Learning and Discovering: From Paper onto the Web

I love wandering through the Web. And I have a pretty standard routine reading every day the mainstream press online. It’s basically four titles: El Nuevo Día (elnuevodia.com), Puerto Rico’s main newspaper; La Repubblica (repubblica.it), Italy’s most important (together with Il Corriere della Sera); Spain’s El País (elpais.com, fabulous for its TV Series and Cinema coverage and maths & science); The NYT (nytimes.com, of which I read everything from recipes to films to book reviews); and The Guardian (theguardian.com). So, every week I have completed a pretty indulgent reading of all of them. [There are the RSS feeds too, through the friendly Feedly, and that’s another story.]

But I also love reading paper newspapers and stuff. When in Italy I indulge every Saturday with three fantastic complements to main papers: Robinson with La Repubblica, La Lettura with Corriere della Sera, and Tutto Libri with La Stampa. The former two have Twitter and Instagram accounts, and all have a wonderful paper version (online version comes at a cost and Robinson’s is not the same as the printed one). I love both, and I spend interminable time reading them. I brought with me a couple of issues of each, so this new year’s beginnings has seen a few discoveries started from paper. Which then go to the Web, and sometimes finish up again on paper or some other stuff. The fact is, I have often bits of information I conserve, archive or annotate that stem from the analogue world. This seems also a nice way to discuss and share them.

What Have I Learned So Far? Here come the annotations. Most of all regarding the figurative arts, which is fine, given in one week I’ll begin my stellar New Media course!

Volto di donna (1900). Ritratto di Paolina Biondi
Image: Public Domain
  • The short story The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson is a classic of American Literature. A sort of horror tale it tells a story about a weird lottery, whereby every resident of a village plays and only one gets awarded. But there’s more… When originally published, on the New Yorker in 1948, it received a record number of protest letters. Read it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery?verso=true
  • Then, there is Tanino Liberatore, a cartoonist, illustrator and mad genius. This is what Guillermo del Toro thinks:

Fact is, I have never read his comics. But I appreciate his dark, hard boiled style.

This guy is RanXerox

Last, and certainly not least, Hyperallergic reports that it’s Public Domain time for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue! By chance I had just named this most beloved music in my previous post on Manhattan (the film). So, starting now, we can remix the Rhap.

[Feat. image: “Ranx & Mast” by Dr Case is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0]

Posted in art, discovery | Tagged | Leave a comment

Manhattan (the film) and 2020

Well, it’s a new year. I’ve been watching a few Woody Allen films, lately (on the home screen), and I shot photos at some frames worth remembering. Thanks to subtitles, I got a scene’s context and dialog.

I thought these two sequences were perfect as a new year’s best wishes. Both are from his movie “Manhattan” from 1979, which I enjoyed again very much, albeit perhaps a little less that when I watched it for the first few times. Yes, I’ve seen it a few times, which is a rare thing, in that I usually don’t read things twice nor watch films twice–except a few.

The black-and-white quality of the photography, the opening and closing with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the Hemingway girl, a splendid Meryl Streep and a spectacular Diane Keaton give this film a unique feel.

BTW, I also watched the wonderful Interiors, for the first time, and I loved it. In fact, some scenes (particularly the sisters watching out of the window) seem to correlate with the beautiful Greta Gerwig’s Little Women of today.

Anyhow, the two sequences are self-explanatory, and come without comment.

From “Manhattan” 1979
Happy 2020, explaining stuff!!

And here comes the second sequence. This time, it’s the silhouettes of Woody and Diane Keaton in the Natural Sciences Museum.

From “Manhattan”, 1979.

And with this deep truth I leave you, reader. Happy 2020 to all.

Posted in films, nonsense | Tagged | Leave a comment

The PR Connection Podcast: Episode 11

Episode 11 PRConnection Podcast

In which Alan & Antonio deal with
strong cellular deficiency

[Originally published at http://prconnection.cogdog.casa/]

And they talk aimlessly about connection (quite rightly) and other high-level stuff.

Hello, planet Earth, do you hear? Instead of raising the bar, we have the lowest possible quality. Zero.

But I love these conversations a little more every time, because it’s nice to talk tech (and other stuff) with Alan. And please listen through the end since he has got a special surprise with the outro.

So this episode seems a weird radio program from the 70’s, with some joker at some place having fun of listeners.

The worst podcast ever.

How can I not worry, Antonio?

Charting our frequency? Seems to be increasing.

[What are we talking about?]

The battery. Welcome back. OMG. Talking disruptions.

And I keep forgetting the English language.

Radio… photography…

Tom Woodward‘s WordPress Timeline JS Plugin useful to visualize an interactive timeline of blogs.

And Fleabag??

I almost watch no tv.

What?

I Am Mine! Says Lucy Van Pelt

Then there’s Lucy. Of course the broken connections means Alan thinks I’m talking about the other Lucy from I Love Lucy. But no, at the time I didn’t know nothin’ about this Lucy #2. For me the one and only is the One From The Peanuts, a memory from my adolescence.

And talking about comics: You want the Italians? Diabolik, Satanik, Alan Ford, Jacovitti…

Max Bunker & Magnus’s Alan Ford: A weird band of detectives.
Image of Diabolik booklet with Jim Groom.
Il Giallo a Fumetti: Diabolik. From @jimgroom’s bavatuesdays.
Satanik comicbook cover
Satanik. Il fumetto dell’orrore. From Amazon.

Yes, Satanik was drawn by the very Max Bunker (Luciano Secchi) of Alan Ford and written by Magnus (Roberto Raviola).

Last, there is Jacovitti, a genius telling Western-style stories, with dumb cigarette-smoking horses, pencils, salami-on-foot and worms on the ground.

I learn that Alan looks at his browser’s cookies (to check privacy etc.)

Usage of facebook. Usefullness? I find myself saying:

No other medium to contact far-away friends besides calling them FTW??

Alan Tweets In ALL CAPS:

Then, there’s Terry Greene‘s podcast Gettin’ Air from VoiceEd.ca, which I (Antonio) will be soon part of, in the company of Terry and other much admired folks.

Not bad for a broken episode 😉

And that’s all, folks.


[Featured image from Flickr: “Broken” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ]

Posted in podcast, Syndicated | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Weekly Insta Post

The weekly Instagram from avunque.

Posted in photos | Tagged | Leave a comment

Beginning of semester

Yes, it seems like the semester just started.

“New Zealand Media & Entertainment Branding” by Unordinary — is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

We had a suspension of disbelief due to the passage of storm Dorian, which was going to pass through half of Puerto Rico and moved easterly later to miss us, fortunately. Classes were suspended a couple of days, and the semester’s second week was gone. Thus, yesterday felt like a new beginning.

But it was really the kick from Alan Levine’s impulse to record a new episode for The Puerto Rico Connection –our low-frequency podcast– and our doing so two weeks ago, that really put me solidly on the horse’s back. Why? Because Alan asked me about a few key questions about my New Media class and other stuff I’m doing, and so, such things acquired a life independent of me–some importance beyond my classrooms.

Shortly the episode will be available on the website and on Apple Podcasts or other aggregator. I think it came out pretty fine: he is such a kind master issuer of questions!

We’ll discuss in situ the details of the episode, but suffice it to say here that we talked podcasts and about the plan in my New Media class to have students do in small groups a number of episodes of the class’ podcast, La Situación— which they would plan, produce and distribute during the semester.

This class really motivates me and I consider it a privilege to share it with my brilliant students. So many experiences, from Podcasting to Una Foto Cada Día (the daily photo challenges we play with for forty days), from Instagram curation to Twitter class account management, to our curated database of shared Web content. The trip just started, and Winter is Sort of Coming (1).

Anyhow, this course is going to change a bit, since in my Department we’re having a revision. Bottom line, it will morph into a Digital Storytelling course (which of course it is already), but with some new stuff on data and their visualization.


(1) I refer to our hard Puerto Rican winter, of course.

Image: “New Zealand Media & Entertainment Branding” by Unordinary — is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Posted in courses | Tagged , , | Leave a comment