The Corner of Hollywood and Life: Musings on Life Mimicking Entertainment and Entertainment Mimicking Life

 

I recently read Richard Maltby’s excellent introductory book on the Hollywood cinema (Hollywood Cinema). As I read the chapters on narrative I was struck by how much Hollywood cinema is like life. Both, though this largely goes unnoticed by those who watch Hollywood movies and who cycle through life, are largely social and cultural constructs.

Hollywood cinema is, as Maltby foregrounds, first and foremost a business. It is and has been, at least since the classic studio system came into existence by the 1920s, a vertically integrated (production-distribution-exhibition) corporation, whose function it is to make monies by selling dreams,  fantasies, and pleasure to willing consumers.

Hollywood, as Maltby notes, sells dreams and fantasies in multiple ways, thanks at least in part to the self-regulation codes Hollywood put in place in the  1920s and early 1930s. As a profit making enterprise Hollywood has wanted to sell its films to the widest audience possible though, at the same time, Hollywood did make B movies, serials, and genre flicks, to more targeted audiences. 

The Production Code, put finally in place in the 1930s, limited Hollywood’s ability to do certain things including issues relating to explicit sexuality. Hollywood learned to get around this literalism by making films that were sometimes ambiguous, that could be “read” (Malby does not like this term because film moves while books do not) in different ways depending on the degree of cultural capital audiences had. Maltby distinguishes between “innocent” readers and “sophisticated” readers (one can break down these categories even further since their are variations in the cultural capital those in each category have). “Innocent” “readers” tend to read movies and, I would add television, literally. They are akin to fundamentalists who tend to read certain parts of the Bible literally.  “Sophisticated” “readers”, on the other hand, Maltby notes, read movies and television not only between the lines but can also delineate the metaphors, allegories, mythologies, and reflexivities movies and television are playing in and on. They can grasp that a television show like, for example, Buffy the Vampire, plays with metaphors of growing up making that show a bildungsroman. The literalists, as a rule don’t get or grasp this. They tend to concentrate on plot (the order in which events are represented in a movie), story (the reconstruction of plot events in a chronological order and which allows audiences to grasp causation), narration (the process by which is a plot is arranged  to permit the telling of a story) and spectacle, particularly the almost orgasmic spectacles of special effects and action. 

Hollywood, of course, socialises viewers. By watching movies audiences, particularly ‘innocent” audiences, come to see Hollywood’s style and strategies of story telling as the only way movies should be made, as the way films are. Socialised to see Hollywood style and stories as natural (fetishisation) they no longer even recognise how Hollywood makes or produces its movies. They no longer, if they ever did, see Hollywood’s 180 degree eye level rule. They no longer, if they ever did, recognise that Hollywood centres its characters much like a Renaissance painting. They no longer, if they ever did, recognise the editing strategies Hollywood uses. They no longer, if they ever did, recognise how Hollywood uses music to emotionally manipulate its viewers, its consumers.They no longer, if they ever did, recognise Hollywood’s “invisible’ camera movements. They are not familiar with the fact that Hollywood uses depth of field and optical technologies to give viewer-consumers the illusion of reality in Hollywood films and it does this not to, Maltby argues, because of an ideology of realism, but because Hollywood wants to make money because Hollywood believed and believes that is what its audience wants.

Hollywood, even after the 1948 Supreme Court decision to break up the Hollywood monopoly or cartel, a decision that was undermined by the 1980s and 1990s, was quite flexible in selling product to customers. Since the late 1940s, Hollywood’s audience had become more male and more young and Hollywood eventually began to make movies for this audience (see Star Wars, a serial with state of the art spectacular special effects, action, and romance). Today, if YouTube reaction videos to movies and television are a guide, most viewer-consumers, “innocent” or “sophisticated”, are fully enmeshed in a films and television should be realistic ideology. These reactors, most of whom have lower degrees of cultural capital, complain again and again about “unrealistic” plots, stories, narrative, character motivations, and even that most unrealistic of contemporary Hollywood movies, special effects (digital matte painting) even when films and television shows are genre shows that are inherently unrealistic.

In life we too, of course, are socialised into seeing certain things that are social and cultural constructs, that are cultural norms, customs, and traditions, as just the way things are, as reality. Many Americans, for instance, and Americans are not alone in this, see the American economic system as the one and only natural or god given economic system. Many Americans believe that American democracy (which has, if you define democracy as the rule of the people, never existed; the US has long been an oligarchy) is the one and only natural or god given political system. Many Americans believe that their culture is the one and only natural or god given culture. Many Americans believe that they are nature’s or god’s chosen people and that they are on a mission from nature or god to bring others the "blessings" associated with their chosen nation. In this scenario America, the nation, is a brand as is American nationalism.

William Shakespeare and Erving Goffman, using theatrical performance as a metaphor for how humans “act” in life, recognised long ago that humans develop frontstage and backstage personas that are grounded in socially and culturally constructed conventions, norms, customs, and traditions as well, personas that are characters in their own often little dramas, melodramas, tragedies, and comedies, sometimes even dark comedies, of life. One of the major places many today get their performance techniques (gestures, facial expressions, ways of talking, etc.) from these days, just as they did in the past, is, of course, the mass media. 

Today is a bit different from the past since social media allows almost anyone who is tech savvy to become a player and even a star on social media like YouTube if sometimes only for a now proverbial fifteen minutes (and dropping). Social media has also made, in many instances, the backstage the frontstage as many no longer manage their backstages to be separate from their frontstages, something anyone who rides public transit or who has walked through a college campus knows (and which has made it mandatory to engage in safe walking).

Needless to say, YouTube reactors foreground the fact that in the brave new digital world, reactors have become, at least in their own minds, actors in their own plays, and they are paid for being actors in their new digital media plays. So many of the presenters on YouTube have been Hollwoodised or Disneyfied, just like Taylor Swift who, at best, is the simulation of a simulation of a simulation, and they are well aware that one of the ways they can make money, in these curiously incurious days, is to ask viewers to do research for them, research which, of course, varies in cultural capital quality, and post it as comments on their YouTube pages. In some cases these social media personalities remind one of PBS since they sometimes urge viewers to contribute monetarily to their social media pages (YouTube, Patreon). On YouTube, for instance, “fans" can “buy’ the YouTuber a coffee, and“donate” monies to a YouTuber. Welcome to a monetised community where even community itself and conversation have been commodified. "Civilisation" on the march.

The Books of My Life: The American College Town

I was not born the bohemian that I am today. I became one. In fact, I became a bohemian sometime in the late 1960s in the Dallas, Texas of most of my early teenage youth. I blame it on music (mostly rock), books, the counterculture and associated countercultural politics, and, particularly on my long lost but still dearly remembered friend John Cerillo (sic). It was John who introduced me to a lot of these things, things that remain, along with the reflexive life in general (the only life truly worth living, in my opinion), a large part of my life today. 

I grew up in a different world than the world today. I did not, for example, initially consider going to an American college or university. It was not the rite of passage, the delaying of adulthood, that it is today. I planned, like many others of my generation, to get a well paying factory job (the almost $4.00 dollars an hour at the time not to mention good benefits at union plants), buy a car, listen to a lot of rock music, and read a lot of books when I wasn’t working. I guess I thought life could and should be a bit like high school at the time. Little did I know how right I was about the high school part since any job one is likely to get has a culture that is a lot like the culture of high school. And little did I know then what I know now that thanks to de-industrialism and globalisation those well paying jobs with good benefits would soon be largely a thing of the past in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and in the core nation world beyond.

It was an accident that changed my mind about attending university. While recovering from the accident—which only added to my health issues since I had and have sometimes severe and incapacitating asthma and some stomach issues—I started taking classes at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, near which my grandparents lived. I was living with my grandparents at the time since my gran was in many ways my “real” mum. Eventually I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, which my father had connections to, and which I heard was really nice and home to a lot of nice used bookstores. Like Erasmus, you see, I bought books and spent any monies left over on food and rent.

When I transferred to IU from Ball State I moved from a town that was not a college town to a town that was a college town. The Bloomington of my college years was a book buyers paradise. It was a pub goers paradise. It was, with its many and varied restaurants, an eater’s paradise. It was a walkers paradise with its gorgeous scenery. It was a lover of monumental buildings, some of them gothic, paradise. It was an art lover’s paradise. It was a music lover’s paradise given the almost 800 concerts the famous IU School of Music put on and Duroc Records. It was a learner’s paradise. It was, in sum, a great place to live.  What it wasn’t was a worker’s paradise. Jobs for those who wanted to stay in B-town after graduation were generally low paying service industry jobs. And while I wanted to stay forever in Bloomington eventually I had to move on since I had dreams of getting a Ph.D. and IU’s social sciences and humanities programmes, like many if not most elite research universities, generally did not admit its undergraduates to its postgraduate degree programmes.

Over the course of my 71 years I have lived in a lot of places, some of them college towns, some of them not. I have, for instance, lived in Dallas, Texas; Muncie, Indiana; Bloomington, Indiana; Austin, Texas; South Bend, Indiana; Toronto, Ontario; Athens, Ohio; Cambridge, England, Moscow, Russia; and Oneonta, New York. Only three of these are college towns and only one of them was a non-college town that has become a college town thanks to de-industrialisation.

As someone who became interested in the history, sociology, and culture of higher education before and after I was a university student I also developed an interest in what is and what is not a college town. In order to tell you why I think some places are college towns and some are not I need to fill in a little bit of the analytical and systematic back story to this issue. I take a five-factor approach to the stuff of human life, a five factor approach, I would argue, which allows us to dispassionately if not objectively approach the stuff of human life. These five factors, I would argue, provide scholars with a glimpse into a reality that is not purely subjective even if much of this “reality” is socially and culturally constructed.

So, with this in mind let’s go back and ask the question of what is and what is not, at least to me, a college town. For some college towns are any town that has a college in it. The problem with this argument, however, and this should be obvious, is that this definition of a college town is, in the final analysis, meaningless and meaningless definitions are not what the humanities and social sciences (let alone the hard sciences) are about. This definition of college towns is meaningless because it assumes that all towns with a college in them are college towns and that they are all, as a consequence, alike. The problem with this assumption is that it doesn’t allow us to distinguish between towns with colleges and universities in them, like New York City, New York, home to Columbia University, NYU, CUNY, and other colleges, Albany, New York, another town with several colleges in or near it, and towns dominated by their colleges and towns like Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, and Athens, Ohio, home of the oldest university in the state of Ohio, Ohio University (sometimes mistaken for the Ohio State University in Columbus (how about that branding!)). I would argue, in other words, that there are differences, important differences, between cities like Albany, New York and cities like Ithaca, New York. 

Anyone who has ever been to Albany and Ithaca and gained an understanding of them knows that there are important difference between these two urban areas. Ithaca is a college town. Cornell University dominates the city economically. Cornell employs one out of every three persons in Tompkins County, the county in which Ithaca is situated. Cornell dominates Ithaca culturally. Cornell’s concerts, talks, and exhibits dominate the small city’s cultural life. Cornell dominates Ithaca demographically. Cornell has almost 24,000 students while Ithaca has a population of around 30,000. Cornell is a significant aspect of Ithaca geographically. Cornell is 4800 acres while Ithaca is 6.04 square miles. Cornell dominates Ithaca politically. Like virtually all college towns in the US it tends to vote Democrats (the higher educated tend to skew left of centre and hence Democrat which is why the Nixon and post-Nixon Republicans such as the Trumpies and their fellow travellers have and are going after universities), particularly in presidential elections.

Albany, New York, on the other hand, is not a college town. Albany is not dominated geographically, demographically, politically, economically, or culturally by the University at Albany, the now defunct College of Saint Rose, the professional schools of Union University near the Albany Medical Center, SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (which is once again part of SUNY Albany after being distinct from it for nine years), or Maria College, even when taken together. Albany is first and foremost a political town. The state of New York is the city’s largest employer. Albany is a regional medical centre. Albany Medical Center is the regional hospital for the capital region of upstate New York and is the second largest employer in the city. Albany is a regional shopping centre. People come from all around to shop at Crossgates Mall and Colonie Center, both of which provide significant employment opportunities (if not necessarily well paying and well benefitted employment opportunities) for Albany County's residents (and some outside of Albany County I suspect). By the way, it is worth reflecting on the fact that all of the dominant employers of Albany, New York, are service sector employers, something that tells us a lot about the economy of postmodernist America.

Given my interest in the question of what is and what is not a college town it was only a matter of time before I read Blake Gumprecht’s book, The American College Town (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). Gumprecht takes a finer toothed comb to the question of what is a college town and what it is not than I do in my freshman level sociology and history courses, which is where I discuss the question of what is a college town. Gumprecht argues that college towns are distinctive and largely American places (there are, as he notes, fewer college towns in Europe, Canada, and Australia for historical reasons). Gumprecht does, like me, define college towns along economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic lines. He goes on, unlike me, however, to delineate five basic types of college towns. There are, he argues, flagship university college towns or research university college towns (e.g. Bloomington, Indiana). There are land grant university college towns (e.g., East Lafayette, Indiana). There are mid-size university college towns (e.g., Athens, Ohio). There are private liberal arts colleges college towns (e.g., Williams, Massachusetts). And there are religious college college towns (e.g. Hillsdale, Michigan). Gumprecht ascribes these differences in college towns to the size of the US (geography), American regionalism (cultural geography), and the newness of the US relative to old Europe, where there are very few college towns given the fact that it was urban before colleges arose and given its cultural differences from the US  including its general lack of the ideology of American arcadianism, the belief that students learn better and can better be controlled in more rural like environments.

After an introductory chapter in which he defines college towns Gumprecht uses case studies to explore the various types of college towns in the United States he enumerates. In chapter one Gunprecht uses the University of Oklahoma in Norman (Oklahoma’s land grand institution) to explore the campus as a public place and space and as a place of art thanks to its monumental buildings, its art museums, its other museums, and its manicured green spaces (emulating the British and French garden?). In chapter three Gumprecht uses Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (a university to which federal land grant benefits were added to an already existing university) to explore the fraternity, student ghetto, and faculty enclave spaces in college towns. In chapter four Gumprecht explores the retail and service landscapes in college towns using Kansas State University in Manhattan (Kansas’s land grant institution) as his example. In chapter five Gumprecht uses the University of California, Davis (California’s first agricultural school) to explore liberal politics and its achievements in college towns. In chapter six Gumprecht uses the University of Georgia in Athens (a university to which land grant funds and academic programmes were added) to explore the bohemian aspects—demographic, cultural, built environment—of college towns. In chapter seven Gumprecht uses Auburn University (a land grant institution) in Auburn, Alabama to explore sports culture (one of the, from the vantage point of today, three original sins of American colleges and universities along with its non-academic power structure and its increasing administrative bureaucratisation), particularly football culture, and its impacts in a college town in the South. In chapter eight Gumprect uses the University of Michigan (Michigan’s earliest state university) in Ann Arbor, to explore high tech changes afoot in one college town, changes that may, paradoxically, be the major factor making Ann Arbor less of a college town. Finally, In chapter nine Gumprecht uses the University of Delaware in Newark to explore student drinking culture and its spatial, political, and cultural impact on town versus gown tensions in college towns.

There are a lot of things I liked in Gumprecht’s book. I liked how he integrated historical and cultural geography, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, culture studies, and autobiography in his approach to college towns. I liked how Gumprecht defined college towns. Like me Guprehcht ties the singularity of college towns to economic, political cultural, demographic, and geographic factors. I liked how Gumprecht explored the dynamics of college towns, well at least college towns that are home to elite research universities, as a consequence of a number of factors yuppiefication and high technification amongst them. I liked that Gumprecht talked about sports in his chapter on a place where football is king, Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. Sports is a big deal, perhaps an even bigger deal these days at the big universities like Michigan and Indiana and even at smaller non-Association of American research universities like Ohio University and Ball State. At the latter students had to pay mandatory fees which included fees for the sports teams and could go to football and basketball games for “free” if they so wished. It was the only way to keep intercollegiate sports alive there. Sports, particularly basketball, remains big at Indiana though football has become perhaps even more and more central to IU identity and boosterism thanks to recent on field successes and even appearances in the new college football playoff system. And I liked that Gumprecht's multi-pronged approach to college towns is repeatable and can be verified or falsified by looking at other college towns, college towns like Bloomington, Indiana. 

I spent, as I noted earlier, several years in Bloomington. Bloomington was not, in any way, a sleepy town when I arrived in B-town to attend IU. Students went to pubs particularly Nick’s, which was the most famous pub in town when I arrived and when I left Bloomington. Nick’s, which was a few blocks from the western edge of campus (this was before the now iconic college gates were added where Kirkwood ends and IU begins) was so popular that it added a third storey just before I left. Kirkwood was the site, along, if to a lesser extent, 4th and 5th streets, of the student oriented retail drag that stretched from the university to the square downtown. Kirkwood still had a hippy flavour when I arrived in Bloomington, though that changed during my years there. When I first moved to Bloomington there were two bookstores on the square (a critical measure of the old college town that was changing before my eyes; since that time the number of bookstores has ebbed and flowed, mostly ebbed, and the IU Bookstore became a brach of Barnes and Nobles and later Follet's with a consequent decline in the quantity and quality of non-text books). There was an ice cream shop on Kirkwood. And there were quite a number of restaurants including the Greek flavoured Trojan Horse and, eventually, the Uptown Cafe (we called it the Yuptown even in the 1980s).  There was even a hardware store on the square. Bloomington also, of course, had a student ghetto or several student ghettos and a kind of countercultural ghetto on the west side of town where those who came to school at IU but never left lived (I wonder if it is still there?).

Bloomington, of course, had and continues to have things that Gumprecht says are elements of a college town. It has and continues to have its student ghetto and bohemian enclaves. It had and continues to have its faculty enclaves. It has and continues to have a food co-op, Bloomingfoods. In the late 1980s and 1990s, an era before the brave new digital age arose, things began to change just as they did in Ann Arbor, as Gumprecht notes. Several things stimulated this change including quality of life issues (many hip mags rated B-town high on the great quality of life index), a decline in state financial support, the fact that increasingly Bloomington became a bed room community for upscale migrants from Indianapolis (the edges of the south part of Indy were about an hour away from B-town), and the building of an interstate that passed near Bloomington. Perhaps most importantly, however, Indiana University grew almost exponentially.

IU grew and then grew some more. The university expanded from the approximately 34,000 students when I was there to 48,000 students today as decreasing state support led to not only an increase in students but an increase in administrative personnel to handle the increase in the student population, including those from outside of the state and the US who pay higher fees. Of course, the increase in students was not the only reason for the increase in bureaucrats in a bureaucracy which had and has a life of its own as Max Weber noted years ago. The result of Bloomington’s and IU’s growth was that both the university and real estate developers built higher end apartments and condominiums to satisfy the high end “needs” of some students driving rental prices up in the process. Yuppification could be seen in the fact that the city turned the south side of the downtown square into a mall full of higher end stores aimed at an increasingly :upscale” and yupscale crowd. Retail establishments on the square, such as the hardware, store disappeared. 

The brave new digital world changed Bloomington even more. It, for example, made it difficult for bookstores to survive at least for a time. Bloomington’s most famous used bookstore, Caveat Emptor, which moved several times, ended up on the square and has almost closed for good a couple of times. The food co-op, which began as a co-op in which you had to work to buy food at, morphed into a food coop in which even non-members could shop and which was guided toward the radiant future of economic glory by a board of "professionals". Today it is a shell of its former self and has suffered through several busts. Subdivisions spread particularly on the east side of the city where IU and the College Mall are. The College Mall area saw increasing business development, a development that made parts of Bloomington look like suburban shopping areas of places such as Colonie, New York or the greater Dallas area which stretched west to Fort Worth and north to the Oklahoma border. Movie theatres declined in numbers and art films became increasingly the province of the Ryder, Bloomington’s longest running alternative newspaper. Recently the Ryder art film series died, like the alternative newspaper it published, with the death of its founder.  As the state of Indiana grew more right wing populist IU has been and is being forced into the politically and ideologically correct mould of the states politically and ideologically correct right wing populists.

There were some things I was less that thrilled by in Gumprecht’s book. I wish that Gumprecht’s excellent maps had been more detailed. Additionally, I think that Gumprecht could have taken an even finer tooth comb to college towns that he does. Athens, Ohio, a place that I briefly lived in the mid-1980s, is a college town but it a a college town with a difference. Ohio University, a second or third tier research university, and poor cousin to the Ohio State University, was and is known as a party town. It is probably the main factor that attracts students, particularly students from Ohio who know that OU is a party school, to it. Athens's retail geography reflects the fact that it is a party town. The Court Street and Union Street downtown area was home to some 24 or so pubs and it was home to an insane Halloween celebration when I was there.  On Friday one could stagger from one pub to another for staggered happy hours. Athens's pubs had character. One pub, for instance, was upscale, another was really down down-scale. Books were less important to Athens’s population. It was home to only two bookstores who sold books other than textbooks. Because of ebb and flow in incoming students Athens and OU were and are also hit by periodic busts. 

Additionally, Gumprecht seems to suggest that at least one other city I have lived in is a college town though it is not. Gumprecht, for instance, argues that Provo, Utah, home of Brigham Young University, BYU, or the Y is a college town, a contention I would strongly disagree with. The Y may, geographically speaking, make up a significant part of Provo. Its 35,000 students plus may make up a significant part of Provo’s population. It may also be an important part of the Provo economy. However, the Y, with its honour code and it consequent impact on things like Provo’s private housing—men and women cannot live together in private housing in Provo unless married—and liquor sales establishments—there were only two pubs and one state liquor sales establishment in Provo when I lived there—made Provo reflect, in miniature, the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Y’s culture and the Y's economic and political culture are, in other words, the culture of the LDS Church. All this, and particularly the Y’s honour code, make BYU less like the University of Notre Dame, where the student body was primarily Catholic when I was there just as BYU’s student body was primarily Mormon when I was there. Both had around 97% Catholic and Mormon in its student body. Most of the Y’s faculty were also LDS and the Y faculty mandated that all undergraduates take religious classes. All this makes the Y, which is a large research university on one level, more like, on another level Bob Jones, with its Baptist fundamentalist ideologies and strong mechanisms for the control of students, than Notre Dame, which I found a lot like an isolated monastery when I was there.

Another problem I had with Gumprecht’s exploration of college towns was that I thought it too focused on large flagship and former land-grant colleges and the college towns they are the central part of. Gumprecht’s chapters focus, in order, as I noted earlier, on the University of Oklahoma in Norman; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Kansas State University in Manhattan; the University of California, Davis; the University of Georgia in Athens; Auburn University; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and the University of Delaware in Newark. Cornell, the University of California, Davis, the University of Michigan, and the University of Kansas are members of the elite AAU. Oklahoma, Kansas State, Georgia, and Delaware are land grant universities that developed into large research universities who aren’t yet in the AAU. Cornell was given land grant income by the state of New York. Gumprecht does talk about Williams College and the college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts but it would have been nice to see, for example, chapters on a small liberal arts college in a college town as defined by Gumprecht, a religious oriented liberal arts college in a college town, and a former normal school cum research university in a college town. 

Great book. Recommended. As an aside, I found it interesting to learn that Gumprecht has left academia and returned to journalism since this book was written. That is a sad loss to the academy.

The Movie Project is Dead: Rest in Peace

When I was an undergraduate at the now decfunct Indiana University I took film classes with James Naremore, Harry Geduld, and Peter Bondanella. Film was not my major at the time but semiology was the in thing in film and I was interested in semiology and all other theoretical -ologys and -isms that were happening in film and literary studies.

I had had an interest in film before this. I had read Robin Wood’s monograph on Alfred Hitchcock. It blew me away. I was gobsmacked that film criticism could be so good. I was amazedy at how attentive Wood was and I was amazed at how perceptive he was. Because of my interest in Wood I was eventually drawn to Ian Cameron’s Movie journal, a journal Wood wrote extensively for and I subscribed to it sometime in the 1970s, the period in which the journal was revived.

Ever since that time it lodged in the back of my mind that I should  write a dissertation on Movie. Movie, you see, though it was important in the Anglo-American world of Britain, Canada, the United States, and Australia, does not get the attention it deserves given its role in bringing an attention to film details and a type or form of auteurism to the English speaking world. By the way, when I did actually do my dissertation, however, it dealt with another topic, Mormon Studies. 

Despite getting the dissertation blues off my back I still had an urge to do that scholarly dissertation on Movie. So, sometime in the 2010s I got was able to get supervisor at the University of Warwick who was willing to supervise me on the Movie project. I applied and was accepted. I decided not to matriculate at Warwick when I did not get any monies, however. 

Still I could not get the Movie project out of my mind. I went back to my documentary materials and outline for the project on my computer and tweaked it a bit. I then contacted two scholars at Cambridge, a place I already know fairly well, who agreed to take me on and agreed to take the project on.

Before I applied to Cambridge—I would have requested admission into Selwyn College for those who are interested—I did some checking around because I needed a goodly amount of primary source materials to do the project as envisioned. The dissertation as planned was to have had three chapters, a preface or introduction, and a conclusion. Chapter one would have focused on the origins of Movie. Chapter two would have been on the culture of Movie focusing on those who wrote for it and the connections they might have to other film study journals and cultures. This chapter would also briefly discuss the importance Movie placed on design. Chapter three would have been on the economics of Movie, a topic that has been generally ignored by contemporary film studies scholars.

Because I needed to use primary source materials, particularly for chapter three, I contacted the new Movie at the University of Warwick, I contacted the folks at the University of Reading who had ties to Movie, and I contacted Jill Hollis at Cameron and Hollis Jill Hollis was the wife of Ian Cameron, the founder and publisher of Movie ever since its first issue came out in 1962. I also I looked to see if there was anything on Movie is in the archives of the British Film Institute. In all this digital running around I found some what might be called oral histories with Cameron and others connected to Movie at a University of Reading website. i found one document relating to Cameron at the BFI, an interview. And I found out from Jill Hollis that she had no primary source material beyond the issues of the journal itself.

Because of the paucity of primary source materials and because I don’t think a dissertation relying on oral histories can really work in the way I wanted it to, I dropped the Movie project once and for all. As a consequence I must admit that I feel some regret and am somewhat sad to have had to drop the project. So, I guess it is back to retirement time for this wanna be lifelong student.

 

The Books of My Life: Empire and Superempire

 

Imperialism. For many thinking people the word imperialism and the ideologies or meanings, actions, and behaviours associated with it has, historically speaking, been conceptualised in normative terms. It has been seen by some, in other words, as a good and by others as a bad. For many Romans, for example, Rome’s conquest of others brought with it the political, economic, and cultural benefits of Roman civilisation while for anti-imperialists  imperialism was grounded in ethnocentrism, exploitation, violence, and brutality. For the anti-imperialist Mark Twain American imperialism was a betrayal of fundamental American values.

Over the years there has been a host of attempts to define imperialism. Economic exploitations, particularly since the rise of Marxism and thanks to Lenin’s influential book on imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, have long been central to intellectual and academic definitions of imperialism. There is a problem with this economic and geographic conception of imperialism, however. The focus on imperialism as a geographic and economic phenomenon, the exploitation of the conquered by the conqueror for economic benefits, is too limited. It is only one of the forms imperialism has taken root in the human community since the rise of human civilisations in the Near East,  the Indus Valley, China, and in what is today Central and South America.

Imperialism is more than conquest and economic exploitation. It is also cultural, political, and demographic. Imperialism does have, of course, a geographic dimension. It has been and is the conquest of one territory by some entity, usually a city-state, a state, or a nation-state. I give you America’s conquest of and occupation of the American West, wherever that American West or the American frontier happened to be during the course of American history. Imperialism has also taken another form. There has been and is a form of imperialism in which the economy of one entity dominates the economy of another entity. I give you Trump’s use of the tariff as a heavy handed means for American economic domination in the world today and Trump's attempt to grab Venezuela's oil for American oil corporations. There has been and is political imperialism in which the political culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s attempt to spread American style “democracy” around the world particularly since World War II. There is cultural imperialism in which the culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s conception of itself as god or nature’s chosen land whose messianic and mission it is to spread the gospel of America across the globe. Needless to say, this American gospel has economic and political cultural dimensions, namely, the belief that Americanism, including the supposedly distinctive form of the American economy and the supposedly singular form of American democracy, is the best thing since that proverbial slice of sliced bread. And there is demographic imperialism in which the population of one entity is hegemonic over another. See the British in India or the Afrikaners in South Africa.

Written in the long shadow of 9/11 and the Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq Bernard Porter’s Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), compares and contrasts British imperialism, particularly the liberal British imperialism of the Victorian era with the American imperialism of the post-World War II era. Porter gets that there are various forms of imperialism which sometimes if not often overlap making these various forms of imperialism Weberian ideal types. For Porter, both Victorian British imperialism and American post-WWII imperialism had geographic, if less so in the case of the United States, economic, if less so in the case of the British (once the Indies corporations became defunct), political, and cultural dimensions. It was in the cultural dimension area where the differences between the two were, so Porter claims, particularly evident.

For Porter both Victorian Britain and post-World War II America were imperial empires. Porter argues that there were a number of similarities and differences between these British and American empires. Both were cheerleaders of free trade though the British empire was less a cheerleader of free trade than the American. The English public school educated elite who staffed the colonies were not devotees of the gospel of free market capitalism, an ideology that proved to be a kind of a countervailing force to those who saw empire as a way to spread the gospel and the reality of “free” market capitalism, argues Porter. The British empire was also, claims Porter, more paternalistic than the American. 

Both empires, according to Porter, spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and of foreign investment. Both saw themselves as civilising and liberating forces bringing “enlightenment" and "democracy" to the areas they colonised. While the British elite, who did believe that the British way of life and its values were universal and absolute, tempered this civilising and liberalising force with a pinch of cultural relativism the US elite saw itself in a way Britain never did, namely, as chosen people of a chosen land who were messianic evangelists for a way of life that was universal and beyond space and time. 

Both empires, claims Porter, had pedigrees that stretched to the past. British imperialism was born in the crucible of the Napoleonic Wars while the US empire originated in westward expansion or manifest destiny. Both empires had an interest in oil, some might argue, particularly in the case of the US, that they were addicted to oil. Hence both had an interest in the Middle East and Iraq. Both empires fought wars in Afghanistan, a place that has come to be known, as the graveyard of empires thanks to the British failure in Afghanistan. The US, of course, had its own failure in Afghanistan suggesting again that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Whether the American failure in Afghanistan, one which echoes its failure in Vietnam, will prove a factor in the fall of the American empire is an open question at the moment. Both empires felt the sting of guerrilla warfare. Both empires were overstretched militarily. Where the two empires differed in particular, according to Porter, was in their size. Britain was an empire. The US was and is, claims Porter, a superempire.

I found Porter’s Empire and Superempire an excellent read. I greatly enjoyed Porter’s rather coy and wry comments on the American empire many Americans refuse to recognise, about the US fighting wars against “enemies” it knows it can defeat easily only to find itself fighting guerrilla wars again and again, guerrilla wars it cannot win in the long run, about the US conviction that its invasions will be welcomed just as they were in Paris during World War II when they aren't, and about the US hoping to cut and run as fast as it can after it invades other countries leaving them, in the process, in economic and political ruin. 

That said I think that Porter overemphasises the differences between the British empire and the American superempire. These differences seem less important when one looks at the two in demographic and technological terms. America is bigger than Britain demographically which means that the US is bigger than the UK in its economic, political, cultural, and imperial dimensions. If Britain was as demographically big as the US would they be more similar? I think so. Technology is also a factor in the seeming differences between the two empires. New weapons like the atomic bomb have been developed since the US transplanted England as the dominant empire on the planet and the US has been willing to use these new technologies. So, the US is really simply a demographically (the key factor), geographically, economically, politically, and culturally and more technologically bigger empire than England. This, however, does not make them fundamentally different. 

By the way, the Commonwealth is a different kind of empire with its loyalty to the Crown and British political liberalism. It is also something that I think should be emphasised in this era of Trumpian economic and cultural imperialisms. The world is sadly in need of a countervailing imperial forces since the fall of the Soviet Empire if simply to keep American imperialism in check. The Commonwealth or the EU, with the addition of the UK and Canada, might be able to check and balance the American empire at least in certain parts of the world. That would mean that both the UK and Canada would have to get over their notion that there is a special relationship between the "Anglo-Saxon" three.

Life as Crisis Management: The Center for Rhematology/Instamed Kiada

 

Like everything created and manufactured by human beings the World Wide Web is a double edged sword. I was reminded of the negative aspects of the Web yet again when I went to pay what I owed to the Center for Rheumatology in Albany, New York for treatment at the Center.

Sometime last week I received my bill from the Center. It wasn't until yesterday, the 28th of December, that I went online to try to pay my bill, however. It turned out to be much more difficult than I imagined it would be and it needed to be. 

I could, of course, pay my bill to the Center in a variety of ways. I could pay it via snail mail by filling in all the relevant information the Center and its pay system, Instamed, a J.P. Morgan company, needed. I generally hesitate to mail in something with credit card information on it, however, given the potential dangers of doing so. Alternatively I could pay the bill the next time I went into the Center for treatment. That was not until December of 2026, however, and I am sure the paymasters at the Center wanted my bill paid long before this. Finally, I could pay the bill online.

At the top right section of the bill was a dark blue box with a statement which said I could "Pay and enrol in paperless billing" by going to the website listed below this direction. This box also contained an "enter code" which I assumed I had to enter to get into the pay system. 

So I went to the website as specified. I had to put my email in, the code in, my last name in, and my zip code in. The enter code did not work (it was totally irrelevant to the transaction as it turns out making one wonder why it was there in the first place and why the bill said "enter code" before it). So I looked for another code and eventually found it on my bill. It was, however, in very small type, something all of us in the elderly category with old eyes greatly appreciate (sarcasm alert). 

So, I put the 16 digit "NextGen Account # code into the box, a code that contained 10 zeros which made it incredibly easy to put in (sarcasm alert). It worked. However, this took me to a webpage that wanted my NexGen password.

Well I have two Next Gen passwords, one for the Albany Ear, Nose, and Throat centre and one for the Center for Rheumatology. I put the Rheum password in; no luck. Nett I put the ENT password in: again, no go. The webpage said I could change my password but I had no intention of doing that since both worked for their given portal pages and I had both saved into the password and autofill in my browsers.

There is so much that is wrong with this beyond both working passwords not working (foregrounding yet again the absurdity of life). First off, one wonders why the Center for Rheumatology simply doesn't use the pre-existing patient portal to collect payments just like the Albany ENT portal, the Albany Med portal, and the Trinity Health portal do. This would make the transaction easier and make it unnecessary to put in all the above information by hand (email, last name, code, password). Second, by not using the portal those of us who wanted to pay our bills had to put in a bunch of information (email, last name, code, password) that, again, would have been unnecessary if they simply used the patient portal to collect payments. I guess the Center's motto is why make it easy when you can make it difficult.

I was eventually able to pay my bill by clicking on the guest link, something I did not see the first two times I went into the Instamed's NextGen page. Given all the unnecessary trouble trying to pay the bill I went through, however, I decided not to use the services of the Center for Rheumatology again. If I need to see a rheumatologist in the future I will get a referral to Albany Med which, as I said, makes it easy to pay one's bills by paying them through the patient portal. All you have to do is go into your portal page and voila, easy pay. My motto, after all, is why make it hard when you can make it easy.

Life in the Pissant Swamp: More Memories of Academic Old Days

 

Every once in a while I think back on my fifty or so years as a student and a teacher in higher education. I was a student at several academic institutions, mostly research universities, over those fifty years, and I taught in several academic institutions over those fifty years including Brigham Young University, the University at Albany, SUNY Oneonta, SUNY Cobleskill, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. During my over fifty years of teaching I saw a lot of interesting things as a participant-observer in the academic jungle but then I also saw a number of interesting things in life.

There were, of course, differences between the institutions of higher education where I taught history, communication, and sociology over the years. Two were small colleges. One, SUNY Oneonta, was a small liberal arts college with an increasing emphasis on the practical I can get a job by majoring in things like criminal studies and human services. The other, SUNY Cobleskill, was a small agriculture college and its student body reflected that reality. One had to teach very differently at these two colleges as I learned very quickly despite them being both small SUNY colleges. 

Two of the institutions I taught at were universities. One, BYU, was owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. It had an honour code and a notion of in loco parentis right out of the pre WWII years and the 1950s. The other was a second or third level research university that had been turned into a university in the 1960s by Governor Rockefeller and his boys. They wanted to create a university system in New York that rivalled that of California. They never came close. 

Still another institution I taught at was a polytechnic, RPI. RPI had a million dollar president and dreams of being MIT or Cal Tech, dreams that could never come to fruition given the marginalisation and small size of their liberal arts programmes and given the poor quality of their facilities (poor library, poor bookstore) compared to those two other institutions it unfortunately measured itself against. 

The students at the institutions at which I taught were also somewhat different. BYU and RPI recruited students nationally and had a healthy number of very good students. That said, the best students at BYU, the best students I ever taught during my academic life, had a broader intellectual focus than students at RPI. BYU was a large multiversity with strong programmes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences while RPI was a science institute with weak humanities, arts, and social sciences, and its students were more focused on the sciences. SUNY Albany, SUNY Oneonta, and SUNY Cobleskill were state and regional institutions. Most of SUNY Albany’s, SUNY Oneonta’s, and SUNY Cobleskill’s students hailed from New York state so these higher education institutions were very much a reflection of New York. SUNY Albany, BYU, and RPI had master’s and Ph.D. programmes if on a small scale and of much less elite status than say the University of Chicago, the University of California, Davis, or MIT. None of these three were members of the prestigious Association of American Universities, the universities that produce most of the faculty in America’s research universities. MIT and Cal Tech are members of the AAU and that should tell you something important about the difference between them and SUNY Albany and RPI.

In terms of faculty, I found them much the same at all of these institutions I taught at with the caveat that those at BYU were somewhat different than those at the other schools. The BYU faculty, most of whom were LDS, skewed somewhat politically conservative even in the humanities and social sciences, the areas that skew liberal in most non-religious colleges and universities these days. Additionally, faculty at BYU had to pass their own kind of honour code test to be able to teach at the Y. This is not to say that there were not faculty at the Y who were liberal in politics; there were. Nor is it to say that BYU faculty were unproductive in scholarly terms: they were very productive across the academic board.

As for the workplaces at all the colleges they were not that different from other workplaces that I have worked in apart from the educational credentials of most of the workers in academic workplaces. There were, as there are in other sizeable workplaces, cliques, including political and ideological cliques. Some of the workers got along. Some did not. There were workers who are interested in status and power. There was Machiavellianism. There were workers who were more introverted and there were workers who were more extroverted. There were workers with big egos and workers with even bigger egos. There were workers who regarded their area of work expertise in territorial fashion. There were bureaucratic meetings. There were missives from on high that were suppose to be obeyed. There were occasional parties. There was plastic fantastic collegiality. There were the poorly attended graduate student gatherings to give papers at which some papers that should have been critiqued more extensively were not.

Recently, I have been thinking a bit about my time at RPI where I taught in Science and Technology Studies for five or six years if memory serves. RPI students, as I said, were generally quite good even if they were very focused rather narrowly on the sciences. In my early days at RPI I used to say that the thing that distinguished RPI students from my students at SUNY Albany was that most of my RPI students were familiar with the various iterations of Star Trek while few of my SUNYA students at the time even knew what Star Trek was. 

At RPI I taught US History courses, a sociology of religion course, and I stepped in to teach a course on the war in Afghanistan after the faculty member who was supposed to teach it could not. Beyond academics I met with prospective students who were interested in history and took them on a tour of campus. I attended graduation parties. I was asked by the assistant dean to put together a curriculum for history in STS. I kept the two US history classes already on the books and wanted to add a course on the making of the modern world. There were a few grad students in the department but I never met any of them.

As a part-time faculty who was not on campus very often, only a couple of times a week in fact, I really did not get to know the faculty in Science and Technology Studies well. I met the chair, of course, Sharon Anderson-Gold, who was wonderful. It was she who gave me the opportunity to teach at RPI and she who counselled me on my academic career. I met Kate Boyer, a historical and cultural geographer, at the downtown library of SUNY Albany and was surprised to learn that she was the daughter of the noted historian Paul Boyer (author of books on the Salem witch trials and American religious apocalypticism) who I had communicated with about the Waco tragedy. She left for the University of Cardiff while I was still on the faculty. I met one of your typical high flyers, a historian of science who had dreams of holding administrative positions in the department and presumably the college if not beyond. There is, after all, money in those there administrative positions. He is no longer a faculty member in the department. I saw a couple of my colleagues on the bus occasionally and we exchanged little more than pleasantries. I briefly met the Fortun's, two on the rise cultural anthropologists who, I think, studied with hot shot cultural anthropologist Michael Fischer and like him were interested in the intersections between environmental risk and environmental disaster and science and technology studies generally They soon left for the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Irvine. And I met someone, thanks to a colleague at the University at Albany who told me about her, someone who was interested, as was I, in Mormonism.

Given our common interest in Mormonism I invited this faculty member out for lunch at Ali Baba's a wonderful Turkish restaurant near the RPI campus one day. I recall several things about this meeting. When she mentioned that she had looked at my syllabus for my Sociology of Religion class I asked her what she thought. She gave me a backhanded comment saying that it was better than previous iterations from other faculty members in the department. 

After our lunch she said she would invite me to lunch or dinner either at her new digs in Massachusetts or at Ali Baba's. She never did. I suspect the reason is a remark I made about ethnocentrism. She rightly noted that Mormons are ethnocentric. I pointed out, just as rightly in response, that so are other cultural and ethnic groups, such as Jews (I think she was Jewish and so was I). Ethnocentrism you see is an inherent aspect of how most humans and most human groups construct identity. In order to become you you have to create a them and the them you often create is profane to you in some way, shape, or form. I guess I was too politically and ideological incorrect for her.

After Sharon Anderson-Gold's death a newly appointed dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and the Social Sciences from the University of Michigan, undoubtedly with visions of even higher status administrative appointments dancing in her head, redid the STS curriculum extensively creating "interdisciplinary" classes of 100 students in the process. I was moved out of my office and stuck in a faculty gathering spot in the basement resulting in fewer students coming to see me. I did teach two more classes in the department but was not offered another history or sociology class under the new regime. Some of the reason for this may have been because I opposed the curricular reforms (which were hardly new, they had been tried before including recently at the University at Albany) of the new dean arguing that before one could benefit from interdisciplinary classes until one had to learn the basics of the core disciplines of the humanities and social sciences such as history. Another reason is probably because I did not want to teach a class to 100 students at the same pay rate I was getting for teaching 40. My time at RPI thus ended without much notice, with little fanfare, and without much of a bang. Such is the life of an adjunct, the lumpen academatariat of the postmodern university.

I have not worked at RPI since. I have not even been on campus. I have no idea if the curriculum has once again been changed by a new dean who too wants to make his or her mark before he or she moves onto something bigger, better, and more remunerative. I did see that the current Science and Technology Studies webpage tries to sell itself to prospective students by saying they have small class sizes. I assume this means that the academic experiment of a new dean who wanted to make her mark with classes of 100 students or more in a college of less than 7000 students at the time has been reversed. That, in my mind, is all for the good.

Memories of Old Days: Illness as a Reality

 

From 1954 to 1967 I had a pretty "normal" adolescence. By that I mean that my adolescence was pretty much like that of my peers.

I don't, of course, remember much from before 1962 and the years from 1962 to 1965 are kind of a blur with little chronological context stuck in my memory. I remember hiding in these, what seemed to pre-teen me, monster shrubs along the front of our house in a large village of around 1200 people lying along a river plain. I remember watching the Wizard of Oz by myself on the television and being so scared by the Wicked Witch that I learned to tie my shoe laces for the first time. I remember learning to ride a bike that my Dad bought for me. I recall one day racing a car home on the bike and apparently forgetting how to use the breaks on it. I did stop but not thanks to the breaks. I was stopped by the brick steps that rose up to our front door patio. I remember crying afterwards because parts of my nose were detached from my face. I remember my Mum running out, picking me up, putting me on the kitchen table, and calling the doctor. The doctor came over and sewed my nose back on while I was still awake and crying. The scars are still noticeable if you look close enough. I remember the first day of school. We lived on the north side of the village so I and a friend (Mark Mattson?) walked across the river and took a left. The school wasn't too far down the road that ran along the south side of the river. I recall walking to a railroad trestle that crossed a deep gorge and looking down, way down to the river below.  It was amazing. I remember the Beatles, buying Beatles records, and going to see the movie A Hard Days Night with my sister at what seemed like a huge cinema to us little ones. I remember massive snow falls and building forts in the snow after the snow stopped. I recall running around in the woods sometimes alone, sometimes with others I recall my sister and me investigating what maleness and femaleness were like. And I remember the assassination of the then US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That was shocking.

Then everything changed in 1966 and 1967. We had moved to the big city in the meantime and I got involved in track. I was a good 75 metre runner but since two of my classmates were substantially taller than me, had longer legs than me, and were just as fast I never finished above third. I was, if I can be immodest for a moment, quite good at long distance running. One beautiful and sunny day I was doing a long distance run. I was leading, as I almost always did, but suddenly I could not breath. I had to stop and sit in the grass. My parents took me to see a doctor and I was diagnosed with hay fever. 

In the next meantime we moved to an even bigger city. My breathing problems continued. Dad took me to the Methodist Hospital in Oak Cliff, a city that had been incorporated into Dallas. They diagnosed me as having asthma and put me on cortisone. Cortisone was great and it made me feel like I could do anything I wanted to do. On the down side, It also had side effects, in my case blown up cheeks. So I was taken off cortisone and put on a portable nebuliser instead. 

My doctors soon wanted to investigate other theories as to why I had breathing problems. They did a skin test for allergies which, as a recall, was negative. They put me on an all soy died which wasn't very good at the time and again the results were negative for allergies. They supposedly fixed a problem with my esophagus. All the while I continued to use the nebuliser, something that largely kept me stuck inside when I was not at school since I had to take it three times a day, morning, after school, at night.

The nebuliser treatment wasn't very helpful. I recall that I had bouts of breathing troubles periodically. On one oocasion my breathing got so bad that Dad had to take me to Methodist Hospital where I was given what seemed like a massive dose of epinephrine in a very large syringe. I watched as the doctor put in into the pit of my arm. I recall vomiting from it when I got home, something that helped my breathing. I also recall having immense difficulty simply walking up the stairs of my junior high suffering as I went up and having to stop and to catch my breath at each landing on the way up.

In the 1970s my asthma treatment changed and changed again. I was put on kenalog but when the kenalog shot wore off I generally ended up in the hospital. Once the kenalog was no longer helpful I was put on albuterol, theophylline, and prednisone. I recall one day being taken to Parkland Hospital where I was given what to me was the most awful and painful thing I had ever experienced: a blood gas test by someone who really did not know how to do it. Man did it hurt. It was not until the 1990s with the introduction of advair and singulair into my asthma treatment regimen that I could actually live a somewhat normal life if with limits, limits learned over the course of forty years.

Thinking back on my illness I think that having asthma played a major role in making me who I am today. It made me introspective, introverted, distant, bookish, and a cinephile as I read and watched movies a lot because I could no longer do what my siblings and the neighbourhood kids did which was to head outside in the neighbourhood to play, play which involved a lot of running around and the playing of semi-organised games of football, the Texas religion.