Imagine an institution that meets the ideals of public higher education: call it Public Good U. What does this institution look like, who does it serve, how is it funded and governed, and what service does it return to the community?
SAVE THE DATE!
Public Good U: Strengthening the Case for Public Higher Education
February 7-9, 2025
Albany, New York
Join us for a groundbreaking national conference exploring the vital role of public higher education as a public good in the 21st century. This timely event will bring together educators, academic administrators, policy makers, and business leaders to address the challenges and opportunities facing public higher education institutions, students, faculty, and staff.
Conference Highlights:
- Welcome Remarks: SUNY Chancellor John B. King and CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez
- Keynote Conversation: Davarian Baldwin (Author, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower) and Sara Goldrick-Rab (Author, Paying the Price and Reinventing Financial Aid), facilitated by Cathy Davidson (Author, The New Education and co-author, The New College Classroom)
- Panel Discussion: state university system heads from across the nation on current issues in public higher education, facilitated by Chancellors King and Matos Rodríguez
- Closing Address: the view from the New York State capitol on the value of public higher education
Conference Tracks:
1. Democracy in America: Educating Citizens Equitably
2. The New College-Educated Workforce
3. Research for the Public Good: Creativity, Innovation, and Impact for the 21st Century
4. Reimagining Town/Gown Relations: Community Building, Civic Engagement, and Economic Development
5. Perennial Issues in Urban Public Higher Education: Lessons From the Past, Tools for the Future
6. What Should the State Provide? New Public Good U Foundations and Funding Models
Organized by:
SUNY University Faculty Senate, SUNY Faculty Council of Community Colleges, SUNY System Administration, and CUNY University Faculty Senate
Full conference details, including a call for papers and registration information, coming soon at http://www.suny.edu/PublicU. Mark your calendars for this essential event in shaping the future of public higher education!
[Note to my regular readers who come here for women's golf coverage: I'm airing Mel Brooks's 1974 film Blazing Saddles tonight as part of SUNY Fredonia's American Studies film series "Myths of the American West," so decided to share a draft of my opening comments here at Mostly Harmless (which is, after all, "for fun"). I'm aware of the 5-car collision that has lead to my favorite golfer Ai Miyazato withdrawing from this week's LPGA event (and onechan's favorite Paula Creamer being a likely WD candidate) and obviously wish them and everyone else involved in it a full and speedy recovery.]
[Note to my non-regular readers who are coming here after watching Blazing Saddles (or missing it): Hope you enjoy this post and are curious enough after reading it to browse around for other posts here that you may find interesting!]
I was four years old when Blazing Saddles was first released in American theaters and until Shannon McRae--the director of American Studies at SUNY Fredonia and organizer of the program's film series "Myths of the American West"--took seriously my half-joking suggestion to include it in the series and invited me to introduce it, I had never seen it in its entirety until this month. In a semester when I'm teaching American Identities, Introduction to African American Literature and Culture, and Critical Reading, I'm particularly pleased to take Shannon up on her kind offer, and offer a few comments as a new viewer of a movie that's been well-known (even to me) for decades, comments that will hopefully be as useful to students in my classes this semester as everyone else who braved the rains to make it out here tonight.
Growing up, I put Blazing Saddles in the mental category of comedies too raw for me to watch, a remarkably capacious category that in the '70s and too far into the '80s included everything from Monty Python to Mad magazine to Saturday Night Live to just about every famous stand-up comedian of the time. If this reference helps people place where I was at, probably Benny Hill was the rawest thing I got access to before graduate school. Yes, I grew up in a small town in central NY and failed to take advantage of 2nd grade in Palo Alto and 7th grade in Chapel Hill. Nevertheless, I was obsessed with everything comical and comics-al. In high school I started a cartoon series called The Gray Area that, despite its being far too derivative of The Far Side, was seen, nay loved, by regular readers of the Pennysaver and other fine local publications for far too many weeks. Me, I loved everything from Gilligan's Island to Scooby Doo, from Diff'rent Strokes to The Facts of Life, from Benson to Newhart, from Doctor Who to The Greatest American Hero, from Airplane! to Ghostbusters, from The Muppet Show to The Tracey Ullman Show, from Tom and Jerry to Rocky and Bullwinkle (in reruns, duh) to Calvin and Hobbes to Mork and Mindy, from any DC comic Ambush Bug appeared in (even though I was almost exclusively a Marvel fan) to the animated version of The Tick. Sure, I hated the Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but otherwise I was pretty easy to please. And I was a fan of The Simpsons before The Simpsons was The Simpsons, man! (It goes without saying from the title of this blog what my favorite was, though!)
All of which is to say that when I go to grad school in the early 1990s I was perfectly primed to understand and appreciate what many still misunderstand and denigrate even today as a French theoretical import: postmodernism. As someone who saw The Simpsons parody of the end of The Graduate long before I ever saw The Graduate, who loved it when Beavis and Butt-head were watching a Johnny Cash video and decided it was gangsta rap, and who came of age in a hip hop culture rife with allusion and remixing and pastiche, I didn't have to think twice about Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of "incredulity toward metanarratives" as a core characteristic of postmodernism.
So it's all too easy and obvious now for me to look back at Blazing Saddles and see it as yet another exemplar of American postmodernism. It's certainly not an original point to make, as a quick google search will show you (I recommend posts by Mark Bourne and Mike Sutton on this aspect of the movie). But what is originality, anyway? Just another stinkin' metanarrative--right, JFL? Perhaps it's slightly more original to claim that Mel Brooks and Monty Python were engaged in a transatlantic comedic one-ups-man-ship that was perfectly postmodern. In the same way that Brooks and his co-writers, including Richard Pryor, were playing with myths of the American west and poking fun at founding narratives of the modern United States, Monty Python was taking on English legends of the Holy Grail and western icons of Christianity--and at roughly the same time. Check me on this. And, as you watch Blazing Saddles tonight, consider some of the debates over postmodernism that occupied so many western intellectuals in the last third of the 20th century: is postmodernism all sound and fury, signifying nothing? is it, in the final analysis, the laugh track of late capitalism? are its politics of race and gender and sexuality and [fill in the blank] reactionary, liberatory, laughable, nostalgic, or what? is postmodernism a thing of the past, and if so, how do we react to it today (and what comes after that post-?) if not, if we are still living in and with postmodernism, what does Blazing Saddles compare to in contemporary and recent culture?
There's so much more to be said--about what light Blazing Saddles may shed on black-Jewish relations in the late civil rights era, for instance--but I think it ought to wait until after the movie. Don't you?
A few random responses to the English-language documentary South Korea: Focused on Excellence, which can be found on youtube in 5 parts, focusing 1st on soccer
then on speed skating
then on golf (Se Ri Pak, baby!)
then on baseball
and finally on figure skating
. I learned a lot from this documentary, particularly about sports I don't follow closely, but I was left wondering what was particularly Korean about the amazing individuals featured in it. Commitment, work ethic, passion, perfectionism, focus--doesn't that describe what any world-class athlete needs? How exactly does a South Korean "focus on excellence" differ from any other country's? Frankly, I learned more about how young talent is developed in Korea from Beth Ann Baldry's story on the 17-shot victory by South Korea over the U.S. (and even more over the rest of the field) in the Women's World Amateur Team Championship than from this documentary (with the exception of the speed skating section).
In addition, I was struck by the way in which the documentary implicitly defined excellence in regional as well as global terms. That is, the Korean athletes' and teams' accomplishments were notable, it seemed, because they reached a standard on the world stage set by Japanese athletes and teams before them. The length the documentary went to minimize or not to acknowledge prior Japanese success was impressive in its own way--it showed how seriously competition with Japan is taken in Korea and how strongly the legacy of Japanese colonialism is still felt there. Even though I can't see Ji-Yai Shin or Na Yeon Choi taking part in that structure of feeling, I can understand better now why their accomplishments (as well as those of other elite Korean athletes) are so prone to be politicized in Korea. Given how bitter the youtube wars between fans of Yuna Kim and Mao Asada can get, I was glad to see this pattern broken in the segment on Kim.
But no segment moved me as much as the one on Se Ri Pak. The clips from her U.S. Women's Open victory in 1998 took me back to watching it live. I trace my current interest in the LPGA back to my excitement at Pak's LPGA debut. The documentary did a great job of evoking that feeling. Now if only they had shown Y.E. Yang power-lifting his golf bag after defeating Tiger head-to-head at the PGA Championship!
As the LPGA comes down to its last 2 events, it's worth pausing to appreciate how big an influence a small gesture can have. Lisa Mickey has a great piece on how as a 10-year-old Dori Carter was invited by Heather Daly-Donofrio to caddy for her on the 18th hole of her victory in a 1997 Futures Tour event--and 13 years later Carter got her own Futures Tour win.
It's also worth taking a look back on the 2000s, courtesy of bangkokbobby at both mylpga.com and Seoul Sisters.com, and deciding what you make of his system for determining who had the best decade. (First question: how is he defining a decade?) [Update (12:24 pm): Answer from bangkokbobby: Not a decade--the 2000s in their entirety! So this could end up being a list of the best women golfers of the millennium, it seems. Kewl!]
And it's also worth considering the growing pains involved in golf's globalization. You don't have to love the Life on Tour blog or agree with Worth Blackwelder's every argument and assumption to think that something's very wrong in the disparities between the KLPGA's treatment of visiting LPGAers and LETers in their respective co-sponsored events.
[Update 1 (11/20/10, 11:01 am): Re: Blackwelder's accusations of preferential treatment for KLPGAers in their dual-sponsored event with the LET, here are some remarks from one of Larry the Looper's commenters:
I read with great interest Worth Blackwelder’s post on this website because I was at both the LPGA Hana Bank tournament and the LET/KLPGA tournament. I am writing to try to separate truth from rumor because I am all for calling a spade a spade, but some of the things that the author says is not only wrong but irresponsible for someone with his experience.
So, here goes. The letters below correspond with the letters in his letter to Beth Ann:
B/ The Haevichi Resort was the official hotel of the tournament. Many players, including Koreans on the LET and LPGA stayed there too. More importantly, the hotel where many of the KLPGA players stayed was NOT complimentary. What tour does that? Many KLPGA players and their families know Jeju island well as they play tournaments there often so they opted to stay in other hotels that may not be as nice, but are closer to the venue. The staff of the KLPGA stayed at one of these other hotels.
C/ Many KLPGA players purchased vouchers which allowed them to pick from the menu and remit their vouchers for payment. I was assured by the organizers that food was NOT complimentary for any players. I agree though, that food at the golf course was expensive. This is true because I paid those prices too.
D/ This is the most outrageously inaccurate statement here. No player received courtesy cars, including the sponsor exemptions. All the rental cars look very similar on Jeju island. The parents of the KLPGA players usually rent these cars at the airport on an individual by individual basis. This fact could have been easily ascertained by asking the someone at the tournament, including the English speaking tournament co-organizers from the UK.
E/ This is true. This is a problem on the KLPGA.
F/ House caddies cost the same for Koreans, Americans and Martians.
So, the author wants us to believe that the KLPGA set up these obstacles to give blatant advantage to KLPGA players and that the LET would allow this to happen.
Clearly, based on the real facts above, the author’s conclusions are just not supported. Further, not only was the tournament co-sanctioned, but the tournament organizers consisted of a Korean company and a UK company working with their respective organizations.
I will not comment on the remainder of his letter. I will say that I think it is good to discuss and debate issues that relate to the game that we love and the tour that we are close to. However, I think that if we are all truly interested in ensuring that women’s golf continues to thrive, then we should be having these discussions based on true facts, rather than inaccurate gossip that inflames people and turns them from reasonable to irrational. This is not only the responsible thing to do, it’s the right thing to do.
I hope everyone reads Happy Fan's fantastic essay on Olympic gold medalist figure skater Yu Na Kim. It provides a great window into the difficulties and pressures of not only training to become a world-class athlete, but to have the hopes and dreams of an entire nation riding on your shoulders, as well. Indirectly, it points to the passions engendered by nationalism in Asia, for Kim's rival throughout her career has been Mao Asada, Mao-chan, of Japan, and neither skater's group of fans has been particularly kind to the other, to say the least. Just go to youtube to see for yourself the tit-for-tat videos posted by the most obsessive and least mature of them. Conscripting star athletes into your own private cyberwar may sound like a colossal waste of time to Americans, but then again, we have our own fallout from past nationalisms to deal with--and the English colonization of America was so long enough ago and was so much less harsh than the Japanese colonization of Korea that we really have no historical analogue to help us understand why it's happening.
Which is not always a bad thing. One of the more positive effects of other versions of American nationalism is the defusing of real tensions in other parts of the world. How else would my brother, a descendant like me in part of Polish Jews, have married into a Polish-American Catholic family, given what happened in Poland during World War II? Even closer to home, my dad was born the year of Pearl Harbor, but he's the father-in-law of a woman from Japan. There really is something to that "Only in America" cliche, isn't there?
Which brings me around, of course, to golf. Can anyone imagine TiffanyJoh, who's just been given a sponsorexemption into the Kia Classic Presented by J Golf, being set up as the good guy (or bad guy) in a grudge match with, say, Mina Harigae--with bragging rights for Korean-America and Japanese-America on the line? An order or two of magnitude more ridiculous to imagine than the race between Ji-Yai Shin and Ai Miyazato to catch Lorena Ochoa for world #1 (they're now separated by .09 points in the latest Rolex Rankings) becoming a nationalist spectacle, isn't it? Much more likely to be a UCLA vs. Duke thing, come to think of it....
Consider for a moment the following thought experiment: what if Michelle Wie had been the player to kick off the LPGA season with back-to-back wins for the 1st time in 44 years, instead of Ai Miyazato? Wouldn't we have been treated to breathless speculation on Golf Channel (including on-line streaming video from Golf Central) on her odds of doing it, expanded tv coverage of the HSBC two weekends ago, endless arguments over the significance of her feat, and top billing for her on every sports highlight show, sports page, and sports site for a couple of days, at least, all as a prelude to the media rush to Okinawa to follow her every move in this past week's attempt to make the JLPGA opener her 3rd worldwide win in a row?
So why not for Miyazato? She's at least as big a global star in women's golf as Wie, plus she already has 18 wins on major tours to her credit. After her HSBC win, she moved up to #3 in the world, only .01 points behind Ji-Yai Shin and within striking range of Lorena Ochoa. Plus, she was competing against Shin, Momoko Ueda, Sakura Yokomine, and other top 50 players in the JLPGA's debut this week, so even though she had trouble getting the ball in the hole and finished T7, behind Sun Ju Ahn, Shinobu Moromizato, and Chie Arimura, she's likely to make up even more ground on Ochoa when the new Rolex Rankings are released today. I'm certainly not the only one to have predicted this level of success. Of those participating in the 2010 LPGA Prognostication Derby, Ron Sirak anticipated the worst finish for her (10th), I of course foresaw the best (1st), while there was a 4th, 2 5ths, a 7th, and a 9th from everyone in between. While two wins in a row from her is a hotter start than even I expected, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that Miyazato has joined the LPGA's elite. So why is she being concern-trolled for being unable to win in North America thus far in her career? Why are Hound Dog and Jason Sobel the only golf writers or bloggers I know of to really take her devote a paragraph or more in the last week or two to her 3 LPGA wins in the last 8 months? seriously? [Update (3/9/10, 5:12 am): Little rewrite there to acknowledge that of course the usual suspects are taking her accomplishments seriously! Bill Jempty wrote, "Miyazato has come out blazing. Can she challenge for #1? I think so." Tim Maitland, who predicted her 2009 breakthrough, has been following her closely ever since. But why so few outside the usual suspects? And why so many mistakes in what they produced?] And how in the world did Hunter Mahan getting his 2nd career win get pitched as a bigger story anywhere in the world than what Miyazato accomplished two Sundays ago in Singapore?
Yes, I said "anywhere"--even in the U.S. Of course in Japan Miyazato is neck-and-neck with Ryo Ishikawa, Daisuke Takahashi, and Mao Asada, among others, for most popular athlete in the country. Where does she stand in the U.S.? Let's see: every major golf site relied on wire reports of her HSBC victory and in the week after it there was a grand total of three hastily-put-together career overviews (by Sal Johnson of Golf Observer and Beth Ann Baldry of Golfweek--scroll down in my Ai-sama victory post to updates 34 and 35 for my assessment of them--as well as a halfway decent one by Larry Bohannan). Even an online golf magazine you might expect better of, Global Golf Post, had Miyazato sharing a page with Laura Davies (good company, but Davies was playing in the minor leagues that week, even if she did get worldwide win #73), in the back half of this week's issue--behind a nice full-page profile of Shin by Lewine Mair. Seems like there's a "no woman allowed in the 1st 10 pages" rule at Global Golf Post.
This despite the fact that the LPGA's tournament previews, notes, and interviews have gotten sharper in the Mike Whan era, that there's been a concerted effort to take advantage of opportunities in Asia and to promote Asian stars, and that even the golf industry seems to be waking up, as evidenced by Titleist's new LPGA ad that was getting serious air time during the HSBC (but has not yet made it onto teh youtubes). So why is the U.S. golfy media so far behind the curve, particularly when it comes to coverage of the new generations on tour? Why do we see more profiles of and promotion of the LPGA's Asian-American stars like Michelle Wie, Christina Kim, Vicky Hurst, and Jane Park--and even of Futures Tour prospects like Tiffany Joh and Hannah Yun--than of Asian stars like Miyazato, Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, In-Kyung Kim, Na Yeon Choi, Eun-Hee Ji, and Momoko Ueda? Consider the golfy media's relatively equal embrace of both Asian-Americans like Anthony Kim, Tadd Fujikawa, and Rickie Fowler and of Asians like Ryo Ishikawa and Danny Lee. As I asked over at Citizen of Somewhere Else yesterday on a very different topic last week, "what's going on?" Is it that hard to talk to English-speaking caddies or agents? To hire translators for interviews with players or to get background from Asian reporters? To read reporting from Asia in translation?
I don't think this is an individual failing, a breakdown in journalistic integrity, or the natural outcome of nationalism or impersonal market forces. It's not often that I get to cite books by academics here, but Colleen Lye's 2005 study America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 is remarkably relevant to any analysis of what responses to the LPGA reveal about race, ethnicity, gender, and class in America today. Even though Lye focuses on a very different time period than our own, she shows how relevant anxieties from even progressive and liberal leaders and writers from then are to us now. Consider the following passage:
Through observations of shifts in naturalism's representation of Asiatic figures to exemplify the promise and the peril of free market expansion, my study seeks to reveal one systematic way in which the critical potential for revealing the damages wrought by globalization in the American context has been short-circuited....
The remedy and exacerbation posed by America's Asia to the crisis of the closing of the frontier entwined the emergence of Asiatic racial form with the intensification of commodity relations and capital's global expansion. The legal designation of Asian immigrants as "aliens ineligible to citizenship" reflected the freighting of Asiatic racial form with an abiding tension between U.S. national interests and capital's transnational movement, between the exceptionalist dream of the identity of nation and capital logic and the nightmare of their nonidentity. (8, 9)
Lye's focus on the "initial textual presence of Asiatic racial form as an economic trope" (11) and argument that late-19th- and early-20th-century Americans displaced their anxieties over capitalism and globalization onto Asians of their own imagining is entirely relevant to our own time, when the LPGA has been featured more in the business section than the sports section, when Americans and Europeans on tour are individualized and "the Koreans" are generally treated en masse and as a mass, and when the presence of Asians on the LPGA is sensationalized either as nightmare or dream. Lye again:
To the extent that American universality depends upon the possibility of assimilation, there is always the danger of finding aliens in our midst, or the wholesale possibility of American takeover by aliens....
In a fifty-year period, a vision of California as a post-frontier about to be engulfed by coolie hordes and Oriental despotism is succeeded by visions of a Pacific Rim utopia, where the local and the global could be made happily coextensive. (8, 11)
The Bivens regime spent too much time worrying about the former, while the Whan regime is working to make the latter a reality. Here's a suggestion: helping American media and fans get to know Asian players as individuals is only part of the solution. (A big part, to be sure, as the closest the lazy American media has come up with anything interesting thus for for Miyazato is that she's a "rock star" in Japan who at first "lost her confidence" on coming to America.) Encouraging American fans and media to embrace globalization is also only part of the solution. (Although highlighting more cross-continent friendships among the players as well as the economic benefits to the tour and its sponsors of exposure in Asia, as well as in Europe and America, wouldn't be a bad idea.) The task is much larger than that: defusing American anxieties that capitalism may be passing them by and that Americans can no longer succeed against global competition and trying to interrupt the historical short-circuit that makes American images of Asia and Asians a symbol for economic transformation. They already realize this can't be done simply by massively promoting American stars (and thus adding to the media and fan pressure on them).
One small start might be pairing Americans of Asian descent with their lesser-known counterparts who were born in Asia--and this could extend more generally between Asian and non-Asian players. The Lorena Ochoa-Ai Miyazato connection has already been established; Suzann Pettersen and Ya Ni Tseng could become a regular pairing, as could Cristie Kerr and Song-Hee Kim, Angela Stanford and Sun Young Yoo, Michelle Wie and Ji-Yai Shin, Paula Creamer (when she's healthy) and In-Kyung Kim, Karrie Webb and Amy Yang, Vicky Hurst and Momoko Ueda, Christina Kim and Jee Young Lee, Jane Park and Na Yeon Choi, Morgan Pressel and Eun-Hee Ji, Mina Harigae and Mika Miyazato, and so on. The point is to put players who combine in interesting ways together on a fairly regular basis, either by game, level of accomplishment or promise, or personality/style. Having tv commentators, golf journalists, and everyday fans on the course and in front of their tv sets getting used to seeing Asians and non-Asians showcasing their games and interacting without the world coming to an end could add up to one giant leap for America.
[Update 1 (3/9/10, 5:21 am): The new Titleist commercial is up on LPGA.com--oh, wait, wrong one....]
[Update 2 (5:33 am): This is not the one I saw during the HSBC--a lot more Asians on that one!
Anyone know where I can find the one aired during the Asian swing?]
[Update 3 (3/10/10, 3:00 am): Here's Stephanie Wei on Momoko Ueda--it's the latest installment in her Know Your Asians feature.]
Let's see, I can't seem to stop writing about golf, my brother works in the golf industry, my mom is comfortable chatting with professional golfers, and my dad now has an essay out in Christian Science Monitor on the ethics of golf. (It came out online yesterday but first appeared in the print version on my birthday, fittingly enough!)
Maybe someday I can even get him to do a guest spot here at Mostly Harmless. Here's an idea: I'll make sure he reads the comments on this post and see if he wants to respond to the commenters....
Ron Sirak and Ryan Ballengee show how interrelated business, sports, and politics are these days in their rundowns of options the major professional golf tours have for coming out of globalization's latest and greatest economic tsunami stronger than ever. I'm particularly glad to see Sirak combining his utopian One World Tour idea with more practical suggestions for coordination of schedules and co-sponsorship of events that I've been floating for a longtime. Admittedly, there are huge obstacles to any of this--no matter how great your plans for highlighting the quality of competition in the world of women's golf, will your existing sponsors go along with them and will you be able to draw new sponsors to make it possible?--but I'm hoping this upcoming LPGA summit will unveil a strategy that goes beyond the players of the LPGA being even nicer and more accessible to their fans than they already are. It's nice to see LPGA.com already featuring more human-interest type stories on players who aren't already international stars, but there's so much more to be done.
[Update 1 (4:33 am): Certainly the LPGA should be able to outdo Golf365's rundown of top players and young guns of Korean descent on tour, especially when Matt Cooper leaves Christina Kim off his first list and Amy Yang and Jane Park off his second. But he makes up for it with a great photo gallery. Thanks to Happy Fan for the links.]
Should this John Strege post be filed under "truth is stranger than fiction" or "too weird to be true"? Look, I can understand being angry at a politician, and I can understand trying to use your celebrity status to influence politics, but threatening to become a citizen of another country just because the current administration won't follow your suggestion that Taiwan ought to host an LPGA event? That sounds pretty extreme to me. Why not first try to find another Taiwanese politician or party that will back you up?
Now that Michelle Wie is reportedly leaving William Morris and joining Tseng with IMG, maybe the two rivals can team up and lobby for their management agency together the next time they're in Taiwan. Or maybe they can really set a new standard and seek citizenship in a corporation rather than a nation.
[Update 1 (11:24 am): Strege just blogged on another story, on Christina Kim's lawsuit against a Korean newspaper, that Tseng should be looking at and thinking about very carefully.]
[Update 2 (11:32 am): Thanks to Bill Jempty for pointing me to this thoughtful and funny post by Brian, which lead me to this one by Kushibo.]
[Update 3 (1:34 pm): Got the link from Shackelford--Wie has signed with IMG. Funny that the Bloomberg piece doesn't mention Tseng as another IMG golfer. Not really! She's not on Tiger's or Annika's level--but then, neither is Wie.]
[Update 4 (3/15/09, 12:14 am): Here's an update on the Tseng story.]
[Update 5 (3/19/09, 10:14 am): Here's the IMG press release on Wie.]
Liked the title of my critique of the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still that I recently posted over at sf@SF so much I thought I'd link to it here. As you can see from the tags, it may be of interest to those who come to Mostly Harmless for something--anything!--besides women's golf.
Just a quick link to Bill Benzon's reading of Osamu Tezuka's Mighty Atom (a.k.a. Astro Boy) as an indirect response to and working through of ambivalence about the U.S. occupation of Japan. Given my own research interests and past blogging on animepolitics, I ought to have a good response for Bill, but unfortunately I grew up in a place that was never in range of any TV stations that were actually airing Astro Boy and have not had the opportunity to reduce my cultural illiteracy since leaving there. Sorry, Bill!
Daniel Thomas MacInnes of Conversations on Ghibli has done the animation world a great service in posting and commenting on a Japanese documentary on Hayao Miyazaki's North American promotion tour for Princess Mononoke at the end of the last millennium. But as good as his focus on the business marketing context of the Ghibli-Disney relationship's beginning is, it's his penultimate paragraph that's the most significant part of his piece, for it touches on something the Full Metal Archivist was picking up on throughout the documentary:
Still, as an artist and dedicated Ghibl Freak, I am endlessly annoyed by all these stupid questions from the suits, the expectation that Miyazaki dumb his work down to the level of...I dunno, the average George W. Bush voter. Why does everything in this country be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator? Why does everybody have to be so mindless, so sloven, so stupid? Thank God there will be no President Sarah Palin in 2009. But in this swamp, that possibility is always lurking nearby, just like November snow in Minnesota.
In fact, Thomas shouldn't have backed off on his self-described "rant" or chalked it up to his health or mood in his final paragraph. Pay attention to Miyazaki's emotional response to the questions asked by most American film critics: he's angry and tense, not just nervous or anxious. The assumptions behind the questions are pissing him off, and because of that, his answers are quite revealing. But the conception of politics Miyazaki is drawing on is much broader than only electioneering and lowest-common denominator media culture, ranging from the interaction between creative artists, their works, and their audiences (particularly children) to the politics and pedagogies of form. No time to elaborate on this now, but will be happy to in comments.
BTW, the FMA fears Ponyo will be his last film. Here's the theme song:
For more on the characters and themes (in Japanese), head over here. MacInnes is the source for those of us limited to English.
To help out some NYU researchers by filling out their survey? And post the link (with comments closed) on your blog? Please don't do anything to bias the survey results...thanks!
