Currently featured
Who’s on the Line?
From a longer Washingtonpost.com article about TV and movie representation of surveillance:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who back in June reportedly went to great lengths to defend Jack Bauer. …At a legal conference in Ottawa, responding to another participant who warned against asking, “What would Jack Bauer do?”
Scalia mounted a spirited defense, saying, “Jack Bauer […]
Film & popular culture
Charlie Rose Interview with Jon Krakauer» Jon Krakauer talks about Christopher McCandless and what drew him to the story of the young man who went “into the wild”. He says he felt a visceral tingle when he first read reports of the hunters who had found the then unidentified body of the young adventurer.
Not New York» I have been thinking a lot about the “apocalytpic cities” section of my thesis. Initial thoughts are to focus on New York, but the whole idea of the multimodal mythic cluster means that New York is every city and every city is New York. Well, that is to say that New York is London, LA, […]
9/11 in a Movie-Made World» Tom Englehardt poses a fascinating set of “what ifs” in an article that traces the “movie-made” world of September 11.
So here was my what-if thought. What if the two hijacked planes, American Flight 11 and United 175, had plunged into those north and south towers at 8:46 and 9:03, killing all aboard, […]
Blogging
I have redesigned this site again following on from last year’s attempt to integrate my different blogging worlds. I was never completely happy with my 2006 design and my attempts at regular blogging this year have been sporadic to say the least. I am hoping that having my key content areas up front will encourage […]
After days of fiddling this new version of my blog is up and running. I have brought together all the entries from my other blogs and reverted to the name I chose when I first started blogging in 2004 - but with a “z” because the other domain was taken. I thought it was about […]
Interesting post by Donna Bogatin about blogging taking a starring role in a new police investigation series USA networks Psych. What is think is even more interesting is the fact that Gus (played by West Wing’s Dule Hill) the sidekick of the starring psychic baddie catcher Shawn, blogs in character on the show’s website. The […]
Blogs in higher education
Student blogs as uni promotion»
A number of universities are using student blogs as a kind of “reality ad” for their courses and campus life. Here in Sydney UTS had an ill fated go at it that didn’t really take off but as I noted in another post last year Sydney Uni has a more vibrant project still going. Today […]
Religious identity
Fallen Preacher Man»
In amidst following the election coverage (and all my corrections) I have still found time to be fascinated by the Ted Haggard scandal and have been spending time as a lurker in the Christian blogsphere (a revelation in itself - a very vibrant and diverse community) where the discussion has been fierce. What struck me […]
Apocalypse myth
Dark Knight Returns»
Batman begins today and all the reviews have been glowing. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times hones in on the characterisation in a way that mirrors much of the discussion on the human/superhero duality that was explored at last weekend’s conference:
What Mr. Nolan gets, and gets better than any other previous director, […]
Presidential politics
Good Mother Bad Mother Politics»
It is hard to imagine what the impeccably dressed Condoleezza Rice feels when she has to defend a President that she must now know deep down is a tremendous disappointment. She endured hours of Senate grilling including a bravura performance from Senator Barbara Boxer :
BOXER: October 19th ‘05, you came before this committee to discuss, […]
Environment and ecocriticism
Symbolic politics in Bali»
They kept the star power to the end. Al Gore fired-up the weary Bali climate change conference delegates with a speech which named the inconvenient truth everyone was battling against: the Bush delegates were stonewalling again. But his message of hope was more instructive: America is changing. As Time noted:
Toward the end of his speech […]
Journalism and the media
Images of death»
The Saddam hanging videos have raised key questions about the changing power of circulated images. The brutality of the incident is emphasised in the dirty grain and jerky focus of the mobile phone images. the release of the second video apparently posted on a pro-baathist news site and apparently showing the ugly state of Saddam’s […]
Literary journalism & feature writing
Billy tells nothing»
Pastor in Chief from Time’s Nancy Gibbs and Michel Duffy has a perfect anecdotal opening:
You have to climb a steep and narrow road, past the moonshiners’ shacks and dense rhododendrons and through the iron gates to get to the house on the mountaintop that Ruth Graham built after her husband Billy became too famous to […]