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September 30, 2005

Hamburger America

Movies about food preparation and consuption also tend to be films about enjoyment, and George Motz's Hamburger America (no IMDB listing) is no exception. That these films also often tend to be about place also seems far from coincidental. While I have in mind films such as Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, Alfonso Arau's Like Water for Chocolate, and Juzo Itami's Tampopo, all of which celebrate the sensual pleasures of preparing and consuming good food, a certain type of enjoyment even creeps into several scenes in Morgan Spurlock's scathing critique of the fast food industry, Super Size Me. (my review), even though Spurlock seeks to deny or disable that pleasure by showing the harmful consequences of a fastfood diet on his body.

It's this pleasure in preparing and consuming food, namely hamburgers, that Hamburger America seeks to celebrate. I had a chance to watch the film last night at a screening, wisely served with a burger and a beer, here at Catholic University last night (the film's director George Motz attended CUA). In the film, Motz travels to eight burger joints scattered across the US, sampling the burgers at each location and allowing the restaurant's owners to talk about the work that goes into the preparation of their specialty and about the history of the restaurant itself, which more often than not, also represents something of a fmaily history. Motz wisely stays off camera, allowing the locals to speak for themselves rather than making himself the "star" of the documentary. In a sense, the film is "about" a certain mode of production, nostalgic for the local cuisines that sometimes disappear beneath the weight of so many franchise restaurants. This enjoyment of the local became most vivid for me during Motz's visit to the Bobcat Bite, a Santa Fe, New Meixco diner, where the specialty is a green chile burger. Because I had several friends in graduate school who were from New Mexico, I came to some understanding of just how important the green chile is to the local cuisine, and each restauarant offered some kind of similar localized pleasure (even writing this review is making me hungry).

There were a few places where the film seemed to want to defend itself "in advance" against the anti-fastfood treatises such as Super Size Me and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, with several characters reporting that they eat one of the local hamburgers every day, and those comments about the healthiness of eating hamburgers struck me as somewhat unnecessary, as I don't read either of those texts as criticizing the local burger stand at all (both Spurlock and Schlosser. Instead, they seem more critical of the fast food industry as such (in which food preparation is completely mechanized) or in the monopolization of choice (fast food restaurants that eclipse the local that we se in Motz's film).

On the whole, however, Hamburger America is an enjoyable little film (it should be playing soon on the Sundance Channel, I believe), although you probably should not watch it while you're hungry.

Posted by chuck at 1:41 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

A Turd Blossom By Any Other Name...

Via Kevin Drum, I just found the Dubya Nickname Database, which lists nicknames "granted" by George W. Bush. Of course, Bush's nicknames for Karl Rove (Turd Blossom, Boy Genius) are pretty well known at this point, but I hadn't seen or heard a lot of these nicknames before.

In particular, I'm troubled by his nicknames for women, which range from the saccharine ("Sweet Susan" for Republican Senator Susan Collins, "Dulce" for reporetr Candy Crowley) to the combative ("Cobra" for Maureen Dowd, and "Ali" and "Frazier" for California senators Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein), something that Kevin Drum commenter Psyche also noticed. Interesting to see so many of the nicknames compiled in one place, though the list looks a little incomplete.

Posted by chuck at 1:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 29, 2005

Airborne Toxic Events Coming to a Theater Near You

If you're one of my readers who teaches in a literature department, you may want to skip this entry. I just found out that there are plans to make a film version of Don DeLillo's White Noise. Apparently the film has been planned for at least a year, which makes me (want to) believe that it may not be happening, especially given the track records of the director Barry (Wild Wild West and Men in Black II) Sonnenfeld.

I'm not someone who believes that literary adaptations are necessarily a bad idea or that the novel (or whatever "original" source) is always superior to the film, but as Aaron pointed out a long time ago, Sonnenfeld's stylistic flourishes don't seem to fit the spirit of DeLillo's novel. Right now, I'm trying to operate under the assumption that this film will never happen.

Posted by chuck at 4:53 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

I Want My WM*TV

The parody advertisements for Robert Greenwald's latest documentary, WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price, are pretty funny and set a nice tone for the film's reception. Check out The Gospel According to Sam Walton and Betty's Diet Plan for a nice irreverent twist on the WAL-MART image (and for more viewing fun, here's the film's trailer).

According to the film's official website, premiere week is November 13-19, with over 3,200 planned screenings in all fifty states and several countries, numbers that significantly exceed the 2,600 screenings for Uncovered.

Posted by chuck at 10:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"Thanks for the Last and Greatst Betrayal..."

Via GreenCine, a link to a short Gus Van Sant video of William Burroughs reciting his "Thanksgiving Prayer." More great Burroughs sounds and images are available at the Reality Studio website. Van Sant's direction, which consists primarily of laying iconic American images behind the elderly Burroughs, is far less powerful than Burroughs' reading itself.

Also worth checking out: a Quick Time version of Towers Open Fire, a 1963 film scripted by Burroughs and directed by Anthony Balch. I hadn't seen this film before, and as experimental film goes, it's fascinating stuff.

Posted by chuck at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 27, 2005

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Just a few quick impressions of the second half of No Direction Home: First, the second half seemed to have a clearer narrative than the film's first half, focusing more explicitly on what Scorsese called "the journey of the artist." Not surprisingly, given the film's limited historical scope, No Direction Home climaxes with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan "went electric." As I've suggested, that reflection on the individual artist as genius isn't terribly interesting to me, and I think Direction underplays the contributions of other artists to Dylan's success in order to conform to this image of the solitary artist Following His Own Path.

And yet, the images themselves were arresting. In the post-film interview with Charlie Rose (cited above), Scorsese remarks on the amazing collection of footage available to him, including the D.A. Pennebaker footage from Don't Look Back, some startling footage taken by Jonas Mekas, as well as all the concert clips. And the scenes of Dylan singing with Johnny Cash were just plain cool. More than anything else, I think that's what I enjoyed about the film.

This treatment of the artist as genius ultimately obscured some of the more interesting political aspects of the 1960s, but there were several powerful moments that seemed to resonate with the current political moment. Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" opens the film's second half and sets the tone for Scorsese's whirlwind tour of the political conflicts of the early half of the decade. Shots of Mario Savio's December 1964 speech before the Free Speech Movement Sit-In mix with shots of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and shots of Joan Baez, whose interviews I found compelling, singing at an anti-war rally. This final image couldn't help but remind me of Baez's recent performance at the Operation: Ceasefire concert, and that's how I'm seeking to link No Direction Home to the present moment.

It's tempting to read Scorsese's use of these historical images (he includes fragmentary clips from the Zapruder film as well) as a "flattening" of history, but I'm not sure that's quite fair or even the most interesting reading of the film. For now (because I should really be doing some teaching prep), I'll just say that the decision to focus on Dylan's early career now seems wise, not because it's Dylan's creative peak. It was certainly a period in which Dylan was incredibly prolific. But these "historical" images certainly haunted the narrative and gave the film a power I'm still trying to articulate (and now I really need to do some work).

Posted by chuck at 10:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 26, 2005

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

I want to watch the second half of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home: Bob Dylan before making a full interpretation of it, but the documentary material Scorsese has compiled here, collecting interviews and culling from concert footage and amateur film, is pretty impressive. And until I watched this film, I'd forgotten how haunting and how powerful many of his songs actually are. Scorsese has long had a great ear for music, and that enthusiasm certainly shows in this film, which I certainly enjoyed watching, although I will acknowledge that some aspects of the film (the somewhat uncritical Dylan worship, in particular, left me feeling cold).

With that in mind, I want to reflect on some of the reviews I linked to earlier in the day. As I mentioned, David Greenberg, writing for Slate, criticizes the film for focusing almost entirely on Dylan's early career, with the effect that Dylan's later career, which features some fantastic music ("Hurricane" is a personal fave), is almost ignored. Greenberg acknowledges, of course, that what Scorsese offers is not a conventional biographical documentary, but wonders whether the film's '60s nostalgia inhibits critical thinking. It's an interesting argument, and while I share some of Greenberg's suspicions regarding nostalgia, even for the 1960s, I wonder if there isn't a way to use the film's nostalgia critically to think about the politics of cultural production.

Like Greenberg, I found myself somewhat frustrated by some of the '60s clichés used as "background" for the film. As Dylan "arrives" in Greenwich Village, we hear the eloquent John F. Kennedy calling the youth of America to national service ("Ask not what your country can do for you..."). I've heard or seen that image thousands of times, and I'm no longer sure that it can be made "new" again, but the sights and sounds that were memorable for me were the street scenes and poetry readings in Greenwich Village, as Scorsese painted a portrait of a youthful artist who was busy absorbing everything he could from Beat poetry to folk, country, and Gospel music, to James Dean and Marlon Brando movies.

In portraying Dylan as the one person capable of Putting It All Together, the film does fall into the somewhat less interesting narrative of Dylan as Genius (which isn't really news for most of us). In fact, my reading of the film should be seen as virtually antithetical to Roger Ebert's account of learning to empathize with Dylan, a reading that derives, in part, from a serious misreading of D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, in which Ebert keys on Dylan's verbal harangue against a young journalist, ignoring the film's commentary on media and the production of celebrity. But in celebrating the artistic scene out of which Dylan emerged, No Direction Home, implicitly at the very least, does reflect on the conditions of possibility that allowed Dylan to emerge as an artist, whether a maturing teen culture, the collectivity of the Greenwich Village bohemian culture, or the institutional status of the music industry. The film also shows the role the budding Civil Rights movement had on Dylan's music when he performs "Only a Pawn in the Game," a scathing critique of institutional racism (although Dylan does resist the characterization of himself as political throughout the first half of the documentary).

I realize that by placing emphasis on Scorsese's portrayal of the 1960s that I am reading the film somewhat against its intentions (or "against the grain" to use an old phrase), but I think there is some value in rethinking Dylan's reputation as someone who absorbed the disparate pieces of a fragmented culture and translated them into something else. It's a tempting reading, though a somewhat uncomfortable one, especially given David Yaffe's more critical take, which takes the film to task for a variety of sins (no mention of the sex and drugs that went along with rock and roll; the implication that Dylan's "people" carefully sanitized Dylan's image). But, following from Yaffe's criticism of the film and other forms of recent Dylan-worship, I think it's worth asking why Dylan (again) now? What cultural need (beyond profit) is the return to Dylan answering? I'm not sure I have the answer to that question--check back with me after Part 2--but I think it's a far more interesting question than merely dismissing the film for its whitewashed take on Dylan and far more satisfying than mere empathy with the genius.

Finally, welcome to all the readers who found their way here from Michael Bérubé's blog. Judging by my statistics, a lot of you are dropping by, so I'd love to know what other people are thinking about No Direction Home.

Posted by chuck at 11:20 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Time Warp to the Fifties

I don't think I've mentioned the fact that I've been invited to guest lecture in a graduate seminar at the University of Maryland. The topic: 1950s juvenille delinquency films, specifically Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, two very different but very powerful films that now represent some of the earliest ripples of a burgeoning youth culture. And once again, GreenCine is right on top of my research question of the day. First, there's a Carina Chocano article about director Mary Harron's Bettie Page biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page (IMDB), which I'm now very curious to see (director Harron, screenwriter Guinevere Turner, and producer Christine Vachon constitute a virtual indie all-star team).

Page, as Chocano notes, "gained notoriety when her bondage and fetish modeling for photographers Irving and Paula Klaw became the focus of Senate hearings led by Estes Kefauver, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, in 1955," the same year that Blackboard Jungle and Rebel were released. Harron's take on the Bettie Page story, and on the fifties in general, is worth checking out, and I'm now pretty curious to see this film.

Also via GreenCine, David Thomson's article marking the 50th anniversary of James Dean's death after crashing his Porsche Spyder into another vehicle. In addition to reflecting on Dean's final moments, Thomson notes the important connection between Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle, which made a belated hit out of Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock." Thomson's article generally celebrates Dean's legendary status, cemented of course by his dying young, but it's also useful for a quick run through on the cultural pulse of 1955.

Posted by chuck at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Time Warp to the Sixties

Lots of great links at GreenCine Daily today, including several reviews of Scorsese's Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home (IMDB) as part of their American Masters series (the film is airing tonight on many PBS stations, including at least one in DC). Writing for Slate, David Greenberg takes the film to task for basking in '60s nostalgia at the expense of the rest of Dylan's excellent career, and offers a more general critique of nostalgia, especially for the 1960s:

Nostalgia is also sentimental and thus meshes well with the machinery of mass culture, which, as Dwight Macdonald wrote years ago, tends to produce prepackaged cultural artifacts not dissimilar from chewing gum. More than any individual historians or critics, it's the leveling tendencies of mass culture that are really to blame for perpetuating our flattened, idealized images of the 1960s.

We've been drenched for so long in so much mass-produced 1960s kitsch that our Pavlovian responses to the music, words, and images of the time override critical assessments of it. And at bottom, today's cultural climate doesn't much distinguish between history and nostalgia. (Billy Joel once explained the genesis of his song "We Didn't Start the Fire"—the one that reels off proper nouns from the postwar years, as in "Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television/North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe"—by saying that he had always been interested in "history.") So, maybe we have to resign ourselves to accepting "the 1960s" as it's purveyed in mass culture—and to concede, with the postmodernists, that ultimately there's no real way to separate the 1960s from our myths of it.

While I haven't seen the Dylan documentary, Greenberg's comments strke me as excessively dismissive of nostalgia. Sure, nostalgia can easily be used to produce "flattened, idealized images" of the past (the VH1-ification of history), but a "critical nostalgia" might also provide a useful way of critiquing and acting in the present (Slate article via Steve, who also notes that yesterday's counter-protest supporting the war in Iraq was, shall we say, slightly outnumbered).

For more on No Direction Home, check out Mick Brown's outstanding article/review. Brown seems less bothered by the focus on Dylan's early career and identifies several highlights from the film. I'd imagine the film is worth watching just for Dylan's screen test for Andy Warhol (speaking of Warhol, selections from the Warhol Museum will be on display at the Corcoran Museum here in DC until February 2006). Hoping to catch the Dylan documentary tonight and write a brief review, at least.

Posted by chuck at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogging Handbook

I know that some of my other frequent reads have posted a link to the Reporters Without Borders' Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents, which looks like a nice introduction to the world of blogging. As McChris notes, "the pamphlet offers advice on starting a blog, strategies for issues like maintaining anonymity and avoiding censorship, and personal profiles of bloggers from around the world." There's a PDF of the whole handbook available online. The handbook includes accounts from bloggers in Iran and Nepal who use blogs as a tool to have their voices heard.

Posted by chuck at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 23, 2005

Daily Show Nostalgia

Via Boing Boing and Lost Remote: Like Jesse, the news that the old set of The Daily Show is being auctioned for charity reminded me of the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer finds the old Merv Griffin Show set in a dumpster.

While I've never really liked that episode of Seinfeld, the artificial nostalgia for those 1970s talk shows always struck me as a humorous concept. In general, the attempts to preserve a televisual past always seem strange to me, especially since TV--which is infinitely repeatable and now, with syndication and DVDs, infinitely repeated--is so resistant to any kind of aura (seeing TV props in a museum, for example, is generally disappointing for me).

The auction is for a good cause, 826NYC, a litearcy center "dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills."

Posted by chuck at 1:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Control Room Update

In Control Room (my review), Jehane Noujaim's 2004 documentary about the coverage of the Iraq war by the Al Jazeera television network, former US Marine captain Josh Rushing (at the time of the film he was a lietenant, as I recall) emerges as one of the more compelling characters in the film. While he is initially optomistic about the war effort, Rushing also demonstrates a willingness to engage in dialogue with the Al Jazeera reporters who are quite literally watching a different war, one that is informed by a much different history. In one of the film's final scenes Rushing agrees to dinner with Sudanese journalist Hassan Ibrahim in a scene that illustrates the possibilities for dialogue.

After the film, it was widely reported that Rushing left the Marines because he was unhappy with their media management. Now, according to The Guardian, Rushing has joined al-Jazeera International. It's certainly interesting to see Rushing's evolution in terms of his relationship to Al Jazeera, which he characterized as an Arab version of Fox News in one scene in Control Room (via Newslab).

Posted by chuck at 1:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 22, 2005

Occupation: Dreamland Screening

Quick self-reminder that Garrett Scott's Occupation: Dreamland will be playing at the Warehouse here in DC on September 30th. My schedule is so insane right now that I'm not sure I'll be able to attend, but I'm going to try.

Joshua Land has a review in the Village Voice. Will be interesting to compare this film to Gunner Palace.

Update: Here's some more good buzz for Occupation: Dreamland

Posted by chuck at 11:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Because I Haven't Participated in a Meme in a Long Time

Via Anbruch and profgrrrl:

Rules:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to it).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to it).
My 23rd post (like Anbruch, oddly enough) didn't have five sentences, so I went to #24.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Here it is:
The identification process itself is pretty trippy (click on the appropriate link of the Ramesses website) [Note: I think this is the link I was talking about], with the use of X-rays, DNA, the placement of the mummy's arms, the mummification process, and other forms of testing.

Posted by chuck at 10:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Blogging: Free Press for All or Free-for-All?

I've just returned from the blogging panel at the National Archives that I mentioned a few days ago. The panelists in attendance included NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, author of the PressThink blog, Deborah Potter, president and founder of Newslab, and Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association. The panel was moderated by Frank Bond of Newseum. In general, the panel addressed the title question: what are the implications for the emergence of blogs for the practice of journalism?

All three of the panelists were fairly optomistic about the effects of blogs on journalism, with Rosen in particular emphasizing the fact that blogs allow writers to bypass the traditional "gatekeepers" that tended to promote one-way rather than two-way communication. Rosen cited A.J. Liebling's remark that in the past that "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one." Of course blogging is relatively cheap, at least compared to other media, but I want to complicate this argument to some extent. Certainly this is one of the reasons I started blogging, and I'm fairly enthusiastic about the opportunities that blogging provides, but these claims about access essentially went unchallenged (I would have raised the question during the Q&A, but we ran out of time).

Cox did mention the fact that most blogs still only have a few readers per day, noting the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem as one illustration of this principle. This is where the question of "access" seems important, as the question of the leisure time needed to sustain a high-traffic blog was addressed only in passing (when one of the audience members asked in bloggers ever get paid). Aside from access to a computer, it's difficult to have the time to research a topic and write about it.

As the panel's title suggests, the discussion focused primarily on "journalist bloggers" and the role they have played in reshaping journalism practice. Potter cited the example of the Rathergate scandal a few months ago, noting the role of bloggers in "deconstructing" news stories and describing blogging as a means for people to "talk back to their TVs." There's certainly value in this potential, but I'm not convinced that what is happening on many blogs that claim to be practicing journalism can accurately be described as such. And much of what has been attributed to blogs (specifically news stories reaching the public faster) might better be attributed to the 24-hour news cycle.

But while I would have liked some "balance" on the panel, Cox and Rosen in particular noted the ways in which blogging has changed our reading practices for better or for worse, and that's a point worth underlining. Blogging has presented some real challenges for thinking about the First Amendment issues implied in the panel's title, and the attempts to contain, through Federal Election Commission regulations, or co-opt blogging are worth noting, if only because these efforts illustrate just how much weblogs have shifted the boundaries.

Posted by chuck at 8:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 21, 2005

Katrina and Public Broadcasting

Just came across this "breaking story" that several Republican Congressmen have proposed to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to help pay for the Hurricane Katrina recovery costs.

CPB has already been deeply damaged by Republican cuts, so eliminating federal funding might be more honest than pretending that we have any real public broadcasting in the United States. But given the fact that CPB is a drop in the bucket compared to other forms of government pork, and given some valuable programming supported by the CPB, I think this would be a tremendous loss.

More at the Salt Lake Tribune, including other proposed cuts such as a delay in the start of the new Medicare prescription drug coverage for one year. Because it's more important to build roads and not to tax the rich than it is to give medicine to elderly and poor poeple.

Posted by chuck at 2:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 20, 2005

DC Underground Film Festival

The DC Underground Film Festival takes place next weekend. Lots of good films, including Jem Cohen's Chain, which I've been dying to see. I may also try to see POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English. But the whole festival looks pretty cool.

Update: Here's more from diyfilms.

Posted by chuck at 11:04 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

The Medium is (Still) the Message

Thanks to Marc for the pointer to Ubuweb, "a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts."

Like Marc, I was fascinated by the recording of Marshall McLuhan's appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. But I was even more intrigued by the fact that Truman Capote and Chicago Bears receiver Gayle Sayers sat in on the McLuhan interview. Also cool: Samuel Becektt's Film, DJ Food's "Raiding the 20th Century," and Mairead Byrne's "Some Differences Between Poetry and Stand-Up".

Update: While I'm thinking about it, I just wanted to provide a quick link to the Ourmedia homepage, which I found via one of my recent trackbacks. I could spend days digging around in the archives of Ubuweb and Ourmedia (and probably will), but my guilt about not getting some work done is starting to kick into overdrive.

Posted by chuck at 2:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Golden Ages and Other Necessary Fictions

Eugene Robinson's Washington Post editorial discusses this week's Emmy Award tribute to TV anchormen Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel, connecting "one of the dreary telecast's few moments of genuine electricity" to the recent coverage of the Katrina catastrophe. In the editorial, Robinson notes that in covering Katrina, TV journalists fulfilled their obligation to inform the public rather than succumbing to "happy-faced oversimplification."

Specifically, Robinson cites the reporting from the Ninth Ward by CNN's Jeanne Meserve ("This is Armageddon") as the moment when he realized the seriousnes of the Katrina disaster (here's a long MP3 of Meserve's outstanding reporting--via), and I think Robinson is right that much of the reporting of the Katrina disaster has been impressive, far better than much of the reporting we've seen in recent years.

In criticizing the contemporary TV media (from which he distances himself as a "print-media" guy), Robinson cites the a "golden age of television news," naming the examples of Huntley and Brinkley, the early days of 60 Minutes, and Edward Murrow. There are certainly valuable reasons to identify that moment as a "golden age." In comparison to breathless round-the-clock coverage of "MWW" (or missing white women) and Bennifer, the high-minded sincerity of these figures offers a welcome alternative.

But in general every golden age is based on some form of exculsion (i.e., it's not golden for everyone), and while Robinson celebrates Jennings, Koppel, Rather, and their predecessors, it's hard for me not to think about the position of authority which those journalists and anchormen assumed. Implied in this comment, of course, is the fact that network news reporting, until fairly recently, was the domain of white men, but the more crucial problem--one that I see as persistent from the Golden Age to the current moment--is the very authoritarian structure of media itself, one that is underlined by concentrated media ownership, a topic that I've been thinking about a lot this week (I'm teaching Chomsky/Herman's "A Propaganda Model" and Greenwald's Outfoxed). And I think it's crucial here to retain Chomsky and Herman's comments, in part because comments about reporting rarely take this "industrial" argument into consideration (TV networks owned by large multinationals are not going to report stories that aren't in their interests), instead usually attributing bad reporting to personal weakness or laziness ("I'm glad to see the media finally developing a backbone").

That being said, I'm intrigued by Robinson's attempt to use these two images (the Emmy ceremony and the Katrina coverage) to revive a "golden age" of reporting, even if I'm suspicious that it never really existed. I don't think a "golden age" necessarily has to be true for it to be useful. Katrina coverage has inspired some self-criticism that might be productive. The difficulty here, of course, is in asking the right questions (the CNN anchor who is interviewing Meserve implies that reporters are sometimes criticized for being "thrill-seekers," which is one of the least of my concerns).

Posted by chuck at 9:21 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 18, 2005

Blogs and Jobs

In other news, the first round of the MLA job list came out on Friday, which means that you can expect somewhat more infrequent posting around these parts. This has nothing to do with Ivan Tribble's advice about blogging. I'm just really busy this week.

Posted by chuck at 10:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Night the Lights Went On (and Off Again) in New Orleans

I originally wrote this entry yesterday, but for some reason it wouldn't publish.....

Brian Williams' blog entry about the most recent Bush photo-op has been making the rounds in Blogworld. Most bloggers have been citing the first half of Williams' entry, in which he discusses the fact that just half an hour after Bush's speech, the electric lights that provided the President with an inspiring backdrop were shut down again:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it...jump to certain conclusions.
It's not difficult to jump to the conclusions implied by Williams, especially given the Bush administration's skill in staging dramatic visuals for Presidential speeches. However, even with dozens of media-savvy bloggers ready to Deconstruct Dubya, the stunning visuals, straight out of a high-concept film, still retain tremendous power. In fact, if someone isn't working on a sequel to Michael Rogin's Ronald Reagan The Movie And Other Episodes in Political Demonology, then maybe it's time to start writing that book.

But while it's important to unpack the Bush administration's often unsubtle use of images, I found Williams' discussion of what happens when the lights go dark (and most of the cameras leave) to be more troubling:

It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is under government occupation, and portions of it under government-enforced lockdown. Police cars
rule the streets. They (along with Humvees, ambulances, fire apparatus, FEMA trucks and all official-looking SUVs) are generally not stopped at checkpoints and roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long lines and snap judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast roped-off regions here. If we did not have the services of an off-duty law enforcement officer, we could not do our jobs in the course of a work day and get back in time to put together the broadcast and get on the air. As we are about to do.
The description of a city "under government occupation" and "government-enforced lockdown" suggests a slightly more coercive attempt to manage the crisis. While I was originally pretty skeptical about Williams' blog, I have to admit that his last few entries have provided some valuable eye-witness insight into the current situation in New Orleans and the potential long-term
ramifications of Katrina's impact on the region.

Posted by chuck at 10:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 15, 2005

National Archives Event Reminder

This is a reminder to myself as much as anyone about some upcoming events at the National Archives here in DC. On Thursday, September 22, there will be a panel discussion on blogging and journalism, "Blogging: Free Press for All or Free-for-All?" I was originally less enthusiastic about this panel simply because I don't believe that the so-called "grassroots journalism" is the most interesting manifestation of the blogging boom (I'm also not always sure that it qualifies as journalism), but after several bloggers reported their eye-witness accounts of Katrina's devastation of Louisiana and Mississippi, I'm a little more curious about what the panelists will have to say.

On Friday, September 23 at 7PM, there will be another panel that should be worth attending: "Copyright, the Constitution, and the Crisis in Historical Documentary Film." I've already discussed my interest in this topic. Also, just a quick reminder that both events are free, but reservations, available at the National Archives website, are required. I'm planning to attend both events, so if anyone is interested in attending (and would like to grab an adult beverage afterwards), send me an email: chutry[at]msn[dot]com.

Posted by chuck at 4:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 13, 2005

Žižek Watching Lacan

A few months ago, I mentioned Astra Taylor's documentary Žižek!, about Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (unfortunately I missed the film when it played in Atlanta and Athens), and now Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Ed has a review of the film that makes me even more enthusiastic about seeing it.

As McLemee notes, it's probably inevitable that Žižek will be compared to Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's Derrida (also a very effective film), but McLemee's description of Taylor's doc has me intrigued. Of particular interest is a scene--McLemee describes it as "plenty meta"--in which Žižek watches a clip of Jacques Lacan, a major influence on his thinking, during a television appearance he made in the early 1970s. I've been curious to see Lacan's appearance on TV for some time, but to watch Žižek watching it sounds even more enticing.

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September 12, 2005

Call For Papers: New Orleans and Other Urban Calamities

The academic journal Space and Culture is calling for papers on the recent events in New Orleans. The papers should be "immediate, short (1000 word) reactions that advance a specific argument rather than general comment." Via the Space and Culture blog.

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September 11, 2005

Photographing Six Degrees

Back in 1994, all the cool kids were listening to grunge rock while playing "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," the party game in which participants attempt to link Hollywood actors to the Footloose star in fewer than six links. The game grew in popularity at around the same time (mid 1990s) that everyone started noticing the Internet, and the game spawned a website, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia and, apparently, a board game. It's also probably not a coincidence that this Will Smith film came out in 1993. The six degrees concept is an enticing one, especially when it functions as a way of making sense of the world as network.

More recently, according to The Observer, photographer Andy Gotts became fascinated by the concept and pursued it as theme of his most recent book, Degrees, in which he connects over one hundred actors, including George Clooney and Brad Pitt, to Kevin Bacon. I'm curious to know what Gotts does with the "six degrees" logic beyond merely photographing celebrities, but the project sounds like an interesting one. Meanwhile, I'm trying to ignore the fact that I'm nostalgic for the good old days when I could link Charlie Chaplin and Kevin Bacon.

Gotts' royalties from the book will go to diabetes research. Thanks to GreenCine Daily for the link.

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"From Slave Ships to the Superdome"

Cornel West on race, poverty, and Katrina:

What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.

It's not just Katrina, it's povertina. People were quick to call them refugees because they looked as if they were from another country. They are. Exiles in America. Their humanity had been rendered invisible so they were never given high priority when the well-to-do got out and the helicopters came for the few. Almost everyone stuck on rooftops, in the shelters, and dying by the side of the road was poor black.

Thanks to Raining Cats and Dogma for the link.

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September 10, 2005

Bushville

Via Mark Crispin Miller's News from Underground, information about a planned protest encampment, Bushville, on the National Mall:

Build Bushville, DC on 9/11/05. On 9/11 Survivors of Bush will participate in a NONVIOLENT act of Civil Disobedience: building Bushville, DC on the Washington DC Mall. FEMA pens Katrina survivors like diseased cattle. Bushville, DC will force politicians and reporters to see them every day. Bushville, DC may be small on 9/11, but it will grow. Bushville, DC isn’t an organization - it’s a vision. Everyone come to the Mall and join the crowd. Katrina survivors are encouraged to come, but all Bush survivors are welcome. Be there and make history.

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Three Movies: Funny Ha Ha, Murderball, and Lila Says

I'm way behind on my movie reviews, and it doesn't look like I'll have time to catch up anytime soon, so here are some quick comments on a few movies I've seen recently (all links to IMDB pages):

Funny Ha Ha: I had a chance to see Andrew Bujalski's thoughtful, observant film at the AFI Silver last weekend (Bujalski attended the screening and fielded questions afterwards), and this film has ceratinly stuck with me (and really deserves its own review). Funny Ha Ha focuses on the experiences of Marnie, a twenty-something recent college graduate who is doing boring temp work. She also has an unrequited crush on Alex, and the film captures Marnie's awkwardness very effectively, especially through the halting dialogue. The cinetrix's review conveys much of what I like about this film and, more importantly, makes the point that it deserves wider distribution. If you get a chance to see Funny Ha Ha, it's well worth it.

Murderball: One of the hit documentaries of 2005 has been Murderball, the story of the United States Quadreplegic Rugby team. I didn't realize until the opening credits that MTV had produced the film, and that aesthetic--for both good and ill--informs the film. U.S. Quad rugby star Mark Zupan is certainly an MTV figure, with his musical tastes and his tattoos and goatee, and the heavy music underscored the hard-hitting matches quite well, and the chair-level camerawork serves the film's subject nicely. But MTV's documentaries have always struck me as pretty shallow, usually offering imaginary solutions of emotional reconciliation to real problems, and I think that Murderball does fall into that category. Like Rachael, I'd expected a documentary that didn't conform to past feel-good sports narratives, but on that level, it felt like more of the same, especially when we see Zupan, at the end of the film, introudicng soldiers who were wounded in Iraq to the sport (that being said, to show wounded soldiers in an American documentary is still somewhat rare given our mainstream media's sanitized coverage of the war).

Rachael's aside ("Is there a women's quad rugby team?") raises another observation I had about this film: its exploration of crises in masculinity. The men on the quad rugby team brag about their ability to have sex and meet women, and the quad rugby groupies are certainly an important part of the film, just as the sport seems to be a way of re-asserting one's toughness. Perhaps more interesting was the Canadian coach, Joe Soares, a former U.S. quad rugby star who was dropped from the team. His attempts to regain a clearer sense of his own masculinity play out in his treatment of his able-bodied son, who shows no interest in sports but a talent for playing music (the viola, I believe). At the beginning of the movie, especially, Joe is clearly conflicted about his son's more stereotypically feminine interests in music. And, following the question of masculinity a little further, as Rachael's commnt implies, we don't see any female quad rugby players, although the film is careful to show (several times) a wounded female soldier showing interest in the sport.

Lila Says: French teen romance that is probably most interesting for its exploration of a relationhip between a shy Arab male and a French teenage girl. Hearing Lila repeat her inreasingly elaborate sexual narratives is also entertaining, but the film overall seemed trapped in the "I-was-never-the-same-again-after-that-summer" genre without doing anything terribly new with it.

I saw Wong Kar Wei's 2046 last night and loved it. I'll try to write a short review later, but given that the film may only be in town for a few days, I'm going to make a quick plug for seeing this beautifully shot film on a big screen.

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We Report. You Decide.

The Scrivener has this image on his blog, and I received it by email yesterday (which means I'm probably a year behind in Internet Time), but didn't have time to blog it.

bushdisaster9kr.jpg

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September 8, 2005

Camera Katrina

I've already written at some length about the emotional power of the photographs of survivors of Hurricane Katrina, but Scrivener's reflections on some of the Flickr photosets of the hurricane survivors really convey the power of these photographs, especially when he identifies with the father-daughter relationships portrayed in this photograph or simply the experience of weathering a hurricane while you're homeless (thanks to G Zombie for calling our attention to these photostreams). His readings of these images leave me wanting more. It's not interpretation exactly, but something closer to identification. They also suggest the need to make things right for the many people who are still living in these shelters.

Scrivener looks primarily at images from Ioerror's photset, "Astrodome and beyond," and few collections of photographs capture the scope of the Katrina crisis as effectively as these photos. Ioerror allows us to see the vast expanse of survivors, but also to get a sense of some of the individuals and families whose lives have been disrupted by the hurricane. This photograph" is especially powerful. Like Scrivener, I'm moved by the sad, exhausted eyes of the father holding his sleeping daughter, but I'm also struck by the father's isolation against the bright orange stadium seats. There's a loneliness in the image that I can't shake, and like Scrivener, I see this photograph as a visual rejoinder to Barbara Bush's incredibly shallow comments about the survivors who are being sheltered in the Astrodome.

I'm not sure I can add much to what Scrivener has already said, but I will mention another resource for people who want to help the survivors get through Katrina's aftermath. AlterNet has "10 great ways to help."

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Purdue Professor on IMDB

Just had one of those "Hey-I-Know-That-Guy!" moments while skimming IMDB in order to avoid more productive work. One of the film professors in Purdue's English department, William Palmer, was interviewed regarding the upcoming cycle of 9/11 films, including Oliver Stone's untitled 9/11 project.

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Immediate Residential Fellowship for a Scholar Impacted by Katrina

I imagine that most people who read my blog already read Matt Kirschenbaum's, but I'd like to help spread the word about a residential fellowship at the Maryland Institute for the Humanities at the University of Maryland for a scholar at an institution closed by Hurricane Katrina.

Go to Matt's blog for further details.

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September 6, 2005

Sloan Semester

Via Anbruch:

As you may have heard, Sloan-C is working the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the Sloan Foundation on a project called the Sloan Semester to bring free online courses to students displaced from colleges shut down due to damage from Hurricane Katrina. We have been putting together a website that provides and collects information that will help in this effort and we are now asking for your help in getting this information out to students that could potentially benefit from this initiative. The Boston Globe estimated that as many as 175,000 students will be displaced this semester due to this disaster. Many will have to seek classes at other institutions, even now that the semester has already started at most of these colleges. Sloan-C has organized more than 100 institutions that offer quality online courses in an accelerated format, starting in October (we are still accepting additional volunteer institutions at the website). This is a grassroots effort, meaning everything hinges on your help to get this information to the students. The press has already given us some coverage, but that can only do so much, it is really up to our personal efforts to get the word out. Please contact as many personal and professional contacts as possible with the hope that the more people you contact, the more likely more students will find out that this is available. Even if you don't know a student from the affected schools, someone you know might, so please forward to all you feel comfortable forwarding to.

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The Living Room Aesthetic

I'm working on a paper proposal for a workshop panel at this year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Vancouver, and the issue I'm planning to address is the concept of the "living room aesthetic," which might best be associated with the current crop of documentaries such as Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on News, Gunner Palace, and Tarnation, most of which are filmed on DV and edited on Final Cut Pro (and often promoted on Apple-related websites).

The term "living room aesthetic" was a last-minute choice, but it's close to the idea behind DIY, though the "living room" grounds practice in a specifc place, in this case, the home, and the stability of "home" as a site for making images (it's also meant as a faint echo of Vietnam's characterization as the first "living room war" or even notions of televised campaign ads promoting "living room candidates," for reasons that I may address later). This "living room aesthetic" can be associated with ideas of democratization ("anyone" can make a movie) that can be politically productive, but must be grounded in some consciousness about access, especially with thousands of people currently homeless or displaced by Katrina.

This paper will riff on some of the work I've already done on Gunner Palace and Uncovered, which I've grown to admire a bit more than my initial comments might suggest, but the ideas are still developing right now, as I once again use my blog as a kind of "academic workbench" (I'm looking forward to Matt's response to Ivan Tribble's second, more defensive CHE anti-blogging piece).

Off topic, but a few other links I wanted to store/publicize: Via Slate, I came across this LA Times article about the use of cameraphones to capture flashers. The article opens with an account of a New York woman who used her cellphone camera to photograph a man who flashed her and then posted his photograph on the web (the man was eventually arrested and charged).

Also, while doing a Google search for something else, I came across the Echo Chamber Project, an open-source doc on how the major networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) "became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq." This sounds like a productive supplement to Greenwald's work on FoxNews and might, in fact, provide an interesting twist for thinking about the "living room aesthetic" that I want to unpack.

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September 5, 2005

New Orleans Links

I'm testing out Technorati tags (yeah, I should have been using them months ago), so here are a few more New Orleans links to keep the information flowing:

technorati tags:

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Potemkin Shelters

The Scrivener is calling for the impeachment of the President:

For setting up fake food distribution sites in the New Orleans disaster zone, posing in front of them for the cameras, and then having his people remove everything and leaving the victims to fend for themselves as soon as the cameras moved along.

Update: Remember, too, it's not just the phony food dumps--it's phony work on the 17th street levee and lying to Senator Landrieu about that work, it's pulling Coast Guard choppers off line to serve as the backdrops for Dubya to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" in New Orleans, it's lying about claims that state officials have not yet officially declared emergency conditions. I'm serious, there should be impeachment proceedings in place soon, if there is one shred of respect for human life or for the office of the Presidency left in Congress.

For the last year or so, I've kept the politics to a minimum here, originally because I was teaching a course on the rhetoric of the election and didn't want my students to feel intimidated by my politics. Being on the job market also made me a little more cautious, lest I appear to be a "loose cannon." But the events of the last few days are convincing me that it's time to add to the political noise in the blogosphere. At the very least, I'd encourage everyone to write their Senators and Representatives to let them know that Bush's handling of Katrina was completely unacceptable.

Update: Scrivener also points to this post by Laura Rozen calling for "bloggers and other information diggers" to hold people accountable for what's happening down there.

Update 2: Lance Mannion has a fantastic post that answers any arguments that Bush's critics are "politicizing" the hurricane. As Mannion notes,

The President has no clue. He needs to find someone who can handle the job of rescue and recovery. Now.

These are political statements. They are also true. Nobody should refrain from telling the truth because the truth might have some politics attached.

But more than the failures being political failures; they are moral failures, as well.

I'm not sure I can add anything to Lance's insightful, impassioned comments, but to say they're well worth reading.

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When It All Changed, Again

I'm still reeling from last week's tragedy in New Orleans. Like many people, I'm deeply troubled by the lack of an immediate and decisive (G Zombie's right--this should be required reading) response on the part of the Bush administration. I am saddened that the President of the United States fiddled while New Orleans drowned. The complete disregard for the lives and needs of New Orleans' black and working-class people is astounding, as G Zombie's entry and this New York Times article illustrate:

Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans lives below the poverty line, compared with 9 percent nationwide, according to census figures. Twenty-four percent of its adults are disabled, compared with 19 percent nationwide. An estimated 50,000 households in New Orleans do not have cars.
It's not easy to evacuate when you don't have a car or when you can't afford a plane ticket out of the city or when everything you own is about to be washed over by flood waters. For Bush to equate, or even compare, the destruction of one of Trent Lott's houses with the experiences of the people who lost everything (or to joke about his hard-partyin' days in the Big Easy), demonstrates a lack of concern for others' suffering that is remarkable. In short, the handling of Katrina was incompetent at best and quite clearly racist.

But against this background, I cannot help but ask the question: Where do we go from here? As Matt notes, Katrina will inevitably be narrativized and compared with 9/11. Like the September 11 attacks, we have a massive tragedy in one of the nation's largest cities. And like 9/11, the event conjures up any number of questions about national identity and national purpose, of who we are as a nation and what governments ought to provide for their people, what it means to be a civil servant.

Here a few questions we can ask: We can talk about why cutting taxes to line the pockets of rich people isn't always a good idea. And to be perfectly clear, I'm not just blaming Republicans for this one. Clinton slashed funding for the levees, too, but Bush's budget cuts (and his spending on the war in Iraq, which continues to take its toll). We can talk about the ways in which the war in Iraq weakened the ability to respond to Katrina. We can talk about the cronyism that allowed someone like Michael Brown to assume the leadership of FEMA when he had no proir experience and had been fired from his previous job for incompetence. We can also talk about the racist characterization of the New Orleans survivors.

At the same time, we should look into the face of this tragedy, to see the faces and hear the stories of the people who were so deeply affected by Katrina (and by Katrina, I no longer mean the storm itself, but the government's response to it, on all levels). These Flickr photographs, taken when the so-called "Renegade Bus" arrived at the Astrodome in Houston, provide one starting point for that. As the photjournalis, "slight cutter," notes, the bus , which was greeted by the news media (I find the spotlight shining into this young girl's face incredibly powerful), was filled with children, who were forced to confront things that many adults never have to face. These images capture the real state of emergency in a way that might be inaccessible in other media (Ted Barlow has a personal narrative from the Houston Convention Center), although Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera's breakdowns on FoxNews comes close).

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September 3, 2005

Penguins Against Bears

Stephen Holden's New York Times article, "A Reprieve for Reality," reviews the continued popularity of documentary films. Holden notes that March of the Penguins, which I still haven't seen, has now surpassed Bowling for Columbine as the second-highest grossing documentary of all-time. Holden then compares March's somewhat "Disneyfied" portrayal of the penguins' annual against-the-elements trek to Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, which portrays suburban surfer-hippie Timothy Treadwell's somewhat misguided attempts to protect grizzlies from the humans he believes wish to destroy the bears.

Holden's main point is to note that the continued popularity of the documentary might reflect a larger cultural wariness regarding the triviality of celebrity culture, a desire for "reality" in the face of reality television's silly twisting of the meaning of that term:

These movies challenge audiences to examine reality at a moment when the very term has been warped beyond recognition by reality television. This has been the summer in which mass culture, in its search for new commercial distractions, reached a dangerous tipping point. There is a sense of exhaustion in the air, as though the accumulation of cultural debris, celebrity worship and meaningless competitions had reached a critical mass.

How much longer can we continue to live inside a bubble where Jennifer Aniston's broken heart and Tom Cruise's public meltdown compete with the war in Iraq, famine in Sudan and the catastrophe in New Orleans as headline news stories?

Are the fame-seeking narcissists who swarm through reality television shows an accurate mirror of who we have become as a people? Or are they an illusion marketed by hucksters who cleverly play on a creeping self-disgust, then devise fresh new camouflage to mask that deepening sense of revulsion?

The relationship of reality television to the rise of the documentary is another question to ponder. Did reality television prepare the way for the new popularity of the documentary? Or is the increasing popularity of documentaries a response to the Orwellian political climate.

Holden asks some interesting questions here. I don't think that the popularity of today's documentaries, including the explicitly politcal ones, can be attributed to a single factor. The "Orwellian political environment," which I take to include not only the Bush administration itself but also the deregulated news media, is certainly a factor, but I think the sense of "exhaustion" he describes is probably far more important, especially now that we are beginning to grasp the real human catastrophe taking place in Louisiana and Mississippi, something I'm still not sure I know how to write about, in part because the event exceeds my ability to understand and represent it.

It's probably worth adding that documentaries can be made very cheaply, and with Final Cut Pro and similar technologies, barriers of technological mastery are somewhat lower than in the past. The lower production costs allow filmmakers to take some chances with the material.

Posted by chuck at 1:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 1, 2005

More New Orleans Resources

Here are a few other ways you can help New Orleans courtesy of Doreen, who has asked for people to forward this call for assistance as widely as possible. A link from your blog or an email to your friends and collegues would be much appreciated, I'm sure.

Chuck, Here's something I wrote to people today and hope you can post for people interested in donating monies....

A specific way to help the city of New Orleans right now is to donate to this fund.

UNO Recovery Fund
in care of
Dr. Robert Rasmussen
3810 West Lakeshore Drive
Baton Rouge, LA 70804

What I think is most important in terms of a building a future for New Orleans--after this initial crisis situation is relieved--is to get the Univesity up and running ASAP. Considering its mission as being dedicated to primarily educating southeastern Louisiana residents and considering that it is the only four year public institution in a city (and also state) that is fiscally strapped, it is essential that UNO functions as soon as possible as a sign that the city has an intellectual center that people can return to and as a source of possibility and hope for many already economically marginalized student populations that attend the university.

Basically, the students of UNO are New Orleans' future. In today's NYT, I read that 80% of New Orleans residents stay put in the parishes where they were born. While I won't go into the reasons why this may be so, I can say that this is the primary population that the university serves and thus helping the university get back on its feet is central to the city's ability to function culturally and economically in the future.

Please forward this to as many people, depts, and institutions as you can. I really do appreciate it.


Doreen also passed along this link to a NYT article about the 9th Ward, its history and architecture and a link to the Irish Trojan Blog, which has been a valuable resource on the events in New Orleans.

Posted by chuck at 8:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Reflections on New Orleans

I want to write a much longer post about New Orleans, especially about the network and cable news coverage, but with my senior seminar meeting for the first time tomorrow, it'll have to wait a few hours or days. KF asks "how the rest of the world can be going about its business so nonchalantly," and I think many of the commenters are right: for many of us, the level of disaster in New Orleans is incomprehensible. I know that I'm overwhelmed, almost silenced by the images that I see, by the stories that I've heard.

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