New Media

Here's something new. Some mad genius is currently at work tweeting Top Gun, in its entirety, frame by frame, in all of its homoerotic glory.

Every half hour, another still appears on the twitter feed of 555 µHz. It is up to the bar scene right now. 

This is one of the strangest and most wonderful re-purposing of a film I have seen in a very long time. It is a super slow-motion screening. It is non-performance art.

It includes the subtitles in the screen-captures for those of us who haven't memorized absolutely all of the dialog from the movie.

Somehow this novel treatment of the too familiar manages to create something of interest out of nothing. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Transference, Countertransference, and Search Committees

My most recent stint serving on a search committee has coincided with teaching a class on Freud. The intersections have been instructive.

There is a strange collision that happens as the fantasies and desires of the search committee members are projected onto each of the candidates in turn and find, or fail to find, some reflection or connection.

Oddly, it seems to me that the candidate plays the role of therapist to the committee rather than vice versa. The successful candidate is the one who best manages the transference of the committee members as well as their own countertransference onto the department and the imagined job. Wishful thinking runs rampant at every turn. This includes the projection of fears which are no less reliant on fantasy than are the projections of hope.

Richard Parker

Richard Parker was the name of a character in Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, who is shipwrecked and cannibalized by other survivors.

Richard Parker was the name of an actual cabin boy who was killed and eaten by others in their lifeboat in 1884. This led to the R v Dudley and Stephens criminal case that set the precedent that necessity is never a defense for murder.

Richard Parker was the name of the Bengal tiger in Life of Pi.

Richard Parker was also the name of one of the characters in Weekend at Bernie's.

Evidently, both truth and fiction are very strange. Q.E.D.