Sunday, March 8, 2009
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."
Saturday, March 7, 2009
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:
These are infuriating:
Jay Mohr's take:
Friday, March 6, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, March 2, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
General update
A list:
• I am an inconsistent blogger and therefore a poor blogger.
• Today was a beautiful winter day in Oregon.
• I hadn't missed 3 days of work or school consecutively in years; but, I was sick from Tuesday afternoon until Sunday, today, only recently feeling a bit better.
• Randy Johnson is a fantastic addition to the Giants pitching staff. Too bad they still won't be able to hit. (Bring back Barry!)
• Midway through the second year of my MA program, I've finally written a paper I'm truly happy with. It hardly relates to my thesis and it's only 6 pages long, a careful look at Marlowe's move toward the Foucauldian "author function" in the Prologue of Tamburlaine the Great.
• I will have a beagle one day. One day, when Zoe is gone.
• My fantasy basketball team is up the upswing thanks to Kevin Love and Lamar Odom.
• I'm too short on time to include links in this blog because I'm behind in my work.
• My thesis will now focus on new media, rhetoric and composition studies through the work of Anne Wysocki.
• Lankshear and Knobel's section on "New 'Ethos Stuff'" in "Sampling 'The New' in New Literacies" is too simplistic but a nice introduction into talking about Web 2.0 and authorship.
• The Blazers need to move Raef's contract and Sergio.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm is now, probably, my favorite series.
• What's with all these little black gnats flying around town lately?
• I should have watched "The Last Waltz" a long time ago.
• I am an inconsistent blogger and therefore a poor blogger.
• Today was a beautiful winter day in Oregon.
• I hadn't missed 3 days of work or school consecutively in years; but, I was sick from Tuesday afternoon until Sunday, today, only recently feeling a bit better.
• Randy Johnson is a fantastic addition to the Giants pitching staff. Too bad they still won't be able to hit. (Bring back Barry!)
• Midway through the second year of my MA program, I've finally written a paper I'm truly happy with. It hardly relates to my thesis and it's only 6 pages long, a careful look at Marlowe's move toward the Foucauldian "author function" in the Prologue of Tamburlaine the Great.
• I will have a beagle one day. One day, when Zoe is gone.
• My fantasy basketball team is up the upswing thanks to Kevin Love and Lamar Odom.
• I'm too short on time to include links in this blog because I'm behind in my work.
• My thesis will now focus on new media, rhetoric and composition studies through the work of Anne Wysocki.
• Lankshear and Knobel's section on "New 'Ethos Stuff'" in "Sampling 'The New' in New Literacies" is too simplistic but a nice introduction into talking about Web 2.0 and authorship.
• The Blazers need to move Raef's contract and Sergio.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm is now, probably, my favorite series.
• What's with all these little black gnats flying around town lately?
• I should have watched "The Last Waltz" a long time ago.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Cadillac Records
Don't see Cadillac Records. Don't miss the music, though. Okay, maybe see the film when it goes to DVD.
There are a lot of problems with the film, and what's worse is that there's so much potential here. This could have been a great, great movie, and there are several strong performances wrapped within a plot that fails to do justice to the influence of Chess Records. Adrien Brody plays Leonard Chess, the record executive who began the label in the 1940s by selling records out of his Cadillac. It seems a little convenient that this film is out as General Motors begs for money from the federal government, of course, and there is no subtlety here: LOOK AT THE TRADITION OF THE CADILLAC, THE HISTORY! WE HELPED BREAK DOWN RACIAL BARRIERS! THINK OF THE TRADITION! I actually laughed aloud in the theater several times.
I need to say some good things about this film, though. Amazing cast. Brody wholly fails, but I think it is due to poor writing, not execution. Jeffrey Wright does a nice job as Muddy Waters. Mos Def predictably steals the screen as Chuck Berry. Columbus Short does a fantastic job as Little Walter, and Beyoncé's Etta James is the highlight of the film. Eamonn Walker as Howlin' Wolf is another bright spot; you may know him from HBO's Oz. Cedric the Entertainer's narration is so poorly written that I shook my head a few times in the theater, just hoping he was about to lead into another performance from Beyoncé or Mos Def. Gabrielle Union shows some talent as Geneva Waters, Muddy's wife.
None of these characters are developed as much as they should be, as much as you'll want them to be. What this does, hopefully, is introduce some of these musicians to new audiences, and perhaps it will lead to more developed biopics of Etta James or Howlin' Wolf in the future.
And please, please buy a Cadillac.
Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" (1964):
Eamonn Walker's Howlin' Wolf:
Beyoncé doing Etta James's "All I Could Do Was Cry":
There are a lot of problems with the film, and what's worse is that there's so much potential here. This could have been a great, great movie, and there are several strong performances wrapped within a plot that fails to do justice to the influence of Chess Records. Adrien Brody plays Leonard Chess, the record executive who began the label in the 1940s by selling records out of his Cadillac. It seems a little convenient that this film is out as General Motors begs for money from the federal government, of course, and there is no subtlety here: LOOK AT THE TRADITION OF THE CADILLAC, THE HISTORY! WE HELPED BREAK DOWN RACIAL BARRIERS! THINK OF THE TRADITION! I actually laughed aloud in the theater several times.
I need to say some good things about this film, though. Amazing cast. Brody wholly fails, but I think it is due to poor writing, not execution. Jeffrey Wright does a nice job as Muddy Waters. Mos Def predictably steals the screen as Chuck Berry. Columbus Short does a fantastic job as Little Walter, and Beyoncé's Etta James is the highlight of the film. Eamonn Walker as Howlin' Wolf is another bright spot; you may know him from HBO's Oz. Cedric the Entertainer's narration is so poorly written that I shook my head a few times in the theater, just hoping he was about to lead into another performance from Beyoncé or Mos Def. Gabrielle Union shows some talent as Geneva Waters, Muddy's wife.
None of these characters are developed as much as they should be, as much as you'll want them to be. What this does, hopefully, is introduce some of these musicians to new audiences, and perhaps it will lead to more developed biopics of Etta James or Howlin' Wolf in the future.
And please, please buy a Cadillac.
Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" (1964):
Eamonn Walker's Howlin' Wolf:
Beyoncé doing Etta James's "All I Could Do Was Cry":
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Synecdoche, New York
I won't say this is the best movie I've ever seen, but I can't think of one better.
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