The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Categories
Hip Hop Video Games!

Jay Z, Considers Himself the American Dream

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/25747950/highlight/295218

Here’s a video I will show in class. I thinking about the image of Jay Z before a video game cover talking about the Dream realized.

Categories
Uncategorized

Prodigal Son, Fred Hammond

The definitive version of this song, I say. 🙂 Click to Play.

Categories
Podcast: Critical Distance Radio

Critical Distance Episode 1:Tips and Tricks for the First Years on the Tenure Track

Are you struggling with the work/life balance as a new professor or graduate student? Have the demands of life on the tenure track left you gasping for air or unwittingly running into walls?  What about your citation program, are you in the market for a new way to organize your books, articles and websites? On this, the first ever episode of Critical Distance, I am including a set of interviews on tools, tips, and reflections from the first and second years on the job.  In the first interview, which is a Mutual Mentoring segment, I sat down with Nat Turner, professor of Education at UMass Amherst. During our first summer break, Nat and I discussed how we handled the ups and downs of the workplace during that first year as new professors. The second interview, a digital humanities and news segment, was recorded at the beginning of year 2 on the job. In this interview, the members of the Digital Humanities Project—which included myself, Jon Olsen from History and Janine Solberg from English—review the bibliographic software Zotero and discuss whether or not it works as a viable organizational tool.  Throughout this episode, you will also hear five tips for how to make the most out of a career in academia; these tips are a collection of ideas that were shared with me during the first years on the job.

Episode One–click here to stream.

Categories
Films Lectures and Appearances

New Black Cinema

So preparing for the Black Cinema Now conference at NYU this weekend has been one of the most fun experiences I’ve had all year and it has been a great way to end my prolific conference run of the 2009-2010 school year.  While I’ve watched a lot of especially bad films that I have intentionally avoided (Ahem, I Think I Love My Wife and I Can Do Bad All By Myself), I have actually enjoyed wading through the good, the bad, the beautiful and the “beautifully ugly” of this contemporary cinematic moment.  I am left thinking about a few gems I stumbled upon and I am taking on a new writing project to flex out some ideas on a few, including some of the films below.

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Categories
Podcast: Critical Distance Radio

Critical Distance Radio–New Logo!! New Song!

It’s official here is the show theme song A sample…Podcast. AND…

this is the new logo for the show–made by my baby brother. ATM!

Critical Distance LOGO

Categories
Current Events Geek Culture

Obama as Black + Geek: Viewing Two Comedic Addresses to the President

So much to say about watching these two speeches, one delivered by Wanda Sykes (comedienne) and one delivered by John Hodgman (The PC Guy from the Mac ads). Watching them back to back as I did helped me clarify a few thoughts I had before on how different discourse communities view Obama as representin’ authenticity as a signifier in specific cultural spaces. In watching these two videos together, I am intrigued by how there is a celebration of him as black (the Sykes address) and as geek (Hodgman’s) and then a quick (and important) distancing of him from the essentialist definitions of each at the same time. The delicate ways in which this kind of thing happens continues to intrigue me.

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Categories
Television

The Newest Cosby Shows?: Reality TV and Black Families

Once again, with Run’s House, I broke my “no MTV in MY house” rule. I’ve seen the show a few times, probably not a full season of any given year.  Eventually, the uncritical consumer-driven decadence, shallowness, and general deprivation of soulful expression or conscious existence that is typical of the network got to me and—sadly—I could not stomach anymore of the glitz and glam and shine that is Run’s HouseI do want to come back to it, though, and think about it and A&E’s Hammertime as popularized televised forays into the lives of black family drama (both real and fabricated, spectacular and mundane).  Are these shows the newest Cosby Show? Like Bill Cosby’s genre-saving sitcom (which recently celebrated its 25 year anniversary), these shows are replete with contradictions and are as problematic as they are promising.

At the very least, they remain interesting (if not altogether engrossing) but I think we have to read them historically, in the context of the line of black sitcoms that came before them, even as the reality formula is the most obvious departure from the previous installments of televised black family comedy and drama. As this is becoming a more visible popular formula (black entertainer’s family and career presented as documentarian entertainment), these shows certainly seem worth more extended reflection. Keyshia Cole: The Way it Is, anyone?

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Categories
Films

The Girlfriend Experience, eh?

First off, I could not find this Steven Soderberg (Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic) film anywhere near where I live. Luckily, a fellow twitterer, Devindra Hardawar, suggested that I rent it through Microsoft’s Xbox Live video rental service.  It is amazing to me that the Xbox continues to stake its claim as a media center (something that I expected Sony to do better). I’m not sure what it means for the film industry that current, feature films are available to rent while they are also in the theaters.  I think this is a trend to watch as it is being done more and more often with indie films. In my case, this was the only way I could watch the film. So I rented it (in HD for 800 Microsoft points, whatever that means) and had a few friends over to share the XBL experience.

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The Girlfriend Experience is not at all what is it billed to be: a steamy, sexy look at a couple that has to deal with job that would stress any relationship. A film that pops, snaps and sizzles with hotness, as the riveting, big beat, drumbeated trailer insists.  Right away the film fails as a voyeuristic entre into the sex worker industry–most especially from the standpoint of pornographic (soft, hard, or otherwise) pleasure.  That is because there is very little pleasure here at all.  Like Soderberg’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) this film is a soulless, tepid representation of what I hope sex is not like for the majority of white folk.  I know there is a pointed critique here about the intersextion (a pun) among sex, consumerism, politics, and the economic downturn that has something to do with arguing that the focus on such matters makes the corporate (white) male impotent and uninteresting white women shallow bodily objects. Yawn. Really. This is a film that bores me enough to make it not even worth it to decode the little bit of social commentary that is here. What we are left with in the end is blaming the central character for her lack of sophistication and for her role as a cog in the sex/economy machine.  The polemical emphasis in the end is an acerbic critique of her, of the prostitute’s complicit role in all of this.  Not only does the feeling/tone of the film become less critical around this point, but this shift in tone that mimics the male characters’ perception of this pretty and high-paid but “cold” and “flat,” “c*nt” is disappointing and makes the whole experience feel like a waste of time. With the male bonding that goes on in the Swingers-like “boys being boys in Vegas” moments, I suppose the final argument here is that the “girlfriend experience” is not worth the trouble.  Real pleasure, intellectual stimulation, and companionship reside somewhere in the “boyfriend experience,” that is, wherever men are left alone to be themselves and bitch and moan about women, politics, and the economy. Yawn.

I do think there is a way to present satire and even a critique of soullessness that does not leave the entire project devoid of spirit and heart.  Even in the most biting social commentary, there is always something to love, to respect, to adore in the project itself.  Soderberg’s latest film offers us nothing to embrace and powerfully little to care about.  Somehow I rate it a few notches above Wolverine but that is only because some of the stark shots of the interior of the apartments are worth viewing–perhaps as still photos. Rating: 5.5 out of 10.

This just in: It seems there there is another film by the same name that predates Soderberg’s version of the film. WOW! I’d so rather see this other film.  It seems like it might get to some of that heart and soul that Soderberg’s flop is missing.

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Categories
Video Games!

A Few Thoughts on Afro Samurai

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/0PxZEarxm6s" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] For quite a while now I’ve been playing Afro Samurai on the 360.  Even though the game received a consistent round of mediocre and dismissive reviews, I am finding it to be a blast! Yes, the default difficulty setting is quite hard, yes its combat is repetitive like all hack-n-slashers, and yes there are some troubling stereotypes here.  But there is also much more to explore in the lush eye-poppingly beautiful anime graphics, in its unique mode of stylization, in the techno-critically informed story, and in the amazing hip hop fusion soundtrack.  The way the game represents violence as artisitic, as a breathtaking spectacle, is also of note.  Further, and here is why I will develop a lesson plan around it for my graduate level class in the fall, Afro Samurai is a game like no other when it comes to the ways in which it represents both the problems and potential of thinking about race and technology (in general) and about race and the video game industry (in particular). I’ve only been playing it for a about an hour or so at a time but I cannot stop thinking about this game as an important marker of where we are.

Categories
Films

Summer Movie Guide!

Ahhhh, summer. To me this means catching up on my writing and research, some course preparation, summer pleasure reading, and summer movie watching! Rather than participate in one of the many online movie pools (where you predict which films will gross the most money), I’d like to offer very brief reviews of the films I see.  Below is my list of summer films, mostly blockbusters, and my initial rating [out of 10 points] and my ongoing comparative ranking [out of number of films seen]. I may toss in a few independent films and even some flicks I check out on video if I can watch as much as I intend.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1) Rating: 1.5 Ranking: 3 out of 3 Bottomline: A dreadful film. The X-Men are dead to me now.  I don’t have any confidence that this franchise will ever turn around.  I am looking forward to playing the video game, however, because that is rumored to be a hack-n-slash fun fest. It will be nice to compare the Wolverine game with Afro Samurai, a brilliant game that I am now playing.

Star Trek (May 8 ) Rating: 8.5 Ranking: 1 out of 3 [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/uiHeviygXw8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]Bottomline: From the standpoint of revenue, I do think that this film is taking a risk by appearing so early. Then again, during these early summer months, it does not have much competition. I am not a Trekkie so I can’t speak from the fan’s perspective but Star Trek does work, mostly because of the casting, character development, and pacing (it has has me a tad interested, for the first time ever, in the franchise as a whole). This film works extremely well as a summer action flick and I am only sorry that I haven’t had the chance to watch it in IMAX because the action sequences are spectacular.  With regard to narrative, I am intrigued by how the super-geek needs both violence and black femininity  to authenticate his masculine presence, to make him a brainiac who is able to maintain a pronounced measure of masculine “coolness.”  I read both Kirk and especially Spock in this way.  Further, does it matter at all that Tyler Perry shows up in this film? I suspect that it does matter but I do not have a clear take on that inclusion. I am also intrigued (like I was with Watchmen) by the “geeks win” reception of this film in fanboy circles.  For me, there is something a little unsettling about this outcry even though I can also see it as trying to destablize masculine norms.

Terminator: Salvation (May 21) Rating: 7 Ranking: 2 out of 3 Bottomline: While I was pleasantly surprised that T:Salvation does not suck, I can’t exactly pinpoint what makes the film fall shy of being spectacular.  I think it may have something to do with less of an attachment to the characters.  I don’t think character development was handled well enough even though previous films in the franchise did a great job here. Can we care about John Connor without Sarah Connor? The result is that the film misses the mark with those incredible character identification moments that send chills up your spine when the protagonists enter kick ass mode.  That just never happens here.
Night At The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (May 22)
Up (May 29)
Land Of The Lost (Jun 5)
My Life In Ruins (Jun 5)
The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 (Jun 12)
Year One (Jun 19)
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (Jun 24)
Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs (Jul 1)
Public Enemies (Jul 1)
Bruno (Jul 10)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Jul 15)
The Ugly Truth (Jul 24)
Funny People (Jul 31)
G.I. Joe (Aug 7): I’m really cautiously optimistic about G.I. Joe.  I know it will make a lot of money and I venture to say that it will be up there in the top 3 highest grossing films of the summer.  But will it be any good?  I include IGN’s casting preview here since it’s pretty good. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/OV8oZ0npUy0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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Inglourious Basterds (Aug 21)
Halloween 2 (Aug 28)

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