John Klingle

I'm John Klingle! Coming outta Chicago, Illinois by way of Louisville, Kentucky, I'm a graduate student at DePaul University working on completing my Master's Degree in the College of Communications, with a concentration in Media and Cinema Studies.

I take the title of that concentration very seriously. Although I came into academic criticism through an interest in and talent for writing about film, it's the Media part that I've really focused on since I got here. I think that a modern communications student can't afford not to have to a broad base of knowledge about all kinds of different media forms. With that in mind, these are only some of the media varieties I've studied:

Classic and contemporary Hollywood cinema

Children's animation

Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr

Film and music reviews

Theater from the Elizabethan era to the avant-garde

Popular music from all across the 20th century

My focus on diversity and range has led me to create serious academic work about all sorts of esoteric topics. I've written papers on the development of rock criticism in the 1970s, the initial critical reception of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Feminism in the 1980s classic Jem and the Holograms, and race and urbanity in the music of Cab Calloway.

I've also developed a broad range of technical and practical skills to complement my critical abilities. I'm not only a multi-instrumentalist (guitar, bass guitar, ukulele, keyboards), I also have experience recording and editing podcasts, shooting and editing film, writing screenplays, and in the development and maintenance of websites to suit all kinds of different purposes!

As far as my personal interests, I love all kinds of cinema, but especially that of Classic Hollywood: I basically grew up with Turner Classic Movies on in the background. I love the music of David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Talking Heads, and I've spent an inordinate amount of time articulating just how deep that love goes. My latest and most atypical interest is in professional wrestling, which I believe is the most uniquely American art form ever created, for all the good and bad that implies.