Round Robin

Round Robin

#1  The Unlucky Duck Finds His Love Unrequited

There once was a duck who had terrible luck

Until he met the girl of his dreams.

He did not realize that she was a hawk.

Nothing is quite as it seems.

#2  

Once carefree and lazy, a bundle of daisies

Uprooted for love, admiring our scent

He took his chances, but she spurned his advances

So into the garbage we went.

#3  Her

For as everyone knew, she was a rebel: a player: a man-eater.

The ghosts of her past boyfriends huddled in cages,

Their corpses lay strewn on the ground with open mouths;

Their redded lips the only dying roses on their graves.

All with their eyes exed out, but none quite as smeared as hers.

And yet she ate on, one doomed heart after another,

Until eventually they all knew they were ghosts before they started.

#4  

“I want to I want to!”

He kicked and he screamed.

What harm could one more do?

And I turned on the screen. 

Five minutes later I realized my blunder. 

Shame brought me down low 

As I looked on in wonder

At a ghost of the boy who was never told no.

#5  

A ghost.

Or is it a spirit.Is there a difference?Or are they the same?I don't know if I believe in ghosts.But I do know I see something.And it's coming my way.

Artist's Statement

                I loved this assignment.  The first night, I stayed up writing a plethora of tiny stories just for fun, much to the amusement of my roommates.  All of the tiny stories I wrote that first night were short, humorous, and a bit morbid in a strangely lighthearted way.  I realize now that that is also an eerily accurate description of me as a person.  I was a little surprised by the stories I received from my classmates, perhaps because somewhere deep down I expected their stories to be similar to mine.  That's a pretty stupid expectation, considering that we are vastly different people with different tastes and inclinations as artists and writers.

                 My favorite part of this project was every time that I received a tiny story from one of my classmates and exclaimed, "This is so good!"  It was fun to see and be proud of my classmates' and friends' work.  Even the stories that dealt with heavier subject matter were fun and exciting to read because, as was stated in the reading, "Whenever humanity tries to really grapple with the deep issues... it becomes a game."  This project highlighted that truth really well.  I think this is a fantastic form to deliver heavy messages in because I suspect that most people at any given moment throughout their day would rather read 4 lines about destructive parenting than 4 pages.  Our messages might get through more clearly if we don't wear out our welcome with our audiences by going on and on about depressing subjects in a didactic manner.

                This project reminded me of Pinterest in a way.  I know, most people use it for the purposes of finding low calorie recipes and DIY projects involving mason jars, but the first 7 boards on my Pinterest are concepts for projects I either have directed/written or am currently preparing to direct/write.  http://www.pinterest.com/thelizardofoz/  Each image on those boards is a picture that a stranger created.  Someone else found that image inspiring for their own project, and someone else pinned it from them, and on and on it went until I found it and added it to my own series of images that it relates to in a way that none of the other people the image has gone through have probably thought of.  Like the collaborative series of tiny stories we created for this project, we all saw different connections and bits of inspiration in the stories created by one another.

                I have never been a big fan of group projects, but I enjoyed this one.  I feel like I really learned and benefited from sharing this train of thought with my classmates.

Music Mosaic

Music Mosaic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX2NYgZUUoY

Artist's Statement

                When listening to Only the Winds by Olafur Arnalds, I was very aware of each instrument's entrance into the piece, as well as its disappearance.  I distinctly felt the absence of each specific kind of sound once it had been there in the music and had faded away.  In last week's reading, Dillard talked about being able to see the things around you.  Only the Winds led me to think about not being able to see what is not there.  I think that it can often be even harder to really see what is missing than it is to see what is present.  I decided to photograph the absence of things; Emptiness.

                Like the music video for Gone, Gone, Gone by Phillip Phillips, all of the images I created for this project are definitely related, but not sequential.  I am not trying to convey a narrative, just an idea.  For example, the image of the candle that has just been blown out is missing a flame.  I am not a fan of displaying candles that don't get used.  They look so artificial and empty to me.  The boots outside of the door are missing someone to wear them.  They are clearly empty.  The girl lying in bed is missing someone to lay with, leaving the bed half empty.  Each image conveys a different emptiness.  It is not until the final image that the subject appears aware of her surrounding emptiness.  

                Only the Winds has a bit of a lamenting quality to it, but it could easily be interpreted as expressing many different emotions.  I think that degree of emotional ambiguity suits the theme of emptiness.  Loss and absence are incredibly intriguing in that they often engender mixed feelings.  You do not miss something without reminiscing about how good it was when you had it.  It is different in every situation and for every person.

                The music is instrumental, meaning that there are no lyrics, and therefore no language barrier.  It is a song that can be understood universally.  Emptiness is also a universal human experience.  We have all felt the absence of someone or something.  Most of us have also probably chosen at one time or another, not to see the absence of that someone or something.  Denial can be very comfortable.  I imagine that almost any person in the world today could look at the image of the girl laughing and talking with an empty chair over dinner and understand, if not even relate.

Thinking & Writing: Electra Heart

Thinking &Writing:  Electra Heart

            Electra Heart is an album by British artist Marina Lambrini Diamandis, popularly known as Marina and the Diamonds.  All 14 tracks on the album are about destructive yet popular ideas in our modern society, and are written from the perspective of someone who accepts the damaging ideas.  The brilliance of the album is in the "cracks."

            Most of the songs are written so that at the most surface level, it sounds like she is endorsing the idea she is singing about, but if you pay attention, there are cracks in the facade.  There are moments when the underlying, hidden damage is briefly revealed.  For example, in the song Teen Idle, Marina sings in the style of a peppy cheerleader,

"I feel super, super, super! (Suicidal)"

            In Power and Control she sings,

"A human vulnerability

Doesn't mean that I am weak,

That I am weak, I am weak,

I am weak, I am weak, weak,

weak, weak, weak, weak,"

When listening casually to the song it just sounds like she is reiterating that she is not weak, but that is not what she actually keeps saying.  What she keeps saying is, "I am weak."

            Sometimes, it seems like every artist feels the need to release a song either blatantly condemning the objectification of women in media, or proudly objectifying themselves because, hey, sex sells.  Lilly Allen did the first with her shocking song Hard Out Here, and Kelis did the second with the ever so thinly veiled euphemistic track, Milkshake.  Marina is an interesting artist because she is sort of doing both, and sort of doing neither.  Her pattern of writing is that she sometimes seems to be saying one thing, but is really saying another.  That is not what a large percentage of current radio audiences are used to.

            What a large percentage of audiences are used to is songs that promote consequence-less, care-free partying.  Marina's version of that archetypal song is informed by a different track on Electra Heart.  The song is called Shampain, and contains the lyrics,

"Drinking champagne made by the angel

Who goes by the name of Glittering Gabriel

Drinking champagne made of an angel's

Tears and pain, but I feel celestial"

With the upbeat and celebratory music, it sounds like the "eat, drink, and be merry," lifestyle is being glorified, and I have seen it interpreted that way.  However, in the title, "champagne" is spelled "shampain," and without the music making everything sound great, some of the other lyrics themselves are extremely dark.

"Lay dagger dead inside a lonely bed

Trying to hide the hole inside my head

Watching the starts slide down to reach the end

The sleep is not my friend"

 Furthermore, in the music video she is wearing the same dress that she wears in the music video for Fear and Loathing, a song about suicide on the album Electra Heart.  The dress connects the two songs, telling a story about a girl who drank and partied all night, but did not feel any better when the night ended.  All these elements make it abundantly clear that Marina does not actually support that lifestyle.

            Why would Marina want to make her listeners pay attention to get some of the messages, instead of making it more straight forward?  She fills her music with contradictions because society is full of contradictions.  We receive so many messages that do not make any sense.  A feminist woman should dress and act masculinely to prove that femininity is just as good.  A woman should "embrace her own sexuality" by dressing revealingly and behaving promiscuously because then she won't be seen as a sexual object.  We do not want to make decisions about people based on race, so we ask everyone what race they are so that we make sure to let enough minorities into colleges.  The list goes on and on.

            All of these solutions just reinforce the problems in bizarre, round- about ways.  We have all heard the expression "Art imitates life."  Electra Heart is a reflection of the confused time we live in.

            We live in a time when society is realizing how flawed it has been and still is.  We are trying to fix things, and that is where all the contradictions and confusion comes from.  We want to make things better, but we do not actually know which direction to go to do that, so we end up with these inconsistent ideas.  A big part of this corrective movement is the idea that anyway you choose to live your own personal life is okay, and will make you happier than following societal "rules".  That seems like a nice sentiment, but it has created a whole lot of people who are claiming freedom from restriction, but are really just causing themselves more hurt, as is reflected in the music of Electra Heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vHi83LTQjU