This past week we talked about audio in my Digital Storytelling class. I spent Tuesdays class talking about This American Life, in particular the 400th episode wherein they take stories from their family members and try to make them interesting. I like the experimental parts of this example, and asked the students to have someone they know, friend or family member, tell them a story and then they try to make it interesting using the medium of audio to enhance the story, through sounds effects, music, multi-track talking over the story, etc. These stories aren’t due until this Tuesday (3/16), so last Thursday I proposed a workshop for Audacity, of which I am no expert, so that everyone could get their feet wet with some basic approaches to audio editing.
One of my own complaints about my approach to this class thus far is that I haven’t integrated workshops to explore the tools and their possibilities as much as I would have liked. So I committed the last class to a workshop, and while I was preparing it I came across a video on YouTube (which actually isn’t a video at all but an audio experiment by a student who tells a story strictly with sound effects):
After hearing that above “video” I got the idea of asking them to break up into groups of two or three and rapid prototype a digital story using only audio sound effects they found on the web. The would have 45 minutes to complete the assignments and the rules were as follows:
No verbal communication, only sound effects.
They had to use at least five different sounds they found online.
The stories should be no more than a minute and half long.
They had to complete it within 45 minutes
Those were the rules, and I gave them the following brief guidelines:
Spend the first 5-10 minutes coming up with the idea for a simple story.
The next 15 to 20 minutes finding the audio samples.
The final 20-25 minutes should be spent editing the audio.
It took me about 10 minutes to lay this all out, and for the rest of the class (save for about 15 minutes at the end when we listened to all the groups’ audio stories) they worked together creating the stories, figuring out audacity—which many of them knew, and showed their fellow group mates, and more generally laughing as they sampled through some crazy sounds. it was actually fun to be in the classroom hearing all these random, crazy sounds that I had no idea how they would make work. But for the most part they did, and I was pretty blown away by the results of a few groups.
I strongly recommend you check them out:
Damian Allen and Caitlin Murphy worked on this story about “harvesting the peasants” —the editing on this one is top notch. Hard to believe it’s not a movie sound track: Download “Harvesting the Peasants”
“Relaxing after work” is a more comical approach to the audio story by Victoria Pacher, Olivia Newman, and Erik Zottnick. This one is hysterical, right up my alley and more than fit for the bava—I actually wouldn’t leave Victoria alone about posting it I was so excited– to both her great chagrin and annoyance Download “Relaxing after work”
We had one sex-inspired sound story by Kenny Cunningham and John Jolissaint, but the audio is no where to be found. It was pretty funny too, and played with your expectations in some very smart ways. When they post it correctly, I’ll link to it here.
We also had two Alien Attack stories: Download Alien Attack Story by Mr. Charlie Rocket and the Whombag
I learned two things from this exercise, my students are deeply disturbed and demented, but on the brighter side, they did some pretty amazing work quite quickly. The time I had been wasting talking about all these examples when dealing with digital photography and the first class on audio would probably have been much more usefully spent actively experimenting and prototyping around a specific challenge. I think this is how I am going to spend the next two to three weeks of class as we transition to video and then mashups—coming up with fun exercises and rapid prototyping for group directed stories. Fun, fun, fun!
Any good ideas for some ways to create a quick experiment with video or mashups? I had some idea about using the archive.org videos, but a little concerned about download time. Don’t be shy, I want to steal your ideas.
The NorthEast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP) is hosting an all day conference on April 6th that is entirely dedicated to WordPress in Higher Ed brilliantly titled “WordPress University.” The conference features a range of speakers dealing with everything from WordPress for libraries, college web sites, academic networks, and teaching and learning spaces. It’s a pretty comprehensive program and covers a lot of ground, and I’m definitely interested in Jay Collier’s work with Bates College, their main site is run on WordPress, and given UMW is currently thinking about a new CMS for their website, Jerry Slezak and I are going to make the pitch for WPMu being the hub for the umw.edu site. And I have some interesting ideas for the architecture, syndication, and deep integration with UMW Blogs, so Jay’s session is of particular interest to me right now.
What’s more, Matt Gold and Boone Gorges will be featuring their awesome work with the CUNY Academic Commons and the cutting edge work they are doing with Buddypress. Their approach to the social network for faculty and graduate students at CUNY should be of pressing interest to just about every college and university out there right now—they are making a social network that respects people’s pre-existing spaces online while simultaneously providing an essential network for the folks of CUNY.
And while unlike the WordCampEd events this one isn’t free, I hope they figure out a way to stream and/or capture these sessions because I for one am dying to see them.
And on a broader note, it is fascinating to see a professional organization like NERCOMP devote an entire conference to WordPress, I think it is more than warranted and a sign of things to come. More campuses exploring and hacking on open source applications like WordPress to start re-imagining the social implications of web-based communities for publishing, research, teaching, and learning. It points to one possible future of how colleges and universities can start re-imagining their web presence as more than a brochure, but an open, dynamic space that exposes and shares the thinking happening at these institutions, and the next logical step is for us to start making more meaningful connections between individuals at the distributed learning institutions. Something as simple as a new platform, provides something as beautifully powerful and complex as a rich network of teaching, learning, and scholarship. We need to explore these possibilities together. NERCOMP’s “WordPress University” seems like an excellent step in that direction.
Update: A much better post about this course and its use of the blog was written by Luke Waltzer here, read that instead.
Mikhail Gershovich’s “Fear Anxiety and Paranoia” film class had some unexpected visitors: student zombies! Something Tom Woodward and I have always known existed, but it is horrifying to finally see them emerge in all their blood besmirched glory at CUNY’s Baruch College.
As Mikhail himself notes in the comments of the post containing the image below:
In Business Policy 5100, students wear suits when they present. In my class, they dress up like zombies and pretend to eat each other. I love it. It was oddly appropriate that you presented on key ideas in zombie movies made up as though you just walked off the set of one.
Absolutely brilliant, I am jealous of such a fun group, and from what I understand this was the first presentation, which sets the bar so very high! What’s more is that Mikhail’s course looks to be absolutely fascinating, deal with everything from Noir to Neo-Noir to Cold War and Zombie films. With gems like Fritz Lange’s M, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate to name just a few. Just reinforces what I’ve always thought, film remains the highest form of art to date and teaching film the greatest experience ever—almost a guilty pleasure, especially with an awesome syllabus like this one.
Kudos to Mikhail and his all-too-cool students for embracing the zombie madness, and having some real fun with it! And major props to whoever did their makeup, the close-ups confirm that it is a professional job—is Tom Savini auditing this class?
Next Wednesday I’ll be doing a presentation at the ACCS conference titled “Is Less More? What The Wire Has to Teach Us About Institutional IT” wherein I use clips from David Simon’s brilliant series The Wire to examine the lie that is “Do more with less” in institutions generally, but higher ed specifically. Keep in mind the theme of the conference is “Doing more with less.” The idea for this presentation comes from the first episode of Season 5 titled “More with Less,” and I’ll actually be starting with the following scene wherein the managers at the Baltimore Sun newspaper frame the changing mediascape and the corporate/institutional response to the situation by announcing buyouts, cutbacks, layoffs, and the necessity to do “more with less”—despite operating at a profit.
Fact is, as David Simon notes in several interviews that “despite being an oft-repeated command to dying institutions, the ability to do more with less is an inherent impossibility.” And herein lies the crux of my argument, we cannot effectively do more with less, rather we need to re-think our relationships as thinkers, learners, and teachers apart from the institutions rather than within them. This does not necessarily mean breaking away from these institutions all together because for the time being the are feeding some of us, but rather to act between and amongst a number of individuals at these various educational institutions throughout Virginia to build a larger network of resources, connections, and a real grass roots sharing of resources to start thinking and acting on how educational technology may allow us to re-imagine, or simply circumvent, the economic and political trappings of institutions.
In short, it is a call to cooperatively create a hub of activity happening at the various campuses around Virginia that we jointly support and cultivate a community of teaching and learning that is distributed, premised on people not infrastructure, and helps us collaboratively imagine what the power of a system of higher education connected through nodes of individuals first, rather than institutions, might ultimately look like.
I’ll actually lay out a design I have in mind for this in another post to come shortly, but in the mean time I’ll end with Captain “Bunny” Colvin, whose inspired speech about no more lying about the state of our institutions and what they serve to re-enforce—”learning for their world not ours,” “they see right through us” and we can’t continue lying about doing more with less. And not only less money and resources, but the lesser vision education more generally has provided us with. It’s time to imagine a world outside of that—and while I’ll probably get much the same reaction Bunny does, it seems to me something worth presenting and pushing for.
This is half-baked, but useful as I try and put this one together. More to come soon, and any ideas to make this stronger would be greatly appreciated.
I was pointed to this post by Cathy Davidson about BlackBoard yesterday via this tweet by Shawn Miller, and I was interested in her post about BlackBoard and was ready to comment when I noticed that I had to register to do so. Now I know registering to comment is not the end of the world, but at the same time I immediately lose the impetus to share my thoughts when I have to go through a registration process, get a password (that is in some one else’s database), and then activate my account to leave a simple comment about my own issues with BlackBoard. Fact is, I won’t do it, it is too much overhead, and not worth the bother. Also, it suggests an obstacle to participating and sharing that is in many ways unnecessary.
I said as much on Twitter to two HASTAC community members:
To which the response was basically we’re not too sure, let’s ask HASTAC, and the HASTAC twitter responded a few times:
So, being a community member makes you more responsible? Not certain of this, but I am pretty certain it cuts back on the conversation significantly and said as much:
The conversation went on between Paolo Magnifico and HASTAC a bit longer after this discussion:
Fair enough, HASTAC sees itself as network of networks, but if that is the case, why not act as a syndication hub of the various conversations your network engages in around the web rather than pulling them into a space like Facebook, which is not really a very good example of a meta-network–a network that harnesses networks would be far more platform agnostic nor dictated by a specific idea of community. Networks in many way change the idea of community, just think about how I found Cathy Davidson’s post, and how my conversation with HASTAC continued on a space outside their Facebook like community space. A network of networks would allow a kind of streaming in of various conversations from a variety of sites and services, and the HASTAC community would be more of an aggregating hub of activity from around the web—at least that’s my take on it. Anyway, like I said, no big deal, no comment left, not signing up. But then I get this tweet:
Hmmm, all I wanted was to comment, I don’t want to necessarily join the HASTAC Facebook-like community. I have a network. I simply wanted to reply to Cathy Davidson—is that so wrong? A community of scholars is fine, and if HASTAC wants to build that than bully for them, but why define it at the level of commentary from others who don’t feel the need to join that community? Point being is the commentary and discourse often happens at the level of comments on a post in this space, and by making that more difficult than it need be you actually hurt your community my homogenizing the voices there. What good is a community without dialogue and commentary, why frame that dialogue around a rather arbitrary idea of community member? Sure it’s simple to become a member and free and all that, but at the same time it also creates a barrier that is entirely unnecessary by reinforcing a sense of community that is more deeply rooted in the inability to control comment spam on Drupal than letting others have a discussion along the path of least resistance:
This is all kind of silly I know, but annoying nonetheless. All I wanted to do was comment, I don’t want to join your community, rather I want to be able to join the discussion freely in many places, and not just at the HASTAC website, but certainly there at times. So, for all that is right and holy HASTAC, open your comments to everyone—the bava commands you!
There has recently been a gooddiscussionaroundJon Mott’s forthcoming publication in the EDUCAUSE Review–it’s officially due out tomorrow—and the issue of getting credit for ideas. More specifically, getting credit for the idea of a post-LMS learning landscape, one wherein the Personal Learning Environment (or Personal Learning Network-depending on how you swing) becomes the new standard—providing a loosely coupled approach to teaching and learning. This is an idea I’m extremely excited about, and it is near and dear to the work I’ve been doing alongwithmy compatriots at UMW, one of whom is now at Baylor. And what strikes me about this conversation is that folks like Leigh Blackall, Stephen Downes, and Mike Caulfield are suggesting that a lack of recognition in the journals is in many ways a slight. And while part of me sees that logic, and I for one appreciate recognition when I get it—and I have gotten too much of it at the expense of my colleagues and numerous professors at UMW—I’m also not too sure the issue of credit isn’t in many ways at the root of some of the more problematic issues tied up with traditional ways we have thought about teaching, learning, and scholarship more generally.
Now, before you jump all over me, hear me out. I’ll try and make it short and to the point (but no promises), and I won’t even pull a Rorschach on your ass—at least not just yet.
Funny thing about EDUCAUSE Review and EQ (and journals more generally) may not necessarily be the citations, I’ve seen articles by Alan Levine and Bryan Alexander, Brian Lamb, and Gardner Campbell—to name just a few—extensively cite blogs in their work—in fact Brian’s article on the Mashup in the EDUCAUSE Review is almost entirely citations from blogs—which might come as no surprise given the author. So, I’m not so sure we can tun on the EDUCAUSE Review here as a culprit that reinforces an intentional marginalization of blogging. In fact, I’d bet money their record is better than the majority of academic journals out there when it comes to citing blogs and other “untraditional academic media.”
That said, does the responsibility of credit then come back to the author(s) of these articles? I would argue to some great degree yes, and I would also argue that who those authors are and how they frame the tone/voice of their articles has everything to do with what is the crux of these journal articles: a normalized, objective voice that makes otherwise individualized and idiomatic arguments that make potentially powerful ideas—often expressed creatively—that much more palatable for the professional academic class. And, often times, but not always, that class is accompanied by three letters after their name and a long list of publications in similar journals which often, but not always, gives them entrè into the journal in the first place. Is this necessarily bad? No. Does it help certain ideas circulate to a particular audience? Yes. Are we putting too much power in the hands of these journals by reacting this way to the idea of credit? Absolutely.
Fact is, I have written extensively about the “End of the LMS” and the death of BlackBoard, etc. on my blog for close to four years now. I have linked to Leigh and Stephen and Mike before, as well as Alan Levine, Barabra Ganley, Barbara Sawhill, D’Arcy Norman, David Wiley, Geeky Mom, and the list goes on and on, but no one is pissed at me for writing about it when I didn’t reference them. No one cares when I go off about an idea like this in the same way they might when it’s a journal article in a publication like EQ, and the reason why is that we still believe that Jon Mott’s discussion of the Post-LMS Era in EQ is somehow more official and real than it might be on a blog, meanwhile we all know that these ideas have been vehemently discussed and hashed out on the blogosphere, where credit is often and necessarily inconsistent and erratic, but somehow implied–and given we are all working for bigger idea of open and free and fluid education, credit seems to be a vestige of another time—like journal articles for tenure committees and the like. I don’t have to play that game, so I don’t. And the idea of publishing in a journal is odious to me because I can’t use the tone that has liberated me from a terrible bout of graduate school and helped me find my stride, and has, as a result, made my work and interaction fun, rather than a list of necessitated acknowledgments, citations, and origins. I don’t blog for credit, I don’t blog for tenure, and I don’t blog to promote a global micro-brand—first and foremost I blog because I like blogging, it’s fun, and when I blog about education it is often informed by the seemingly obvious fact that education is over-priced, run by fools, and in serious danger of becoming yet another commodity. And this idea of credit gets to the heart of this idea of the commodity, because in many ways credit builds the abstract, but very real, commodity of authority—and the two often lead to some assumed role of leadership and justified power.
But, that is not how I see this loosely coupled conversation emerging and it is a bit distressing to see it move towards a scramble for credit, recognition, and some anemic sense of “edech celebrity” —not unlike what we are seeing play out in the Twitter commentary at TedxNYC as we speak—I guess the unconferences and barcamps didn’t highlight individual genius nearly enough—and what we have now is a push towards an almost ceremonious recognition of certain individuals as somehow more—and not to say they may not be—but I don’t understand the push to accentuate it so. Credit? I guess, and then soon follows leadership, power, and then what? More of the same, maybe?
Yesterday Joss Winn published a post titled “Towards a Manifesto for Sharing,” wherein suggests that the need for institutional sanctioning of sharing in many ways goes against the very logic of why and how we share. In this post he points to a new emphasis for education more specifically
…on grounding education in the reality of our social relations, the struggle of daily life, the hierarchical relations between institutions and people, and between academics and students. The desire for autonomy is also a desire to re-instate the commons, to break the enclosures that currently inhibit sharing. The conscious act of sharing is both a move to resist oppression and a drive towards autonomy.
Often journal articles, celebrity conferences, and the like remove us from the social relations that made so many of these ideas possible, they elevate and re-inscribe the hierarchical relationships between institutions and people, as well as academics and students. And the commons itself becomes unevenly distributed around ideas of credit, -who said what first? -who linked to who? -who made you? The point is, part of the move towards autonomy and a resistance to oppression has everything to do with letting go of some of our ideas of ownership and authority, in an attempt to cultivate a space of creativity and a tone and home of our own. Journals often don’t provide us with new ideas in edtech, but rather move to codify those we have already had some first hand experience with in shaping through thought and praxis. They are a barometer for all the folks who have decided not to join the conversation, and that’s fine, but I really don’t see it as a threat to—or a forgetting of—the sources, because we are all working towards a large idea of seeing education change, and if we revert back to the traditional nodes of power in terms of owning ideas, necessitating credit, and invidious distinction annointed our leaders than we really haven’t re-invented anything—just put a new label on old clothes. A social history of edtech as a emergent movement is far more interesting, and in my mind necessary and relevant right now, than an intellectual one.
Antonio Vantaggiato of the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico has just blogged about the very cool approach he is taking to teaching his Computer Science students about Web Content Management. He’s giving theme the tools and the spaces to both experiment with open source CMSs in their own spaces and asking them to collaboratively build documentation of the results of their experiments in a wiki. I love this model because it nicely balances the importance of having individuals create and maintain their own spaces online while at th same time cooperating to build a group legacy of documentation and lessons learned. You can see the course site here and the course wiki here, both of which the students built and designed—another beautiful touch.
What’s more is that Antonio is having his students get their own web hosting and domain names to provide them the space to experiment (all of which will feed back into the course site), and to do this he actually found both free web hosting with 000webhost.com and free domain names with co.cc—so the whole thing comes at no cost to the students! Brilliant! This looks to be a grand experiment, and a very cool way to teach computer science students about open source, web-based content management out on the open web with their own open source tool box, domain, and web hosting that they can take with them when their done. More than that, the collaborative documentation promises to be both a very useful resource for the class as a whole, as well as for many beyond it. Kudos Antonio, and avanti!
Jeff Swain recently published a video asking others why they Tweet, so I figured I would respond. As usual, it’s hard for me to be serious about anything, especially through video, and despite two takes at a response I still think I failed. But hey, I’m the bava, and my theme is clean
OK, I did find this useful. [referring to an old WP tutorial post]
But I stayed on this page all day because I loved the header pic…
Then when I tried to grab it I found the rotator and holy shit you have the best header pics ever!
Thanks, and now I just need to track down some of those films.
I couldn’t agree with Tyler more, I do have the best header pics ever, and to show my faithful readers how responsive I am to their needs and desires, I decided to post a play-by-play of the brilliant header images that have adorned this blog since December 2005 when the lights when on. Additionally, I’ll have you know that unlike some who will notbe named here, I’ve been themogamous with the K2 theme for WordPress for almost five years now. I remain devoted to my theme, and I am of the mindset that a blog’s theme is a contract with your readers, a deep and sacred aesthetic relationship that should not be altered under any circumstances. Far too many people switch themes as if it were just a container for their ideas rather than an integral and constitutive part of the ideas themselves, and it’s my firm contention that the thematic promiscuity that is rampant on the web right now is an underlying factor in the decline of the fabric of the blogosphere more generally. There are no loyalties, the thoughtless hopping from theme to theme has escalated in recent years to a mindless jumping from service to service, and soon enough the web becomes a sordid orgy of half-assed apps and orphaned content, a broken platform lacking any sense of consistency and persistence. Well, the bava knows that, and as an antidote to the general moral malaise that abounds online currently, we’ve done our best to give everyone who comes home through its always open doors exactly what they expect, a clean, well-lighted theme that understands memories are made in space over time, and that the persistence and consistency of that space over time is paramount in making this world more than virtual.
Before I get into a free wheeling discussion of the headers and their respective films, let me first give the long overdue credit to this classic Mario Bava fan page that provided me with well more than half all my header images.
Before I figured out how to load the random header script, this blog actually had only one header image for about a week or so. The first, and because of that the dearest to me, was this still from Mario Bava’s classic….
The Girl Who knew Too Much is possibly the best example of Bava’s acknowledgment of his place as an uniquely Italian b-movie filmmaker by putting the Giallo—a popular Italian dime-novel tradition named after their yellow covers (giallo in Italian means Yellow)—on film for the first time. But this is just one of Bava’s many firsts. Not only is Bava playing with the Hitchcock classic in this work, but placing it within a suspenseful, serial killer framework that doesn’t abuse the gore that becomes commonplace in his Italian b-movie heirs, namely the over-rated Dario Argento. Moreover, it was only one of two films that Bava shot in stunning black and white, and his almost noir-like mastery of light in this film makes a nice juxtaposition to his homage to the black and White Masterpieces of of the Monster movies of the 30s apparent in Black Sunday.
Probably the most numerous and gripping headers on the bava come from his acknowledged masterpiece Black Sunday. Starring the queen of 60s horror, Barbara Steele (who I still have a crush on), this film is often cited as the pinnacle of Bava’s aesthetic—though the visual magic of Danger: Diabolik (1968) and Planet of the Vampires (1965) make for some powerful challengers to that assertion—but after seeing a couple of his shots in glorious black and white it becomes clear why some may make this argument. What strikes me about Black Sunday is that its film aesthetic comes right out of the stage-sets of the classic period of horror films during the 1930s. It is really a pleasure to watch Bava’s ability to conflate the camp world of Barbara Steele with the aesthetic brilliance of James Whale. More than that, he captures the horror in this film by interpolating the gore—the Iron maiden Scene is a perfect example of this—rather than simply filming the blood like some porn-inspired money shot that characterizes Italian b-horrors of the 70s and 80s. Admittedly I enjoy many of the gore fests of the 70s and 80s, but none capture the elegance and pared down raw visionof Bava’s earlier work. What’s more is that you can watch this fil in it’s entirety on YouTube on you tube in its entirety (one file, rather than the usual 10 or 11) here (thanks to Starzmedia—though keep in mind there are a few commercials, however it does seem to play for others outside the US, thanks @LisaRead for testing this).
This one is near and dear to me because it is actually the first Bava movie I ever watched, and it remains remarkable to me because it proves that vision and imagination is far more important than finances. Bava turns simple models into a psychedelic trip through outer space. The plot has two spaceships filled with the best-dressed astronauts ever (it is an Italian film, mind you) that land on a deserted planet to investigate the SOS transmission they have been monitoring. Turns out the planet is inhabited by formless beings that need to be hosted by foreign bodies in order to escape the limited resources that plague their planet (sounds remarkably similar to the plot of Ridley Scott’s Alien, no?). Moreover, the mist-filled planet seems to inform the aesthetic of Alien, creating a specular experience – perhaps born from limited resources – that realizes an abstract vision of space that opens up an imaginative element of cross-fertilizing scifi and horror (another benchmark used to celebrate Alien). The first ten minutes of this film may be my favorite of all of Bava’s work, the way the actors work through the G-forces pulling them to this strange planet is nothing short of brilliant, and the technology aesthetic for the spaceship is so magical. You can find this film in its entirety on YouTube as well, but not all in one file. Here is part 1, which comes highly recommended.
Must admit this was not one of my favorite Bava films despite the fact that it is considered by many to be his highest achievement. Everyone from Federico Fellini to Martin Scorsese to David Lynch quote this film as an inspiration for their own work (I’m sure Tim Burton does too, but he is a hack so I won’t recognize him here on the bava unless I am abusing him for his inexcusable Planet of the Apes remake). I’ll have to re-watch it again before I try an articulate my own flat response to this film, but I can absolutely see the remarkable of the psychedelic fun house imagery. Moreover, the film is immediately and completely divorced from any sense of naturalism, although it is in many regards played straight. There is probably something I’m missing here, so this goes back on the queue before I spout off about it giving it another go. Either way, I loved the image below of the dude about to be snuffed.
Bava’s contribution to the Sword & Sandal genre features some inspired set design of the underworld which are in many ways taken to the next level in his scifi/horror masterpiece Planet of the Vampires. The film also features the great Christopher Lee and has some brilliant camp with the relationship between Hercules, Thesues, and Telemachus. One of my personal favorite headers features Hercules, Theseus and Princess Deianira on the beach, and I think beautifully captures what I think is Bava’s best campy film, in no small part because the end of the film features Hercules smashing an army of zombies with boulders. Great stuff.
Here’s a look at some of the beautiful set designs and colorful lighting that might otherwise get overlooked for all the camp:
I’ve written about this film already at length, one of my personal favorites because I love how Bava does S&M, but I choose this header rather late, sometime in 2008, because it reminded me of the first header from The Woman Who Knew Too Much with the focus on the horrified eyes, but this time Bava uses deeply colored light to similar effect as black and white.
Black Sabbath (“The Telephone” epsiode)
Mario Bava’s horror anthology features three short films based on stories by the other Tolstoy, Chekov, and Mauppasant. Black Sabbath has a fascinating history in that it was cut dramatically for the US release, in particular the sub-plot of a lesbian relationship from the short film titled “The Telephone” removes key scenes and re-writes in translation various dialogues that would capture this short as a story of revenge story into one of a ghost story. The headers from Black Sabbath pay tribute to that short and the lost scenes. You can see the US version of “The Telephone” on YouTube in 3 parts here, and then compare it to the Italian version for those significant differences here.
Some other fun facts about Black Sabbath via Wikipedia:
In August 1969, a heavy blues-rock band named Earth decided to change their name and agreed that the title of this movie would be a nice fit for their sound. This band, Black Sabbath, later rose to much acclaim.
One of my favorite Mario Bava films because it puts bava in the seemingly foreign genre of the sex comedy. And how does he deal with it? Well he turns it into he Rashomon of erotica. Telling the tale of a lox tryst from four different angles according to four different characters, all of which get increasingly insane. More than that, the interiors of the 60s apartment are absolutely brilliant. Some argue you’re not missing anything if you haven’t seen this Bava, but I disagree, this is a must see because it is so very different from just about everything else he’s done.
Six Women for the Murderer (a.k.a. Blood and Black Lace) (1964)
Must admit I haven’t seen this one yet, but it is on my list. Got the image here, and here’s a review. Again, though, Bava with the eyes!
This is a departure from the bava-themed header that come before it, but I had to pay some homage to a video game that in may ways inspired some of the same horror Bav brought to the big screen. The first 15 minutes of Half-Life 2 remains the most amazing direction of a gme ‘ve yet to see, and truly opens up this genre as a magical space for storytelling that earlier games like Duke Nuke “em only hinted at. And some may argue Bioshock is a more recent example, and while I enjoyed it, it was nothing like that opening sequence of Half-Life 2, still the standard in my mind.
“Bomb Shelter”
This is simply an image I found when work on my first domain name ever, redbaiters.com (which simply redirects to bavatuesdays now). It was going to be an homage to red scare propaganda on the web, which there is a ton, but I never got it off the ground, though I learned a ton in the process. Anyway, I loved the image, and incorporated it into the pantheon of header images
Upon finishing this monolithic post about seemingly nothing (my favorite kind) it strikes me that I am missing some gems. There is nothing from the film fumettiDanger: Diabolik (1968), Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), or Rabid Dogs (1978). All classics that need to be represented here, so I guess I need to do a follow-up once I add some more header images. What’s more, if you click on the Rabid Dogs link above, you’ll notice it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article, which has to change as well.
The NorthEast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP) is hosting an all day conference on April 6th that is entirely dedicated to WordPress in Higher Ed brilliantly titled 
To which the response was basically we’re not too sure, let’s ask HASTAC, and the HASTAC twitter responded a few times:
The conversation went on between Paolo Magnifico and HASTAC a bit longer after this discussion:
Antonio Vantaggiato of the 
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