RMWMTMBM Archive

2012 Year in Music

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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Those Children Were Not Babies

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

“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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Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement

It’s been a little while since the inhabitants of Facebookistan got all fired up about something–  where are you now Kony2012?— so I was half-delighted and half-disheartened to see the newest brouhaha to hit the social media site, which I’m calling the Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement (FPD).  As these things tend to happen, FPD had been…

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Storytelling and Incredulity

The new film version of Yann Martel‘s 2001 novel Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and starring the  wide-eyed and captivating Saraj Sharma in the title role, is (exactly as the posters promise) an “epic journey of adventure and discovery.”  And that’s the problem with it. I read Life of Pi shortly after it…

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American Values Project Exhibition Gets the Greenlight!

After much Sturm und Drang for the AVP team, we’re happy to announce that we’ve finally managed to secure a location and date for our exhibit! So, mark your calendars: We’ll be staging the VERY FIRST exhibition of the entire American Values Project collection on MAY 5 at Marshall Arts gallery in downtown Memphis. May…

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The Vicissitudes of Netiquette

In the last couple of days, I’ve received a lot of criticism about this post, in which I solicited Dr. Vincent Hendricks (and encouraged my readers to solicit Dr. Hendricks) to grant an interview with me, for the benefit of his English-speaking audience, about the recent kerfuffle surrounding his decision to post on his website–…

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New “Comments Policy” at RMWMTMBM

Well, we managed to make it almost six whole years before having to address the problem of internet trolls on this blog. Not a bad run, all things considered. The practice of not “moderating” discussions or insisting on comment “approvals” has been intentional on this site so far. In my view, the delay caused by…

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Guest-Blogger Shiloh Whitney on the Hendricks Affair

[Introductory note from Dr. J: Hello, readers. Just a quick introductory note about today’s “guest blogger.” Shiloh Whitney (pictured left) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at McGill University. She submitted a rather long comment to the previous discussion taking place on this blog surrounding the Hendricks affair, so I asked her if she wouldn’t…

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American Values Project [Update]

A lot has happened with the American Values Project since my last update. We received a generous grant from Rhodes College’s Center for Outreach and Development of the Arts (CODA) to buy some new equipment, revamp our website and, most importantly, stage a physical exhibit of the project here in Memphis. CODA has been an…

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