Don't Diss Yoko!

If you were looking for a cool poster to hang in yr cubicle at work to fight the grey monotony of things like I eternally am, I think I found the coolest poster available for sale on teh internets.

The text at the bottom reads: "Girl was famous before she met the man whose fame so completely obscured hers. She was part of the first wave of female Japanese artists who struck out for New York to revel in the new Post-War, multicultural, cross-national wave of performance and video art that was taking the world by storm. She ran a gallery out of her apartment that showed the height of avant-garde art, and was an early member of the legendary group Fluxus. She played a key role in the movement towards what we now consider a work of art to be: not just a precious object on a wall, but a total experience that goes beyond painting, sculpture and photography into performance, video, and installation. Her works often present the audience with a moral dilemma; they are beautiful, brilliant, illuminating, weird, and (fair enough) occasionally terrible. Her music is the same. She is epic. Don't dismiss all this because you heard she broke up the Beatles. Face up to the facts! Post-War American culture was uncomfortable with a sexually confident, strange and intriguing Asian woman commanding the cultural spotlight, especially at the height of the Vietnam War. We've got a cultural hangover that won't let us shake off the idea of strong women as sirens who drain mens virility. Say: Don't Diss Yoko! Say thanks for making the world a more interesting place. Long Live Yoko!"

I will tell you where you can find this amazing poster if you buy me one, as well. :D Or you can just "use the Google," G.W. style and hook yrself up.

Props to Bea Arthur

She was always my favorite Golden Girl...

Analysis of a Writing Sample: J.R. Carpenter's "The Cape"

In composing this work, I believe Carpenter intended to get people thinking about the boundary between fact and fiction. I think s/he wanted us to question why we trust our memories more than our doubts. I think this because s/he told me so in the "Author Description." I was, however, grateful for these directions because I like to have an author's note on their work to give me a framework in which to think about the piece and assess how successful it is based on what their intentions were. However, I experienced the piece before I read the author's note, which I think is important--to experience it without assistance first so you can truly gauge how successful it was based on what you took from it without their instruction. Many components of the piece point to the dichotomy between fact and fiction, however, specifically the frame with text that says "these events happened so long ago that this whole story is in black and white" combined with the slide in which s/he admits there is no picture of their grandmother but that if they had one it would be there, which suggests that we construct our own memory of things based on what we have, which is sometimes very little. Perhaps the threads we create to connect what is left to us via our own memories or stories passed on are little lies or assumptions that help us weave a tapestry to explain to us who we are.

For example: I used to think I had memories from when my parents were still married. They divorced when I was two and a half. What I think happened was that I spent so much time looking through my baby book and updating it with new photos of me as a child, that I started to recall the photos and believe that I remembered being in the backyard with my dad and our dog Freckles and my mom pushing me in a stroller down a street made of bricks and sitting in a baby seat wearing sunglasses. But I didn't remember them. I saw them, and I recalled images of myself, where I was outside myself, so I remembered things like the silly sunglasses I had on and how happy my father looked because I looked at them from a historical perspective outside of the moment I was once in and noticed things about them. (I've always been fascinated with myself.) Also: I wanted to remember those things. My real memories begin when I am four, just after my mother re-married. I have always used photographs and letters, any kind of evidence I could locate to reconstruct my parents' love. I have this picture of them in California in 1984 or something, and my dad is wearing the shortest shorts I have ever seen and that is all he is wearing, and my mom is wearing a bikini top and some high-waisted shorts and they are posed in an open parking lot in front of Mary Lou Subaru, a piece of shit car my dad bought for $100 that he had to turn off when they went down hills, and Mary Lou has a beer sitting on her hood, and in the background is a gorgeous bluff, covered in trees, with a road alongside it on which a VW van is chugging around the bend. I also have a poem my dad wrote when my mom told him she was going to divorce him that was tucked into an original envelope of photos my dad had developed (like it had our old address on it and everything) and it's horribly sad. It's like a Bruce Springsteen song. It's like "The River." It's "Downbound Train." It's deliciously sad and heartbreakingIt's my treasure. I have no memories of my parents being married, but through these artifacts I attempt to reconstruct their rise and fall, the arch of their love, some semblance of romance that I can cling to and attach myself to, to know that I am a product of this EPIC THING.

I think Carpenter actually wants to know more about their family and is constructing their history in a way to illuminate the emptiness of the threads s/he has. I know that s/he says it's about the fact/fiction binary because the pictures aren't family-related and the maps aren't to scale and are out of date, but now that I'm writing about this, I think it is about the potential empty-feeling of the threads of family history if you don't try to attach them to something with these little threads that fill in the holes and make your family history a tight knit blanket; better to have a tight knit than a loose one when the cold wind blows. We are from a linear-society, we must know ourselves from beginning to end. This idea is furthered to me by the frame that states "sound carries, especially in winter." There is a specific emptiness to winter that enables sound to carry. This suggests to me a kind of haunting, or the way in all of Bruce Springsteen's saddest songs there is that keyboard part that always, unmistakably sounds like a forlorn train bounding through the plains at night. It's that kind of sound carrying: grief, emptiness, the being without.

I think Carpenter chose not to use a traditional approach with this piece because we are talking about memory. Memory is non-linear; memory is especially nonlinear when you have very few memories with which to actually construct something. This is why I think the non-linear form has been utilized frequently in recent history for the writing of memoirs.

L I N E S

For my short animation project I will be examining lines:

rounding them,

subverting them.

I will use visual lines as well as lines of text

in this experiment.

I would tell you more

but I am trying to let my content drive my process

while also letting the medium drive my creative impulses.

R.I.P. Reginald "Omari Huduma" Blanton
6/3/1981 - 10/27/2009



"Nothing is more difficult to understand than the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to forget them."

--Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

DID YOU KNOW
THAT THE RATE OF
SUICIDE
AND THE RATE OF
SEXUAL ASSAULT
WITHIN THE U.S. MILITARY
NOW EXCEEDS
THAT OF THE CIVILIAN POPULATION?

There is a film about it premiering only in NYC because it's been effectively banned in this country.



(how

does

that

make

you

feel?)

Technological Impact on My Writings

Okay, so I don't actually type correctly. See, I started instant messaging when I was in third grade and became able to hunt and peck reaaaally fast to keep up with three or four different instant message conversations, so that is the kind of culture I grew up in. I am 22, so unfortunately a lot of my childhood was spent waiting until 5pm when I was allowed to sign on to AOL (insert weird login noise here). However, I have always been an avid reader, so I have to say that for me, personally, I feel that I have a command of standardized language as well as a fluency in the continuously emerging technologically-motivated language. I think communication has become less formal. I also think websites like "I Can Haz Cheezburger" have made it popular to speak pidgin English, which is odd to say the least. Most of my communication with friends and family is through Facebook and text messages at this point in time. This is part cultural shift and part convenience on my part.

(I had to rewrite this next part. Technology FAIL.)

Responsibilities I am taking on as a producer/reader/future teacher of texts:

SUBVERSION. I take on the responsibility of challenging language, and treating it not as an apolitical tool but as a system which works in the favor of the dominant cultural paradigm.
CULTURE. I take on the responsibility to make it clear that culture is an ongoing conflict and not a warm blanket we are all sleeping under. There are some school districts where Huckleberry Finn is supposed to be taught without any discussion of race. This demonstrates a strict separation of literature and history that I will not tolerate. There is a need in this society to separate literature and history because literature liberates history. Asking students to read a text and be able to answer multiple choice questions or fill in blanks from a word bank about what Susie had in her hand when she came into the house, or what Papa was wearing when the fire started, is not engaging our students in critical thought. It is limiting the level of cognition we ask them to think at to the lowest levels of word perception and literal comprehension. Beyond any of this, Mark Twain would roll in his grave. If America is a circle, then race is at the center of it. By agreeing to even acknowledge culture as an ongoing battle, I believe I place myself within that war. I am willing to fight.
CREATIVITY. I take on the responsibility of making art (and life) fun and engaging, with an emphasis on discovery, appreciation and play alongside commitment and compassion.
SUPPORT. I take on the responsibility of at least trying to think of everyone in the process of making something, whether it is an animated writing or a lesson plan. I think it would have benefited me a lot more to read Dorothy Allison in high school than it did to read Charles Dickens. It makes sense for multicultural classrooms to be less successful in America when we are teaching a bunch of brown children a perspective of history that further victimizes and marginalizes their people. I take on the responsibility of each individual's story in constructing my own.