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.

Hounds of Love Are Hunting Me

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