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Courtesy of cnn.com

• Beyonce does interview with bleeding feet
• Newest Obama ‘loves to chew on feet’

New York man accused
Schilling says season over
Oil rebounds on word

Doctors say Woods should
Ohio teacher burned cross
Floating foot a hoax

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As I type these words, the lead story on the CNN website is a classic example of “good” moral panic reporting about the “blistering pace” of murders in New Orleans. Nearly one per day this month alone, and with a per capita rate that makes other alleged hotbeds of violent crime look placid and calm by comparison. The story itself goes to great pains to claim that the rising tide of crime in the City That Care Forgot predates the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. The lesson? New Orleans has long been a crime-ridden, dangerous city. Always. If things are bad there right now, it’s got nothing to do with the storm or its aftermath. Nothing at all.

It’s an especially curious — and disturbing — story, given that today is the two year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast. The “murder board” story isn’t a breaking story or time sensitive news, after all. And, barring the appearance of a fast-breaking bit of news, CNN could just as easily have devoted their lead spot to an anniversary piece: “Katrina: Two Years Later” or “Rebuilding the Big Easy” or some such. It’s a pretty safe bet that when the six year anniversary of 9/11 rolls around in two weeks, CNN (and much of the rest of the mainstream media) will quite happily run such anniversary pieces. Stories with sentimental titles like “We Will Never Forget” or “The Day Everything Changed” or “Where Were You When . . .” There will be plenty of patriotic flag-waving. And New York will almost certainly not be the target of “blame the victim” reporting.

Of course, the “problem” with journalism that would remember Katrina in the same fashion that 9/11 has been (and will be) is that such reports would need to acknowledge that, two years later, large swaths of New Orleans are still in shambles. That the federal government completely failed — in both the short and the long term — to respond effectively to the first massive disaster to strike the US in the post-9/11 era. That thousands of people displaced by the storm and the flood still can’t go home again.

And heaven forbid that CNN should point fingers at the government for failing to serve the public during a major catastrophe.

Or maybe just the celebrities. Accidents only become important, after all, when celebrities are affected by them. Eleven people were evidently hurt in the accident discussed in the story — one of them seriously — but because there are “no findings to suggest anyone famous was involved in the accident,” CNN can happily spend most of its time talking about Tom Cruise.

It’s about time that advertisers started taking women seriously as intellectuals, rather than as pretty faces and hot bodi–

–waitasec. Nevermind. This is, after all, an ad for silicone breast implants.

Even better, though, is the that the site linked above gives you the chance to click through for a larger version of the same image . . . that turns out to be the same size as the original image. Which doesn’t do much to inspire confidence in what the product will do to enhance one’s . . . intelligence.

[Tip o' the linking hat to Stay Free!.]

[Spoiler warning: Follow the links in the post below at your own risk, since those will reveal the names of the films in question . . . and that may mean you learn more than you want to know about the plots in question.]

Right before Margaret left for six weeks of New Zealand summer, we saw two films in a row that included a comic scene where a family corpse was moved from one place to another. In both cases, the scene in question wasn’t something either of us would have predicted about the movie when we entered the theater.

Since Margaret’s return from the Land of Relentless Scenic Beauty, we’ve seen two films in a row that ended with a crying baby being transported through a raging battle. What’s more, in both cases, the battle in question involved a guerilla uprising against a fascist state. And, again, this wasn’t necessarily something one could necessarily have guessed in advance.

So now we’re wondering what quirky theme we’re in for next. Movies where people mistakenly eat the family pet? Movies where the hero(ine)’s big secret if revealed in the backseat of a parked car? Movies where Perry Como records figure prominently in the soundtrack?

[Possible mild spoilers ahead, depending on just how sensitive you are to these things.]

Just came home from seeing The Departed at the glorious second-run theatre around the corner. And it was, in all sorts of ways, classic Scorsese: it’s not a film for folks who flinch at a little blood (’cause there’s more than just a little to be found here), but it’s sharp and engaging and taut . . . and it’s tough to make a 151-minute film seem taut.

Still, as I walked home from the theatre, I found myself wondering about the film’s opening moments, which feature footage of white-vs.-black violence from the Boston busing furor of the 1970s, with a voiceover from Jack Nicholson’s character, Frank Costello:

I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Years ago we had the church. That was only a way of saying — we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a fucking job, we had the presidency. May he rest in peace. That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this — no one gives it to you. You have to take it.

And then, after that, except for one brief line (also in the opening few minutes) from Matt Damon’s character, blackness effectively disappears from the movie as a subject of any significance. There are no scenes where Boston’s Irish mob tangles with crosstown black crime bosses, no visible racial tensions involving the movie’s lone black police officer, no further utterances of the N-word from Costello (or anyone else): for the last 145 minutes or so of the film, it’s simply a white man’s world, and no one else really matters much.

Which, to my mind, makes that opening speech and the accompanying footage all the more disturbing. Maybe the idea was to convince us that Costello is a cold-hearted bastard — except that Costello is also clearly supposed to be (and is) charming and charismatic (while still being a brutal crimelord) . . . and there are enough early scenes of Costello behaving like a violent badass to render any opening “tough guy” speech unnecessary to establish his credentials as such. So those initial words and images feel much more gratuitous than anything else: an excuse to have the biggest star in the movie drop the N-bomb and accuse black folks of being lazy, and to recirculate old images of rocks being thrown at (presumably) “lazy” black schoolchildren. And then, having done that, we can sweep all the blackness that’s just been invoked back under the rug and get on with the “real” business of watching six white men (Baldwin and Damon and DiCaprio and Nicholson and Sheen and Wahlberg) rack up an impressive body count to determine which of them is the real Alpha Male of All Boston.

The tagline above is at the heart of the University of Minnesota’s latest “Driven to Discover” public relations campaign. It’s by no means the worst such campaign I’ve seen,* but it does seem to cut against the grain of the U’s public aspirations to become “one of the top three public research universities in the world.” Setting aside the problems with that campaign,** there’s a pretty big gap between saying “we want to be the best university in the world” and “we want to be just like Google.” There are certainly many different benchmarks that one might want to use for measuring and comparing universities, but I doubt that the ability to transform significant research findings into pithy soundbites is likely to improve Minnesota’s ranking very much. To a certain extent, I can understand the desire to add the proverbial human face to what many people see as a large and impersonal institution. But there are probably better ways to pull off the “human face” trick well than to try and make the U into a search engine with a face . . .

. . . especially given what a search engine with a face turns out to be: i.e., Ms. Dewey. As an example of an online game with a semi-slick interface, Ms. Dewey is very distracting and very disturbing, all at the same time. Someone spent an awful lot of time and energy scripting the dozens (hundreds?) of responses that the site’s namesake — a 21st century version of an old B-movie trope (the professional librarian who’s really an uninhibited sex kitten) — offers to various searches, and so there’s a certain ELIZA-like quality to the site: i.e., it’s easy (at least for me) to spend more time playing around with quirky, random, and/or perverse “conversational” gambits — just to see what sort of response you’ll get — than to play things straight and take the program at face value.

To be sure, part of what makes the site work is that some of those pre-canned responses are pretty damned funny. The site’s gender politics, however, remain a bit tricky: “Ms. Dewey” (who’s portrayed with style and sass by Janina Gavankar) offers up the occasional dose of (post)feminist self-reflexivity about how brainy women with multiple degrees get paid more to be eye candy than to strut their intellectual stuff . . . but most of the site still leans heavily on Gavankar’s ability to purr and coo suggestively for an audience of straight guys. And I’m still trying to sort out just how I feel about the site’s racial politics: Ms. Dewey’s style has more than a little racial/ethnic ambiguity to it, which is both cool (insofar as people of color aren’t often depicted as encyclopedic repositories of infinite knowledge) and not so cool (insofar as women of color are routinely depicted as fetish objects).

In the end, though, the site is still nothing more than Microsoft’s “Live” search wrapped in a fancy Flash interface*** . . . and all that flash and style ultimately makes Ms. Dewey into a pretty lousy search engine. If you’re serious about going online to try and learn about something, you’re probably not going to be happy with a search process that requires you to sit through 10-20 seconds of Ms. Dewey’s schtick (however amusing that might be at times) before you’re actually given a long list of sites in a box that’s (a) way too short, (b) difficult to scroll through, and (c) impossible (because of that Flash interface) to grab URLs from without copying them by hand.

Similarly, if you’re serious about promoting a university — any university — as a source of first-rate knowledge and cutting-edge research, you probably don’t want your sales pitch to imply (even obliquely) that your school is long on flash and short on substance.

And, to warp Richard Stallman’s words a bit, it’s free as in “free beer” and “free speech.” More details in the following announcement from Ted Striphas and Kembrew McLeod:

Ted Striphas and Kembrew McLeod announce the release of the complete contents of Cultural Studies 20(2/3) (March/May 2006), a special issue on “The Politics of Intellectual Properties.” By special agreement with the publisher, Taylor & Francis, the issue can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.indiana.edu/~bookworm and http://kembrew.com/academics/research.html.

About the issue: This special issue of Cultural Studies aims to create a genuinely interdisciplinary scholarly discussion of the politics of intellectual properties. While many areas of study pay lip service to the idea of interdisciplinary work, one remarkable thing about recent intellectual property research is the way it has produced an actual cross-pollination of scholarship. Drawing together prominent scholars from multiple disciplines, this issue of Cultural Studies speaks to many significant topical intersections–from library science, computer science, and the biological sciences to popular music, film studies, and media studies, to name a few. In addition to presenting compelling, cutting-edge research, this issue explores what cultural studies can contribute to public conversations about the politics of intellectual properties.

Issue Table of Contents:

1. Ted Striphas & Kembrew McLeod, “Introduction—Strategic Improprieties: Cultural Studies, the Everyday, and the Politics of Intellectual Properties”
2. Adrian Johns, “Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science”
3. McKenzie Wark, “Information Wants to be Free (But is Everywhere in Chains)”
4. Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe, & Lewis Kaye, “Your Second Life? Goodwill and the Performativity of Intellectual Properties in On-Line Games”
5. Steve Jones, “Reality© and Virtual Reality©: When Virtual and Real Worlds Collide”
6. Jane Gaines, “Early Cinema, Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’arroseur arose”
7. Gilbert B. Rodman & Cheyanne Vanderdonckt, “Music for Nothing or, I Want My MP3: The Regulation and Recirculation of Affect”
8. David Sanjek, “Ridiculing the ‘White Bread Original’: The Politics of Parody and Preservation of Greatness in Luther Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.”
9. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, “Out of Sight and Out of Mind: On the Cultural Hegemony of Intellectual Property (Critique)”
10. Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Afterword—Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto”
11. Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Just Say No: Negativland’s No Business”