Some interesting essays, available for a limited time, are available here. I liked the one by Nick Mamatas on Hurley, the character in Lost. Missed one by Kristine Kathryn Rusch which I wish I’d caught. Worth going back and looking every once in a while!
Tag: media
Two Videos From a Busyish Day
Today was kind of busy, so here are a couple of videos I found amusing, with comments as to why they caught my attention. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iC65ufGUvKM” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] Have I mentioned that at a high school variety night I performed a freejazz/fusion version of this song? Sort of. Same bass line, and I hollered some of the words into the mic before the atonal saxophone weirdness kicked in. (I played my tenor.) I was accompanied by a keyboard bassist named Jennifer Duggleby and a drummer named Mike Murza. I doubt anyone recognized the song. Maybe one or …
Not Quite Foucault, But…
I’m grading final exams from my Media English course — where, unlike what the title might suggest, we didn’t just use media to boost English. Instead, we looked at issues ranging from copyright, User Created Content (or User Generated Content) online, censorship in media, the power of one medium to supplant another, the politics of (ostensibly) non-political films, and so on. Personally, I thought it was a great class, but the real proof is in the pudding. And though the students drafted the majority of the final exam — with excellent, excellent questions — the final question was mine. There’s …
Party Last Night
I am not going to talk about the party I was at last night, except that it was nice to see Sanghoon and Rira again, and good to meet several new people including Dr. Kim Kyu-hyun, and a few others. I wish I’d known they were likely to leave early-ish, so I could have talked to them more… especially since I have a funny vague feeling I was intended to talk to someone I didn’t (much). One of the “few others” I met was a guy I recognized, but couldn’t place where I recognized him from until someone mentioned Youtube. …
“… I think we don’t need to think about it…”
So said one of my students about the depiction of gender roles and sexuality in advertising. To which my response was, “We don’t have to think about anything, but is there any reason we shouldn’t? Do you think people should have fewer critical reading skills when it comes to media?” I put it in slightly different words, so I’d sound less, er, irate that I do there. But really, it was a strange moment. I know that, “I think we don’t need to think about it,” isn’t probably intended in the way it comes across — this was a comment …
Muddlings Both Helpful and Not-So-Helpful
First, the not-so-helpful: It’s amazing what happens when someone really, really thinks that, say, “traditional” means “good.” For example (and yes, this is a paraphrase): After reading the essay, I think that we can’t say Japanese radio in Korea was good for Korea. Yes, it allowed us to create a popular music of our own, at a time when intellectuals were insisting that traditional (court) music was the only “pure” Korean music. But since that music was influenced by Japanese pop music of the time, we can’t really say it was a way of resisting Japan. But since it had …
Ada Lovelace Day
Argh! I missed it–unsurprising, since I’ve been deluged with work and email, and since I also spent more than an hour after a long string of classes today, helping some students figure out how to find an angle for their article for the magazine we’re working on. (So if I haven’t replied to an email, it’s coming soon, dear reader/correspondent.) Well, Nalo and Jetse both blogged for the occasion, among, I’m sure, many others. But I did not let Lady Lovelace go unnoticed on her special day: when one of my students claimed (today, in Media English) that the “first …
Media, Power, and Technology: The Themes of My Media English Course
So, I was thinking about what to do with the real intro lecture to my Media class, last week. (Yes, it was week three of the semester, but as one student put it to me the other day, “We don’t think of the first week of school as the first week of classes. You know how we change classes and shop around.” The first week of real classes is Week 2, and in Week 2 I led a discussion about personal opinions and experiences of Media, of course. So I was casting about for what to do with my Week …
Define “Big,” and Define “Butts” (Plus a Barrage of Amusing Youtube Videos)
The other day, while I was searching for the video “Soju Mama” in a recent post, I ran across this commercial: The fact they used this song, and this celebrity, in this commercial, suggests one of these two possibilities: They figured most people don’t know what “I like big butts” means. Which is maybe plausible, since I find most Koreans who aren’t really high-level in English translate whichever Korean word indicates both (is it 엉덩이? That’s the one I learned first and remembered because I heard it so often, so I assume it’s the most common) as “hip” to indicate …
Swiss Cheese News and the Un-Mediagenic Reportage Barrier
Boing Boing has updated — with very little new information — about the case of Dymond Milburn in Galveston, Texas. “Hey, look, a little black girl in her yard! She must be one of those hookers we’re looking for!” “But the hookers we’re looking for are white. And she’s in her yard, with her doggie, fiddling with the circuit breaker.” “SO?!?!? She’s totally a whore. I mean, look at how she’s dressed. What, are you scared? There’s four of us and one of her, bro. Come on, let’s go enforce the law.” [Car door slams.] “Hey, little black hooker girl. …