Michael Oman-Reagan | Footenotes

June 28, 2010

That Round-Up I Wrote Recovering from Pride – 6/21 -6/27

Oh Commonsers,

My poor head aches, my shoulders are red with fury and my feet are exhausted – but what a day for a parade eh? Hunter and Baruch were out this year. I was hoping CUNY would have a float but it didn’t happen so I’ll make you a deal, right here on Footenotes; If we can talk CUNY into putting a float in the parade next year I’ll liveblog on top of the thing. Nothing sexier than a shirtless blogger.

I can’t remember if I saw these last year or not but it looks like the storied rainbow flag has some regional competition:

Personally, I like ’em. I was going to post photos of the Hunter and Baruch groups and these new flags that were everywhere, but my camera didn’t make it back home with me. Ah well – I hope it met another nice camera of the same gender and had a good time.

Alright alright, you get it, enough about my weekend.

The Blogs!

Thing were busy this week, I love it. We started off with a post from Michael Smith @msmith at It Cannot Be Trivial about his works on cross aesthetics. As I’ve mentioned before, the back-story on a work of art is often of more interest to me than the work itself. I think part of that comes from the fact that art is so often a subjective experience and yet it can create this plutocracy of ‘taste’ that may or may not just be a reflection of gallery reps and auction house interests. To hear the story of how a certain piece came to exist can really open up a work and give the viewer a place in it that was somehow closed before.

After I reread that little paragraph it started to look like I was saying I didn’t like this week’s display. To the contrary Ive been crazy about crosses regardless of their religious dimension since I was little. I was a spooky kid.

Speaking of crosses and spooky stuff, Michael Oman-Reagan had two posts out this week. The first was an early bird reminder about the AAR’s meeting in Atlanta this year. I know we have a couple of religion groups and programs here on the Commons so take note. The second was about Congress getting all nosy and bothering Steve Jobs. Turns out the gummerment is concerned about whether Apple might be overstepping it bounds with its Location Services features. Honestly I didn’t even know that was a feature and after hearing about it I still don’t know how threatened I supposed to feel. I mean if Jack Bauer can just triangulate a cell-phone call to find anyone on Earth then I’m doomed as it is.

Next up in my queue of blogs to cover…oh…uh…so about what I said up there about print being dead…sometimes I just run my mouth without thinking. Apparently we’re all missing Book Expo America. Librarianship in Lower Manhattan blogged about this weird book-lover Xanadu with free booze and librarian worship. Awesome. Also – who knew that Kathleen Collins @kcollins , one of our own, had a book signing there? You have to blog about this kind of thing so we can show up!

Turf Wars @Akendall checked in and gave us an update on the Icelandic excavations. Turns out there are sheep and clay pipes buried in the earth. I’m excited to the see the video out of there and whatever else they managed to pull out of the ground. I’m a dork about that kind of thing. I do think we ought to start a pool here on what he’s going to find. My money’s on a sword. I don’t know why, it’s just a feeling. Come on folks, step right up and place your bets.

Maura Smale @msmale was up in Connecticut giving a presentation on a game she created called Quality Counts. Please don’t turn you game loose on Footenotes. We’re like dinner theater here: bad dinner, bad theater. That being said, she titled the post ‘Still in the Game’ and something struck me as familiar. Did you really reference late Steve Winwood?

Linda Wadas @lindawadas from over at ‘For the benefit of all sentient beings’ pointed out a couple of kinds of vetch that popped up in her yard. You can’t eat ’em but they look pretty.

And finally this week we’ve got a couple of new things from the Community Team.

Scott Voth @scottvoth – resident Wiki overlord – made a great post about integrating wikis into your blogs. This is a great resource if you’re using your blog for classroom work or online courses. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it, but I’m off to do that after we wrap up here. You can always message Scott with wiki questions, he’s here to help!

Sarah Morgano is bringing a new feature to the Commons that I’m really excited about: 5 Questions With… This week she talked to Adam Wandt @awandt about the Commons, blogs, and Twitter. Got something to say – go find her! Otherwise she’s coming to you…

and between Apple Location Services and her all around Jack Bauer-ness you can’t hide.

See you next week!

1 Comment

June 7, 2010

Late Edition 5/31 – 6/10

Otherwise known as ‘The Round Up I Wrote on Monday Morning Because I Spent All of Last Night Waiting For Godot”

It’s a long story, it’d bore you.

Let’s see, what happened this week in the blogs…

For starters there’s a new blog in town. Michael Smith @MSmith launched IT CANNOT BE TRIVIAL, which I gather is going to be an introspective project as he combs through a lifelong collection of his work. Beyond that it’s also shaping up to be the Commons’ first blog on the visual arts. There were two knock out posts this week; an eponymous post about using his work to subvert a rather stubborn Father’s particular definition of ‘Art’ and a follow-up piece about the intersection of the pencil and neutron. I can’t wait to see more and thanks for bringing this work to the Commons.

I’m tempted to use this as an opportunity to talk about my favorite state’s decision to ‘whiten’ the faces of minority children in public school mural, but I’ll exercise some restraint.

No, really, I promise.

Aaron Kendall @Akendall wins best summer prize. He’s going to be blogging (and filming!) about an archeological dig he’s involved with in Iceland for the summer. In short, having a better time than me. I don’t actually know anything about Iceland except that it covered the earth with a dark cloud of ash a couple of month ago and occasionally has government sponsored fairy exorcisms, but on some level that just makes the place better. Oh, and obligatory Bjork:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUNDkiRkrtk&feature=related[/youtube]

Michael Cripps @michaeljcripps posted an outline (and a call for help) for using blogs in an upcoming course…

Joseph Ugoretz @jugoretz I’m looking at you.

Timothy Wilson @twilson posted about Jack Miles over at Franglophone. In full disclosure I raced over there and geeked out in the comments when the post went up earlier. If you haven’t read any of Miles’ work it’s great for the summer. Heavy without being oppressive and more than relevant considering how much the word ‘God’ gets tossed around in political discourse. His literary critique of religion is also poignant without requiring any advanced knowledge of literary criticism or technique. Also – I love the French/English approach of Franglophone. I’m trying to dust off my French and the blog is a great way to dredge up all those forgotten verbs that are knocking around in the back of my head.

Wrapping up the week, Tony Picciano @Apicciano called out a David Brooks piece in the Times this week. I think I’m supposed to be unsettled by the fact that David Brooks is making doey-eyes at Obama’s education strategy. I think I might also kind of agree with David Brooks…so I’m not totally sure I’m glad I read the op-ed.

Whatever man; giant oil spills, 8 years in Afghanistan, Israeli/Palestinian/Turkish/Aid Flotilla the Middle East, Rush getting married again, that other volcano in Iceland…getting on with David Brooks for one op-ed might not be the end of the world.

Oh and bloggers, what happened to my posse? If you haven’t graded those papers by now they probably aren’t getting graded at all so get back to blogging!

See ya next week!

4 Comments

May 23, 2010

The Round-Up I Wrote While You Were Watching ‘Lost’

I knew I wouldn’t get home till halfway through ‘Lost’. Tomorrow I get to sequester myself from all media and phone calls until it finally downloads and I can catch up with the rest of society. So while I suffer let me comb through the blogs this week and see what’s going on around the Commons.

First up, Tamar @tamarzilkha over at blogging politics took some time to consider whether the immigration laws in Arizona we’re really all that bad. I’m going to go with yes. Always a fan of acronyms, I tried to the crack the title code. Stop the BS Department of Homeland Security was my first guess. With a little influence from all the poetry going on over at Carl James Grindley @Grindley and Tim Wilson’s @twilson blogs I felt I should try a little harder though and decided on ‘Sundry Things Have a Dozen Hearts Severed’. Don’t blame the art.

Speaking of Carl James Grindley, this week’s poems we’re particularly nice. Coffee Shop is my favorite so far. I thought the poem a day madness from April was a breakneck pace, but it looks like he’s going to come close to keeping up the pace in May.

Appalachian Anthropology had another post up this week. I really love blogs like this that annotate a larger work in process. Although I might not ever get to read the final work that comes out of the process, it’s such a pleasure to watch someone have really personal experience with their research and share that over the course of project. I feel like this is the best way to use a blog in some sense, not so much as a public journal, but at as instrument to record the ways in which the self becomes integrated into the fabric of their own efforts.

Linda Wadas @lindawadas over at For the benefit of all sentient beings brought us some ducklings! More than cute ducks was a reminder that spring is here, which I need to remember because it was a long, long winter.

Michael Oman-Reagan @omanreagan reposted a Pogue’s Post from the Times about IT security overkill that kicked up some conversation in the comments. The Pogue piece was funny but made an excellent point about overkill. That being said it was especially well timed on the heels of news this week that Todd Davis of Lifelock, you know the guy who posts his social security number on his TV commercials talking about how his service keeps your identity safe…has had own identity stolen 14 times since. (Thanks Metafilter!)

To wrap things up I just want to say – Get better soon Tony Picciano!

and…

Congrats to the Commons – we passed 1,000 members sometime this weekend!!!

1 Comment

April 24, 2010

Things I Learned About Myself on the Commons…Round Up!

Well, first I learned that I can’t remember if ‘About’ would be capitalized in a title for a blog. I’d go grab my copy of Strunk & White but…you know.

More importantly I learned:

Mary Carroll is my new hero.

Apparently I’m buying an Android.

I am a Twitter moron.

And…

I don’t go to enough Black Metal shows.

Let me explain.

So I started to read all of the blogs for this week’s round-up and things got off to a great start with Mark Carroll’s Always a Bridesmaid. I was basically stopped cold in my tracks when I got just one meager sentence into the post and read:

“I decided I would Nora Ephron them with my morning coffee.”

Never in my life have I seen Nora Ephron turned into a verb. Genius. So genius I didn’t get it at first. Was Mary Carroll going to reveal the identity of Deep Throat or was she trying to land a gig at Huffington Post? Nobody cares about Mark Felt anymore (Nixon who?) but the writing was great. Tender when it needed to be, acerbic for the rest. I have to say though, couldn’t you just Modge-Podge some of your old acting posters all over your husband’s sculptures?

The rest of the post brings up a good point about online and blended courses, and what we lose as educators when the classroom turns to pixels. In our rush to meld the internet and its endless features into a measured instrument for education we often let our enthusiasm overrun an appreciation for face time. Not to get all Martin Buber, but those breakthrough moments are hard to see on a Facebook update.

Speaking of Facebook updates, I mean Twitter, I finally caved and signed up. I was reading Sarah Morgano’s post at Commons Connections and started to feel a little left behind. I’m following four people and they’re all co-workers. Epic. I’ll be sure to blog about my life with Twitter as I get the hang of it. Fortunately there are a lot of great resources around the Commons for getting up to speed. So what is this number sign # thing supposed to do?

Foolishly I thought I was inciting violence last week when I ragged on Apple products to Michael Oman-Reagan, resident Mac guru at the Grad Center. Turns out he’s just as unhappy as I am. He made a post this week about Steve Jobs’ touchy feelings on porn. Apparently King Steve doesn’t want smut on his products. No surprise there, that’s long been the standard at Apple, but it does raise some interesting questions about who gets to shape morality in this age of open source. Is market ubiquity the same thing as censorship? Are Apple products so good looking and seductive that we’re not even tempted by anything else? That being said…we all remember what happened to Betamax.

Anthony Picciano from Tony’s Thoughts is away at a blended learning conference so no links this week. Hopefully on his way back we’ll get a post about what was going on there. Maybe they addressed some of the issues brought up at Always a Bridesmaid.

Helldriver was back this week blogging about the Immortal show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. First off, any black metal show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple sounds rad. That place must be charged with like 150 years worth of super secret Masonic ritual stuff. We’re lucky the Earth didn’t split open and unleash a thousand winged Dan Browns all over Brooklyn. More importantly, this:

“They absolutely exploded when the lights went down, and the shadow of the drummer appeared behind the kit, and then the other two members of the trio sprang from the wings in a miasma of noise and smoke. They banged their heads and made devil-horns. They knew all the words, and “sang” them, too, as surely as if the lead singer had said, “Now, boys and girls, aspirate along with me …”

Seriously, whatever you were doing that night wasn’t half as fun.

Finally – Carl James Grindley is just about done with Poetry Month. I’m not exactly sure why this makes me happy, but it works on the same level as when I watch the marathon run right through my neighborhood each year. For no real reason other than the thrill of it I just stand there waving my stupid inflatable TMobile balloon as the athletes slug through. You’re almost there!