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.