Fireside Chat

Objectively, the Fireside Chat is probably the most straightforward assignment of the course. The difficulty, in my experience, is settling on a belief that you find sufficiently defining to work off of. Mine was a defense of artistic shortcomings via my love of punk rock. I have been a punk fan since at least middle school, so I am reasonably well versed. In high school I started to consider the movement intellectually, and read whatever books I could find about it. So the ideas I expressed in my fireside chat were not recently formed. I have had them in my head for some time. This meant that when I drafted a script for my chat, it felt very conversational to me.

Since the idea of a fireside chat, in its original incarnation, is to be conversational and familiar, I tried to emulate this in my writing. I tend to be nervous about speaking in front of people, so my performative abilities, or lack thereof, may have choked out these efforts.

The video I made was mainly intended to provide some excitement to my statements. I think there is incredible intellectual value in the punk movement. But I am also aware of the irony of pretentiously discussing a lower class protest movement built on vitriol in an academic setting. I hoped to demonstrate how truly rough, even to a fault, punk could be. There is plenty of righteous and well-deserved anger to be found. But we should probably be critical of the narcissist nihilism of the Sex Pistols, or the aggressive, hyper-masculinity of Black Flag’s Henry Rollins. Punk rock was genuinely dangerous, and while that could be problematic, it was also distinctly exciting. This sense of danger made sense as a reaction to sanitized, boring corporate rock, which was becoming increasingly prevalent. Punk began as an attempt by common, music loving people, to reclaim music culture from elites who cared only for profit.

These roots are vital. I wanted the video to reflect these roots, but also the evolution away from them. Bands like Joy Division, The Clash, and Gang of Four can fairly be called punk, but they revolutionized the movement. They harnessed the reactionary impulse, and created work that, in varying ways fulfilled punk’s artistic potential. When I cut from footage of Henry Rollins to Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, I intended it to be emblematic of a shift from populist punk to high art punk. Both performers are seen in a state of true mania, but they use that mania in starkly different ways.  

Concerned Citizen

During the early stages of this project we thought of a lot of different people who we could interview. While we were sifting through dozens of potential document subjects that we did not personally, our dear friend Karim Doumar, who was a local journalist, gave Aidan a call. As the phone sat in front of us buzzing away, our eyes grew double in sized. We looked at each other, both thinking the same thing, why weren’t we doing a project about someone like Karim who was someone we knew that was actually making a difference in their community. I guess it never occurred to us that someone we knew personally could be making such a big difference in their community. So we sent our documentary crew on down to Berkeley, California to find out who our friend Karim Doumar really was and how he was making a difference in his community. Once in Karim Doumar’s backyard, we immediately got to work on uncovering this exciting story. First, we found out a little about what Doumar does for the community. We thought this was the most important thing to start off with because it gave us an idea as to why he does the things he does which is what we did second. We found out why he writes for the specific newspaper he does and why he writes for any newspaper at all. As you can see in the video, Doumar is so passionate about his newspaper because it is free and is helping all members of the community, not just the affluent one. He also does this job for free because it is something he is passionate about. We finally found out how what he is doing is actually making a difference, which you can see in the video. As you can see Citizen Doumar is being a great influence in his community and is obviously very concerned. An outside media source that was very influential in the making of this documentary was Spotlight because we’d like to think that Doumar is headed in the right direction in breaking national news. In the reading for this assignment, Goldbard talks about the right that everyone has “to participate in the cultural life of the community”. We felt that Doumar was not only acting upon this right but also allowing others to more easily have this right by providing everyone with the local newspaper for free.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-D5rqgJaUU&feature=youtu.be

Game for Change

Play this

This week’s assignment presented an unprecedented challenge for me. I am fairly bad with technology, or at least slow to learn it. Game for Change requires proficiency with Twine to express ideas, and that was a major restriction. Besides the technological learning curve, it required thought about how to format ideas in the format of a sort of webquest. I have no experience in that, so I felt like I had very little vision for the project.

On the other hand I am extremely passionate about the issue I presented. I believe that climate change is an existential threat to all humans, but especially to the disadvantaged. The more I read about it, the more there is to frighten me about what this phenomenon can do, if left unchecked. It is infuriating to see people unschooled in science rationalize the findings of scientists. It is also infuriating to see industries that stand to lose from action against climate change attempt to influence the political machine away from action. I believe they do it out of greed, and that there actions will have the most severe impact on my hypothetical children. It is the kind of issue that should force common people into action.

But the media has not spoken enough about its disproportionate impact on the impoverished. Perhaps this is because the media still has not been able to convince enough of the public that climate change is real at all. But examining its effect on various groups of people essentially makes it social issue (though not exclusively).

I wanted my game to be genuinely informative. It ultimately was probably too wordy. But I found it difficult to separate what information was crucial and what was expendable. I tried to choose alarming information. I do not think this was a sensationalist decision. The problem of climate change is an alarming one, especially for the poor. When we discuss it, we should be aware of its worst possible ramifications.

I also wanted my game to reflect the absurdity of choosing not to respond to climate change. This may have been somewhat mean spirited. Its a good thing to try to genuinely understand those who have a different point of view than yourself. However, its also truly insane that educated people want to prevent action against climate change, or refuse to believe there is any such thing. So I think it was a valid choice to reflect an absurdity in the opposition to my cause.

World Building

Masks, as mentioned in the interview

Interview, and the interview transcript:

Sir Thenjamin Bevenin, a child of British royalty who made his name by virtue of his revolutionary discoveries regarding string theory, and improving our mathematical understanding of gravity. Since then, Sir Bevenin's fate has taken an unexpected turn. After a lengthy disappearance from his station at Cambridge University, Sir Bevenin reappeared with scientific reports that first threatened to discredit his scientific renown. Sir Thenjamin Bevenin claimed no less than to have broken dimensional barriers and entered a parallel universe. His claims were rebuked by the scientific community with the same unilateral strength disavowing creationism, climate change denial, and the danger of GMO's. Still, Thevenin fiercely defended his claims. What came next was, perhaps, the most shocking development. Thevenin began to politicize his scientific claims, dangling his ability to reach parallel dimensions as a promise to the desperate. He established an organization, The Beveninists, and offered those who ascended its rank the promise of his radical exodus. To bemusement and shock, the world has watched for three years, as his organization has grown in size, power, and violence.

Newsman: Sir Thenjamin Bevenin, thank you for joining me.

Bevenin: Thanks for having me.

Newsman: How do you respond to the overwhelming dismissal of your findings by the scientific community?

Bevenin: Well (snorts cocaine), people have incredible capacity to rationalize information. Consult any psychologist, and they will tell you that. My findings are the most important in human history. This also makes them an existential threat to many. Others see the salvation in what I am saying. The fact remains, you will find no scientist who can account for the nature of my findings.

Newsman: Could you attempt to explain the nature of your findings? Why are they definitive?

Bevenin: The physical properties I identified simply cannot exist on earth. I measured them using instruments from Cambridge that are designed to be averse to tampering. I have no idea how to tamper them, because they are designed by engineers of the highest degree, and I have no expertise in that field.

Newsman: What physical properties specifically?

Bevenin: Higher rates of gravity, strange chemical compositions, as yet undiscovered chemicals, and time anomalies that I am still examining.

Newsman: So there are aspects of this other dimension you do not understand?

Bevenin: Well of course. It is literally a new world, and one with new physical properties, and I am only one scientist. It does not make my data less compelling. I am making new and pertinent discoveries daily. For example, having studied my samples, I believe that the new ecosystem may impair facial nerve functions in some, approximately 27% if I am correct, so my organization is now constructing masks that will allow rudimentary expression and communication.

Newsman: Let us ignore the question of your data for a moment. Do you think that the conditions of today’s world - environmental desolation, looming famine, and the renewed promise of nuclear conflict - make people more susceptible to joining extreme cults and religions?

Bevenin: Yes of course those things affect people, and of course religion is an answer. There is desperation, and religion can be a valid way to satiate that.

Newsman: Does the mass desperation undermine your credibility?

Bevenin: Certainly not. If my findings are valid, then the people have found a good home for their desperation. And my findings are incontrovertible.

Newsman: Sir, could you describe to me what this place looks like.

Interview cuts off here.

Artist's Statement:

I think Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is an amazing movie for several reasons. As it pertains to this assignment, I want to discuss its environment. There is so much obvious care in the establishment of that world. I love the way Cuaron uses his camera to explore the foreground and the background of his shots. I think it was also quite prescient to establish reactionary religious cults, in the wake of destructive infertility. I considered possibilities for reactionary sects in the face of an increasingly bleak world.

This idea stuck with me. I think there is a pretty clear connection to current politics. People turn to Donald Trump and to Bernie Sanders out of desperation (though I do not mean to liken them more than is fair). This idea did not begin with any political thought, I just found it could be an interesting narrative. But I think that connection makes sense.

So for me, this weirdness was about the idea of increasing desperation. I am not totally pessimistic about the world’s prospects. I think most of our problems are solvable, but that does not mean we will make a political choice to solve them. If we do not solve the most serious ones, increased desperation will be a given and absurdities, like Donald Trump as president, will become realistic.

Science fiction has always been a medium that creatively explores and elevates realistic content. Cuaron’s film applies neatly to that. Children of Men is haunting because it makes current the sort of crisis many feel is looming. Specifically that environmental abuse will manifest in horrifying and confounding ways, and that the western neoconservative world order may collapse leaving the unknown in its place. Increasingly this project became, for me at least, an attempt to express thoughts about my world and future. 

Julian Bleecker says in his article, Design Fiction, “ [Design fiction] objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, imagined or expressed…” this was important in creating the artifacts that represented our world because we focused on what aspects of this world were the most important and then created our artifacts in such a way that they could allude to the rest of the story. We also did not go into great detail or explain much of what the cult leader’s intentions were because we decided to implicitly explore them by only showing the audience bits of what he believes in and what he is actually attempting. This was important to us because we wanted the character to not seem too crazy explicitly but actually have pretty messed up intentions. This is also a political issue that is relevant in our own world, especially now during the presidential race.

Webspinna

            Both of us might designate Webspinna as the most challenging of this class. This is, in large part, because it demanded performance. But the nature of the project also required time and meticulousness. I think that the best performances were the most obviously strategized, and intricate. The project asks for a broad sense of meaning. Some sort of conflict must take place. But these broader strokes are comprised of sonic intricacies that take time and effort to shape, like with pointillism or mosaic art.

            The most enabling thing for us was to have a subject that we not only love, but are well versed in. Hopefully our project made it clear that this subject is horror movies, something we have both loved since a young age. The specific tension that informed our battle is the struggle for supremacy between slasher films, or otherwise non-fantastical horror, and horror of fantasy. The latter consists of ghost stories, some urban legends (think of It Follows), fairy tales, most science fiction, and the horror of folktale beasts like the vampire. Basically, it is The Shining and The Exorcist vs. Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

            Due to our shared genre affinity, there was a mutual feeling of vast material to draw from. Thus, the challenge was to filter. Filtering consisted of choosing what might add to a larger statement. We used The Goblins soundtrack from Dario Argento’s Suspiria, because the eerie breathing captured the spine tingling nature of that which is supernatural. The other major source for the supernatural side was Disasterpiece’s main theme for David Mitchell’s aforementioned It Follows. This song was meant to express a sense of beauty and adventure that can be found in horror films, as opposed to the horrors of life. This was meant to underscore the idea of horror film as inherent fantasy. Art is a simulation of true emotions (I hope that is not read disparagingly, it is not meant that way), and the idea of horror based on things most people do not believe in is an important part of that conversation.

            We also included samples of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining. These samples derive from a conversation between Jack Torrance, an increasingly insane father, and the apparition of a man called Delbert Grady, who is known to have killed his family and then himself. He tells Jack that he has “always been there”, in reference to the haunted Overlook Hotel. That was meant as a chilling addition to the ascent of the Disasterpiece song. It was also a kind of love note to supernatural horror. Ghosts are less immediate, less manageable than the terrors of films like Scream or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In Stephen King’s novel The Shining, the Overlook Hotel is destroyed. But the characters specifically take note that the area still feels lethal. Its evil could not be destroyed by fire. It has always been there, and it always will be.

Textual Poaching

I find age to be universally interesting. Every age exists on a spectrum that comprises mortality. So every age advances our relationship with life and the inevitability of death. I consider aging the defining process of life, and something very artistically compelling. Films like Dazed and Confused or the music of the Smashing Pumpkins have been important to me. But before those influences, I had JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I read it when I was young, and was drawn to the protagonist, Holden Caulfield. He voiced concern over matters such as the fate of fish when their ponds freeze over, or his love of the permanence of museum dioramas. It was hard to grasp intellectually as a scrappy youth, but Holden clearly had deep anxiety regarding the ravages of time. He was fundamentally confused about how to react to his approaching adulthood, and like so many others, I felt a bond with him.  

Our assigned essay, How Texts become Real, resonated with my feelings about this book, as well as other works. Catcher went from being a story I happened to especially like, to having its own life in my mind. I have come to feel not only that I can relate to Holden, but also that I sort of know him. Not in the way I know an actual human. Rather his personality, experiences, and feelings are a powerful part of my collective body of intellect and morality. So his experiences have attained a heightened, even mythic dimension for me. And all of this exists outside of the experience of reading Salinger’s book.

Clearly, I love this work. I even felt conflicted about changing it at all. But ultimately I thought I could alter it to express myself as a young millennial. I wanted to keep some of Holden/Salinger’s original intent, but make this something fit specifically to my perception of being a young person in 2016. I think my generation has this sense of uselessness in the face of a fearsome world. You can see it in our politics. Young Republicans and young Democrats overwhelmingly support Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, respectively, who both promise a radical socio-economic reordering. There is anger at the feeling we inherited the debilitating consumerism of the boomer generation, along with their looming ecological disaster.

But it goes further. There is a sense that harkens back to the uncertainty of the early 1900’s when the work of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, along with the horrors of WWI, forced people to reexamine their own sense of reality. The reality of our ecosystem, our nature, changing to something dangerous, and the reality of the Internet redefining social interaction are unsettling prospects. Simply spending so much time on the Internet impacts our perception, and I sought to reflect this in my composition by seeking a disjointed style. Salinger was concerned with adulthood and the loss of innocence. The loss of innocence remains universal, but its context has changed.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. They're running and they don't look where they're going. The best thing, though, you could go there a hundred thousand times, nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy - Yes, I'm changing. One thousand years of this pass, evenings, mornings, afternoons - countless lives measured out in coffee spoons. If the children don't grow up, and continue to run without looking, their bodies will get bigger, and their hearts will be torn up. They'll be just a million little gods causing rain storms, turning every good thing to rust. Now I'll drown my beliefs, just to cut the kids in half. I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and cut the kids in half. Like a daydream or a fever, cut the kids in half. In the belly of this machine, I said that I would see you in the next life, but - 

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and still we don't know, just where our bones will rest. Still, praise to the glory of loved ones now gone. 

On a live-wire, right up off the streets that lead you to an overwhelming question, What is it?,

Let us go and make our visit. And I saw in your face, that we're the same when we begin again. Along the stretch of some unnamed plane, we begin again. 

Material from: The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, Radiohead, Deafheaven, Arcade Fire, Joy Division, Smashing Pumpkins, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 

Medium Specificity

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A5tP13n2ZA

       

           Perhaps this is too candid, but I had entirely different plans for my piece. I think these plans were promising, and I was excited to act them out. Then I caught the flu, which kept me confined to my room. My original plan was to film a complex scenario/interaction, and strip it of any sound while editing. The goal would be to convey the mood of the interaction, and the basic story without its finer details.

            

Being confined to my room for the better part of a week, I was forced to take a similarly minded approach with an existing set of materials. So, I went through my computer and found footage of a storm I filmed in Ocracoke, North Carolina. As I worked, I increasingly thought of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight. I found that film beautiful, and admired its willingness to completely eschew narrative function. To convey images with no clear meaning is a statement that art is above literal meaning, or at least not beholden to it. It can also be a realm of nebulous emotion. I think that everyone subscribes to this idea, even if they do not know it. We all accept the power of music, even without knowing why a certain melody or sound causes a reaction. The mysticism of it is beautiful in its own right.

            

McCloud’s essay-via-comic Setting the Record Straight pulls a cool trick. It establishes a pejorative view of comic books held by those who do not esteem them as an important or promising art form. It then defines the form of comics and explains why they are valid. While reading it, I realized that his claim that comic’s are capable of more than superhero yarns is proven by his decision to essentially write an essay in the form of a comic.

            

My piece did not pull so devious a trick, though I do think it highlights qualities of film. My goal was to put something together that suggests what a storm feels like, or perhaps what the idea of a storm feels like. Jonathan Glazer, while interviewing for his film Under the Skin, mentions a Jean Renoir movie called The Grand Illusion. A sequence in this film involving a prison-escape resonated with Glazer because he felt, “right there”, or “in it.” He uses the word sensory to describe his experience with the film.  

             

Cinema can be intensely visceral, and I find that I dwell on this. In assembling my piece, I wanted to express murkily defined feeling via sensory overload. Editing was my main tool in shaping this. I wanted to pair a jarring quality with a sort of quiet, and hypnotic mood. So I robbed the piece of its sound and arranged the images according to a shape expressive of my feelings. The timing, framing, and color of moving images lend films a sense of shape. Maybe our emotional reactions to cinema are a reaction to this sense of shape. 

Brother Russia

Collaboration undoubtedly leads to fantastic works of art. Film especially is typically an entirely collaborative medium. Auteur theory, which positions the director as the author of the film, is useful in understanding the role of a director in creating cinema. However, it can fairly be critiqued for underselling how collaborative film really is. Look no further than a standard credit sequence to see that this is true.

Music is not so inherently collaborative as film. Great artists like Bob Dylan and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields can be considered truly responsible for all the music on their records. But of course collaboration is vital for some of the greats. Groups as famous as The Beatles or as influential as Sonic Youth have made incredible things through complex interplay. How these heights of interplay are realized is not clearly understand. In both of the aforementioned bands, there were many years of history involved. So their ability to know each other and respond to each other, in a sort of literal conversation expressed in sound, was vital. Clearly in our context, we have no such advantage, because most of us were strangers just a few weeks ago. The fact that we are relatively unacquainted with one another further necessitates a capacity for humility and an effort to appreciate the work one’s partner has done.  

I think this assignment was a good lesson, if not a success, for me inasmuch as my ability to collaborate is concerned. To be wholly truthful, my partner and I did not communicate very well. To be clear, this was not the product of a clash in personality. Rather, it seems more the result of busy schedules and a miscalculation of what it is like to share screenwriting duties.

I went into this project wanting to write something serious and dark about a strange part of history. I have known about Grigory Rasputin for some time, but my interest was sparked during a discussion of him in a class I had last semester. The design of the class was to look at Russian history via its depictions in cinema. Rasputin, though mythic, was a very real Orthodox Monk who had an illicit sexual relationship with the Queen of Imperial Russia. Fearing his influence, a group of nobles conspired to kill him. The anxiety caused by his rise in power was sufficient enough that our textbook, Gregory Freeze’s Russia: A History, discussed him for a considerable length of time. The rumors surrounding this event relay that Rasputin was, as though superhuman, nearly impossible to kill. The obvious absurdity of this man appealed to me. The latent comedy of this absurdity manifested itself to me more than ever when I stumbled upon a song called Rasputin, by a group called Boney M. I sought to make the dialogue reminiscent of how young Americans speak. To me, there is something inherently funny about the contrast between Imperial Russians and my own ilk.  

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwdUB0l0cDmjUTFvbndwcmpsekE/view?usp=sharing
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         

Process Piece

When our group decided we wanted to represent the process
of falling asleep, there were immediate challenges. Most obviously, sleep is
problematic because it is not a noisy process. The idea of communicating
restlessness with sound was challenging to us. We decided to use rustling,
irregular breathing and distorting time to communicate the inability to fall
asleep. Having looked at the project holistically, context seems to render the
early material virtually intelligible.  

We also decided to depict the act of falling asleep in a
surreal manner. This is entirely formed by the process of going to sleep. As
the mind relaxes, what neuroscientists call alpha waves begin to manifest in
the brain at high levels. Once these waves become predominantly what are called
beta waves, the body is asleep. However, there is no sharp demarcation between
the two types of wave. So as our minds go to sleep, consciousness is mixed with
unconsciousness. Thus, we experience a state where rationality mingles with
dream logic. Additions like the hypnotist could be external, or it could just
be a sort of proto-dream sequence.  

Of Broderick Fox’s modes of documentary, the piece our
group made is most reminiscent of observational, performative, and poetic. In a
sense, this is an observation of sleep, however, instead of being scientific,
it takes artistic liberties. That the piece takes such liberties is what ties
it to the performative and the poetic forms. For example, with the absence of
any imagery, much of the material in this process piece is left up for
interpretation. The listener is more or less unaware when the subject is
actually asleep, therefore one is not able to discern what is reality or simply
a pigment of the subject's imagination. We decided to approach this topic with
these artistic liberties, because often when one is falling asleep or
attempting to sleep, it is hard to tell the difference between reality and the
dream world.

Arguably the most essential element of this documentation
is the guitar. We decided to use the guitar as a representation of what the
subject was thinking. The chords begin when the subject coughed, this was
intended to be some sort of starting point for his thoughts, it is when the
subject is finally at rest and is able to let his mind wander. Other than the
starting point, how we structured the guitar, is left open to interpretation.
It is also applicable to all people because it has no words, therefore anyone
can decide what the guitar chords mean to them.

Round Robin

The tall man exited the house on the hill, and moved toward the boy in the dying light. 

Matt froze. In two impossibly long steps, the tall man was at the window. He lit a cigarette.

The tall man looked over at Matt. He put out his cigarette and pulled out a bazooka. 

The tall man set the bazooka down, looked at Matt again, and spun it in place. "Pucker up."

The rocket missed and decimated a nearby vacant building that had been on the market for years. The owners received a flood of insurance money and were able to pay off all their debts.

Aidan: The first thing that comes to my mind about this assignment is its organizational difficulty. It would be simple enough if it were done all at once and in person. However, for our group at least, the virtual element became problematic. Whether from technical difficulty, or the kind of miscommunications that occur in virtual conversation, we experienced confusion. In my case, this was creatively restricting because I spent more time stressing over communicative errors than thinking about artistry or collaboration. As far as the work that was done, I found it to be challenging because there is no sense of control. However, it does prompt one to be more economical in the use of language. I found that to be a valuable experience in making less words mean more.  

Tabitha: We’ve repeated frequently that creativity loves constraint, and in these short story exercises, I’ve found that to be the case. There’s something really challenging and yet freeing about having to communicate plot, character, theme, and ambience in 20 words, ten words, six words. It’s intriguing to build off other's ideas in both written and visual form, and actually reminded me of group writing for films or television shows. However, in this particular assignment, the communication and technicalities tripped our group up a bit. In Totems without Taboos:The Exquisite Corpse, DJ Spooky speaks of breaking down “the linear flow of ideas between people.” The at-times confusing form of this assignment made it a bit hard to do that, and it sometimes seemed as if we were creating an unwieldy, passive Frankenstein, a painfully self-aware and pointless monster, instead of the one that haunts Mary Shelley’s novel purposefully. It’s an elegant art form, however, the very short story, and feels like a language of its own. To learn it feels essential, but the path to doing so can be hard to navigate.

Trevor: These story sequences were exercises in entropy both in the interpretation of them and organization to do them. Writing and compiling the stories became a weird mission of preservation. There was an odd weight of lineage and legacy to respecting the last story and passing on something understandable and inspirational for the next while trying to write something decent. It’s an odd way to play the surrealist game DJ Spooky told us about, turning the Exquisite Corpse into a preservationist exercise. A truer playing would have veered into the irreverence of something like Axe Cop’s childish, self-contradictory bliss nightmare.

Camden: This telephone-esque exercise was a fine example of how the style of a story can develop a momentum even if the various chapters of the tale are written blindly by different authors. As readers, we can easily discern the familiar components of our favorite genres.  As writers in a group, we perceived distinctive story components and were able to incorporate those components into whatever chapter we contributed. It's almost compulsive. We don't want to write something that goes against the established theme or tone. As a testament to this, some aspect of the original tone was preserved within each mini-series written by our group.

Barrett: Throughout the entire assignment, I was most fascinated by the way my story seemed to evolve. It made me realize that whether or not we intend to apply the “Exquisite Corpse” idea to our art and our stories, historically, it is bound to happen anyway. Do not all stories and ideas become embellished and drawn out over time? The organization of this assignment was inevitably a disaster. Not in the ideal sense, perhaps, but in the realistic carrying out of it. I’m still not sure if it was all done correctly at this point. But I tend to believe that is part of the process and certainly part of the art. Confusion is only compounded into the spontaneity of our responses. In fact, disastrous collaboration is often what spawns cherished art. The somewhat humorous example of the ruined Ecce Homo fresco in Spain comes to mind. It developed from ancient art to bizarre reconstruction attempt to template for memes. This assignment allowed us to just taste that process and be aware of doing so.

Music Mosaic: Subterraneans, David Bowie

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh-jDMuzuIE

            In her essay Seeing, Annie Dillard speaks of sacrificing details for a greater picture, or sense of truth. In this assignment, I attempted to make minor abstractions form a whole.

The piece I chose is called Subterraneans, and was composed by David Bowie in 1977. It is part of an album called Low. The name is a nod to Bowie’s mental state, however it is a rather lighthearted description of the truth. Rather than a mundane sort of sadness or ennui, he was caught in existential torment. After spending the greater part of a decade addicted to cocaine, courting a damagingly obsessive relationship to celebrity, and devolving into paranoid isolation while living in California, the man sought a change of pace. Low is dramatically different than his previous music, and reflects astounding emotional depths.

One of its songs, Warszawa, was written specifically to reflect the desolation of its Polish namesake. Subterraneans feels similar to that song. There is a sense of profound damage in both, though this sense is more immediate in Warszawa. It strikes the listener as memory in Subterraneans. It does not sound like the death of a culture, but like a memory or half-forgotten story of something long dead. The pain felt in this song is cold, not visceral, and even attains a level of ethereal beauty. The synthesizer portions were densely layered in production, in such a way that the melody sounds indirect. It is reminiscent of hearing a song being played from a distant room in a large house. Some of the instruments were recorded backward, furthering the song’s sense of weightlessness. Low deals explicitly in the theme of societal collapse, and Subterraneans seems to be growing backwards where most songs press forward.

With these thoughts in mind, I chose to include some sort of visual abstraction in each photograph I used. Some images are seen through water or reflected off of it. Some are deliberately freed of context. The final picture is simply a light effect I created in my room. I took some of these pictures at the Bonneville Salt Flats. The Salt Flats are beautiful and barren. There was once life there, and now the earth is literally salted. The flats act as a natural monument to a prehistoric lake. They became linked to Subterraneans in my mind. Both speak beautifully of something that came before, and now is lost. As Bowie’s song seems to slip backward, my images slip to increasing darkness and confusion. It is my hope that together these abstractions are reborn as something understandable.