fact that he is in power. The Republican right wasn't exactly silent when Bill Clinton was in power, as Jerry Falwell's The Clinton Chronicles, to name one notorious example, illustrates (I remember watching an infomercial in which Falwell was selling this film and getting chills--and not because of anything that the film alleges about the Clintons). But I think James' article and most characterizations of this phenomena have been far too reductive to characterize it as mere "Bush-bashing," as James does. For most of these documentaries, especially the better ones, the political commitments run much deeper than dislike for Bush, a trend I expect to continue in Silver City.

For the most part, these left political commitments are incompatible with Hollywood's focus on profits over personal statements, something that no doubt also effects TV's potential for producing edgier political fare (a problem that James discusses), and most of these films have been produced outside of Hollywood. And as Chris notes, the center of documentary production in in New York, not Los Angeles. Whether this is a new phenomenon, I'm not entirely sure. Certainly, the 1970s saw an incredible rise in activist documentary filmmaking, with the work of D.A. Pennbacker, the Maysles, and Barbara Kopple, most prominent among many others, but it seems clear that something is happening. Whether this is because "distributors are seeing a niche market and are filling it," as Chris suggests, or because of cheaper and lighter equipment allowing more people to make and distribute films (the MoveOn phenomenon), I'm not sure. I'm certainly happy to see all of these new films becoming available and raising arguments that are often neglected in nightly news broadcasts.

Finally, many conservatives have mused that these political films have made little difference (see Adesnik's comment). I'm not sure how "effectiveness" would be measured when talking about a documentary film. If we're talking mere quantitative numbers, F9/11 clearly had a massive audience, while other documentaries, such as Control Room, have done quite well. If we're talking about changing the election, I think that's pretty much impossible to predict. There are too many variables at stake to make any credible determination that this cycle of political films has made a clear difference. If we're talking about changing the national political conversation, however, I think the answer is obvious. Moore's film has been in the media spotlight for months, and even if he has taken a beating from the right (and some people on the left), political filmmaking has been in the news for months. The arguments raised by this diverse body of films have clearly shifted the political discourse, especially about the role of the media in covering politics, and I think that's a pretty big deal.

Posted by chuck at 11:27 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 18, 2004

Opening Day, 2004-05

Yesterday was my first day of teaching for fall semester, and I think the class meetings went pretty well. I was unable to fall asleep Monday night, causing most of the day to be shrouded in a fog of sleepiness, but meeting with students for the first time is usually very enjoyable (as it was this time). Each of the three classes very quickly began to gain personalities, and I can imagine each of the three sections having very different, but all very productive, discussions of rhetoric and democracy.

To celebrate finishing my first day of teaching, I went with a new colleague to see a free preview screening of The Blind Swordsman: Zatôichi (IMDB) sponsored by a local radio station that plays all the hits. It was a great way to relax after a long first day of teaching. My knowledge of Japanese film, and samurai film specifically, is limited, but I very much enjoyed director Takeshi Kitano's slightly irreverent take on this genre. I learned afterwards that the film is based on, or updates, a popular Japanese film series, but what I most enjoyed about the film was its use of self-conscious moments where the director seemed to be winking at the camera, such as an early scene in which the sound of four farmers hoeing a field becomes syncopated with the rhythm on the soundtrack. The winking jokes about a blind swordsman (apologies for the bad pun) were also very enjoyable, and the film's musical numbers add to the film's pleasure. In reading through some of the film's reviews, I haven't come across this comparison, but in an odd way, the film reminded me of Juzo Itami's Tampopo, not so much on a thematic level, but because of the playfulness and self-consciousness present in both films.

Still trying to shake the cobwebs this morning, er, I mean afternoon. Even though I've been teaching all summer, I think it will take a week or so to get back into the routine this fall.

Posted by chuck at 1:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 16, 2004

Democracy Matters

I just realized why the title "Democracy Matters" sounded so familiar. Golden State Warriors basketball player, Adonal Foyle, has a foundation called "Democracy Matters." I believe I'm going to keep the blog URL, but I should probably at least change the title of the blog to avoid confusion. Doh! What makes this strange is that I thought I Googled that title last night to make sure that nobody was using it. Very strange.

I had planned to blog about Foyle's Democracy Matters a few months ago. I was intrigued by an interview I'd read with Foyle in AlterNet and appreciated his commitment to getting young people involved in politics and his support of progressive causes. I'll certainly provide students with a link to the real Democracy Matters because he's doing some interesting work and talking about democracy in a way that I find valuable.

Any suggestions for a new title?

Update: I've tentatitively decided to change the blog title to Rhetoric and Democracy, at least for tonight. Hopefully I'll think of something better tomorrow.

Posted by chuck at 8:23 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Interns Gone Wild

Like Byron, I was intrigued by (free registration required) the recent Washington Post article about Jessica Cutler, the Washingtonienne. Cutler, as most blog junkies will know, became famous when her blog, in which she narrated stories of her sexual affairs with several Washington insiders, was mentioned in the gossip blog, Wonkette. After he blog was discovered, Cutler was fired from her job but managed to secure a six-figure book contract and a gig posing for Playboy.

In his discussion of the article, Byron comments

I noted on my initial blog post that she seemed really naïve about blogs but this article makes it clear that she is really naïve about *everything*.

And I'd agree that, for the most part, Cutler comes off as being rather naïve, particularly about blogs, though I wonder how much of that lack of sophistication is performed. It seems clear to me that Cutler is being pretty careful in crafting her narrative for specific purposes, whether to sell her upcoming book or to restore her reputation. She mentions her parents' divorce, watching too much cable TV as a kid, being coddled in a negligent gifted-and-talented program, all things that are designed to set off certain alarms in today's "culture wars" regarding education, gender politics, and family values. By saying this, I don't want to suggest that Cutler is entirely in control of her narrative, but she (or one of her friends) acknowledges at one point that the blog served as a kind of device for taking control over her story.

What I find more troubling about the article is that it seems to buy into the popular narrative of a world in which morals are declining. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the article is the implicit comparison between Cutler's actions and the actions of the soldiers in Abu Ghraib. In commenting on the Cutler controversy, Daniel Yankelovich, who "has been studying American values for fifty years," states that Cutler is a sign of declining values in the US. As the Post reports:

He means a sign of our times, as is Jessica's frumpy 21-year-old contemporary, Pfc. Lynndie England, whose gleeful mugging for the cameras as she mocked naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib unsettled the national conscience. Both women have left many people questioning: How did we get here?

Jessica's "behavior is not mainstream majority behavior in the same way that most soldiers in Iraq are not abusing people," Yankelovich says. "She's an extreme, but she's a sign. These kinds of signs are breaking out often enough that you know they are signaling something much larger and more important."

This implicit equation between the torture of prisoners and consensual sex seems rather unfair. I'm also troubled by the fact that Cutler is singled out as the scapegoat, when it's pretty clear that several men were also involved, many of whom voluntarily gave her hundreds of dollars in cash. There seems to be an implicit message that when women are having sex like men, that's a sign that our values are in decline. [Side note: the emphasis on ("frumpy? what is this emphasis on fashion/appearance?") Lynndie England's participation in torture of Iraqi prisoners completely ignores the fact that several other (male and female) soldiers were involved.]

The article also frames Naomi Wolf's comments on Cutler's story in a fairly misleading way, suggesting that she "agrees with" Yankelovich, when her position seems a bit more complicated, especially in terms of her broader critique of a "pornographized culture" in which "sex has been commodified and drained of its deeper meaning." I don't really see her argument as signifying a complete decline in values, and there's nothing in Wolf's comments that would even come close to comparing Cutler's actions with those of the people in Abu Ghraib and others who might have endorsed their actions.

I'm tempted to fisk the whole article, but I'll identify just one other point for now. Yankelovich goes on to implicitly blame the social revolutions of the 1960s for the contemporary situation that produces a situation, or story, like Cutler's (sorry: this entry ran longer than expected).

According to the Post,

Sexual mores are only the crest of a tidal wave of change. In a span of about 15 years during the 1960s and 1970s, Americans underwent the kind of dramatic transformation of social values that usually occurs over generations, Yankelovich says. First college students, and then an overwhelming majority of Americans, rejected much of the social rigidity of the 1950s. Deeply held American values such as conformity, respectability, sacrifice and duty to others were elbowed aside by newer values: personal satisfaction, individual choice and a pluralism that tolerates vast differences in race, religion and lifestyle.

Yankelovich has coined the term "expressive individualism" to describe the new ethic of personal freedom that, among other things, opened the way for women, gays and minorities to make extraordinary gains. "It was a sweeping revolution, and we are still figuring out its consequences," Yankelovich says.

One unintended consequence of the revolution, he says, is that social morality has now become so relative it has begun to make Americans on both the left and right very anxious, although they disagree sharply on what to do about that. Yankelovich sees that nervousness in Americans' responses to events as diverse as Enron's accounting fictions, the Roman Catholic Church's protection of pedophiles, the Iraqi prison abuse scandal and Jessica's blog.

"The country is taken aback by moral relativism in all of its forms," Yankelovich says. "To me, the best way of thinking about it is that people are now free to say: 'I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't break the law.' An earlier generation, my own generation growing up in the United States, would say, 'What has the law got to do with it?' The usual model for societies is that they have a very thin layer of law and a very thick layer of social morality. What this expressive individualism has done, as an unintended consequence, is weaken that layer of social morality to the point where it's almost disappeared."

Again, the comparisons between Abu Ghraib, the Catholic Church, Enron, and Cutler seem rather imprecise, but to translate the social transformations of the 1960s, which fought for equal rights for blacks, women, and gays, into what Yankelovich calls "expressive individualism" completely micharacterizes these changes, and the Post author should not have allowed such a claim to go unquestioned, even if Yankelovich acknowledges some positive consequences from the 1960s. It's an incredibly reductive reading of contemporary social and sexual mores.

I'm not sure that Yankelovich is entirely wrong in identifying what he calls "expressive individualism," but I don't see it as having been caused by the 1960s. Instead, this hyper-individualism is the product of advertising discourse that reinforces these concepts ("Just do it!" "It's my wireless plan," etc).

Posted by chuck at 11:00 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

August 15, 2004

Winner Take All

Some quick notes about my upcoming composition class:

Even though Michael Bérubé assures us that "this is not a real post to the blog," the post did remind me that I'd like to include sections of Lani Guinier's Tyranny of the Majority for class discussion (see his review of Guinier's Lift Every Voice). The course textbook, Good Reasons, anthologizes a short section, but I'd like to require my students to read a little more, if possible.

Her discussions of citizenship, and the willful mischaracterization of those positions in the media-frenzy confirmation hearings of 1993, should fit very nicely into the course I'm teaching this semseter. I taught a longer section of "Tyranny" when I was at Purdue, and her critique of winner-take-all elections provoked one of the more compelling discussions I had that semester (in a fairly lively class).

I'm also considering revisiting a discussion I had two years ago with my students about citizenship using material from Chris Hables Gray's Cyborg Citizen, an assignment that worked very well a couple of years ago, but something I'm not sure I'd be able to re-create. One of the most important points raised in Gray's "Cyborg Bill of Rights" is his stipulation that "Business corporations and other bureaucracies are not citizens, or individuals, nor shall they ever be," which would allow for a discussion of what it means that corporations, under certain circumstances, can be understood as "persons."

I know that I should be finished with my syllabus. After all, classes start on Tuesday, but I'm just tinkering at this point, I promise. I'll try to post my syllabus in the next few days, but I've had a bad habit of not posting my new syllabi lately.

Update: Here's a transcript of George Lakoff's appearance on NOW with Bill Moyers, which includes a discussion of "framing" that might be useful for my students. In addition, I think I may have my course title (courtesy of Ruth Rosen of the Rockridge Institute): "Demcoracy Matters."

Posted by chuck at 7:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 14, 2004

Open Water

Perhaps my single biggest phobia is death by water. In fact, one of my earliest childhood memories is of nearly downing in a Boulder, Colorado, swimming pool. So, naturally, I decided to see the low-budget ($130,000 according to IMDB) thriller, Open Water, last night. Open Water tells the story of a married couple, Susan and Daniel, who are abandoned in the ocean by a scuba boat that caters to tourists. The film's low budget, its lack of special effects, and its genre connections, have inspired comparisons to The Blair Witch Project, but such comparisons don't really do justice to either film. While BWP uses horror film motifs to reflect on visual technologies, Open Water's use of suspense conventions to create a much more philosophical, almost existential, series of reflections (see Roger Ebert's review on this point).

The film opens with Susan and Daniel preparing to leave for their vacation. There is some mild tension in their marriage, in part because both of them are so focused on their careers. The film opens with both of them on cell phones, talking to colleagues, before Daniel, waiting in the car, uses his phone to call his wife inside their house. But the film wisely de-emphasizes their marital tension for the most part, focusing instead on the lack of control they seem to have over their work lives. As David Edelstein points out (he also makes the Blair Witch comparison), these sequences are very effectively mundane, capturing the ordinariness of their lives in a fairly subtle way.

The couple arrives at an unspecified Caribbean island, and they begin to unwind, to relax just a little, and to separate themselves from the demands of their work obligations (Susan even declines the offer to check her email). The scuba scenes that follow are nicely done, with the couple playfully swimming underwater, admiring the harmless ocean creatures they encounter. Then, as Susan and Daniel resurface to climb back on the boat, they discover that the boat is gone, their isolation beautifully conveyed with a high-angle, extreme-long shot showing them completely surrounded by water, floating helplessly in a vast expanse of water.

For the last hour of film time, we are more or less left floating in the ocaen with Susan and Daniel. They know they are in danger, but, as Ebert notes, the ocean is relatively calm, and there's nothing much to do but talk and wait. Gradually, the sense of danger begins to build. A jellyfish stings Susan. Sharks approach. They begin to feel thirsty. Daniel remembers information he learned watching the Discovery Channel and warns Susan against drinking the salt water of the ocean, and the couple talks to pass the time and ignore the growing threat they face. Their conversation is relatively banal as they try to pass the time, and while they fight briefly over who is to blame, that question quickly becomes irrelevant.

Wisely, the film rarely cuts away to the shore, choosing instead to maintain our identification with Susan and Daniel, leaving us uncertain of what's happening on the shore, where one of the crew members gradually realizes that the two divers are missing. I found the ocean sequences completely fascinating (unlike James Berardinelli, who inexpicably found the dialogue "pretty pedantic," and dsecribed the film's last hour as occasionally "dull"). The "POV" shots, where the camera floats just a few inches above the ocean's surface help create the powerful effect of isolation and helplessness. If anything, I felt these sequences should have been of even longer duration, to build the sense of dread even more effectively (one gripe here: the acapella music was a distraction and seemed to take away from the sense of isolation that the film was so careful to create, but then again, I'm not a big fan of most non-diegetic music).

There are two great moments in the film that are worth mention that I'd rather not reveal to people who haven't seen the film, so click below the fold at your own risk, but for those readers who haven't yet seen the film, I'd certainly recommend it.

First, the thunderstorm sequence was beautiflly done, one of the most effective moments in the film. For several seconds at a time, the screen was almost completely dark until the sky would be briefly illuminated by the lightning of a passing storm. This willingness to show a completely dark screen is a risky move, but it adds to the feeling of dread inspired by the film.

Second, Susan's decision, after she realizes that Daniel has died, was very simply and starkly conveyed. Susan's decision (and the way in which it was conveyed) completely floored me. Of course, we know that rescue efforts are in motion, that the helicopters may soon find Susan, but her decision to essentially commit suicide, is a powerful one. In that final moment, Susan does manage to take some control over her life, over the conditions that surround her. This ending is, by no means, comforting, and it's impressive to find a genre-style film that is willing to take the risk of not comforting us at the end of the story.

Posted by chuck at 12:36 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 13, 2004

Call the Spin Buster...

Just a quick note remindning me to include the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk in my course blogroll once things get rolling. I'm still trying to come up with a cool title for the course, so no course blog just yet (because we all know that a cool title makes all the difference).

Posted by chuck at 6:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Two Notes

I just learned about a planned "Day of Conscience" to call attention to the tragic situation in Darfur, Sudan, and wanted to call attention to it here (via Eric Alterman's blog, another possible reading for my composition class).

Also, while I'm writing, the AP just released an article on Metroblogging. Here's the full article, courtesy of Jason DeFillippo.

Posted by chuck at 4:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Day in the Life

I'm starting to feel the pressure of fall semester (I start teaching on Tuesday), so blogging may vary over the next few days. Here are a few topics that I'd planned to write about that never quite became full blog entries:

• School's Out: I'm looking forward to my annual Dazed and Confused screening. Every year after the first day of class, I watch Richard Linklater's film about the last day of school. I'm not sure why I picked up this habit (after all, I like teaching), but I've had this ritual for several years now.
• I've Got the Power: Steven Shaviro's review of Bruce Almighty effectively captures my reaction to Jim Carrey's most recent "pop" film. The film should have been far more self-indulgent when Bruce had divine powers rather than falling into cheap special effects, and I'd argue that the film itself encourages us to ignore the final moralizing closure sequence, which comes across as an almost completely cynical adaptation of Hollywood formula.
• Sex With Republicans: Both Jen of Good Intentions and Elizabeth Carmody mentioned Fuck the Vote, a website that, as Elizabeth puts it, works "to defeat George Bush by offering sex to Republicans who promise to abstain from voting in the election." I promise to refrain from any "swing state" puns.
• Movie Night: I'm planning to see Garden State tonight, but George's recommendation of the Metallica movie sounds promising (even though I don't share his unironic love for Lynyrd Skynyrd).

On Francois' suggestion, I dove into my archives the other day to see what I was thinking about this time last year, and of course most of my thoughts were focused on teaching, but I was pleasantly surprised to come across a discussion from late last summer that addresses some of the questions raised recently in the anonymity discussion. I don't have anything particularly new to the current discussion, but it's interesting that it has re-emerged at the beginning of a new school year. Now I really should be organizing my syllabus or working on my Fight Club article.

Posted by chuck at 1:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 12, 2004

Post Apologizes For Pre-War Coverage

Interesting Washington Post article on their pre-war coverage of U.S. assertions that Iraq had WMD. The article (free registration), by Post reporter Howard Kurtz, acknowledges that the newspaper should have been more assertive in warning readers that evidence of WMD was "shakier" than most people believed. The apology seems a little half-hearted in that memebrs of the Post staff still insist they did more to question the WMD claims than other newspapers, but that they simply didn't introduce those questions assertively enough:

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

Still, the article provides an interesting window into some of the decisions that editors and reporters face on a daily basis, including the Post's tendency to provide the administration a "mouthpiece" on page 1 and to bury points of view critical of administration claims.

I'm not sure there will be anything completely new for people who were or became skepitcal about Bush administartion claims about WMD (Greenwald's Uncovered addressed these issues months ago, and the New York Times has also apologized for pre-war reporting on WMD), but the "inside story" on how news decisions are made is interesting reading.

Note to self: This type of material might be useful for class discussion of how biases in news reporting might be more complicated than a simple "conservative" or "liberal" bias. When reading the article, I couldn't help but think about Andrew Cline's useful work on media biases.

Posted by chuck at 12:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Dude Abides

The Big Lebowski is the movie equivalent of comfort food for me. For well over a year, it was my designated hangover movie, guaranteed to entertain when I was too tired to get up off the couch (for better or for worse, I no longer seem to find myself hungover very often--maybe once a year). But for obvious reasons, I can watch TBL endlessly. In fact, just last night, I watched the film for the first time in several months (and no I wasn't hungover), and I realized that I'd forgotten just how remarkably funny--and how beautifully crafted--TBL really is.

Fans of the film will know that the Coen Brothers' paean to bowling, Raymond Chandler, and the counterculture, will know that Lebowski was a box office disappointment (and a disproportionate number of them will claim they liked the film before it was cool), but it has since become a cult classic, complete with a traveling national convention, profiled in this New York Times article (link via Green Cine), in which fans of the film attend dressed as their favorite characters or props from the film (apparently the severed toe is a popular costume). The article also features a profile of Jeff Dowd, the guy who provided the inspiration for the character of the Dude.

Posted by chuck at 12:01 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

August 11, 2004

New Bush Campaign Advertisement

Like George, I'll be teaching an election theme in my freshman composition course this fall, and his recent collection of some prominent political weblogs should be very helpful for me as I set up my course blog (note: I've been planning to include one essay by Lakoff, and this exerpt from Moral Politics just might work)..

In addition, I'm planning to ask students to do analyses of some political advertisements (both historical and contemporary). With that in mind, I came across an article on Yahoo about a controversial new Bush advertisement, "Solemn Duty," which invokes the September 11 attacks. Might be interesting to talk about this ad/the coverage of it in the Yahoo article.

Posted by chuck at 5:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2004

Gonna Get Myself Connected

Just got off the phone with my parents' next-door neighbor, and he's solved my modem problem (it turns out my modem was destroyed by lightning). It looks like I may be returning to the world of the connected either later tonight or tomorrow.

Posted by chuck at 4:46 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Breakin' the Law

Just came across an article from the Birmingham News about the dangers of blogging on the job. According to the article, state employee Doug Gillett, an editor with University of Alabama Birmingham's creative services department, may be breaking state election law by contributing to his anti-Bush blog and to the comments in the Atlanta Journal-Contitution's "Politics 101" blog:

The problem is that he was at work at the time. He's a state employee and was using a UAB computer, and his activities could run him afoul of state elections and ethics laws.

Election law prohibits public employees from using "state, county or city funds, property or time, for any political activities." The state ethics law has a similar prohibition.

Gillett said Thursday that he didn't realize his activities might violate the law. [...]

University of Alabama at Birmingham spokeswoman Dale Turnbough said Thursday Gillett will face disciplinary action. "UAB has clear policies against using university time and resources for partisan politics or non-university business and takes violation of those policies seriously," Turnbough said. "We began to look into this matter as soon as it was brought to our attention today, and we will follow up with appropriate disciplinary action in a timely fashion as soon as we conclude our review."

The Birmingham News articles goes on to quote Jim Sumner from the Alabama Ethics Commission, who notes that blogs represent an interesting new challenge for ethics laws. Discussions that once took place "around the water cooler" are now often taking place in the blogosphere. He notes also that it would be "unenforceable and undesirable" to stop all political speech in the workplace.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know Georgia law regarding using state or local property or funds for political speech? Or whether such a law would even be enforcable for professors whose work isn't easily measured by the clock? Or what constitutes "political speech" to begin with?

Update: Here is Doug's blog.

Update 2: Ann of Practically Harmless has more information on the story.

Posted by chuck at 2:18 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 9, 2004

Primary Run-Off Elections: Don't Forget to Vote!

Tomorrow is the day for primary run-off elections in Georgia. Several important races, including the run-off election to determine which Democrat will run to replace "Zig-Zag" Zell Miller. And, as Tim's recent post on Blog for Democracy illustrates, your vote can make a difference, even in Georgia.

Speaking of the Democratic primary, I'm endorsing Denise Majette over "Criss-Cross" Cliff Oxford, who has stated (according to Jen) that he will vote for SR 595, which would add an amendment to the Georgia Constitution banning gay marriage.

If you haven't already registered to vote, you won't be able to vote in the run-off, of course, but there are still several weeks left to register before the election day in November. Like George and Jason, I've included a link in my sidebar to one website where you can register to vote quickly and easily.

Update: I'd also add a quick show of support for Debra Bernes who is in a "non-partisan" run-off for the Georgia Court of Appeals. She sounds like a great candidate. Meanwhile, her opponent Mike Sheffield is under the mistaken assumption that conservative judges ("standing up for traditional Georgia values," by which I believe he means that he is "a church-going family man with children who believes in traditional marriage between a husband and wife") are not activist judges.

Progressive Georgians successfully supported Judge Leah Sears against a conservative judge. Let's win another one.

Update 2: Due to probelms with some absentee ballots, the Court of Appeals election mentioned above has been postponed. I forgot to vote this morning, but just called and Dekalb County precincts are open until 7 PM (I'm not sure about other Georgia counties).

Posted by chuck at 4:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sam Waterson and Rhetoric

CJ has a great idea for teaching rehtoric: show an episode of Law and Order. I quite like the idea of using a courtroom scene from Law and Order to illustrate the importance of audience awareness to students. I'm going to continue using blogging to illustrate this point, but courtroom TV shows and movies, especially L&O, can be a great way to illustrate this point.

CJ includes even more useful suggestions in the comments. I also like the idea of using John Edwards' "Two Americas" speech, and given my course's focus on the election, I'll likely direct my students towards that speech, either for class discussion or as one possible text for their first paper assignment, a rhetorical analysis.

Posted by chuck at 2:09 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 8, 2004

McMaster University Institute on Globalization

Footnote for my (currently in incomplete outline) paper on Fight Club and globalization: McMaster University's Institute on Globalization. Some useful resources are available here. If I were teaching this course theme again this fall, my students would be spending a lot of time looking at this website.

Posted by chuck at 7:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spiderman 2

Okay, I know I'm a little late on this one, but I wanted to make sure Spiderman 2 made $350 million or so before going to see it myself. To be honest, there were so many other movies playing here in Atlanta, it just got lost in the shuffle. I'm not going to write up a full review of the film (I'm probably one of the last people in the US to actually see it, but for anyone who hasn't, spoilers follow), but it was quite interesting for a superhero film. I do have a few questions for readers who have seen the film and/or have read the comic book series.

I'd always found Spiderman/Peter Parker's seclusion to be a bit selfish in a way, and the decision to have Peter reveal himself (intentionally or not) to Mary Jane was an interesting plot move. There is something chauvenistic about Peter not allowing MJ to decide what level of risk she's willing to take to be involved with him, altough the basic superhero rescues damsel in distress model seemed to persist. I'm not a regular reader of the Spiderman comic books (my parents quietly steered me away from superhero comics when I was young, so I never picked up the habit), but the plot move allowing MJ to choose Peter strikes me as a fairly serious departure from the comic book storylines. To what extent is that true? What did other people think of that particular plot choice or of the film in general?

BTW, it was very cool to see one of my favorite character actors, Bill Nunn (Radio Raheem from Do the Right Thing), in a minor role as a newspaper reporter.

Update: I forgot to mention two or three shots from the film that I found particularly interesting. The first shot I mention below (in the comments) was a freeze frame during the sequence in which Peter Parker briefly gives up his "responsibility" as a superhero. The freeze didn't seem to fit the context, but for some reason I just found it an interesting disruptive moment.

The other shot sequence I liked: the "POV" shots from Doc Ock's tentacles, where the screen is divided into four "simultaneous" quadrants a la Mike Figgis's Time Code. The fragmented, almost crystalline, vision simply struck me as very cool, a nice disruption of "normal" cinematic vision.

Posted by chuck at 4:02 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

August 7, 2004

My Singular Contribution to the Domestic Blog Meme

Laura at 11D (formerly Apt. 11D) taps into an issue I've been thinking about a lot lately: the question of "political" versus "personal" blogs, and while I think that Laura's question implies the necessary blurring of that boundary (i.e, the personal is political), like her I've found that female bloggers often seem more comfortable talking about personal experiences than male bloggers. I've also discovered that because I currently do not have access to the Internet at home, I'm learning a lot about which blogs I prefer most, a question that I think this post may implicitly answer.

I know that I've appreciated the recent efforts by several bloggers to reflect on the relationship between the academy and everyday life (and, yes, I know these terms are not entirely distinct), but for the most part, the people who are thinking about these issues are female (I know there are some exceptions, as Miriam notes; feel free to point out others). Jimbo's comments to Laura's entry offer one explanation for this divide:

I keep thinking I want to talk about living in the suburbs, what that means for me and my family, how it structures who I am, my alienation as an academic from suburbia, yadda, yadda, yadda; and I do manage to get in a few comments about living the burbs. But I find most of my posts drifting back toward things academic and political rants. Part of that is where I am in my life: going through tenure; part of that is the season: we seem in the midst of an incredibly important election. [...]

One thing about men and the personal: I think it is very hard for men to write about sex and sexuality in a blog and not come off as boasting and sounding like a cad.

As Jimbo's comment might suggest (check out his blog), I sometimes find it difficult to talk about my personal life, often for reasons similar to the ones he describes (this entry has been very difficult to write--I've revised it several times). At the same time, I'm also aware that because I'm on the job market and because I'm working on articles, I'm almost always thinking about those topics rather than something more explicitly personal.

I've contemplated describing trips up to Roswell to visit my parents for dinner, for example, but I usually resist doing so simply because I know that my caricature of suburban sprawl likely would be terribly incomplete and unfair (it's very hard to resist characterizing my travels to Atlanta's northern suburb as a trip into Stepford). And most of my trips to the coffee shop or to see live music seem rather unexceptional. At the same time, the emphasis on the "domestic" in this discussion seems crucial. Because I'm single and live alone, I write from a much different perspective than many of the people who have been contributing to this discussion. Life in my apartment is usually uneventful, aside from the occasional appliance catastrophe.

I also find certain personal experiences dificult to represent narratively in the space of a single blog entry. I'm concerned that I will end up sounding like the treacly Daniel Stern voice-over from the TV show, The Wonder Years, rather than being able to offer the meaningful or humorous observations that I find in other people's discussions of their personal life. Instead, I usually find that my discussion of personal experience is usally mediated by whatever popular culture text I happen to be reading or reviewing at any given time, as my recent discussion of Craig Thompson's Blankets might illustrate. In that sense, I think my blog occasionally does enter into personal experience even though I may not talk about whether I'm dating or what parties I'm attending. And, although I generally discuss my academic life here, like Miriam (same link as above), I don't believe that my blog falls easily into any category. It is, as the title suggests, an experiment, one that is on-going, one whose focus changes as quickly as my attention span.

See also Brayden's post on this topic.

Posted by chuck at 3:07 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

August 6, 2004

Atlanta Metroblog

A few weeks ago, I expressed enthusiasm for a new blogging concept, Metroblogging, and just wanted to follow that up with the news that Atlanta's Metroblog is now live! I still think it's a cool concept, and I'm happy to see that one of my favorite local bloggers, The Mad Dater, will be contributing as well. It's just a coincidence that I happen to be one of the contributing bloggers.

Posted by chuck at 7:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fight Club and Masculinity

In response to my somewhat frazzled recent post about (among many other things) my paper on Fight Club, David (blog) mentioned Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization, in which, as David puts it, Bederman

deals with the ways in which white American men defined their masculinity through identification with (consumption of [?]) the heavyweight championship in boxing. If I remember correctly she spends at least some time discussing the transformation of the American workforce from farmers and other types of self-employment into clerical workers in stores and in office places and how this transformation led to new notions of manliness.

While in the GSU library this afternoon, I forgot to track down Bederman's book, but I did come across an essay on FC by Suzanne Clark in JAC that makes a similar connection. In "Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality," Clark writes,

If the film Fight Club reasserts a masculine identity threatened by the feminization of American culture, then it reiterates a theme more than a hundred years old. Theodore Roosevelt took up the manly sport of boxing at Harvard when he was an undergraduate and recommended western ranch life in the 1880s to ward off the dangers of feminine sentiment and a softening of manliness. (413)

Clark goes on to note that Roosevelt was careful to make visible this notion of masculinity by hiring film crews to capture images of Roosevelt's Rough Riders in Puerto Rico. The primary point that Clark makes (and it's an important one) is that "it is important to think about how gender conventions operate historically and how they are mobilized in the film" (413). I'm still working through Clark's article, but I think it will help me to shore up some of the questions about historicizing gender representations that I tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to convey in class discussions with my students and that I have been trying to work through in my article.

Update: Check out Terry Lee's essay, "Virtual violence in Fight Club: this is what transformation of masculine ego feels like" from Journal of American & Comparative Cultures, Fall-Winter 2002.

See also Adrienne Redd, "Masculine Identity in the Service Class: An Analysis of Fight Club."

Posted by chuck at 7:31 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

A Reason to Stay Home on Friday Night

Was thinking about going out for a movie tonight, but here's a good reason to save $8.50: a film junkie's dream episode of NOW With Bill Moyers featuring John Sayles (talking up Silver City) and Jehane Noujaim (Control Room). Thanks to indiewendy for the viewing tip. The episode is scheduled for 9PM, but as the cool kids say, check your local listings (Note: I just checked my local listings and can't find the Bill Moyers show on Friday night (or any night) in Atlanta: anyone know when the episode might be playing?).

Maybe I'll go see a movie after all....

Update: In the spirit of Jenny's "library swap" concept, if anyone happened to tape the Sayles/Nojaim interviews, I'd be happy to copy/track down something (a TV show, a hard-to-find journal article) in exchange (just contact me at charles.tryon [at] lcc.gatech.edu or at the street address in the sidebar).

Posted by chuck at 4:19 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 5, 2004

Control Room Footnote

Just a quick link and comment to note that Marine Capt. Josh Rushing, the military spokesperson who appeared in Jehane Noujaim's Control Room, has decided to resign from the military partially in response to a military order barring him from discussing his role in the film.

Posted by chuck at 10:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Journalism and Rhetoric

Few bloggers out there offer better sustained rhetorical analysis of the media than Andrew Cline in his blog, Rhetorica. With fall semester kicking into gear, I'm still trying to think about some of the questions pertaining to this year's election and the role of the media in framing it. With that in mind, I'll be stealing links from Andrew over the next few days.

First, he points to Tim Porter's discussion of the most recent content analysis of American newspapers by the Readership Institute.

Second, and perhaps more relevant to my English 1101 class, he addresses the question of media objectivity. Journalistic objectivity has been getting a lot of play lately because of films such as Outfoxed and F9/11, and I think that Andrew's comments about the structural biases of journalism are very important here. As Andrew points out, the "fairness bias," which requires a journalist to get both sides of the story, often prevents journalists from identifying clear lies in campaign discourse (and here he helpfully points to Bryan Keefer's essay in the most recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review). As Andrew succinctly puts it, "The fairness bias becomes a detriment to journalism when journalists fail to call a lie a lie--especially when the facts are plain to see." He also complicates any simple notion of a political bias in the media, whether conservative or liberal, and because the Liberal Media Bias is one of our most convenient and ongoing cultural myths, I think it will be crucial to discuss and hopefully debunk that my classes.

Also useful: Andrew's breakdown of various media biases and how they might play out in the coverage of an event.

Posted by chuck at 4:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

We the Media

Thanks to Dr. B. for recommending Dan Gillmor's book, We the Media. Dr. B. mentions that the book focuses "on democratic journalism is available for download under the CC license. It looks like an interesting read and includes work on blogs." Sounds perfect for my freshman composition course this fall.

Update: I took some time this afternoon to "flip through" Gillmor's book (is that what you call it when you read something on Adobe Acrobat?), and it looks really useful for some of teh discussions I'd like to have in my composition class. I will likely supplement Gillmor with some more recent news articles and blog entries on the blogging of the Democratic and Republican conventions. Still working out the specifics, but I think this could be a great way of introducing some of the technological issues associated with elections and citizenship in general.

Posted by chuck at 1:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Off the Bookshelf

During my mini-vacation last week, I finally had the chance to read a couple of novels that had nothing to do with research. Before my trip, I picked up Max Barry's Jennifer Government on a friend's recommendation. The novel is a near-future satire in which all of the characters take on the name of their employer as their surname, hence the main character's name. Jennifer's main nemesis throughout the novel is John Nike, who decides to kill several people who purchase a certain model of Nike shoes as a form of promotion (this happens in the first few pages--I'm not giving much away). It's a fun satire of economic globalization in the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut with an Adbusters twist.

While in Champaign, I borrowed Jim's copy of Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson, about growing up fundamentailst in the 1980s and early 1990s. Because of my fundamentalist Christian youth, Jim has been recommending this "illustrated novel" for a long time, and so far I've found it pretty compelling. Thompson captures the language and logic of that world very effectively, and his renderings of a church youth camp are completely familiar to me, even though my experiences were slightly different. I'm nowhere near finishing, but I think that actually speaks to the depth and pleasure of the novel itself--in a sense, I don't want it to end. Reading Blankets has allowed me to revisit a major part of my past, and I'm sure I'll have more to say about it in the next few days.

Posted by chuck at 1:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 4, 2004

Too Many Threads

Classes start in twelve days here at Georgia Tech, and I'm starting to feel a little excited and just a little overwhelmed. I'm working on my syllabus for my fall semester freshman composition course (3 sections), in which I'll be using an election theme. I'm still sorting out the details, but like my compsotion courses last year (1101 and 1102), my election-themed class will have a blogging component (while you're in the neighborhood, check out Alex's plans for using blogging in one of his courses).

I recognize that having an election-themed course can be risky, but it seems like one of the most important ways to convey to students the importance of developing their skills in analyzing and producing argumentative writing. Because I've just finished wrapping up loose ends on my summer film course, my ideas here are still tentative.

Also excited that some things are coming together on a September Project event or two here in Atlanta. According to the map, there's already one event planned for the Dekalb County Library, but I've been talking up the event at Democracy for America MeetUps and other events, and there's a lot of enthusiasm and interest out there. I'll have more details about TSP in the next few days.

Still (sort of) working on my Fight Club article (and a few conference papers), but haven't made much progress lately. I'm still dissatisfied with the fact that Fight Club looks at globalization from the perspective of a major film studio. Most of my ideas here are still too tentative to share with such a large audience, but hopefully I can talk about the article in more detail soon.

Posted by chuck at 10:13 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Weirdly Appropriate Blog Spam

I just got a piece of blog spam (now deleted) advertising a tobacco company website for this film review. It's one of the few times I've considered leaving up a piece of blog spam, but then I decided I didn't want to encourage spammers.

Posted by chuck at 2:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bush Asked to Discontinue Blog

Cynthia beat me to the punch, but I found this Onion article too funny to pass up.

Posted by chuck at 2:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 3, 2004

Reading Orwell in 2004

Just received an email from Randy Cauthen of Rhetoricians for Peace about the 1984+20 project. According to the website:

This project is designed to promote a worldwide reading and discussion of Orwell's 1984 in October of 2004, immediately before an American election that will be haunted by Orwellian themes. The members of Rhetoricians for Peace believe that Orwell's novel has a great deal to teach us about the nature of political truth, the manipulation of language, and our responsibilities as world citizens.

The project is sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and began at the College Composition and Communication Conference in March of 2004, with a motion by Rhetoricians for Peace member Harriet Malinowitz. The full text of the motion, which passed unanimously, is: "The intentional manipulation of public discourse for political and commercial purposes has intensified in recent years. In light of this, we urge NCTE to sponsor a national reading and writing assignment for fall 2004 on Orwell’s 1984 for colleges, high schools, communities, and libraries. In support, the NCTE should create resources, forums, and websites for student, teacher, and community projects."

For more information, check out the NCTE Orwell page or go to the main Rhetoricians for Peace page.

Posted by chuck at 4:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Literature Scholars and Weblogs

George has an interesting entry about public perceptions of scholars of language and literature. He begins with an anecdote from a recent conference in which someone (presumably another academic) spoke dismissively about academic blogs. Like George, I have several hundred hits on my blog per day, and while I recognize that blog entries and journal articles are much different, academic blogs are one of the few places where people are likely to encounter representations of our profession, other than newspaper articles by non-academics and movies which happen to feature professors (either as characters or as experts).

In an informal survey in Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass, George concludes that many people who have negative perceptions of the work being done by English professors don't really have a clear understanding of what we do. To that end, George plans to use his blog to better represent what scholars of literature and language do. To some extent, I hope that my blog and other blogs like it already convey a little more about what we're doing in the classroom and in our research, but navigating the boundary between academic and more public audiences can sometimes be difficult. Like George, I'm glad to see that so many people are invested in reading and writing, and I'm looking forward to contributing to that discussion and reading George's entries on our work.

Posted by chuck at 3:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 2, 2004

The Corporation: First Impressions

I'll write a longer review later, but because The Corporation (IMDB) may only have a limited run here in Atlanta, I just wanted to mention the movie briefly here tonight. This first review will primarily consist of most immediate impressions, and I'll be cheerleading a bit simply because I think that others should see this film.

Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar's film is almost certainly the most intelligent documentary I've seen all year. More than any other oppositional or broadly political documentary I've seen, this documentary treats the corporation as a systemic problem rather than seeing corporate abuses as the bad behavior of a few "bad apples" who took their greed a little too far. The Corporation is a very demanding film, but one that will reward interested viewers. In fact, the film dismisses this "bad apple" metaphor in the very opening sequence, noting that the public indignation at Tyco, WorldCom, and Enron (among others) actually fails to grasp the systemic problems of capitalism.

Like This Land is Your Land (review) The Corporation essentially begins with the problem that corporations have been given legal personhood through a misreading of the 14th Amendment and discusses the impact of that decision before treating corporations as a psychological case study to be evaluated and diagnosed for mental disorders (using the DSM), coming to the conclusion that corporations are essentially psychopathic in nature.

The filmmakers' observations are supported by talking heads interviews with theorists including Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, and Noam Chomsky, as well as investment bankers and current and former CEOs who discuss the destructive nature of corporations. The amount of material presented in the film can be overwhelming especially in a single screening, but I think that's inevitable when a film is going to set up and support such a complex argument. The Corporation is based on a book, and the sheer abundance of information reflects that depth of research. I'm still sifting through the ideas developed in this film and my experience of watching it, and I'm certain that I'll have more to say about it in the next few days.

Posted by chuck at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

One of the Few Times I'll Ever Link to Drudge, I Promise

I'm taking advantage of my limited blogging opportunities while I can (the modem hunt begins soon), and I came across two fun links on the web this afternoon.

1. Stop the Insanity: a photograph from the Democratic Convention (via Blog for Demcoracy)
2. "Putting the F Back in Freedom:" Via Eugene Hernandez, links to news about Team America: World Police, the latest Matt Stone-Trey Parker project, described by Hernandez "as an adventure film with an all-marionette cast." According to Drudge, Dick and Dubya give it two thumbs down.

Posted by chuck at 2:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Village

Unlike Roger Ebert (note: Ebert's indignant negative review is a thing of beauty) and Stephanie Zacharek, I never promised Disney, Touchstone, or M. Night Shyamalan that I wouldn't reveal the plot twists in Shyamalan's most recent film, The Village (IMDB). I will try to put most of these revelations below the fold to protect readers who haven't seen the film, but hopefully my review of the film will protect readers from ever seeing the film in the first place. In my initial conversations with Jim about the film, we did work out a fairly interesting "symptomatic" reading of the film, noting that The Village has a fairly engaging treatment of "isolationism," of the need to withdraw from a dangerous and threatening world. Such an allegorical reading works pretty well, but in retrospect, I'm a little less impressed with the way in which the film works out that concept.

The basics of the plot: we begin with a small, isolated 19th century village where the villagers are threatened by a group of creatures who live in the woods beyond the edge of the village. These creatures (who have a pseudo-ominous name I'm too lazy to re-type) have, according to the elders, killed villagers who fail to observe the rules of the truce (don't wear red, don't go beyond the edge of the woods, etc). The elders succeed in frightening the children of the village from ever stepping foot into the woods to find "the towns" that apparently exist nearby. Despite these dangers, the villagers lead a happy, if unexciting, life, in which teenage girls are preoccupied with marriage, and schoolteachers recite lessons to attentive students (that part I liked). However, because of an "accident," it becomes necessary to go to the towns to obtain "medicines" that will save one of the villagers. I'm probably revealing too much above the fold and do so at the risk of incurring the wrath of M. Night.

Visually, the film is relatively interesting. Roger Deakins' cinematography fits the film's narrative nicely. While Zacharek faults the film for having "an Old Sturbridge Village vibe" (I compared it to an Abercrombie and Fitch, or better, L.L. Bean, catalog photograph), the artificiality of the village seemed apprpriate to the film's overall meaning. This artificiality translates into our perceptions of the characters who inhabit the unnamed village: we have the the kindly teacher (William Hurt), the spunky blind girl (Bryce Dallas Howard), the village idiot (Adrien Brody in a rather disappointing performance and an even more disappointing make-up job), and the heroic and kind young man (Joaquin Phoenix), all recognizable stereotypes from similar fictions, and while I appreciated Dark City's use of film noir stereotypes in conveying the artificial reality in that film, the treatment of the artificial in The Village falters considerably.

Spoilers ahead.

The plot twist that Shyamalan has taken great pains to hide seemed rather predictable to me. About ten or fifteen minutes into the film, I recognized that the village was going to turn out to somehow or another be "fake" or artificial. I didn't predict the precise nature of that reality, although I did guess that the film was supposed to be taking place "now."

As viewers of the film will know, we learn that the village was built by a billionaire (the William Hurt character) in collaboration with a group of others who had suffered traumatic experiences due to their lives in the city (Sigourney Weaver's younger sister was raped and murdered in "the towns," etc). This is revealed when William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver open a black box that contains souvenirs (newspaper clippings, photographs) of their lives before entering the village. This reveal was fairly interesting, and the artificiality of the village does offer an interesting take on virtuality (although I think that Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor are more accomplished in this regard). Like Blade Runner and Dark City, which allow photographs to be a crucial clue into the virtuality of the exisiting world (or at least the people who inhabit it), The Village uses photographs to introduce us to the "real" time of the film, the contemporary moment of crime-ridden cities, home computers, and Patriot Acts (to be more precise, it may be significant that the villagers choose to withdraw from the world in the 1970s, as implied by the haircuts and fashions revealed in the pictures).

The reveal also provides a useful way of thinking about the film's critique of the "elders" who have chosen to withdraw from the world and to force that decision onto the rest of the villagers even if it means cuasing them physical or psychological harm (the film implies that the village idiot could be cured with the right medication). The effects of their emotional and physical violence on the people in the village, even if this violence is merely passively accepting preventable deaths, is pretty powerful, but I'm not sure the allegory can be complicated much further than that.

It's also very, shall we say, convenient that one of the villagers just so happens to be blind. Bryce Dallas Howard's character, Ivy, also happens to be a "tomboy," capable of navigating the woods "as well as any boy" (I'll leave the gender issues alone). This plot device allows us to see that the village is actually a giant "gated community" patrolled by rangers who have been paid by the billionaire and believe the area to be a wildlife refuge.

In general, I'm becoming less patient with Shyamalan's films. I skipped Signs altogether, in part because I've had my quota of Mel Gibson for this lifetime. But the "plot twist" approach is becoming increasingly less convincing with each permutation of it. The use of the plot twist often acts as a substitute for "real" profundity, and upon reflection, I think that's what is happening here. The film still offers a potentially interesting symptomatic reading, but on the whole I was a little disappointed.

Posted by chuck at 1:01 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Interstate 72 Revisited

Returned late yesterday evening from visiting friends in Champaign-Urbana for the weekend. I had a great time, and now I'm finally in front of a functioning computer with a working modem for the first time in days, so here are some basics about my weekend. I got to spend a lot of time with Jim, Renee, and Rowan. It was terrific to catch up with JR&R, especially Rowan, who is now aged 10 months.

Before taking the Brittain Fellowship at Tech, I taught for two years at the University of Illinois in a non-tenure track position, a job I deeply enjoyed. NTT's at Illinois often get the chance to teach upper-level film and literature courses, which is pretty rare, and C-U is a fairly cosmopolitan college town (and getting better). While in C-U this weekend, I had the chance to revisit some of my favorite C-U haunts, including Cafe Kopi, where I wrote and revised countless pages of my dissertation, and the coolest video store I've ever encountered, That's Rentertainment, where I rented most of the movies I discussed in my dissertation. It was also very exciting to see the improvements in the New Art Theater, and I enjoyed visiting the C-U Farmer's Market, something I was too lazy to do when I lived there before (my antipathy towards mornings is well-documented). The only "negative:" I was bummed to learn that I would be missing a Barack Obama speech in Champaign by two days (he'll be speaking, I believe, at the Champaign YMCA).

I also had the chance to catch up with one of my dissertation advisors, who now teaches at UIUC. Over coffee, she made some great suggestions about my Capturing the Friedmans paper, including the observation that CTF might be compared to An American Family, the pioneer 1970s PBS "reality TV" show about the Loud family. More details on the paper (and that comparison) coming soon.

Posted by chuck at 11:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack