Works
Book Review – Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words, and Noise
A review of Sara Piazza’s book, Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words, and Noise published in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio…
OUPBlog: Prince & ‘The Other Eighties’
For people left out of the 1980s neoconservative vision of what America should be, he was a beacon, guiding us through this thing called life.
Alphaville: “The Same Old Songs”
This article, published in Issue #3 of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Alphaville, examines the recontextualization of 1950s rock in the form of “Oldies” in teen films of the 1970s and 1980s.
“Fixing the Fifties”
The chapter, published in the Rowman & Littlefield collection The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade, looks at both Reagan’s political speeches and pop culture texts from the period (Back to the Future and Family Ties) in an attempt to understand the implications of political and cultural mobilizations of nostalgia in the 1980s.
“It Was Something…”: Sadie Benning, Kathleen Hanna, and the Limits of Grrrl-hood
This essay, published in the collection _Singing for Themselves_, works backwards from the collusion of Benning and Hanna in Le Tigre to trace the connections between Sadie Benning’s celebrated video art and the music of Hanna’s Bikini Kill.
“A Pure Object, A Spectacle, A Clown…”
“A pure object, a spectacle, a clown…” was a companion to performance artist Neal Medlyn’s show “Wicked Clown Love,” and discusses the relation of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies to the fan culture surrounding horror-rap group Insane Clown Posse.
Raphael Saadiq’s Soul Memory
In Summer 2012 I curated a discussion on the open-access scholarly forum In Media Res as a part of their Theme Week on “Media Memories.” In this post, I explain the distinction between retro, as an aesthetic or representational style, and nostalgia, an affective response to contemporary historical and political conditions.
“The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Peculiar Sanctity of Fandom”
This article, submitted to a special issue on what media studies scholars term “Aca-Fandom,” centered on the tendency of recent media studies scholarship to inherently respect fan practices, despite the very real existence of fan practices that engage in symbolic and even material violence.
Negative Dunkalectics & “On Windows Closing”
In 2011 I joined the staff of Negative Dunkalectics, an often tongue-in-cheek look at the cultural and aesthetic world of NBA basketball.
The Re-Decade
Designed as a companion site and promotional vehicle for my book manuscript, I started The-Re-Decade on popular microblogging site Tumblr in late 2012.
