viz.

Image Credit:  Hulu

Glee’s return last night to television with their new episode “Hell-O” not only served to get my students excited this morning before class, but also demonstrated the utility of using rhetorical concepts to analyze the musical genre.  In this unit of my class my students are considering how kairos informs musical performances.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

As everyone reading this blog knows, I love random bits and pieces of pop culture.  Jezebel is one of the websites I visit to indulge this love, and they did not let me down last week.  I’ve been saving this since then, and though I know it may be a bit late to write on this, I couldn’t resist bringing this to everyone’s attention as a kind of alternative archive in its own right.

Image Credit:  A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections

I thought I’d step back from the contemporary pop culture discussions today to look into two archives with a more historical emphasis:  the Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection and A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections.  Both of these collections offer extensive resources for instructors in eighteenth-century literature, politics, art, and culture.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Radical Software

H/T:  Chris Micklethwait

As Noel prepares to lead a Best Practices for Digital Images workshop here at UT, the rest of us in the Visual Rhetoric group hope to make some of this work public here on viz. for others to use.  One website that presents some interesting work done in the 1970s that theorizes the use and creation of digital/video media is Radical Software.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

H/T:  Hampton Finger

Lucky for you and me that before I started working on my blog post today that my friend Hampton asked me if I’d seen the new OK Go video for “This Too Shall Pass,” and thus I stumbled onto a much more interesting debate than any engaged in by any Texas Republicans running for the governorship.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from The Atlantic

Every time I sit down to write a blog post for viz, I struggle not only to think up exciting titles but to find striking visuals to decorate my posts.  As we all know, the picture that illustrates the story plays a role in helping to draw meaning from the text.  The above picture from The Atlantic shows a good relationship between the two:  the sign in the foreground looms ominously over the house to stress the anxious idea implied by the headline “Foreclosure Sales Trap.”  However, there are times when the visuals work to imply something that the text doesn’t warrant.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from NBC Olymics website

I’ve loved watching figure skating since I was a kid enjoying the movie The Cutting Edge. This meant that I used my free time last night watching the men’s figure skating short programs.  My attention was drawn not only by free time, but also by the extensive press coverage given to the American figure skater Johnny Weir in the last month, especially related to his decision to wear fake fur to the Olympics after PETA threatened to protest him.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Youtube

Since almost everybody else on the Internet is commenting on this year’s Super Bowl ads, I couldn’t resist offering my take.  The obvious issue with the Super Bowl ads this year is their fairly blatant sexism.

Image Source:  Up in the Air website

During the break I ended up watching Up in the Air at the Alamo Drafthouse on a Thursday night.  While driving home, stuck in traffic, I suddenly drew a mental connection between my physical position (waiting to pull into traffic on busy South Lamar) and the movie I had just seen.  Up in the Air centers on the adventures of George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham, a man who dreams of reaching ten million miles traveled on the road for his work.  By necessity, the movie features a lot of airport scenes.

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds!  After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz.  I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all.  My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”