Quentin Tarantino’s fictional Shosanna Dreyfus in Inglourious Basterds wasn’t the first to substitute a film for showing to a Nazi military crowd. Though there were no luminaries in the audience, that honor probably goes to Nikola Radosevic, who recounts in The Tramp and the Dictator how he switched movies shown to a crowd of German soldiers in Yugoslavia, putting up Charles Chaplin’s lampoon of Hitler, The Great Dictator, instead of the expected fare.

Perhaps, were he alive today, William Holden would be another of those big stars playing small parts in Quentin Tarantino films. He would be perfect for it: understated, but able to convey a wide range of emotion with a look, Holden always seemed about to hit the skids—in life, and in his film roles. In addition, he wasn’t scared of movies not for the squeamish.

Writing on John Huston for Life magazine on 9/18/1950, James Agee began:

The ant, as every sluggard knows, is a model citizen. His eye is fixed unwaveringly upon Security and Success, and he gets where he is going.

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[Hi Folks... I've been away for far too long. Thing is, I haven't been writing about the issues I used to, but have been concentrating on a book on the movies of Quentin Tarantino that will be appearing soon from Praeger. Now, I am continuing to write on film, and have even started a blog on that (www.aaronbarlow.com). I'd like to share my posts here.

That title, adapted from a Raymond Carver short story, should be the question at the heart of all discussions of Quentin Tarantino's new Inglourious Basterds. The movie sits at the intersections of film and our world, history and fantasy, and reality and myth. Yeah, it has unpleasant aspects (what Tarantino film does not), but that, too, is part of another of the crossroads at the heart of the film, the one between bad and good—or, to put it another way, between the human tendency to see what we do as fine and dandy and what the other does as evil.

Yesterday, a copy of the screenplay of Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, arrived in my mailbox, from Amazon.com.  I read it today.  I haven’t seen the movie yet (it opens in the US next Friday—and I will certainly be watching an early showing, popcorn on my lap), but I am ten times more interested in seeing what Tarantino does in filming his script than I was two days ago.

Dim changes approached. He rolled over to see: faint colors crawling slowly under the corrugated-zinc door. Little light came with them, dull, sliding grays reaching tentative, translucent fingers through outlined cracks. He imagined that they were seeking sneaky purchase for pulling themselves into the room. Furtive, their movement were, certainly. He watched through slitted, sleep-encrusted eyes while, cautious and silent, they explored new means of encroaching upon the cinderblock chamber where he had been sleeping.

“But it’s just a false dawn, not real day, not so soon.” He closed his eyes again as his cracked lips mouthed the words that soothed him. “Nothing dangerous here, not for awhile.” A pause and a sigh. “It shouldn’t be so bad, anyhow: merely one more start; another aching morning.” But then he groaned, thinking ahead. “Cool, yes it is, for now, but calling the scalding sun.” Another pause, and an expelled breath: these prefaced a mumbled attempt at irony: “Just another coming day here in the Sahel.”

He stretched, then, and pretended to relax, turning his head away from the door, trying to recover the quiet he’d felt before hearing his own words.

But the world, oblivious, wasn’t going to allow that.

Merciless and unyielding, it sent the sudden sharp whoosh of a military jet roaring low overhead, jerking his eyes wide, demolishing any sense of quiet in the coming African dawn and shooting a spike of pain, a missile into his forehead.

All the talk of a ‘jobless recovery’ going on gives me the heebie-jeebies. What bothers me is that people get left out of the equation. The economy becomes nothing more than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the idea that if it goes up, things get better for everyone. A rising tide floats all boats sort of argument.

Somehow, I suspect, that’s related to ‘trickle down,’ even though the water’s going in different directions.

Now, I ain't no economist, and I ain't no economist's son—but I do have eyes, and ears, and I do live in the United States.  And the people around me, for the most part, are those  who make (probably) something well under $100,000 a year.  For the most part, we've lived reasonably comfortably for the past twenty years.  Our homes have increased in value steadily even though our income has not.  Our children graduate from college (a good sign for the future) and, though they are generally saddled with debt from student loans, jobs (until recently) have been there for them.  With a little luck and careful purchase, many of them were able to buy their own homes, were able to use the increasing value of their homes to offset the burden of college debt.

What follows is a presentation I will give at the Popular Culture Association annual meeting in New Orleans, LA this coming Wednesday:

"I don't see what the big deal is. Everybody steals from everybody; that's movies.” From Swingers (Doug Liman, 1996), that line comes just as homage to Reservoir Dogs commences. And it’s true, though the ‘if everybody does it, it must be OK’ logic is a little strained. It’s not the purpose of movies to be original, but to be entertaining. And to be entertaining, one must work with audience expectations, which means working with the successes of the past. Instead of creating something new, one must make the old new—itself an old piece of advice. ‘Make it new,’ ordered Ezra Pound, revitalize. That’s where art lies.

What follows is a contribution written by Aaron Barlow for a roundtable at the the Southern States Communication Association annual meeting in Norfolk, VA on April 3, 2009:

Collaboration depends on acceptance of certain assumptions, of course, including that both parties bring something of value to the effort. Given that and my title, you might think that I am going to argue against collaboration, saying that the amateur journalist just doesn't bring enough, that he or she isn't needed, even in the contemporary atmosphere of change and expansion in journalism. But I am not claiming that. In fact, I am not going to propose anything about collaboration at all, for I don't know what the best route for the future is, or if collaboration might be part of it. What I do know is that the amateurs, right now, carry the power in interactions with professional journalists; it is they who control the situation. So, instead of arguing that amateurs are the ones in need (though they may well be), I am going to suggest what many bloggers and citizen journalists have already suggested, that it may be that the professional is no longer be needed, that the fears of journalists over the past decade concerning the future of their profession are justified. Collaboration in reporting, as many see it, may merely be a way of keeping on life support a profession that has seen its day. Perhaps we should, as some have suggested, lay it to rest along side carriage-makers, milkmen, and Linotype operators. Starkly put, what may be feared by journalists for their careers may not be something that the general public need find troubling. The reporter running around shouting “The end is near” may be rousing up nothing more than a yawn. And the public may even be right to yawn.

The following is a paper I will be presenting at the Appalachian Studies Association Annual Conference at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio on Friday, March 27.

There are, of course, similarities between the Appalachian college student and the Brooklyn one, but you won’t find them if you go looking for racial or ethnic parallels, religious ones, or even economic similarities. There may be a few superficial racial relationships, but these will prove about as significant as lumping together the Basque and the Belgian. Some of the Christian denominations may share names, but the individual churches struggle with problems distinct to their environments. And poverty in the city and in the country mean completely different things. The similarities, instead, lie in traditions of trouble and struggle, of loss, of the internal battle between desires to give up and push on, of fatalism that somehow still pushes one to fight against fate, of a ‘borderer’ toughness that Appalachia has retained and new immigrants must develop—at least until they assimilate or establish a strong enough enclave to maintain themselves by themselves—and, sadly enough, of failure. Oh, and one more: All of the groups have found themselves on the receiving end of stereotyping, insult, and discrimination.

Perhaps Nicholas Kristof (whom I do admire) hasn't been keeping up with his John Dewey.
In today's New York Times, he writes:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.
Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

He worries about this because "we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices" and implies that the situation is new to the Web--conveniently forgetting that New York City, a century ago, had more than a dozen major newspapers (not to mention all of the smaller ones, the newsletters, the magazines, the flyers) and that readers were feeling exactly the same then, and acting exactly the same.

What follows is the text of a short talk I will give as part of a roundtable on Saturday, March 21 at the New Jersey College English Association Annual Conference, Jubilee Hall, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ at 2:30. The session is called "New Media and the Literary Artifact."

Rather than an extension of our old texts of granite, solid and unwavering, what we have gained, through new media, is a 'book of sand.' As in the Jorge Luis Borges story, it is now impossible to find the first or last page, or to return to a page one has found before. Or, at least, to be sure it is exactly the page we saw before. Text has lost its solidity, textual scholarship its underpinning. You may think I'm stretching the analogy, but think again—by the time you do, the world will be different. And text will be different, too.

Yesterday evening, I realized the mayor was coming.

It wasn’t hard: Department of Sanitation workers were cleaning the sidewalks in front of my house, my neighbors’, and across the street. Normally, that’s left for us homeowners to do. That, coupled with signs stapled to trees and posts stating “No Parking Saturday –Police Department,” made it clear that something unusual was happening.