Introduction
5
Entertainment Experience” and you will never think of the local mall in the same
way again.
G. Christopher Williams offers the first of the two musical offerings in
this issue. In “Losing Himself in the Music,” he says that Marshall Mathers (aka
Eminem aka Slim Shady) is the quintessential postmodern ar tist as he creates and
manipulates his identity through the musical expression of “I, me, and he.” More
than one persona is needed for best personal expression, and his works are an
expression of self, an extension of self which produces a blurring of “authentic
self’ and the self of his art.
The other music-based essay highlights the punk artistry of the Dead
Kennedys as ultra-contemporary vocal protest art. In the words of Dennis Russell
from his work, “STARS AND STRIPES OF CORRUPTION,” the “Dead
Kennedy’s works represent a frontal assault on what the group perceived to be a
heartless, dehumanizing, militaristic Reagan administration that was buttressed by
hypocritical and bigoted fundamentalist religion.”
In the sole offering based on television, “The Language of COPS,”
Milford A. Jeremiah says he created a “study of language in its social context.”
He now presents his findings in a brief commentary on the socialization of police
officers to their job as evidenced through their language, samples of which were
harvested through observation of the television show COPS.
And finally we have the “Carpenter Trio.” The pieces of B.R. Smith,
Shea G. Craig, and J. Robert Craig should be read as a unit. As the authors
requested, here is the summary of their work in their own words:
We decided to write the John Carpenter papers to celebrate the
25th anniversary of the release of his seminal work, Halloween,
in 1978. Several recurrent themes across Carpenter’s work
appeared to us. B.R. Smith discusses one of these resonant
themes: the origin of the evil mankind is forced to face
throughout Carpenter’s work. In his discussion, Smith finds
“that evil is over and over again portrayed as an actual, even
tangible, force,” and that the institutions designed to protect us
often only further advance the interests of the dark force. In his
paper, Shea G. Craig uncovers the often-utilized theme of
identity theft as a permutation of the invasion of the individual.
As he tells us, Carpenter hammers this loss of trust and identity
into certain of his titles, while showing us that mankind needs
to learn to work together to solve its problems and survive the
pending menace. Both papers note that, for Carpenter, evil may
be defeated, but only temporarily. One piece of the “Carpenter
formula,” according to J. Robert Craig, is his depiction of the
“Hawksian Woman” as a member of the group of people forced