Indie Promotion

The Columbia University Press website has published some of my work online, and I just wanted to alert those of you not following my every thought and link on twitter to these two items:

1. Indie's introduction has been posted for all to see. It begins:

Like so many cultural categories, indie cinema is slippery. The same term refers not only to a diverse body of films spanning more than two decades, from Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Synecdoche, New York (2008) and beyond, but also a cultural network that sustains them. This book is about American indie cinema as a film culture that comprises not only movies but also institutions—distributors, exhibitors, festivals, and critical media—within which movies are circulated and experienced, and wherein an indie community shares expectations about their forms and meanings.

To read the rest, click on over.

2. The CUP blog has posted an interview with me. It starts off like this:

Question: Why “indie” rather than “independent”?

Michael Newman: At some point, maybe in the 1990s, indie became a kind of catch-all for describing edgy, youthful, subcultural, or alternative culture...

The rest is on the CUP blog.