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The Austin Zen Center's Garden as a Model for Austin
(Image Credit: Jay Voss)Nothing sums up the best of Austin’s landscape gardening tastes like the garden at the Austin Zen Center. Located on West 31st Street between Guadalupe and Lamar, the Austin Zen...
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State-Craft or The Art of Leadership in George W. Bush's Paintings
Image Credit: Kim Leeson / George W. Bush Presidential CenterLast year, an adventurous hacker found and leaked pictures of paintings made by former President George W. Bush, including two revealing...
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Erasing Wyldstyle: Heteronormativity in the LEGO Movie
Artist Jason Freeny's LEGO Anatomy ModelImage Credit: hiconsumption.comIn my last post, I laid out the theoretical groundwork of biopolitics for a critique of the subversive potential of the LEGO...
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In Your (Type)Face: Part I
Image via Parimal Parmar, Bēhance.netI'm in the midst of the (long) process of building a digital magazine called Covered with Fur for Austin small press A Strange Object. This week I'm choosing...
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Bringing "Rip Van Winkle" to Life, Part II
Joseph Jefferson as Young Rip Van Winkle Image Source: WikipediaIn my last post, I began telling the story of how “Rip Van Winkle” came to be converted to film. The story is fraught with all of the...
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Processing Extraordinary Tragedy in Ordinary Days
Image credit: Fresno Beehive[Spoiler alert: if you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity of attending Ordinary Days, know that the following describes much of the play’s ending.]Manalive, the...
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Developing Austin for the Future
(Image Credit: austinchronicle.com)This is most likely my last post of the semester, and I thought I spend it writing about development trends in Austin. Anyone who has lived here for more than a few...
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Reaction Shots and Reader Response at the Purple Wedding
Image Credit: Cyndicyanide[Note: Spoilers below the cut.]As a Game of Thrones fan, I was pretty excited to watch this last week’s episode. It’d been a while since I’d watched, and the wedding of...
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What's Haunting Dove's Real Beauty Campaign?
Image Credit: People's LabEvery image is haunted by the excluded. Every social movement is haunted by flaws. After reading Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination...
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Bringing "Rip Van Winkle to Life," Part III
Image credit: Joseph Jefferson as Rip harryhoudinicircumstantialevidence.comJust as there are as many interpretations of a text as there are readers, every new adaptation of a text weaves and builds a...
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Casino's Law: Defending American Liberties in Personal Injury Attorney...
Image Credit: Screenshot from VimeoThe Super Bowl, with an audience of 111.5 million people, tends to be a place where the definition of “American” is equally invoked and contested. Not only do the...
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Lilo & Stitch: The Danger of Beautiful Stories
Image credit: captured from Netflix.comIf Frozen (as my previous blog argues) gleefully revises Disney’s traditional iconography, Lilo and Stitch does something far more interesting. Both are, in their...
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Shoal Creek: Perhaps As Resourceful As Urban Planning Gets
(Image credit: Jay Voss)The park that stretches along Austin’s Shoal Creek is pretty amazing when you think about it. Starting near Lady Bird Lake downtown, the trails and bikeways wind all the way up...
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Nudity, My Dear Watson: Sherlock and The Woman
Image Credit: Personal Screen Capture from Amazon PrimeBBC's ongoing show Sherlock is a present-day adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's nineteenth-century detective stories, and it gleefully delights in...
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Scopophilia in A Game of Thrones
Image Credit: Fanpop.comAn incessant struggle for dominance. A never-ending vigil against opposition. A fierce match of razor-sharp wits. A game, one might say, of thrones. Wait, no. I meant a game of...
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Pictures from Sochi
Photo credit: Morry Gash/AP via The GuardianEarlier today, members of the band Pussy Riot were attacked while performing in Sochi in front of an Olympic banner. According to The Guardian, none were...
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A Posthuman Selfie?
Image credit: Wikipedia, Mars Curiosity Rover's first selfieIn my last post, I recounted a history of some of the most iconic images of space which primed my reaction to the Mars Rover’s portrait of...
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Journey and Non-Referential Iconography
Image source: Thatgamecompany.Probably all illustrations, and certainly the animated images I’ve discussed in Frozen and Lilo and Stitch, come freighted with a vast history of associations. Striking...
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Small-Government Urban Planning Sometimes Negates Itself
(Image Credit: dfwfoodtrucks.com)There’s no doubting that Austin’s a great example of urban sprawl. Anyone who’s driven up Burnet Road on a shopping expedition, or down South Lamar looking for a...
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Convicting Capital Punishment in Art
Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny SubversionsWhen you live in Texas, you get used to people asking you to verify certain popular stereotypes: cowboy boots, country music, ten-gallon hats, and...
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Questioning the Gaze and Studying Ballroom Culture
Image Credit: WikipediaI was initially going to begin this rumination with the pretty dull introductory phrase “In Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning,” but before the virtual...
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Militant (Feminist) Grammarians
Cropped from image belowYou know you’re a huge nerd when multiple people from various corners of your life all forward you the same link, and that link is a bunch of diagrammed sentences.This snazzy,...
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The Most Democratic Selfie?
Image Source: eonline "By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these ‘heroes’ to ‘hold’ their...
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The LEGO Movie, Narrative, and Children's Play
1978 LEGOS Ad. "a toy that stimulates creativity and imagination for years."Source: Ourlifeintoronto.comSometimes, it’s hard to separate a film from the circumstances in which you watch it. In my case,...
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Searching for Wildflowers at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
(Image Credit: Jay Voss)With spring now fully upon us, and the last frost finally out of the way, plants are starting to leaf in the Texas Hill Country. And aside from appreciating the odd dogwood tree...
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The Building Blocks of Biopolitics: The LEGO Movie, Empire, and Multitude
Image Credit: ForbesNot only did seeing The Lego Movie (2014) lodge the parodic pop song “Everything is Awesome!” firmly in my skull, it also sent me scrambling for a way to intelligently theorize the...
View ArticleGreat Minds Leave Academia
This post has been removed by the DWRL because of concerns over rhetorical jurisdiction. In the event that it is revised for another DWRL venue, we will publish the link here.
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Bringing "Rip Van Winkle" to Life
Gif illustrating how a Phenakistoscope works Image credit: WikipediaIn adapting a book for film, a number of executive decisions are made: scenes are cut, metaphors are made visual, and wardrobes are...
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Generic Branding and our Culture's Values
Image source: Dissolve.comBranding and corporate marketing can be bizarre. Sure, there are the big brands, the Disney’s or Budweisers or Coca-Colas, whose very names evoke our day-to-day experience of...
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“Rueful Reluctance:” An Unwitting Cat Owner’s Search for Meaning Among Memes
Image Credit: "Nyan Cat-Pop Tart Cat," by Chris TorresLast week, my neighbor stopped by to tell me that he was moving, and that pets were not allowed at his new residence. With all due histrionics, he...
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