I did the above GIF on the fly while showing the Breakfast Club edition of ds106 how to make animated GIFs using MPEG Streamclip and Photoshop. Today was a thoroughly enjoyable class—and the students seemed to have a blast and did some fun stuff themselves. Many of them are already done with there 10 visual stars, a couple did closer to 20! What’s more, we are on our way to the design assignments, and after spending the last hour of today’s class talking about the design assignments, I know it’s gonna be a ball. I love ds106 design!
On Monday I started teaching five students as part of the Summer Enhancement Program for high school age students. I proposed a Digital Storytelling class—surprise, surprise—that spans two weeks and what I figured I would do is have them do an abbreviated, two-week session of ds106 that lasts for 2 and a half hours a day for 4 days over a two week span (“Two weeks Bender, I gotch you!”). The nice part is there are no grades to worry about and the class infrastructure is all set up and ready to go thanks to ds106.us.*
I haven’t taught high schoolers since 2003-2004 when I taught English at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, NY. That was a trip, and to be honest I couldn’t get out of Dodge soon enough. The kids were awesome but the actual institution had more in common with a jail than a school, and I was starting to think more like a warden than a teacher (it was the early years of the Bloomberg/Klein anti-Union trail of terror). I’m no martyr, and the one thing I learned from that experience is monolithic institutions like the NYC Public School System will crush your spirit quickly and mercilessly—especially when run by robber baron financiers.
Anyway, I was already excited to get back in the saddle for this two week session with a whole different breed of students and having wrapped up day two a little while ago I am thrilled at the progress so far. Yesterday I gave them a brief introduction to Digital Storytelling, had them all tell me their own stories, and then headed up to the computer lab and had the lot of them get a WordPress blog site (one of them already had a Blogger blog!). I then showed them the basics of posting, talked about incorporating media around the web (YouTube, Flickr, links, etc.), discussed the importance of their controlling their privacy while working on the web, and that’s all we had time for.
Today we got right into the thick of Visual assignments and I used Alan Levine’s in class exercise for Photography for the first 30 minutes to get them out and about around campus to explore and get in the habit of looking and seeing anew. They were asked to do the following:
Make an ordinary object look more interesting, almost supernatural.
Take a portrait of a person; have them display an emotion.
I’m pretty blown away by the results thus far, and after this experiment I turned them onto the Daily Create which they will be doing for the next two weeks. Easy as pie—open course architecture that provides a communal infrastructure that works and anyone can tap into? That’s far more interesting to me than MOOCs.
After we shared our photos and discussed the shots, we headed up to the computer lab and I introduced them to the wonderful world of the ds106 assignment bank, which has 372 assignments and over 4000 examples! They seemed to love this whole idea, and I let them know they had ten stars of visual assignments due by Thursday, with another 10 design stars due by Sunday (you must work them hard!). We spent the last hour and a half discussing Flickr, picking an assignment, and learning the basics of layers in Photoshop (but the concept can be easily abstracted to any photo editing software). We did the Creep on a Movie Scene assignment because it’s fun and it provides a relatively simple introduction to layers in Photoshop. I spent a half hour trying to explain layers using two different images, but I am so out of the habit of teaching a program that it failed miserably. I scrapped it and just went around from student-to-student and helped them use the move tools, the magic wand, the magnetic lasso, some layering transformations and opacity settings and we were golden. What’s more, they started helping each other and I was once agin in the comfortable position of not trying to lecture about an application I am only moderately comfortable in 🙂 The crazy thing is their work was good and fun! Only one had ever used Photoshop before—another knew GIMP!—but they all picked it up rather quickly and the fact they were photoshopping a creeper into a scene from their favorite film made them that much more invested. Here’s a couple of examples from their work today:
The Road to WeeGee
Obama creeps on Land of the Lost
Yeah I was there
HEEEEY OBAMA 😉
Anyway, I loved the character weegee (based on Luigi from the Mario franchise) creeping on The Road to El Dorado. A couple of them had Obama as the creeper, which I am fascinated by—Obama love in the younger generations is pretty interesting to me. I don’t think anyone in ds106 at UMW has done any Obama meme art for the class until now. And creeping your way into the Breakfast Club is nothing short of genius!
In less than an hour 5 high school students knocked out some impressive first runs at ds106 assignments using Photoshop and had fun along the way (two stars down!). I think the marker of ds106’s greatness is the way it can adapt across different registers so seamlessly to highlight skills of K12 or college age students alike. I can’t believe more elementary, middle school, and high school teachers aren’t experimenting wildly with models like this (or maybe they are and I just don’t know it). I could care less if it’s ds106, but the idea of an open framework where they can program the assignments, share their work, have fun, and fine tune media creation skills seems like a pretty solid approach to all kinds of web literacies—or whatever we want to call them. I’ll stop preaching now, but jesus stop talking about it and start playing with it—it freaking works!
I’ll stop there because tomorrow we do animated GIFs and I have to do a little prep on the creative GIF I will be bestowing on them 😉
_________________________________________________
* One thing that struck me while running with this two-week course is that when I showed off the assignment bank to these 5 students they were immediately excited about creating stuff—and there is so much great stuff there. With all the talk about MOOCs I think we missed the boat with open, shareable frameworks that anyone can tap into—the key is personal ownership, syndication, and collaboratively created and shareable spaces (green spaces!). Funny how none of these ideas really come up in the larger, popularized discussions of MOOCs—it’s as if the idea of architecture and sharing has all just been re-canned as large broadcast experiences. That seems completely antithetical to the original framework of open, portable experiences, but more and more it’s what the MOOC conversation is evolving into: the focus on consumable product rather than a process of individual ownership and communal exploration with the web as platform.
One of the craziest and most memorable films of the 80s is the ultra-camp, TV alien invasion film TerrorVision (1986). I kind of think of it as the b-film alter ego of Videodrome. I wrote about TerrorVision back in 2008 when I had dreams of doing a series of posts about b-movies in the 80s and the rise of VCR culture—I never got around to it, surprise, surprise, and the post still stands as a monument to my blogging whimsy.
Anyway, I’ve been reading more and more Tumblr blogs because it seems like most of the interesting animated GIFs and assorted design work is happening in that space, for whatever reason.One of the sites I ran across that I really enjoy is the “read comics till your eyes bleed” blog that is a constant stream of images, animated gifs, etc. Given tumblr’s design it’s hard to know what’s original to the blog and what’s not (one of the immediate visual limitations of tumblr as an admitted newbie) but whether original or not it is a pretty interesting collection of media artifacts, it comes recommended. What pushed me to write this post, however, was the fact that there was actually an animated GIF from TerrorVision, which throughout the 90s and 200s has gained a pretty loyal cult fanbase with good reason—so bad it’s so good.
This post is part of an inadvertent series of posts about my attempts to fight various media companies claims of copyright infringement on my uploaded YouTube clips. You can see part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here for context.
More than a month ago I decided to start fighting every single copyright claim I received on YouTube over the last five or six years using the defense that these videos (taken with my posts) represent educational fair use. My win-loss record is spotty at best, as I noted in these twoprevious posts, but turns out that over the last couple of weeks I’ve been on a kind of winning streak—a few of which I really didn’t expect to win at all. This just goes to further reinforce the ridiculously veiled logic of how and why these media companies decide what is breaking fair use, and what is not. It appears arbitrary at best, and with no obligation to explain their reasoning we remain at their whim. The deck is stacked in the media companies favor from the beginning, and the way YouTube handles the claims reinforces this guilty until proven innocent logic of copyright claims. Despite that, I have decided to continue chronicling this process in hopes that more people exercise their right to claim fair use because it shouldn’t be illegal to openly critique and analyze the culture industry that creates us in their own image.
A good example of this is the edited argument I created from clips of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). I was trying to juxtapose a series of scenes to reinforce the idea of the zombie in this film as an embodiment of the blind, mindless consumption that is driving the American dream in the 70s and 80s—a scathing critique of US consumerism to the point of graphic cannibalism. The copyright was claimed by the German licensing company Content Lizenz Agentur—who also claimed infringement for my scene from David Cronenberg’s Scanners—-but it turns out they released both. They seem to be a scummy, opportunist outfit that is simply trying to claim copyright and run ads. If you get a claim one one of your videos by them, I recommend you fight it—they seem to be bonafide cockroaches.
Speaking of cockroaches, the folks at Movieclips, who are basically trying to take down competing videos to collect more ad revenue, claimed copyright on one of my favorite clips (all of mine are ad free, mind you) wherein Harry Dean Stanton explains the Repo Code from the 80s cult classic Repo Man (1984). If you get a claim from Movieclips fight those bastards, they have no more right over that clip than you that I can see—correct me if I am wrong MovieClips! Rather than doing anything cultural, educational, or even committing a crime of movie-loving passion, they’re simply collecting ad revenues. How the hell do they stay in business? Why aren’t the media companies by way of Google cracking down on them?
Fox has refused all my fair use claims for the Grapes of Wrath video clips I uploaded, whereas Warner Brothers has released the third and final clip I had uploaded from Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). So all of my Lolita clips have been cleared whereas none of my Grapes of Wrath clips have—why? The post I wrote about Grapes of Wrath loses all of its power without the three clips I had included, and for me that is part of the crime—it is like a book publisher telling me I can’t quote William Faulkner’s [[Absalom, absalom!] to do textual analysis openly on the web.
And just when I’m ready to write Fox off as the latest evil media empire, they go ahead and release their claim on my “Formative Five” movie analysis. But despite that, you still can’t view that clip on YouTube because Warner Brothers has claimed it for copyright infringement as well, and they won’t release their claim. Isn’t this nuts! My short term work around was to simply upload this particular video to Vimeo, but it is just a matter of time before Vimeo gets its copyright scanners.
All that said, I was thrilled when NBC Universal released its claim on my oldest clip on YouTube pertaining to film analysis, the introduction to the 1946 version of The Killers. That was claimed recently, and I was really afraid my fair use defense was going to be refused, but it wasn’t. So now that clip—which had been blocked world-wide immediately after the claim—is once again available for all to see [yeah!]. And here is the companion post to that clip.
The clip from the Hughes Brothers’ American Pimp was also released by MGM. Winning!
But all-in-all it’s still a spotted record at best, Warner Brothers refused my claim on a short, 30 second Cigarette Ad clip from Blade Runner. And while all the decisions are not in yet, I would say I’ve won close to 40 to 50% of my claims—which is much more than I ever thought I would. What I’m wondering now is if these released claims on my videos change the status of my YouTube account from derelict pirate to cultural critic? 😉 The immediate victory would be that I can rest assured that Google won’t delete my YouTube account any time soon, but that is just the first step. The next, and more important step, is challenging the media establishment on the idea that people of the world cannot legally enter into an ongoing discourse with their content.
I think you know MOOCs have arrived when the aftershocks of the University of Virginia fiasco (an excellent article summing it up thus far in the New Republic by Kevin Carey here) reverberate on your home campus so quickly. UMW’s President Rick Hurley, who has brought stability and focus to a UMW community that has seen its own Presidential woes over the last 4 or 5 years, has called together a meeting of folks to be debriefed on what’s going on in this realm, and how we are positioning UMW in terms of online learning. As luck would have it, it just so happens that we have a few people on campus who’ve been thinking long and hard on this stuff.
Turns out we have been doing a number of great things in terms of teaching and learning technologies for a number of years. We’ve imagined and implemented a open source web-based publishing platform that features a variety of work happening around the UMW learning community with UMW Blogs. What’s more, we’ve made this work openly available to anyone on the web to interact with. We’ve built a community of people at UMW that grok the web as an integral part of understanding the relationship between teaching, learning, and a campus-based liberal arts experience moving forward. What’s more, online learning isn’t supplanting anything at UMW, it is part of an ongoing academic culture that is exploring the online space as a platform to build community, share our work freely, and grant access to the world through the simple act of defaulting to open. What we are doing here is experimenting with how web-based networks inform the relationships amongst teaching, research, and scholarship that have yet to be fully imagined.
Sometimes it’s a luxury to be flying under the radar as a small, public university because you aren’t so caught up with the purity of your brand, political jockeying for power (though that still happens, just not on the same scale), or pissing off major donors. With such freedom you can actually create the conditions wherein experimentation and innovation can take root, and that’s how UMW came to many of its discoveries in educational technology, most recently the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) known as ds106. Unlike the overwrought reaction of UVA’s Board of Visitors to the future of web-mediated learning, the shape of things at UMW was born of curiosity, openness, and an iterative approach to development. Not unlike how it came to just about everything its done over the last 7 or 8 years. From the beginning we were encouraged to do our work openly online, research the state of the field, read widely and voraciously, and share the process in turn. And we did.
So in 2008 when Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Dave Cormier created the first MOOC—we were paying attention, we were discussing the implications, and eventually we started designing our own. In terms of MOOCs, I always thought the massive was overstated until Stanford’s AI course hit last Fall, I had to do a double take when I learned over 100,000 thousand people had signed up. Whether or not we understand it as good or bad, the ability to even imagine orchestrating an online learning experience for more than 100,000 people in a semi-organized fashion is mind blowing. Even if a small fraction of them, say 10%, finish the course and learn something about Artificial Intelligence (and I think much more than that did) that’s roughly 5,000 more people than go to UMW all told. That’s a different layer of scale for classrooms and global networks, and it’s a game right now that can only be played by the most prominent celebrity professors.
But what about the rest of us? What might UMW bring to the MOOC if not an idea of celebrity professors and brand recognition? I would argue we can and should create an experience that taps into what’s unique about UMW: a small, rather affordable by US standards, 4-year public liberal arts campus. The idea comes from a conversation with the great Michael Wesch who was talking about the implications of a campus-wide version of ds106 for all K-State students. A kind of game/class embedded in the campus experience but open and accessible to anyone on the web. This is exactly right and the the vision of Ed Parkour, spaces where the web becomes part of the built environment of the campus and the experimentation for teaching and learning happens there as a result of the community. This is where UMW could shine—we can’t play the same game as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc., and we shouldn’t even try. We’re a small teaching college and we’re pretty good at it, highlight the best teaching happening around campus though an interactive experience the campus community can join in. How fun would it be to imagine such experiences as not a way to gut the campus experience, but as a way to re-imagine it entirely. ds106 has not done this campus-wide approach at UMW just yet, but what it has done is prove that a classroom experience can evolve into a community that transcends the idea of any one course.
What would truly enable other schools like UMW to escape the potentially vicious circle of celebrity faculty is to battle it with a connected and engaged community. That will be its own kind of gold, a vision of a student who understands and shapes the nature of these online connections with their own domain and web hosting while still remaining grounded in the campus life is a more realistic vision of the future. Why would UMW react to either or when it is so well suited for both? Why has this discussion become so linear? Why has the idea of online learning become divorced from the experience on the ground, why has it come to be understood as an almost unrelated entity almost entirely divorced from the campus community all together? These are just a few of my ideas on the matter as we prepare to meet with UMW’s president over the next couple of weeks. It is unfortunate that it took the incompetence of UVA’s Board of Visitors to become the reason for this meeting, but at the same time I am really glad we are finally having it—even if it’s 18 months after ds106 broke the MOOC sound barrier 🙂 UMW (and its wide ranging network of associates) has a ton to offer to this conversation, and using these various technologies and approaches to promote engagement, build community, and conceptualize these new means of communication are shaping our culture is essential to the 21st century citizen—-but like everything else at the university, it needs to be approached with an open mind, freedom, and some sense of possibility rather than crisis.
Me and UMW Blogs are going on 5 years this Summer, she’s is the baddest of the bad and meanest and leanest of the mean and lean. She’s a veritable titan of her kind, she’s an educational publishing platform of the very best kind, and she’s turning five. Five years ago from roughly May through August we brought together the early MistyLook themed WPMu and MediaWiki hybrid out into this wasteland of bad BlackBoard installs, and we shone a light.
A light of good publishing practices, a site for everyone regardless of his or her class status, and course spaces that actually looked good. We were already dreaming of fancy syndication, course aggregation, and a space attractive and user friendly enough that you would actually want to have a stake in it. It worked, five years later we have more than 6500 sites and 8500 users, and that number has steadily increased over these past five years. We run heavy traffic sites like UMW Bullet and EagleEye, or blogs for alumni 3 and 4 years out. We have aggregated blog posts from more than 40 UMW students who have written about their travels around the world, and some class sites that imagine a whole new use for online space discussion, tags and the community in the virtual. There are student created research sites I’d put up against any university’s publicly open and shared work. Not to mention more than 35 original literary journals created by UMW students.
It’s been an amazing space to watch emerge and grow into a distributed and highly active, yet loosely bound, community of classes, students, faculty and staff. I continue to feel honored to be a part of it. Oddly enough, I also feel further and further away from it, so much happens there in a single day I can’t really keep track, we also have hundreds of plugins and themes, it’s a vertiable laboratory doubling as an enterprise system, it’s truly remarkable in that regard. We had almost 100% uptime this past academic school year, and save some recent brute force attacks these past two weeks, it has been a model for both reliability and possibility within a university platform.
Now I’m gonna talk numbers for a second because I continue to be blown away by them. This year alone we have more than 1.2 million unique visitors from all over the world and 4 million page views! This is mind blowing, umw.edu is a veritable brand with 100 years of history behind the idea and it gets 14 million a year. We’ve been doing open education out in the open for 5 years without packaging it—it’s an ongoing happening that others around the web can tap into, it is a model of online education that is not separated from a time, place, and most importantly the people that shape it. I love this system! It’s the proto-type for our upcoming Domain of One’s Own pilot, and it continues to evolve as an integral space wherein we all work.
What’s more, as Notorious B.I.G. would have said if he was in my shoes, “Mo traffic, mo problems.” We’ve been getting brute force attacked this last week, and Zach Davis, per usual, comes up big and writes us a script to block too many attempts on the login page, which has been pulling us down. Such issues come with age, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time, but it also makes sense to share out Zach’s solution here. And to Zach’s credit, this is a someone trying to hack into WP, and this i where some expertise on our side for sys admining would give him Zach some freedom and force us to take a bit more responsibility. And while I want to in my heart of hearts, I’m not that good—and we can only run enterprise sites like UMW Blogs and the quickly emerging ds106.us successfully for so long until we start needing people who are good, who do it regularly, and know how to admin WordPress properly—I can hack my way through but it is ugly and I’ll be the first to admit that my skills are not world class in this department 🙂
If you are having mini-DDOS attacks and your WordPress site is crashing as a result, then what follows may be very useful to you thanks to the great Zach Davis who got the original idea for this wp-login brute force login attack solution from this awesome blog post:
I’ve done a number of things. I’ve tightened the firewall, tweaked the mod_security rules, reduced the number of apache processes available to the server, and installed an apache module called DOS Evasive. All of these will tighten things up, so keep an ear our for users having problems. We may need to loosen restrictions at some point.
_____________________
I don’t want to have to keep worrying about this server, which is crashing a few times per day, so I’ve gone ahead and implemented a solution to this brute force problem. I’ve added a mod_security rule to apache that looks like this:
# This has to be global, cannot exist within a directory or location clause . . .
SecDataDir /usr/local/apache/logs/data
SecAction phase:1,nolog,pass,initcol:ip=%{REMOTE_ADDR},initcol:user=%{REMOTE_ADDR}
<Location /wp-login.php>
# Setup brute force detection.
# React if block flag has been set.
SecRule user:bf_block “@gt 0” “deny,status:401,log,msg:’ip address blocked for 5 minutes, more than 15 login $
# Setup Tracking. On a successful login, a 302 redirect is performed, a 200 indicates login failed.
SecRule RESPONSE_STATUS “^302” “phase:5,t:none,nolog,pass,setvar:ip.bf_counter=0”
SecRule RESPONSE_STATUS “^200” “phase:5,chain,t:none,nolog,pass,setvar:ip.bf_counter=+1,deprecatevar:ip.bf_co$
SecRule ip:bf_counter “@gt 15” “t:none,setvar:user.bf_block=1,expirevar:user.bf_block=300,setvar:ip.bf_counte$
</Location>
(for future reference, the rule is stored in /etc/httpd/conf/modsec2.user.conf)
Basically, what this does is assumes that after a successful login, WordPress will redirect the user (and send a 302 header). On an unsuccessful login, WordPress displays the login page with a regular 200 header. The rule tracks how many 302 headers a user gets while visiting the wp-login.php page and, if they exceed 15 10, it blocks the IP for 5 minutes. I tailed the mod security log and the request log at the same time and saw another attack come in (they are coming in constantly; within 5 minutes of blocking an IP, I see more requests, often as many as 3-4 per second from the same IP).
We need to watch this closely and make sure people can still login to WordPress. Normally I would want to test this before deploying it to production, but in this case I think it’s more important to get things locked down and then adjust as necessary. Please make sure that logins still work and let me know if you experience any problems.
How many of you get support like that from your host? It’s amazing, and this reminds me just how integral Zach has been to all of UMW’s successes with UMW Blogs, here’s to you hippie—it’s been an awesome 5 years and sooner or later we will let you out of our experimental prisoner. Nobody makes the bava like the Davis, NOBODY!
Back in February of 2006 I did my first Movie List #1″ post (which inspired my epic “The Horror, the Horror” horror movie list post (probabaly the most visited ‘serious’ post on the bava over the last six years) , it was an idea I had for an ongoing series, but after two posts realized how much work it is to blog like that. It was actually fun stuff, but it took a ton of time. A year later I did “Movie List #2” which was dedicated to film noirs and then never touched another movie list for 5 years.
But that has all changed now, I’ve been on a bit of a movie watching binge while I was sick over the last two weeks. I am re-watching a ton of stuff, and the only film below I haven’t yet seen is Yasujir? Ozu’s Tokyo Story, which is ironic because it is on almost every film critics best film of all time list.
Anyway, it has been fun going back through some old films, and I got the opportunity by simply strolling around campus on a lazy Summer day. I walked over to UMW’s library and raided their DVD collection. It is far too small, but it has some real gems, and I’ll be going back regularly. Another interesting note is several of them are on the National Film Registry list (Harlan County, USA, Gun Crazy, and Kiss Me Deadly) and this is great research for my upcoming class, I have the feeling I’ll be watching more and more film as time goes on, here’s to such an awesome possible future.
Watched
Harlan County, USA(1976) I previously linked to a video of John Sayles talking about the influence this documentary had on his film Matewan (1987) (another classic) and his analysis is pretty spot on. I came to this film after I watched another film of Barbara Kopple’s called American Dream (1990) about the Hormel workers strikes that doesn’t end nearly as well as the mine workers strike in this film. The idea at the end of Harlan County, USA is that while these mineworkers might have won a hard fought victory, such success is fleeting and labor must be always vigilant and ready to carry on the struggle. American Dream is the manifestation of that concern, labor takes a hard hit in the Reagan 80s and the demise sprawls over two decades through these two films. Take together, these two films make for an amazing chronicle of US labor over the 70s and 80s. Go to school, watch Barbara Kopple’s remarkable documentaries about the decline of US labor, an interesting note for me is Kopple worked with two other titans of documentary film the Maysles Brothers in the 60s before taking up this project.
Check out the trailer:
The New World (1995) This is my second time through this film. I watched it when I first got to Virginia in 2006, but it was an unpleasant experience because my TV was, and remains, too small for this film. I actually don’t think there is a TV big enough for it. It needs to be experienced on the big screen, and I think it will become a lock for the Film Registry in a few more years. It brings the Pocahontas myth back to life with a sense of veracity and mystery all at once. It reminds me why the exploratory and colonial periods of history are so fascinating, Malick imagines this moment with all its wonder and horror and magic, but it’s not an argument or an essay, it’s a poem. I think the best review I have read about the film is Mick LaSalle’s from The San Francisco Chronicle:
Terence Malick’s one-of-a-kind film, about the life of Pocahontas and the dawn of American history, contains some of the best filmmaking imaginable – some of it beyond imagining. I have seen it at least five times and have no idea how Malick knew, when he put it all together, that the movie would even make sense. It’s difficult to write a great short poem. It’s difficult to write a great long novel. But to write a great long poem that’s the size of a great long novel – one that makes sense, doesn’t flag and is exponentially better than the short poem or the long novel ever would have been – that’s almost impossible. Malick did it. With images.
Yeah its slow, yeah it can be hard to watch at times, but it is art dammit, take your Ritalin and eat your film vitamins!
Rabid (1977) I love David Cronenberg. And I love nothing more than Cronenberg from 1975 to 1983. For many Cronenberg’s body horror films have a specific arc, they really start with the early, overtly sexually transmitted horror films of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977) —starring the convincing pornstar Marilyn Chambers. In these two films the idea of an epidemic that changes the face of the world is at stake, kind of Soderbergh’s Contagion before he made it, and with more sex, surgeons, and skin grafts. The middle period—and my personal favorite period—of his body horror work is The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), and The Dead Zone (1983) —all in some way moving the horror back from the societal to the personal. All of these films are far more contained, and while the implications of the plot always seem global, they always return to a more personalized bodily transformations that in turn shapes their story. Max Renn of Videodrome is a perfect example of this, as is Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone. The final period of Cronenberg’s body horror, and my least favorite, is typified by The Fly and Dead Ringers—which is more about indulgent, egotistical, and emotionally disturbed scientists—and in neither films were the scientists all that intriguing.
As for Rabid, the motorcycle opening is rad, and Marilyn Chambers is hard not to constantly stare at, there is something hypnotic about this film, as if you were already infected and just waiting to go mad. The 70s style, architecture, and general feel of Montreal is beautiful. The way in which Cronenberg captures the possibility of Marshall Law in the city in the event of such an epidemic is both frightening and deeply intriguing. The “what if” is always there.
Finally, check out this CBC TV interview with Cronenberg in the late 70s wherein he explains why they cast a porn star in the lead.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) I talked a bit my experience watching this film in this post with a couple of animated GIFs to boot. What really struck me about this film on the second or third watching was how beautiful and perfect the opening scene is. It’s 8 or 9 minutes of some amazing cinema that nails it on all levels: the back and forth between Hammer and Cristina in the car is amazing; the shots of the road and the Lost Highway sense of darkness, and the storytelling that hints at things but gives nothing away–it shows without telling. What’s more it is stark, cold, and mean with a small trace of compassion that seems to get tortured out of the film after only the first 8 minutes. Go and get the film and watch it in its entirety. In the meantime check out the opening scene:
Gun Crazy (1949) I have a whole blog post dedicated to this one. There are numerous scenes I want to rip and post to YouTube because they are so rich, as well as at least one animated GIF. Gun Crazy is one of those great b-movie noirs that produces the textbook femme fatale. The truly bad woman that can’t help it, and the poor sap of a guy who can only be her dog. It seems remarkably two-dimensional and empty when you write it, but when you see them together on film robbing and killing for love and passion it seems that Bonnie and Clyde was made almost twenty years early. I will write that blog post and include a few more scenes, but in the interim check out this short scene wherein Annie (Peggy Cummins) tells Bart (John Dall) that she wants more than $40 a week, she “wants things, a lot of things, big things.” Her speech is brilliant, and those things are more than just money, they’re an idea of living—a razor’s edge approach to life. This film is full of moments like this, it’s a total gem—not to mention the deep dark commentary on America’s fascination with guns that is everywhere in this film (with no small thanks to blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo).
On Tap:
Tokyo Story (1953) Next up is Tokyo Story, and I have to admit this is one of those films I should have seen a while ago but never did. I have seen it repeatedly talked about as one of the greatest films ever made, but still haven’t been pushed to see it. I think while I was watching Sansho the Bailiff by Kenji Mizoguchi recently I started realizing Japan has a whole film history besides Kurosawa that is amazing. A few years back I saw a film by another Japanese director Tomu Uchida’s Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka (1959) and I really wanted to return to all these directors films and see more. The films are beautiful, precise, and human in a way film seems to have become denatured to these days—save perhaps Malick’s films.
Friday the 13th (1980) Perhaps one of the most maligned films of all time? The slasher cycle is in full effect with this one, while a terrible film in many ways it also serves to codify the plot devices that drove Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween into the national consciousness. Friday the 13th was a cheap jam on a theme that created one of the most memorable mask wearing mindless murderer of last 30 years . This watching will be with Camp Magic Macguffin in mind all the way 🙂 I’m going to make this one of the films I try and argue belongs on the National Film Registry list, it may be a hard sell for many aesthetically (whihc I would agree with), but I think there is a solid argument for its cultural significance over the last 30 years.
Martha Burtis tweeted this bag of gold a day or two ago from the great John Cage. I am posting it here for posterity, it very much describes the way in which we have tried to approach ds106, and I think I will be writing this into any and all future syllabi I create from here on out.
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
Perhaps one of the most maligned films of all time? The slasher cycle is in full effect with this one, while a terrible film in many ways it also serves to codify the plot devices that drove Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween into the national consciousness. Friday the 13th was a cheap jam on a theme that created one of the most memorable mask wearing mindless murderer of last 30 years . This watching will be with 
