Places and Spaces.

I am posting these here just so that I can show them to my SI students on Monday. These are technically both representations of the San Fernando Valley, but note how they are different from each other and also different from the reality we experience day-to-day. Those differences can be understood to be the differences between a place and a space.

(Karla Klarin, Valley View, 1984)

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Blues Bar.

Is it wrong that I have started telling my students that there is a secret restaurant under the library? That it has a full bar and a live blues band on Friday nights? And that they aren’t allowed to go there?

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The Ethos of Dentists.

I recently got to see some of the mid-term political ads that are running in not-where-I-live (they don’t bother running many political ads in Southern California) and it’s funny because in the Freshman English class where I am almost-a-teacher we have been dealing with pathos, ethos, and logos. Ethos is always a tricky one to understand. It is basically an appeal to credibility, like: 4 out of 5 dentists agree that brushing your teeth is a good thing.

Political ads though seem to use a different form of this rhetorical appeal. Political ads are more like: 4 out of 5 dentists agree that the 5th dentist is an asshole.

The really fun ads are the ones that invoke President Obama as the 5th dentist. Below I have written a midterm ad that the RNC should feel free to use, because it is as good as everything else they are producing, but also because it demonstrates the inversion of ethos that seems to just be the norm now.

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