Gypsy boys-Truffaut movie etc
Gypsy boys-Truffaut movie etc
While I was waiting for the shuttle to go to the Dolapdere campus from the Kustepe campus, I happened [�happen to� is my favorite verb today] to eavesdrop chatting among the gypsy parking �employees�. They communicate through soccer. Soccer is a language for basic communication. Why no one studies soccer as a cultural practice in Turkey? I know there is a growing interest for soccer among intellectuals but I don�t think there is still a good ethnographic work on the role of soccer in Turkey. With my growing interest in the subject, I see that I have an expanding ability to produce immediate communication with more people from different backgrounds.. I know, I know this is a clich� topic and I do my own contribution to the clich� production.
We have screened Truffaut�s Fahrenheit 451 in the MED 101 class- first year Introduction to the Mass Media class- today. It is a disaster. Students were bored to death and I happen to face student unrest. This class is taught in 4 sections with 3 professors and 4 TAs. I am one of the TAs. While we were discussing what to screen, I objected to screen this movie but I was part of the minority. In fact, I was the only one to object. I like Truffaut and I see a joy of life in most of his films. But I find his attempts to deal with science fiction (oh the Alphaville case) helpless� We could easily find another movie which would have an easy narrative and which would not have a caricaturized TV bashing. But this is all about student-bashing. I begin to believe that most of my colleagues choose to underline their difference, to prove their intellectual superiority through making life hell for students (and then claiming how stupid they are) or through blind criticism of mass media products. I believe there is a relation between these two processes.
A columnist from Sabah, Emre Akoz castigated this attitude in a TV forum recently. I mean, how intellectuals position themselves through a constant non-constructive TV criticism. I think he was quiet successful in the polemic against 3 scholars, one of which happens to be the professor I am TAing for:)
