Category Archives: Uncategorized

Passion and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke … Continue reading →

Steven Peacock’s recent observation that many academic analyses of television too often become ‘systematic, determined to “solve” the text’s engagement with a specific subject’ is a timely reminder that our evaluation of television art would do well to avoid treating … Continue reading →

What to make of Boardwalk Empire? HBO’s costume drama set in the USA during Prohibition reminds me of one of those fascinating objects that often crop up on Antiques Roadshow. One can admire from afar the detailed textures and evident … Continue reading →

Last year John Caughie published an essay (in Screen vol 51 no 4 [Winter 2010]). Entitled ‘Mourning Television: the other screen’ his article characterised contemporary television in terms of decline, decadence and loss. I have responded to this elsewhere (Screen … Continue reading →

I am writing this at the desk of one of the staff writers for David Milch’s Luck in one of the many offices in the building complex where Milch’s Red Board Productions lives. The office and building is clean and … Continue reading →

One of the things the Coen brothers already knew that no doubt attracted them to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was the importance of theoretical physics for 20th and 21st century aesthetics. That the nature of matter involved … Continue reading →

As in the first Modern Warfare game Infinity Ward’s latest FPS delivers a fine range of military aesthetics, the sounds sights and movements of shooting over distances and using the environment as a palette for lethal human interaction. As in … Continue reading →

For the past seven months I’ve been running a reading group on Donald Sassoon’s 2006 book, The Culture of the Europeans, working our way through its 1600+ pages; yesterday Professor Sassoon himself turned up at the University of Queensland to … Continue reading →

I attended what turned out to be a somewhat bizarre event at my home university yesterday, a symposium on the past, present and future of cultural studies. The speakers were: Graeme Turner, who introduced the book he is writing which … Continue reading →

One of the many attractions of the You Suck at Photoshop is its visualisation of performance and subjectivity in the form of interaction with software. Juxtaposed with the brilliant vocal performance by Troy Hitch the mouse pointer’s manipulation of Photoshop’s … Continue reading →