Popular Culture: Shaping and Reflecting Who We Are

One of the learning opportunities for Maricopa Community College students, faculty, staff, and administration, as well as the community, is the annual Honors Forum Lecture Series. Now in its 23rd year, this series brings distinguished local, national, and international speakers to the Maricopa Community Colleges on a topic related to the Honors theme. The lecture series permits each college to plan activities to engage and challenge their students. The invited speaker has the opportunity to visit and participate in informal discussions with students and faculty at two of the colleges before the day's activities culminate with the keynote presentation at Phoenix College.

The theme for next year's Honors Forum Lecture series is Popular Culture: Shaping and Reflecting Who We Are. This theme will allow students to explore the various aspects of pop culture, such as:

• What is the definition of pop culture?
• What are its origins?
• How does society gain access to pop culture?
• How does it develop?
• How does it become history or evolve into tradition?
• How does pop culture reflect and influence who we are?
• How important is pop culture to individuals and societies?

The speakers scheduled for next year will address these questions, as well as explore aspects of popular culture such as television, music, family, literature, and politics.

Mike Reiss

Simpsons Mania: Behind the Scenes with America's Favorite Family
September 22, 2004
Mike Reiss has won four Emmy Awards for his work on The Simpsons, the wacky animated series that has kept America laughing for more than a decade and earned Time magazine's vote as "the greatest TV show of the twentieth century." During his eleven seasons on the show, Reiss penned a dozen scripts and produced over 200 episodes. His other television credits include The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Alf, Eddie Murphy's The PJ's, and It's Garry Shandling's Show, where he earned an ACE award for writing and producing.

Culled from more than two decades of creating the funniest and most outrageous shows on television, Reiss' presentation is a unique glimpse inside the cutting edge of entertainment, including rare video clips from The Simpsons. He takes audiences inside the lives of Springfield's first family, revealing how The Simpsons was almost cancelled before it hit the air, secret trivia of the show, insane dealings with network censors, and lots of gossip about celebrity guest stars. Reiss also delves into the current state of television programming, describing with his characteristic wit why TV is so rotten and what steps need to be taken to bring the medium back to life.

A former editor of both The Harvard Lampoon and The National Lampoon, Reiss continues as consulting producer on The Simpsons. In addition, he is a frequent contributor to Esquire and Games Magazine, and is an award-winning mystery writer. He has published four children's books, including the surprise best-seller How Murray Saved Christmas, a Christmas story for Jewish children. His latest work is Santa Claustrophobia. He has lectured on comedy and animation at more than two dozen colleges, as well as the Smithsonian Institution. Mike Reiss holds a B.A. from Harvard University.

Steve Benson

Benson's View on Pop Culture and Politics
October 20, 2004
Steve Benson is a native of Sacramento, California, and the oldest of six children. He began drawing cartoons early in life. The first creation he remembers producing was at age three, when he took a book off the shelf and added his own interpretations to the illustrations. He now gets paid for doing what he used to get sent to the principal for!

At 18, Steve completed a degree with the Art Instruction Schools of Minneapolis, Minnesota – known to millions of Americans as the famous "Draw This Dog" school. Despite visions of spending the rest of his life drawing Tippy the Turtle on the back of matchbook covers, Steve enrolled at Brigham Young University in 1975 as an art major (after having completed a two-year mission for the Mormon Church in Japan). Steve is proud to say he knows judo, karate, and five other Japanese words.

Steve spent his college career as a full-time student and teaching assistant, while at the same time supporting his wife and young family by producing cartoons for the BYU student newspaper. While at BYU, he published his first collection of cartoons dealing largely with campus life and the starry world beyond.

After graduating cum laude in 1979 with a B.S., Steve, his wife Mary Ann, and their two children moved to McLean, Virginia, where Steve worked for a year on Capitol Hill as a research assistant and ad hoc cartoonist for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. During the 1980 election, he drew the personal caricatures of all 42 Senate Republicans and remembers how difficult it was for observers to distinguish the cartoons of the Senators from their actual photographs.

Pat Murphy, then editor of the editorial pages for the Arizona Republic, rescued Steve from the dark dungeon of Capitol Hill in 1980, when he offered him a job to replace the retiring Reg Manning.

In 1981, six months after joining the Republic, Steve became nationally syndicated with the Washington Post Writers' Group. As one of the top 10 syndicated editorial cartoonists in the country, Steve is presently with Tribune Media Services, which publishes his work in approximately 200 newspapers and magazines. His cartoons have appeared on CBS Face the Nation, the MacNeil-Lehrer Report, and ABC Nightline, as well as in Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report. His work has also been published in publications in Japan, Korea, England, and West Germany.

Steve is a 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner and a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. He won the national Headliner Award in 1984 and the Best of the West in 1991 and 1992. Steve has also received first place in several Arizona Press Club competitions.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Exploding Stereotypes: Beyond the Myths
November 17, 2004
A journalist and former staff writer for both the Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez always had the itch to write fiction. Fueled by creative inspiration and the desire to write the book that she has always wanted to read but could never find, she wrote The Dirty Girls Social Club. A publishing phenomenon, the novel set off a bidding war between major publishing houses and became one of the most anticipated novels of the season.

The daughter of a Cuban father and Irish-American mother, Valdes-Rodriguez is a native of Albuquerque. She went to Berklee college of Music in Boston to study jazz saxophone. In one of many serendipitous moments in her career, Valdes-Rodriguez turned an essay about sexism in the jazz world into a job writing for The Boston Globe. She continued her studies at Columbia University and earned a master's degree in journalism. When she moved to California, Valdes-Rodriguez covered the Spanish-language music industry for The Los Angeles Times and taught journalism courses at UCLA.

Leaving The Los Angeles Times after two years, Valdes-Rodriguez focused on her writing and taught at the University of New Mexico. She attempted to sell a nonfiction proposal for a book about the post-Selena generation of Latin pop singers. Book editors didn't like the proposal but enjoyed her writing and asked if she had a novel in the works. Valdes-Rodriguez said yes, although she had nothing prepared. She completed The Dirty Girls Social Club during an intense burst, writing as much as fifteen hours per day.

Laura Ziskin, the producer of Spider-Man, in association with Jennifer Lopez's production company, has optioned the film rights to The Dirty Girls Social Club. The novel was also released in a Spanish-language edition.

Robert Moody

Bach to the Future
February 16, 2005
Robert Moody marks his seventh year as Associate Conductor of the Phoenix Symphony with the 2004-05 season. He leads the Symphony each year in a wide variety of concerts, including presentations of Handel's Messiah and in celebration of New Year's Eve. He serves as conductor and host for the Symphony's popular "Classical Connections" series, introducing novices and enthusiasts alike to the backstage stories and art behind symphonic music-making.

In addition to his responsibilities as staff conductor for The Phoenix Symphony, Robert Moody is a frequent guest conductor with orchestras and choruses across the United States. This season marks his fifth year leading the Oklahoma City Symphony's "Discovery" concert series. Other recent and upcoming guest conducting appearances include his debuts with the Houston Symphony, Oregon Symphony, and Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, as well as return engagements with Hilton Head Opera (for Puccini's Tosca and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor), Annapolis Symphony, and the Detroit Symphony.

Robert Moody made his Carnegie Hall conducting debut in 1999, the same summer in which he stepped in to conduct at the Santa Fe Opera, filling in to international acclaim for the company's ailing director John Crosby. Mr. Moody conducted the finale concert of the 2001 Spoleto Festival, and subsequently made his debuts with the San Francisco Symphony and with Miami's New World Symphony.

A native of South Carolina, Robert Moody earned a bachelor's degree in music from Furman University in his hometown of Greenville. He completed a master's degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he studied conducting with Donald Neuen. Mr. Moody has held conducting posts with the Evansville Philharmonic, New York City's InterSchool Orchestras, Brevard Music Center, National Repertory Orchestra Festival, and the Santa Fe Opera.

Stephanie Coontz

What's Love Got to Do with It? Marriage and Family Life in Popular Culture through the Ages
March 23, 2005
Stephanie Coontz teaches history family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, and is the national Co-Chair of the Council of Contemporary families. A former Woodrow Wilson fellow, she has received the Dale Richmond Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics for "outstanding contributions to the field of child development," and the Washington Governor's Writers Award. She has also testified before Congress about her research.

Coontz has been called "brilliant and invariable proactive" by the New York Times Book Review and "a treasure" by the Los Angeles Times. Coontz has published six books on family history, gender roles, and contemporary family issues. These include The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, The Way We Really Are: Coming To Terms with America's Changing Families, American Families: A Multicultural Reader, and Better or Worse? Transformations in Marriage. She has also been published in Life, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Modern Maturity, Vogue, and many other magazines. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN's Crossfire, Leeza, Fox on the Family, and CBS This Morning, and has been featured in documentaries hosted by Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters.

Marcyliena Morgan

Can Hiphop Survive Pop Culture?
April 20, 2005
Marcyliena Morgan is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the founding director of the Hiphop Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Her research has focused on youth, gender, language, culture and identity, sociolinguistics, discourse, and interaction. She is the author of Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture (2002) and editor of Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations (1994). Her other publications include articles and chapters on gender and women's speech, language ideology, discourse and interaction among Caribbean women in London and Jamaica, urban youth language and interaction, hiphop culture, and language education planning and policy. She is currently completing a book on hiphop culture entitled The Real Hiphop- Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the Underground.

2003-2004 Honors Coordinators

Honors
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/