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The Burning Bush

Big Love, Smallville, and Messianic Fiction

The spring of 2011 marks the finale of two television series that have been keeping me company for several years, each of which I feel a little misty at the thought of letting go of. Beware, traveler: herein lie spoilers for Big Love and Smallville.

The protagonists of the two programs hardly seem similar, at a passing glance. Big Love's Bill Henrickson is a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist, a family man, and an entrepreneur. Smallville's favorite son, Clark Kent, is a monogamist of undetermined Protestant stock, single, and searching for the right career.

  

But scratch the surface a little (with Kryptonite, if you must), and it's easy to see how the two characters have more than a passing resemblance to one another. Even beyond generalities one could draw regarding each program's implicit statements about the American Dream, for example, each continuity's set of thematic elements mirrors the other so well, in fact, you'd think the writing teams were each cribbing from the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index. (And heck, if one subscribes to the Campbellian monomyth theory, as does your humble host, the popular wisdom is that we're all cribbing from it, all the time, simply by being part of our own culture.)

The Secret Identity

Both Bill Henrickson and Clark Kent protect double lives, secret identities. The lies and deception that these two men, each of whom purports to rely on values such as honesty and forthrightness, are born of their iconoclastic and idiosyncratic natures. Bill is forced to hide his family life away from the American and mainstream Mormon publics that will castigate him for his lifestyle choices, while Clark must obfuscate not only his abilities, but his very species, in order to lead a normal life and to facilitate helping others.

Elastic Journalism

On Friday, the First Lady of Inkville and I checked out "Multimedia Journalism & the Landscape of News," a talk by The Daily's Gabriel Dance. It was sponsored by my old stomping grounds, the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication.

Dance was a popular act; we arrived a few minutes late, and found the room already at capacity and hotter than Hades. Good on him.

A lot of what Dance had to say really hit home, especially his strong recommendation that 21st century journalists need more than one skill set. And as I can attest both as a freelancer and as a former magazine staffer, it's hard out there for a pimp, assuming the pimp is a writer trying to support himself solely through freelance.

Dance's song-and-dance about multimedia was interesting, and he aptly demonstrated how the concept of "journalism" is elastic enough to encompass computer animators, designers, illustrators, and other creatives.

All Dance's examples stemmed from his time at The New York Times, and I'll admit I was hoping for a bit more about Dance's new gig at The Daily. But that job is new, so perhaps Dance deserves a pass for at least a few more weeks. And frankly, The Daily has thus far failed to impress me.

But what really left me scratching my head was the amount of culture shock Dance must be experiencing transferring from the Times, a supposed liberal bastion, to working for Rupert Murdoch. As I type this, Dance's personal website features a link to an article about a journalist's "battles" with Murdock, so perhaps The Daily really is enacting a separation of church and state for the purposes of doing business.

Loaded Sixteen Tons, What Did I Get?

Taking a cue from my University of Oregon media colleague Zack Barnett, I thought I'd use this space to explain what it is, precisely, I do in my day job. It's a job I love; I have even waxed eloquent in public about how much I dig it.

In a nutshell, I maintain and produce new content for the website of the UO's Office of Admissions. That sounds a bit dry, though, and isn't really representative of the fact that I'm constantly trying to drag more of our communications and student recruiting plan online. Fellow writers sometimes seem surprised I'm so happy in a marketing job, but I believe in the product, and trust me, the job offers plenty of room to flex my creative muscles.

It's not a one-man band, of course. The other musicians with whom I'm making this beautiful music include  fellow admissions staffers like my boss, higher ed communications expert Holly Moline Simons; amiable and talented back-end web developer Tony Herrig; designer/photographer/videographer/jack-of-all-e-trades Isaac Viel; and wondrous wordsmith Randianne Leyshon. We're kind of like the Justice League, but with more paper cuts.

I also partner with key media innovators across campus, including the aforementioned Mr. Barnett; Debbie Williamson-Smith of the UO's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; and Katherine Gries of the UO's Clark Honors College. We're kind of like the A-Team, but with more carpal tunnel.

My direct work for the Office of Admissions website includes maintaining all the existing pages of the site, and developing new content such as fairly recent additions aimed directly, for example, at green messaging, student veterans, and Spanish-speaking families. Sometimes it's exhausting keeping on top of it, with so many stakeholders. This site has a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and a lot of the chefs from other departments they all seem to want to perform a taste test. But I'm blessed that Holly and my other bosses seem happy to let me do most of the cooking.

An outgrowth of the UO's web presence, the new, minty-fresh, interactive online Virtual Tour has been a yearlong exercise in creativity. The project has many parents, and it was my job to sort of ride herd on all the various fronts: film, music, design, photography, development, and writing. To date, this is the UO project I'm most proud of, and one that I hope will net us a lot of student applications. This is the exciting part of my job, cooking up innovative methods of communicating with students. This is the sort of thing that makes all the headaches worth it.

Anyone who knows me well enough to be a regular Inkville reader probably already knows how addicted I am to Facebook. Who knew I'd land a job in which I can get paid for it? It's like I somehow found a way to sit around reading comic books. Oh, wait. I did. If you haven't already "fanned" the UO Admissions Facebook page, what are you waiting for? Daily doses of my scintillating wit, filtered through the higher ed propaganda machine. I use the page to remind fans of application deadlines, answer student questions, and basically act as an ambassador for the incredible wealth of academic offerings and student culture on the Oregon campus. The Oregon Daily Emerald, the UO's student newspaper, just ran a little article about the page and how I use it.

You know, early on, I used to dig Twitter. A lot. And some still do. But the more time I spent tweeting from my personal account, the more I felt like I was just sort of screaming into the void. The UO was probably right to hire a man-child like me to helm this job, but I think even I have reached my personal generation divide with twitter: I guess I'm just more of a Facebook guy. That said, I do tweet, early and often, from the account I maintain for the UO. And I guess someone's watching: the higher ed site .eduGuru recently listed my stream as one of its "Best Admissions Uses of Twitter."  As if my narcissism wasn't bad enough already...

This academic year has seen our staff moving more and more into the production of short online videos, another strategy to attract the teenage audience that is the lifeblood of an admissions office. My passion for the project was stoked and re-focused by a presentation by the media manager of Connecticut College at this past November's American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education (*whew*) in Boston. Most of the work here is by the aforementioned Mr. Viel, or by a talented local videographer named Erik Talbert. Erik's "Game Day Walk to Autzen Stadium" video does a great job of conveying the energy here in Eugene on game day, as close as we get to a state-mandated religion here in liberal Eugene. And Isaac's basketball-themed film is so compellingly beautiful that even I'm attempted to convert. Well, for a minute, anyway.

Well, there you have it. I have work-related profiles on MySpace and Flickr as well, but they're either not a primary mode of communication (in the case of the former) or in need of a bit more work (in the case of the latter).