viz. - visual analysis

Reaction Shots and Reader Response at the Purple Wedding

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 21:37:54 +0000

[Note: Spoilers below the cut.]

As a Game of Thrones fan, I was pretty excited to watch this last week’s episode. It’d been a while since I’d watched, and the wedding of Joffrey Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell gathered together many of the show’s beloved characters.

More importantly, it also meant the end of the show’s most-hated character, Joffrey, whose poisoning ended the episode. What intrigues me today, however, is the fan reaction to his death, recorded in GIFs, fan art, and videos. What does it mean to celebrate Joffrey’s death? What value does the reaction video have for audiences? and how does visual communication change the idea of reader-response?

Readers have long found ways to record their reactions to texts, whether in letters to friends or in the books themselves. Marginalia, as described by H. J. Jackson in her book Marginalia, reflects the visual structures of the book itself: “A tour of the annotated book from front to back, whether we consider conventional use or idiosyncratic variations, reveals that our customs and expectations, constant over time, are based on the conventional format of the book itself. In more ways than one, marginalia mirror the texts they supplement" (41). Thus, as footnotes go at the page's bottom, so does supplemental marginalia. For example, a recent reader found the following marginalia in a 1528 manuscript:

Image Credit: Superlinguo, via io9

Whether or not the reader was commenting on the abbot’s sexual practices or expressing disgust at the text, the reader leaving the marginalia communicates his reaction to others long after his death. During my own dissertation research at Harvard’s Houghton Library, I found some interesting marginalia in this copy of the 1765 edition of the satirical poet Charles Churchill’s Works:

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider / Houghton Library

As one reader responds indignantly to Churchill’s “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” another mocks and subverts that reaction. We readers following them can not only enjoy the text but their mutual exchange. Readers today need not limit their reactions to the page’s margin, however, but can spread them over places like Twitter and YouTube, where websites like Buzzfeed and io9 curate them for other fans to read and enjoy:

Image Credit: Screenshot from io9

These responders use humor to comment on the show, responding not just to the details of one scene but the whole episode and series at large. Also, their writing participates and relies on other internet memes to be intelligible, as when Ol’ Qwerty Bastard adapt the Kanye West meme to apply to Game of Thrones. Just as book-readers use marginal comments in a similar fashion to print commentary, these reaction tweets are written for an Internet-literate audience and partake of its themes.

Image Credit: brienneoftarth

H/T: Brianna Hyslop

Likewise, GIFs and LOLCAT-like images are created to comment on the character and react to him based on the popular perception. For example, if one Tweeter compares the spoiled King Joffrey to the popstar Justin Bieber, one fan makes a Tumblr remixing images of both to write the comparison visually. Another fan comments on Joffrey’s cruelty by presenting Out-of-Context Joffrey, taking a line used to mock his uncle Tyrion and presenting it as a self-affirming bromide. These visuals don’t create new readings, but instead rely on an understood reading of Joffrey as terrible to make a joke. We can imagine Joffrey’s biological father Jaime running thus towards his dying son, but towards the wedding pie. Other fans will reblog GIFs of Joffrey dying alongside celebratory GIFs to represent their reactions.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Still others record their reactions on video rather than through remediated pictures or text. The reaction video is a genre which shows people watching some sort of media event (from Auburn’s surprising kick return against Alabama or the 2 Girls 1 Cup video) and responding to it. Fans of Game of Thrones have recorded their reactions to major events like the Red Wedding, in which several members of the Stark family are killed by Lannister agents, and this week’s Purple Wedding. Some of the reactions are NSFW, so at least put on your headphones first:

The viewers’ visible excitement contrasts oddly with the Joffrey’s audible choking and his mother’s raging grief, but these videos provide solidarity between the audience within and without the screen. There is a tension in some of the videos about how aware the person in the video is of being filmed: sometimes the video’s subject acknowledges the camera, sometimes they just react. We as an audience can also be cognizant of the person doing the filming, who understands what’s coming and wants to record it. Whereas marginalia is a semi-private act—one person reading alone and recording that reading—these reactions are performed for their viewing companions and the room and the wider YouTube audience. A whole bar breaking into applause at the critical moment shares solidarity in their reaction, and the viewer joins them in their joy. Yet the viewers’ enthusiasm—like the man who responds to Oleanna Tyrell saying “Help the poor boy!” with “No!”—seems not to be in doubt, as he stares at the TV and not the camera filming him. There’s a sense in which we are engaging with individuals in an unguarded moment, framed so by the knowing person holding the camera. The emotional exposure creates intimacy, even if it is highly mediated.

Image Credit: The Independent

I’d like to consider here how these videos also replicate the common film technique of the reaction shot, where within a movie the camera will scan other characters within the scene to see what they make of what’s happening. The Purple Wedding itself features many reactions, like Joffrey and the actors responding to Tyrion’s speech, or the people reacting to Joffrey’s death itself. The goal of a reaction shot is to reveal or obscure something about the character, depending whether or not their reaction appears onscreen. In a show where subterfuge and outright scheming are required—“when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die”—no characters are allowed to react visibly with strong emotion. Only Cersei does so. That very tension may be why the reaction videos are so popular—they supply the place of what must be hidden, what cannot be expressed in Westeros. The film medium thus produces both reactions, and the means for viewers to react.

We Have Sold The Future: The Uses of Future Hopes and Fears in Petroleum Industry Advertising

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 02:59:39 +0000

Image Credit: Shell

The future of Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama is optimistic. Clean architecture and efficient technology aid people as they move through the business of their day. As promised in a series of 1937 Shell advertisements in Life magazine using the words of Bel Geddes, the city of tomorrow will alleviate many commuting frustrations. Until that city emerges, however, the ads offer Shell gasoline as a way to save money and reduce wear and tear on car engines while stuck in stop-and-go traffic. This use of a hopeful future contrasts with the darker tomorrows that lurk behind many of today's petroleum advertisements, drawing attention to the double-edged sword of appeals to the future.

Image Credit: Shell

In the 1937 ads, the Shell Corporation promotes its product as a stopgap to deal with the failings of the present until the the arrival of a better future. The first ad quotes Bel Geddes promising that by 1960 stoplights will be a thing of the past, as cars use underpasses and express streets to reach their destinations. The second ad has Bel Geddes reassure us that "children won't play in the streets" and pedestrians will not impede the flow of traffic. A third ad shown below places Bel Geddes in profile next to a quote about pedestrians, express and local traffic all having their own paths.

Image Credit: Shell

Two ads contrast photographs of overcrowded and traffic-choked streets of the late 1930s with the clean, efficient cityscape sketches and models of Bel Geddes. In two of the ads, a third visual bridges the present and future: photos of smiling, happy motorists posed in their cars with Shell gasoline pumps in the background. The ad text spells out the argument: "The regular use of Super-Shell will cut the cost of your stop and go. There's a Shell dealer near you."

Image Credit: Chevron

That such hassle-free commutes failed to materialize is personally a source of disappointment (especially as I dodge vehicular traffic while walking to the bus stop each morning), but the failure of the future to live up to our highest hopes isn't terribly surprising. What does provide some measure of uncertainty, if not surprise, is the choice advertisers or any other rhetor has to make when using an appeal to the future: do we look forward with hope or trepidation? The Shell ads of 1937 presented the company's product as a bridge to a better future, but many oil ads today offer products as a bulwark against encroaching problems.

Image Credit: Chevron

The petroleum industry now wrestles with a future fraught with the threat of global climate change, industrial disasters and resource depletion, even as technological innovation also promises to open up new areas for resource extraction and create greater fuel efficiency. Chevron's website speaks to many of the issues the future brings when it comes to the petroleum industry: Energy Supply and Demand, Energy Policy, Energy Efficiency and Conservation, Emerging Energy, Environment, Climate Change, and others. The first Chevron image above acknowledges the consumer desire to "use less energy" and it promises that Chevron too will help governments and businesses to become more energy efficient. The ad does not explicitly state that people wish to use less energy to save money (let alone consider the idea that oil reserves will one day run out), and the ad uses a positive, can-do tone. Yet, the ad cannot avoid responding to troubles on the horizon.

A second Chevron image from its Supply and Demand web page acknowledges greater energy demands in the future, showing a picture of skyscrapers under construction that look much more like the buildings of today than the futurism of Bel Geddes in the Shell ads from 1937, reigning in optimism for a more realist and incremental outlook.

The kairos of the two eras influences the choices made by the ad creators—Art Deco's optimism vs. the pessimism of our millennial age. Below in a 2007 ad, Shell promises, "We invest today's profits in tomorrow's solutions," elaborating that "The challenge of the 21st century is to meet the growing need for energy in ways that are not only profitable but sustainable."

Image Credit: Shell

Even this nod to a potentially difficult future is couched in hopeful language befitting an ad promoting a company. Shell speaks of "tomorrow's solutions" and "challenges" not problems, though those problems lurk beneath the surface. Unlike the Shell of 1937 that looks to the forecasts of Bel Geddes futurism, the Shell of 2007 century takes on the task of describing and shaping the future. And, their future promises not utopian transformation but a kind of stasis, holding onto energy production that is at once sustainable, profitable, and able to meet the "growing need for energy." Another 70 years, and likely considerably less time, will tell whether such a prediction is any less utopian than a smooth rush hour commute.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Commodity Conrad

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:03:14 +0000

Image Credit: Phil Hale

As an avid and generous reader of Joseph Conrad, I don't like Phil Hale's cover art for the most recent Penguin Classic releases. It's not the artist either. Hale can credit to his name some wonderful portraits and figures. No, the problem is that Hale took too much for his own that ubiquitous but injurious reading of Conrad, which became prevalent pretty much from day one: namely that Conrad is a DIFFICULT author (woe to the author who wins that terrible epithet!), and this predominantly because Conrad's prose, like Hale's writhing, headless corpse-like figures, is TORTURED. A few of the more famous modernists said some very dismissive things along these lines about Conrad, and it is our misfortune to have inherited their anxiety of influence as authoritative judgment. But Conrad's prose is compelling, immediate and alive! Yes, it's true and I state it with certainty. Conrad is not difficult, he is rewarding. Kipling said reading him is like reading a great author in a first-rate translation: that is to say, you get two arts for the price of one. But Hale's covers can turn off even me from reading one of my favorite authors, such a forbidding, cold, and painful experience do they promise. Cold War Conrad fared much better than his postmodern iteration, so far as book covers are concerned. And the original editions achieved an attractiveness which has never been matched. I'll show you. Come along.

Contrast, first, a few of Phil Hale's other figures with his covers for the new Penguin Conrads.

Image Credit: Phil Hale

Hale's officially commissioned portrait of former Prime Minister Tony Blair is ennobling, understated, and modern, qualities few portraits of state share. Hale's painting of the great Sri Lankan cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan is exhilarating and alive. It shows much of what cricket fans find so enchanting about that game. And then Hale's cover for the graphic novel Halo shows a light hand with violence, very well suited to the adventure series. All of these qualities suggest what the editors of the new Penguin must have recognized: Hale is a good choice for fresh editions of Conrad. All the more lamentable, then, that Hale didn't bring them to bear on Conrad!

Image Credit: Phil Hale

These Munchian nightmare figures take all the fun, all the consolation, out of Conrad. I think I see some of what Hale might have meant. The faces are obscured just as, in Conrad, the sheer amount of information about a character tends to obscure rather than clarify our understanding of them. And of course there is pain in Conrad's books. But, as I suggested, I think these figures are not tortured on that account but on the theory that Conrad's prose is famously convoluted. In either case, Hale's painful, contorted Conrad cruelly ignores the Conrad who, he insisted, so loved humanity:

For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten. And perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. (Conrad in 1905)

I don't find this sentiment nor the prose in which it is expressed painfully convoluted. But who will ever find their way to this consoling Conrad when there are covers out there like this one by Dan Eldon?

Image Credit: Dan Eldon (2007)

It's not that there is no pain or blood or even torture in Conrad. Of course there are because these exist in the world and Conrad was a realist. But there is also love and life in Conrad. The Penguin Modern Classics took more to heart Conrad's warmth for people. The covers from this era are troubled but certainly not corpse-like:

Image Credit: A detail of 'Die Windsbraut' by Oskar Kokoschka

Image Credit: Detail from The Coming Storm by Winslow Homer

Oxford World's Classics Conrad is also less blinkered by Conrad's depictions of pain:

Image Credit: Detail from Margaret by Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833-98)

These are beautiful and complex paintings that allow for a layered emotional response. And there are good reasons to further complicate already intricate novels with paintings. As Geoff Dyer recently observed in The New York Times, classic paintings, such as those used by Penguin Modern Classics, served as "visual essays on the books they adorned," and a "side effect was that books I was reading for an education in literature doubled as an introduction to art history."

Very well; either let us return to classic paintings for covers or let us paint Conrad more generously. This shall suffice for paperback school copies.

Believe it or not, though, Conrad was not always read just for school. People read him because they found him worth reading. The original editions reveal a Conrad wrapped up and presented for leisured enjoyment.

Image Credit: wikipedia

I'm not one for commodification, but a commodified Conrad might not be the worse thing if it gave him, at last, that kind of reader he always wanted more than any other. Let us name this reader by everything she or he is not, or not only: conceited, elitist, conspicuous and fashionable.

Reading Religious Monuments

Todd Battistelli — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 22:07:05 +0000

Image Credit: Department of Veterans Affairs

The religious meaning associated with the above symbol seems hard to miss. Different denominations may favor different variations, but the Latin cross is inextricably associated with Christianity. Yet, in the context of legal arguments over the separation of church and state, some suggest that the cross conveys a meaning other than an identification with the Christian religion. Oddly enough, these arguments for a non-Christian Christian cross often come from those deeply invested in preserving the presence of crosses and other ostensibly religious symbols on government property.

Image Credit: Joe Crawford

Since 1954, the Mount Soledad Easter Cross, the original name of the monument pictured above, has looked out over San Diego. Since 1989, litigants have participated in a decades-long struggle to challenge or defend the structure on state-church separation grounds. Generally speaking, government can neither inhibit nor support religion, such as by providing a city park as a site for a permanent religious display and worship. However, the question of where to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional religious displays has proven difficult both to resolve and to discuss in a productive matter.

In the Mt. Soledad case, for instance, the site had been used for Easter worship services. Once litigants filed a complaint that the religious symbol should not sit on government property, defenders of the cross' position redefined it a veterans' memorial instead of a worship site. The courts were not persuaded by this redefinition, ruling against its continued presence. At that point, defenders worked with the city to sell the land immediately surrounding the cross to a non-governmental third party in an attempt to get around state-church separation concerns.

A less prominent, more remote cross that sat on government-owned land in the middle of the desolate yet stunning Mojave desert has faced similar legal challenges and received similar support from those who try to re-define an iconic image to mean something other than its iconic meaning.

Image Credit: AP Photo/The Press-Enterprise, Carlos Puma

Unlike the Mt. Soledad cross, the Mojave cross was originally created as a war memorial in 1934, not as a worship site. The Mojave cross sat on a wild rocky rise, unlike the well groomed park at the top of Mt. Soledad, though both look out from prominent positions. The more primitive construction of the Mojave cross and its more remote location seem to enhance its iconic imagery (regardless of what meaning one reads into the icon), standing as a lone symbolic structure in nature, as opposed to the Mt. Soledad cross that stands a few minutes travel from the hustle and bustle of San Diego.

Image Credit: Stan Shebs

The early legal challenges to the Mojave cross resulted in it being encased in a plywood box. As with the Mt. Soledad case, a land-transfer was made to move the Mojave cross off government property. Litigants challenged the transfer, but the Supreme Court ruled that it was an acceptable solution to the state-church issues and sent the case back to a lower court to rule. Soon after, the cross was stolen.

Image Credit: Ken Lund

The Mojave case raises difficult questions about the meaning of symbols in a diverse society. Those who objected to the cross, saw the cross as exclusionary. For example, the Freedom From Religion Foundation said, “Sectarian symbols such as the Latin cross sanctioned by government as war memorials neglect the sacrifices of our non-Christian and non-believing veterans.” Some of those defending the cross denied the religious meaning of the cross, such as American Legion representative Mark Seavey who said, “The cross is emblematic of sacrifice, not religion.”

The Supreme Court justices were also divided on this question of whether a symbol that has religious meaning can serve as a symbol of sacrifice for all regardless of their religious beliefs.

Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, argued:

But a Latin cross is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs. It is a symbol often used to honor and respect those whose heroic acts, noble contributions, and patient striving help secure an honored place in history for this Nation and its people. Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten.

Kennedy, unlike Seavey, does not dismiss the cross's religious meaning. Instead, he suggests that a meaning of sacrifice overrides the religious meaning at least for constitutional purposes. Writing in his dissent, Justice Stevens says:

I cannot agree that a bare cross such as this conveys a nonsectarian meaning simply because crosses are often used to commemorate "heroic acts, noble contributions, and patient striving" and to honor fallen soldiers. The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice. It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith.

Image Credit: Marco Chiesa

Justice Kennedy invokes images of European cemeteries from World Wars I and II, and the cumulative effect is a moving reminder of sacrifice. Though, as Justice Stevens suggests later in his dissent, remembrance does not depend on the symbols being crosses, and, indeed, crosses were not the exclusive symbol used to mark grave sites. In the above picture one Star of David marker is visible among a multitude of crosses. Nevertheless, given the normative value of Christianity for American identity in those historical eras, it isn't surprising to see nearly all graves in a given view marked with crosses.

Image Credit: Prashanth Raghavan

Unlike the cross-shaped markers in the European cemeteries that Justice Kennedy mentions in his opinion, markers provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US indicate religious preference in a different way. The upright headstones or flat markers all share the same shape, though next of kin can elect to have an “emblem of belief” engraved onto the face of the stone.

Image Credit: Department of Veterans Affairs

There has been some controversy in getting the VA to accept certain symbols, but the Department currently hears applications for new emblems of belief in addition to the fifty-plus emblems already approved. In most photos, the dominant emblem remains the Christian cross, yet a wide range of other emblems bear witness to the diverse worldviews of veterans, ranging from atheism to Wicca.

Image Credit: John Hamer

Blogger John Hamer remarks on the wealth of diverse religious identifications he saw while at Arlington and Fort Leavenworth National Cemeteries. The cumulative effect of row upon row of markers that look similar from a distance yet reveal individual differences upon closer examination conveys Kennedy's message of remembrance while also evoking the American principle of e pluribus unum that a lone, large cross does not convey.

The Composition of Popular Romance: Gone with the Wind's Storyboards

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:23:57 +0000

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider

After a crash of cymbals, the bright brass instruments build to a climax until the violins enter: so begins “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Pulitzer-prize winning novel was a legitimate phenomenon before the movie, but the 1939 film is an artistic achievement on its own merits. Gone with the Wind was one of the first movies chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in part because of its rich history. Gone with the Wind not only holds the record for the highest box office ever (when adjusted for inflation), but also held the rest for most Academy Awards (10) until 1960. Numerous books and documentaries recount the tangled history of the film’s production, which was plagued with cast battles, multiple directors, expensive delays, screenplay revisions, and a battle with the Hays Office to preserve an infamous final line. Much of the material for this work comes from the Harry Ransom Center’s extensive David O. Selznick Collection, which contains not only the producer’s numerous papers but also various production materials from his films.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center not only features this collection in past and future exhibitions, but also displays its contents on its windows, which show several of the film’s storyboards on the Center’s north and northeast walls. What the storyboards can tell us both about film history and Gone with the Wind itself is something I want to briefly examine here.

As discussed by Alan David Vertrees in his book Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking, David Selznick and Gone with the Wind are central to the history of cinematic production design. Selznick created the title “production designer” for William Cameron Menzies, the man who drew Gone with the Wind’s storyboards—drawings which suggested the flow and look of each scene. Gone with the Wind was one of the first live action pictures to be entirely storyboarded. Thus, while production designers were originally responsible for scenic design only, Menzies influenced Gone with the Wind’s entire look, including color, lighting, composition, and camera movement. His achievement garnered him a special Academy Award for “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind.” The film’s original trailer gives some sense of what Menzies accomplished:

The Harry Ransom Center’s windows show storyboards depicting the film’s fire sequence, which a Gallup poll of North American audience members deemed its most memorable episode. However, the Ransom Center’s archives also include storyboards of other sequences, and I took this opportunity to delve into the Selznick Collection’s storyboards to learn more about what storyboarding in Hollywood’s golden age entailed, and what effects these visuals might have.

Searching through several boxes of Gone with the Wind storyboards held within the Selznick Collection, I was interested to note their variety. Some of the boards (like the ones for the fire scene) were relatively compact squares; others, like the ones I found portraying the Twelve Oaks barbecue that takes place early in the movie, are more substantial: made entirely of wood, at least a foot across in length, and reasonably heavy. My photograph here tries to capture what these storyboards actually look like.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Despite their age, their colors are quite striking, as the storyboard depicting the O’Hara family’s arrival at Twelve Oaks shows.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Menzies incorporates various color palettes into the film to visually highlight the differences among the film’s early antebellum scenes, the later stark Civil War sequence, and the bleak Reconstruction period. However, Menzies often doubles the heroine’s fiery personality with reds: Scarlett’s flight from Atlanta is illuminates by the flaming buildings around her; a burning sky backlights her defiant declaration that she’ll “never be hungry again”; the burgundy ball gown she wears to Ashley’s birthday party after being caught embracing him marks her as a scarlet woman.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The color palette also is distinguished from particularly difficult scenes where Scarlett shoots a Union officer, or faces assault from men in the Shantytown near her mills. The storyboards do not illustrate the scenes in detail, but provide a sketch for what it should look like. Pencil lines are still visible among the color.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

These storyboards are uniquely valuable not only for their place in film history, but also for thinking more about how artists like Menzies and Selznick visually composed Gone with the Wind’s epic romance. The “sketchness” of the storyboards conveys some of the sense of fragility inherent in the film’s narrative. By movie’s end, Scarlett is forced to rethink all her ambitions and desires, to recognize both the fragility of her world and her own mistaken understandings of Rhett and Ashley. Her narrative resembles the mental acts of revision that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy undergo in Pride and Prejudice, but with a more complicated finale: instead of uniting, she and Rhett part. Gone with the Wind perverts conventional romance by denying love at the close.

Yet, the film’s last shots complicate the trailer’s claim that “the screen has never known a love story to compare with this, when Rhett Butler meets Scarlett O’Hara.” Instead of despairing when she loses Melanie and Rhett, the people who loved and supported her, Scarlett’s face and the music express hope as she and the viewer both realize her truest love: Tara, her family’s home. It is Tara that provides her the strength to assert that “tomorrow is another day,” and the final shot of Scarlett standing outside her family home, posed against a sky filled with red clouds takes the viewer back to her refusal to give up in the face of poverty, hunger, and despair. Menzies’s visual logic makes Gone with the Wind more than a love story between a man and a woman; it is instead a love letter to America, written to Americans shaken by the Great Depression. Gone with the Wind celebrates both a defiant land and the hopes of the people who populated it. In representing the film through Scarlett’s escape from a burning Atlanta on their windows, the Harry Ransom Center embraces Gone with the Wind as an American narrative worthy of further study.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Unmarking Death

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:47:35 +0000

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

H/T: Lauren Gantz

Death is often in the news, whether it involves major singers, local Austin celebrities, or Twitter death hoaxes. Yet when we visualize death, it’s typically in memorials, not actual pictures of dead bodies. We’ve come some ways from the Victorian memento mori photographs which attempted to render the corpse vital and to serve, as Jamie Fraser notes, “as a keepsake to remember the deceased.” While traditional burial practices, which use embalming fluids to delay putrefaction and decomposition, likewise make the corpse appear as lifelike as possible, most people don’t make hair rings or take pictures of the dead to remember them. In this way, we remember the dead as not dead—as lively. In his photography series Unmarked, Stephen Chalmers presents an alternative way to represent death.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In a recent NPR article, Chalmers discusses Unmarked’s origins in a hiking trip that went past one of Ted Bundy’s dumpsites. As he says, “[J]ust that little kernel of information really changed how I felt about what was otherwise a really fantastic early date. I was struck by how my experience of this place was so changed by knowing the history of the location.” Thus, the series features the locations in which serial killers disposed of their victims’ bodies. Each photograph is named for the victim left in the place.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In photographs like the one above, Jennifer Joseph, Chalmers uses focus to direct the viewer’s attention to the specific place where the body once lay. The placid pastoral scene contrasts dramatically with the idea of violence that murder contains, but there is no dramatic visual tension in the photograph. As Chalmers tells NPR, “I kind of like the absence of spectacle. I’m a quiet person. I like for the images I make to be quiet.” The images are quiet in their lack of subjects and their rural backgrounds. The tetherball in Debra Estes hints at a more suburban setting, but the photo’s only dynamism occurs in the contrast of the yellow tetherball set against the browns and greens. However, Chalmers also explicitly states on his website that the images are meant not only to refuse “clichés of prefabricated sentimentality,” but also to “convey the original sense of shock at arriving at these sites of trauma and also that the self-conscious refusal of information and emptiness of the images and conveys our distance from this sense of shock to demonstrate the essential inaccessibility of these traumatic events and degrading deaths.” If the Victorian image is a “prefabricated sentimentality,” Unmarked works differently.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

Unmarked represents death in this “absence of spectacle,” the still scenes set against the media circus surrounding serial killers and their victims. Because we cannot hope to either represent or fully comprehend the victims’ traumatic deaths, the only way to do so is through its visual opposite. However, while such a series seems deeply respectful of the victims, it only displays death in its lack of display. Chalmers’ visual logic suggests that the only true way to represent murder victims is by refusing to represent them—a treatment that is provocative and beautiful, but may only reinforce the victims’ absence. Where is the space in which mourners can represent the dead, between too much and too little presence? Is the only way our culture can show death is by unmarking it?

#IWillAlwaysLoveYou: Whitney Houston and Rhetorics of Tribute

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:51:43 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

By this point most people—at least the ones reading blogs or The New York Times—have heard about Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday. As it so happened, Houston passed away the night before the Grammys, turning that celebration into a kairoitic moment of mourning. Singer LL Cool J opened the Grammys with a prayer for Whitney and Jennifer Hudson performed her most famous hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Since then, LeAnn Rimes and the television show Glee have offered performances of this song in tribute to Whitney. Likewise, her family is allowing her funeral to be streamed on the Internet. I’d like here to consider further the function of these institutionalized tributes. How can (or should) we remember the dead?

The Jennifer Hudson performance occurred after the Grammys showed video of Houston singing her hit “Saving All My Love For You” at the 1986 Grammys. Hudson sang part of the song while placed under images of the vibrant young Houston in red.

The performance’s visual rhetoric of mourning is clear: the blue light behind her encodes the seriousness of the moment; her black dress makes visual the grief she expresses through the song. The styled hairdo might almost be an allusion to Houston’s hair in the video. Hudson’s voice has some of the same gospel sound that Houston was herself trained in, but her register and tone are lower and deeper than Houston’s, both turning what in Houston’s performance was a divaesque number into something sadder. She ends her performance not in a repetition, “Darling, I will always / I will always / I will always / Love you,” but in “I will always / Love you / Whitney, we love / we love you.” The choice to sing “I Will Always Love You” is a natural one, not only because it’s Whitney Houston’s greatest hit, but also because the song is about saying goodbye to a loved one.

Originally written by Dolly Parton about her split from a partner, Houston’s performance of “I Will Always Love You” for the movie The Bodyguard changed in into a parting from the man who saved her life (as played by Kevin Costner). The music video made for the song, which featured scenes from the movie, showed a lone Houston in an empty theater, singing as she recollected her experiences with Costner. It is thus not just a song of parting in her voice, but one of departure.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Her performance of the song, described by Joe Levy, is “monumental, undeniable and, as many of her recordings were, a triumph of vocal ability that presents itself as human indomitability.” In fact, memorializing her through reference to her most famous and popular performance is to remember Whitney at her best.

Image Credit: The Mirror

However, Whitney Houston, like the deceased singer Michael Jackson, lived a life of controversy. As her personal struggles with drugs overtook her musical career, she took part in the reality show Being Bobby Brown. Certain phrases she said on the show—like “hell to the no,” “kiss my ass!,” and the infamous “crack is whack” from a Diane Sawyer 2002 interview—gave her a secondary notoriety. She became the subject of humor for comics, with Maya Rudolph doing imitations of her on Saturday Night Live. However, what Whitney can be remembered at this time? As Rudolph is preparing to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, a number of websites are speculating whether she’ll attempt to do her impersonation again. Many suggest it’s “too soon” to remember her such—but who has the right to memorialize her? Her family and friends, like Rev. Marvin Winans, are “seriously grieving” and “want to do this with dignity.” The Whitney they remember is as much a young girl as a famous singer. Her fans and the music world at large pay tribute to her vocal gifts. Others might treasure her almost-campy afterlife on Bravo and The Soup. Decorum suggests that the dignified or proper thing is to preserve her in an orderly—and ordered—fashion. Yet fans on Twitter connect to her death through hashtags varying from #iwillalwaysloveyou to #crackiswhack as they attempt to come to terms with her death. In such case, the public’s memory and public memorializing practices can’t be disciplined, though hopefully all such actions are done out of fondness and love.

Mowgli's Brothers: The Jungle Books, Wild Children, and the Twentieth Century

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image:screenshot from volotov.com

“The first thing I want you to do,” Walt Disney is reported to have said to lead scriptwriter Larry Clemons upon giving him a copy of The Jungle Book, “is not read it.” Indeed. Not reading The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 collection of moral fables about Mowgli’s childhood among the animals and re-entry into human civilization, is a bit of a cottage industry. As one of the western world’s most famous feral children (alongside fellow turn-of-the-century literary peers Peter Pan and Tarzan), Mowgli has long been public property. But in the hundred-odd years since Mowgli, Baloo the Bear, and Shere Khan first entered our collective unconscious, the Jungle Books have embarked on their own odyssey that takes in everything from Imperialist allegory, Edwardian paramilitary organizations to Soviet science fiction and contemporary eco-criticism. And that’s just “The Bare Necessities.” All told, Mowgli’s adventures have taken him places Kipling—for all his fertile imagination—would never have dreamed, forming a kind of secret history of the twentieth century. In what follows, I try to quickly unpack some of that history through various images of Mowgli and The Jungle Book.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Mowgli first saw the light of day in various short stories published throughout 1893 and early 1894, collected in volume form later that year. Only three of the seven stories concern Mowgli (“Mowgli’s Brothers,” “Kaa’s Hunting,” and “Tiger, Tiger”) while the remainder of the volume is filled with other animal tales— the proto-environmental narrative of “The White Seal,” and the classic tale of bravery and duty, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” among others. Yet it was Mowgli’s ambivalent relationship to mankind, best expressed in “Tiger, Tiger,” as well as Kipling’s enunciation of “The Law of the Jungle” that caught early readers’ attention. With their portrayal of human society as deeply corrupt and their consequent valorization of Mowgli’s decision to “hunt alone,” the stories partake deeply of the degenerative cultural anxieties of their time (though oddly enough, Lockwood Kipling’s illustration above emphasizes Mowgli’s androgynous sexuality). Like all of Kipling’s imperial fictions, Mowgli works strangely—on the one hand, he clearly represents a kind of fetishized, animalistic native Other; but on the other, he surpasses human society. Closer to nature, he is also an idealized figure.

Image: http://www.scouting.milestones.btinternet.co.uk/cubs.htm

This was, of course, tailor-made for Robert Baden-Powell’s brief. Baden-Powell, alarmed by the early failures of the British military in the Boer War, famously founded the Boy Scouts as an attempt to reverse the degenerative tendencies of modern life. His foundational 1908 text Scouting for Boys had already incorporated the famous “memory game” from Kipling’s Kim; in 1916 Baden-Powell founded the Wolf Cubs as a junior arm of the Scouting organization. Its history, symbols, and motivations were drawn directly from, with Kipling’s approval, the Jungle Books. Even today the story “Mowgli’s Brothers,” now retitled “The Story of Akela and Mowgli,” appears in sections across the official Wolf and Bear Cub Scout Handbooks.

Further into the century, the Jungle Books were the subject of several major motion pictures, in particular Alexander Korda’s lavish, British Imperial spectacle from 1942 starring Sabu (whose film career particularly embodies the complexities of late colonial and post-colonial life for South Asians) and Disney’s famous 1967 version. The Korda version, made in the waning days of the British Empire in India to keep up morale on the home front, exemplifies the stirring, Orientalist fantasies the Korda brothers did so well--the film was a follow-up to the massive succes of The Thief of Baghdad (the poster for the 1942 film leads this post). As for the animated version, Walt Disney's quote makes clear that the text was merely a springboard for character development. That version would steamroll the ambiguities of Kipling’s tales into a narrative preparing young Mowgli for a productive life among human society (though at least it largely avoids the uncritical Orientalism of the 1994 live-action version, which also perversely failed to cast an actor of Indian descent in the lead role).

Image: www.realussr.com

More intriguing to me are a pair of Soviet adaptations of the work, the film-series Maugli [Adventures of Mowgli] (1967-71) and the science fiction novel Malysh [The Kid aka Space Mowgli] (1971). Maugli was released in five roughly twenty-minute sections, and, as the image above suggests, emphasizes heroic and epic themes. Unlike the Disney version, to which this series seems an ironic counterpart, the Soviet version remains fairly truthful to the stories. Apart from their emphasis on structuring masculine identity—an increasingly common theme in popular Soviet film and fiction during the post-Thaw years (and really, Kaa's positioning is none too subtle)–the Mowgli stories probably offered a veiled platform for discussion and critique of Western imperialism (the party line interpretation of French and American involvement in Vietnam). The full series is available here, though without subtitles.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii’s Malysh uses the Mowgli myth as a distant political allegory. In the far future, the first colonists of a distant world use the Kid—the teenaged survivor of a previous attempt to explore the planet—as a proxy to briefly attempt communication with the indigenous closed society of “Ark Megaforms” discovered living on the planet. The story ends, however, with the failure of the Ark Megaforms and humanity to communicate. The colonists depart, leaving the Kid behind, with only a transmitter as his link to human society. Here the Mowgli myth structures a deeply moving allegory of failure to communicate, in which the West (or is it the East) remains unable to penetrate and speak with the closed society of the East (or, again, is it the West)? These transformations of the Mowgli story seem ripe for further examination.

Image: dailymail.co.uk

Finally, British graffiti artist and all-around provocateur Banksy used the characters of The Jungle Book for his contribution to Greenpeace’s “Save or Delete?” exhibition in 2001. The controversial image of the Disney incarnations of the characters hooded and lined up for execution makes a vivid argument about environmental change. At the same time, I find it fascinating that the images seem to be invoked in a “non-colonial” environment. While the use of the Disney characters could be read as an argument implicating Disney’s corporate policies in environmental change—though I wouldn’t necessarily pursue that argument—there doesn’t seem to be a consciousness of colonial and racialist policies underlying the image. Is Bansky blind to those tensions in this piece, or does it seem to indicate that Mowgli’s origin as a product of colonial fantasy is obscured to 21^st century viewers? Whatever the case, the ecological underpinnings of Banksy’s image suggests the ways the Mowgli myth continues to impact audiences in new and provocative ways, some hundred years after his first appearance.

Charles Dickens, Graphic Novelist: Adapting Great Expectations

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Original cover art for Illustrated Classics Acclaim Edition by Chuck Wojtkiewicz

Image: sonicdan.com

Quick—how do you sell kids on a hundred-and-fifty-year old novel that’s about (among other things) a middle-aged man’s pained reflections on class identity and snobbery, confrontational gender politics, and criminal law reform? If you answered, “Why, turn it into a comic book, of course,” congratulations—you may go to the head of the class. Great Expectations seems the most unlikely of Dickens’s novels to create in comic book form—in fact, it’s one of only two novels Dickens did not commission illustrations for, suggesting that even the Inimitable was skeptical of its visual appeal (Hard Times is the other). Yet comic book versions of the text have flourished since the 1940’s. To join in the early celebrations of Charles Dickens’s bicentennial (and in honor of yet another film adaptation), this week I’d like to discuss some images in the book’s transformation from adult novel to children’s text.

Full disclosure: I’m a would-be Dickens scholar, as well as a long-term Dickens fan, but the inherent popularity of Great Expectations continues to surprise me—it was once again voted readers’ favorite over at The Guardian. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the novel isn’t fantastic, and despite my theoretical summary above, full of action, what with all the convicts, evil doubles, cracked old women, sinister lawyers, and femme fatales stuffed into the plot. But it’s also a mellow slice of late Dickens, and Pip’s outrage and embarrassment over his youthful behavior is a hard sell for most teens forced to read it in school (what fourteen-year-old cares about their priggishness?). The nightmarishly carnivalesque street-life of Oliver Twist or the turns of luminescent comedy and tear-jerking melodrama in David Copperfield I find (and found) far more congenial avenues into Dickens’s work.

Of course I say that, but Great Expectations was the first Dickens novel I read, probably around six or seven, in the edition below:

Image: mycomicshop.com

The low-rent gnarliness of that cover has stayed with me a long time. It’s a splendid gothic scene that’s reminiscent of those great EC Comics covers from the 1950’s with the lurid greens and blues against the mouldering gray of the cemetery. The lifeless colors of the outside world focus the attention on terrified child and his attacker. The suggestion of sexualized violence is a bit weird considering the target audience of these books was boys from 8-13, though there are traces of sexual violence all over the story. (I wonder if Peter Carey, whose version of the novel, Jack Maggs, makes good but explicit use of male-male sexual practices, ever stumbled upon this cover?) All the same, the cover certainly piqued my juvenile interest and provided my first taste of one of the great, if not the greatest, novelists of all time.

Image: comicbitsonline.com

Image: robot6.comicbookresources.com

This first encounter between Magwitch and Pip has proven to be a durable entry point for illustrators of the novel (in whatever version). It makes perfect sense, as it entices younger readers to find out what’s going on in the text without alienating older audiences. Above, both the British Classical Comics graphic novel and the Penguin Deluxe Edition have chosen to feature it. I quite like the way that the Penguin, in otherwise a quite nice reprint of the full novel, emphasizes the comic-strip nature of the scene through paneling and word bubbles; something that the other versions—most of them actual comic books—don’t do. There are ironies to market production….

Image: mycomicshop.com

The original 1945 Classics Illustrated cover, featured above, provides probably the most strongly gendered cover I’ve seen, as two ragged-but-manly men struggle in the mud, a far cry from the desperate starving Magwitch and Compeyson of the text. I do like how the margins of the cover are also enticingly filled with potentially violent figures: on the right, a somewhat crazy-eyed soldier with gun in hand; on the left, gentle Joe swings his blacksmith’s hammer with a bit of bloodlust on his face. What right-thinking boy—be he British or American—could resist such strong appeals to his masculinity?

Image: classicscentral.com

I’d like to conclude, though, by looking at two less-gendered but perhaps more strange images. Above is the Greek cover for the Classics Illustrated edition, which features an obviously post-inheritance Pip (notice the classy bow tie) whispering conspiratorially into Miss Havisham’s ear. Without dramatizing a specific scene in the novel (at least not one I can identify at the moment—any thoughts, fellow Dickensians?) this strange image manages to nail the gothic circulation of secrets in the novel. There’s a cumulative and weird power to it, with its literalization of wealth in the form of treasure and the sinister looks on the faces of Miss Havisham and Pip. By making Pip, even unintentionally, look like a villain, this image captures in a seemingly offhand way the complex narratorial work of the novel in which Pip is one of the villains of the text: the polite country boy turned decadent prig.

Finally, the haunting image this post leads with captures the gothic strands of the text. Miss Havisham’s face is distorted mask, as much animal rage as human skull. Estella’s central positioning as the object of Pip’s gaze, as well as our own, duplicates her role in the text. Her look of disdain and barely-controlled anger quickly reveals the nature of this love triangle (and the obvious pleasure the artist has taken in making her look so beautiful and nasty—probably unintentionally—replicates the real misogyny in the text). Behind everyone looms the shadow of Magwitch, whose life is intricately bound together with all these characters, though we don’t know it. But what I like best is the depiction of Pip, a faceless screen for the reader. After all, he is a sort of everyboy, and this image encourages to identify with him and to become him, just as the text of the novel also encourages that identification. Brilliantly reflecting the depths of the novel as well as its surface, this image suggests that, after all, Great Expectations’ surprising visual popularity is warranted.

YouTube & Fair Use

snelson — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:07:38 +0000

Recently, one of my YouTube videos was automatically removed for "copyright violations." I decided to take a closer look into YouTube's policies and found they may be dissuading users from exercising their Fair Use rights.

In partnership with Megan Varelmann and Vincent Robert-Nicoud, I created a video illustrating a few of Lev Manovich’s concepts from The Language of New Media. The scene YouTube found questionable was an illustration of the Language of Selection through a clip of the

IKEA scene from Fight Club:

Our use of this clip was in my mind well within Fair Use, so I filed a dispute. The video was restored within a week, but it got me thinking about some of the silencing effects from YouTube’s automated system and their approach to “educating” consumer-producers (or “prosumers,” to use Alvin Toffler’s term). The visual rhetoric of both the interface for filing a dispute and the cartoon copyright violators are forced to watch subtly argue for copyright as mainly for owners’ rights, rather than a balance between owners’ and users’ rights.

First, though, a bit of clarification on YouTube’s policies. In 2007, Viacom, Inc. brought a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for mass copyright infringement. Viacom argued that YouTube knowingly allowed users to upload copyrighted content, and Viacom wanted its share of the multibillion-dollar pie that is YouTube. In 2010, Google (the owner of YouTube) won the case, but only because the judge ruled YouTube is protected underneath the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In these provisions, online service providers are protected “from liability for information posted or transmitted by subscribers if they quickly remove or disable access to material identified in a copyright holder's complaint." Thus arose YouTube’s fairly recent measures to remove offending content.

YouTube created their Content Verification Program, where copyright holders could submit material to a database that YouTube uses to automatically screen uploaded videos. A match from the database then means the copyright owner can block, track, or monetize the content. Blocking the content automatically removes the video. Tracking allows the owner to keep an eye on the offending video for future action. Finally, the most controversial option allows the owner to “monetize” the offending video by placing ads around it. All of these options happen automatically (and impressively, from a computing standpoint – see this TED talk for a brief explanation of the system). That is, there is no human intervention in these stages, and there have been numerous complaints about YouTube’s crawlers assuming an offense before the facts are reviewed, especially since three violations equals a blocked channel. Even Lady Gaga ran afoul of this automated system when her channel was temporarily suspended for posting videos of her own copyrighted music performances. Fear not, though, humans: we can still petition our machine overlords.

If a video is flagged, users then have the option to dispute the automatic takedown for one of three reasons: 1. the Content ID program made a mistake (the video contains no copyrighted material); 2. the user doesn’t need the owner’s permission to use the content (the portion used falls under Fair Use); or 3. the user has the owner’s permission to use the copyrighted content. When a user files a dispute, YouTube automatically restores the video, but the user has just made herself legally liable should the copyright owner choose to sue for infringement.

If you’re feeling a bit confused, you aren’t alone. The process can be somewhat daunting for a casual YouTube user, and this is only the first stage in copyright complaints. Further, the dispute form uses some interface choices that serve to silence the user’s input into the process. The takedown notices from YouTube are vague, giving only a short statement that in my case read “Your video, Visualizing Manovich's New Media, may have content that is owned or licensed by FOX. No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.” Of course, no action was required on my part had I chosen to not dispute their claim.

But I did want to dispute their claim. The video in question was made for a class, and I stood to gain nothing financially from challenging their claim. However, I wanted to exercise my Fair Use rights and learn more about this process. When I visited the Content ID Matches section to dispute the takedown, I was informed by YouTube that the length of the copyrighted material may not matter. While this is technically correct, the length also may matter in Fair Use disputes. On many other pages about copyright on YouTube, the company takes a hands-off approach, stating they “can't give [me] advice on either of these topics [i.e., Fair Use and Fair Dealing], and if [I] do plan to use even a small portion of copyrighted material in [my] video [YouTube would] strongly advise [me] to take legal advice first." But here, YouTube makes a point to tell users that the length used may not matter, thus pre-empting a common conception about copyright that may actually hold true.

YouTube cautions against frivolous disputes, as such actions could make me legally liable in civil suits (and should the “10 Strikes Bill” circulating in the Senate pass, possible criminal penalties in the future). However, it’s a computer program that chose to flag my video without any context to the situation, and thus no consideration of Fair Use rights. The program works in the owners’ favor by acting first and asking questions later, presuming guilt instead of innocence. Say, for example, that Fox had wanted to monetize my video instead of blocking it. Would Fox still receive revenue from my video between the time it was flagged and the time I acted to dispute the claim?

Even beyond the advantage given to complainants by YouTube’s Content ID system, the notice gave too little information to mount a thorough counterclaim. All YouTube told me was that my video contained some material copyrighted by Fox. My video actually contained clips from four other films, and only by searching the Internet Movie Database did I learn Fight Club was the only one Fox owns. In the larger arena of mashups, parodies, and home videos, a single uploaded video could contain a lot of copyrighted material that falls under Fair Use. What parts did YouTube’s Content ID system match? Was it a clip from a film? The television program running in the background of my humorous cat video? A couple of bars from a song? To effectively argue a position, both parties need information, and the current YouTube system hands more information to the owners while limiting the information given to users.

The dispute process interface further reinforces this imbalance of information. If the user files a dispute based upon Fair Use, YouTube gives the option of one small text field to explain the use:

In my case, I explained how my video fared under each aspect of the four-part test, and the text went well beyond the field given. Thus, it was difficult to edit my text and added to my frustration with the entire process. If the copyright holder rejects the dispute, though, no explanation is needed whatsoever. The user only receives a notice that the claim is rejected.

While YouTube doesn’t deny users their Fair Use rights, as such a practice would be illegal, they certainly frame the debate in such a way to make exercising Fair Use difficult. YouTube’s Content ID system is designed to shield YouTube from liability in copyright cases, and it’s understandable that any company would want to do so. YouTube must sift through the twenty hours of video uploaded each minute. Mistakes in such a massive system are inevitable, and I’m amazed by YouTube’s programmers for even being able to address such a large dataset. However, even when “educating” the public about copyright, YouTube errs on the side of copyright for owners’ rights. Next week, I’ll address YouTube’s Copyright School, a kind of “traffic school” for those it deems “copyright violators.”

Re-Covering the Classics

Cate Blouke — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 20:09:40 +0000

Contest winning re-designed book cover by Philipp Dornbierer for The Fox Is Black

Elizabeth's post this week (about the Great Gatsby game) reminded me of a design contest I stumbled upon recently. TheFoxIsBlack.com, a blog about web and graphic design, has begun a series of monthly competitions inviting participants to redesign the covers of classic literature. Last month was The Great Gatsby (winner pictured above), and this month it's The Lord of the Flies. (The deadline is February 25th, so there's still time for you designers out there to get a shot at the $100 Amazon gift card).

Re-designed book cover by Matthew Gore for The Fox Is Black

It's interesting to think about the interaction of text and cover art, how the cover can shape our perception of and approach to a book. Aside from just being pretty cool to look at, the entries are fascinating to compare and could be used as a conversation starter in classrooms. For example, comparing the image above (Matthew Gore's entry) to the one below (Ian O. Phelan's entry). Though both feature the color green, what can we infer from the choice in hue? Also, the image above is more masculine and violent (with the broken glass), positioning Gatsby is the central figure, whereas the image below depicts a female figure and focuses our attention on Daisy.

Re-designed book cover by Ian O. Phelan for The Fox Is Black

Under Their Spell: An Interview with Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:12:38 +0000

Image Credit: Small Screen Scoop

I know that this post is a bit belated, but my excitement in posting this fabulous interview makes me unable to resist the potentially corny title. (And no, while these actresses are not my actual interview subjects, both of them love musicals as much as I do, and one has even written about the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from which this pictures comes.)

I had the lucky opportunity to interview Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis, recent graduates from the PhD program in Performance as Public Practice from the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, at the end of May. The initial reason that I asked to interview these ladies was that both include musicals as a part of their research interests and that each worked with Stacy Wolf, a former UT professor whose book A Problem Like Maria made its way into my own syllabus this past year; however, both ladies were eloquent on the challenges of teaching students to enact visual analysis and to think critically about musicals. The lively and interesting conversation we shared can be found either on the views page or directly here.

Interview of Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:25:25 +0000

In the spring of 2010 viz. contributor Rachel Schneider interviewed Drs. Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis about their experiences teaching musical theater and performance for the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. Here is the transcript of that interview, conducted on May 19, 2010.

Viz: To start off our discussion, I’d like it if you could introduce yourselves briefly for the viz. readers, and describe your academic and teaching experience here at The University of Texas: what kinds of classes have you taught here? Have you yet had the opportunity to teach your own research? And what is your research?

Dvoskin: My name is Michelle Dvoskin. I just finished the PhD in Performance as Public Practice. I taught Intro to Theater for non-majors for two years, which is a 400-student lecture class. I taught two semesters of Intro to Acting for non-majors, and then Theater History Post-1800 for a semester. My research is on musical theater as a way of doing what specifically I’m calling queer historiography: that is, a queer--counter-normative--way of communicating histories.

Manis: I’m Shelley Manis and I just finished a PhD in Performance as Public Practice. I taught a year of the theater history for majors sequence, which is first Theater History to 1800 and then Theater History since 1800. I have been a TA for Stacy Wolf’s musical theater class. I was a teaching assistant for the regular history class for two years before I taught it, and then taught for two years in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, including teaching the Rhetoric of Performance.

Viz: Great! Well, as I mentioned before the interview started, viz is interested in the intersections between visual rhetoric, visual culture, and pedagogy. While we come from different academic disciplines—you both have doctorates in PPP and I am in the English department—we all share an interest in pedagogy. What commonalities do you think there are between these disciplines of rhetoric, English, and performance studies, and is there any benefit to make our students of interdisciplinarity?

Manis: Actually, one of my biggest interests is in the intersection between rhetoric and performance, and I think that a lot of what they have in common for me is that rhetoric works in terms of time and place—specificity in time and place—and for me, performance’s power comes a lot out of where something was performed, in what circumstances, and who is observing it. I think that in terms of the underlying sort of things that come together to make performance and rhetoric powerful—they’re both very similar in that way—performance is really powerful because of its affective structure, because you can watch it and be invested in it either live or watching a recorded performance. It’s something that’s trying to speak to you at an emotional level, so I think teaching about the way a performance works affectively is a really useful way of teaching students about emotional appeals in rhetoric, and how emotional appeals can work both in terms of the text, which we spend a lot of time talking about in rhetoric, but also in terms of what we’re seeing, what the bodies are doing onstage, what are they doing to each other on stage, and how audience members are responding to what they’re doing both viscerally and emotionally.

Dvoskin: One of the things that’s most interesting to me about musical theater and reception is the thing that Stacy Wolf and others have written about: that musical theater is embodied. We don’t just watch and think, we don’t just watch and feel, we watch and do as we hum along or we’re tapping our toes, or—

Manis: Going forward at that first moment in Wicked where Elphaba soars up and the whole audience—

Dvoskin: Yes, there’s that small lunge that everyone around you is doing, and that there’s a way in which it becomes a kinesthetic experience as well as an intellectual and emotional one that is really powerful that I look forward to thinking about more. I also think that it’s so important to remember that performance texts—especially musical theater—aren’t just texts. Even for theater history majors or students whose focus is performance or design, those elements are so easy to lose track of when you’re reading a script. We need to remember that this can actually happen in all kinds of ways on the stage. When I teach Gypsy, which is the musical I teach most consistently, there’s an exercise I do when I bring in clips of four different women playing Rose from all the major productions and I show the exact same section of the “Rose’s Turn” number and have the students practice analyzing the performance through that. This helps students see all the ways in which what’s being communicated is both the same and completely different depending on what body and what production choices are happening. And I think that’s a really important thing performance studies can bring, that it's not just all page, it’s—

Manis: Three dimensional or even four dimensional. I think the thing that students in rhetoric can struggle with is what is an emotional appeal, what is an intellectual appeal, what is an appeal based on authority, and I think that the multidimensionality of performance is a nice way of getting students to sort of dig in beyond the text and understand the other aspects that come into play when making arguments.

Viz: Actually, this brings up a question that got answered for me a little bit when you, Shelley, came and guested and did a guest lecture in my class. Finding performance texts and getting students to have a text in front of them I found to be one of the difficulties of using pop culture pieces in the classroom because organizing discussions around a text that students have previously seen but don’t have in front of them on the page. Michelle, you said you deal with this by using YouTube clips. What are the ways in which (a) you make your students aware of the multidimensionality of the text and the strategies you use in the classroom and (b) on the practical level of having texts in front of you in the classroom, how do you deal with that? What advice would you give to someone who wanted to teach a similar class at Texas or elsewhere?

Dvoskin: Show stuff. That’s the basic thing. It takes time—and it’s an interesting problem; in teaching this semester I taught two units on the musical, one on the “golden age” of musicals and a post-1969 unit. In the post-1969 unit I had all this stuff I wanted to show and two days for the lecture and discussion before we got to specifically talking about A Chorus Line, which was the case study for the unit. And the first day I got through three slides because I showed so many clips. For each clip we stopped and talked about it and picked it apart and we looked at what are the lights doing, what’s happening, what do you see, while also reminding them that it’s not quite the same because what we’re seeing on a screen is a captured moment, an archive moment, and not the repertoire moment that we have in the theater. It was incredibly worth the time and I think it was one of the most rewarding days we had all semester, but it’s also a challenge because you can’t spend that much time on everything unless you’re going to teach very little over the course of the semester. And I didn’t show nearly as much the next day because I couldn’t if I was going to explain to them what, say, concept musicals were, since really it was all rock musicals that first day, and it’s a tradeoff. But I’m hoping that, since we spent so much time really watching and discussing and unpacking that first day, they were able to do some of that work themselves, and I think they were, based on the discussion we were able to have about A Chorus Line, which doesn’t have a great video archive.

Manis: Yeah, I agree with all of that, and one of the things that I do is that I usually start with is saying, “Here’s something that we’re going to watch, and this time, just watch it and lose yourself in it.” Then we’ll watch it and do some talking about what’s going on. Then I’ll say “we’re going to watch it again, and this time take careful notes on exactly what you see: so, what are the bodies doing, what are the lights doing, what catches your eye, what throws you off—whatever it is, take extremely detailed notes.” Then we watch it that way and then we start talking about what they saw, and I stress that it’s going from what you see to interpreting what you see and how what you see made you feel to get to a piece of analysis, so that it goes from observation to analysis and evaluation.

Dvoskin: Which is one of the most difficult things to get students to do—articulating what is actually happening in front of you is one of the hardest things for me to get them to do. They want to skip straight towards “I loved it” or “It was weird” or “It reminded me of this.” They want to skip to that comparison phase of the critical triangle. One exercise that I stole from a colleague of ours, Kelly Howe, is a Boal exercise that I’ll use to have them start discussions of texts. I’ll ask them to sculpt an image of the text and go through those three steps and stopping them—“Oh, it looks like she’s reading.” “No, what do you see?” because—

Manis: Sculpting an image is them using their bodies to make a tableau, either moving or still, depends on what you want. You break them into teams and then they make a tableau.

Dvoskin: Sometimes I’ll make them do it at the front, so the exercise is as much about getting the people in the audience to articulate what they see in front of them as it is about the people who are creating it. In my acting classes in particular I’ve found it to be a helpful thing to get them to step back and to get them thinking about what they’re seeing and what the literal visual is before you move on. It’s an easy way to push back against the tendency to do comparison or evaluation.

Viz: That was something I found to be difficult for my students, that they just wanted to go straight to aesthetic appreciation of “this was bad,” but we have to talk about “what is it trying to do, how is it trying to make that work,” more analysis instead of—

Dvoskin: “And what do you see that tells you that?”—that’s a question I go to a lot. “Well, it really looks like they’re not connecting at all.” “Well, what do you see that gets you there? What’s physically happening that gets you to say that?” “Oh, well, they’re not making eye contact.” “Great; what else?” “The lighting is different on the two of them; she’s in a purple-y light and she’s in an orange-y blue light.” “So, that’s an interesting judgment, but how do you get there?” I make them walk it back.

Viz: Another question that I have is about trying to be interdisciplinary and trying to get students to think rhetorically about musicals is finding a vocabulary to use in the classroom to actually describe and discuss commonly together; how do we talk about how they move across the stage? My project last semester for viz. was trying to come up with such a vocabulary for what rhetoric would call delivery; I looked at Richard Schechner’s textbook, which didn’t seem to have a lot to offer—is there a language that performance studies uses or were there ways in which you found you had to come up with vocabularies for students in different places, like for you, Shelley, teaching rhetoric students who are not familiar with theater—

Manis: I use performance language. One of the first things that I do a section on what is performance and what is the vocabulary we use around performance, and then another section around what is rhetoric and what is the vocabulary we use around rhetoric, and then we spend a eek melding those together: what are the commonalities, where is the overlap in those, where are they different, and then how can we use those two things to talk to each other? There are always the basic things like setting, staging. With movement, I found this from our colleague Claire Croft to be “what do you see happening.” You don’t need to know what a pirouette is or anything technical about that. All you need to be able to do is describe, so I encourage them to use a lot of descriptive language and I have them read from a book called Writing About Theater which has an introduction about writing about theater for undergraduates and have them read selections from that which gives them a vocabulary to work with, and then whatever terms of rhetoric I’m using, we work with that.

Dvoskin: I guess I don’t really have a rhetoric vocabulary, so for me, I don’t work with that.

Manis: You use the language of history a lot! You’re still interdisciplinary in that you’re talking about historiography.

Dvoskin: Sure, I guess I just never found it difficult melding languages. That’s not something that’s come to my attention. And when I teach, even when I’m teaching non-majors, I make sure they have basic theater 101 vocabulary—what’s upstage, what’s downstage—but I think what you said about just describing what you see is what it always comes back to: what’s happening. If you can tell me that, I don’t care about a jeté or an upstage cross. Just tell me what they’re doing.

Manis: And what’s exciting about that is that students often will find more interesting ways of describing things that if we had just given them a word for it. Or a lot of times you’ll have students—as in my rhetoric of performance class, I had students who were good at math, and some students who had done theater and done directing and some students who had done music, and so gave each other that kind of vocabulary. So I think being open to descriptive language will often times add an expertise that you wouldn’t have arrived at other times. And when I teach rhetoric, I don’t teach things like the difference between pitch and tone because I don’t know how to teach that in terms of rhetoric; I teach it in terms of performance. That may be my bias as a performance scholar, but I have a really hard time teaching tone in writing.

Viz: To back up a little bit from where the discussion has been going, because I’ve just taught a writing class, how much writing instruction have you done in your classrooms and what kinds of writing assignments have you given them. If you have done that, do you think that learning to write better helps them analyze performances better?

Dvoskin: I always incorporate writing when I can; the courses I’ve taught have not been writing component classes. One assignment that I like to use, which functions differently in the three classes I’ve taught, is some sort of a performance review. And I start that out, whichever class I’m teaching—and I got this from Claire Croft—with the performance response triangle of description, analysis, and evaluation, where you’re building them on top of each other and you have to describe before you can make a useful metaphor, and that you have to do those levels before you can evaluate anything. We do a lesson on that and talk about how to do that. We practice that with the sculpting exercises, we do things like that. In an acting class we would practice that with the work they do on stage. Then I'd work with them on their written reviews of other people's work, offering read to drafts, and helping them to push on what they saw, because so often—and this is true across every class that I’ve taught—the impulse is to relate the plot: this is what happened in the show. I don’t really care. That’s not the point of a performance review, and that’s not the kind of work that we’re trying to do, and so really pushing them to think about—OK, if you need to give me a sentence or two of plot so I can follow what you’re saying, fine, but what’s physically happening on that stage? What are the performances doing, what are the design choices doing, how are they communicating? And how do you build that into—particularly in theater history—an analytical piece that also engages with theater history. In that assignment, I ask them to do a little bit of research into the history of the piece that they’re seeing and make an argument that fits the production that they saw into that theater history, which for a lot of them was very challenging. And that was a moment when I wished I had four TAs for my 50 students and we could have really taken time to go through multiple revisions and write a couple of them, but there were two of us and there were 50 of them, so . . .

Manis: I do very similar writing exercises. In my rhetoric of performance class I have them do a performance review. This year, my class was based around controversies, to follow the RHE 306 model that we taught last year, and I had everyone choose a performance that either was controversial, engaged with a controversy, or caused a controversy of some kind. And their performance review needed to incorporate not only those things that Michelle and I talked about, about what do you see, but also the rhetorical context, so what’s going on at the moment this performance was released, what historical moment is it coming into, and how does that historical moment influence the ways in which the audience would likely take up the show. So that’s one exercise that we do. I’ve been teaching writing for 8 years; I taught 3 years at KU, one including an intro to drama class, so that was a literary writing class, and 5 years here. Another writing exercise that I like is that I have them do dramaturgy casebooks, where I have them interpret, they have different sections that they have to do research about, so what is the history of their production, what major productions have been done of this play, what do we know about the playwright, what do we know about the people who were in the play, what do we know about the historical moment, the world of the play itself, how can we help people understand what’s going on in that world—that kind of work, so that they are doing research skills and having to synthesize the information that they find in order to say something about an argument they think that the performance is making.

Dvoskin: I would also throw in that the final project I had my theater history students do this semester was a performance project instead of a written piece, but it certainly incorporated writing as they had to turn in a script, as well as an annotated bibliography. I found that incredibly useful to get them to think multi-dimensionally and to get them to play around with those ideas in a way that’s not so much about learning to become better writers, but still push them to engage with those ideas and to do it in writing. Some of the scripts were quite good, and as writing were quite good, so I think that’s also a really useful tool when working with performance.

Manis: I also have them do a lot of in-class writing in teams, so a lot of times if I’m teaching them about, say, rhetoric and performance, and what were the differences in between them, I had the teams get together and write a few sentences about what were the areas of overlap and what were the difference between rhetoric and performance. I wanted to get them to make an argument about performances and the similarities and differences between performance and rhetoric. So, little things like that. Just every now and then we’ll have in-class work, like if I’m trying to teach them how to write a thesis, we’ll watch a piece of something, and I’ll get them into their teams and have them write a thesis sentence about the kind of thing they saw. I do a lot of in-class workshops when I’m not teaching a writing-specific class, so in my theater history class I gave another writing assignment where I would ask them to situate themselves in a particular historical moment that we had talked about, and as a particular person—so, say you’re a theater manager in Elizabethan England. What play do you think would be a successful play to do and why, so that would then ask them to bring in the historical aspect and bring in the context, but also the analysis of the play itself; so, things like that.

Viz: What seems to be one of the useful overlaps between all the work that we’ve done is to get the students to think about historical context.

Manis: Kairos! Performance is all about kairos!

Viz: But moving on from this, I wanted to ask a little bit about, since you both write about musicals in your own research, the ways in which your teaching impacted your writing or what kind of research do you do. Have these things worked together for you in your career here at Texas?

Manis: Teaching your class, Rachel—having them read a chapter from my dissertation and then having them talk about Wicked in your class—was one of my most successful teaching days ever. It makes me realize that I think teaching one’s own research, whether you have them read your own work or—I don’t know, there’s so much investment in it and I loved seeing them get excited about it. I always get excited about what I’m doing, but that was so magical for me to say here’s what’s going on, now watch this and let’s talk about what you see. I would like to do more of that in the future, and I think one of the things about teaching musicals too, and being able to teach writing—and I think Michelle can speak to this more than I can—is the affective investment in musicals. People get so excited about them. Whether they love them or hate them, there is something that you just cannot help but get invested in that.

Dvoskin: The vibe in the room is palpably different on days you do musicals. In 301, and I’ve guested in lots of 301s, even the 8:00 AM sections get so excited because it’s something they’re familiar with in a very sort of non-threatening way. It’s interesting that in the musical theater field, there’s so much angst about is it dead, is the form dead, “the young people, they don’t like musical theater,” and I just want to start telling everyone to come to my classes. Every time I do a lecture on musicals I start the class by asking everyone in the room if they have seen a musical, and at least two thirds of the 400 hands in the room go up, usually more. They know them, and the investment is huge. The day we got through the three slides on rock musicals, it was in large part because of the time we spent on the clips, but why we spent so much time on the clips was because they couldn’t stop talking about them. Particularly when I showed the piece of Rent, and the room of students who had no exposure to the original production, who had only seen the DVD of the last performance that was filmed on Broadway or had seen the movie version were obsessed and couldn’t—it got to a point when one of my students raised a hand to ask a question, and had to specify that it was for one of her classmates, because her classmate was clearly such an expert in this particular version of the show. I mean, it was awesome. But yeah, that investment level is huge and makes it so much more fun in the classroom. Those are the days when you’re really all on the same team, which is fun.

Viz: That is something I found to be true too; one of the things that I found to be interesting and sometimes difficult is that it can become so fun that that they have problems taking it seriously. Have you ever had that problem where they’ll be engaged, but find it difficult to take it seriously as an object for analysis—pop culture as something we can discuss and describe?

Manis: I make a clear division with that, about when we’re going to have fun with it, and then when we’re going to turn it back into an object of analysis. I like to give them the room to express the silly stuff, and I’ll do that with another pop culture reference, 30 Rock. On that show the writers have their two-minute dance parties and the writers break it down and dance around the table. If we start doing that, I’ll say, “OK, 2 minute dance party, let’s riff on this for a while” and then we do and then we go back to analysis. But I think that they find that because they’re such experts that they actually have a lot of fun talking about it analytically when they realize that, oh, they can do that and that they know that they’re doing.

Dvoskin: I’ve never had a big problem with that. Sometimes I’ve had them focusing on analytics that aren’t as interesting to me, particularly in 301 when I try to break down the history of musical theater in 50 minutes, and I usually end up structuring it by subgenres, the book musical, the concept musical, the rock musical. Often I’ll find afterwards that four or five students are running up to me onstage afterwards asking me what would this musical be, and they’ve missed the part where I said that categories are really flexible and provisional . . . But at the same time, they’re engaged and it is a mode of analysis and they’re looking at musicals as something to take seriously. They are thinking about genres, and it is important what kind of musical it is. It’s not so important to fit it into a tidy slot, but in terms of the kinds of work they can do, book musicals and concept musicals, for example, are allowed to play by slightly different rules.

Manis: And I think that a lot of times too when they—when I was in your class and would ask them what the music was doing, and they would want to go to something slightly different because that’s such a hard thing to do, so I think that sometimes just saying, “Yeah, this is really hard, but we’re going to grapple with it” is enough to get them to go, “Oh, OK, yeah, that’s true. You’re not expecting me to be perfect; it’s just hard.” For me, I think that sometimes that’s where it can go off the rail—and to give them a hook to think of it in terms of genre, or what does it remind you of, and your students said, “It’s like ‘Thriller’!”, that was so bizarre, like a whole new way of looking at Wicked, but there’s a moment where they do move their arms back and forth, but sometimes that opens up new ways of thinking about things.

Dvoskin: I think it’s also important that musical theater fits in a weird cultural space: it’s not precisely pop culture, and so I think in terms of their responses, there’s a difference. Talking about Glee, for example, is totally pop culture, but Gypsy, even though it’s a history of previous forms of popular culture, but it’s not—it operates in a really complicated culture space.

Manis: Some musicals are definitely popular culture; like mega-musicals.

Viz: Spring Awakening I also think crosses into that, in terms of what I had in my classroom and the ways in which my students responded to it and thought and felt about it seemed more like pop culture.

Manis: The touring mega-musicals like Wicked, with how many it sells, how many locations it’s got worldwide, and where it’s going—I don’t know that I would argue that Spring Awakening is actually pop culture because people still have rarefied access to it.

Dvoskin: Yes, but the same is true—the ticket prices on Wicked, who can access—I mean, it’s not a television show where anybody who can afford one television in their house can access it.

Manis: But they can afford the soundtrack.

Dvoskin: Yes, but the soundtrack is not the show. It’s something that actually fascinates me in terms of studying musical theater and something that using Stacy Wolf’s book pushes us to talk about on our musicals day in class is—what this is this thing in terms of cultural capital and cultural status. In part because a huge part of how the field does and doesn’t work at its best has to do with people’s cultural assumptions and their discomfort with something that is a lot like pop culture, but isn’t pop culture because of questions of access and those issues—there’s no easy way or place to get at it.

Viz: It’s also weird to think about the way in which in the 50s and 60s it was more pop culture than it is today. The introduction to A Problem Like Maria wants to go there.

Dvoskin: Yes, but she also explicitly sort of argues that it is and it isn’t pop culture. It has this weird middlebrow thing going on. The albums are pop culture and are artifacts of pop culture, but the actual production isn’t quite.

Manis: Though it is part of the zeitgeist. It’s complicated.

Dvoskin: That’s something I think is interesting and want to keep on the table because it’s useful as a pushback against the—“Oh, musicals,” which I say as I throw my arm back behind my head in a vaguely dismissive way with an ironic eyebrow raise.

Viz: Well, I think you’re absolutely right that that’s a good way to fight back against that assumption because it’s something that came up in my class with students going home and talking about taking a class on the rhetoric of the musical over spring break.

Manis: That’s one of my biggest investments; for me, one of the things is that I absolutely do not believe in separating pleasure and intellectual rigor. It’s not two different things.

Dvoskin: And one of the arguments I make in my dissertation is that this stuff matters because it’s stuff that sticks with us. They do have a wide audience, and in my conclusion I talk about reading Daily Kos, a liberal website, while finishing the dissertation, and in a discussion about something happening one of the comments quoted 1776 without attribution, just a line from ‘Cool Cool Considerate Men’: ‘Ever to the right, ever to the right, never to the left, ever to the right’—no attribution, no nothing; he actually misquoted it slightly, which tells me he didn’t look it up. That was the thing that popped into his head, that was the response—a line from a musical about history.

Manis: And the most recent advertisements for the Garnier Nutrisse skin cream are “Defy Gravity,” with the background in that Wicked green, and it’s all about skin cream, but “Defy Gravity” is a phrase in the zeitgeist.

Dvoskin: I have to say, I wish Macy’s would stop using Rent, though. That’s just disturbing. I’m like, “Why is ‘Seasons of Love’ on my—no!” Not that Rent isn’t terrifyingly commercial, and whatever, but—no! It can’t be a Macy’s ad!

Manis: It’s like that Pepsi ad that was with the—it’s the song that’s actually about a guy who’s struggling about coming out, “Break Free,” and there was a Pepsi ad with people break-dancing to “Break Free,” but that song is actually a really tortured story about a young man who’s scared to come out, and it’s selling Pepsi.

Viz: “Break out and be homosexual and drink Pepsi.”

Manis: “Homo drink Pepsi?”

Viz: OK, well, this is maybe a good point to lead into a discussion about Stacy, because I know both of you were her students while she was here—

Manis: And after she left!

Viz: And actually, I, like you Michelle, I’ve used parts of that introduction to A Problem Like Maria as my version of the introduction to the musical genre, what is a musical, going off the things she talks about how the musical is conventionally defined. Since both of you have worked with Stacy, how do you feel her work has influenced yours, both in the classroom and in your own writing? Were you both TAs for Stacy?

Manis: Only I was. Actually both of these things—and what’s influenced me in both my pedagogy and writing is Stacy’s enthusiasm. She comes into a room, so excited to be there and so excited to talk about what she’s doing, and students get on board with her. Even reluctant students got on board with Stacy in her classroom respectfully. Stacy’s enthusiasm is how I model myself in the classroom as a teacher and dealing with students, both in being enthusiastic in what I’m teaching and what the students are doing well, and then in terms of writing. Her writing has given me—she’s got this great article called “In Defense of Pleasure” and that is sort of the essence of Stacy: I’m not going to apologize for thinking this is fun and writing about it as though I love it. That’s what I get from Stacy.

Dvoskin: Yeah. I think that Stacy offers a model for scholarship in musical studies that is really rigorous and theoretically engaged. That has not necessarily been the norm for that field, but it's been changing because of people like Stacy. I don’t think I’d be able to do the kind of work I’m doing without Stacy having first done the work she’s done, in a variety of ways.

Viz: No, I had the opportunity to meet her when she came back for Lisa Moore’s class conference on lesbian genres, and she was very helpful at sending me some of her materials and talking with me about some of the stuff that she’d done in the classroom, and I was able to use some of it, with tribute to her, a little bit.

Dvoskin: She’s incredibly generous.

Viz: Very much so, which is really appreciated. It seems to me that one of the nice things about UT that I’ve seen across many departments is that people in rhetoric, in performance studies are helpful about giving to each other, and supporting each other’s work in a way, which is hopefully what the DWRL does too.

Manis: It does!

Viz: Well, some random questions to jump to think specifically about what you’ve specifically done in the classroom in teaching musicals; in my first semester I attempted to teach rhetorical theory like J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and Kenneth Burke’s dramatism. Have you ever taught that kind of theory in your class or used it to apply to musicals?

Dvoskin: No.

Manis: I’m trying to think—I don’t think I have. I always stick to the rhetoric, whatever rhetoric they’re using because I’m new to this department, so I sort of—I’m still getting oriented to that, so I stuck to the rhetorics we used in the classroom. And I felt like since I was asking them to almost learn two disciplines that I didn’t want to go too theoretical. I wanted them to be able to grapple with it.

Viz: Are there particular theories that you do teach in the classroom that you think are relevant for thinking about the cultural work that musicals do?

Dvoskin: Not explicitly, and that’s largely a function of the classes that I’ve taught. Trying to cover all theater history from 1800 on, even in the case study model that we’ve moved to, I’ve got enough to do without trying to explicitly teach a lot of theory. I will use theoretically inflected work—when we talk minstrelsy I’ll use Eric Lott, things like that—when we do queer theater I’ll talk about queering and queer theory a little bit, even just to explain why I’m using that word, but—

Manis: That’s how it comes up: if I use a word that comes from some sort of theory I’ll say, “So I’m using this word, and here’s the way people who do scholarship in this area talk about it,” but I don’t assign theory.—For example, I had a student doing the movie Milk and talking about how one of the things it did was advocate for a day when gay people wouldn’t be queer, they would just be people. And that was a moment where we could have a discussion about how actually queer is a word that has been taken back and now it’s theoretically strong and here’s why, et cetera.

Dvoskin: If I were teaching a semester on just one aspect of musical theater I might, but not in the kinds of classes I’ve been teaching up to this point.

Manis: I did have them read a little bit of Schechner and Turner on what performance was, but only so that we could start thinking about performance and how we wanted to talk about it. It was never something that we returned to it in the sense of “Talk about this à la Schechner” or anything like that. It was just to give them a sense of where performance studies as a field was—one of the founding myths of performance studies, basically.

Viz: Because one of the things that’s come in the course of the discussion is sometimes about some of the issues that can come up in discussing musical theater: for example, Stacy Wolf’s work often deals with issues of queer identity, and audiences’ interactions with that. We’ve talked about moments like that; one of the questions I have is: is this something that you try to do in your own teaching work, bringing up some of the potentially controversial issues related to musicals? Is this too explosive, or the students are comfortable, or you don’t wade into those waters at all because it’s Texas?

Michelle: I guess again for me it’s about the classes I’m able to teach and the time I have. I don’t push away from it—when we talked about Golden Age musical theater, the section I had them read from the introduction had some information on gay men’s relationship to the form, and we certainly talked about that, as well as the relationship of Jewish men to the form, but it’s not—I don’t avoid it at all, but in the context of the specific courses I've taught, it hasn’t been something I’ve spent a ton of time or energy on.

Viz: That’s something just you work more with in your scholarship then—

Dvoskin: It’s very important in my scholarship. My scholarship is about queer theory and musical theater together, but it’s not something that—I don’t get to pick the classes I teach. We have some freedom to design our syllabi, but I didn’t get to say that I’m going to teach a class on musical theater, gender, and sexuality, which I would love to do someday. That would be awesome. But if I’m teaching theater post-1800, of the time I’ll spend in musical theater, about two weeks, I can probably spare about 20 minutes, if that. And when it comes up, great. And when we look at A Chorus Line and people talk about the ways in which sexuality played out in that musical, and how that was important it its moment, that’s great, that’s a part of the conversation. But I don’t feel like it would be fair to them to make that the conversation, because then they lose everything else they should be getting about that material on that day. When I get to pick my own classes entirely, I’m sure it will be a different story.

Manis: Same thing.

Viz: I find that stuff may come up in discussing a particular musical as a part of its context—

Manis: Yeah.

Viz: It never came up so explicitly.

Manis: In my class, which wasn’t just about musicals, but it was about their final projects, which they all chose film because they could see it and watch, everybody had to do an individual presentation on the argument they were making that their thing was making. And the last student to go said, “Wow, I just realized that all of us—our films have arguments about what it means to be an American, or what it means to have the American dream.” There are definitely courses you could design around those ideas of nation-building, identity building, or of subjectivity, that kind of thing, but I think the limited amount of time that we have in a survey or even in a topics class, in some ways.

Viz: Something you can touch on and have to move on?

Manis: I do a lot of “tuck this away for later.”

Dvoskin: I was fascinated in my theater history class with the final projects how many of the final projects took up gender and sexuality; they had to take two different movements and put them in conversation with each other in performance, because that was a central theme of my class. Stuff doesn’t happen in isolation. I would say that more than a third of the groups chose to use either lesbian, feminist, or queer (or some combination thereof, since they’re not easy to pry apart) performance as one of their two movements, which I found heartening.

Manis: You know, and I should—I have my students read Brecht, which is theoretical, and then we talk about—since Brecht is all about making arguments; that’s his shtick anyway—there’s some theoretical work that happens there.

Viz: And just as a final question about classroom affect, not just the students’ but your own, since the musical itself is such a theatrical, dramatic genre that is conscious of its own stylistic features, have you found that teaching musicals made you conscious of your own performativity as an instructor, and has that ever affected the way you’ve developed a classroom persona? Not that you would ever probably go in with arms wide—

Dvoskin: Depending on the day, I might. I performed a number on the day we did A Chorus Line.

Viz: Really?

Dvoskin: Well, for a good reason. I had been joking about it for a couple of days beforehand since it’s a musical that I love and I used to do one of the songs as an audition number, but—

Viz: Not “Dance 10, Looks 3”?

Dvoskin: No, but I was joking that I should do that for my students, just to see what would happen. No, what happened was that a student asked, “how does the song ‘Sing’ work, because if she can’t sing, how does she sing a song?” When it’s on the page you can’t tell. And I said, “Actually, it’s very—I need an Al,” which is the other character in the song. And I knew that I had enough musical theater junkies in the class that I would get someone, and sure enough, several hands went up. And I was like “Great,” and performed a chunk of the song for them, because it was easier to do it than to explain how it worked. I mean, I could have probably done that in a sentence or two too, but with the singing there’s a visceral sense of “Oh. Yeah. OK,” and besides, it was a day on musical theater! But I’m also a performer deep down and so when it comes right down to it I’m likely to show that when I can. I actually think I’ve thought more about my persona in terms of teaching 301, where it was shaped more by: there are 400 of them staring at me, how do I craft something that will make me approachable and likeable but also authoritative enough to not have 400 students talking for an hour. I think that really helped shape my teacher-performer self because that was the first class I taught here.

Viz: Wow.

Dvoskin: Yeah, the primary thing—I also was a TA for the small Intro for Majors class, but I was a TA for 301 for three semesters before I taught it, so my initial experiences were, “Hello, large theater-like room full of people,” and I’m sure being a musical theater person had something to do with how I came up with who I am.

Manis: Yeah, my affect in the classroom is, I don’t know if it’s as influenced by me as a musical theater person as much as by me as a fan, and so for instance in the rhetoric of performance class the first thing I do on the first day is show them a clip from Lost and then we analyze it. So that’s one of the first things we do and I don’t hide my enthusiasm about it. I’ll show it and then I’ll go, “BOOM,” and then we’ll talk about it—we’ll talk about what’s so compelling about it and why we get excited about it. The other thing about me is that I have—even when I taught theater history which was a 60 person class—I must be performing something because one of the comments I got was that “she’s so happy all the time, I don’t know how I feel about it.” So it’s enthusiasm for me, and I guess that does come from a sort of—I’m sure that there’s an ethos of musical theater in there and an ethos of fandom for me. And because I want to model that fandom doesn’t mean mindlessness: that you can be totally enthusiastic about something and still totally thinking about it very seriously.

Dvoskin: And I do set myself up from day one in every class I teach, whether I’m introducing myself, part of what I talk about is that my work is in musical theater, but I’m also a big musical theater geek, and I may burst into song at any moment. It’s part of what I put out there, because it’s true.

Manis: It’s true.

Dvoksin: There’s an off-chance that I may find myself singing and not know it. It happens

Manis: I find myself saying things randomly like, “look at what we can accomplish—together.”

Dvoskin: If anything that’s a point of contact for the students. We bond. Some of them roll their eyes, and I’m always very careful to say that you don’t have to like musicals, I won’t judge you.

Viz: I did more straight theater in high school and not musicals, so I had to specifically promise myself and my students I wouldn’t sing, and it does make it harder to discuss the songs at times. But thank you both so much for doing this interview with me and I hope that this is a nice little capstone on your time here at UT. Thank you very much!

Hell-O?: Glee’s Karotic Appeals

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:24:34 +0000

Image Credit: Hulu

Glee’s return last night to television with their new episode “Hell-O” not only served to get my students excited this morning before class, but also demonstrated the utility of using rhetorical concepts to analyze the musical genre. In this unit of my class my students are considering how kairos informs musical performances.

Kairos, defined by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee as “situational kind of time, something close to what we call ‘opportunity’ (as in ‘the time is ripe’),” is a concept that works well for thinking through musicals as it asks students to complicate their ideas of context and audience. What appeals may work for one group at one particular time and place might not serve as well in another time. Arguments about, say, feminism receive a different reception today than they did in 1960, so an analysis of Bye Bye Birdie would want to take that into account. Because students can often assume that audiences’ dispositions are constant, looking at a contemporary cultural example like Glee can show students how kairos is both situational and can be created by careful rhetors.

In the case of this episode, which just aired yesterday, “Hell-O” seeks to draw viewers back into the world of Glee over four months after the previous episode, “Sectionals,” which showed New Directions winning their glee club sectionals competition. “Hell-O” also has to establish the new conflict between the club and their regionals rival Vocal Adrenalin as well as the new romantic developments between Finn, Rachel, and Rachel’s new suitor Jesse St. James. Thus the show takes advantage of this moment of re-introduction by incorporating a number of songs into the show that contain the word “Hello” in their title, as by including Lionel Richie’s famous number:

What makes this number successful is not only the charm of Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff (former co-stars in Spring Awakening) but also the winking inclusion of the number into the plot. This song sets up the lonely Rachel Berry to fall in love with the successful senior St. James as it simultaneously introduces him and his vocal abilities to the show’s viewers. The violinists who pop up in the background ready to accompany them acknowledge the musical genre’s falsity while also drawing attention to the moment’s created “magic.” After this scene, the teenage Rachel is ready to think of herself as “in love” with a man she barely knows, and the music sets the audience up to believe this. Likewise, the show’s closing number “Hello Goodbye” works towards a similar goal:

The titular hello and goodbye demonstrate the complex division and development in the Rachel and Finn relationship: while the episode started with Rachel assuming that she and the reluctant Finn were dating, it ends with Finn interested in Rachel, while she is pursing a secret relationship with Jesse. In other words, as she says goodbye, he says hello. Their body language as they move back and forth reverses the dynamic of the first thirteen episodes: now he is the pursuer, and she the pursued. However, coming at the end of the episode, this number sets up their new romantic conflict for this season’s remaining eight episodes. The show says goodbye for the evening, but lets us know that this is far from permanent. Here, Glee takes advantage of the kairotic moment to not only maintain its meta-discourse by winking to the audience but also to set up dramatic arcs and create narrative tension between the New Directions group and Vocal Adrenaline; the road to hell is paved with hello, in other words. While the reviews have been mixed about certain other elements in this episode, I only wish my students could grasp kairos as easily as Glee does here.

Report from the Classroom, Part 2

Laura T. Smith — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 03:48:53 +0000

(Image credit: Google Earth map created by Smith's RHE 306)

Caroline and I completed our Food Geographies Collaborative Writing Workshop last week.

My students decided to keep their class map broad, not restricting it to Austin, to Texas, or to the United States. As a result, the geographies they trace are provocative, but also somewhat diffuse. That is, we might have gotten better results by densely mapping a limited area, but patterns emerge on our worldwide map that would not otherwise have been visible.

While many students chose to map sites in the Austin area or the United States, the above map shows the efforts of two students who worked on mapping some non-U.S. sites, including major World Food Program sites, fast food locations in developing counties, and key sugar-producing sites. More detail on these sites and others, after the jump.

I had some difficulty getting students to think about food controversies in terms of what information should go on a map. Many students wanted to map corporate headquarters of relevant companies such as Kraft, McDonalds, and Monsanto. While I think it’s actually quite helpful for students to see these companies as physical, located entities, I’m not sure that their geographical placement on the map tells us as much about food politics as, say, one students’ mapping of key sugar industry sites, or another student’s mapping of fast food restaurant locations in developing countries. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make more of these connections about the geography of food during our closing discussion on Tuesday. I wonder if, in the future, it would be helpful to give the map a more focused theme, e.g., “How might we map hunger?” “Or how might we map nutrition?”

Here are some highlights:

Anna’s mapping of caffeine shows that many major caffeine-product companies, including Red Bull and Vivarin, are based in Europe, but have dominant markets in the United States, which she notes has a global reputation of being addicted to caffeine.

Daniel’s mapping of World Food Programs features a massive food cooperative in Uganda that is the World Food Program’s largest supplier of key commodities. His placemark explains that the cooperative produces genetically-modified maize, corn, beans, and vegetable oil, among other crops. He also placemarked a major food drop-off site in the Sudan which receives large quantities of genetically-modified foods.

Griffin’s mapping of non-U.S. McDonald’s locations shows the influence of American fast food in both major metropolitan cities and in developing areas. According to Griffin’s placemark, the McDonald’s location is Pushkin square is the largest-grossing McDonald’s in the world.

Two students, Elizabeth and Duyen, teamed up to map farms and Community-Supported Agriculture sites (CSAs) near Austin, TX (as the below map shows), while Kirsten mapped the oldest farmer's market locations in the United States.

(Image credit: Google Earth map of farms and CSAs near Austin, TX, by students in Smith's RHE 306.)

On Tuesday, we’ll finish the exercise by analyzing the map and having a conversation about what’s missing from our class map. In addition, we’ll overlay Caroline Wigginton’s class map and discuss the ways the expanded map enacts collaborative writing. We’ll also note differences in the two classes’ approach to food politics.

In conclusion, I want to add that the students seemed to really enjoy this exercise. The were eager to jump onto computers on find places to plot, latitudes, longitudes, and images on Tuesday, and on Thursday, as they transferred their data from the Placemark Data Collection Worksheet to the class spreadsheet (which they all edited simultaneously from individual computers, using Google Documents), they were eager to see their results show up on the projection screen. The exercise was dynamic and collaborative and provided a refreshing change of focus and pace for the class.

The students also seem to be interested in the prospect of composing their final “paper” as a Google Earth narrated tour, an option I’ve allowed them. I’m looking forward to receiving a number of these.

Illustrative Example: The Mimetics of Visual and Text

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:16:17 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Atlantic

Every time I sit down to write a blog post for viz, I struggle not only to think up exciting titles but to find striking visuals to decorate my posts. As we all know, the picture that illustrates the story plays a role in helping to draw meaning from the text. The above picture from The Atlantic shows a good relationship between the two: the sign in the foreground looms ominously over the house to stress the anxious idea implied by the headline “Foreclosure Sales Trap.” However, there are times when the visuals work to imply something that the text doesn’t warrant.

Recently, my friend Jillian Sayre drew my attention to a tweet from Rachel Maddow about a story on Politico:

Obama health proposal is 11 pages long. Politico story on it uses a photo of a 12 inch tall stack of paper.

When you pull up the story on Politico, entitled “President Obama releases health reform proposal,” the image that decorates the side is a triptych where Obama is at the center, on the right side you have a doctor holding up a sign advocating “Doctors for a Public Option,” and on the left you have a picture of a large stack of papers, meant to signify the bill. However, the article directly links to the 11 page proposal at the top of the screen—why would Politico deliberately use that stack of paper to illustrate the idea of the “health reform proposal,” especially if they’re providing the proposal for their audience to read? This may be a part of telling a larger narrative about government: that it’s complicated, the bills are too long, and readers need news organizations like Politico to fill in the gaps.

Image Credit: Politico

H/T: Jillian Sayre

However, as Tristram Shandy points out, sometimes the visual is meant to stand in for the text, to say what the text cannot say. In the case of the Politico story, the gap in meaning might be a political message that the picture implies. In Betsy McCaughey’s interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she brought a copy of the health care bill in a binder to use the visual of the bill to condemn it, just as her significant glances at the camera were meant to reflect to the audience the skepticism and doubt of Washington that she seemed to feel. Too bad her answers to Stewart’s questions were less than convincing.

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In thinking about this topic, however, I found an interesting study done in The Atlantic Journal of Communication that sought “to examine the effects of news photo presence and role-congruency in news stories of Hillary Clinton on reader interest and memory.” Its conclusion, according to the abstract, was that “mere presence of a photo meant the story would be ranked as more interesting, but photo presence and role-congruency with the story did not affect recall of story ideas.” While visuals do have the power to make arguments, authors Andrew Mendelson and Esther Thorson suggest, they don’t override an audience’s comprehension of the actual context of the text. Maybe, then, Maddow’s critical reading skills aren’t unique and Politico instead merely intended to draw attention more than make an argument. However, considering the effectiveness of visual arguments in many media, I wonder how readers might be influenced by such arguments, even as they separate them from the text, especially as those readers are receptive to those arguments before hearing them.

Anomie in the Airport

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:36:11 +0000

Image Source: Up in the Air website

During the break I ended up watching Up in the Air at the Alamo Drafthouse on a Thursday night. While driving home, stuck in traffic, I suddenly drew a mental connection between my physical position (waiting to pull into traffic on busy South Lamar) and the movie I had just seen. Up in the Air centers on the adventures of George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham, a man who dreams of reaching ten million miles traveled on the road for his work. By necessity, the movie features a lot of airport scenes.

Image Source: Up in the Air website

In one early bonding moment between George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham and Anna Kendrick’s Natalie, Ryan is trying to pose a cutout of his sister and her fiancé in front of the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. When Natalie questions why his sister would want a picture in front of an airport, Ryan returns that this airport is the home of Lindbergh’s flight and The Spirit of St. Louis—symbols of Americana itself. For someone like Ryan, who describes his home as “up in the air,” the St. Louis airport connects with a wide history of air travel that must, indeed, feel like a home to him. Yet, what kind of “home” is constructed by the aesthetics of the movie? What is the visual rhetoric of the airport?

The New Yorker’s review commented that

Airports are the seedbed for all that is most alien, angering, and atomized in our twenty-first-century days, and there are times, in this film, when Clooney’s eyes appear to glaze and say, Come die with me.

As a frequently traveler through the Lambert-St. Louis airport, I have to agree that its aesthetic is fairly plastic and alienating. While the main ticketing area has high arching ceilings, the gating area is filled with uncomfortable plastic chairs and old carpet. The only touches of personalization are the St. Louis shirts with the Arch on them that you can buy from gift stores in the airport; most of the shops are populated with national chains like Starbucks, Chilis, and other fast food options.

Image Credit: Flickr

Walking around Lambert, it is easy to feel disconnected—the cool colors of the tile floor do not invite you in. However, the routine shops create continuity: if you go from this airport to Denver, for example, you will find the same restaurants, the same souvenirs to make you feel grounded, even at the moment of radical departure. Do airports work to make travelers feel at home even as they ship them around?

Image Credit: Flickr

I think Austin’s International Airport presents an interesting contrast. Austin’s airport features local Austin restaurants like Mangia Pizza, the Salt Lick, and Amy’s Ice Cream, and decorates the baggage claim area with large, highly colored guitars. However, it shares with Lambert a certain alien aesthetic, as it has high ceilings with visible pipes and structural components. The airport has to walk a fine line between suggesting its locality and creating continuity between destinations—constructing an open feeling that reflects travel and flight within the grasp of limited local construction budgets.

These things aren’t usually brought to constitute a home; however, if home indeed is where the heart is, maybe that home is as relentlessly mobile as airplanes themselves. Ryan Bingham may be alienated, but he’s happy being so. Americans are always ready for change and travel; so is the airport.

Blogging Pedagogy: Or, How to Make Students Read Musicals as Rhetorical Texts?

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:10:53 +0000

Andi, I enjoyed reading your post from Saturday, as I'm struggling myself to think about how to teach visual rhetoric in my classroom-although, the concerns I'm undergoing are much different from yours. There may be ethical concerns about using podcasts to teach a variety of songs united around a different theme, but most of what I do will involve looking at pretty pictures.

Credit: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

As I'm moving from unit one (where we've focused on introducing the basic terms of rhetorical study and mastering discussions of musical lyrics and songs) into unit two (where we'll begin watching full musicals and stage performances), I had the students watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog as an example of a short musical (link to the musical in full here), and discuss how it relates to American values. On Friday we'll move into a discussion of visual rhetoric by looking back visually at Dr. Horrible (to save time), but I'm struggling to think about how to discuss the visual elements not just of the static photo, which can be easily captured, but also the moving image.

What kind of language is necessary to talk about how running a hand through one's hair builds ethos? Some of the static imagery should be easy: as with the pictures below, where the shift in Dr. Horrible's color-coordinated costume signifies a move from innocence to experience/evil:

Credit: Dr. Horrible Screencaps

However, while delivery is one of the five classical canons of rhetoric, it doesn't get much play in modern textbooks. If anybody can recommend any sources to me, I'd be happy to test them out on my students. I imagine we might end up adapting a vocabulary from performance studies to serve rhetorical purposes, which should work. I'd appreciate having something more to say than just pointing out Evil Thomas Jefferson to them, though.

Credit: Dr. Horrible Screencaps

American Gothic on Mad Men

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:32:55 +0000

Image Credit: Chicago Tribune

Mad Men, AMC's popular television show, has long garnered the attention of visual designers based on its subject matter (the advertising world of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s) and on its careful attention to authentic period detail. (The show's few missteps, as when it featured a 1987 Compact Edition of the OED, were widely reported on the Internet.) The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, deliberately chose to set the show on Madison Avenue because advertising is "a great way to talk about the image we have of ourselves, versus who we really are." Since starting to watch the show, I've been fascinated with how the design elements, the character’s actions, and dialogue all work to construct a claim to authenticity about what the 1960s were that some immediately rush to challenge.

Image Credit: Flikr

Last night's episode, "Guy Walks into an Advertising Office," significantly upset the show’s claims to ultra-realism in the sequence where the invading future boss and Brit Guy McKendrick loses his foot in a lawn mower accident in the Sterling Cooper offices. The reaction shot featuring several of the ad men covered in blood made such an impression on my friends that we had to use the DVR to re-watch the horror several times over. While this might be due to our lack of disgust, I think it also had to do with a different kind of argument that the show wants to make about the reality of life in the 1960s.

War has come up several times during this season in conversations between Don Draper, the show's protagonist, and his father-in-law Gene. In this episode Smitty (the man who first drove the John Deere lawn mower into the party) discusses the Vietnam War draft before the accident. While this season is set in 1963, and so well before the major opposition to Vietnam, the blood spatter also rehearses the Kennedy Assassination to occur later this year.

This show has not shied away from presenting culturally complex or challenging moment (as when the boss Roger Sterling performed in blackface earlier this season for his guests), but this show seems to be using visuals very carefully to define what kind of 1960s it describes. While the Slate in particular has offered great coverage of this, I look forward to seeing what other visual arguments the show might offer in the future.

William Eggleston

dsmith — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:22:32 +0000

William Eggleston pioneered the use of color photography as a valid visual art form. His 1976 MoMA exhibit was the first one-man show to feature color images. Like his friend Ed Ruscha, Eggleston’s a now legendary figure in contemporary art, and many articles and interviews with him are available in print and online, like this one by Jim Lewis. Unlike most photographers, however, Eggleston rarely takes more than one shot, and only occasionally makes use of the viewfinder. He points and clicks. His saturated color photos often reveal a world that borders on terror and hilarity—and the democratic range of his gaze provides dazzling and impersonal perspectives on U. S. cultural life. The opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet pays tribute to Eggleston’s saturated colors—and the tone of that film captures Eggleston’s sense of the macabre and decayed peripheries that surround us.

Although I admire the color and composition of his photographs, I appreciate more the perspective he brings to mundane things. One photograph form the 1970s reveals a number of shoes under a bed. In another, a child’s tricycle rises ominously over the driveway. There are pictures of gas stations and lonely fields of the Mississippi Delta. Human form does not receive special attention. Instead, it is absorbed into a body of work that values popular objects and landscapes equally. Eggleston’s perspectives make claims about what we see in a democracy and how we see it. That democracy is slightly warped intensifies the all too real values imposed by it. We’re fortunate to have Eggleston’s lens show us what is often not so readily available to our senses.

Work like his, however, confronts our understanding of rhetoric and visual communication. One photo, for instance, reveals only the inside of an oven. Such a mundane vision could be easily dismissed. But on further reflection, we might recall that ovens provide warmth and sustenance. Holiday birds and breads are baked in them. Here, the rectangular pit is striated with two metal racks, revealing an order and symmetry inherent in the design of daily objects we take for granted. Such symmetry reveals a preference for simplicity and utility: core values of democracy. The bare bulb in the back allows users to observe food as it cooks. The rust-stained bottom edge of the outer portion at the hinges suggests that this oven has been used for quite some time too, and the tile floor and doorframe to the right registers a situation wherein a middle class (or lower) sense of decorum is at stake. The oven is clean and symmetrical, and yet the signs of ware and use appeal to our sense of place and values. As viewers, we wonder about the domestic experience of this household. More significantly, the photo seems to ask us to reflect on what is shared and what is not. Certain properties in a democracy are held in common, while others separate us by class, race, gender. The photo argues that we share in certain ancient requirements of hearth to relieve the pangs of hunger. It claims too that the value of appliance and symmetry motivate our assumptions about home design, cooking, social exchange, and class. But perhaps this oven is clean not because of a tidy attention to domestic hygiene, but because it simply isn’t used that often. Perhaps it is rented along with the apartment, and the inhabitants require other domestic pleasures than home baked bread. Of course, a microwave could be on the countertop, making the oven almost obsolete. What does this tell us about a culture wherein obsolescence can so readily present itself as an option in our conception of domestic appliance?

Eggleston’s arguments about form and function in his photographs make him a peculiar and accurate witness to democratic spaces. The intimacy of his perspective is balanced with enough indifference to reveal the shared surfaces of our experience. Just enough incongruence, in Kenneth Burke’s sense, keeps his images alert to the experience of life in late 20th/early 21st century America.

Visual rhetoric on the campaign trail

John Jones — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:24:33 +0000

As the Democratic primaries have continued on throughout the winter, columnists and pundits have been reaching out to find ever more ways of distinguishing between Obama and Clinton. Salon has posted an article analyzing the design of the candidate’s logos, while Clay Spinuzzi has blogged on the contrasting designs of Obama and Clinton campaign flyers being distributed in Texas (without any images, unfortunately).

In both cases, Obama is declared the temporary winner. According to Karrie Jacobs in Salon

Of the current campaigns, Barack Obama’s is the best at getting his message across through graphics—think of all those “Change we can believe in” signs—and most careful observers see his as the first sophisticated corporate-style identity to emerge from presidential politics. While the Bush-Cheney W was, in Froelich’s words, “cold,” Obama's symbol is the opposite, literally and figuratively sunny. While the W was crude, Obama’s mark is smooth.

Spinuzzi claims that Obama’s flyer seems more detailed, noting that

the Obama flyer appears customized for Texas from the ground up, while the Clinton flyer seems more generic.

While politics have always depended in some way on visuals for their persuasiveness, it is refreshing that this visual persuasion is getting this kind of attention from the media.

Michelle Obama’s halo

John Jones — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:30:59 +0000

Timothy Noah at Slate has been keeping an eye out for evidence that Barack Obama is, in fact, the Son of God. In his latest post, he linked to this picture of Michelle Obama from Reuters:

According to Noah, the framing and Obama’s posture suggest a passing resemblance to this woman:

Despite how Ms. Obama photographs, according to Noah, she keeps her husband down to earth.

In the Feb. 13 Financial Times, Edward Luce suggests that the candidate's Sancha Panza of a wife, Michelle Obama, keeps her man from developing a Messiah complex, and scolds this column for not recognizing that. Actually, I never suggested Obama had a Messiah complex (though others have). I merely suggested that a few excitable souls in the media bear the apparant conviction that Obama is the Redeemer.

John Updike on the history of the snapshot

John Jones — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:04:07 +0000

The New Yorker recently published an essay by John Updike on the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition “The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978.” The essay contains some information on the history of snapshots, and analysis of the same.

Political theatrics

John Jones — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:21:24 +0000

No Caption Needed has posted a brilliant analysis of the theatricality of presidential campaigns.

Jim Wilson/New York Times

From the post:

You are looking at a photo from last week of Fred Thompson stepping onto a stage in Prosperity, South Carolina. The long view allows us to see the candidate as part of a scene, rather someone around whom everything else is compressed. The view also isolates each part of the scene: candidate, bunting, handler, local supporter, and wife-and-kid are each identifiable as if pieces of a grade school diorama. What is most revealing, however, is that we see both stage and backstage in a single view. What would have been The Candidate framed by the Red White and Blue becomes instead a tacky stage set–hey, don’t trip on that cord! And instead of those gathered in his name, we see instead wife-and-kid waiting in the wings, or waiting to make their entrance, but either way now bit players that make Thompson no more than the lead in the school play.