Hey, How About We Finally Abolish White-Blindness?

I originally wrote this piece on "white-blindness" back in the mid-1990s when I was a grad student—and it shows—but it's strangely relevant once again, for reasons I don't need to get into as history is rhyming once again.

Save the Date and Spread the Word: Public Good U Is Coming!

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!

A Mostly Harmless Putting Tip for the 4th of July

Just got back from fireworks at Orchard Park Middle School--quite the scene!--and was tinkering around with my putting on the actually-pretty-fast carpet in our living room, and I may have figured out something cool. Here it is:

Problem: I tend to be a feel putter, who likes to set up correctly, pick as precise a target as possible, and just trust my body to get the ball to it. (That trust is partly the product of 1000s of putts on The Rail--a metal-yardstick-type training device--during winters in western NY from the late '90s to the early '00s, but that's another story.) Lately, however, I've been overthinking my putts. I'm getting too aware of what different body parts are doing during my stroke and trying to control the putter face too much in the midst of the stroke. I haven't trusted my lines and have started trying to steer the ball into the hole instead of just rolling it toward my target. In particular, I've been having a lot of trouble while getting ready to pull the trigger to begin my putting stroke with quieting my mind and trusting my body.

Solution: A new pre-putt routine and a new triggering image. Yes, "image"--not words. What I was doing tonight is looking very closely at my target and trying to identify a specific point on it that I'm aiming for. Once I've established that point, I try to keep a clear image of it in my head as I move my eyes from it back to the ball. Once my eyes get to the ball, I start my stroke. Look, visualize, putt. Very simple.

Results: The difference between last night and this one was amazing. I was missing all over the place yesterday, overcompensating like crazy from putt to putt. I was pushing, pulling, you name it, even when I tried the exact same putt over and over. Tonight, I was making everything I was looking at. And I was putting from a different length and angle each time. Even my misses were closer and the pace of my putts was better. I'd say I went from making less than 40% of the 8- to 10-footers I was practicing yesterday to over 80% tonight.

Caveats: Every putt I tried tonight was relatively straight. I haven't figured out the breaks in the new house to my satisfaction, but whichever way the ball was curving on a given putt, it wasn't more than an inch over those 10 feet. So this visualization trigger may just work on short and straight putts. I have to take it to a putting green to see how well it transfers to different kinds of putts, particularly those where the line is dependent on the speed.

Tentative Conclusions: That said, I have to say I'm really excited about this new pre-putt/trigger routine. I was big into The Inner Game of Golf as a teenager and I like to think what I've come up with is in tune with that book's advice. Maybe what the looking/targeting part of the routine does is force you to use the part of your brain that handles aiming without you actually having to do any calculus yourself. Maybe focusing on the visualization part--along with the standardized/automatic nature of the actual trigger itself--serve to keep your verbal/intellectual consciousness quiet and keep the right parts of the brain active in that crucial fraction of a second before you start your putting stroke.

OK, so this is starting to sound like Zen and the Art of Getting the Little White Ball in the Damn Hole even as I'm writing it, but I really do think if you have a putter you trust, if you know how to take a stance that's comfortable to you and helps you keeps your eyes over the ball and your head still during the stroke, and if you've practiced that stroke over and over and over with something like The Rail that gives exaggerated feedback on the effects of even very tiny mistakes, then you really can be very zen. As some band once said, "I don't think so!" And if this routine helps you not think but "use the force," I think it may help your putting. I'll let you know if it helps mine!

Recommended Reading: My Fantasy Fiction Students at sf@SF

Back in the day, Mostly Harmless had an expansive definition of "fun" (as its perpetual tag line, "for fun," and long links list over there on the left remind me every time I visit the site), which included science fiction, fantasy, anime, music, tv, films, theory, and politics, as well as golf. Fortunately, I've got a couple of academic/pop culture blogs, sf@SF and American Identities, that allow me to sound off on most of those topics when inspiration hits me and I don't feel like cross-posting it here. More important, though, they allow me to showcase some of the work my students have been doing in my courses.

Well, the time has come for my Fantasy Fiction students to start sharing their response essays with the world (or that portion of it that makes it to sf@SF!). And that's where my Mostly Harmless regulars come in: I'm asking you all to point your own intertubey (and other) networks at the most interesting essays from my students this semester. I think you'll see from the 1st post that their topics, views, and writing will be worth your time!

All Hail 3Tops-san

Ashes to ashes

Paint to paint

Where 3Tops was

Now 3Tops ain't

The Politics of Astro Boy

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 anime politics, 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!

The Politics of Miyazaki

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.

Moving Day

We Have a Site! And a Line-Up? And Sponsors...?

As in a real, live, location. A building, if you will.

What is this about? Click here and ask yourself which god(s) of stupidity made me forget to cross-post that CitizenSE post here. But hey, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. Instead of a cross-post, I have something much, much better.

Video from the Virtual Goods Summit 2007 at Stanford University. Watch it all. I haven't--yet--but Sloucho has.

Sloucho, you'll recall, is the guy too busy to blog here about some of the material we never quite got around to doing together as a ground-breaking video games studies book back in the early aughts--mostly due to mutual slackerdom. Well, since then he's straightened up and appears to be flying right. His Fantasy Football writing gig has been supplemented by a third job toiling away in Everquest 2's platinum mines. His first job? Oh, he was just named Professor of the Year there. I'm totally serious. Things are going his way. And coming. Watch the video and try to figure out how he's making more per month on his third job than I am on my first.

So my point in mentioning all this is that we don't just have a site but also potential sponsors and a stellar line-up for the video game studies summer camp idea you all were too lazy to click and read about up there in my first link. Go do it now, so you'll appreciate what I'm about to do next.

Site: Cameron University's Center for Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurial Studies.

Sponsors: Click on the link, for starters. Feel free to suggest more (or self-nominate) in comments.

Line-Up (other professor-coach types than Sloucho and me): Dave Lester. Rob MacDougall. Timothy Burke. Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

OK, so they haven't officially confirmed. Heck, some of them don't even know yet that they're being recruited, or are doing a damn good impression of it. Only others we let in are close personal friends or those whose friend(s) already in can wangle a majority vote among those already in for them.

Seriously, this is going to be big. I can't believe no one has done this already. How do you patent this? Or is that trademark? Yeesh, maybe we can bring somebody in who knows something about intellectual property. Between the 2 of us, we ought to know someone.

Yeah, I said Lawton, OK, in summer 2009. You got a problem with that? Sloucho has to take advantage of his summers to do most of the heavy lifting directing an Honors Program there, so no travelling road show until we finish beta testing it on his home turf.

OK, anyone else who wants in can leave a comment or drop me a line at my super-secret bloggy email address (or any of my others--impress me with your fab research skills)....

Please excuse my tone. When I was talking about all this with the Full Metal Archivist yesterday evening, onechan came over, listened in for awhile, and interjected, "why are you laughing like a monster from Pretty Cure, daddy?" No, my laugh had nothing to do with the Powerpuff Girls CD playing rather loudly in the background. It's the possibility of never having to teach a summer course again and still being able to send both my girls to any college they want.

Curious?

[Update 3/26/08: Bill Benzon shares an article on the social networking pros of video game play. Thanks, Bill!]

There's an article in the NYTimes today about virtual life for kids:

Some excerpts:

Worlds like Webkinz, where children care for stuffed animals that come to life, have become some of the Web’s fastest-growing businesses. More than six million unique visitors logged on to Webkinz in November, up 342 percent from November 2006, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a research firm.

Club Penguin, where members pay $5.95 a month to dress and groom penguin characters and play games with them, attracts seven times more traffic than Second Life. In one sign of the times, Electric Sheep, a software developer that helps companies market their brands in virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com, last week laid off 22 people, about a third of its staff.

By contrast, Disney last month introduced a “Pirates of the Caribbean” world aimed at children 10 and older, and it has worlds on the way for “Cars” and Tinker Bell, among others. Nickelodeon, already home to Neopets, is spending $100 million to develop a string of worlds. Coming soon from Warner Brothers Entertainment, part of Time Warner: a cluster of worlds based on its Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and D. C. comics properties.

. . . .

But more is at stake than cultivating new revenue streams. For nearly 50 years, since the start of Saturday morning cartoons, the television set has served as the front door to the children’s entertainment business. A child encounters Mickey Mouse on the Disney Channel or Buzz Lightyear on a DVD and before long seeks out related merchandise and yearns to visit Walt Disney World.

Now the proliferation of broadband Internet access is forcing players to rethink the ways they reach young people. “Kids are starting to go to the Internet first,” Mr. Wadsworth said.

. . . .

The power of the virtual worlds business was shown recently when Vivendi announced a plan to buy Activision, a publisher of video games for consoles like the Sony PlayStation 3. Vivendi owns World of Warcraft, a virtual world for adults with more than nine million members and revenue of more than $1 billion.

Still, the long-term appetite for the youth-oriented sites is unclear. Fads have always whipsawed the children’s toy market, and Web sites are no different, analysts warn. Parents could tire of paying the fees, while intense competition threatens to undercut the novelty. There are now at least 10 virtual worlds that involve caring for virtual pets.

Privacy and safety are a growing concern, particularly as companies aim at younger children. Some virtual worlds are now meant to appeal to preschoolers, using pictures to control actions so that reading is not required.

So I'm thinking about a re-working of Lord of the Flies in which the main action takes place in an adult-free virtual world and the growing chaos there threatens to spread beyond that particular virtual world and take down the whole net. Until, that is, the Power Puff Girls come to the rescue.

Usagi

What is it, Onechan?

What's the white thing in front? What's the fuzzy blue thing in the background?

Extra credit: Is the Mostly Harmless Jinx in there somewhere?

Trees for Tuesday

Animist Sunday: Tree Spirit (Kami)

Postmodern Sunday: Bakki and Sloucho

Sloucho is still far too busy to start posting here, but he just wrote what would have been a great one over at his paying gig at Fantasy Football Today on postmodern sport. Clearly he's angling for the postmodernism beat here at Mostly Harmless.

Or maybe the tsuma is. Thanks to her, I was able to introduce you earlier to Kimutaku and the Disney version of the "para para" dance that was popular in Japan around the turn into this millennium. Here are a few more versions (non-Disney) based around this character he created for the Smap x Smap variety show he and his bandmates have made the most popular in Japan. So without further ado, I present to you Bakki ...

...at an elementary school:



...in the park:



...at a construction site:



...at a disco bar:

pre-historic golf

For all you golfers and WAAGNFNP loyalists here's proof that prehistoric man played golf long before he watched TV:



And here he is, doin' the Tiger under the watchful eye of the ultimate ur-golfer:

Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre

So, there they were, Sparkychan and Gojochan, two friends, cavorting in the woods. See, here they are cavorting:



And then they decided to have some tea. Do you know why? Because anytime is a good time to have tea time. That's why.



"Boy, that tea sure was scrumptious and delicious, Sparkychan. What should we do now?"

"I don't know, Gojochan. I wonder what Onechan and Imoto are doing."

"Me too. Do you think they're watching cartoons?"

"Yay, that's what we'll do, Gojochan. We'll watch some cartoons."

"PowerPuff Girls, PowerPuff Girls, we're gonna' watch the PowerPuff Girls."

"Yippee!!!"



"Hey! Octo looks like the wormasrhrimparamadamadingdongosaurus doesn't it, Sparkychan?"

"Unnhuh."

And then they watched one of Uncle Bill's favorites, Fantasia. See the winter fairies skating on the ice:



And here's one of the bestest scenes:



"Look at all the snow flakes, Sparkychan."

"Yeah, they're pretty, Gojochan. But what's that big stringy thing?"

"Hmmm . . . Could it be a hair brush?"

"I don't think so. It's too funny shaped to be a hair brush."

"And what would a hair brush be doing out in the snow."

"I know what it is, Gojo."

"What, Sparky?"

"It's a tippy end branch from a pine tree."

"Yeah, up real close. I see. And those are pine needles" – says Gojochan while pointing at all the needles.

"It sorta' reminds me of winter in Japan, Gojo."

"Yeah."

"Let's have some more tea."

"And cartoons!"

So they watched My Neighbor Totoro:



Here they are exercising along with Mei and Satsuki:



And so they finished watching the movie, which they liked alot, especially the Catbus. And then you know what they did?

Of course, they had some tea. And while they were drinking their tea, something scary and terrible happened to them. So get prepared for a mystery.

[Onechan and Imoto getting prepared.]

A big monster came out of the sky and scooped them up and took them away. Here's the monster:



Actually, it's sorta' pretty. All glowly and stuff. But don't let that fool you. This is a meanie monster. But you'll have to figure out the name for yourself because I'm too scared to think about it.

And you know what that meanie monster did? It stuffed Sparkychan and Gojochan into a box:



"What are we going to do, Sparky?"

"Let's try to escape. I'll climb up on your shoulders, OK, Gojo?"

"Let's do it!"



But you know what happened then, Onechan? This is what happened:



"Ow, that hurts!" said Sparkychan.

But the meanie didn't stop. The meanie closed the box on Sparkychan and Gojochan. Now isn't that mean? They're all scrunched up in the box.

And then you know what the meanie did? The meanie put the box in a spaceship and sent Sparkychan and Gojochan to another galaxy far far away:



Isn't that the coolest spaceship ever, all funky and blue? And all that pretty yellow space dust! with the red sparkles! Wow!

Whoops! I forgot. This is a scary mystery about Sparkychan and Gojochan.

What about Sparkychan and Gojochan inside the box inside the spaceship? What's going to happen to them? Are they ever going to get back to America? Will they ever get to eat ice cream with Onechan and Imoto?

So many questions, so many mysteries.

Post-Modern Monday: Rhinoplasty

Cross-posted at The Valve.

A decade or so ago I read an article about appropriation as a BIG THING in the art world. I thought it was silly. And so I did what any intelligent person does when confronted with high-toned silliness, I riffed on it.

I took Dürer's rhinoceros as my starting point:



I then scanned it into my handy-dandy Jobs-Wozniak Appropriator and concocted the following dialogue on bioengineering and informatics.

* * * * *

“Do you think he would mind?”
“Who?”
“Albrecht.”
“Albrecht Einstein?”
“No, Dürer, Albrecht Dürer, the print maker.”



“Mind what?”
“If I appropriated his rhinoceros.”
“What for?”
“I want to do some genetic engineering.”
“Genetic engineering?”
“Yes. I had this dream the other night. A voice kept repeating 'zebroceros' over and over again, with a very deep and meaningful intonation.”
“What's a zebroceros?”
“Well, it must be a cross between a zebra and a rhinoceros.”
“And you want to get into genetic engineering so you can make the cross. Isn't that going to be difficult? I mean, the zebra and the rhinoceros are such very different animals. Do you think the cross will take?”



“Don't see why not. This isn't like ordinary cross-breeding. Here we get right into the genetic material, the information specifying the organism's form and function. We just splice one strand of information into the other and voilà! we've got it.”
“I see. Tell me. Do you think we could make a rhinana?”
“A rhinana?”
“Yeah, a cross between a rhinoceros and a banana.”
“Well, if it's OK with Albrecht. It's his rhinoceros.”



“You mean there's no problem about the rhinoceros being an animal and the banana a plant?”
“Of course not. When you get down to the genes it's all just information. Bits and bytes of biocode.”
“Well, then let's try something between animate and inanimate. Wrapping paper. Yeah, a rhinoceros and wrapping paper.”



“But wrapping paper doesn't have any genetic code at all. No DNA to splice.”
“But it does have a pattern. And the pattern is information, just like the DNA. What should I call it”
“Wrappoceros? Papoceros? Zigzagoceros?”




“Oh.”

Onechan's Choice

What's going on? Where are Gojira and Sparkychan? What are they looking at?

Even More Otaku Autoethnography: Belated Awakening

So I'm getting a little bit personal in this final Japan-America Society of Fukuoka talk for this Saturday (assuming the typhoon bearing down on us doesn't cancel it! it's due to hit at 6 am that day) and tracing my growing awareness of a dialogue of sorts between certain American images of Japan and Japanese popular culture.

A key turning point in my awareness of Japan as relevant to these concerns was reading and discussing William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer with my closest friends in graduate school. In making sense of it, we were led into considerations of its sequels and spinoffs, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, movie phenomena like Blade Runner and Akira, and particularly the 1996 release of Ghost in the Shell in American theaters. In part, we were interested in the ways these works picked up on, played with, and projected what I would later learn to call Pacific Rim discourse’s identification of Japan with the future. In part, we were interested in the ways they expressed what I would soon learn to call a kind of high-tech or techno-orientalism in the different styles and moods in which imaged and imagined a Japan-dominated future. But we were more interested in their connections to the critical and cultural theory we were reading on the human and the post-human, postmodernism and late capitalism, cyborgs and information technology.

For me, however, these were side interests during my graduate school years--my main focus was on American, not transnational discourses of race--so the way I was exposed to Japan was mainly through the U.S. literatures I was reading and teaching. It was through the lenses of Korean-American writers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nora Okja Keller, Chinese-American writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Gish Jen, American Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko, and African American writer Ishmael Reed that I continued being exposed to Japan, out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as I completed my dissertation and got my first full-time tenure track teaching job.

In fact, what brought American images of Japan out of my peripheral vision was visual culture. As I returned to my childhood “fan” mode in my first few years back in New York state--this time of Cartoon Network animation blocks like Toonami and Adult Swim--I began to reflect on how much I had changed, along with American culture and Japanese animation, since the early 1980s. For one thing, new American-made cartoons were clearly indebted to Japanese animation. Through Powerpuff Girls, particularly its episodes that referenced manga and anime and other elements of Japanese popular culture, and South Park, especially the 1999 “Chinpokomon” episode that parodied both Pokemon and American stereotyping of Japan, I started thinking about American borrowings from, homages to, and parodies of both Japanese popular culture. But it was the overwhelming popular response to the American-made movie trilogy The Matrix that was released between 1999 and 2003, that really focused my attention. Here were Hollywood filmmakers who openly acknowledged their borrowings from American and Japanese cyberpunk, who made science fiction appealing to new audiences around the world, and who worked with Japanese and Korean artists to produce Animatrix, a series of short animated films that often rivaled the movies themselves in inventiveness and creativity. During that same span of years, popular Japanese anime like Dragonball Z, Cowboy Bebop, and InuYasha began airing in translation on cable television in the U.S. and I followed them closely, drawn to their plots, characters, themes, visual artistry, and music.