Archive for 2015

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chat


Last Monday I was standing in front of you all, kind of surrounded by a giant .gif of a dead guy with cockroaches pouring out of his mouth and some random couple making out, and I was trying to tell you about how niceness doesn't come easily to me. Afterward, Hunter said this about you people in the audience: "They did not want to look anywhere in front of them," and I was glad. What I was trying to do was make you feel how I feel all the time. Which is to say: uneasy and itchy and anxious. I've always felt uncomfortable inhabiting my own body, like I'm this brain that has to kind of muddle my way through maneuvering these arms and legs around. Moreover, I'm uncomfortable inside myself, and I have a hard time relating this thing that I am -- and the emotions I have, etc. -- to other people, even in cases where it's important that I try to relate them. I have a problem with assuming that people will just inherently know that I like them, and even though I'm acting like they're lame and gross and that everything they like/do is lame and gross, they'll somehow just be like, "She loves me and we're best friends, la la la." But they don't. They just feel sad and attacked and mostly like they don't want to be around me anymore. So I've been trying very hard to be more sincere and gentle with people, and let them know that I like them, and treat them like actual friends and family members instead of mortal enemies or whatever. I think this is me saying that I believe in niceness, even if I'm still a little bit unsure of the delivery.

I think a lot of the other fireside chats addressed big societal or cultural beliefs and problems -- like depression or the twenty-first century problem with face-to-face communication, etc. -- but mine was less global, more of an internal offering. I was trying to say, "Here is what I am, and how I am, and here is what I'm trying to do to be better." And even though this was a completely personal and introspective ordeal, I still hope that it was a way that the "community" (or everybody else listening to the fireside chat) could better understand and relate to not just me but to each other. Even if everyone else doesn't suffer from the same prickliness and the same anxieties as I do, maybe they can relate to the sentiment that I feel like a small, lonely person hurtling around on Earth and trying to connect with people; I think a lot of other people feel something similar to this, even if it's not framed within the same parameters and hindrances. Everybody has their thing. Everybody feels like an outsider based on some kind of weird personality quirk or whatever. I think what I was trying to do was say, "Here I am, and come closer." 

I said that I believed in distance and uneasiness and emotional walls and uncertainty. And I still do. Addressing these issues in front of an audience didn't magically vaporize them or whatever. After the fireside chat -- which I thought went well, and which I felt good about -- I'm still struggling to be pleasant. I've never had a problem with being loyal or altruistic or protective or full of love, instead I've just had a problem with relating any of these things to the people I care about as anything other than crankiness and venom. That's why the couple standing next to me kissing -- a straightforward display of physical and emotional intimacy -- is something that's so much harder for me to reconcile with than something as snarly and blatantly obscene as a dead dude with cockroaches coming out of his mouth. I can do snarly and obscene. I can do gross. I can do irritable and explicit and violent and loud and nasty and angry. I can do fireworks and machine guns and guts and slime. But I can't do tender or gentle. I can't do romance or sincerity or amiability or softness or quietness. I am prickly, bristly, surly, petulant, jealous, cranky, hesitant, anxious, doubtful, insecure, irrational, nervous, testy, skittish, aggressive, and problematic. And it's okay, because I believe in the dream of exponential growth and of second chances and of do-overs. I believe in a learning curve in all things, whether it be coming to terms with depression or figuring out your relationship with God, or simply trying to be a person who can be soft and lovely to other people who are soft and lovely. 



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citizen


We went into this interview without a project -- or at least without a "cause" -- but instead we had a person we wanted to focus on.  Relying less on the "institution" and more on the intrinsic values or beliefs that one person -- Jesse Baird -- actually had allowed us to get to the meat of a problem he actually cared about instead of a cookie-cutter "mission."  In fact, we tried to prompt Jesse to talk about various topics that we thought might provoke a discussion (politics, abortion, feminism, female circumcision, etc.) but sometimes smaller issues take precedent over these universal issues and can provide a basis to build up to them.  Jesse's thoughtful critique of passivity in societal interactions relating to harmful behaviors actually does address sexism, racism, homophobia, rape culture, etc. but not in the rah-rah, grandiose Big Topic way that we are used to in confrontational social settings.

Furthermore, our aim was to capture the actual essence of what Jesse cares about and finds valuable just by himself.  Our project is about how not everyone has to be the director of a food bank or spend their Saturdays volunteering at a soup kitchen to be an activist.  Jesse, in his everyday interactions with other people, stands up for a cause that isn't getting enough attention from media, politics, society, etc.  Moreover, not everybody has the societal influence to start their own campaign or charity, and not everyone has the opportunity or time to make a drastic global change. Thus, it's the day-to-day, interpersonal human interactions that can actually start the ball rolling toward social evolution and away from antiquated paradigms of bigotry and injustice.

As for outside media, we referenced home videos to capture a more realistic aesthetic instead of a clinical and polished experience.  In home videos, you get the unedited truth and probably gratuitous material -- like Jesse on the broomstick or screwing around with a camera -- even though not all parts of those moments relate directly to the cause, they still relate to the individual.

Goldbard makes an statement claiming that "encroaching on the old paradigm, knowledge from many different spheres reveals how cul- ture is key to creating the conditions that enable human rights and therefore, security rooted in caring rather than coercion."  Jesse's project is not to be the next President of the United States and change the world that way, instead he just wants to add to the conversation to create "the conditions that enable human rights" and it's as simple as that. 

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game for slay


"Slut-shaming" is a part of colloquial and scholarly vernacular that emerged in the mid-2000's that describes "the act of making, or attempting to make, a woman or girl feel guilty or inferior for certain sexual behaviors, circumstances, or desires that deviate from traditional or orthodox gender expectations, or that which may be considered to be contrary to natural or religious law" (and that definition is from Wikipedia, because I am pond scum). In it's most typical -- and maybe most tragic -- state of being, slut-shaming emerges as besmirching women for their clothing/appearance choices and adhering sexual implications and assumptions to the women based on their dress. 

One of the most basic (and cowardly) forms of slut-shaming is cat-calling in any of its many mutations. We are all familiar with the classic Yelling Something Vulgar Out of Car Windows at Women Walking on the Street. There's the stereotypical Construction Workers Verbally Violating Women as They Innocently Pass By. There's the Anonymous Wolf Whistle in a Crowd. All of these, no matter how innocent or well-intended, are forms of sexual harassment. Feeling the right to comment, especially sexually comment, on a woman's body is not only gross and embarrassing, but also misogynistic and derogatory. 

 My Twine game, "SLUTS R US," features an array of scenarios that hopefully address a wide-ish variety of reactions to slut-shaming and possible misconceptions about what it is and how to deal with it. For example, one of the common yet problematic mindsets that people have is that only women wearing "slutty" clothing will be slut-shamed. This is definitely not the case. Besides the fact that modesty is relative, even women wearing traditionally "decent" clothing may be assaulted for the sight of their body in any clothes. That's why I included clothing options that were more likely to be viewed as "suggestive" -- like a bikini top or a pair of short-shorts -- but I also added the option to pick a ΓΌbermodest pair of BYU-approved knee-length shorts and a school t-shirt. But no matter what the player chooses to wear, slut-shaming and cat-calling are still problems that they, as literal or virtual women, have to face. That's why the Twine format is so useful in the discussion and education of objectification of women in media/games; instead of trying to talk about how to portray "strong" or "realistic" depictions of women (like Anita Sarkeesian talks about with Stephen Colbert here), Twine forces the player into a position that isn't just a "realistic" woman, it's actually you.

 I referenced Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," in the creation of SLUTS R US, particularly the part where Adichie has to reconcile the fact that she initially believed that all stories were about foreigners with the reality stories can be about anyone and any place. I added an option to my game where players who didn't understand the harm of cat-calling and in fact felt flattered by it could learn about why it's actually offensive and destructive, which hopefully kind of mimics the way Adichie had to come to terms with something she assumed she understood, even though that wasn't the case.

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world building

Welcome to FLEA*.

Population: 600 Billion

Year: 3209 A.D.

Swine Flu wiped out the human race in the year 2075.  After disrupting the life cycle of Earth, the only species that was self-sufficient enough to survive were the genus musmusculus (MICE).  After decades of research, we enter the year 3209 where mice have developed synthetic human bodies that they use as vessels to carry out every day processes more effectively and efficiently.

They do so while wearing visors.

They are: Mice In Visors ™.

How it Works
They work together in cubicles within the pseudo-human skull.  Each body contains about 10 mice working together to control the central nervous system.

The mice use these bodies to do everyday life things that they had observed back when humans roamed the earth.  But despite their strides to be as human as possible, they still only care about one thing: obtaining food.

And so, in order to get food, they barter with items that they observed to be desirable and beneficial to humans when they existed.  Things such as: uncharged iPhones, tampons, cigarette butts, etc.  These are all items that they saw humans interact with frequently, and therefore are thought to be important for trade.


Bartering
 
The mice also can't seem to shake their animalistic desires like cheese and being warm, comfortable, and safe.  So these things are in abundance in their world: furniture resembles cheese, they wear a lot of sweaters and their houses are covered in fur.



Things they like
The mice have a tacit agreement as to who is in charge.  So there is no government, they all just know what their place is in life, and stick it through.  This makes for a very peaceful world, and within the body they all work together to create a single mechanism. Mice (In Visors™) are basically successfully doing exactly what present-day humans are trying to do.


Artist's Statement:

In the initial stages of conceptualization, the only thing we knew about this world was that mice were sort of like overlords. When we started considering what was and was not realistic, mouse overlords couldn’t possibly run Earth because of their general smallness and lack of know-how. But mice inside human bodies would be unstoppable. I literally cannot think of a single thing more powerful and sensual than a mouse in a human body. So we thought about how cunning mice would overcome their fragility to ultimately survive. The solution was relatively simple: of course mice would figure out robotics and put together realistic human host bodies so that they could thrive in the harsh conditions of a post-apocalyptic, humanless world. With their new found access to things like Opposable Thumbs™ and legs long enough to reach the pedals in Cadillac Escalades, etc., mice could finally do all the things that they envied about human life, including (but not limited to): skateboarding, hot-tubbing, drinking beer, cat-calling at babes (RIP), flippin’ burgers at the local Five Guys, smoking weed, etc. Mice could do it all AND MORE!  

For outside media, we took the sort of obvious route and referred to the Pixar movie, Ratatouille. In the film, one rat figures out a way to control a human’s body by sitting on top of his head and pulling his hair (science?). Instead of this charming, albeit unrealistic approach to rodent/human control interactions, we decided to capitalize on a more pragmatic version of the same principle. Thus, mice would inhabit cold, humanoid shells that they themselves had crafted in their rodent laboratories, and they would have to work together inside the pseudo-human body in their own collaborative efforts mouse-to-mouse instead of human-to-mouse.

After researching mice and their typical way of living, we began to see just how crazy a world controlled by mice might be. By finding their unusual habits, we realized just how different the society would be. For example, mice prefer dark, and they do have their own type of “classes” among them. With just these two details, you would have a world in the dark and a new anarchy system. Even the littlest changes could cause the most dramatic difference in a world.

From the reading Julian Bleeker said, “Design fiction is a way of exploring different approaches to making things, probing the material conclusions of your imagination, removing the usual constraints when designing for massive market commercialization.” This quote indeed expressed the different ways to approach in making a new world. We tried to figure out what one small detail would do to the rest of the world. For one thing, furniture would look like pieces of cheese. Cheese became the new barter system, which in millions of ways changes the world. We then had to approach a world that functioned without money, but instead cheese. How would this world actually function? It was an interesting experience in trying to create a world that would actually work. In the end it brought many new ideas and pieces to the creative table.


(*I guess this is our project. I'm sort of sorry.)

  

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medium whatever

THIS IS A POEM

 This is the first stanza.
This is the second stanza.
This is the third stanza.
This is the fourth stanza.
This is the fifth stanza.
This is the sixth stanza.
This is seventh stanza.
This is the eighth stanza.
This is the ninth stanza.
This is the tenth stanza.
This is the eleventh stanza. 
This is the twelfth stanza.


---------------------------------------------------

 
I am a person who has taken one hundred million creative writing and poetry classes. Thus, I've been over the But What Is Poetry? question one hundred million times and in each of these debates we (i.e. me, other students, professors, various scholars who have written essays concerning the problem) inevitably come to a consensus that most things can be considered poetry; even everything is poetry. That said, in the 18th century the But What Is Poetry? debate would have gone quite a bit differently. Poets like Samuel Coleridge and Lord Byron and John Keats relied religiously on the poetic staples that we still discuss in remedial high school English classes: form, rhyme, meter, etc. However, in the anything-goes, internet-heavy, artistic free-for-all that is the 21st century, poetry doesn't have to be defined by the classicism that it was first designed with. In fact, it doesn't even need to be contained within the parameters of words or language at all. 

 For instance, prose poetry has become a widely accepted poetic "form" in recent years, yet it's still controversial because traditionalists are asking, "If it's prose, how is it poetry?" And thus the But What Is Poetry? question spins around again and everybody gets all flustered and upset about what poetry can or cannot be. (Check out "The Straightforward Mermaid" by Matthea Harvey and "Heroic Moment" by Charles Simic and see what you think.)

 Or Flarf poetry, which has only occurred since the early 21st century and couldn't exist at all without the presence of the internet. Read "Mm-Hmmm" by Gary Sullivan and try not to fall in love.

Another post-internet "form" is the pseudo-spam Twitter account that we all known and luv, "Horse ebooks," which some experimental scholars have not-even-jokingly started analyzing in actual universities as poetry.

 Moreover, there's "Drift" by Caroline Bergvall --- which my poetry class studied and analyzed last semester --- that has almost zero concrete language or narrative, and actually relies on scribbled, visual "stanzas" to convey its message. And it's still poetry, despite its apparent lack of recognizable English "language."

 There's "In the Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound, which is two measly lines but is featured in basically every single poetry anthology ever. Similarly, there's an actual poetic form called a monostich which is any poem that is composed of a single line. (For example, a monostich by Ralph Hodgson which reads in its entirety: "'Skunks,' the squirrel said, 'are send to try us.'")

And these examples are, like, 0.0001% of all the other experimental poetic forms that exist. There is so much new, weird, avant-garde poetry that is just sort of hanging out on the internet, or in flimsy little chapbooks in indie bookstores, or in new Bohemian anthologies that aren't quite being taught at BYU yet.

In crafting my own medium-specific poem, I came upon the problem that if I accepted everything as poetry --- or everything as art --- then this project became extremely difficult in its inherent prescription of finding loopholes and nuances to work with. If everything is poetry, then there is no specificity to explore, you know? So finally I decided to mess with poetic form in all the ways I've been describing. Like, "If a poem is ______, then is it ______." So the tenth "stanza" --- which is constructed of regular English words --- then links you/the audience to a .jpg of a few panels of the comic Orc Stain via the internet (is the process of the linking part of the poetry?), and thus says, "Okay, so this comic is poetry." Then stanza eleven links you to a Girls music video, and says, "Not only is this video poetry, but also the song is poetry." And then stanza twelve links you to a clip from Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, so that film is poetry, and Godzilla is poetry, and Mechagodzilla is poetry, and the characters' dialogue is poetry, etc. etc. 

 It's like in the excerpt from Understanding Comics, when Young Scott McCloud says, "Sure, I realized that comic books were usually crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable, kiddie fare -- BUT -- they don't have to be!" In poetic terms, I come from a place that started out as, "Sure, I realized that poems were usually stiff, flowery, rhyming, pretentious, esoteric, highbrow, formulas -- BUT -- they don't have to be!" They can be whatever ~thing~ a person messes with, that calls on tropes of the nature of speech (if not speech itself), or that uses one thing/process/idea/feeling to describe (in whatever form that describing actually takes) to describe another thing/process/idea/feeling.

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histories: rabbit baby

Read our screenplay Rabbit Baby: HERE.
Our story was based off of the strange tale of Mary Toft, who in 1726 convinced everyone in England that she had given birth to a rabbit baby, or Sooterkin. She eventually admitted that it was all a hoax and was arrested for fraud. Despite this, Doctor Nathaniel St. Andre, surgeon to King George I, confirmed that it was indeed a genuine case. We were intrigued by the idea that not only regular people, but medical doctors were so convinced that this impossible situation was plausible. At first, we did not know in what direction to take the story. We approached the project from many different angles, but we finally decided that the most interesting story would be found by assuming that the fantastical elements of Mary Toft's story were in fact real. Despite being a fantastical story about a half-rabbit child, the story focuses on human elements and the difficulties of being a young woman in Rural England in the 1700s. The way that the character Wiley treats our heroine, Arley, is characteristic of the sexist attitudes of the time. Indeed, their very species, one half-rabbit and the other half-wolf, can be representative of the class distinctions that were also enforced during that time period. Just like in "The Veil", our protagonist is a young girl dealing with obstacles over which she has no control or influence. In "The Veil", the protagonist is oppressed by the cultural revolution in Iran, whereas in our story she suffers from her mother's bizarre actions that have affected her life since birth. By using the fantastical but fraudulent tale of Mary Toft as a template for our story, we were able to analyze the difficulties of class structure and gender roles in 1700s England.
 
As for outside media, the project reminded us of the web-series-turned-Comedy-Central-serial, Drunk History. Basically, Drunk History is a project that consists of an intoxicated narrator recounting some historical event from her/his foggy memory. Meanwhile, actors in period costumes act out what is happening according to the drunk storyteller. First of all, the Hi(Stories) and Memories exercise in screenwriting made us think of Drunk History because of content, obviously. In Drunk History there is a person trying to explain something historic as matter-of-factly as they can, but it gets muddled and fictionalized because of their state of inebriation. Our assignment did something (sort of) similar to this, because we also started with a moment of historical truth but then extrapolated fabrications as we went along and made up fictitious characters and scenarios. 

 Moreover, this project was also reminiscent of Drunk History because of its collaborative nature, and the way two ideas of an event or a story don’t quite line up perfectly when two or more people are trying to portray the ideas in the biased way that they think they happened/should happen. In Drunk History, it’s the collaboration between the actual historical event and the drunken storyteller and finally the actors attempting to kind of enact both things at once. In this assignment, it was two writers trying to wrestle two different views of what a story should look like into one space.

Works Cited
"Mary Toft." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015
"Sooterkin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015.
Haslam, Fiona. "2." From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-century Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1996. N. pag. Print.

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process piece: i am zelda and you are too

I AM ZELDA AND YOU ARE TOO
Love, Avery and Josh


Our Process Piece takes the form of juxtaposition between two "populations" playing different versions of the same video game. The first is a newer edition of Zelda, and the players are two males; in this segment, the boys are rowdy and smack-talk each other. In the second half of the piece, a lone girl plays an old Nintendo 64 version of Zelda and is relatively quiet and wordless throughout the gameplay. The juxtaposition of these two variations on similar processes reveals differences and gaps between male versus female, groups versus solidarity, and new versus old.  

This project was similar to “The Smokehouse” video by Smith Journal that we watched for class. For example, in the video, the audio played a far more important role than the visual. In the beginning of the video, we hear the chainsaw before we actually see it on film.  In our audio, you can distinctly hear the difference between the two parts. The video game sounds clue the listener in to what is happening. The boys were much more vocal during their gaming, whereas the girl was much more calm. In “The Smokehouse,” there are times when either the sound effects or the dialogue are the most important audio. When the guys are playing video games in our audio, it’s their dialogue that tells us what they are doing or how the game is going. When the girl is playing, it’s mostly the video game sounds that inform us of the nature of the process.  Our audio samples are also similar to the “Routine” videos. Obviously, our project relies completely on audio. The “Routine” videos would not be as exciting if they didn’t have any audio. If you watch a video of someone playing a video game, it’s bound to not be as exciting or entertaining if there is no audio. The game talk and sound effects add so much and tell their own story.   

In terms of outside media, the project is reminiscent of the website and movement, "Listen To A Movie" (listentoamovie.com), which is a free beta site that is marketed "for the cubicle workers of the world." Essentially, you can be doing whatever—working, running, riding a bus, doing homework—in a space where you can be connected to the internet but don't have the capacity or time to actually view a movie, only put the audio of the movie on as background noise. It's a film experience for multi-taskers.

The Process Piece assignment is similar to Listen To A Movie based on the fact that both projects center around subjects or events that were meant to be heard and viewed, and once you take away the visual element you get a completely new kind of media and art. Without an image to accompany a sound—especially a sound process—it's easy for a listener to make different interpretation based on their stunted knowledge of the subject at hand. Our piece is about video games being played—a process that one hundred percent depends on the ability to see what's happening on the screen—and the unmistakeable sounds of gameplay and human interaction doesn't need to be illustrated with pixelated cartoon characters.
 

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round robin: queen of doom

QUEEN OF DOOM & CO.

Veronica Lizard, Queen of Doom, slays skeletons and rat-people in the Underworld after school to pay her way through community college.

Susanica Lizard, princess of Doom, follows her sister to the Underworld entrace,
and tattles to her parents, Bluebelly and Komodo.

So Bluebelly Lizard leaped down to the underworld wearing a speed-o to slay Hades and save then ground his daughter. 
As I hung out with Hades in the Underworld, my Dad barged in out of nowhere! What is he wearing?! He is so embarrassing and ruins everything.
My dad destroyed the underworld with his ridiculous imitation of a clown.

END.

 Artist Statement:
Just like The Exquisite Corpse, Round Robin was very collaborative and could not be done alone. Doing the Round Robin reminds you of many other collaborative projects including, the production company hitRECord, the documentary Life In A Day and the art of remixing songs. With song mixes in particular, the original piece is reconstructed into something never meant by the original author. DJ Spooky emphasizes this. You take something, reimagine it then “juxtapose, fragment, flip the script.” Every round we did this and the end result was very different then the person before could have imagined. Because there were different minds and voices in each part of the stories, the form, content, narrative and theme tended to change but each story complemented the one before. There is no telling how it will end up. Writing such short stories made it so the reader had to fill in the gaps. This made it easier for the next person to write the next part and continue it on in a unique way. It is interesting to see how each story connects and the things people chose to connect and continue through. If the order had been changed, the stories would have been very different. Round Robin gave me a greater understanding of the collaborative process. Collaborative projects are meant to inspire and make an original idea better though the use of multiple perspectives. When you build something together you become connected.
In addition to being highly collaborative, it was a uniquely self-revealing project, which gave insight into the mind and imagination of each individual.  Much discussion could be had based on the similarities and tendencies of each individual to continue each distinct story in a certain way.  For example, while contributing to five different stories, one writer may tend to one specific theme or plot direction overall.  While the process lead to out-of-the-box thinking, perhaps it shows that what resides outside the box is what exists deepest in a person’s cultural background and traditional beliefs.
It was interesting to see what stories looked like as they went by. Since we only got to see one picture per story, it was awesome to wonder how the story had become what it was. It felt like a really good exercise for the mind to imagine how a story could possibly get to some weird points. It was kind of fun to try and come up with something creative in hopes that the person after you would laugh or smile at the picture that you sent them. Obviously they were not stories to send to Hollywood or anything, but they may have sparked some ideas for some of us.

Working as a group was also a helpful thing to experience and learn. We could have been a little bit more organized at the beginning to help us all make sure we were doing the right stories, but other than that, we worked hard to work out any problems that we faced. I’m glad that we were able to experience that since it is something that we will have to deal with all the time in the real world. It is good to see that we can handle something like this maturely and respect each others work.

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music mosaic













In a lot of ways, "Sleeping on the Roof" by the Flaming Lips is predictable, pedantic even: the same little riff of a couple plodding notes is replayed over and over without much variation. But then there are there suddenly these bizarre, space alien laser noises that start at 1:32 and reoccur sporadically through the rest of the piece, and the combination of these two opposing (feelings)--the predictable and the uncouth--made me think of human thoughts and emotions, which spin and thunk and pivot and fester. That's the reason I chose to give manifestation to the thoughts of various people and character trapped in still-form, people who--like the song--have no words or lines, and thus they could be feeling anything; perhaps they're feeling beautiful and powerful, like Diana Ross with her crown to symbolize strength and regality, or perhaps they're simply worrying about dinner like Sailor Venus. All people feel the pains of stress and responsibility--the target on President Obama's back--and all people have fears and doubts--Hitler's warning exclamation point. The point of the images is that people are sometimes more complicated and uncertain and unwieldy than they might seem, the same way the song is more complex and dynamic than it seems upon first listen. Everything is full of layers and oddity. Everything fits together strangely.

Similarly, the thoughts/feelings of a person might not match their outer persona, the creature they show the rest of the world, and that's why the people in the photos are black and white and their feeling/thought emojis are colorful, bright. It's like what Annie Dillard says about not being able to see the full spectrum of color and light. We cannot see every thought or feeling that a person has, only what they choose to display outwardly. The laser noises don't match the melancholy of the rest of the song. The placid face of the teenage girl hearing some wordless secret doesn't match her inner horror. Everything fits together strangely.

The pattern of the song seems obsessive, like when the mind gets stuck on something and keeps turning it over and over. In the pictures, each "character" is thinking about a single thing, feeling a single thing; this single-mindedness reflects the obsessive repetitiveness of the music, it shows minds getting stuck in a rut of compulsion and mania and preoccupation with a single emotion or thought. Like the song, these people can't get out of their patterns, and thus they're stuck in a still format--photographs--and even their emotions and thoughts are frozen in time. Everything fits together strangely.

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thinking & writing: will "nobody's empire" end oppression?


Will Belle and Sebastian's "Nobody's Empire" music video end oppression? First of all: no. "Nobody's Empire" will not end oppression. This is not to say that the video isn't an inspiring or hopeful piece of art, or that it won't motivate its viewers to be active in fighting injustice. Belle and Sebastian and video directors Blair Young and Stuart Murdoch certainly aren't saying/showing anything that would harm the progress of ending oppression. The video is an archive of both the exquisite and the macabre, and it uses this juxtaposition of beauty and horror to convey the sensation of suppression and dread in images of flowering trees or flying birds next to images of young people being shot in the head or hospital IV's. In the recurring master shot in the video, a crippled woman, a young man wearing 1940's-era garb, and a woman dancing with a machine gun are grouped together in a way that evokes revolution and resistance. Meanwhile, the song lyrics, too, project a sense of urgency and a call for action: "Intellect, ambition, they fell away; they locked me up for my own good," Belle and Sebastian front man Stuart Murdoch sings in the third verse, and then later, "On the edge of nobody's empire, if we live by books and we live by hope, does that make us targets for gunfire?" The images combined with the lyrics make a good case for fighting oppression; they're stirring and exhilarating and noble. That said, there will be no big uprising in reaction to this music video, there will be no sea change, as it were, just because of the line, "You're a quiet revolution, marching with the crowd, singing dirty and loud for the people's emancipation."

The "Nobody's Empire" video is simply too nice. It's too pretty and inspirational and upbeat. Revolutions don't start on the backs of good lighting and modern dance and pictures of sunny meadows. Even including the more "disturbing" images in "Nobody's Empire," like a bomb going off and destroying a city, the video is still too full of flowers and babies and couples holding hands to really spark any uproars. The video doesn't say "Look how horrible everything is, we must fix it," it says, "Some things are bad, but the good stuff overshadows the bad stuff." That's a wonderful, important message to send, but it's not going to start or end any wars. It's not going to change anything at all, really. 

One of the biggest problems is the intended audience of the music video. "Nobody's Empire" is aimed at Belle and Sebastian's target audience: primarily North American and European listeners to have access to the luxuries of funky, nontraditional alt. pop. It is not directed at those being critically oppressed in the world, simply because those who suffer from major oppression like tyrannical governments or extreme poverty don't even have access to the publication of this music video. So they're not benefiting from viewing it because they're not viewing it.

Moreover, the video demands change, but doesn't gets its hands dirty. It portrays violence and hunger and war in cursory glimpses, but nothing graphic. There's nothing really shocking or dangerous in it because---as terrible as it may be---we (a collective society) are very accustomed to the consequences of violence and hunger and war. We're used to it. 

A good example of an anti-oppression movement that had the balls, if you will, to really put their beliefs into action is the Russian feminist Riot Grrrl punk band/protest group, Pussy Riot. In 2011, the group of eleven masked women started doing guerrilla performances around Moscow, making statements about women's rights and LGBTQA rights, plus opposing the inconsistencies and injustices established by Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The demonstrations were vulgar and combative and profane. In a strict and oppressed system like Russia, all these acts were illegal and resulted in the arrest and incarceration of three of Pussy Riot's members, and later, their public assault. However, due to the radical nature of Pussy Riot's demonstrations, the world clamored around Pussy Riot and their subversive ideals for change. "Free Pussy Riot" became an international campaign, and a slogan for gender rights and freedom of speech. Following the arrests, there were protests all over the world and political upheaval in Russia that finally ended with the release and amnesty of not only the Pussy Riot members, but also other "high-profile" Russian political prisoners who had "disturbed the peace" like members of Greenpeace. Pussy Riot is an example of an artistic movement that wasn't afraid of getting a little bit ugly---they didn't juxtapose their messages next to pretty landscapes or happy children like in the "Nobody's Empire" video---but sometimes ugliness and trauma is the only way to make change actually happen.

"Nobody's Empire" has a phenomenal message---it's a good reminder, it makes you think---but it's too tame to actively fight oppression. It's not going to change anybody's mind, only reinforce their current beliefs and opinions about oppression. 

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