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.
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.
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