Nitsuh calls BS on that one McSweeney’s piece floating around (it’s an online submission and a quick read):
It’s not that I don’t get jokes about students being pointy-headed and namby-pamby and whatnot. (Yes yes clever.) But ultimately, there’s a rhetorical thrust to this piece that’s just as often associated with, say, racist uncles at Thanksgiving, [...]

Wordpress pinged me and told me that someone didn’t like a Pitchfork review I’d written, and had also linked to my blog in doing so.  Which is all fair game, of course.  You write for Pitchfork, you answer to a pretty big audience.  But there are two unique things here that made me want to [...]

In 2008, I attended an academic conference called “Exploring New Media Worlds,” at which I gave a paper on mp3 bloggers, record labels, affective labor, and so forth.  My panel were all discussing similar ways in which music was working itself out online, and the audience had a bunch of interesting questions.  After the session [...]

Earlier today, Tom Ewing (this guy) used the word “performative” in a blog post to describe a particular form of online mediation.  The specifics of Tom’s vague use of the word weren’t as important as the fact that someone used the word in a blog post.  In my particular realms of academia, performative is a [...]

“I…experienced disorienting moments of temporal suspension when I downloaded large files of music; these were long moments of isolation and boredom. Everything seemed to pause in the speeded-up temporality of cyberspace. I had similar feelings of separation in Java during Ramadan, when performances and many social activities were halted for a month of fasting and [...]

The last few years, various things–scheduling conflicts, themes at the other end of the world from what I’m interested in/can write compellingly about–have coalesced to restrict my attending EMP, despite my intense desire to commingle with so many others whose work I admire, fear, and most of all, enjoy reading. This year, though: uh-huh. [...]

Fun books for the next few months! And some chatty academic ones, too!

Jason Sperb, elegantly explaining my own significant affections for this film.
Be Kind Rewind is less about cinephiliac love for those films they ’swede’ (Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, etc.), and more about their cinephiliac affect–the feelings they generate in individuals and in communities. Indeed, it is not about the individual film and is entirely [...]