A lesson on political equivocation from Thomas Friedman

30Sep09

Tonight in my Television & American Culture course, I screened Buying the War, an excellent Bill Moyers PBS feature detailing how the press allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Bush administration to enable the fraudulent war in Iraq. (If you haven’t seen it, check it out online.) The screening reminded me of this piece [...]

Filed under: Media Politics, Not Quite TV   |  3 Comments

Trapped in a web of meta-Wikipedia

06May09

I stumbled across this article via Google Alerts discussing the varying practices within Wikipedia. I discovered it because one of the examples it uses is… my Wikipedia entry:
Jason Mittell’s case is similar. His biography concludes with some quotes from a New York Times article in which he defended Wikipedia against the charge that it represented [...]

Filed under: Meta-blogging, New Media, Not Quite TV   |  5 Comments

Name one thing…

19Jan09

I write this on a day I’ve awaited for eight years: the final day of the George W. Bush presidency (also known as the Dick Cheney Vice Presidency). It’s hard to fathom how much has transformed over the past eight years, and thus I believe that Bush’s tenure will be regarded as one of the [...]

Filed under: Media Politics, Not Quite TV   |  14 Comments
Tags: bush, presidency

Best of 2008

31Dec08

One of the great gifts of having a blog is the opportunity to spout off opinions as if they are truth. And the end of the year is the time for bold opinions that quantify the previous year, often in multiples of ten. I thought about offering a TV Top Ten for the year, but [...]

Filed under: Film, New Media, Not Quite TV, TV Shows, Television   |  6 Comments
Tags: 30 rock, Battlestar, breaking bad, bsg, celtics, chuck, colbert, daily show, dark knight, death cab, dj earworm, dr. horrible, friday night lights, gta4, Lost, middleman, portal, pushing daisies, rachel maddow, radiohead, red sox, the bad plus, the office, The Wire, true blood, tv on the radio

The thrill of defeat and the agony of victory

21Oct08

In 2004, my lifelong Red Sox fandom came to fruition, with a unprecedented sense of contentment and peace after years of suffering. That lasted around a week, until Bush was reelected, offering a stomach punch to my other lifelong allegiance to progressive politics. For a native New Englander, these two events were uncomfortably related, the [...]

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Tags: baseball, election, red sox

When I was a kid…

04May08

This is not a nostalgic post, nor is it an attempt to judge the present on the standards of the past. And I’m not trying to tell any kids to get off my lawn.
Rather it just struck me that there’s a pretty big shift in the media ecosystem. Actually, this isn’t news to anyone who [...]

Filed under: Meta-blogging, New Media, Not Quite TV, Spoilers, Technology, Television   |  2 Comments
Tags: bissinger, costas, leitch, sports

Anonymity and its Discontents

03May08

Over the past week or so, the Middlebury College campus has been abuzz about the new site Middlebury Confessional. The site is part of a chain of Confessional sites that started at my alma mater, Oberlin College – this article outlines some of the controversies surrounding other incarnations of the sites. I’m quite interested in [...]

Filed under: Middlebury, New Media, Not Quite TV   |  4 Comments
Tags: confessional

Being a Researcher at a Liberal Arts College

25Apr08

One of the things I’ve found myself doing more and more lately is talking to junior faculty and new PhDs about the job market and career options. I enjoy such conversations, mostly because it allows me to vicariously experience the exciting possibilities tied to starting a career, with none of the attached uncertainties and risks! [...]

Filed under: Academia, Middlebury, Not Quite TV, Teaching   |  10 Comments
Tags: faculty, liberal arts

Classes, taxes & The Wire

11Feb08

I’ve been swamped lately planning for Spring classes – because of Middlebury’s Winter Term, our classes start late, so tomorrow’s my first day of the Spring, despite the 0 degree temperatures. My two courses are Theories of Popular Culture and Media Technology & Cultural Change – feel free to play along at home with the [...]

Filed under: Academia, Meta-blogging, Middlebury, Not Quite TV, TV Shows, Teaching, Television   |  2 Comments
Tags: taxes, The Wire

A tenured blogger

07Dec07

Apologies for the lack of content here over the past month. I could claim solidarity with the writers’ strike, but it’s a combination of lack of time and lack of inspiration of anything to say that warrants carving out a moment to post.
Until now – while it might not offer any great insight or have [...]

Filed under: Academia, Middlebury, Not Quite TV, Teaching, Vermont   |  16 Comments
Tags: tenure

Dumbledore’s sexuality and the authority of the serial author

21Oct07

As you might have heard, Dumbledore is gay. Or at least so says J.K. Rowling.
I’m less interested in how this impacts our understanding of the world of Harry Potter, the relationships between Albus & other characters, or even the cultural controversies surrounding the series that this announcement has already inflamed. What interests me more is [...]

Filed under: Books, Fandom, Narrative, Not Quite TV   |  27 Comments
Tags: authorship, fan fiction, Harry Potter, Lost, sexuality

Raftman Fandom

13Oct07

I have a particular interest in narratives about popular culture fandom. In part it’s for teaching, as I like to show films like High Fidelity and Almost Famous
that dramatize how fandom matters in people’s lives. But I also find them generally compelling when done well, as the dramatic power of the intense affective relationship that [...]

Filed under: Fandom, Not Quite TV   |  1 Comment
Tags: comics, raftman, short films

The Powers that Blog

19Sep07

I try not to fill this blog with tales of local interest, as I realize that most of my scant readership cares little about my little hamlet and institution of Middlebury. But an interesting development occurred in my local blogosphere that bears notice: Middlebury College’s President Ron Liebowitz and Dean of the College Tim Spears [...]

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Lighting up the Internets

11Jun07

Just wanted to share a few links to some of my media mentions, as this morning saw the publication of 3 different stories that I contributed to. In The Boston Globe, there’s a nice piece about the endings of serial stories, inspired by The Sopranos and Harry Potter finales. Don Aucoin is one of the [...]

Filed under: MediaCommons, Not Quite TV, Press   |  Leave a Comment

Anti-war guerrilla performance

04Jun07

Before I discovered media studies, I was a theater guy – I did a lot of performance, directing, music directing, etc. with an emphasis on political theater. I still miss the direct connection between performer & audience that can occur in a live performance, but I soured on theater because I found that the interesting [...]

Filed under: Media Politics, New Media, Not Quite TV   |  2 Comments