alarming knowledge
Paper is finished! Yay! Now I have three days before I have to start working on my final paper for my Hitchcock class...
I am currently running on about 1 hour of sleep.
Any bets on if I am going to fall asleep at work or not? (If the price is right I will.)
And now, your moment of zen:
In Bombingham, Grooms suggests that camera images create an incomplete representation of American life, no matter how much influence these images exert over Walter’s perception of America. Sturken writes: “Photography, film, and television help define citizenship in twentieth-century America” (26). I came of age in the 1990s, thirty years after the fictional events of Grooms’ novel, but like Walter, I too have watched Forbidden Planet, I too know how Mr. Tibbs sounds and acts. But as time has progressed, new camera images have emerged to serve as America’s screen memories. Whereas the flying saucers of Forbidden Planet now seem quaint and trapped in the 1950s, I willingly suspend my disbelief when I watch movies like The Matrix. I quote entire conversations from The Simpsons; I confidently assume that someone I just met will laugh at and understand these references the same way that my friends do. But rarely do I stop and question what the camera images I encounter through television and film are not mocking or glorifying. Even the word Bombingham serves as a screen for the thousands of complex personal experiences experienced by Birmingham’s citizens during the Civil Rights Movement. Just because Grooms has written his story down, is his representation of a African-American child's experience in 1960s Birmingham any more accurate or truthful than a camera image?
I am currently running on about 1 hour of sleep.
Any bets on if I am going to fall asleep at work or not? (If the price is right I will.)
And now, your moment of zen:
In Bombingham, Grooms suggests that camera images create an incomplete representation of American life, no matter how much influence these images exert over Walter’s perception of America. Sturken writes: “Photography, film, and television help define citizenship in twentieth-century America” (26). I came of age in the 1990s, thirty years after the fictional events of Grooms’ novel, but like Walter, I too have watched Forbidden Planet, I too know how Mr. Tibbs sounds and acts. But as time has progressed, new camera images have emerged to serve as America’s screen memories. Whereas the flying saucers of Forbidden Planet now seem quaint and trapped in the 1950s, I willingly suspend my disbelief when I watch movies like The Matrix. I quote entire conversations from The Simpsons; I confidently assume that someone I just met will laugh at and understand these references the same way that my friends do. But rarely do I stop and question what the camera images I encounter through television and film are not mocking or glorifying. Even the word Bombingham serves as a screen for the thousands of complex personal experiences experienced by Birmingham’s citizens during the Civil Rights Movement. Just because Grooms has written his story down, is his representation of a African-American child's experience in 1960s Birmingham any more accurate or truthful than a camera image?