Do you need to see the Star Wars films to actually enjoy them?

Posted on October 19, 2007 by Reverend

Thirty years ago I would have laughed at this question. Silly rabbit, of course you have to see the movies to enjoy them. How else would you know what to do with all those awesome Kenner action figures you wanted so desperately? Recently my world view has been shaken a bit by my twelve year old neighbor. He is an avid Star Wars fan and we talk regularly about the virtues of the Star Wars saga in all its brilliance. He shows me his Star Wars Lego catalogs, his latest purchases, gives me an intensely detailed walk-through of his Lego Star Wars video game escapades. So, you will understand that i was a little bit shocked when I learned that he had never seen one of the movies. Not one!!!

Imge of lego Star Wars figuresWell if you aren’t shocked, it’s all right because I’m shocked enough for both of us. I mean I felt betrayed! How can he know so much about the series and never have seen one of the movies, not even episodes I, II, and III (even though they suck!). Well, I guess I am showing my own essentialism here, for it just seemed impossible to appreciate Star Wars without first experiencing the “real thing,” i.e., the films. And while my neighbor may be a particular case, I am beginning to wonder whether twelve year old around the world are growing up with a different Star Wars. A series of narratives they learn through video games like Battle Front and the insanely popular Lego Star Wars video games.
Not to mention the equally popular Lego Star Wars sets.

Image of Luke Skywalker Kenner Action figureI remember back in 2005 when my nephews first got the Lego Star Wars video game thinking why in the name of everything that is holy would these kids want to play a “fake” Star Wars game when they can play the “real” games like Battle Front, etc.? Well, I understand this is the marriage of two insanely successful brands that have subsequently fostered a veritable consumer feeding frenzy — but was the frenzy any less when the original Star wars figures arrived on the shelf? According to Wikipedia’s article on the Kenner toy company:

Kenner Products obtained the rights to produce action figures and playsets for the Star Wars trilogy from 1977-1984. After Kenner acquired the license to produce Star Wars toys when the Mego Corporation rejected it in 1976, Kenner popularized the 3.75 inch action figure that became an industry standard and continues to dominate the action figure toy market.

And my follow up question is –was there was a Lego Star Wars movie that I missed? Why would kids want Legos when they can have 3.75″ action figures? It makes no sense to me! What I failed to realize is that for many of these kids the video game is the movie.

Image of a Tusken raiderI guess my control over the notion of what the real Star Wars is doesn’t translate that well. I have my own, very historically specific memories of when I was my two nephews age, having seen Star Wars for the first time in a huge, single screen movie house (which allowed smoking!) and being utterly blown away. I also vividly remember coming home and dreaming of Sand People for months. I also remember when I was my neighbors age having seen The Empire Strikes Back for the first time and realizing just what it means to get hit in the head with a 2×4. “Did I just see Luke get his hand cut off by his ‘father’?” or “Are you telling me Han Solo is cryogenically frozen?” I had no idea what the hell was going on in my world, I waited six years for utter despair? It was my first real movie pill. I had to swallow it, but my sense of everything just wanted to throw it back up again. The force had truly been disturbed.

So, once again I have another pill to swallow: Can you actually appreciate the genius of the Star Wars saga without watching the films? Am I an essentialist if I answer resoundingly YES! –probably–but ya gotta draw the line somewhere and, damn it, if I am gonna get old and die that is the one I’m gonna fight for ’til the grave.

Posted in movies, star wars, video games | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or a 150,000 is going to end that war…

Posted on October 18, 2007 by Reverend

Another gem from UMW Blogs. Professor Mara Scanlon’s Asian American Literature class is currently reading lê thi diem thuy’s novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For–a tale about a Vietnamese family that moves to the U.S. soon after the end of the Vietnam War.

One particular student shared with the class in the form of a blog post contextualizing a clip on YouTube from Errol Morris’s Fog of War. The excerpt from the film deals with the fundamental breakdown in any cultural knowledge that the US had about Vietnam history more generally (sound familiar?). The scene from The Fog of War that this student links to traces Robert McNamara’s (the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War) assertion that the war was being fought on each side with a completely different understanding of what they were, in fact, fighting for: ““We [The U.S.] saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not as they saw it: a Civil War.”

Can this nation’s political and military history be understood in terms of a progression?

Posted in film, movies, UMW Blogs, YouTube | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Who cares if Tarantino loves movies?

Posted on October 17, 2007 by Reverend

I recently saw Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Let me first say that I haven’t, until now, really considered myself a Tarantino fan. Checking out his Wikipedia article I realized that he did far fewer features than I originally thought. And of the five features he directed, I am a huge fan of at least three: Death Proof, Reservoir Dogs, and Jackie Brown. Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown did some amazing things with film narrative and characterization, while Death Proof is a brilliant resurrection of the exploitation films of the 70s. And while I recognize the significance of Pulp Fiction as the reification of the independent film movement during the mid-90s, I could certainly live without it, and the same goes for Kill Bill (both volumes).

That said, I have always appreciated, albeit grudgingly at times, Tarantino’s encyclopedic knowledge of b-movies and unconventional education in the hallowed halls of an old school movie rental store. I mean, come on, Tarantino was instrumental in having Detroit 9000 re-released, enough said.

So, when I told a friend how much I liked Death Proof recently, he said he hadn’t seen it and after reading this review by Lance Mannion he was not necessarily inclined to. Here’s a bit from Mannion’s review that kind of sparked my new appreciation for Tarantino that I really didn’t know I had until I had something to react against (sorry Lance):

Tarantino doesn’t love movies. Not the way someone like Woody Allen loves movies. Or even Mel Brooks. Certainly not the way Truffaut loved movies. People who love movies love stories and characters. They love actors. Tarantino likes some of his actor pals, and he enjoys hanging with pretty actresses and working with them.

Tarantino doesn’t love movies as much as Woody Allen or Mel Brooks, not to mention the great Truffaut? What a ridiculous accusation this is. Why would anyone premise a review on the idea that one director loves film more than another. Who cares? Would it make any sense for me to argue that Jack Hill loved film more than Roger Corman? The elitism of traditional film criticism oozes from such a statement. What if I said that Fritz Lange loved film more than Leni Riefenstahl? Could this statement ever be separated from the politics each of these filmmakers (both technical masters) represent?

Perhaps the different political and cultural context of this statement might expose the absurd logic of such an accusation. Does the phantom fact that revered Fritz Lange might have arguably loved movies more than the infamous Riefenstahl begin to suggest anything about the political context in which both created what most critics consider masterpieces? Does an artist’s (or a film’s) greatness depend upon something other than its context? And does what an artist really thinks or loves ever play a role in their perceived greatness? I would argue no for both.

Death Proof is the film Tarantino’s “education” had been preparing him for all along. More than that, it came off beautifully. Kurt Russell was an awesome maniac, and his character in this film made me want to re-watch Escape from New York and The Thing yet again. It was a genuine exploitation film with some of the best moments of shock and schlock I have yet to see in this genre, not to mention some unbelievable stunts, an impressive resistance to over doing CGI, and a complete disregard for being “good.” Maybe Tarantino doesn’t love film, maybe he hates film to its very core. But I really could care less how he feels about film, for Death Proof was a gem.

Posted in film, films, movies, YouTube | 28 Comments

Stephen King’s “The Mist”

Posted on October 16, 2007 by Reverend

Through the latest Fangoria on the stands I discovered that Stephen King’s short story/novella “The Mist” has been made into a film, and is currently in post-production and should be out in theaters November 21st, 2007.

The trailer is a bit underwhelming when I think about just how powerful this story was for me when I read it in 1985. King’s Skeleton Crew is the only first edition of a hardback book I own, and is without question one of my favorite collections of short stories. Say what you will about King, but his stories in Skeleton Crew epitomize the social power of pop horror imagination more than any other writer of recent time. His work is uneven, without question, and he even frames the reason why his work has become increasing unreadable over time (if unintentionally) in the introduction to Skeleton Crew:

A short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger…writing short stories hasn’t gotten easier for me over the years; it’s gotten harder. The time to do them has shrunk, for one thing. They keep wanting to bloat, for another (I have a real problem with bloat–I write like fat ladies diet). And it seems harder to find the voice for these tales… (17)

There is no question that much of King’s work has bloated, but this collection of short stories remains a lean (for King at least), tight collection of some of the most compelling horror tales I have ever read. With stories like “The Jaunt,” “Survivor Type,” “The Raft,” “Beachworld,” “Word Processor of the Gods,” and my personal favorite “The Mist.”

I guess I love King’s stories in this collection because it was the first time I ever encountered a writer who incorporated so many of my realities as an 80s adolescent into the texture of his texts. The grocery store and all the brands he constantly references in “The Mist” had a huge impact on my imagination. I felt like King and I inhabited the same world, he was talking about the quotidian minutia in our life that no one recognizes. More than that, he was making this seemingly normal reality frightening — he was re-valuing its meaning and often shadowing the ostensibly innocuous brands that surround us with a patina of madness and horror.

Image of Double IndemnityKing’s two-dimensional characters with their beautifully wrought idiosyncrasies coupled with the close attention he pays to the objects that inhabit our built environment are what bring my thoughts back to his work repeatedly. These elements of his writing in the best of his work (which I would argue is Skeleton Crew) are quite similar to the best of Noir fiction and film from the 1930s and 40s. Having read a ton of King before I encountered Noir-ish film or fiction, I remember the first time I saw Double Indemnity as an undergraduate. Oddly enough, I couldn’t stop thinking about King’s writing style throughout the film, it seemed to have so much in common with how Billie Wilder framed spaces like the grocery store, the bowling alley, the fountain shop, the insurance office space, not to mention the character quirks of Barton Keyes’s “little man inside” telling him whether or not a claim was fraudulent. Keyes is one of the most memorable caricatures in film for me, because his entire person is distilled into that quirk, making for extremely economical and effective character development. King was a master of this in his early short stories, unfortunately he got too bloated, for his early work is really quite a pleasure to read and might be the Taylorized horr-noir of the 1970s and 80s.

So, in short, I am dying to see “The Mist,” however I am trying to control my enthusiasm for I have no faith in recent movies. Well, except for the latest Grindhouse film by Quentin Tarantino which is brilliant! But I should probably save that thought for my next post, for like King my posts are getting evermore bloated 😉

Posted in books, film, film noir, movies, YouTube | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

The UMW Blogs Twilight Zone

Posted on October 15, 2007 by Reverend

I guess I have been having too much fun on UMW Blogs featuring faculty and students blogs. But this evening something happened to me, something so strange it invokes the smoke smooth voice of the great Rod Serling, “Next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

RSS Reader Roblog

While scanning through my RSS reader this evening I saw something that brought the UMW Blogs experiment full circle for me. A blog from a student was titled “Where in the world is Jim Groom?: National Folk Festival.” Say what? I was, indeed, at the National Folk Festival in Richmond yesterday, and I had the good fortune to experience some awesome music and storytelling (more on this below). But how did Roblog know this? More than that, why am I being featured in the title of one of his blog posts?

Well, quite simply, because Roblog is an awesome blogger and he sure knows how to have fun. He must have recognized this good Reverend from doing one of my WordPress revivals in front of numerous classes this semester (in fact he has two classes he is blogging for). Not to mention all the times I commented on his blog. So, he saw his opportunity to catapult me into the blogging Twilight Zone (for I am sure he knows how closely I follow all the UMW Blogs, and particularly his) and nailed it.

Well, here’s to you Roblog, your blog rocks, and your latest post just goes to show how much fun a profoundly silly thing like a blog can be, thanks for making my evening. Additionally, I appreciate the candid photo of me with my WordPress t-shirt –not to mention your color commentary!– I must say I look damn good!

Image of the bavaking
This one goes up on the “I love me” wall!

How fun is that? I love UMW Blogs!

I also love the National Folk Festival at Richmond. Roblog’s and my path only crossed once (even if previously unbeknownst to me), for the Campbell family band is the only show we both saw, and that is no surprise given how much was going on at this festival. My family and I got there at about 2:00 and started off with the amazing brass Gospel band The Madison Hummingbirds, also known as a “Shout Band.” They were unbelievable musicians, and immediately electrified the audience with their bopping sounds. If you can spare three minutes check out the video of the Madison Hummingbirds on YouTube performing at the National Folk Festival a couple of years ago.

We later heard Dovie Thomason, an extremely gifted story teller from the Lakota/Sioux tribes, tell the story of how Iktomi became an accidental hero. Iktomi is a trickster figure specific to the great plains tribe and the story chronicled how he traded his mind for beauty and the resulting encounter with Iya, the “camp eater” who face is as big as the full moon rising and the backward sucking of his breath inhales entire camps. Wow, the story of there encounter, and Iktomi’s ability to trick Iya and save the imperiled camp unintentionally was so beautifully told. I could have listened to her tell these stories for years and years. She even had a few jabs about the ways that technology isolates humanity from the land and one another even further, Antonella looked at me knowingly, and at some level I completely agree with Dovie Thomason.

Finally, we saw Maggie Ingram & The Ingramettes, Gospel blues by evangelist Maggie Ingram, her son, daughter and granddaughter, plus six more vocalists and band members. The Ingramettes, with their deep, over-powering voices, were relieved by the James River which rhythmically rocked in the backround to the deep-felt gospel blues as the sun extinguished on an almost perfect day in Richmond.

Image of Maggie Ingram and daughter

Thanks for helping me to blog all this Roblog, you’re an inspiration.

Posted in fun, national folk festival, richmond, UMW Blogs, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

WPMu Tutorials (Week 2)

Posted on October 15, 2007 by Reverend

This one’s a little late, and fortunately I didn’t have to do much work to bring the following resource to you. Keeping in line with a philosophy that Scott, D’Arcy, and Brian were promoting at Open Ed 2007, why create new content when much of it is already out there?

WPMu tutorialsIn the spirit of re-use, here is a WPMu Tutorial blog authored by Andrea (who is the same prolific and extremely knowledgeable andrea_r from the WPMu forums). This blog has some great advice, tips, and more in-depth information about WPMu that folks who are just starting out with this resource may find extremely useful.

Below is a quick list of some of the gems you’ll find on this blog:

  • “Before you Install” is a helpful post that discusses the potential pitfalls of setting up WPMu on a run-of-the-mill hosting service. Some sound advice here, especially is you are working towards a large community of blogs.
  • Choosing a host gives advice about which hosting services play nice with WPMu, and how to choose the right service for your project, again great advice here.
  • The differences between WordPress and wordpressmu lays out the difference between a single installation of WordPress and the multi-user environment on some of the more specifically technical points.
  • Database structure is one of the key difference between WP and WPMU, and this post offers an overview of the WPMu database structure quite nicely. With a promise of more discussion to come.
  • Where to find error logs is a quick how-to for finding the error logs for your WPMu install, an important log to keep track of.
  • How to moderate signups is a quick hack for
    moderating new bogs as they are created to prevents splogs. However, is you are using the e-mail domain as a filter for users, this is unnecessary.
  • Changing the default theme is yet another hack that takes you through changing the default theme for WPMu.

Ahhh, so much good, free advice brought to you with so little effort, thank Andrea for all her hard work.

Speaking of freely available resources, if you are starting a WPMu install for whatever reason you might find the documentation wiki at UMW Blogs of some use. Feel free to take what you want from the documentation re-use and remix it as you see fit.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Universities using WPMu

Posted on October 15, 2007 by Reverend

Mario A. Núñez Molina did some research on Universities that are using WordPress Multi-User in this post. There are at least ten colleges and universities on that list that I wasn’t aware of before reading the post. Something that is extremely exciting for me, because there are far more universities experimenting with WPMu than I originally thought -though not nearly enough.

Blogs feature

Mario even Features my favorite WPMU blog installation 🙂
If you don’t read Mario’s blog, you really should. Not only is he as prolific as they come, but he has his pulse on the world of education and technology like few other blogs do. Nonetheless, he really doesn’t need anyone promoting his blog for him because his readership seems far more extensive than most other EdTech blogs I read on a regular basis written in English. Which raises a question for me: how important is it to starting reading blogs from other cultures written in other languages. I have gotten so many resources, tips, and possibilities from tapping into Mario’s blog, which has opened me up to a whole other world of Educational Blogging that I would have not had access to otherwise. And while my Spanish and Italian are worse than rough, when I saw all the cool things that they are doing I was immediately driven to see the innovations happening on a broader international stage than just Canada, the US, Britain, and Australia. In fact, I have been using my rusty language skills more than ever before.

In fact, at the Open Education conference I met a great guy and absolute EdTech maverick (thanks you Brian for introducing us) in Pedro Pernías Peco from University of Alicante in Spain. Pedro is hot on the trail of EduGlu and is doing and unbelievable job with making RSS do his bidding, if you haven’t heard his talk from Open Ed 2007 here, be sure to check out his awesome slides as well.

Excuse my necessary digression and now back to my original post idea, I have at least four more schools to add to Mario’s WPMu list:

  • Otis College of Art and Design is one of my personal favorites. Sue Mayberry has done an unbelievable job at Otis and needs to be applauded. The policy and the documentation is wonderfully done. And, as with most things from Otis, it looks so good!
  • University of Alicante, Spain (Pedro showed me the link for this, and it is beautifully integrated into their homemade LMS, but I can’t find it currently -maybe Pedro will send the link?)
  • Bryn Mawr College (thanks to the trailblazing work of Laura Blankenship)
  • University of Buffalo (They are almost using WPMu as an departmental blogging/CMS space -interesting stuff)
  • University of Calgary (in Clandestine Alpha thanks to D’Arcy Norman, but making real headway as I understand)
  • Keene State University has recently introduced WPMu into their learning environment, thanks to the inimitable Mike Caulfield. Expect much more from these folks.
  • University of British Columbia (unconfirmed, but from what I understand they may be taking the jump)
  • The University of Richmond has some WPMu action stewing in the pot, it may have been recently released, though I don’t have a URL for this one just yet. Any help?
  • Update: The College of William and Mary is now running WPMu, and these cool cats are even hosting it externally, very cool! I just wish they would open up the comments on the front page so I could tell them as much.

So, between Mario’s list and mine, are we ready to have an informal, distributed meet up to start talking about what we’re doing with WPMU in the educational realm? And perhaps in more than one language…

Hey, we might even have a panel at Northern Voice 2008…

Posted in UMW Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Nationwide Campus Protests for Guns not Butter

Posted on October 12, 2007 by Reverend

Image of gun and students
Image courtesy of ratterrell

Looks like there will be some campus protests throughout the US from October 22-27. And it’s about time for students to stand up against the health care crisis, rampant political corruption, the Iraq war, and our disappearing civil rights…

But wait, these protests are of a different order. Looks like this protest is in reaction to legislation that will outlaw students from carrying concealed weapons on campus (this was actually legal?). Jesus Christ! am I living in the twilight zone or what? Below is part of an e-mail message I received this morning.

This message is being sent to offer you information on a nation-wide student protest which will take place the week of October 22-27, 2007 so that you are not unnecessarily alarmed should any of UMW’s students decide to participate.

The “Students for Concealed Carry on Campus” group, which is advocating for concealed carry of handguns on campuses in protest to proposed legislation in many states which will outlaw firearm possession on a campus, is asking students nationwide to join their protest the week of October 22-27, 2007.

The method of protest being advocated is the wearing of an empty firearm holster on campus. There is no legal statute nor University regulation governing the wearing of any empty holster.

I’m not just scared, I’m downright terrified.

Posted in campus, gun control | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

James Farmer and the Great Debaters

Posted on October 11, 2007 by Reverend

James L. Farmer, Jr. was a major figure in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. He was a renowned orator, one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), organized the first sit-ins, and was a key figure on the Freedom Rides during the 1960s, a phrase he actually coined.

Image of Martin Luther King. Whitney Young, and James Farmer meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964
Lyndon B. Johnson meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, and James FarmerOne of the lesser-known facts about one of the lesser-known leaders behind the struggle for social justice during the long twentieth century was that he taught at Mary Washington. During the 1980s and 90s (up and until his death in 1999) he taught a class on the Civil Rights movement. In fact, professor Tim O’Donnell’s freshman seminar, “James Farmer and the Great Debaters” (oh yeah, Farmer was also a part of the storied Wiley College debate team that broke the color line and defeated Harvard University in 1935), is actually transcribing the audio from one of Farmer’s courses that was recorded during 1987. In fact, the course was actually video-taped, but unfortunately the video for the first four classes are unwatchable.Additionally, Farmer brought three major figures of the civil rights era (Whitney Young, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Walter E. Fauntroy) to campus during the late 1980s and taped some really interesting interviews with these figures about their reflections upon this moment. So, Tim O’Donnell’s class has done an unbelievable job of scouring the archive at Mary Washington for all these resources (and this is really just scratching the surface), and more than that they are going to transcribe these resources, put them in a blog and make them freely available to the world wide web. So, if all goes well, just about anyone will be able to sit in on a course with a figure who lived through and had a profound impact upon on of the most tumultuous moments of US History.

I believe this class will be following a similar format as the American Rhetoric site on UMW Blogs (see an example here, which features Malcolm X’s speech “The Ballot or the Bullet”). Each page will include the audio file of each lecture as well as the corresponding transcript. Additionally, at least nine classes will have a video component, wherein you can see Farmer in action in front of the classroom. Say what you will about lectures, but I’d sit in a lecture hall any day of the week to listen to this man talk about his experiences, which are extraordinary in every sense of the word.

Here is a quick two-minute introduction to one of the videos that I think is beautifully edited and features one of Farmer’s speeches during the 1960s movement -powerful stuff indeed.

[MEDIA=19]

What an amazing resource, and it just makes me smile to think that Tim O’Donnell and the students in his seminar will be making it available to the world at large. The labor is intense, but the rewards are even more intense.

Posted in civil rights, James Farmer, politics, video | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Book Autopsies

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Reverend

Brian Dettmer’s Book Autopsies featured on the Centripetal Notion blog is well worth a look if you haven’t seen it already.

Book Autopsies

Found via Carole Garmon’s UMW Blogs post for her Video Art class here. Go UMW Blogs go!

Posted in art | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments