Tommy's Page

I will be continuing to blog at:

http://morahan.blogspot.com/

for the forseeable future.

Focal Point will be show at the depot on the large screen projection at 5 p.m.

Mad Men sucks the viewer into the virtual world of a 1960's New York advertising firm from the first sound and image experienced. The soundtrack has a stunted pre-emptive quality to arrest our attention to the discomfort of the unpredictable nature of a large advertising firm in the sixties in New York. Coupled with this is the minimalist presentation of the introduction sequence for the show. Stark vector lines and silhouettes litter the screen as a male image plunges from on-high into the abys… Continue

[This is originally a post for a class in BECA, SFSU but if you ignore the text in brackets then you can experience it as it is - i.e without class implications.]

It is (intuitively in the Gitlin sense) a fact that the elderly members of our society are treated with less than optimal respect. In the vein of intuitive discovery (that Gitlin has used in his post on pop culture which we have read for this class) I assert that it is easy to convince people that the elderly deserve to be appreciated… Continue

(This is a response to two readings in BECA-770. The readings are from Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 1965 and Todd Gitlin, We Build Excitement.

Todd Gitlin says that his, “intuition is that there is something revealing and disturbing in a culture many of whose most serious talents propose to cast away feeling, to confine themselves to the surface, to beg questions of purpose and authenticity.” He seems to be a proponent of intuition and feelings. These, one could argue, a… Continue

This is a "response to readings" for the class BECA 770, Writing for New Media.


Television was still new into the early fifties. Adorno’s article How to Look at Television was published in 1954. Assuming that it took two years for his writing to make it into publication, Theodor W. Adorno was seeing the potentialities of television clearly, very early on. Perhaps he was ahead of his time.

A red stop sign signifies that we stop driving to look both ways and then continue carefully. Many… Continue

McCain took the stage walking slowly, smiling, from within a stark semi-cirle of light on a huge stage. The re-configured stage, in the supposed image of a town-hall setting, was more akin to a U2 concert stage. He walked "the plank" to be "among the people" and fool us into believing he was close to us. Similar to Bono and his stage theatrics, McCain girated and invited us into his world (Not!)but never did we "feel" close to him. Perhaps if he sang a verse of "I still haven't found what I'm lo… Continue

Source:
Goldman, R. (1982). Hegemony and managed critique in prime-time television: A critical reading of "Mork and Mindy"
Theory and Society, 11(3), pp. 363-388.


Response to the article for BECA 770, Writing for New Media with Dr. Marie Drennan.


Television is entertainment. Television is social commentary. Reading television texts may be ambiguous. The author in this piece achieves his objective by analyzing the text of Mork and Mindy to show that it is a social commentary with contradictio… Continue

Arianna Huffington is featured on the cover of the September, 2008 issue of The Commonwealth (The magazine of the commonwealth club of California). Her article “What happened to the right?” is an attempt to make sense of the “GOP she accuses of having gone off the deep end – taking the country with it” (excerpt from “Right is Wrong,” May 19, 2008 quoted in this piece).

In her attempts to understand this “going off the deep end” she attributes much influence to the media. And she asserts that th… Continue

Blather, blather, blather...

"Isn't she lovely, isn't she wonderful." With these lyrics being blasted out to the Democratic Convention, Michelle Obama smiled for the cameras and stood tall and proud and patriotic. Her broad smile, her carefully choreographed speech, her tall stature and her small kids rounded out her definition as a wife, mother, sister and daughter - all gender biased definitions (embedded in her speech).

And then she stood to the side to "greet" Barack on-screen - the main m… Continue

“Back in 2000, when Obama was an Illinois senator, an entrepreneur named Robert Blackwell Jnr. hired him to be his lawyer, paying him a monthly retainer of $8,000 – big money for a part-time legislator with an annual income of just $58,000.”

A few months later Obama wrote a letter to state tourism officials in support of funding a table-tennis tournament which was run by one of Blackwell’s companies. The funding was awarded to the tune of $320,000 and Obama earned $112,000 in fees from Blackwel… Continue

How do the media affect our health? Psychologically and physically?

A team of researchers lead by Dr. Michelle Wolf is investigating the effects of media on the individuals’ body image (How the individual perceives their own body). We have interviewed many and conducted focus groups from many different backgrounds and sexual persuasions. Professor Wolf has been conducting studies in Body Image and the Media for over ten years and she started out her media career at The University of Texas at Au… Continue

Net Neutrality.

Introduction.
(1) Net Neutrality as we know it must be protected. (2) People using the internet must be made aware that having access to information is of very little benefit unless you actually use that information. (3) The internet is not accessible to everybody and this must be rectified. The world population should be given free and easy access to the information on the internet everywhere.


1. Net Neutrality, neutral and free access to information over the internet, as it… Continue

Maybe I’m a little too cynical but this whole oil thing may be getting out of hand. Many critics of the President still claim that the US forces are in Iraq because of the rich oil deposits there. I’m not clear, in relation to the oil in Iraq, what benefit it may be to the US.

We see the price of oil increase and increase and increase etc…. (Shouldn’t it be getting cheaper if that’s why the US forces are there or am I missing something?) Exxon Mobil announces the greatest profit ever for (for o… Continue

Saint Patrick's holy mountain was getting busy as I drove east away from my original home in the West of Ireland yesterday. Garda (the Irish police) barricades and parking restrictions were in place on the usually quiet roadsides. The weather was very cooperative and warm as the locals prepared to welcome the tens of thousands of pilgrims for the annual ascent to the top of Croagh Patrick (Croagh comes from Cruach, the irish word for mountain). Children licked pokes (ice-cream cones) to cool dow… Continue

Recession.
On visiting Ireland (Eire) for the second time this summer it seems apparent that the recession has reached home. Everyone is aware and many are affected - but the Irish humor is still intact as is the weather and the people.
Recession is no longer the headline of past weeks but is moved to the main text of media as a discussion and as an issue to be solved and weathered. Reality sets in.
The Taoiseach of Ireland asserts that Ireland can weather this storm.

U2's Sky Bar.
An Bord Plea… Continue

Sometimes baseball is baseball. Wiffle ball is just wiffle ball. And sometimes kids are kids and they should be applauded for being innovative, creative and exercising.

On the front page of The New York Times, July 10th, 2008 there is a story about Wiffle Ball in Greenwich Conneticut cutting in on the resident's lives.

In Greenwich Conneticut, a couple of teenagers took the initative to clear out some overgrown town property and invest a lot of time and some finances into converting the ground… Continue

Barack Obama says he stopped wearing his U.S. flag pin as a result of his "own carelessness".
On NPR's "All Things Considered," on June 30th, the show referred back to a previous interview
Barack Obama had done when he said that the flag pin had become a, "substitute for true
patriotism" after 9/11. So it wasn't really carelessness in the conventional sense - rather it was
a calculated act to make a statement. He said that the pin was not going to be his statement of
patriotism on his chest, ins… Continue

Landing in Ireland almost a week ago it was extrememly obvious that some things have not changed
in the 18 years that I have been gone regardless of the Celtic Tiger and its effects.
It was refreshing to be reminded of the real energy associated with the westerly winds and the
slanted rain as it washed refreshingly, windswept across my face in the early morning. What more
could a returning emigrant ask for after enduring a "pleasant" (considering) nine hour flight?

The Celtic Tiger, in its whim… Continue

In the Middle Ages "glass panes were so precious, the duke of Northumberland had them removed from his castle windows whenever he took a trip" (Sennett, 2008:99). By coincidence I happened to be reading this little piece at just about the same time I visited the exhibition of Dale Chihuly's glass work in the de Young in San Francisco. It gave me a simple but rewarding insight into the value or the historical significance of glass- i.e it wasn't always everywhere and available to all. In fact at… Continue