Marjorie Foley's blog

Childishness and Despair in The Decemberists "Calamity Song" Video

Marjorie Foley — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:00:02 +0000

Image credit: buzzinemusic.com, amazon.com, and Marjorie Foley

[In honor of the David Foster Wallace Symposium being hosted at the Harry Ransom Center this week (and in honor of how much we at viz. love David Foster Wallace), this week's posts will be dedicated to all things DFW. Look out for guest posts from outside writers and lots of excitement from the viz. staff.]

Two summers ago, I spent ten hours a day for ten days reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. At 1,000 pages, this means that I was spending an insanely long six minutes on each page, reading and rereading sentences in order to first understand the grammatical structure, then to understand the basic meaning of the sentence, then to understand that sentence's relationship to the paragraph, the chapter, the book, and so on. While at times I felt like I was working, and suffering while I worked, Infinite Jest was also one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life--while DFW is often criticized for his overblown prose, his writing is also full of batcrap crazy fun. The Decemberists, in the video for their "Calamity Song," capture the fun, the hilarity, the chaos, and the pain that is always present in David Foster Wallace's work.

Image credit: youtube.com and Marjorie Foley

The subject of the video is Eschaton, a fictional tennis game played by Hal Incandenza, one of the main characters in Infinite Jest, and his peers at the Enfield Tennis Academy. The game is played in a futuristic world in which years are no longer numbered but rather sponsored (the Eschaton bit happens in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and much of the Northeastern United States is destroyed due to a nuclear "accident"--the area is now known as the Great Concavity (into which catapults launch hazardous waste and where babies are born without skulls).

Eschaton, a word which means something akin to "end times," is played across multiple tennis courts, with various areas of the courts corresponding to parts of the globe. The highlighted areas represent the teams, and the combinations of countries, with nuclear capabilities-- North America (AMNAT); the former USSR (SOVWAR); China (REDCHI); India & Pakistan (INDPAK); "the wacko but always pesky" Libya & Syria (LIBSYR) or Iraq, Iran, Libya & Syria (IRLIBSYR), and the somewhat weak South Africa (SOUTHAF). Sometimes, depending on the number of players, one may have other teams "like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas." Players fire 5-megaton nuclear tennis balls at enemy areas, creating playful worldwide chaos, massive civilian casualties, and juvenile tennis rivalries.

Parks and Recreation's Michael Schur directs the video and somehow manages to nail down DFW's weird cheerful pessimism. While the video is not a line-for-line re-enactment of the Eschaton game played on 8 November in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the combination of the colorful, childish pranks in the video and Colin Meloy's super-depressing lyrics (at the end of the song, "all that remains is the arms of the angels") captures the absurdity of 12-year-olds playing a game that "shocks the tall" and is separated "from rotisserie league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables" by its ability to train superior tennis players, and possibly by how high and drunk the players are in the game (at least in the book). The "tanned and energetic little kids" who play Eschaton drink "surprisingly bracing Gatorades" and share a "hand-rolled psychochemical cigarette" while they act out worldwide destruction in a world that's already suffered its share of nuclear destruction.

Image credit: youtube.com and Marjorie Foley

In Infinite Jest, there is some argument about whether or not weather affects the game (it's snowing in the book, raining in the video) and whether or not one can launch nuclear weapons at players, like the young lady who gets hit in the head by a tennis ball (this young woman is SOVWAR Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan, who in the book is described as crew-cutted, "who at twelve-and-a-half looks like a Belorussian shotputter and has to buy urine more than quarter-annually and has a way more lush and impressive mustache than for instance Hal himself could raise, and who gets these terrible rages"). Her following ('roid) rage sparks a brawl between the players: In the book, Ann Kittenplan punches a peer in the top of the head repeatedly, then shoves someone's face into a chain-link fence. In the video, however, the drug use is nonexistent and the violence is downplayed, perhaps to rebalance the childishness of the Eschaton players with Meloy's lyrics. In the video, Ann Kittenplan smiles as she runs after the players, making this game and the violence that follows seems like much more fun than it is in the book. And Ann Kittenplan is now healthy and pretty, rather than violent and ugly.

Image credit: youtube.com and Marjorie Foley

As the brawl plays out, Otis P. Lord, the nerdy and beanie-sporting gamemaster, must first declare a cease-fire in order to work out terms between AMNAT and SOVWAR (which is why he replaces his multicolred beanie with his white one) and it is during that time that Kittenplan gets hit in the head by a 5-megaton tennis ball. After the hit, Lord puts on the red beanie that signifies "Utter Global Crisis," a state which is reached not by destroying whole countries in the game, but by the players resorting to (drugged and drunken) violence. In the book, Lord is criticized for declaring an Utter Global Crisis due to people losing their tempers while playing a game. We must wonder, here, how much DFW was comparing real life nuclear threats to a childish game moderated by someone as silly-looking as Otis P. Lord.

Image credit: youtube.com

The Decemberists sit on the sidelines in the role of disinterested Enfield Tennis Academy staff, and while Meloy ends up against the fence, screaming the lyrics at the degenerate children, they otherwise don't seem to care that the children are playing a game to destroy the world (which is made much, much worse by the existence of the Great Concavity and the skull-less children who are born in that vicinity). Their disinterest highlights the absurdity of Infinite Jest, an absurdity that plays out in how the young players make destruction into something fun, which we real-life people do in many of our games.

While Schur and the Decemberists capture the fun of Eschaton and nuclear warfare (as if that were a thing), they obviously miss much of the despair that's at the heart of Infinite Jest. They miss the drugged pre-teens who work from morning to night to be tennis stars. They miss Hal Incandenza's social anxiety. They miss the other, far more depressing characters at the halfway house; they miss the overdoses and the guy who kills all the neighborhood cats. I'm not really sure what to make of that--does removing the worst of Eschaton show us that humans are better people than we think they are or are they much, much worse?

See the full video here.

Marc Chagall's Exodus: Another Visit to the Harry Ransom Center's King James Bible Exhibition

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:11:07 +0000

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

It's a bit surprising to walk into the Harry Ransom Center's current exhibition on the King James Bible and see Marc Chagall's Exodus series on display, but, considering his origins in a Hasidic family, the Jewish artist's works are a surprising addition to any gallery. Chagall's work was an uncomfortable subject for his parents and, later, his in-laws--telling your Hasidic parents that you're going to grow up to be a painter is a bit like telling religious Christian parents that you're going to be a stripper. Despite shocking his parents by painting nudes, Chagall would continue his work to become the foremost Jewish artist of the 20th century, earning respect from his contemporaries for his understanding of color and his ability to use a limited palette with eye-popping results.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

The first image in this post is the frontispiece for 24-print collection entitled The Story of the Exodus, published in 1966. The image above shows Exodus 2:11, in which Moses witnesses the sufferings of the Jewish people enslaved and forced into hard labor by the Egyptians. In the story, Moses kills an Egyptian when he sees the man beating one of his people, the beating here represented by the violent red and hands with whips in the top right corner. The violence and suffering here is dreamlike, as all of Chagall's work is--the people's suffering in this image is represented by a dreamy thought bubble emanating from Moses's righthand horn.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

Working during the Second World War and afterwards coming to terms with what happened, Chagall's works, like the works of many artists in the first half of the 20th century, reflect the bafflement and impotence of watching the Holocaust happen from afar. Chagall was lucky to get on the list of European artists that some United States officials were trying to save, and, unlike Picasso and Matisse, he did leave Vichy France in 1941.

Interestingly, Chagall colors (literally) these prints with bright optimism for an ancient future, even after the Holocaust. The above image, another beautifully colored one, shows Moses at the burning bush, where God, after becoming concerned about the sufferings of the people, appointed Moses to lead the Israelites out of oppression and to the land of milk and honey.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

After Moses asks how he is to prove that God sent him to the Israelites, God turns Moses's staff into a snake, as in the image above. Each image shows the influence of Chagall's works in gouache, used not in these prints but in his other works. Gouache is much like watercolor, but contains an opaque base in order to create a brighter, opaque color. The limits on painting in gouache (as well as the benefits) are reflected in the spots of color in this image even though it's a lithograph.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Art Institute of Chicago

The Exodus prints are part of a larger trend in Chagall's religious works. From 1931 until 1956, he worked to illustrate the Bible; later, he would turn to crucifixions in order to best express tragedy. This last image, The White Crucifixion, is not from the series at the Harry Ransom Center, but understanding this crucifixion is important to understanding the importance of Exodus series and the rest of Chagall's work.

Chagall believed no artistic subject expressed suffering as well as a crucifixion. (For a fictionalized account of a Jewish artist painting a crucifixion, Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev is worth a read. It gets at the depths of pain that would cause a Jewish artist to paint a Christian form.) Though it's generally used by Christian artists, Chagall uses this crucifixion to express the persecution of the Jewish Jesus specifically and of the Jewish people in the 20th century generally. In the top left corner, one can see communist soldiers coming to terrorize Jews, in the top right, a soldier burns a synagogue in Lithuania (the soldier originally wore a swastika on his armband).

SOPA and PIPA; Or, If It Weren't For The Internet, We Would Have No Idea What Was Going On

Marjorie Foley — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:31:47 +0000

Image Credit: Wikipedia

If you didn't see this image last week, you may have been hiding under a rock. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed this image on January 18 as a result of their protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, which involved blocking all English-language content on the website. As a result of the blackout, 8 million people looked up their representatives in Congress, and a unknown number of people tweeted amusing and seeemingly illiterate things. (Mildly NSFW content in full post.)

Image Credit: Twitter

One collection of these amusing tweets can be found at herpderpedia, where one can read tweeted criticisms of the Wikipedia blackout, many of which profess to know absolutely nothing about the reasons behind the protest, even though users have just visited the site, which explained the reasoning behind blocking content. If one thing is clear from all these tweets, it's that students don't know how to function without Wikipedia. And, I confess, it was a tough day for me, too. There are just so many things to look up!

Criticisms of online protests by Wikipedia and other major websites like Google and Reddit were not just limited to the herpderps of high school and college students trying to complete their homework. A particularly nasty editorial from the Boston Herald describes the protests as a "hissy fit" that would only effect college students who should really be doing their research elsewhere. The Herald is among a reduced number of papers that still supports SOPA, that reduction being a direct result of internet protests.

Image Credit: caffpowered via reddit.com

And, as is usually the case when the internet gets something done, those involved were pretty proud of themselves. One Reddit user celebrated the sea change with this Photoshopped image of a still from 300 (making the image an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation), which likens himself and other users to a few Spartans defending their homeland against invasion by a vast number of evil forces. While from the outside, the image may seem pretentious (you might notice that the shields, made from web browser logos, exclude Internet Explorer, which only a rube would use), the celebration and self-congratulation are not unfounded.

Image Credit: Google

This infographic from Google shows how the internet response triggered mass protest in the forms of 887,000 telephone calls to Congress and telephone and 3,000,000 signatures on anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA petitions, and this image is a few days old already. Opposition to the bill is credited to the availability of information on the internet, and many news sources and protest websites credit their actions with educating the American public about SOPA and PIPA, even if herpderpedia shows that many Americans still did not understand the protests.

Image Credit: ProPublica.org

The most telling image comes from ProPublica, a non-profit internet news publication that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2011, the first time that a non-print publication won. The infographic details who supported and opposed SOPA and PIPA prior to and following the January 18th protest, showing just how effective the January 18 actions were.

The Hollow Face Illusion: Why Charlie Chaplin Can Still Scare Us

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:00:58 +0000

Image Credit: premiumblend.net

The side of the Charlie Chaplin mask on the left is convex; the one on the right is concave. If you can see the concavity on the right, 2009 research suggests that you may be schizophrenic. Luckily for me, I can't see the concavity, but watching videos of the hollow face illusion all day has been disturbing nonetheless.

This hollow face illusion has been used in previous research in human vision, especially research into how humans perceive faces when no faces are present, such as on the face of the moon. This research suggests that humans use top-down rather than bottom-up models in order to recognize faces: We have internalized ideas that faces must be convex, so we tend to disregard other visual clues that a face may be concave. In other words, because our brains know that normal faces are convex, most people mistakenly perceive all faces as convex.

The illusion is particulary interesting when the mask is rotated so that each side appears convex, except for a brief moment when one side appears to eat the other AND appears to rotate in the opposite direction as its converse side.

The 2009 study, however, showed that schizophrenic people (and other studies show that the same is true for people under the influence of drugs) were less likely to be "tricked" by the hollow face illusion because their brains were less likely to strenthen connections in the frontoparietal network, which controls top-don processing. They're instead more likely to use bottom-up visual processing in which their brains do not override visual cues.

There's a good video explanation by Richard Dawkins in which the cancavity and convexity are easier to see and understand, mostly because of the permanent marker coloring the inside of the face.

I wonder, here, what the repercussions are for visual rhetoric pedagogy. If 7 out of every 1,000 people are schizophrenic and cannot see the same optical illusion (and if those seeing it are actually viewing it inaccurately), then there is even less of a "right" answer in visual analysis than there was before. With other mental illnesses (and of course physical variations in our abilities to see, including blindness and color blindness) surely affecting the way that images are perceived, it becomes difficult to discuss visual analysis in any way that doesn't immediately fall apart.

That difficulty is further played out in the philosophical argument over one of our simplest visual perceptions: color. Philsophers disagree about whether color is perceiver-related and subjective or intrinsic to objects and objective. That disagreement bleeds over into the discussion of this optical illusion--it's impossible to have a universal experience of sight even for those who can see. With color and depth perception varying across humanity, it's a wonder that we can communicate through visual media at all.

But somehow we do, so I'll leave you on a more positive note: A similar optical illusion to the hollow face illusion is the Gathering for Gardner Dragon, named after a conference focused on Martin Gardner, the American mathematician who was so interested in stage magic. The dragon's face appears to follow the viewer quite quickly. It's tons of fun, and you can make your own dragon at home.

You can make your own dragon by using the pattern below.

Image Credit: Binary Arts/Think Fun

"In Gay Years, I’m Older Than You": Husbands and Marriage Equality

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: husbandstheseries.com and Marjorie Foley

This Sunday evening (the day I usually sit down to write for viz.), I was a little at a loss for what to write about, and, I confess, I was a little jealous of Rachel Schneider's post this week, "Calendar Boys, Beefcake Girls." So, I pulled out the big guns and asked Facebook what I should write about. With lots of good suggestions (an honorable mention goes to Lauren Gantz for suggesting that I write about Ron Paul's collapsing eyebrow), the winner is Husbands, recommended by feminist scholar extraordinaire, Sarah Ruth Orem. Husbands is a recent web series following the zany lives of Brady and Cheeks, two gay men who get married after having too much to drink one night in Vegas.

Image Credit: husbandstheseries.com

Actor Cheeks and baseballer Brady, though they've only been dating for six weeks, wake up after a hard night of drinking (Cheeks is passed out in the bathtub and Brady is moaning into a toilet) to find they're married. Though they're really not sure they're up to the task, they decide to stick together in order to demonstrate their loyalty to marriage equality. But neither is prepared for marriage--as one of them remarks in the seventh episode, "I never thought past wanting the right to do it.”

Though Husbands combines somewhat-expected gay jokes with a dash of nostalgia for every TV show Debra Messing has ever been in, it still manages to be both engaging and didactic. In episode two, for example, Brady and Cheeks are still unsure it they're married. After seeing their matching rings, they attempt to sort out what exactly has happened:

Brady: "They’re novelty rings exchanged in the spirit of high camp such as we gays are known for."

Cheeks: "Satirical performance pop art!"

Brady: "Yes! We celebrated marriage equality by getting fake married Vegas style."

Even the dialogue, here, is self aware about being self aware--they don't want others to think that marriage equality is a bad idea, but they know how it looks.

So, Brady and Cheeks set out to be as normal as possible (“What else do normal people do? They buy furniture!”) while still negotiating the basics of their relationship, which they worry about constantly. Cheeks even goes as far to think that they're incompatible because their Sleep Numbers are so far apart.

Image Credit: husbandstheseries.com

They also constantly argue about who is the dominant partner in the relationship, which is probably most amusing in episode ten, when they get a dog and Cheeks tells Brady, "In gay years, I’m older than you." But, besides the one-liners (“Hey, Cheeks? Uh, what’s your real name?”) intended to show us that Cheeks and Brady are in a "wacky" relationship, Husbands manages to pull off heteronormative normalcy at every turn. There's snuggling, dog acquisitions, fights over who gets what space in the apartment, and all the typical trappings of a shotgun-marriage-based sitcom.

Image Credit: husbandstheseries.com

It's worth noting the social networking aspect of their relationship, since that's where this post began. In episode eleven, Brady gets upset with Cheeks because the latter didn’t update his relationship status on Google+. To appease his husband, Cheeks gets on his phone to take care of all the updating necessary: "Select...Married...Done. Hang on, I’m updating my status…Hang on I’m tweeting..I’m emailing it, tagging, stumbling, annnnd Digg….Oh, hang on. I need to twittpic the new tattoo above my ass that says Mrs. Brady Kelly, smiley face."

Laughter all around. I'll leave that episode here for your viewing pleasure, since it's my favorite.

Occupy Austin: Love-in, Left-Wing Tea Party, or What?

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:00:14 +0000

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

Last Thursday afternoon, I borrowed a video camera from the Digital Writing and Research Lab and headed down to Occupy Austin, a gathering intended to stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. If you've been following the media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, then you know that people are confused about what exactly it is the protesters in New York want, and in Austin it doesn't seem to be much different.

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

There were certainly people at Occupy Austin who fit some of the stereotypes coming out of conservative media outlets: there's a hippie playing a flute, people in suits doing yoga, and a bunch of kids who looked like they could start a drum circle at the drop of a hat. And there were plenty of signs proclaiming non-political messages of love and solidarity with others in the movement. Some aspects of Occupy Austin seemed more like a love-in than anything else.

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

But, as Jon Stewart touched upon in an episode of The Daily Show, there were also many parallels between this and Tea Party protests. Many of the protestors despise the Fed, are angered by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and think Barack Obama is evil.

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

During the General Assembly portion of the first day of Occupy Austin, tensions were obvious between those who wanted their occupation to be about community solidarity and those who wanted the group to move to political action. The General Assembly is the portion of the day in which anyone can raise issues for discussion in the group. Organizers depend heavily upon Robert's Rules of Order, voting on who can speak and limiting how long they can speak.

I recorded a lengthy portion of the General Assembly in which speakers raised issues--solar energy, forming political action committees, even forming cheerleading groups--and then voted upon how many minutes each speaker could have. What I found most interesting was the reliance on Robert's Rules of Order, a system of rules intended for deliberative assemblies, in an atmosphere in which political deliberation seemed unacceptable.

I edited the following video down in order to show just how many times the organizers took the floor back (or forceably took the microphone back) from people proposing issues. While the proposers are breaking the rules of order by going beyond thirty seconds to raise their issues, it also seems like the man in charge of the microphone (the guy in the brown shirt), likes to take the microphone back whenever someone proposes political action. Note that at 1:13, he tries to take the microphone back from the older gentleman, and he throws up his arms to show that he has a "block" to what is being said. In Robert's Rules of Order, and as explained earlier in the general assembly, blocks are used only when one thinks that whatever is happening will be disastrous to the group as a whole. What you can't hear the man in the brown shirt say because of sound quality is that "This movement is not about partisan politics."

Video Credit: Marjorie Foley

It's pretty clear that there are some people at Occupy Austin who do think that the movement is about "partisan politics," especially if partisan politics means issue politics. But it seems like the "leaders" (here, brown-shirt guy and white-shirt lady) of this non-hierarchical organization want to prevent the movement from moving in that direction.

There are two readings, at least, of this situation. The first is that, as Jason Fitzgerald argues, while there's no "message" coming out of the movement, there's certainly a reason behind the protests: people are protesting or occupying in order to bring attention to income inequality and corporate influence in government. Instead of debating "issues," these protesters want to express solidarity with other in the community without moving to political action because they believe that the political system is broken. Some people at Occupy Austin certainly fit into that category. The second reading, I think, is something more like what happened with the Tea Party. In order to build a populist movement, groups shy away from being overly ideological, focusing too narrowly on social issues, or focusing too narrowly on identity politics. They build a following first, build solidarity with their communities, and use the General Assembly to hash out what the message is, whatever it is.

David Douglas Duncan at the Harry Ransom Center

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Duncan with the Sheikh of Huzayel in 1946. Photo by Welles Stabler (via Harry Ransom Center)

In 1996, former Life Magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan donated his archive to the Harry Ransom Center, the premier humanities research center located at The University of Texas at Austin. viz. is proud to be partnering with the Ransom Center this year, and we're extra excited about the Ransom Center's web exhibitions, which include fabulous shots from Duncan's time in the Middle East.

Image Credit: Life Magazine

While photographing Palestine in 1946, Duncan was, according to the Life blurb, offered a "brand new" wife in order to give up his camera, but it was not to be. Douglas would continue on to photograph the the Korean War, Vietnam, and Pablo Picasso.

In 1948, Duncan photographed construction on the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which would transport oil from Qaisumah, Saudi Arabia to Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon, from 1950 until 1976. Also called the Tapline, the pipeline greatly reduced to cost of oil transportation to Europe. These photos, especially the one below, tend to be slightly more playful than his other photos of the Middle East, which often center on religious and political divisions.

Photo by David Douglas Duncan (via Harry Ransom Center)

Here, golfers in mostly Western garb take shots from inside the Tapline. Early oil ventures in Saudi Arabia were dominated by Western companies, and the Tapline is no exception. Built jointly by companies that would later become ExxonMobil, Texaco, and Chevron, the Tapline eventually fell under the ownership of Aramco, which itself wouldn't be fully owned by Saudi Arabia until 1980. By then, the Tapline was no longer operating at full capacity.

Photo by David Douglas Duncan (via Harry Ransom Center)

Here, as the Ransom Center's caption describes, workers delivering pipeline hurry to change a flat tire before the midday sun threatens their lives. The perspective on this photo does not exaggerate each segment's length--each piece is one hundred feet long. And, in proper style, the man changing the tire might as well be Don Draper with his perfect, slicked-back hair.

Photo by David Douglas Duncan (via Harry Ransom Center)

In stark contrast with some of Duncan's other photos, particularly the ones showing divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, this last photo shows a Master Ironmonger working with Africans and Arabs in order to build the Tapline.

Duncan's Tapline photos, as well as many more in the collection, often evoke sentimental feelings for a man who was beloved by sheikhs and spent the entirety of 1957 photographing Picasso. The web exhibition is certainly worth a look, even if it's just for the photograph of Picasso, shirtless, teasing his dog. But don't forget to take a look at the war photos for which Duncan is famous.

Magazine Covers Ten Years After 9/11

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:59:49 +0000

Image Credit: businessinsider.com and The New Yorker

Lacking a television and the will to listen to news reports about the September 11 attacks during the past week, my only information about the 9/11 anniversary came from The Onion's satirical headline "Responsible Cable News Outlets To Devote Sensible Amount Of Airtime To 10th Anniversary Of 9/11." Though I haven't yet turned on a TV to see the media coverage, it seems from my brief perusal of the internet over the weekend that The Onion was, as usual, a little too close to the truth--some news outlets haven't been as sensible as they could have been. Yesterday, businessinsider.com published a series of sixteen magazine covers commemorating 9/11 that demonstrate a variety of media reactions to the 9/11 anniversary. From this classy New Yorker classy cover to pictures of the dead and dying, these images are stunning and range from sensible to alarming.

While The New Yorker's cover reminds me, a little inexplicably, of Pablo Picasso's Guernica--tasteful, sad, but not overindulgent in grief--some of the others are not as restrained. Newsweek, for instance, alludes to the results of the War on Terror in two covers for this week, one inspiring fear by wondering if Osama bin Laden succeeded in his plans, and the other asserting through its juxtaposition of font sizes that the main descriptive term for Americans post-9/11 is not fear, grief, or revenge, but resilience.

Image Credit: businessinsider.com and Newsweek

Certainly bin Laden's success or failure is something we all want to consider--did he win? Are we worse off now with TSA screenings, the housing bubble, and American, Iraqi, and Afghani casualties? And also, what does it mean that Newsweek has lauded Americans' "resilience" in the past ten years? Though 9/11 wouldn't be the time to criticize American military actions and Islamophobia, it might not be the right time to lay blanket praise at the feet of people bent on indulging grief, promoting a culture of fear, and seeking vengeance, as Newsweek admits. Whatever Newsweek's position, the juxtaposition of praise and blame perhaps prevents us from feeling either blameless or bad. Whether we're supposed to feel some regret and some joy in nationalism is up for grabs--maybe we're not supposed to feel anything at all.

Image Credit: businessinsider.com and ESPN Magazine

Perhaps ESPN does a better job of making us feel good about ourselves on Patriot Day--I can almost hear a roaring crowd singing the national anthem in a packed stadium just before kickoff. And it's really hard to feel bad in a crowd, watching one's favorite sports team. But this cover also seems to make light of tragedy even as it praises America for moving on through tragedy--what exactly does it mean to "play on"? What is a game and what is not? Is ESPN underestimating the impact of 9/11 on America? Or am I underestimating the importance of football to the American populace? It seems as if no media outlet--even The Onion--can let this day pass unnoticed, even if that notice is satirical, unrelated, or pandering to nationalism.

Image Credit: businessinsider.com and TIME

This last image is the one that struck me the most. Playing on Tribute in Light, an art installation of 88 searchlights that shine upward as a memorial to WTC victims, this cover expects us to assume that those lights shine beyond and outside of the United States and into our future. However, I'm struck with exact opposite reaction of the one intended on the cover--Looking at the United States from space does less to make me imagine the U.S. as a shining beacon as it does to remind me of the retirement of the Space Shuttles over the course of this year. With no planned future for the space program, there's no way for us to move beyond our borders and into space. And though it's a little trite to say, pushing to defund NASA and other governmental programs that are not related to national defense mean that we might never move beyond 9/11 in the way this photo suggests that we will.

Hurricane Irene, Internet Argument, and Punishment

Marjorie Foley — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 04:44:06 +0000

As the Northeast prepared for Hurricane Irene last week, southerners who had weathered dozens of hurricanes sent both insults and helpful advice to their less-experienced neighbors in the north. The internet was abuzz with people wondering why New Yorkers were incapable of understanding what to do in a hurricane, and snarky retorts concerning Texans' inability to manage mild ice storms abounded. On reddit.com, the Australian redditor Xsophos posted this infographic comparing Irene and Hurricane Katrina with Tropical Cyclone Yasi, which hit Queensland, Australia this year.

Image credit: ABC News

Some American redditors promptly took offense, thinking that the post was intended as an insult to Americans' preparedness or fright, even though Xsophos offered no commentary about Australian superiority or the danger involved in any of these storms. One user sarcastically calls Australians "lucky" and another thread devolves into Australians insulting American sexuality and Americans making snide remarks about Australian censorship, as well as comparisons of flora and fauna.

The accuracy of the data is called into question on this thread, but it is most fascinating (and perhaps unsurprisingly stereotypical of internet culture) that an image comparing windspeeds generated more arguments about Americans' repressed sexuality and the ugliness of possums than it did arguments about media representation of natural disasters. Users' devolution into insults rather than discussion of the facts about these storms, or even the purpose of Xsophos' post, highlights the contradictory relationship between user anonymity and personal insult on the web--users fling insults at assumed Australians who may or may not be Australians at all. And the same goes for stereotyping New Yorkers and Texans: Though this time we know who they are and where they live, the distance creates an assumed anonymity in which it's okay to laugh at someone facing a natural disaster.

As Irene hit the U.S., one young YouTube user, Christian Flaherty, embraced the "haters" who comment on his videos by creating this interactive video in which those same haters can send natural disasters his way in order to punish him for the quality of his videos.

By pressing various buttons, users can send tornadoes, earthquakes, and blizzards in Christian's general direction (he creates a video for each in which he acts out the disaster), rather than merely commenting that he is "gay" or a "faggot" as some users have. Christian's response to those insults is remarkably apt and reminiscent of some ultra-conservative reactions to Katrina--for instance, Pat Robertson arguing that God sent the 2005 hurricane as punishment for legalized abortion. By interacting with Christian's video, we can play God. Instead of calling him names, users can send him a fictional chance at death.

Following Irene, some politicians again said that God sent the hurricane to punish Americans, except this time it wasn't to punish abortionists or homosexuals. At a rally in Florida, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann argued that God is punishing us for the size of the federal government's budget. Maybe there will be a YouTube video?

QR Codes, Immersive Environments, and viz.

Marjorie Foley — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:53:50 +0000

At the Blanton Museum of Art, one side of the Greek and Roman sculpture room looks like this:

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley at Blanton

A beginning student's analysis of this room might argue that Romans like Cicero (top left of image) were austere, honorable, and very different from people today. Or the analysis might argue that the curator, at least, wanted the viewer to believe those things. And while it's true that this room may have been set up to suggest such Greek and Roman qualities to the average museum-goer, outside knowledge, like the fact that these ancient sculptures were often painted, can complicate analyses of rhetoric at the museum.

While a simple viewing of Cicero's bust, above, reinforces the general reverence that we have today for the great Roman orator, knowledge of one of his final rhetorical acts might change the viewer's perception of the artwork: After Cicero tried, and failed, to convince Mark Antony and Octavian to cede their power to the Roman Senate, they ordered his death because his orations threatened their power. In other words, one of his final acts as a rhetor was a major failure. What if, instead of having students and other museum-goers navigate this room without this information, we could direct them to outside resources in order to better understand our perceptions of the Romans?

In order to do just that, the Immersive Environments Group in the DWRL is currently working on a proposal for the Blanton Museum of Art that uses QR (Quick Response) codes to engage museum-goers with the visual rhetoric of public spaces.

This is what a QR code looks like:

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley and .qr (QR code generator)

With a QR code reader on your mobile phone, you can take a photo of the QR code. The reader will then link you directly to a website, make an outgoing call, or send a text message. Of course, different readers are compatible with different phones. I use UpCode for my Samsung Seek, which is compatible with a wide range of phones, but the Immersive Environments group is currently investigating compatibility for other popular phones.

QR codes and QR readers can help students expand upon, comment upon, and even challenge rhetorical situations, like what's going on in the Greek and Roman sculpture room. If we were to place the above QR near the bust of Cicero and encourage viewers to use it (or you can use your mobile phone to read this one!), they might get a different perspective of the Romans by viewing this video detailing Cicero's final days, which I made just for this occasion.