Kaufman: "Movies are Dead"

Interesting interview from Charlie Kaufman, whose film Synecdoche, New York was my favorite of 2008.

Milk

I finally had the chance to see Milk on Saturday night, and better yet, I watched it while drinking beer at the McMenamin's Old St. Francis School theater in Bend.

Of the nominees for Best Picture this year, I've seen Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Milk. I'm hoping to see Frost/Nixon and The Reader soon. I think it was clear that Benjamin Button did not deserve to win Best Picture, and I think it was a toss-up between Milk and Slumdog Millionaire for me; perhaps I'd give Slumdog just a slight edge.

Anyway, this is old news, as Slumdog won Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Milk won Best Original Screenplay and Sean Penn won Best Actor for his role as Harvey Milk--he certainly deserved it. (I do want to point out that Richard Jenkins was fantastic in The Visitor, and if you haven't seen that, check it out.)

I felt a bit embarrassed and ashamed that I didn't know more about Harvey Milk before watching this film, and going in with little knowledge of how he actually died made that scene especially powerful. My ignorance worked to my advantage this time, at least as a moviegoer.

(Aside: McMenamin's wheat beer in Bend was unbelievable, one of the best I've ever had. I'm going to head to the Corvallis locations this week in search of the same brew. Fingers crossed.)

Here is Sean Penn's Academy Award acceptance speech for best actor in a leading role:


And here is the trailer for Milk:

Farewell Bend, Oregon

Jackie and I made a weekend trip to Bend to begin our spring break. Bend is a nice, trendy town nestled in the heart of the Cascades in central Oregon, and it reminds me a lot of Boulder, Colorado -- very neat, very friendly, very expensive, and filled with rich people from all over the country.

We visited the Deschutes Brewery, which was fantastic, and the local McMenamin's, a former Catholic school.

The trip back was a little slow because of a snow storm in the mountains at Santiam Pass (elevation 4,800+). A lot of people were putting chains on their vehicles, but fortunately that wasn't necessary with ODOT doing a nice job of keeping the roads clear enough for most drivers to make their way safely through the pass.

The first photo below is from Oregon Route 223 looking back into the stormy Cascades.

Sunday happenings

Two goals for today: Watch the Blazers play the Hawks (in Atlanta, 10 a.m.), and make great strides on my paper for ENG 595, Language, Technology, and Culture.

Well, the Blazers got whipped. I won't mention the score or link to it, but I will say that they must play much better in the next week during this 5-game road trip if they're going to stay in the middle of the Western Conference playoff race. Rudy, Blake, and Nic need to play better than they did today.

The paper is going fine. It's a sort of mini-MA thesis for me, focusing on five openings Anne Wysocki sees for new media:

1. The need, in writing about new media in general, for the material thinking of people who teach writing
2. A need to focus on the specific materiality of the texts we give each other
3. A need to define “new media texts” in terms of their materialities
4. A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms
5. A need for strategies of generous reading

More on the struggles and successes of the Blazers and my thesis project as we move forward.

Wendy and Lucy

Here's the trailer for one of the saddest films I've seen in a long time, which is currently playing at the Darkside in Corvallis. Great movie, and shot in Portland.

Mos Def added to Sasquatch

Great news: Mos Def has been added to the Sasquatch Music Festival lineup for Saturday, May 23.

The case for Nic Batum?

Today on Yahoo! Sports blog Ball Don't Lie, I make the case that most of us in the Northwest are not saying, "dang, we should have taken Durant over Oden." It may happen one day, but I'm not ready to call Greg a bust, not for at least another year or two.

Further, I claim that Nic Batum is a better defender than Kevin Durant. This is not a wild claim; do the math on their blocks and steals per minute. Here is an Oregonian story from early November about Batum moving into the starting small forward position because of his defensive ability.

Now I'm on my way to class, and I have a paper due tomorrow on Ben Jonson and the Foucauldian author function. Ugh.

And enjoy this Batum highlight in hopes that the Blazers take down the Lakers in the Rose Garden tonight:

Wrangler Bandit Captured!

My Wells Fargo bank in Roseburg was hit by the Wrangler Bandit late last month. I had no idea. This was just two blocks down from my apartment on Jackson Street. Bank robberies in Oregon have been all the rage lately, but that's no surprise with this depression on.

Never Had Nobody Like You

Very catchy song off of M. Ward's new album Hold Time, called "Never Had Nobody Like You."

Worst commercial campaign right now?

Carl's Jr. gets my vote. There isn't much resistance online to CKE Restaurants, parent company to Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, and I'm not sure why. Their human rights record is not good, but that's typical of most fast food chains.

These are infuriating:





Jay Mohr's take:

LA Clipping The Birdman's Wings

The Blazers lost to Denver last night in a game I didn't expect them to win, having just played a tough game against Indiana in Portland on Wednesday, then hopping a flight to play in Denver with the division lead on the line and Carmelo returning from suspension. Oh well.

But I want to show Chris "The Birdman" Anderson's block against Rudy Fernandez, and then show you what happened on the very next possession. Following the play, Anderson combed his hair with his fingers. Good show, but some of us have grandparents who could have blocked this one:



LaMarcus then shows The Birdman up on the next play:



And please, can we keep Rudy on the bench until he grows up? Nice to see some toughness from LaMarcus, who I've criticized at times for being too soft and not rebounding enough. His rebounding average is firmly stuck at 7.0 per game. As a 6-11 power forward, with Greg Oden out of the lineup, the Blazers need Aldridge to hit the boards harder than that and keep his game in the paint on both ends of the floor.

Clearly, he can play in the paint.

Sasquatch Music Festival

Last weekend a few friends and I decided that, yes, we will spend the $160 per ticket (it's up to $195 or so now) to attend the Sasquatch Music Festival on Memorial Day weekend, May 23-25, at The Gorge in central Washington.

Three days of great music and comedy. I'll probably continue to have anxiety over the amount of money this will cost me (camping is another $100 for 4 people, I think), but then I just look at the lineup and figure, well, this will be great. Performances I'm most looking forward to:

Saturday:
Kings of Leon
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Decemberists
Animal Collective (not that familiar, but I hear they're excellent)
M. Ward
Blind Pilot

Sunday:
Jane's Addiction
Nine Inch Nails
TV On The Radio
Of Montreal
St. Vincent
The Builders and The Butchers

Monday:
Ben Harper
Erykah Badu
Silversun Pickups
Fleet Foxes
Gogol Bordello
Grizzly Bear
Girl Talk
Blitzen Trapper
Demetri Martin

I really enjoyed typing that up.

I can hardly wait to see TV on the Radio. Here's a clip of them performing "Shout me out," off their latest album Dear Science, which was selected as the best album of 2008 by Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Pitchfork readers, NPR, Spin Magazine, and on and on.

Thesis Project (Wysocki citations)

Once upon a time, I thought that this may be a research blog. Bah! But in that spirit, I thought I'd provide a few annotated citations that I'm focusing on for a seminar paper on new media, which will serve as an entry point into the actual writing of my thesis focusing on the work of Anne Frances Wysocki and new media studies.

What I especially appreciate about Wysocki (who spent a good deal of time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at Soumi, now Finlandia, and Michigan Tech), is her focus on advocacy and rhetorical awareness in the composition classroom, and that all of her theory is applied to the classroom. Theory and pedagogy are one.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs.” Computers and Composition 22 (2005): 55-62.

Wysocki examines in this article why the materials we use acquire the social and historical restraints they have, particularly those used for communication. She argues that, “to ask after the constraints as we teach or compose can help us understand how material choices in producing communications articulate to social practices we may not otherwise wish to reproduce” (56). She questions whether we’ve read her title as “a way with words,” or “away with words,” and considers visual spaces as they’ve changed where reading becomes more public and less in silence.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “Impossibly distinct: On form/content and word/image in two pieces of computer-based interactive multimedia.” Computers and Composition 18 (2001): 137-162.

Wysocki explains that much of what is written to assist students with writing or analyzing visual aspects of texts “assumes that those visual aspects work as form or theme or emotion or assistance to memory,” making the visual separate from but supporting the text (137). This article argues that “idea” and “assertion” do the work of “content and “information,” and teachers need to expand and modify the ways we conceive visual aspects of texts when we teach.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “It is Not Only Ours.” College Composition and Communication 59.2 (2007): 282-288.

In the “Re-Visions” feature of CCC, Wysocki reappraises Joseph Janangelo’s “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts,” first published in the February 1998 issue of CCC. Wysocki examines the ways in which hypertext have become naturalized and argues that there are “other compositional logics besides the academic that are worth exploring as people in the classes we teach come of age in times of variegating texts,” and that our ethics serve as a proper guide as we move away from “our academia” (284).

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications.” Writing New Media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition. Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Eds. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004. 1-42.

Wysocki outlines five openings she sees for her teaching practices in this article, which is the first chapter of the book:

1. The need, in writing about new media in general, for the material thinking of people who teach writing
2. A need to focus on the specific materiality of the texts we give each other
3. A need to define “new media tests” in terms of their materialities
4. A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms
5. A need for strategies of generous reading (3)

These openings serve as “ground and introduction” for the chapters that follow, which include a second chapter by Wysocki, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts.”

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts.” Writing New Media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition. Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Eds. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004. 147-198.

In the opening of this chapter, Wysocki shows us a page from The New Yorker that she finds beautiful, but upsetting. The issue at hand centers on an advertisement for a book of photographs from The Kinsey Institute, and the ad features a naked woman standing sideways in high leather boots. Wysocki’s primary argument in this chapter is that “approaches many of us now use for teaching the visual aspects of texts are incomplete and, in fact, may work against helping students acquire critical and thoughtful agency with the visual, precisely because these approaches cannot account for a lot of what’s going on” in, for example, this magazine ad (149). Wysocki’s article argues the existence of these shortcomings, turns to eighteenth-century definitions of beauty and aesthetics, and attempts to “better understand how to support students (and myself) be generously and questioningly reciprocal in our designings” (149).

Wysocki, Anne Frances and Julia I. Jasken. “What Should be an Unforgettable Face.” Computers and Composition 21.1 (2004): 29-48.

In this article, Wysocki and Jasken look at the history of interface development and how we have come to a limited focus on the computer screen. They suggest that we see how the design of what is on screen shapes the actions and thinking we can do while engaged with interfaces (29). They reference articles from Computers and Composition dating back to the 1980s, and offer strategies for teachers to help students “develop reflexive and more generous interfaces” (29).

Wysocki, Anne Frances and Dennis A. Lynch. compose/design/advocate: a rhetoric for integrating the written, visual, and oral. New York: Longman Press, 2006.

In the opening of Lynch and Wysocki’s first-year composition textbook, compose/design/advocate: a rhetoric for integrating the written, visual, and oral, they describe the text as “an approach to communication intended to help you determine the most effective strategies, arrangements, and media to use in different contexts” (iii). The book aims to provide students with “systematic” approaches for analyzing situations that require different documents or presentations. The authors note that, seeing communication as key to developing relationships among people, and “careful communication as being central to active and engaged citizenship,” the text focuses on civic advocacy (iii). The three sections are titled, “Designing compositions rhetorically,” “Producing compositions,” and “analyzing the compositions of others,” with assignments woven into each section but also compiled at the end of the textbook.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “Seriously Visible.” Mary E. Hocks and Michelle Kendrick. Eds. Eloquent Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. 37-59.

In this book chapter, Wysocki challenges the “old and not uncriticized news that visual documents ought not to be taken seriously” which is “still very much present and repeated” by applying counterexamples of visual documents and hypertexts that do and do not support active and engaged relationships with texts (37). While hypertexts do not automatically make active readers, Wysocki argues, visual documents are not best suited for children and the illiterate.

Blazers vs. Spurs

I went to my first, and possibly only, Blazers game this season with three friends yesterday. The Blazers, fighting for the playoffs in a very close, tough Western Conference right now, blew out the Spurs 102-84 after losing to them in San Antonio roughly a week earlier. The Blazers opened the game with a big lead and never allowed the Spurs to get close. Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge each scored 26 in the win. Rookie Nic Batum also contributed this dunk:



P.S. Don't count on finding good food near the Rose Garden before a game. Go early and eat on the other side of the river.