Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Maria
Fine Draft
Winter Project Proposal

This winter I would like to do two smaller projects. The first is to write a screenplay for a short film that will be 20 to 25 minutes long, and the second is to help Blythe and Mellissa as an assistant on their production of Genet’s The Maids. I have wanted to write and produce a film for a long time but don’t have much experience. Although film and theatre are different mediums and certainly have their own particular characteristics and challenges I think helping out with rehearsals, set building, and other technical aspects of the play will be helpful when it comes to directing and producing my own film.
The movie I want to write is going to be a comedy about free will. It involves two main characters, Cynthia and Evan, identified as a boy and a girl who are stuck in their lives and daily routines until a mystical experience happens and suddenly transforms the both of them into “extreme” (completely uninhibited and impulsive) versions of themselves.
The two biggest influences behind the idea for this film are the essay Theory of the Derive by Guy Debord in the Situationist International and the 1928 Film The Crowd by King Vidor. The spirit of the Derive and living life according to your inspiration in the moment is something which is embraced and exaggerated in the film in a hopefully funny and also hopefully interesting way, and it will explore what might happen if we were to fully live out the idea and how doing so might enrich or fulfill our lives and also how it could damage them. The movie The Crowd is an influence because of it’s themes of mechanization (and determinism) and especially because of how this was portrayed through the cinematography of the film. I would like to incorporate some aspects of the style of the film when I get to the process of storyboarding. Also I want to reference two particular ideas from the movie. The first is a scene where the main character first gets to the city and goes into an elevator and faces the wrong direction and gets corrected, and the second is a scene with a street performer and the hopelessness that this figure conveys and also it’s implications in terms of social class.

Sam is in a dark place. The voice of Panopticon comes from offstage.


Sam: What is this place?

Panopticon: A prison!

Sam: I'm talking to a dang prison? Why am I here?

Panopticon: You were arrested for talking to yourself. That's disturbing the peace.

Sam: If you're a figure of my imagination, how come you're patronizing me and not playing along with my psyhcosis?

Panopticon: Why should I? That's not my job.

Sam: You're not answering my question! What are you?

Panopticon: I'm a prison. I'm circular with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners an at all times be observed. I'm a structure.       Panopticon.

Sam: So you're watching me?

Panopticon: I might be.

Sam:  Do you even exist? I'd rather be kicked in the head. How do I get rid of you?

Panopticon: Wait for legislation, the pills to come. Or... just try an forget... (evil laughter)

Finally, that old pair of shoes has been laid to rest. Born an orphan in some unknown factory in an unknown location the shoes were purchased in Seattle Washington by Maria at the Payless shoe adoption agency-store. It wasn't exactly love at first sight. Maria was starting a new job and decided to purchase the least expensive pair of black shoes on her credit card, however she is Shoes' only surviving family. Shoes was always too something. Too trendy, slightly oddly shaped. So fashion conscious they weren't fashionable. Sassy with a full 2 in heel, they felt good to take off after work. Their only redemption in Maria's mind was the fact that they were cheap, a point that was cited frequently.

New life was breathed into Shoes when her owner's one pair of sneakers wore out and for two months she wasn't able to find a pair she liked. Moving away from the city, this pair of heeled shoes found herself hiking down nature trails, kicking soccer balls and walking across miles of pavement. Suddenly she was taken on dates.

For a brief and glorious period at the end of her life she was able to escape her limitations as a fashion "don't" and live an extraordinary life far beyond the expectations of many normal work shoes or boots. When Maria finally did find herself a pair of sneakers she liked she was thrilled but found herself a full two inches shorter. At this point Shoes were worn and tired after a life full of adventure and peacefully passed on.

Maria
Fashioning the Body Paper #2
Scott Turner Schofield and Brecht’s Notes on Theatre

    In this paper I want to make the argument that many aspects of Scott Turner Schofield’s Play, “Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps” were in line with the qualifications Brecht laid out describing his idea of the epic theatre. The play was effective in the ways that Brecht talked about in terms of inciting critical response and helping the audience to see a clearer version of reality by including its complexity. However, at the end of this paper I come to some places where I think the play might not so easily fit on either side of the epic theatre/traditional theatre binary from Brecht’s description. Maybe it’s just an effect of taking this class, but it appeals to me a little bit that Scott’s play resists (or transcends?) this binary in some ways and isn’t easily categorized.
    First I want to examine the story of the play. In his notes, Brecht says that the regular theatre has plot whereas the epic theatre has narrative. He also says that traditional theatre’s story has a linear development whereas the epic theatre moves in curves. Lastly, he talks about how traditional theatre follows an evolutionary development, whereas epic theatre jumps. Each of these statements has to do with the structure that the story, or more appropriately to use his terms, narrative, takes in the theatrical work.
The structure of telling stories which Scott used in his performance fit very well in with the idea of montage or jumping around. Not only were the stories separate montages but there was also at least an implied element of randomness in their order (and possibly even to which stories he got to telling). Scott literally asked us, in the between the stories, which ones we wanted to hear next. Placing the scenes of the play in a random order seems to defy any traditional linear structure or an order which uses them portray growth or evolution. Brecht never said scenes needed to be random in order to produce a work of epic theatre, but the effect is very in line with the epic theatre. Also it promotes the idea of being able to let the scenes stand for themselves. Instead of just being parts of a larger plot they are worthy of being individually included for their complexity within themselves.

Here is a summary of our presentation on Obama girl last week, along with some additional comments.

We introduced obama girl by showing two youtube videos, the "Obama girl vs. Giuliani Girl" video, a popular video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekSxxlj6rGE) in which the Obama girls and off with the Giuliani girls and by showing another youtube video where she appears on "wallstrip" a (http://www.youtube.com/user/wallstrip) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmoBmaz4rUI) a user page on youtube which makes daily comedy videos about the stock market.

After presenting the videos and giving everyone a moment to recover we began to deconstruct Obama girl, beginning with the question of who the actress who played her was. We revealed that her real name was "Amber lee" showed her modeling website (http://www.amberleeonline.com), and also a page describing how she was Howard Stern's girl of the month (http://www.howard.tv/missHowardTV/June2007) in June 2007. From this information we could see that Amber lee was an actress hired for the part of Obama, in fact she was discovered because of being on Howard Stern. It was also briefly discussed that Amber lee (the person) didn't know who she would be voting for when she made the first video. This shows how constructed the whole thing was, and separates her body from her character.

That point was even further driven home in the next video we showed called, "Obama Girl vs. McCain Mama" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86HEv_Wtyj8) , in which the interveiwer literally asks her "so you are just the body?" to which she replies, "yes". The interveiw also showed clips from the "I've Got a Crush on Obama"video which initially made Obama Girl famous on youtube.

To find out more about who else was involved in the creation of Obama Girl we went to the website which procduced her videos, named "Barely Political" (www.barelypolitical.com). We talked a bit about their name, how it might have been a play on "Barely Legal" while simeltaneously addressing the fact that the site had more to do with entertainment than really informing about any political issue at hand. We didn't get to showing this but it's interesting to look at the lyrics of the "I've got a crush on Obama" and see how little they really have to do with anything political whatsoever. (http://www.anysonglyrics.com/lyrics/o/Obama-Girl/Crush-On-Obama-Lyrics.htm). We also looked at the tag line "Bare and Balanced" that they used for the site. We mused how it was interesting that in order to produce this phrase not only had they added the word "bare" but it was neccessary to take out the word "fair".

i was talking to someone about class and he told me that recently he went to an annual privacy and internet security conference and that the theme this year was "panopticon", and more specifically, how it was important for people to resist becoming a panopticon society. the website has a lot of the lectures that were given posted online for free. i thought it might be worth sharing...


http://www.cfp2005.org/Program.html

surgeon hand turns in a moment from a blow to a caress
hands
machinery
flexible
adaptive
graceful terrible expression to the rage of man

no better proof of the manifestation of design on the part of the Creator than in the small most finished
most finished piece
most finished piece of mechanism

anatomist
the hand indeed the most servicable as well as graceful instrument with which man is endowed.






hard
soft
tender
deliberately tantilizes him
reaches his fingers under
too soft
too tender

kept quiet for twenty four to fourty eight hours

sampling examining

wash the world in ivory soap

ivory soap slaughterhouse
the animal is being slaughtered

bloody bleeding liver
would this patient be better off if he gave up his fine wines?

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My group and I visited the girl's locker room.

The uniformity and utilitarian set up of the room seemed to give an ambience of indifference to the individuality of the bodies in the space. It seemed to be more set up for the purpose of functionality than for anything else. The attitude of the architecture seemed to reflect the general etiquette of indifference and distance a person is expected to uphold in a locker room, although there were a few structures which allowed for more privacy.

The main part of the room contained rows of lockers with benches in between for people to sit and change. There were two smaller stalls off to the side for private changing. The entire space was divided in two by a wall, with a nearly identical set up on both sides. The lights were off on one side and on the other.

Behind the last row of lockers was a sauna room. The room was warm with a bench along the perimeter, it was dimly lit and I couldn't find any light switches.

Before entering the shower area there was an 8 foot horizontal mirror. The one person we encountered in the locker room was standing in front of it, looking at herself.

The shower are had 4 tree like shower structures, three of these trees did not have dividers in between the shower heads. 1 tree had dividers but no doors (unlike a stall). If someone was concerned about privacy and wanted be obscured from people's view the best spot for this would have been to be in the very back section of this one special shower tree, otherwise people showering on the sides of the tree or walking into the shower space would be able to see them, because there weren't any doors. These dividers might have been effective in minimizing your interaction with the people next to you.

In front of the shower area was a 4 foot wall, which reached just above my stomach and would have covered my stomach and lower half from immediate view if I would have used the space.

Maria

Concept Rhyming Paper #1

Foucault

 

    I chose the word discourse as the topic of my paper. I wasn't able to access the Old English Dictionary definition of the word so instead I'm using the Dictionary.com definition. Hopefully this doesn't make the result too different.

 Dictionary.com gave these definitions for the word discourse:

 1. communication of thought by words; talk; conversation: earnest and intelligent discourse.

2. a formal discussion of a subject in speech or writing, as a dissertation, treatise, sermon, etc.

3. Linguistics. any unit of connected speech or writing longer than a sentence. 

-verb (used without object)

4. to communicate thoughts orally; talk; converse.

5. to utter or give forth (musical sounds).

 

    I think the two definitions given here which might be closest to what Foucault meant when he used the term in History of Sexuality are definitions two and five. I think he meant something more specific than just general communication (which is the way I most commonly hear the word used today), as the first and fifth definitions suggest or the vague, "anything longer than a sentence" explanation given as the third definition. I think he also meant something more than simply to utter or give forth, as definition six suggests. I'm not sure whether the "musical sounds" part of that definition is a poetic way of referring to words and speech in general, or whether it is actually alluding to a more musical or poetic type of speech or music quite literally, but if that is part of the definition I think Foucault meant something more technical than that.

    In Foucault for beginners they define Foucault's use of the word discourse more along the line of a technical mode of discussion complete with its own terminology and jargon. My interpretation of the term from reading History of Sexuality aligns with this definition.