If I keep sending personal apologies to people I will wear down my fingers to bloody nubs and be unable to type again (great idea, some of you say), so I'd like to make a public apology/clarification. First, I am sincerely sorry if anyone has been insulted by my intervention. I meant nothing personal in my remarks. That, alas, is the problem. One of the hazards of this medium is that the stupidest among us are liable to forget that we are communicating with actual human beings and not a bunch of algorithms. I forgot. I apologize. Second, some have suggested that I have been trying to limit discourse. On the contrary, I would like to see it expanded. So often, we degenerate into throwing titles and names at each other, as though that makes an argument or proves a point.We might all benefit if those textual references came surrounded by thoughts, some sort of fairly cogent ideas about a particular text's/figure's importance to the topic at hand. That is what I meant by the "demonstrating a lack of thought" comment. I, and I think others, would like to see everybody's ideas more than our bibli- and film- ographies. To pick an example, I think it helpsvery little simply to offer "Liqid Sky" to someone interested in women protagonists in science fiction film (I was the one to offer that nugget, by the way). I should have, I think, offered some thoughts about the film's very willful and strange reconfigurations of gender. That would have served at least two functions: 1. Providing more information to the initial inquirer and 2. Potentially beginning a whole new topic of discussion for the group, one not necessarily willed by anyone (I do not want to get into a discussion of Liquid Sky) but arising through something of an organic process. As has been noted, Mr. Ulin initially requested that responses be sent to him personally, rather than to the entire group. Given the breadth of his request, that seems like a good idea. Perhaps more general interest is achieved through greater specificity like, say, "Hitchcock's Women Artists." That may sound contradictory, but I think it's probably true. Greater focus provides more information to the group about the inquirer's project and makes it easier for those definitely not interested in a topic to skip responses to it. (By the way, Mr Ulin, I already asked your friend to pass on my apologies because I don't have your address. But if you see this befoore you see her, please be assured that my remarks were in no way directed towards you or your scholarship.) Finally, the cultural studies crack. That was sort of a joke. I mean, I do cultural studies myself. But I fear sometimes that its ascent has robbed us of a common theoretical language or concern. We have become, as film scholars, so concerned with the apparently concrete that the concrete threatens to turn into an abstraction (I'm stealing this from Hegel). Cultural studies comes with very important concerns, and I'm not suggesting chucking it. Just, like I said, an expansion of discourse, in which we can reassert the legitimacy of theory and provide ourselves with a subject rather than an array of objects. Perhaps a collective mourning for Metz would allow us to delve into our theoretical past, strip it of its elements of faddism, and renew its power and relevance. Oh, I almost forgot, the Al Franken Decade. Al Franken noticed that toward the end of the eighties, people began predicting what the nineties would be like. So you'd get, say, an environmentalist claiming that while the Me Decade is over, the Environmental Decade has begun. That is, the eighties were the Me Decade but the nineties are going to be about what I'm interested in. Thus the birth of the Al Franken Decade. Thanks to all who sent public and personal responses to last night's rant. I hope those who were/are angry accept my attempt to make up. I'm pretty much a jerk, but not as big a jerk as you might think. Especially not after a night's sleep and an awakening into a crisp and sunny Iowa day.