Fireside Chat

                I believe in absolute truth.  I believe also that everyone has interpreted and does interpret those truths as best they can, through art and other means.  Dimitri Martin, in his “If I” tour said something to the effect of this:  that there is a parallel universe right before our eyes which is revealed through a small shift in perspective.  Perhaps the best way to gain this shift in perspective is to learn from someone else’s.  Everyone grows up with experiences completely unique to herself.  This is clearly evident across centuries and nations, but I would also argue also that no two siblings grow up with the exact same view of the world.  And the more perspectives we gain, the more “universes” we see, or perhaps, the more clearly we see the universe as it truly is, tangibly or intangibly. 

                In order to demonstrate this belief, I utilized the Disney attraction “it’s a small world” designed for the UNICEF pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, later relocated at Disneyland park in California and then replicated for Walt Disney World in Florida and for Disneylands Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.  Most likely, plans are in place for a sixth permanent installation in the upcoming Shanghai Disneyland.  It’s a staple attraction, easily and immediately readable.  And the small world song, written and composed by Richard and Robert Sherman, has become a multi-nationally recognized and cherished song (also parodied and endearingly dreaded).  Its lyrics were intended to be simple enough to be easily translated into any and every language – lines like “there is just one moon and one golden sun and a smile means friendship to everyone.” 

                That one golden sun can also represent light, truth, or anything dependable in our lives, anything about which everyone can relate.  This unifying symbol is represented in every room of the attraction yet with a drastically different design in each case.  For my presentation, I chose to organize the graphics of these suns side by side – all together, all at once.  They all look like the sun, they represent the source well enough that, shown separately, one might say, “Well, that’s a sun, son,” yet none of them really replicate the sun.  They are representations seen through a different perspective.  This is true of any text.  No artist ever truly captures the source as it is or was.  Why should it?  If I want to see the sun, I’ll step outside and I’ll feel it on my skin.  From another, from their art or voice, I want to know how they see the sun and what it means to them.  I want to see from their perspective.  In this way I gain two-fold:  I learn to love the sun (or whatever the subject) even more, and I also learn to love the sharer.  And through this, our beautiful world gets a little bit smaller.

Concerned Citizen

The Kristin Perkins Interview

To some people, feminism is a charged word synonymous conflict and confrontation. To others, feminism is a simple statement of the discrepancy between the way women and men are treated in our society; any conflict in this case is in the eye of the beholder. Kristin Perkins is an example of a college student that chose to identify with a local feminist movement after seeing examples of the unfair treatment of women in society, specifically in our own community.

Recently there was a web movement on twitter called #YesAllWomen that allowed women to tell stories about how they personally have been mistreated in society because of their gender. This movement was followed by #YesEvenMormonWomen which had specific relevance to communities like the one at BYU. These statements used social media to add a personal voice to the larger issue at hand. All of the stories are different, but the underlying ideology is the same: Women are not receiving fair and equal treatment in our society when compared to their male counterparts and because of this many women are subject to abuse, discrimination, and objectification. Each and every woman has a voice to be heard and a story to tell. Campaigns like this one allow for the individual to be strengthened by the collective in opening up a larger social dialogue on the issue.

           As Kristin shared in our audio report, first we need to bring awareness to this problem in our own community. It is not just something that happens in another part of the nation or world, gender discrimination can be found in our everyday lives so far as we are able to identify it. She is doing so by helping develop the “YesAllWomen” devised theatre project. This play takes real stories from local women and puts them in the form of a production in order to communicate to a larger audience while still retaining the personal aspect of the experience that is so valuable. Projects like these help us change our community by forcing people to go outside the comfort of the commonly adopted perspective and face the inconvenient reality that exists at their doorstep. As Arlene Goldbard said, it is healthy to confront the old order of things and just because it has always been done, does not mean it should be perpetuated. Person by person, change can come about so far as we act on what we have learned rather than rely on the convenience of the past.

Game for Change

Only one thing on the Mind

                There’s a phrase I hate.  There are actually several that I hate, but I’m thinking of one in particular right now.  Whether or not you believe the answer or not, when I say that men only have one thing on their minds, you know what I mean.  Everyone has the same answer.  Though it’s never spoken, just ask any American, possibly any Occidental, and see if they don’t immediately know what you’re implying.  And just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s sex.  Apparently men only ever have sex on the brain. 

I tend away from absolutes in general, but this one is particularly upsetting.  Demitri Martin, joking about racism, says that Mexicans are bad listeners.  He corrects himself as saying that Mexicans are good listeners, but realizes that’s racist too.  So he finishes with the right amount of Mexicans listen the right amount of time.  Saying that all men are always thinking of one thing, whether football, trucks, or Haydn, is going to be sexist (though I’d love for any other option to take sex’s place). 

My game is set up so that despite your activity, despite your hobbies or preferences, the conclusion is that, actually, the whole time you were just thinking about sex.  I wanted it to feel out of place and jarring.  We’d be talking about having breakfast in the afternoon and then sex would interrupt.  I decided to embrace this assignment's heavy-handed potential, but with a little bit of a satirical touch.  My favorite touch is the Woman option at the first of the game.  Though it wasn't my primary focus, it was worth touching on the common and very untrue stigma men have against women:  they are completely foreign and we can never understand them.  If both this and my primary statement are true, then men are sex beasts, and women are so impossible that discussion is deemed futile and ruled out completely – might as well just gawk at ‘em.

I found an amazing article from Cosmopolitan (May2007, Vol. 242 Issue 5) called “Inside a Guy’s Naughty Mind.”  They create their own experiment to prove what I’m trying to disprove.  One of their DJ’s allegedly recorded all his sexual thoughts during the day on a tape recorder - there's a booty call and the unnamed "hot bartender."  The whole account is so contrived that nothing about it makes me believe that it’s true.  A more legitimate study conducted at Ohio State University (posted in Journal of Sex Research in the article “Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability”) showed that, from a sample of 72 men, the amount of sexual thoughts in a day ranged from 1-388.  388?  Even the Cosmopolitan guy only had 27.  The median, however, was 18.6 (women were marked at 9.9).

Mostly, I wanted to show that not all men are entirely consumed by a single physical urge.  But then again, I just spent my whole afternoon and evening, plus additional preparation during the week, thinking about this assignment.  

World Building

Radio Spot - an anti-Time Pirating spot, maybe a bit more pathetic

 than our own anti-media pirating ads - by Chris

Anti Time Pirating Ad 

Stitches in Time Sale - a store that sells period clothes made from real 

wool and cotton, fashionable for now or then - by Chris.

Time Correctors Logo - the government agency that specializes in repairing 

the damages made accidentally or maliciously by civilian time travelers - by Daniel

Legalize Time Protest - A group of activists fight for
the equal access of time for everyone - by Daniel

A Time Energy Scanner - for help in planning

 and navigating your way through time - by Brett

A Time Travel Card - showing that one is legally
and properly authorized to time travel  - by Brett

Brett - Elements that would be present in the highly regulated industry of time travel are items that would aid in the regulation process. The time travel pass card carries the personal identification information of those wishing to travel, much the same as a license for drivers in our world. The time energy scanner is used by the regulation officers to scan individuals for any residual time energy from recent trips. The strength and type of the reading identifies when the traveler went, and if all aspects of the trip were within the regulations of the approved trip.

Chris - Daniel’s idea was that everyone could time travel.  The possibilities of how to approach this were as endless as the parallel universes of such a world.  That means that after a short brainstorm in class, our first task was to settle down into one choice - set some boundaries.  We decided on the period when time travel was available for everyone, fairly accessible, but still highly regulated by the government.  Their relationship to breaking time laws would be like our relationship to burning cds: it’s illegal, but it’s not likely any punishment will be administered.  Thus, we decided to focus our efforts on government programs - that fixed infractions rather than prosecuted perpetrators - on protest groups - Legalize time - and on businesses - clothing and technology.  Through creating these artifacts, the world came closer into being.  Just as in films like Jurassic Park, Blade Runner, Harry Potter, and LOTR, where the worlds are often just as engaging as their stories and characters, by creating logos, businesses, adverts, and government programs, our world seemed to take shape, gain its grounding, and come alive.

Daniel - Oftentimes we find that the concept of time travel daunting and almost dangerous. However, we imagined a future society where the advent of time travel is similar to the advent of the internet. It is a groundbreaking and world-changing development in our society for the better. When we are able to travel through history, we are able to separate facts from fiction. History is not something that is recorded “post-game”: it is a live, living, breathing thing. Every bit of information is accessible, firsthand, throughout time. As long as you are anchored in the “now”, you can access any number of events, present or future.

Webspinna Battle

Heavenly Hell


James
           Very rarely have I left class knowing what I wanted to do, but somehow with the combination of Chris and myself we did. At the first suggestion of performing “Heaven vs. Hell” we agreed upon it.

An exciting battle needs duality. And in order to have duality you need personality. So the first process, before any clips were selected, was to find a voice for an angel and a devil. Chris and I wanted a comical approach. We decided to have the devil be more of a nuisance and annoyance than the physical representation of evil. Hence the gag was set up. Conceptually the devil would be the disturber of the peace, therefore the angel’s voice had to have an element of peace. So we made a list of peaceful things: children’s choir, nature sounds, and Morgan Freeman. Then we thought of silly ways to interrupt the peaceful sounds that would result in an extraction of the peaceful element within them. By colliding one sound with another we found that what you achieve is more sound. Isn’t that what music is? Sound stacked on stack. As achieved in the Art of the Glitch or Pogo’s Snow White remix disrupting or interrupting a piece of art simply makes more art.   

Christopher
            Jonathan Lethem in his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” discusses plagiarism.  If a text is good enough, in a way it just becomes public property.  Also, if it’s good enough, another creator may not even realize he’s plagiarizing.  An example of the latter came to me after my friend Davey Lowell gave me back the short story I’d written.  He said he loved how I wrote that “the door slammed open.”  I hadn’t remembered writing that, but I did remember reading that expression more than once in Bradbury stories, which I was big in to at the time.  I knew exactly from where I’d gotten it though I hadn’t consciously borrowed it.  For this assignment, it wasn’t until we’d planned it all out that I’d realized we’d pretty much just copied the old cartoony shoulder angel and devil.  I did specifically though plagiarize my costume from Jason Sudekis’s Mr. The Devil character from Weekend Update. 

One other piece of our project was to address the nature a true heavenly attitude.  For me, being angelic doesn’t involve sitting by yourself, listening to children’s choirs, and scorning your annoying neighbor; being truly angelic involves broadening your view of the world, understanding your neighbor, and sometimes joining in with him on a little kick line to one of his favorite songs.

Textual Poaching

My Video: 12 Angry Ferdinand

               The piece of my identity which I’ve chosen to address is smaller than many of the proposed categories, such as white, American, male, twentysomething, or Mormon – smaller, I suppose, in that it’s more specific.  For example, there are, most likely, less people who identify as peacemakers than there are members of the male gender or citizens of the US - not every man, not every American fills this role - but I feel it’s much more a part of who I am than either of those examples.  It was the part of my identity of which I first thought when the assignment was given.  I came to fill the role of peacemaker primarily within my family, but it has since spread into every other major group with which I am involved:  school, work, church, friendship circles, etc.

                The two texts I chose to poach were the stories of Ferdinand the Bull, interpreted here by Walt Disney Animation, and of 12 Angry Men, interpreted here by Sidney Lumet.  In 12 Angry Men, Henry Fonda’s character, Juror #8, is, at first, one man against 11.  His major virtue is that of giving the other side of the argument a chance.  That’s how I see it, and Jenkins’ “How Texts Become Real,” in which he argues that a text reaches its true cultural life through use, interpretation, and personalization, gives me power to do so.  Juror #8 is a character that I have, perhaps, refashioned for my own comfort.  He fills the role of peacemaker through empathetic, intelligent, and sometimes contentious means.  He’s not cruel, he’s determined, especially since human life is on the line.  Had he entered the court room with all other 11 men immediately calling out “Innocent,” though, I’m sure he would have stopped them a moment to consider the other side, just to be sure.  He represents fairness, equality, and balance, and to me, that’s peace.

                On the other hand, there’s Ferdinand.  I didn’t grow up with Ferdinand the Bull but was introduced to him through Elliott Smith, a peacemaker in his own way.  It’s a perfect example of a cult story as outlined by Jenkins.  Munro Leaf, the book’s author, wrote it for his illustrator friend.  He had no agenda.  Then the Spanish Civil War broke out.  It was promoted as a powerful example of pacifism.  This continued to expand into other issues and nations, the book becoming in essence the definitive symbol of pacifism.  Hitler banned it.  Ghandi claimed it as his favorite book. 

                For my purposes, then, with Ferdinand being such an adorable story and such a recognized example of peace, I montaged him against clips from 12 Angry Men in order to allow Juror #8, my peacemaker of preference in the narrative world, to be seen in the light in which I see him:  a peacemaker.