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Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
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-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.
I am Jim Groom
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Tag Archives: film
Moral Endings in Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice
Picking up on my last post about the broader crisis of existential meaning in Hemingway’s “The Killers” for noir 106, it might be be interesting to look at James M. Cain’s 1934 novella The Postman Always Rings Twice. I this reading I was struck by the deeply perverse … Continue reading
Is there an idea to “The Killers”?
Noir is often characterized by pithy dialogue, rainswept city streets, the femme fatale, shadowy characters, tortuous plots, etc. These tropes certainly help one identify a style of noir, and you can find the tropes in all the literary examples of noir … Continue reading
“I Confess” and “Torn Curtain”
Antonella and I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) the other night, and I was a bit disappointed. That’s rarely the case with a Hitchcock film, but I couldn’t help feeling the story was stilted and Montgomery Clift couldn’t get into anything … Continue reading
The Academic GIF
I wrote several months ago about the experience of working alongside UMW’s Chinese History scholar Sue Fernsebner to start imagining how she might integrate animated GIFs into a curriculum centered around film analysis. I tongue-and-cheek referred to it as GIFiculum, or GIF … Continue reading
Filmfax ode to the legendary Ray Harryhausen
Just got the latest issue of Filmfax, and look what greeted me on the cover: the late, great Ray Harryhausen painting a miniature of Medusa from Clash of the Titans (1981). The article features an excellent interview by Mike … Continue reading
bavatuesdays Episode 2: Hercules in the Haunted World
Paul Bond and I got together for another awesome talk about Mario Bava’s second feature Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). The discussion ranges from points about Bava’s brilliant use of color in this film, the Sword and Sandal genre, … Continue reading
The Digital Legacy of the 1980s: Super Mario Bros.
My kids and I explore movies and series on Netflix to watch on a somewhat regular basis. And while I’ve been underwhelmed by their live streaming library as of late like everyone else, we recently stumbled upon The Super Mario Bros. … Continue reading
“Listen Terencino” —Fellini as Maniac
Anto watched a documentary on RAI recently titled Fellini: I’m a Big Liar, which has a series of interviews of people sharing tales about the great Federico Fellini, and what a maniac he was. And no story captures this better … Continue reading
Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”
Ubuweb has been on a serious tear recently, and I love their twitter feed cause I get to see those gems as they roll out. Is there any better resources on the web for 20th century avant-garde art than ubuweb? … Continue reading
Come and play with us, Danny
Man, I think I came across one of the coolest things I have ever seen today. I was in a nondescript Z Pizza joint in Franconia, and the pizza wasn’t too terrible as extra-NYC pizza goes. That said, I will … Continue reading