The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Author: Professor Russworm

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Television

Young, Gifted, and Black: MTV’s Taking the Stage

In watching MTV’s newest reality show, Taking the Stage, I am breaking my own house rule: No MTV allowed in my house under any circumstances.  Since for many years now I have refused to watch MTV (I find it depressing, shallow, full of misinformation and problematic cultural encoding directed at a vulnerable demographic), I discovered the show by happenstance–it came on while I was visiting a friend and together we watched the first episode.

Fast forward to now and my willingness to bend my own pop-cultural consumption policy.  Taking the Stage is currently queued up on my DVR and I plan to watch the entire season unless I begin to find that it, like so many other MTV reality shows, broadcasts materialist values that gradually rots viewers’ souls.

Thing is, I almost can’t stop watching this show, which is a Fame-inspired ensemble production about an arts based high school in Cincinnati. The reason I am so drawn in has more to do with my uninformed impressions of where high school aged kids are today.  I’ve been very much a cynic about the way MTV markets immaturity as cool, dysfunction as hot and sexy. While I see some things in Taking the Stage that certainly help frame the show in this light, I also see much, much more. Dare I say that there is something beautiful and hopeful that the show captures about black youth?  Even though there is a slant toward the messily melodramatic, I am also seeing a wider range of personalities and some really talented kids.  I’ve also seen a very rational and responsible black mother who cautioned her daughter (in a firm but loving way) about prioritizing her dreams over boys.  There are self-aware gay boys; sane and mature best friends who are ambitious but not back-stabbing.  Basically, I want to believe in the kids on this show. I want to see them dance–soar–and start their lives post-high school.  So far, MTV has my attention and I’m intrigued to see what the season will behold even though I fear that I will have to wade through some garbage in order to explicate its real potential.  For now, I am staying tuned. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/CqvI-hmdhdo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Update: Ok, I complained about this on my twitter page before but I have to say it again: Playing music by Chris Brown and Rihanna on this show is so inappropriate! On episode 3, Tyler and Jasmine have riff (he cheated) and the music over their interaction is a Rihanna song.  I can’t say enough how disappointed I am that MTV keeps doing this. Why color, mar, or otherwise inform this space with the soundtrack shadow of that situation? Mixing the Rihanna/Brown tracks over this story pollutes the potential here in some profoundly disappointing ways. Sigh.

Categories
Uncategorized

A Brave One, eh?

This is a placeholder post more than anything.  I just watched The Brave One (what a drab title) with Jodi Foster and Terrence Howard.  I want to say something about it but don’t have the time right this second.  I plan to upload the weirdest sex scene and a bit of Foster’s rampage.  I do intend to spoil the ending so if you are holding out, see the film and then read on.  But only after I get back to this post…

Categories
Video Games!

“F”ing Gaming: From Fallout 3 to Fable 2 to Forza 2

Gaming, both as a hobby and as a research interest, has been a slow go for me this year.  Since I got my Xbox 360 Elite last July, I have finished Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3, played some NBA Live and Left for Dead, struggled with Fable 2, and reunited with the driving simulator while playing Forza 2.  I have also dabbled with other titles and I have a STACK of games at home to play.  Thing is, there simply isn’t enough time in the day to game the way I really want to.

Much to my surprise, I loved Fallout 3. I am not a huge RPG fan so my adoration of this game still surprises me, even a month after I finished it.  Well, it’s probably more accurate to say that there are times when I really hated this game’s difficulty settings and the amount of time it took me to finish it (logged in 90 hours, I know, I know, I know, but I tried not to use the Walkthrough, stumbled around and found things the hard way and kept walking instead of teleporting).  By the end, I really loved my black woman character and Star Paladin Cross, her black woman sidekick.  Just the fantasy potential here for having two black women roam apocalyptic DC was huge for me.  I created a rifle-shooting, charismatic black woman who was mostly kind but a little aloof.  I also imagined my character and Star to be lovers as they wandered the Wasteland.  The pre-ending to the game, the last mission following the robot, was one of the most satisfying and exciting moments in my recent memory. Great fun! Finishing the game was bittersweet and Fallout 3 all but ruined Fable 2 for me–a game I just can’t like enough to finish despite being a HUGE fan of the Xbox original version.

The anti-fun Fable 2

In that regard, I blame Fable 2 for my current gaming slowdown. While I don’t consider myself a hardcore gamer, I am hardcore in my enthusiasm for gaming and that makes me a purist at heart who likes to finish games–even if it takes me MONTHS–and each time I turn on my 360 and fiddle in Fable 2’s pretty but vapid world, I just don’t feel inspired to play on.  Still, even though I have Gears of War 1 and 2 waiting to be played and a still-in-the-shrinkwrap copy of Battlefield Bad Company, I have not let myself play another narrative game. The unfinished Fable 2 haunts me like a fun-sucking curse, taunting me to play or turn away.

The restoration of fun Forza 2
The original driving fun Gran Turismo

My inability to either finish Fable 2, throw Fable 2 in the toilet, resell Fable 2, or simply move on has halted my narrative game play. Enter Forza 2 as away of jumpstarting my gaming enthusiasm for the moment. Now I still don’t have a lot of time to devote to gaming (maybe on 3 hours a week right now) but picking up Forza 2 has been the right move for me.  First off, I forgot how much I love driving games.  Some of my fondest memories of grad school involved me sitting around with my fellow students, playing Gran Turismo on the PlayStation 1, and lamenting about our experiences over the roar roar roar of the pretty cars on the simulated tracks.

This meditation on how I got from Fallout 3 (a newer title) to Forza 2 (a slightly older title for the system) helps me clarify for myself the top gaming genres near and dear to my heart.  While I like the adventure set, and even a good RPG (my brother and a good friend have been hounding me to play Mass Effect), I do think I’m going to have to say that driving games are tops.  They are a great way to sneak in a few minutes of play at the end of a very stressful day.  On the 360, you can’t beat the option to have your own music blasting over the system as you fly around the tracks.

Perhaps my next post will be on gaming genres and how they fit into my gaming life. For now, here’s a preliminary ranking of them:

Gaming and Genre

1. Driving/Racing (Forza, Gran Turismo, the Burnout franchise, and even Grand Theft Auto for me because driving is so imperative there)

2. The Sims franchise (looking forward to The Sims 3 but I think I will wait for the Mac version for the first time ever)

3. Shooters (this is why I think I will like Gears and Battlefield if I can ever get on to them)

4. Sports titles (NBA, ESPN football of yesteryear, golf)

5. Action Adventure (I’m really thinking of taking the Brainy Gamers advice and trying Beyond Good and Evil–someday)

Categories
Digital Humanities Teaching

The Happy Digital Humanist: Youtube and Powerpoint in the Classroom

So I am learning that I am a “digital humanist” and a happy one at that.  I think this means that I embrace the use of digital technologies while teaching and researching the humanities (more on this in future posts).  This week I have had a fantastic time figuring out ways to share my research in presentations and in figuring out ways to disseminate a lot of information in the classroom without losing my audience.

While I know Powerpoint is not the best presentation software out there (I also like Keynote and the new Slide Rocket–WOW), I have had a relatively easy time this week embedding video clips into Power

point and I think it can still be used with a great deal of success, despite Powerpoint’s general clunkiness and general lack of dazzle appeal.  Indeed, I made some fantastic looking slides that contain over an hour of film clips from Blaxploitation films (specifically Sweet Sweetback, Shaft, Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Black Sister’s Revenge). I will say that the night before my talk at Emerson College, I spent hours upon hours bookmarking, ripping, saving, converting, and then uploading said video files into Powerpoint.  For a lecture that lasted 2 hours, I’d say the prep that went into it was at least 9 hours–which amounted to working well into the wee hours before my trip.  Some of that time includes figuring out the best way to outline my lecture but a lot of it was fiddling with the video programs and making the Powerpoint slides look as hot and hip as possible. 🙂 (By the way, it is perfectly legal for media scholars to break the copyright on DVDS in order to share clips in class.  I have found Bill Kirkpatrick’s guide for how to do this absolutely invaluable.  See: The guide here )

The time consumption factor aside, taking the time to embed video into presentation software is well worth it. I just don’t understand why presenters will opt to fiddle with switching from Powerpoint to IDVD then back or over to a stand-alone DVD player during a talk.  Not only is this process inelegant, it wastes valuable time and can be distracting for an audience.  I’ve seen job candidates take this approach and I almost always want to pull them aside and give them the tip to embed, embed, embed.  But I digress… 🙂

The other useful tool I want to comment on is using Youtube in the classroom.  I think my feelings about Youtube are similar to those that I have about Wikipedia.  I often discourage students from relying on Wikipedia because the service simply cannot take the place of substantive research on a topic.  Further, I think professors are especially leary of Wikipedia’s tendency to include inaccuracies and misinformation.  Youtube is susceptible to these same shortcomings, particularly as the original video posters often tamper/edit video content before uploading.  So the main problem is that students may never know if they are viewing a clip as it was originally broadcast or if a fan has done some editing to produce his/her take on the material.  Those reservations aside, I currenly use Youtube in my Powerpoint Presentations and on my course blogs/course websites.  After I veriy that I am indeed dealing with untampered material, I am finding that you simply cannot beat the vast array of useful clips that Youtube houses.

One of the challenges I face in dealing with video on my course blogs, for example, is having enough storage space to upload things that I want the students to either view out of class or use as a reference as they prepare for exams.  While Umass uses the excellent Word Press client as its blogging software, there are some pretty strict limits to how much storage space we have to work with.  Even if I own a clip, chances are, the film file is often way too big for me to upload from my own collection.  As a result, I’ve found it invaluable to be able to embed Youtube files into Powerpoint and into my course blogs.  For footage that I own that is not on Youtube, I use a service like BilpTV to upload and share it myself–again to get around the storage restrictions.  Personally, I don’t prefer Youtube’s video quality options or its basic interface so I use BlipTV to share my own.

This is all to say that it has been a great week for me to find ways share my natural enthusiasm for what I study with others.  I believe mastering some of the tools of the digital frontier helps me best do that.

Categories
Lectures and Appearances

Two Spring Appearances…

While I’ve been rather slow making posts this semester, I have gotten a couple of papers/lectures scheduled. The first of these is a lecture on Blaxploitation films that I will be delivering at Emerson College in Boston from 6pm to 8m on Thursday, February 19th. The lecture and screening are free and open to the public.

The second appearance is in the Five College Area’s Center for the Study of the Americas.  I will be delivering a paper on black popular fiction in April. Date and location are TBA.

Categories
Films

A Millionaire (film) at Heart

I haven’t quite figured out how to talk about why I love Slumdog Millionaire as much as I do. I’ve seen it twice in the theaters already. Both times it was so crowded I got jammed into the first row–bane of my viewing existence.  Yet even though I watched the film up close with a craned neck,  this movie still managed to sing to me.  Some may have hated the ending (I’m not crazy about the train platform union) but it is perfect that it ends with a Bollywood dance sequence. Why not? It is a beautiful film–from shot to shot, even in the moments when the implausible romantic plot threatens to sour–it never stops being the best of what a certain type of film can be.  It creates characters you can cheer for, sing for, and dance for.  In that regard, the final song, “Jai Ho,” is also a gem and MIA’s partcipation on the soundtrack was spot on.

Above all, the bright young star, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, who plays the youngest Jamal is fantastic and makes the film what it is–something that is equal parts dark and light, sweet and harsh, horrific and mesmerizing.

It’s a rather boring post to acclaim something without much of the scholar’s critical edge but I can honestly say that Slumdog is restorative in an important way for me. It reminded me of why I watch films and I know I will surely see it a 3rd time soon. :-0

Post update 1/15: (After doing so well at the Golden Globes, can the film also do well at the Oscars? The film is not perfect; it has its obvious flaws [plot improbability, should not be in English for the last 2/3 of the film, a superhero-like construction of exceptional characters who can escape systemic poverty].  But, there is something about it that makes it endearing and the kind of film I think has some staying power.  I am a little worried, though, that the early success could sour the film’s Oscar potential–not so unlike how the early buzz around Brokeback Mountain fueled a fast-burn kind of backlash.  In either event. it was a pleasure to watch the cast, crew, director, and musicians receive recognition.)

Categories
Films

Seven Pounds of Fluff

Analysis
While I’m sure there is a lot to say about Will Smith’s latest film, Seven Pounds, there are two thoughts that stuck with me after viewing it today.

First, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about beauty and suffering and how our pop-cultural terrain is ubiquitously saturated with narratives that frame pain and suffering as magnetically, irresistibly beautiful. So it made perfect sense to me that Will Smith’s character not only falls in love while trying to kill himself but also falls in love with a breathtaking woman who is dying. Indeed, Rosario Dawson’s beauty is presented at its heart-wrenching best as she collapses, gasps for air, and flirts with dying in her sleep after the film’s one sex scene. (The most climatic and erotic scene in the film, however, is Smith’s own upending.) Our’s is a culture heavily invested in the aesthetics and affect of masochism and this is definitely a thought to which I want to return. I only flag it here with this film because it kept leaping out at me as I watched pain and heartache get coded as that familiar once-in-a-lifetime type of romantic love. The pairing of beauty and suffering, of love and death, strikes me as a fascinating (Freudian) cultural pathology even as it is also a warm and familiar narrative tendency.

The second thought I had is related to this in a way. The last Will Smith movie I saw, Hancock, drove me crazy for the way in which it rationalized unrequited love. The racial politics of that film grated on me at every turn and contributed to my overwhelmingly ambivalent feelings about Smith as an actor and his selection of roles. The biggest problem I saw there was in Smith’s character’s inability to be with the (white) woman of his dreams. If I recall correctly, there was some convoluted explanation for how two superhuman immortals could never be together without putting each other—or the world!—in harm’s way. Hence, the film ended with Smith’s character giving up that once-in-a-lifetime love to watch over the world. Again, perpetual longing is normalized, as it is in Seven Pounds, and the blockbuster black star plays some kind of curious martyr. I think in both cases I’d rather see love, longing, beauty handled more interestingly. It’s hard to watch Smith earn his acting stripes while playing out such problematic and ultimately flat tropes. Then again, conventions can only be established if someone helps make them stable.

Review
I think this is a wait for Netflix type of movie. I am a straight sucker for sentimentality and so at least I expected this film to move me to tears. It didn’t (not really, maybe a forced sniff) and it’s fairly predictable. It’s nice to visually consume both Dawson and Smith though, again the whole beauty and suffering thing makes them that much more watchable. I will say, and not with a tinge of cynicism, that we can always use a “life is a gift” reminder/moment. So: C+.

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Welcome to the site

Welcome to TreaAndrea Russworm’s Research Blog!

This site includes posts and reflections on representations of race in popular culture. It is also a space where I reflect on other topics that are more random but remain equally fascinating to me.

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