July 9th, 2010
Hey everybody,
Sorry for the long absence — but things are ready to kick into high gear with Split Reel!
A) I’ll soon be posting an interview I recorded in June with Australia’s Christina Lee, author of Screening Generation X;
B) I’ve also lined up a show with Maurice Berger — professor, author, and curator of the exhibit “For All the World To See,” on visual culture within the civil rights struggle. The exhibit is currently stationed at the International Center of Photography in New York City. (More on this after the jump.)
C) I was recently interviewed by Aharona Ament of CHIRP — you can read my e-mail responses to her insightful questions here.
So, about that exhibit…
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March 4th, 2009
So, I originally wrote this essay about time-travel a year ago for the online pop-culture mag The High Hat, but they’ve been experiencing technical difficulties for quite a while, and… well, I wanted to put it out there before too much more time (no pun intended) had passed. Enjoy!
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February 10th, 2008
A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay for an online magazine called The High Hat about an incredible comic-book series called Supreme Power. Written by J. Michael Stracyznski, Supreme Power — a darker remake of the 1980’s series Squadron Supreme — was basically a postmodern look at superheroes. How would the United States government realistically deal with the arrival of a Superman-esque force? How tempted would they be to use such super-powered individuals to advance their own agenda? And how would those those individuals act once they realized that they themselves were far more powerful than the folks they were serving?
I was generous with my praise of the book after having read the first dozen issues, but in truth, I probably didn’t recommend it as strongly as I should have… which is to say that I should’ve labeled it the best comic I’ve ever read. The next six issues were magnificent and ironed out the (very minor) flaws that I felt populated the series at the time, and after SP reclaimed the name of Squadron Supreme in a toned-down format — Marvel felt the graphic nature of the book stifled the potential size of its audience — Stracyznski was in the midst of building towards a cataclysmic showdown. In the most recent issue, Hyperion and Redstone, the two titans of the book, had locked horns in a brawl that had all but leveled Los Angeles. Reinforcements for Hyperion had arrived, Round 2 vs. the sadistic Redstone was about to commence, and then…. Nothing.
It’s been over a year since that last issue, and outside of the Ultimate Power miniseries (where characters from the Supreme Power and Ultimate Marvel worlds collided — who knows when it was placed chronologically?), there’s been not a peep from Marvel about when the book might resume. It’s one thing to put a book on hiatus at the end of a particular story arc, but right in the middle of a major battle? Shame on you, Marvel Comics. Shame.
Anyway, here was my initial take on an incredibly amazing story, complete with enough endnotes to make David Foster Wallace proud.
January 7th, 2008
I’ve always been fascinated with how the worlds of entertainment and politics have become more intertwined throughout the years — this is an essay that I wrote on the topic back in the fall of 2006 for the online magazine PopMatters: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/6113/heres-my-autograph/
January 7th, 2008
Hey folks,I have an essay in the new issue of the online pop-culture magazine The High Hat, about the portrayal of mental illness in film and television. Check it out here: http://www.thehighhat.com/Nitrate/009/fullam_straitjackets.html
