Chad rocks the funky beat.

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Originally uploaded by Trevor_.

From our going away party in San Diego.

Food in tubes. Spacey.

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Originally uploaded by Trevor_.

Sara and our funky new lamp.

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Originally uploaded by Trevor_.

Okay, now I understand why flickr is so damn cool.

Oh, and, my book was published this week.

While Amazon is saying it is not yet available, I have been assured by my editor that my recent book project, _Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Tradition_, is currently winging its way to various targets, including my postbox on campus.

For whatever reason, Blogger seems unfriendly toward Mac-versions of Explorer and is not allowing short-cuts for linking, etc. Ah well, just another reason to install Mozilla. Until then, here's the link:

http://wsupress.wayne.edu/film/worldcinema/nestingentcgn.htm

Strange to see it finally in print. Andy and I have been working on it, in fits and starts, for nearly two years.

We have rejoined the connected

Fresh from his entirely necessary religious sabbatical, the cable technician came by today and fixed our internet connection. So we now have internet at home. This allows us to do a number of things at home that we couldn't before, such as internet banking, e-mail, job searching, and most relevant to this context, blogging. We are also now able to download pictures from our camera to our computer, so we are quickly approaching the point where I will be able to upload pictures to this blog.

Given the slowness at which I negotiate technological puzzles of this sort, I have a recurring image in my mind of these factors falling into place in much the same way that tectonic plates slowly collide over hundreds of thousands of years. Some day soon, they may align in such a way that Sara and I will be back up to par with our connectivity in San Diego.

Now, with links!

Check out the newly added links section in the sidebar section. The first bit of work I've done with html in quite some time, even if it was just a matter of cut/paste. Just four links so far, but all fine people worth giving a moment of your reading attention.

Queen Margrethe II versus Missy Elliot

Don't mess with Dronning Margrethe II. She'll slap you down, and I don't care how gangsta you act on MTV.

Raining in Denmark

The snow has mostly melted in Copenhagen. I've been using the ice on the chain of lakes around downtown as a gauge for whether Spring is on the way. There almost entirely thawed at this point, and it's raining. Rain is good, I think, because if it were colder, it would be snow. Meaning that Spring would definitely not be on the way.

But I've been fooled before. The lakes almost thawed last month, and then snow dumped on us for three days. The weather has been doing this a lot lately. Warm, cold. Thaw, freeze. I'm starting to understand what T.S. Eliot meant when he said "April is the cruelest month," and it's only March.

The great thing about weather in Denmark is that, like Seattle, when the weather gets good, people really flip out. Everybody is outside all the time, on days that are even only moderately nice. What San Diego would consider a cold day. You get out and try to soak up as much vitamin D as possible, to remind yourself that life is good and people are often wonderful. I love that about Denmark.

Current Research

Thanks to Mark F., the text to my recent research seminar can be found here. The text is meant for listening audience, so I've taken some short cuts with citation, etc. But anyway, here it is, as a Word doc or as HTML.

Music you should check out

I'm happy to see that my excellent friend, Mark D., is enjoying one of my favorite bands, Tegan and Sara. You should be, too. My current fantasy band line-up is Tegan and Sara opening up for The Frames.

Easter holiday

Denmark pretty much shuts down for the week surrounding Easter. I find this utterly hilarious, as Denmark is also one of the most unreligious nations in the world. Most Danes will go to church exactly three times in their life: christening, wedding, and their own funeral. I think there's also the equivalent of first communion in there somewhere, but not everybody does that, either. So meanwhile, the cable guy can't come fix my internet connection at home because of this all important religious holiday, which he'll likely celebrate in the very same way that I, a firm atheist, will celebrate it: by watching some television, drinking a few beers, and maybe going for a trip to the countryside. I shouldn't complain, I know. I won't have to teach for over a week. But still, I love the idea that Danes even have religious holidays. I mean, who do they think they're fooling?

Postscript

As a nice postscript to my last post, I can report that one of my colleagues just told me that my work is based on 'kiddie culture,' and that I should work on driving my students out of my classes so they can return to 'real culture.' She also called me the enemy. On the whole, I thought the conversation went quite well.

Off to study more kiddie culture.

Research

So yesterday was my big 'Research Seminar.' The students in the department have set up an ongoing series of faculty lectures each year that orients them with what we're doing in our research time. As I'm the new kid on the block, there was a lot of interest in what I was going to say. Not so much, I suspect, because of an interest in the topic so much as an interest in what kind of colleague I'm going to be and whether I'm going to fit into the various plans for development of the department that are ongoing. I felt a bit like an East Coast debutante at her coming-out ball.

The title of my paper was 'The Business of Fun: Globalization and Integration in the Entertainment Industry.' If I can figure out a way to post it on-line (it's about 17 pages), and if anybody actually cares, I'll post a link to it someday.

I've gathered from my colleagues that my position here was a contested one from its origins. As with academia around the world, funds are tight when it comes to hiring new, potentially permanent faculty. There were conflicting ideas about what kind of a posting would best suit the department, and after the battle of deciding what kind of scholar would be hired came the battle of whether the department would actually hire somebody who fit that profile. Evidently, I did. Which means that I feel even more like I'm under the microscope. Everybody has been perfectly nice and pleasant to me, so I don't really think there's any aftermath of that sort. But it did crank up the anxiety before my presentation, so much so that I got a migraine and thought I might have to cancel. The power of positive thought and a lot of caffeine saw me through.

Which brings me to the point of actually discussing my research project. Before I took a break to work in the private sector, my research was of a very heavily theoretical kind, and what's more, in an area of theoretical work that is highly disputed by many other theorists. However, after a year in the corporate world, I'm finding that my enthusiasm for that kind of work has pretty much dried up. So much so that my presentation yesterday contained little if any overt theoretical positioning. Instead what I offered was a pretty cut-and-dry assessment of the business and organizational challenges contained in the task of integrating the film and game industries in the age of globalization. It's a topic that's most certainly on the mind of a lot of studio executives on both sides of the equation, but for whatever reason, not many film or game scholars seem to be talking about it at all. Scholars seem to be mostly focusing on theoretical issues that, frankly, not many people working in either industry have a lot of time to worry about. Which leads me to wonder if game theory will end up the same way as film theory: completely detached from and often hostile toward the very industry that generates its texts. It seems unnecessary, and most likely, counterproductive.

However, the concern that keeps going through my head is that, by going down the road I'm on, whether I'm going to alienate my fellow department members by confirming their worst fears about hiring a scholar so far out of the normal domain of 'English.' The problem being, I can't really fake an interest in something else.

It's a conundrum.