If you’ve been inspired by the Video Data Bank #VDB in the past, consider adding your name to an open letter to #SAIC urging them to reinstate the staff and support the mission of this unique #VideoArt distribution resource: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

As soon as I saw that Frank Gehry died my first thoughts were of Mike Davis' hardboiled poetry in City of Quartz: "Frank Gehry as Dirty Harry"

Syllabus construction: the eternal struggle between making life boring but easier (through repetition of material) and making it interesting while driving yourself crazy (with lots of new prep).

NYU folks, come join us next Thursday!

Joan Crawford on acting: "The written words weren't too important.... I knew that the writer would be grateful to me. His words were dead words. They were brought to life by me."

Where the real battles in higher ed are fought

Interesting film of the South Bronx before it became the torched landscape you see in Wolfen. I came across this title in a book of film reviews for mental health workers; it was commissioned by Lincoln Hospital, later famous for a strike that locked the white drs and management out of the building.

Come to think of it, I've never used a formal grading rubric, nor has anyone ever asked me for one. Sometimes we don't realize how good we have it.

Love Letters (1983)

"A suitable audience, one which would find this film meaningful and a constructive use of their time, has not been conceived by the reviewer." This seems to be about as close as a professional medical writer can get to true bitchiness.

I gave this a listen recently because the cover was so striking and it took me a while to even find the band's name on it. Glorious, especially the B-side—somewhere between prog, jazz, and psychedelic folk. Is this sui generis, or is there more Canadian music like this that I just don't know about?

I don't see how you can both attend SCMS next year and "stand in solidarity" with those who aren't. Academics are typically good at twisting words around, but this one truly defies comprehension.

RIP to the great Jimmy Cliff. I never cared much for his work after Harder, but his soundtrack for the film and his performance in it have been a major part of my imaginative life for at least 15 years. The energy, the intensity, the ecstasy and also the inwardness of this scene are unparalleled.

While everyone else is enjoying Noirvember, I'm still basically in the throes of a long October. (from I Walked With a Zombie)

It's amazing that people still write books that are just summaries of films. This approach might have made sense in the twentieth century when many films were hard to see—and the author's main achievement was simply having seen them—but with today's easy availability it should be analysis or bust.

No. Just no

My reading aloud of Justin Chang's delightfully witty takedown of the new Wicked has only succeeded in my child insisting we re-watch the first Wicked sooner than later

I don't know what to make of Sirat. Very effective in its own way as a sort of L'Avventura + Wages of Fear + Squid Game experience, but like so many other films released by Neon, it feels wrapped around a core of emptiness.

Yesterday, while highlighting passages in a very dull book about neurology, a waiter asked me if I was an actor studying a script. I am going to interpret this as meaning that I am extremely attractive and should appear on TV

Is there any especially good writing on film and "persuasion," in the rhetorical sense? It seems to have a presence in research on documentary, but as a theme it is largely absent from the nontheatrical field.

Remember when Michael Rapaport was really funny in Spike Lee's Bamboozled? If there's anything I've learned from Facebook reels recently, those days are long over

People who know about Bollywood: Can you think of any films that specifically thematize psychiatry in some way? I recently came across a statement in a history of shock therapy to the effect that Indian films often depict ECT inaccurately, but the authors gave no film titles or examples.

Gaslighting starts earlier than I realized. Apparently a contingent of boys in my daughter's first-grade class has started telling the girls, "Ladies, ladies, calm down." The speakers include a boy notorious this year for breaking open a can of paint and permanently defacing the schoolyard with it.

I just saw that the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai has passed away. Ichikawa's Conflagration, while a mediocre film, has one of Nakadai's finest performances as the disabled student Togari. His halting, twisted walk in the schoolyard has to be one of the most striking entrances in cinema.

If I had to live in any American city other than New York, I'm starting to think it should be Baltimore

I don't know if it ever occurred to the writer of this that older editions are just nicer, feel better in the hands, have better covers, heavier type, etc. I would prefer a Penguin Classics from my childhood over a recent printing any day, even if the pages are a bit yellowed.

Because the two really do belong together

For anyone in or around the College Park area, I'll be speaking on the topic of "Research and Surveillance in a Total Institution" at the University of Maryland on this Friday November 7, 1pm; details below

This is already impossible to find in Manhattan. A colleague appears to have bought the last copy at the nearest Gristedes (appropriately enough, one of the businesses that has vowed to leave New York if Mamdani won the election)

My school just gave me a bunch of money to do research in Omaha and Lincoln in January. What does one do in Nebraska in January?

Mamdani has so completely changed the horizon of expectations this year that I'm struggling to recapture a moment in my life when I still thought that Ramos would be a great candidate

For anyone in or around the College Park area, I'll be speaking on the topic of "Research and Surveillance in a Total Institution" at the University of Maryland on this Friday November 7, 1pm; details below

My school just gave me a bunch of money to do research in Omaha and Lincoln in January. What does one do in Nebraska in January?

Now that Tetsuya Yamagami is on trial for killing Shinzo Abe, I highly recommend Masao Adachi's film Revolution+1, which I wrote about back in 2023 for Tribune:

A new twist in the AI wars: Has anyone had the experience of reading handwritten answers on an exam, yet still feeling as if they were composed by GPT? I am wondering if students would go through the trouble of generating answers to hypothetical questions in advance and memorizing them for a test...

We're all set for Halloween here with some origami models courtesy of Oriol Esteve and Jo Nakashima

The White House movie theater over the years. In the East Wing, demolition imminent. The first film screened there was D. W. Griffith's racist epic Birth of a Nation in 1915. Jimmy Carter watched 480 films there, the most of any president: letterboxd.com/jfrankenstei...

If Marie Antoinette were queen, we'd be eating cake

College profs are still doing battle with the forces of GPT, but at least we'll never have to deal with the moral problem of "67"

There is nothing like having a child of one's own to make one realize how limited and provincial (because based on oneself) our views of childhood really are. Every child is an unknown universe waiting to be discovered.

Aspirations: "He led an idle, useless existence and spent most of his time locked in his study, imitating the songs of starlings, the crowing of cocks, etc., and writing so-called libertine verse." (Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlyov Family)

I've long been a tremendous admirer of The Cremator (do most cinephiles have a romance with the Czech New Wave at some point?), so I'm pretty excited to finally see some of Herz's other work:

This new statistic saying only 16% of Americans read for pleasure reminds me of a class the crime writer Lawrence Block once taught on "reading for pleasure." Probably most of us would benefit from such a class, perverse as it is to think that pleasure is a skill we must nourish and develop.

I've noticed that hardly any job postings seem to ask anymore for "evidence of teaching effectiveness" (course or peer evaluations, usually). Did committees ultimately decide that this was too humiliating, or have they just found the undergraduate's solution of using RateMyProfessor instead?

People in the Seattle/Tacoma area: I'll be reprising my talk on animal research films for the Tacoma Film Festival on October 12th and then introducing Ted Kennedy's experimental doc B.F. Skinner Plays Himself afterwards. Swing by and say "hi!" grandcinema.com/movie/free-f...

Two new job postings in the Film and Media Studies program at Hunter College: one in Film Production, one in Journalism. The production job:

This may be the best title of a book ever. Imagine if all titles were equally descriptive: "Academic Monograph with Tedious Descriptions of Gothic Architecture." "Collection of Previously Published Essays with No Unity Among Them or Discernible Point."

Really sad to hear that Bluestockings is closing for good. It was one of the first places I started going to in New York, 20 years ago. Indeed some of these bookmarks are starting show their age, much like me.

Every appearance of RFK Jr. in the news reminds me of a phrase I once read in Christina Stead: "depraved healthiness"

Just a reminder that there is still time (10/1) to apply to SCMSSP's parallel conference, to be held "both virtually (online) and, simultaneously, in person in/from Chicago (exact physical location TBA) during the same dates as SCMS March 26-29, 2026.... contingent upon agreement not to attend SCMS"