Red Dawn, 1984 (Remember when American Movies fantasized about Russian Invasions?)

March 1, 2011 By 3 Comments

Word on the street is that there is a possible release of the remake of Red Dawn in late summer of this year. If you grew up Cold War America then there is a high chance you were screaming “Wolverines!” as Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell drank moose blood in the mountains of Montana.

Image from http://wwww.threeimaginarygirls.com/files/uploaded-images/wolverines.jpg

Image from http://www.bigchicosmovieblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/red-dawn.jpg

Quite possibly the best mix of Patrick Swayze Jennifer Grey mix pre-Dirty Dancing, Red Dawn was actually the stuff of my nightmares! Imagine getting to Brooklyn all the way from Kabul and seeing this movie — it opens with paratroopers landing by the high school just as the teacher finishes up a lecture on the invading Mongol hordes!

This 1984 teen film was released right around the time that the Soviet-Afghan war was at its thickest and Afghans were winning popular American support. You can see the connection in these two photos I’ve juxtaposed — the first, the Wolverines (brave rebels fighting Nicuaraguans, Cubans and Russians who were invading the U.S.) and then the Mujahideen (brave warriors fighting the Soviets and given their own Afghanistan Day by Reagan in 1987)

Image from http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/6100000/Red-Dawn-1984-80s-films-6130207-1024-768.jpg

It’s like the cast of The Outsiders and St. Elmo’s Fire merged and were given military weapons.

Photo by Jonas Dovydenas

See the similarities… okay so the Afghan Mujahideen are not wearing letterman jackets and posing on bleachers, but you get it! In this photo, the Mujahideen are photographed in the Kunar Province, 1985.

Image from http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/reddawn.jpg

This one is in the mountains — come on way too similar to 80s photos of the Mujahideen!

Image from http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/reza_p57%5B1%5D.jpg

One of the most famous Mujahideen glory era photos of Ahmad Shah Masood by the famous international photographer, Reza.

Image from http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4asx7ilAA1qzzh6g.jpg

Not sure if die-hard Red Dawn fans will buy this connection. I’ve already had one facebook comment war with a friend from high school who was vehement that Red Dawn had nothing to do with the Mujahideen. But… you and I know better.

Image from http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2009/02/10/reddawn120704.jpg

It’s all fun and games till the commies conquer the McDonalds! What could happen next? Silver Spoons in Russian?!!

Red Dawn (1984)

Now onto the remake, which has its own issues of being Sinophobic. Honestly, I thought the easiest step would be to make invading Turbanismo Warriors. But apparently, they decided to have the Chinese invading America. Some have said that it’s anti-Asian sentiment may have even canceled it. Hmmm… maybe it would have been better to invest in a remake of Robocop?

Filed Under: Media, Politics

The Medium Isn’t the Message

February 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As the New York Times observed, two of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture up for Oscars last night were about transformations in communications. “The King’s Speech,” which won, remembers the pressure that radio put on King George VI to minimize his speech impediment in the days leading up to World War II, when his country needed to hear a strong and articulate message from its leaders. “The Social Network” also looks back, all the way back to seven years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg began the journey from outsider geek, to big man on campus, to CEO of the paradigm-changing communications giant that Facebook would become.   Transformations in communications are also part of the way the Oscars were presented this year.  The Academy added many features to appeal to people who now go online and use social media while watching awards shows.  It used younger hosts and an interactive website, and had nominees’ mothers (“mominees”) tweet about the Oscar experience.

“The King’s Speech” is getting dismissed a bit by observers as ‘just’ a historical drama, a costume piece, and a buddy movie (the king and his speech therapist). It does, however, offer some interesting implicit speculation on what kind of king Edward VIII, friendly to Germany, might have been had he not abdicated. “The Social Network” presents a slice of history as well, albeit an incredibly recent one. The fact that the historical moment “The Social Network” explores is so recent certainly highlights the remarkably fast evolution and impact of social networking technologies. Is it because evolution in communications is so rapid, intense, and ongoing, that “The Social Network” manages to pull out the drama of a recent moment as clearly as if it were a costume piece and we’d had decades to process it? Or maybe it’s just the great job that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin did with the screenplay, which also won an Oscar.

“The King’s Speech” deals with politics, and “The Social Network” with academia and the business world, but both of them are ultimately about relationships, the human element that should not get lost in the shuffle when we think about information and communication technologies. With Twitter and Facebook in the news daily as part of the political upheavals occurring in the Middle East, it’s worthwhile to remember that communication is about people, even when technology is their conduit. Twitter isn’t toppling oppressive regimes; it is people who are already energized for change, using it as one tool to communicate, who are effecting that change.  “The King’s Speech” isn’t about radio, it’s about a lonely king as Eliza Doolittle and his pal the speech therapist as Henry Higgins. And “The Social Network” isn’t just about the origins of the social networking tool Facebook. To me, it says much more about social class and exclusion; it could be an Edith Wharton or Henry James novel, for the pitfalls of social climbing and hubris it explores so poignantly.

Both “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” are really good movies, both about relationships and communications, and extremely well-done.  “The King’s Speech” was heavily favored, but “The Social Network” was my pick, and not just because of its relevance, nor the fact that social media are observably impacting our lives every day. It’s just a compelling narrative, and I loved the ending, which imagines Zuckerberg sitting at his computer hitting Refresh every few seconds, hoping that the girl who rejected him will ‘friend’ him now on Facebook.

You know what’s cool?  [Hint:  it's not a billion dollars.]  What’s cool is a timeless story about human frailty, and about the imperative we all feel, as social beings, to communicate and connect with others.  Both movies offer that in spades.

Filed Under: Interpersonal Communication, Media, Social Networking, Technology, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Scholarly writing gets hijacked, interpretation is a wild ride

January 31, 2011 By 2 Comments

pen mightier than sword
Creative Commons License photo credit: smemon87

After reading violent threats against Frances Fox Piven online, my first thought was “If books are so powerful, then why threaten with a gun—go and write your own book.”

Hannah Arendt, in On Violence, describes violence as indicating the lack of power. Power, she says, is the capacity to capture people’s hearts and minds, to change the way they think and act. In the late 1960s, she wrote against what she saw as leftist writing that glorified violence (she cited Fanon and Sartre). Power is what separates Karl Marx’s ideas, which galvanized, inspired, and engaged debate, from Joseph Stalin’s regime of suppression through threat and through actual violence. (See also page 2 in her article in The New York Review of Books). Fascist regimes, according to Arendt, are regimes without new ideas (see her review of The Black Book in Commentary, page 294).  What they have instead is a monopoly on the means of violence.

But, what is the written threat of violence? It is not the same. This week seemed like a good time to turn to Judith Butler’s scholarship on hate speech (Excitable Speech). I was surprised to find that Butler takes apart the distinction between physical violence and language, and two of the main terms she uses in this project are control and vulnerability. In society, people are vulnerable to and dependent upon language, and language is beyond our control. Therefore, hate speech is said be “like a slap in the face” because being called a demeaning name actually affects a person’s sense of their self and the way they appear to others.

Control—language is beyond the speaker’s control. Frances Fox Piven’s writing has been interpreted in ways she never intended, ways that seem irrational to her (and to me). Yet, Butler argues, engaging in language always means the speaker does not control the way her words will be interpreted. Others may not read the same material in the same context in which you wrote it. The speaker can suddenly find herself in a struggle she never intended to enter, one with terms and stakes she never predicted.

Even in the absence of real violence, does the written threat of violence prove Hannah Arendt’s point—does violence in language indicate a lack of power, and the lack of new ideas? If it does indicate a lack of power, how is one in the position of professor at City University, and other professors and authors, to respond? As Butler argued, it seems to me that suddenly authors are being unpredictably granted a power they have not themselves presumed to wield. Are they responsible to a power that anyone ascribes to them?

Graduate scholars are aware of how insular and hermetic our work and our communications can be. Now I’m wondering if scholars should be prepared to take their ideas out for a spin, outside the contexts of journals and conferences, to imagine interpretations from more diverse audiences and to defend and delineate their ideas. This hasn’t been part of my training—I’ve been trained to confront some scholarly authors with the oppositional arguments of other scholarly authors.  As a writing and public speaking teacher, I coach students to consider their intended audience, to write towards their common knowledge and interests. Now I’m wondering how much writers and speakers need to consider their ability to respond to unintended interpretations, unintended audiences. It’s a frightening challenge, but Fox Piven seems to be responding steadily in what I can only imagine has felt like a very shaky playing field.

Filed Under: Audience, CUNY, Language, Media, Politics, Uncategorized

On Paglia on Gaga

September 23, 2010 By 3 Comments

I’ve been following with some curiosity the groundswell of blogosphere rage  following Camille Paglia’s attempted takedown of Lady Gaga in the Sunday Times. (A few of the many examples here, here, and here.) Each day for the past week or so, every glance at Twitter or my RSS feed yields up another vehement rebuttal, attacking Paglia’s thesis (an admittedly shaky one, centering on the disembodied asexuality of Gaga and her generation) and Paglia herself (comments range from critiques of her archaic interpretations of feminism to pretty vulgar bursts of outright misogyny). Given Gaga’s immense popular appeal, as well as the fact that she’s become a novel cultural “text” to be continually unraveled by and for the academic community (she’s even the subject of a self-described, hagiographically-titled academic journal, Gaga Stigmata), this is unsurprising.

But the more I read, the less interested I became in analyzing Paglia’s argument and its various deconstructions, and the more I began to speculate whether more effective writing on Paglia’s part might have won a few more readers over to her side. Respondents parsed her arguments (fairly accurately, it seems) without critiquing her actual writing. But the writing itself fails to function as the academic work of cultural criticism it’s framed as, structurally and syntactically. It’s rife with generalizations—and dated ones, at that (ie., Gaga is often seen “tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up,” with a “bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves,” and a face that’s “creepy” as it mouths “insipid” lyrics). Tucked amid dangling modifiers and abrupt transitions, her generalizations shift in the direction of Gaga’s demographic, a generation of “atrophied” voices forced to “communicate mutely through a stream of atomized, telegraphic text messages.” Of course, this generation comprises Paglia’s students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she teaches media studies—ostensibly without attempting to understand new conventions in communication. I have to wonder, though—does she understand the old ones, either?

Filed Under: Art, Media, Music, Politics

“Hell’s bells, Trudy!” and other Mad Men lingo

September 21, 2010 By 1 Comment

As a fan of the TV show Mad Men, whose creator Matt Weiner attempts to inject historical authenticity into all aspects of the show (currently dramatizing New York life in 1965), I really enjoyed an online discussion about how much cursing and slang really went into casual speech in that era.  The video is on Bloggingheads.tv and also excerpted on the New York Times website here, and includes Benjamin Zimmer of the Times speaking with John McWhorter of the New Republic.

People like the main character’s ex-wife Betty, and his colleague Pete Campbell, have particularly stiff and proper speech styles that frankly sound somewhat phony today.  Does Pete Campbell’s proper speech style ring true for 1965, in terms of his character’s background and aspirations?  Like Data on Star Trek, Pete doesn’t even use contractions [I mean, he does not], and uses what Zimmer calls “minced oaths,” like hell’s bells and judas priest.

An interesting part of this conversation concerns what evidence the writers might properly use to reconstruct the reality of speech from the ’60s.  Would the letters people wrote in that era be a good measure?  How about popular film?  After deciding that letters would be too different from spoken language, they consider that movie dialogue is an unreliable indicator, too. Social pressures may have pushed screenwriters and actors to make it all sound more proper than everyday speech actually did in those days.

So what spoken language examples could you find then for casual speech from that era, as a point of comparison?  John McWhorter suggests a radio show that recorded people when they did not realize they were being overheard, Candid Microphone, a precursor to Candid Camera.    Having listened to these old recordings, he thinks that, except for some now outdated expressions, ordinary people in those days — “in terms of sloppiness,” and slang, and cursing — sounded just like us.

I was trying to remember how my own parents spoke in those days. My parents were from the deep south and spoke with heavy southern accents, so I’m pretty sure they didn’t sound like the New Yorkers on Mad Men. In fact, cursing was considered so unladylike in the south that I never heard my mother swear at all. It was also bad form for a family man, so my father cleaned up his epithets to things like “Flitter!” Sounds as quaint as hell’s bells in retrospect.

Filed Under: Interpersonal Communication, Language, Media, New York

Reading the Remix

July 28, 2010 By 1 Comment

During the spring semester, we had some excellent Cac.ophony posts on the theme of remixing: “Agents of Information Change? Perhaps Not” by Melissa; “Vanilla Ice All Over Again” by Lauren; and “Lessig on Remix” by Wendy.  These posts raise essential questions about how we teach students to produce media in this digital age when it so easy to sample others’ work.

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend  “Texts Without Contexts,” an essay from this past March by literary critic Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times books section.  Kakutani begins with a review of many of the challenges involved with production of media in our time, including reviews of texts new and old that challenge the boundaries of copyright law.

I found this part interesting, but was most struck by the next section, beginning with the following:

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

Kakutani focuses on intellectual, cultural, and social changes associated with the consumption of media.   She is not writing about teaching students how to read and research, but it is not difficult to see the implications for the classroom, as well as for graduate-level research, and the general communication challenges we grapple with on this blog.

Filed Under: Copyright, Internet, Media

An open letter to the Coen Brothers

May 14, 2010 By 10 Comments

Dear Joel and Ethan,

So, last week I was reading this article complaining about the state of movies today by film producer Linda Obst. She writes that the only ones that seem to get made these days are those based on comic books and video games, with lots of explosions, dumb laughs, and hot boys under the age of 24. Obst blames the recession, arguing that studios have no money, and are therefore completely unwilling to take on the risk of producing movies that are actually thoughtful or well-written if they don’t have sparkly vampires or require 3-D glasses. (Which doesn’t really make sense to me–wouldn’t movies with big stars and killer special effects require tons of money to produce? Do you have any insight on this?)

I guess I had this article somewhere in the back of my mind when I read this story about diploma mills (h/t Jessie Daniels) about a physicist who happened to see a viral pop-up ad for a bogus university, which somehow led to him falling down the rabbit hole, unearthing a vast transnational network of scam artists. It is a fascinating read full of intrigue, as Dr. George Gollin teams up with the FTC and the Secret Service in a sting operation (OPERATION GOLD SEAL!) to chase and bring down diploma mills. It involves the Liberian embassy, a clandestine meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in DC, and Pentagon officials with fake degrees. It’s like some Cold War-era spy thriller, only about diploma mills instead of assassination and state secrets! Who knew?

You guys are smart. I bet you know where this is going. Please, please, please turn Operation Gold Seal into a movie. It seems right up your alley, a kind of madcap noir. Forget about what Obst said about what kind of movies can be produced these days. I’m sure you are just as sick of the CGI-ification of every single cartoon and toy from the ’80s as I am.

Can’t you just picture Russell Crowe as the rogue physics professor? Or perhaps you’d like to go with an older, more distinguished type like Ben Kingsley or Michael Caine. John Cho and George Clooney would make awesome Secret Service agents, and Holly Hunter and Jeff Bridges can be the couple in Spokane who cooked up the diploma mill scheme.

Okay, and just in case Obst is right, how about a compromise: throw in some of those kids from “Twilight” as undergraduate research assistants, and we’re golden.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

A fan

Filed Under: Fun, Media

And then what?

April 27, 2010 By 5 Comments

NeXTstation
Creative Commons License photo credit: btornado

Last Wednesday I attended, with some other fellows from the institute, the Digital University conference at the Graduate Center. Several times during the day, and during a reception in the evening, projects that participants had worked on were demonstrated. A list of  several was started by Matt Gold who moderated the pedagogy workshop.

Many of these projects were original and inventive in their use of technology. I was particularly struck by this comparative representation of all the different iterations of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This website allows you to follow the evolution of the text and easily compare several editions. It’s simple to use, elegant in a very minimalistic way, and does its very specific task very well. Several projects demonstrated at the conference had similar goals, of essentially displaying a large amount of information in a graphically effective way. There was  a very striking and “pretty” application using self-generating spiral graphics to demonstrate genealogical information, for example.

But what next? I’ve had the opportunity to look at several such projects over time, and the web is full of similar attempts, that never get much use besides being demonstrated in conferences. How is a project like this meant to be used in teaching? I’m sure many of you are familiar with MERLOT, the site where, in my experience, many such brilliant ideas go to die.  I feel like many of these projects begin from a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” perspective, without careful consideration of what they will actually be used for.

Of course, the designers of these projects can validly claim that these are flexible tools with many possible applications, and that it is up to the instructor to make the best use of them. But technology has traditionally been designed and developed to deal with specific problems. Why should instructional technology be any different?

Filed Under: EdTech, Internet, Media, New York

Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion

April 9, 2010 By 2 Comments

Several units at Baruch College, including the Schwartz Institute, are planning an initiative for the next two academic years: Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion. The broad goal of the project is to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center while more deeply integrating the performing arts into the curriculum and the life of the College. We are finalists for a Creative Campus Grant, a competition funded by the Doris Duke Foundation, and organized by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. The project will proceed even if we don’t get the grant (winners will be announced in August), although the programming will be more robust with the additional resources.

Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

  • Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
  • Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
  • Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

Filed Under: Administration, Art, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Media Tagged With: , ,

The Performance Artist and the Archives

February 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During the fall of 2009, I took a course at the Graduate Center with Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, “Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance.” Going in, I had assumed that much of the archival material we would be referencing would be from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This digital venue brings together videos of performance throughout the Americas that would otherwise be “inaccessible to scholars.”

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutdQW_jz0g[/youtube]

Filed Under: Art, Fun, Internet, Media, Music, Politics, Resources Tagged With: , ,
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