this is not an exit

This semester made me aware of just how stubborn I am. And just how much I need to be willing to flex myself. Working on both the sound and video projects, I noticed some specific things about how I function creatively that put me at odds with any sort of exploration, or at least put me in a position where I had to be willing to rethink some of my preconceived notions of how to work.

For instance, both projects showed me just how attached I am to the idea of narrative. Kelly mentioned in her blog that she saw the exact opposite about herself, that her own fiction oddly enough resists arc in some way and fights the stereotypical structure of narrative, something I would say is to her credit in her work, something that distinguishes it and opens it to a lot of linguistic play that perhaps my work is not as open to, given its adherence to that old concept of plot. I, on the other hand, both in my fiction and in this class, have been attempting to subvert the whole narrative paradigm I’d previously operated in creatively. Sort of. REALLY stubbornly. You’ll notice that both my sound project and the video project I participated in had some arc to them, largely because that’s where I feel I work from creatively. This is what makes sense to me. What I’ve wanted to do, then, is to work around that arc, to see what ways I can play with other elements to redefine what I’m doing with the whole concept of narrative. In this respect, Kelly and Todd have both really pushed me. I suck at working in groups, so this was really a struggle for me, and I have to admit that if I’d been entirely in control of this project, the end result would have been very different. I think each of us believes this about ourselves. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is something interesting about the idea of attempting to remove as much of that Aristotelian arc of conflict as possible, and Kelly and Todd have both helped it in this direction (I was probably dragging my feet every step of the way). I thought it was very interesting that Kelly thought it was going the other direction, when I felt it could have been much more plot-oriented than it was. Shows my biases, I suppose.

Secondly, I think the video project in particular pushed me to be more willing to edit my original conception of a creative piece. I resist revision. Vehemently. If I revise, I either add to the original piece to provide clarity or I throw it aside entirely and start over. I do not cut unless I have no other choice. Todd and Kelly are clearly believers in cutting, and I think this was the greatest problem we ran into putting the final piece together. Again, this is certainly not a bad thing. It’s entirely possible the project is objectively better because of their willingness to remove things they didn’t feel fit in. I just had a different idea of what fits in. Almost every time we discussed whether a particular shot was working for the whole project, it played out largely the same.

Me: “Oh come on, that’s hilarious.”
Todd: “It doesn’t fit.”
Kelly: “Yeah, it really doesn’t.”
Me: “But… come on! He’s feeding the toaster baked beans! It’s funny!”
Kelly: “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Me: “Okay. Fine…. But it would have been awesome.”

That old adage that a writer is supposed to kill his babies when he revises is not one I concede to often, and so letting go of some of my favorite parts of our footage really hurt. This is the essence of collaboration, I suppose. Maybe it didn’t fit into our final concept of the project. But it fit into MY concept of it. Which is why I fought so hard to keep things in. But ultimately, I suppose, because we had to debate about things like this, the project reflects more accurately our combined views on what we finally wanted to do with it. Kelly’s and Todd’s were just more likely closer to each other’s than they were to mine, hence my initial resistance.

I’m with Kelly that I felt like overall this class opened me up to a lot of non-writing ways of being creative, and I would be interested also in continuing to pursue them. We all talked about taking the full footage we got for the apocalypse piece and making our own individually realized projects out of that. Perhaps it would be a good exercise to do this and place them next to each other in some way; perhaps this combination and repetition of images could as an artifact say something different than the version we cut apart together. Even the idea of comparing collaborative work to work derived from the same sources but different artists intrigues me, and I wouldn’t mind playing with this further. I suppose that might be the best way for me to ultimately get away from simple narrative without rejecting it entirely, by stacking it instead. Something to take with me, I guess.

dead baby jokes

Only slightly ironically, the idea for this project began as a joke. I think I was discussing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with my boyfriend one afternoon, and no doubt he or I made some tasteless comment about dead baby jokes, since there is in fact, to my knowledge (since I have yet to finish the book), at least one dead baby in the novel. So I asked him what he thought stand-up comedy would be after the apocalypse, how a post-apocalyptic environment, particularly one in which someone is left basically alone, would affect the parameters of comedy. I didn’t exactly say it like that, of course. It was more along the lines of “Would we still have crappy Seinfeld airplane humor if everyone is dead?” But the concept was born, and it was born out of goofy speculation.

Then I decided I really liked the idea. And pitched it to Kelly and Todd. And since all three of us both have a fond appreciation for the absurd, specifically when it comes to humor, we decided it was rife with possibilities. We found ourselves almost overwhelmed with the possible places we could take it. And, also, could not resist the opportunity to bring Bill Cosby to a new level.

At this point we’re envisioning it as something with a very loose narrative base to it, so loose that I don’t think the apocalypse itself is given too much time to come to the forefront. A lot of the visual element will be a single character on the screen negotiating with his newly decimated surroundings, and doing so largely through an exploration of humor, as it either changes or doesn’t change from our pre-apocalyptic understanding of it. And, of course, it means we get to make Todd grow a beard. Which should be an experiment in and of itself.

In approaching this, I’ve found a couple of different works that seem to speak directly to our intentions (or what we think our intentions are; as Todd so aptly pointed out, these things have a tendency to take on a mind of their own). The first is a video called Flatness 145, done by an artist named Rob James. It’s fairly simple and makes no effort to explain itself, something I think we’re shooting for ourselves, since explaining why anyone would want to figure out comedy after their entire culture has been wiped out may double the length of the video and make it, frankly, way less funny. It consists of a simple group of brief collected images, drawn together with headings at the beginning of each “day,” and a sense of movement that conveys the passage of time through simple tasks. Embedded in these images is something odd but seductive in its simplicity: numerous fruits and vegetables that appear occasionally, breaking up scenes and giving the impression that some sort of vegetative invasion is occurring. There isn’t a whole lot to it, but James is clearly playing around with the absurd imagery usually associated with the B movie genre, and that sort of silliness that does not draw too much attention to itself is basically what we want to convey in our own piece.

The other one is The Allens by artist Erik Bunger. Conceptually, this one is just as simple, but is at the same time more complex in its execution; its inaccessibility is in fact the point of the piece. The entire video is a monologue from Woody Allen in which his original awkward Brooklyn speech is layered over by waves of the same words translated into various languages, to the point that no linguistic thread can be found throughout in one particular language. As Bunger explains it, the languages become nuances of the same personality, like linguistic tics almost, although in some places there is some overlap so comprehension even for a native speaker of one of these languages is compromised. Its pertinence to our project, I think, lies in the fact that something as simple as humor, which can be treated itself as a language of sorts, can be compromised by external forces, in this case a complete breakdown of social and cultural norms. How does one approach satire when there’s nothing left to satirize? This sort of distortion, although in a subtler way, is the focal point of our piece.

an excuse to discuss rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

I’ve always been fascinated with stop action animation as a medium, probably because it’s so labor intensive (and probably also because I grew up with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Wallace &
Gromit and so many other claymation kid-oriented work out there). Working in precise, meticulous terms is always something that I’m awed by, probably because fiction writing allows me the opportunity to write in a whirlwind and correct later, rather than create in a slower way which requires working out things on a micro level until it works before moving on. I don’t have the patience for it, and so I’m intrigued by it.

But the stop-action in Stop Motion Studies is of a very different breed. And I found myself even becoming impatient with it as it went along. Perhaps it’s the disconnect of it, the jump between sections both in the actual photographs and for the “reader,” who is experiencing brief pieces, linking only a few photos that are presented in loops of no more than a couple of seconds that one can watch once or twice or sit staring at indefinitely. Because these are only short loops connected by the reader’s navigation between screens and whatever thematic (and clearly locational) correlations he or she makes, it never fully coalesces into one piece for me, becomes there are too many jumps.

So this may seem like a silly question, but I’m curious why this (side note: while searching for Wallace and Gromit videos on youtube, I found a LOT of edited together and played with versions, which felt relevant to me; thus the clip I’m giving you guys is one some guy edited together with Flight of the Conchords music layered on top of it, which amused me):



is less appealing to me than the stop motion pieces, why I am drawn to Wallace and Gromit and even silly remixes of it, but am put off by these other pieces, despite the similar attention to detail that I find fascinating about both poles of what we consider “stop action/motion.” I’m sure there are a lot of little reasons. Wallace and Gromit is adorable. It involves an evil penguin and a wide assortment of cheese. There are a lot of very simple jokes in it (Gromit getting into the fridge and finding a handful of bunnies pretending to be condiments and hiding behind celery). But I have a feeling there’s something more basic to it too.

I feel like I get the point to Wallace and Gromit, whatever that point might be. It’s linear, it’s accessible, it says something clear. I find myself alienated in all these ways from the Stop Motion Studies. There’s no linearity to it apart from the omnipresence of the subway. We are only given small, distant glimpses of people and as a result are alienated from them, something I think is aggravated by the fact that people usually appear in three sections or less. There is no consistency of personality in it. So what am I supposed to feel from beginning to end? I’ve gone through a lot of it and I still have no idea.

Perhaps the delineative aspects of it are exactly its point, that it’s saying something is essentially delineated about life and that observences on the subway offer us perfect examples of this. But in this case, the point is labored. Why continue to make essentially the same piece over and over again? As usual, I might feel clueless on this, but I am, as so often happens, lost.

I’m intrigued by the idea of searching for lines in things that might not necessarily have lines. Putting lines where they don’t belong. If I felt like a plot was implied in these images, particularly if it’s clear there was none in the first place, perhaps I would be less resistant to them.

technology is an infernal machine, technology is an infernal machine...

Yes, the times they are a-changin’. This is a mantra particularly in the publishing industry because we as writers, fiction or poetry writers in particular, are constantly made to deal with the changes in the industry, constantly chattered at about our own obsolescence, our own imminent death, and frankly, my brain is starting to get tired. When did all of this become one big product? Why are we as a society so obsessed with examining how we consume?

When I was in high school, my first job was at a market research firm based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not your typical after school job, I know -- not exactly working at the local movie theatre (although I did that too, eventually). But it was an easy job which mostly consisted of sitting in a small, bleak cubicle and spending six hours waiting for my computer to dial the next random number, and then, whenever it picked up, the quick recitation of the script on my screen (verbatim, underlined) in the vain hope that the person on the other end wouldn’t hang up or tell me to go fuck myself in the first thirty seconds. My raises were determined by my success rate, you see. It was hour upon hour of automated deconstruction of consumer habits, questions in precisely repetitive language. Oddly enough, since the job was so stressful, the place was usually filled with high school students working short shifts to accommodate our schedules. All of my friends worked there at some time or another during the time I did.

This is what came to mind for me while reading Anderson’s summation of Ben, the lens through which he intends us to see this latest generation of tech-savvy teenagers. Indeed, this is how I viewed each of the pieces for this week: numerous examples of the ways in which we are meant to see that the advent of the internet and the expansion of media is somehow rendering old paradigms of media consumption -- specifically the archaic notion of going down to a bookstore and buying a book and then taking it home and reading it -- no longer useful to us. Out with the old, in with the new. The times, they are a-changing’.

But if there’s anything I learned from being a seventeen-year-old market researcher, it’s that people as groups follow arcs, but individuals never do. Yes, when the computer-recorded responses to the carefully worded questions were completed, some sort of discrete group of conclusions could be extrapolated, all of which could be clumped with other conclusions. Researcher analysts who never have any direct contact with individuals taking the surveys could derive mathematical conclusions based on data. But at seventeen, sitting in those ugly little cubicles and conversing from Michigan with strangers in Utah or wherever, I accrued a number of much more personal ridiculous stories from what little personality I managed to pick up from someone through the phone. And was the recipient of a lot of long distance anger, none of which contributed to the final numbers in those surveys. Even Anderson’s use of Ben, the sixteen-year-old who loves anime and watches The West Wing, can only give us so much. Given, he provides a good foil for Anderson himself given modern capabilities, but he also conveniently promotes Anderson’s argument that we as consumers consume differently as what’s available to us changes. So we’re not in front of the TV watching Gilligan’s Island anymore. But are we to believe that those teenagers no longer exist? Or for that matter, that that body of readers who buy books from bookstores have ceased to be? I remain unconvinced.

Oh, the options. Yes, I can get behind this. I can even embrace it, because I am equally intrigued by the options that, say, amateur filmmaking technology offers us. But I resist the idea that we as a culture only discard. Or that we are all like Heather Mash in the Bargain Book Hunting article, constantly tossing aside what we’ve already consumed. Although I will give Anderson one thing: we as media consumers are spreading ourselves out. And this, in my opinion, can only be a good thing.

P.S. My title is stolen from the Jonathan Franzen essay, Why Bother?, from his essay collection, How to Be Alone. This is the rant he says he is afraid of getting into as he is writing a social novel intended to criticize the very thing it's being made obselete by. Which I suppose is kind of what I resorted to here.

one person from another, endlessly

I feel like so much of my brain lately has been focused on print as something obsolete, something that’s past its prime in a way, and I have to say it’s pretty damn depressing.

I know that perhaps this is not what Stephanie Strickland was going for in her essay, Dali Clocks: The Time Dimensions of Hypermedia, but her continuous emphasis on this concept of “now,” her cadence on this attempt to capture an immediate present or to define it in various ways through digital media, points back again and again to the obsolescence of writing linearly, to experiencing text as an easily definable series of moments on the page.

But then that same sort of thing has been attempted in textual works. What comes to mind is Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a rather strange work that tries to debunk the concept of linear fiction as much as it can while remaining readable, although its methods become a little comical. For instance, when characters are walking down a spiral staircase at one point, the text appears in a spiral on the page, thereby forcing the reader to either crane or rotate the book to take it all in. But more importantly, the whole thing is in two separate narratives, one the actual story (with its own footnotes, mind you, because it’s billed as a semi-academic analysis of a non-existent film) and the other the story of a guy named Johnny Truant entirely in his own set of footnotes. It degenerates eventually to the point that there are numerous lists of things going on next to the actual narratives and the page just becomes a clusterfuck of text that largely confuses and infuriates. Which makes me wonder: can these intentional mis-directions and visual trees (as with the Rosenberg piece Strickland cites in her essay, the text piling up as the reader scrolls his/her mouse over it) and games with the concept of linearity become so cumbersome that they destroy meaning? At what point does meaning break down entirely, or is it fluid, so that meaning can always be drawn from a piece no matter the breakdown of clarity in it? I don’t have an answer to that question, but my instinct is usually to err on the conservative side and assume that there is such a thing as betraying the reader by being too self-indulgent. A little bit old-fashioned of me, perhaps.

Another moment of synchronicity for me: I just did a presentation for Marcia Douglas’ International Fiction class about the concept of writing fiction with a purpose, specifically a socio-political one, which was intended to ask a few questions. Most relevantly, I wanted to know if Purpose, capital P on that one, muddles the work, if trying to Do Something with your work ruins its accessibility and alienates the reader before it can get its point across. In doing so, I was reading Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, a long essay about the craft of fiction, and he said a few things that seemed to directly pertain to Strickland’s piece, particularly about how ephemeral art is and the artist’s constant fight to create a “now” that can be preserved as an accurate mirror of society. For instance,

“What should the novelist do in the face of that destructive forgetting? Snap
his fingers at it and build his novel as an indestructible castle of the
unforgettable, even though he knows that his reader will only ramble through it
distractedly, rapidly, forgetfully, and never inhabit it.”

So that “now” can never be captured, and novelists may be even more ill-equipped to capture it in their work than the digital artists that Strickland speaks of, particularly those who in that “now”-capturing play with the very idea of “now,” so what you’re experiencing in any given moment can’t necessarily be reconciled to the moments before and after.
I wanted to close with this fantastic video from a group called Blu that is made by stop-action animation through erasable chalk. This felt like a great example of the concept of the ephemeral in art.

thunderstruck (insert wicked guitar solo here)

I felt a little bit lost jumping into this project to be perfectly honest. The actual creative element I’ve been exploring enthusiastically; I found myself even with a surplus of ideas because of the delicious openness of the project itself. What I found daunting was locating a particular piece of sound art that could be said to inform my own approach to the topic, probably because my understanding of how one piece of art informs another is obviously more deeply engrained in fiction writing; digging through various sound art across the spectrum, I found myself asking: “How can any of these be directly related to my own understanding of the work, which derives from a place totally independent of any digital background or even audio/musical background?”

Charles Bernstein’s piece, “Piffle (Breathing),” felt like it opens from a very similar place to where I intend to go with mine, simply by virtue of its use of basic body sounds to set a particular mood. My own piece is still developing in its conception, simply because my instinct is the same with fiction, furniture and anything really: clutter the hell out of things until I feel like I need to dig my way out. Where it begins, though, is with a very simple concept. When I was a child, my family was not religious; I went to church approximately 4 times, and only so my parents could dump my brother and I off while they went golfing with my grandfather. Beyond that, my only religious experience was in something called vacation bible school, which was basically us being shunted off to a local church for a week to sing songs and reenact Bible stories with sock puppets. While we were there, a group of about 200 children would sit in this huge chapel and play “thunderstorm,” a game in which everyone would rub their palms together, then start snapping, then stomp their feet on the floor to simulate the sound of a rainstorm. This only worked with a bunch of people participating, and for me it began to embody everything I understood about organized religion: you cannot find God without lots of people, and sometimes we as individuals are forced to find him, even if we don’t want to.

My sound piece begins from the attempt to reenact that thunderstorm sound with the sound effects from a single person, namely, myself. I am going to do as much as I can through manipulating it, but I ultimately expect to fail, which is part of the point. On top of this, I intend to layer a narrative which I am currently writing, which begins with the sentence, “She found Jesus in a rainstorm, even though she was not looking for him.” Beyond that, I’m still deciding on any additional layers.

Back to Bernstein. What immediately struck me about this piece when I began listening to it was the very basic and yet disturbing place it opens. For a good moment, we get only the artist breathing. I was so uncomfortable about this after the first few seconds that I found myself actually skipping ahead to find what else the piece consisted of on the first listening. What it develops into is three layered pieces: the first, the breathing; the second, a conversation that begins after this; and the third, a conversation between the artist and someone else regarding the logistics of the actual piece. What drew me to this was two things. I was interested in the use of breathing in the piece for numerous reasons: the discomfort it causes, the background rhythm it creates, and the fact that it’s so simple and yet shapes the piece so definitively. Also, the meta-art tactic it uses with the one conversation makes us that much more aware of the piece’s art-ness, and this artistic self-awareness is always something I’m interested in.

I’ll talk about this more in class. But to round this piece out, I’ll leave you with a little AC/DC and admit that on some level I’m sure this informs my piece as well (forgive the video; it's a poor substitute for the original music video, which was difficult to find an accessible copy of):

Trees falling in a presentation hall...

I’ve gone about seven different directions trying to put into some sort of context The Yes Men and last week’s Hacker Manifesto. I think seeing the film enabled me to better respect the ideology expounded upon in the reading, although more in the sense of using artistic expression in its most open interpretation as a means of stirring things up politically. I don’t think what bothered me so much about the Hacker Manifesto was the ideology itself, although its strictly Marxist idea of art being constantly co-opted I did resist somewhat, if only for the more romanticized reasons from Chabon’s essay I discussed last week: the pleasure inherent in any art form makes it ultimately too personal and thus impervious to being completely made into product. To put it simply, art finds a way. I imagine the Trickster of Chabon’s essay, in the bookstore or otherwise, defying convention, skirting expectations.

What I came out of last week’s viewing interested in was this idea of art’s adaptation into what might not normally be considered art for specifically political means. Which is not to say that doing so for other means isn’t interesting. Rather, I feel like, for myself, if there is no political or at least social vein to one’s work, some attempt to “stir things up,” then why am I paying attention to any convention you’re attempting to defy, or even why do I bother to write myself (I think I‘ve seen too much literary work, experimental fiction specifically, which seems to be experimenting for its own sake without saying anything remotely interesting with it)? I’m intrigued by the whole concept of political art, if only because the conventions it attempts to escape are frequently not merely conventions of form but of law and social behavior. How does one use art to express something political that moves people under a government that, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly encourage that sort of behavior?

So I started looking into some political art on the internet, focusing finally in two places: the Yes Man’s continued work pretending to represent organizations they find reprehensible, and the work of artist Ron English, specifically his political billboards. Something I found intriguing about the Yes Man’s more recent work was the effect that their notoriety had on their efforts, specifically how it preempted any shock value they made have had in front of a board of individuals ignorant to their usual hijinks. I was interested particularly in their infiltration of a Dow board meeting in 2005, since I did my undergrad in Mt Pleasant, MI, about fifteen minutes from where the meeting was held, and am well aware of how that company shapes the economy and political climate of the region. The response to their presence, specifically a whole slew of guards who apparently knew exactly who they were, while entertaining, brings up an important issue in their work: is this in fact the co-opting that the Hacker’s Manifesto is pointing to? Has the general alert to their existence and the success of their efforts to draw attention to corruption drawn so much attention that their methods themselves have become obsolete? Will it be necessary for them to find new ways to continue this work in order to get the same point across? How does one’s work remain vital when the very point of it--garnering media attention--makes the continued work impossible?

This is part of what drew me to the work I found of Ron English and other billboard and graffiti artists. The messages seem to be along similar lines in English’s work, although his seems to be a bit more partisan, specifically his endorsement of Obama. But the difference in medium means that there is both a smaller group of people contacted by a particular work but a greater amount of anonymity. The artist is not directly part of the work, and thus the risk involved in presenting that work is smaller, insomuch as that work is less likely to be prevented from presentation and thus has a higher possibility of reaching its target audience. The art is less persona and more representation and so the artist is not openly associated with his work. At the same time, though, the risk in the Yes Men’s choice of medium is coupled with a higher volume of press and therefore a greater impact if it succeeds. A billboard, however well-done, is easier to ignore. English’s work seems dependent also upon volume, but this volume derives from the number of billboards he creates and the location of presentation, in other words, the likelihood of press coverage due to the significance of its presence. In either case, a work is dependent to a certain extent upon press. If the audience reached is limited, the work is somewhat defeated in its intentions. As was discussed in the film, the initial presentation was not the point so much as the fallout it created; without fallout, the work is merely an extremely well-prepared prank.
All of this seems more resonant with explicitly political work, but it brings up a question for all art that attempts to break down barriers and create precedents: if no one hears you, does it fail? Who is art for: the artist or the audience? What does it mean to be a successful as an artist? I suppose that this is a question we all as individual artists must answer.