Posts Tagged ‘Harmontown’
Every Last Weekend Link
* Food for Marquette English’s Hamilton event later this month: A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems. And another: Hamilton, Inc.
Broadway can be a very poor investment, but when shows hit, they really hit. The most successful of them dwarf the revenues of even the biggest Hollywood blockbusters. “Hamilton” could easily run on Broadway for a decade or more. In September, the first road production will open in Chicago, and it will be a “sit down” show, meaning it is intended to stay there for a year or more. Ultimately, there may be as many as seven “Hamilton” companies, in addition to the one on Broadway, performing at the same time in multiple American and international cities. Ticket revenues, over time, could reach into the billions of dollars. If it hits sales of a mere $1 billion, which “Hamilton” could surpass in New York alone, the show will have generated roughly $300 million in profit on the $12.5 million put up by investors. (There are many eye-popping numbers to contemplate, but maybe the most striking one is this: The show is averaging more than $500,000 in profit every week.)
* Call for Papers: Faulkner and Hemingway conference at the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. I was just down there to give a talk and had a fantastic time.
* New digital journal, thresholds, co-edited by Fran McDonald and Whitney Trettian. Here’s the CFP for the debut issue:
The debut issue of thresholds will focus on the theme of the extraneous. We seek manuscripts that deal with the extra, the foreign, or the strange from any angle. We welcome contributions that combine the creative and critical in their approach, and are eager to consider work that is experimental in both content and form. Final submissions will be comprised of a short piece (a maximum of 7000 words) accompanied by a series of fragments. Please submit 400-word abstracts and a brief bio to thresholdsjournal@gmail.com no later than May 15, 2016. Final essays will be due July 31, 2016.
* Elsewhere on the Duke alum beat: Huge congrats to Ainehi Edoro and Brittle Paper, which is now part of the Guardian!
* Protest and Power at Duke. Duke Students End Sit-In in President’s Office. A Lawsuit, Unmet Demands, and Coloring Books: Inside Duke’s Sit-In. A Guide to the Allen Building Takeover Collection, 1969-2002.
* The point is to implement an authority structure that can control public universities under permanent austerity and in the absence of a growing and rising middle-class. Culture wars are good for discrediting particular sources of sociocultural knowledge like ethnic studies, feminist studies, or Middle Eastern Studies. Budget cuts are good for taking the whole public university sector down a few notches. But to reengineer a static enterprise, after decades in which their boards failed to maintain the state revenues on which the system was built, public university governors need the audit and assessment practices that Europeans have long called New Public Management (NPM).
* In a case showing the reach of college sports corruption, a former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi instructed his assistants to complete junior college coursework for recruits.
* Jacob Brogan reviews the first issue of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther. And here’s not the only one!
* If you’re not, you should really be reading The Vision.
* Can you imagine, just for a moment, being a Chancellor of a university—a position with an enormous amount of responsibility to an incredibly wide range of stakeholders—and have someone interrupt you with a ‘No Whining!’ sound effect while you are trying to describe how many staff members you’ve had to lay off and what programs you’ll be cutting, with no end in sight? Would you have an existential moment of crisis where your inner voice conceded, “Oh my god, I’m an adult”? Well, I guess the ‘flexibility’ everyone wants for Chancellors doesn’t apply to their actually speaking without permission and an approved message.
* Questions for the #4c16 crowd.
* To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of lines for male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.
* Incredible narrative about a professor allowed to return to their job at UCLA after egregious sexual harassment. And it’s not even the most unbelievable story of an unrepentant predator allowed to walk free with no significant punishment I’ve read this week.
* Yes, apparently Zack Snyder has the same carte blanche to make Justice League, even after turning the first-ever movie starring three of the biggest, most popular superheroes in the world into a film that analysts believe won’t even make a billion dollars worldwide. Maybe that still sounds like a lot of money, but you know what actually made a billion bucks? Tim Burton’s needless 2010Alice in Wonderland film. If you put Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman together in a live-action movie for the first time ever, don’t you think that movie should probably outgross Iron Man 3?
* My sense is that militarized drones, those machines for remote seeing and killing known in military jargon as “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” should be understood to signify an end of empire in two senses. First, an end as in conclusion, or terminus. Hannah Arendt argued that proliferating death is not a sign of an emerging or persisting hegemony but its waning: “rule by sheer violence,” she notes, “comes into play where power is being lost.” This means that the assassinations proliferating in the name of the American phase of accumulation are the sign not of its strength but its incipient weakness; never mind autumn, we could say that drone war is a sign of the coming winter. Second, I mean an end in the Aristotelian sense of telos, or purpose. If we take seriously the fact that empire is best understood not as a culture or as a discourse but as the monopoly on putatively legitimate violence—the stretching of the state’s power over life and death past the boundaries of its “own” populace—then the power of sovereign decision crystallized in globally operated, remote assassination machines is the very essence of empire: its telos, or end. President Obama’s now-infamous “kill list meetings” sharpen to an obscene purity the American state’s power of judgment over life and death beyond its own citizenry and constitute the distillation of imperium as such.
* Never say never again: ‘Speedy Gonzales’ Eyed As Animated Feature At Warner Bros.
* New Jersey University Was Fake, but Visa Fraud Arrests Are Real. Fake New Jersey University Established by Cops to Catch Visa Fraud Has Pretty Good Job Placement. Fake, real, real, fake, let’s not quibble — are they hiring?
* The ideology of the future: Kiplinger’s presents 20 Amazing Ways Life Will Be Different in 2030.
* The Future Happened 56 Million Years Ago.
* Plants Taking Over New York City Is What Will Happen When the World Ends.
* At this Florida jail, the inmates are also zookeepers.
* How to Write a History of Video Game Warfare.
* Prestige TV is a nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake: Dexter return to television confirmed.
* My next screenplay: Radioactive boars are running wild and breeding uncontrollably in the northern region of Japan contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
* Bernie Sanders Is Even Less Competitive Than He Appears.
* Bruce Springsteen Cancels North Carolina Concert in Protest of Anti-LGBT Bathroom Bill.
* Our prayers answered, Paul F. Tompkins was finally on Harmontown. I’ve also really been loving the back catalogue of Hello, from the Magic Tavern and (at long last) Welcome to Night Vale after a sojourn through It’s That Episode. Non-podcast news after the link!
* Now more than ever, it’s time for Animaniacs.
* So does this: The Warriors Are Now Long Shots To Win 73 Games.
* Saddest of all: The New Jersey Swamp Dragons? It almost happened.
* Not for me, but maybe for you: LARB has a Grantland-style sports spinoff.
* Grant Morrison was right! Science Says Superman Should Be Black.
* This seems pretty plausible, honestly.
* And I don’t need to tell you what’s coming. Every Cool Detail We Spotted in the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer.
Good Morning, It’s Monday Morning Links
* Paradoxa has put up Mark Bould’s introduction to issue 25, on “Africa SF.” My article on Octavia Butler’s Patternist series is in this one.
* “Sharing economy” companies like Uber shift risk from corporations to workers, weaken labor protections, and drive down wages. Against Sharing.
* Run the university like an insane person’s idea of a spa.
At Auburn University in Alabama, for example, students can soak in a 45-person paw-print-shaped hot tub or scale a 20-foot wet climbing wall before plunging into the pool. Designs for North Dakota State’s facility, on which construction is scheduled to begin next year, include a zip line that students can ride out over the water, a 36-foot-diameter vortex of swirling water and a recessed fireplace on an island in the middle of the pool that students can swim up to. A small “rain garden” is planned to mist lounging students.
* Meanwhile: The ruins of the latest horrible trend in academic misspending.
* Colleges’ Pursuit of Prestige and Revenue Is Hurting Low-Income Students. Why Neoliberal Labor Practices Harm Working Students. Professors on food stamps: The shocking true story of academia in 2014. edutech woowoo, now and forever.
* Marc Bousquet remembers when #altac was a trap.
First, statistic plucked from academic journal where the writer didn’t pay to pass the paywall. Also, a biased survey from a company with countless vested interests. It’s official: the above trend is slightly more common than you thought.
* How to Tell if You’re in a MFA Workshop Story. How to Tell If You Are In an Indie Coming-of-Age Movie.
* 9 college freshmen dead in alcohol-related incidents in first weeks of new school year.
* Better Teachers Receive Worse Student Evaluations.
* King Richard III was probably hacked and stabbed to death in battle, according to a new study.
* What the 17th Century Can Teach Us About Vaginas.
* The second Harmoncountry tour will come through Chicago. November 1.
* When superheroes fight cancer.
* Where are animals in the history of sexuality?
* Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal.
* From what you have heard, was the shooting of an African-American teen by law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri justified? 55% say yes.
* And everyone is mad at Adam for making what seems to me to be the most obviously true observation about protest marches: they don’t work.
Thursday Morning Links
* There’s Literally No Evidence That Restricting Where Sex Offenders Can Live Accomplishes Anything. The article goes on to suggest these kinds of laws may actually be worse than useless by increasing recidivism.
* According to the Cato Institute, more than 9 percent of reports of police misconduct in 2010 involved sexual abuse, making it the second-most reported form of misconduct, after the use of excessive force. Comparing that data to FBI crime statistics indicates that “sexual assault rates are significantly higher for police when compared to the general population.”
* Bill for Ferguson enforcement coming due.
“All this workforce out there has to be fed,” he said. “We used up all of our tear gas and pepper spray.”
When you factor in the coming police brutality lawsuits I don’t know that Ferguson will be able to survive as a municipality at all.
* Against a leftist Hamilton. Almost makes you feel Founding Fatherless. We’re Founding Orphans.
* Trolls drive Anita Sarkeesian out of her house to prove misogyny doesn’t exist.
* DNA tests show that much-praised Chicago cop stuck gun barrel in suspect’s mouth.
* There’s (still!) hope for a Deadwood revival.
* Sprung from the pages of Harmontown, Schrabbing hits the mainstream.
* Through the looking glass: A Nevada gun range today defended having children fire automatic weapons despite the fatal accident at a nearby shooting range that occurred when a 9-year-old girl was unable to control the powerful recoil of an Uzi she was shooting.
* Vox issues a classic non-retraction retraction on its controversial David Chase story.
* I’d always wondered why I often have the urge to take a nap immediately after ingesting caffeine. It turns out I’m just really in touch with my body.
* And on the local art beat: Whenever there is a discussion about public art in Milwaukee, it often begins and ends with bellyaching over Mark di Suvero’s “The Calling.”
Tuesday Links!
* Ian Bogost on moralism and academic politics: The Opposite of Good Fortune is Bad Fortune.
* This week on Studio 360: Will Sci-Fi Save Us?
* The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program.
* They say there are no heroes anymore, but I’ve decided not to promote any of the truly horrible things people have been saying about Gaza. You’re welcome.
* Lazer-guided metaphors about America in 2014: FEMA Wants to House Migrant Children in Empty Big Box Stores.
* Or this one: Luxury Condo’s “Poor Door” Is Now City-Approved.
* The Globe and Mail has a powerful piece about Huntington’s disease and the right to die.
* UC Regents approve pay increase for university executives. Top UC coaches earn twice as much money as top UC brain surgeons. Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?
* In recent years, a handful of community colleges in that state have outsourced the recruitment and hiring of adjunct instructors – who make up the overwhelming majority of the community college teaching force – to an educational staffing company. Just last week, the faculty union at a sixth institution, Jackson College, signed a collective bargaining agreement allowing EDUStaff to take over adjunct hiring and payroll duties.
* Segregation and Milwaukee, at PBS.
* A recent random spot check of hundreds of arraignments by the Police Reform Organizing Project showed that in many courts around the boroughs, 100% of those appearing for minor legal violations — things like taking two seats on a train or smoking in a train station — are people of color.
* The nation’s top gun-enforcement agency overwhelmingly targeted racial and ethnic minorities as it expanded its use of controversial drug sting operations, a USA TODAY investigation shows.
* Sun Ra Teaches at UC Berkeley, 1971.
* There’s a place in Cornwall where LEGO washes in with the tide.
* Historical Slang Terms For Having Sex, From 1351 Through Today.
* Five Former Players Sue NFL Players Union Over Concussions.
* In praise of UNC’s anti-grade-inflation scheme.
* Holy NDA, Batman! One of the nation’s largest government contractors requires employees seeking to report fraud to sign internal confidentiality statements barring them from speaking to anyone about their allegations, including government investigators and prosecutors, according to a complaint filed Wednesday and corporate documents obtained by The Washington Post.
* First a LEGO episode, now a Futurama crossover: The Simpsons really wants me back. It’s been fifteen years, dudes, just let me go…
* How does squatters’ rights fit into Airbnb’s business plan?
* This Woman Has Been Confronting Her Catcallers — And Secretly Filming Their Reactions.
* Art Pope vs. North Carolina.
* Red Klotz, who led basketball’s biggest losers, the Washington Generals, dies at 93. A Statistical Appreciation of the Washington Generals And Harlem Globetrotters.
* “So, what have you learned in your many years of toddler torture?” “They hate it.”
* Dan Harmon on Paul F. Tompkins’s Speakeasy, with beloved Milwaukee institutions like the Safe House and the Marquette University English Department warranting mentions. Now, for PFT to finally appear on Harmontown….
* Now, please hold all my calls: the next episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead comes out today…
This Feels Terrible
Neil asks Jeff what he thinks about Erin and Dan getting a puppy together.
“That dog, I can fucking guarantee it, is going to be the shittiest dog in the world,” Jeff says. “Dogs are very susceptible to the personalities of the people that raise them. If that dog is sane, healthy, and happy, I’ll buy everybody that’s watching this a fucking drink made of solid-gold cowboy hats.”