Month: June 2024

Those Children Were Not Babies

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

In a press conference shortly after the horrible news of the Connecticut grade-school shooting broke, White House press secretary Jay Carney said: “There is, I am sure– will be, rather– a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I do not think today is that day.”  Carney could not have been more…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Redux

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 30 Day Song Challenge, 30 Day Song Challenge (The Sequel), 30 Day Song Challenge 2014, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

A couple of years ago on this blog, for the whole month of June, I participated in the 30 Day Song Challenge, a rather ingenious invention by some anonymous music-lover on Facebook.  The way the 30 Day Song Challenge works is that it provides one “prompt” every day– for example, “a song that makes you…

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2012 Year in Music

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 2012 Year in Review Lists, Dr. J's Lists, Music, RMWMTMBM Archive, Year in Review Lists 0 Comments

This has been a quiet year here on RMWMTMBM, but I didn’t want the year to end without my annual retrospective wrap-ups of 2012.  Following in the tradition of the last couple of years, I’ll break the lists up by topic, beginning with 2012 Year in Music. (If you’re feeling nostalgic, check out 2011 Year…

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2012 Year in Sports

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 2012 Year in Review Lists, Dr. J's Lists, RMWMTMBM Archive, Sports, Year in Review Lists 0 Comments

Legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi once said: “If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?”  In spite of the many ways sports serves as an apt metaphor for life, Lombardi’s sage reflection keys in on one of the important differences between sports and life.  Namely, in sports, they keep score.  On a scoreboard.  And…

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2012 Year in Politics

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 2012 Year in Review Lists, Dr. J's Lists, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Year in Review Lists 0 Comments

Election years are always crazy years for American politics.  They’re not always Clint-Eastwood-talking-to-an-empty-chair crazy, though.  Nor are they, as a rule, “legitimate rape”- or “binders full of women”- or “fiscal cliff”- or “austerity”- crazy, that is, so crazy that one requires a Crazy-to-English translator to watch the evening news.  And although American politics is never…

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Poverty Porn, Pre-Humanism and Beasts of the Southern Wild

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

Several weeks ago, I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild (adapted from the one-act play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar), the first feature-length film by director Benh Zeitlin and possibly one of the toughest films to characterize that I’ve ever seen.  Whatever other faults it may have– and I will get to those shortly–…

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Film of Exception: Zero Dark Thirty

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

I’m not sure exactly where to place the blame for the total disappointment that is the (Academy Award-nominated) film Zero Dark Thirty, which tells a based-on-real-events story of “the greatest manhunt in history.”  The hunted is, of course, al-Qaeda founder and mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks Osama bin Laden.  Zero Dark Thirty is organized as…

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The “Real” and “True” You

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Film, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

Last week, my Philosophy and Film class took up the theme of “documentary truth.”  In preparation for our Tuesday night seminar, students were required to choose one film from a list of documentaries (Grizzly Man, The Thin Blue Line, Night and Fog, Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Super Size Me, Ghosts…

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Concepts in Motion (or, Why You Should Assign Short-Films in Philosophy Courses)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

“I say that I do philosophy, which is to say that I try to invent concepts.  What if I say, to you who do cinema: what do you do?” –Gilles Deleuze French philosopher Gilles Deleuze famously speculated in Cinema 1 (1983) that what he called the “movement-image,” a unique creative product of cinema, makes it…

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I Bet You Gonna Find Some People Who Live in Memphis

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Memphis, Music, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Sports 0 Comments

Apologies in advance to my close friends and family, but the truth is that there is quite literally nothing in the world that I love more than Memphis. Thanks in part to the Grizzlies’ inspiring display of our city’s three most valuable homegrown resources– heart, grit, and grind– and in larger part thanks to the…

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