Frickin' Dishes

https://soundcloud.com/sam-woodruff-3/frickin-dishes-mash-up
by Bryce Bolick and Sam Woodruff

“Frickin’ Dishes” manipulates and repeats fewer than 20 audio recordings to illustrate the never-ending task of cleaning dishes.  Much like a song, its auditory theme cycles often enough to be recognizable and represents the mechanical routine of taking dishes out of the sink, scraping off caked food, rinsing, and throwing them into the dish washer.

To add a common human sentiment towards the chore, moans and complaints of the one washing the dishes are heard. The tempo and volume of the repeated noises intensify as the frustration and annoyance towards the task increases.  Ultimately, the audience can appreciate the great amount of monotony of this ever present task.

Upon capturing all the isolated noises, we couldn’t help but notice the musicality of some of the noises. Although it wasn’t in the original plan, a musical hip-hop beat (compliments of Garageband) was added to the machine. The up-beat tone it adds may have appeared contradictory to the more obvious agenda of the work, but does it?

First, a quote from Thomas C. Foster in his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor.  Here Foster is talking about symbols in literature.  

“Is that a symbol? Sure it is…. Seriously, what do you think it stands for, because that’s probably what it does. At least for you….Here is the problem with symbols: people expect them to mean...something in particular. Exactly. Maximum. You know what? It doesn’t work like that… in general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing.”

As our piece becomes more noisy and abstract, it gives more room for interpretation.  It doesn’t have to mean the same thing to everyone and thus our change in overall tone of our piece was part of what came out in our creative process. We have found it meaningful as an added layer of emotion to our piece on dishes.

So is this abstraction appropriate?  The Mercandante’s Routines 09 answers this question.  The process of getting a haircut is documented in an abstract way.  The abstraction sends the film through the kaleidoscope of human emotion making it more internal and unique for each individual.  When we watched the video we noticed the noise of the weed wacker and it made us think of haircutting as a violent process stripping one of their identity. Was this the artists intention? Quite possibly, but maybe not and that is okay because the experience was symbolic and individual.   

Abstraction represents realities of emotion.  Most people hate dishes.  This is what we showed first.  Monotony is pressed upon us but the abstraction brings room for interpretation.  As the clinks and scratches repeat themselves frustration can sometimes give way to fun through the little hip hop melody.  Possibly on the other side of that, the emotion invoked is how much I hate it when people try to make a process fun when it isn’t. The point is it can mean different things to different people. We tried to express emotions we feel and realities of the process with noises that invoke memories of doing dishes. What people get from it is up to the listener.  

Sources:

http://vimeo.com/12552164  Routines 09

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines. New York: Quill, 2003. Print.

https://soundcloud.com/sam-woodruff-3

The Tale of Geoffrey the Confuzzled Gnome: A TMA 112 Compilation

The Tale of Geoffrey the Confuzzled Gnome

by Bryce Bolick, Helen Butcher

Moran Akana, Jess Baird, and Steven Bills

"Geoffery was a bright little gnome, but was

 not quite sure how to pronounce his name."

Geoffrey realized he was having a hard time 

remembering how to articulate a lot of things. 

He decided to drop by his doctor’s office and 

nip his hereditary dementia in the bud.

After the completely successful and universally 

known surgical procedure, Geoffrey’s doctor 

prescribed him a diet of asparagus and sage

banana smoothies, exclusively.

The latest fad diet it in: asparagus, sage and 

banana smoothies. People rushed to the store get 

the ingredients for their new health drinks, hoping 

to finally lose the extra weight.

The Michaels family celebrated each time there 

was a waning moon, which annoyed the family who 

lived below greatly.

From the Exquisite corpse, “The remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script — anything else, simply put, would be boring.” It seemed as if everybody was “flipping the script” as we continued the last person’s story, sometimes taking it in a whole new direction. On the flip side of that, there are some stories where a thread is woven finely throughout all five of the mini-stories, making a (more or less) complete narrative, with each story complementing the last.

This technique of starting a story and then passing it on to another to complete is nothing new: there is a game called “Photoshop Tennis” where one person introduces a photograph, and then sends it off to another person to add an element to it, who then passes it on to another person to edit. This goes on indefinitely, unless a specified  number of edits has been pre-agreed upon. Examples of this include:

“The “text” is never inanimate — it’s the human imagination that gives shape and meaning, the elixir that breathes life into the golem.” In some ways, pieces of art that we create and “finish” are never really done. Unbeknownst to us, somebody could pick up that piece of work that we created, and add to it, etc…, until, along down the road, it is unrecognizable from the work that we created initially.

Another art form that can be remixed is music. Famous artists create and release music that then gets into the hands of the remixers, who then make the music their own by adding and taking things away, but re-structuring the song in a way that was never meant by its original author.

In our Round Robin storytelling experience, each of the tiny stories exist by themselves as a stand alone. However, combining five of them together to create a collage of different ideas that all sprang from the same seed. Each contributor used a different vocabulary to try to make sense of the unusual and limited information they were given. In a way, one artist’s choice to use “the hardiest of folk” to describe a group of people that a previous artist described as “notoriously rowdy bunch” differed in verbal texture as much as water colors and oil paints do. Thus, even if all of us tried to preserve the tone and content of the story, it would inevitably change over time.

Our individual pictures added an extra element of expression, and another opportunity to leave our mark on the story. We had varying styles and a wide variety of framing to suggest plot. As mentioned earlier “The remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script”. On occasion, an author would create a juxtaposition, fragmentation, or script flipping between the picture and the text, thus creating an odd precedence in the mind of the next author. Close ups versus wide shots, color versus monochrome all added something different to the mix.

The Blue Marble to Rachmaninoff Prelude in g minor op. 23

Rachmaninoff Prelude in g minor op. 23 #5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QB7ugJnHgs

I shut my eyes and listened to the prelude for the first time. Through my temporary blindness, I focused on what my mind's eye instinctively produced. I attempted to envision what Annie Dillard described as "the Eden before Adam gave things names."

The rapid tempo, and the up and down of the notes in the beginning put butterflies in my stomach. They were the sort of butterflies that have come to me as I've drifted on waves of the ocean, or driven over the top of a hill pretty fast. The bouncy, bright thought of bobbing around in the water influenced the image of the Blue Marble soaring around in a sea of wavy blue lines.

The Blue Marble sails randomly 

through wisps of blue.

As the song progresses, musical phrases compete with one another. Most of the notes move cheerfully up the piano, but heavier, more ominous notes interrupt the musical progression and drag tone down an octave or two.

To illustrate this abrupt contrast, I introduced a second character to the story: the Red Icosagon. The Icosagon is made up of rigid, intentional, angular lines. This create a more intense, less whimsical appearance than the happy little Marble that sails through rolling blue curves, and emphasizes the conflict in the music.

The red lines blocks the Blue Marble's path 

as well as drawing the viewers' eye to the

Red Icosagon.

 As the conflict continues, the contrast between

lines and colors become more apparent.

Eventually, the music becomes more lethargic, dark, and subdued. No soaring images came into my head. Instead a mournful little Marble whose dreams failed hom sat isolated on the ground.

If this were Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, these mournful echoing notes would be played in the “belly of the beast”. To represent the dejected and defeated tone of the music, I created images that showed our curved hero weighed down in a polygonal prison. As the occasional high note resonated amid the lower keys, I became aware that the hero of this story must be very wistful. To illustrate this, I continued to use the curved lines, which the Blue Marble has an affinity for, but put them beyond its reach.

After its defeat, our hero looks back upon better days 

while trapped within an unfamiliar world. Eventually,

it must find its way  to finish the fight.

Gradually, the music regains its original tempo, tone, and vigor, and the Blue Marble finds its way out of the psychological maze. It regains its ground and after many musical clashes, the Marble spirals upward victorious on a brighter note.

Straight and curved lines battle ferociously as

the different musical phrases compete for the spotlight.

Finally, to represent the outcome of the battles (the Marble's defeat, and then triumph) I employed the use of the Golden Mean. The Golden mean is an aesthetically pleasing ratio (approximately 1 to 1.62) that the Greeks observed. It’s commonly used in architecture and found naturally in the world around us.

(complements of http://5010.mathed.usu.edu/Fall2012/SBartholomew/finalproject.html)

The angular representation of the Golden 

Mean displays the Red Icosagon's triumph 

over the Blue Marble...

(Compliments of  http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread945221/pg1)

...while the spiraling curved representation shows

the Blue Marble's triumph and transcendence.

An Ignorant, but Well-Meaning, White American Male's Prespective on 30 Rock's Portrayal of Caucasian's Fear of Racism

30 Rock--Season 1 Episode 16 "The Source Awards"

http://amptoons.com/blog/2010/06/02/cartoon-reassuring-white-people/

Our country has made leaps and bounds in the way that equality among different races is executed. We aren't kidnapping foreigners and forcing them into lives of servitude. "One drop" of blood in our bodies doesn't forfeit protection offered  by the constitution. Heck, people can actually stay seated in whatever seat they sit down in for their entire bus ride! That means we aren’t racist, right?.....Right?

In 30 Rock's episode "The Source Awards",  Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) goes on a date with the smart and handsome Steven Black (Wayne Brady), and yes--he is black. While Black enjoys himself immensely during the date, he is oblivious to the fact that Lemon finds no chemistry, allure, or common interest to which she could build a relationship with him. Lemon turns down a second date, and Black accuses her of being racist. Lemon (Tina fey) then embarks on a frantic, uncomfortable quest to prove to everyone that she's a "color-blind" citizen. In the process Lemon--as do many white well meaning Americans--makes everyone around her uncomfortable with her unnatural interactions.

Yes, slavery, segregation, and the Jim Crow laws are dead. Racism does exist in many forms, but as a whole is condemned by our society. However, sometimes unfamiliarity with those of other ethnicities is confused with racism or bigotry. Since Americans don't want to be branded as a "racist" or a "bigot", we try to hide our insecurities with over-zealous respect and ignoring differences.

Before Lemon goes on her date, both her boss, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) and her disgustingly self-centered friend, observes that Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) Black is in fact, well--black. Lemon dismisses both comments and claims that she doesn't see people that way. Then before exiting the scene she says something about or has an interaction with black people that inadvertently draws more uncomfortable attention to their skin.

Of course, Donaghy and Maroney are both white. So after Lemon and Black have another talk where he suggests she is racist, she interrupts the black actor, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan). As Lemon asks whether or not he, a black man, can reassure her white-guilt riddled mind, Jordan is in the middle of dressing up as Oprah Winfrey as part of the demands of a script she wrote. She misses the irony of the situation because she is far too caught up in whether or not her black friend thinks herself racist.

By no means am I suggesting that we as American's should not care about the perspective of others. I am not suggesting that we shouldn't get to know the perceptions of those around us. But when we some of the attempts that we make to appear tolerant are unnatural, it becomes evident that we are more concerned with how others feel about us, than how they feel. Whether it is pretentiously attempting to appear more cultured than we are, or showing an inappropriate amount of favor towards a minority of a different race, the result is usually making that person feel less comfortable.

Now, “The Source Awards” did not just poke fun at white people trying to hard to show their tolerance and respect for everyone equally. It also draws attention to those who “play the race card” way too often.

As mentioned earlier, Lemon couldn’t find any common ground to base their relationship on. He doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t care too much about food, and is not a huge Star Wars fan. Anyone who knows anything about Liz Lemon, knows that those are her defining passions, and that Lemon is completely justified in not seeing things working out on a person-to-person basis. As established, Black plays the “race card” and he gets dinner paid for, and a little make out session on the way home. Later Lemon asks him if all women uninterested in him are racist to which he responds: “No! Some women are gay.”

I do find it interesting that Black and Jordan have the same colored skin, but that they represent two very different cultures. Black is a well educated person, that comes from a reputable family, and enjoys the versions of movies that are shown on airplanes because the swear words are taken out. Jordan comes from a rough life in bad neighborhoods. He is spontaneous, uneducated, and has been lets all sorts of obscenities pass over his lips.  

I have met several people of different ethnicies who have been “white-washed” as Black has been. Whether they are black, latin, or asian others who have not assimilated to white culture have cracked jokes about how their white-washed brethren aren’t quite in the same group as them. This leads me to believe that perhaps Jordan’s sarcastic comments about Lemon’s racism is more credible.

It has begun!

My blog is now fully operational!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcRnq9lzvNM