Sunday, December 6, 2009
Almost forgot
I so liked the "Sordid Underbelly of One Girl's Filthy Apartment" in Graphic Design: The New Basics that I gave it to my Advanced Composition students as an example of an "Essay of Place."
Welcome to Bollywood!
I also use Bollywood films in teaching (well, it's a toned down, Indian film that utilizes many of the Bollywood musical conventions). India has always had a strong film industry (think Ishmael Merchant if nothing else), but it's like Bollywood films have just been "discovered" by the west. Given that these films have a larger per capita international following than Hollywood films, it's no wonder that they are finally spreading to this culture. Baz Luhrmann was influenced by a Bollywood film for Moulin Rouge! I have a couple Bollywood films in my DVD collection (although one isn't really Bollywood; it's from Tamil--I know "Bollywood" is really only for a fraction of films coming out of the Mubai film industry and India is a very large place--although it does star Aishwarya Rai); they are quite delightful. I hadn't heard of "Nollywood", but then I don't really care that much about documentaries, although one of the winners at this year's Manhatten Short Film Festival was a Nollywood style documentary from Mozembique.
What I find interesting about Bollywood films in the context of Practices of Looking, is that the Bollywood films were influenced by the Hollywood musicals of the 1930's and 1940's and now Bollywood is starting to influence Hollywood films. At the beginning of the current recession, i did hear talk that this sort of movement was likely and that the recession or an economic depression is good for musicals--these are usually upbeat with a triumph over adversity ending, just the sort of pick-me-up people who are stressed often need. There's even apparently a Bollywood parody of Bollywood, Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om (I haven't seen it, but a such a film should be hilarious).
My students seem to like the Bollywood clips I've shown, and my Indian students (some of whom have been really shy about speaking in class) get really talkative when they see my examples. But it is also important to realize that Bollywood films are a specific genre in the Indian film industry--films like Fire and Water are hardly "Bollywood."
What I find interesting about Bollywood films in the context of Practices of Looking, is that the Bollywood films were influenced by the Hollywood musicals of the 1930's and 1940's and now Bollywood is starting to influence Hollywood films. At the beginning of the current recession, i did hear talk that this sort of movement was likely and that the recession or an economic depression is good for musicals--these are usually upbeat with a triumph over adversity ending, just the sort of pick-me-up people who are stressed often need. There's even apparently a Bollywood parody of Bollywood, Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om (I haven't seen it, but a such a film should be hilarious).
My students seem to like the Bollywood clips I've shown, and my Indian students (some of whom have been really shy about speaking in class) get really talkative when they see my examples. But it is also important to realize that Bollywood films are a specific genre in the Indian film industry--films like Fire and Water are hardly "Bollywood."
Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson
This is a painting that shows up in my lecture slides as well, but for a very different reason. While the bodies of executed criminals were used in dissection suggests, as the authors of The Practice of Looking point out, the difference in social status between those attending the dissection lecture and the body being dissected, the painting also provides a shift in how medicine was viewed. That a body was being dissected at all suggests a difference in thought with regards to dissection--good luck getting a corpse to dissect if you were a da Vinci or Michelangelo. They dissected corpses, but they had to get them on the sly--dissection was forbidden by the Catholic church. Rembrandt's Holland was split between Catholics and Protestants. That Rembrandt is showing a public dissection attended by prominant burghers without fear of the authorities (even if the painting is a composite)rather than a furtive midnight dig and an Igor-like assistant hauling a mysterious bag into the laboratory also signals a change in how the human body is viewed.
The book briefly mentions the ethics of displaying bodies, such as the 19th Century Paris morgues, the Visible Human Project and Body Worlds, but doesn't go into much depth. I know there is a big concern with that here--the bodies at Dixon Mounds had been on public display until fairly recently (not any more) and legislation has been passed regarding the display of human remains. I ended up my Survey of British Lit class with Seamus Heaney's "Gauballe Man" and "Punishment" and I debated showing them photographs of these people. I'm not bothered by them, but then if the CSI series did an archeological version, I'b probalby do something about my television (like get a new one). Meanwhile I've made due with PBS's Secrets of the Dead--the episode of ergotine being the likely suspect in teh Salem With Trials also looked at some of the European bog people. But I digress. Finally, I decided to use a photo of Tollund man (he looks like he's sleepingso the student's shouldn't be too grossed out--Heaney wrote a poem on him too, but it wasn't in our anthology). There's the hint of Danish blood in my family tree, so Tollund man could be a relative, albeit a distant one, so I'm not appropriating someone from outside my "group". When I've gone hiking in bogs, I've joked with my hiking partners that someone centuries from now will find out blackened bodies and surmise we were part of some ancient ritual that involved the goddess Canon Eos judging by the necklaces around out necks and strange three-pronged pyramids. Plus, I think these bodies found in European bogs are fascinating and if I weren't so horrible at chemistry, forensic anthropolgy definitely has its attractions.
This reminds me of a story from a few years ago. My niece was in junior high, and she was very upset at her social studies teacher for focusing on Otzi the Iceman (the 9,000 body found by hikers in the Italian alps in 1991). In talking with her, I discovered the real reason she was upset was because Otzi was a boy mummy and she wanted to know where the girls mummies were. So, I went on-line and found articles on the Incan Ice Maiden found in Peru and the Pazyryk Ice Maiden found near Mongolia/Siberia. Despite the gruesome nature of this research, my niece went to bed happy because now she had seen the girl mummies.
The book briefly mentions the ethics of displaying bodies, such as the 19th Century Paris morgues, the Visible Human Project and Body Worlds, but doesn't go into much depth. I know there is a big concern with that here--the bodies at Dixon Mounds had been on public display until fairly recently (not any more) and legislation has been passed regarding the display of human remains. I ended up my Survey of British Lit class with Seamus Heaney's "Gauballe Man" and "Punishment" and I debated showing them photographs of these people. I'm not bothered by them, but then if the CSI series did an archeological version, I'b probalby do something about my television (like get a new one). Meanwhile I've made due with PBS's Secrets of the Dead--the episode of ergotine being the likely suspect in teh Salem With Trials also looked at some of the European bog people. But I digress. Finally, I decided to use a photo of Tollund man (he looks like he's sleepingso the student's shouldn't be too grossed out--Heaney wrote a poem on him too, but it wasn't in our anthology). There's the hint of Danish blood in my family tree, so Tollund man could be a relative, albeit a distant one, so I'm not appropriating someone from outside my "group". When I've gone hiking in bogs, I've joked with my hiking partners that someone centuries from now will find out blackened bodies and surmise we were part of some ancient ritual that involved the goddess Canon Eos judging by the necklaces around out necks and strange three-pronged pyramids. Plus, I think these bodies found in European bogs are fascinating and if I weren't so horrible at chemistry, forensic anthropolgy definitely has its attractions.
This reminds me of a story from a few years ago. My niece was in junior high, and she was very upset at her social studies teacher for focusing on Otzi the Iceman (the 9,000 body found by hikers in the Italian alps in 1991). In talking with her, I discovered the real reason she was upset was because Otzi was a boy mummy and she wanted to know where the girls mummies were. So, I went on-line and found articles on the Incan Ice Maiden found in Peru and the Pazyryk Ice Maiden found near Mongolia/Siberia. Despite the gruesome nature of this research, my niece went to bed happy because now she had seen the girl mummies.
Parody
(I wrote this some time ago, but it didn't get posted for some reason)
Since the text for class mentions parody—I happened to see two hilarious commercial parodies on television quite some time ago (like the 1980's). One was an advertisement for RAID, the bug spray, but it was clearly based on the black and white Calvin Klein Obsession ads that were also on the television at the time. There were obvious differences in that the animated insects RAID usually employed were there and the commercial was in color (so there was no confusion as to the product being sold—a can of insect killer, not musky perfume). However, the cartoon insects were lounging around, leaning on classical columns and things like that, spouting fragments of speech like the attractive people in the perfume commercials.
The second commercial was a Burger King ad that was based on the De Beers diamond ads—the people (I remember there being a man and woman) were in grayscale silhouettes, but the Whopper was in color. The “diamond music (“Palladio” by Karl Jenkins) played in the background. Instead of the diamond, the man handed the woman the Whopper. Again, I don’t think many would have confused the product being sold.
Despite both of these commercials being brilliant parodies, in my opinion, they only aired once or twice. I’m sure there was a curt cease and desist letter sent in each instance, and I’m not sure “fair use” applies to commercial works (commercial speech isn’t as free as regular speech).
When I did research on Stella Gibbon’s novel Cold Comfort Farm, I discovered it was a parody of the “rural” novels that were popular in England during the first couple of decades of the 20th century. I actually have two novels by Mary Webb, who was one of the major authors of this literary genre, but I would not have associated them with Cold Comfort Farm (and I was introduced to that book through an ad—how could I resist a book described as “Jane Austen meets the Beverly Hillbillies”? ). However, Cold Comfort was such a great parody that it apparently put an end to the genre it was making fun of. Speaking of Austen and parody, I read Northanger Abbey long before I was able to find a copy of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (which was not quoted in the recent BBC adaptation of Northanger Abbey—Matthew Lewis’s The Monk was. Geesh. It isn’t as if Mysteries lacks bits as titillating as The Monk). The same goes for Thomas Love Peacock’s parody of the 18th century gothic novels, Nightmare Abbey (I probably read that before Northanger Abbey). Finding the original novels being parodied was a bit tough 20 some years ago. I eventually did.
I like a good parody.
Since the text for class mentions parody—I happened to see two hilarious commercial parodies on television quite some time ago (like the 1980's). One was an advertisement for RAID, the bug spray, but it was clearly based on the black and white Calvin Klein Obsession ads that were also on the television at the time. There were obvious differences in that the animated insects RAID usually employed were there and the commercial was in color (so there was no confusion as to the product being sold—a can of insect killer, not musky perfume). However, the cartoon insects were lounging around, leaning on classical columns and things like that, spouting fragments of speech like the attractive people in the perfume commercials.
The second commercial was a Burger King ad that was based on the De Beers diamond ads—the people (I remember there being a man and woman) were in grayscale silhouettes, but the Whopper was in color. The “diamond music (“Palladio” by Karl Jenkins) played in the background. Instead of the diamond, the man handed the woman the Whopper. Again, I don’t think many would have confused the product being sold.
Despite both of these commercials being brilliant parodies, in my opinion, they only aired once or twice. I’m sure there was a curt cease and desist letter sent in each instance, and I’m not sure “fair use” applies to commercial works (commercial speech isn’t as free as regular speech).
When I did research on Stella Gibbon’s novel Cold Comfort Farm, I discovered it was a parody of the “rural” novels that were popular in England during the first couple of decades of the 20th century. I actually have two novels by Mary Webb, who was one of the major authors of this literary genre, but I would not have associated them with Cold Comfort Farm (and I was introduced to that book through an ad—how could I resist a book described as “Jane Austen meets the Beverly Hillbillies”? ). However, Cold Comfort was such a great parody that it apparently put an end to the genre it was making fun of. Speaking of Austen and parody, I read Northanger Abbey long before I was able to find a copy of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (which was not quoted in the recent BBC adaptation of Northanger Abbey—Matthew Lewis’s The Monk was. Geesh. It isn’t as if Mysteries lacks bits as titillating as The Monk). The same goes for Thomas Love Peacock’s parody of the 18th century gothic novels, Nightmare Abbey (I probably read that before Northanger Abbey). Finding the original novels being parodied was a bit tough 20 some years ago. I eventually did.
I like a good parody.
The Perspective of realism
When I teach my humanities class, I use really streamlined definitions of realism, stylistic, and abstract: realism is close to nature proportion-wise (I use one of George Stubb's horses, Whistlejacket, as an example), stylistic is "we can still tell it's a human, but it's somewhat out of proportion (Marc Chagall for this) and abstract is the essence of human, horse, etc. (Picasso). Some of the Greek sculpture is idealized or hyper-realistic, and the text book we use questions if Michelangelo's David is really an abstract sculpture, because it violates phi in its proportions--David would be monstrous (arms too long, hands too big, etc.) if he were to get down off his pedestal and walk the streets, yet the brilliance of the sculpture is that it looks normal.
When I was researching the history of perspective and looking for examples of the first Renaissance paintings to actually use perspective, I got a different result than what Practices of Looking claims. First there are the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the Fayum mummy caskets of Roman Egypt that portray humans fairly accurately in three dimensions (much better than Giotto, who was really, really close to depicting 3 dimensions on 2 dimensional space)--one and two point perspective were still a little bit off in the landscapes I've seen. Practices of Looking mentions Brunellschi, but not Masolino, and I've seen claims that his St. Peter Healing the Cripple predates Brunellschi for demonstrating one point perspective.
I wrote a poem on Simone Martini's The Annunciation--it was in response to a poem written by Eva Chruscial, who got her Ph. D. here.
My students really struggle with abstract paintings, and I confess I do too (maybe not in the same degree though)--because I know how difficult it is to draw a hand, I really appreciate the skill it takes (I will be absolutely captivated by textures like mink in a painting). But you can change--I was never a big fan of the Impressionists, but I really like Impressionist paintings by American Frank Benson and Dane Pieter Kroyer (a poster of one of his paintings hangs over my desk as I type this--a remarkably peaceful painting of a woman in pink, reading in a lounge chair with a dog at her feet and a huge rose bush covered with white blossoms in the foreground.) Okay, so maybe its the French Impressionists, who have all the fame, I really don't care for. Jackson Pollack is useful for demonstrating that art needs to be INTENTIONAL and even though they may have painting dropclothes that rival a Pollack painting, they didn't put the splotches there on purpose. I've also discovered that if students look long enough at a Pollack painting, some of them start to see faces.....Hm.
I thought it interesting that the authors used Who Framed Roger Rabbit and A Night at the Museum as examples for their blend of real actors and animated characters. Did these authors never hear of Gene Kelly's famous dance with Jerry Mouse in the 1945 Anchors Away! ? This concept is nothing new, but by dating the use of this technique to 1988 and 2006, they make it seem like it is fairly recent.
When I was researching the history of perspective and looking for examples of the first Renaissance paintings to actually use perspective, I got a different result than what Practices of Looking claims. First there are the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the Fayum mummy caskets of Roman Egypt that portray humans fairly accurately in three dimensions (much better than Giotto, who was really, really close to depicting 3 dimensions on 2 dimensional space)--one and two point perspective were still a little bit off in the landscapes I've seen. Practices of Looking mentions Brunellschi, but not Masolino, and I've seen claims that his St. Peter Healing the Cripple predates Brunellschi for demonstrating one point perspective.
I wrote a poem on Simone Martini's The Annunciation--it was in response to a poem written by Eva Chruscial, who got her Ph. D. here.
My students really struggle with abstract paintings, and I confess I do too (maybe not in the same degree though)--because I know how difficult it is to draw a hand, I really appreciate the skill it takes (I will be absolutely captivated by textures like mink in a painting). But you can change--I was never a big fan of the Impressionists, but I really like Impressionist paintings by American Frank Benson and Dane Pieter Kroyer (a poster of one of his paintings hangs over my desk as I type this--a remarkably peaceful painting of a woman in pink, reading in a lounge chair with a dog at her feet and a huge rose bush covered with white blossoms in the foreground.) Okay, so maybe its the French Impressionists, who have all the fame, I really don't care for. Jackson Pollack is useful for demonstrating that art needs to be INTENTIONAL and even though they may have painting dropclothes that rival a Pollack painting, they didn't put the splotches there on purpose. I've also discovered that if students look long enough at a Pollack painting, some of them start to see faces.....Hm.
I thought it interesting that the authors used Who Framed Roger Rabbit and A Night at the Museum as examples for their blend of real actors and animated characters. Did these authors never hear of Gene Kelly's famous dance with Jerry Mouse in the 1945 Anchors Away! ? This concept is nothing new, but by dating the use of this technique to 1988 and 2006, they make it seem like it is fairly recent.
Stole 'N Symbols
I got my final project complete enough to take to church so my friend could model it (I told him to practice his catwalk strut) and I could take photos for the project. He reiterated that he liked using the less obvious or popular symbols as then people ask questions. They won't ask questions if they think they already know the answers. I also had photos of the church in Germany where I saw the bleeding pelican, and teased him that when he met me, he probably didn't know I'd know such esoteric information (he had to agree).
Several others ooh and aahed the stole so far (a number of women quilt and one had made my friend his Good Friday stole), associated the phoenix with Fawkes in the Harry Potter novels, and then my friend brought up the eagle and its symbolism. He pastors a dual parish (two churches) and the younger church had gotten most of their their paraments from the older congregation. One of these has an eagle, but other than representing the Gospel of John, he wasn't sure what the meaning of this bird was (and if for St. John, it would be on a white background, which this wasn't--he thinks it's purple, which is Lent or Advent). Not a problem--I looked it up in my book (you really don't need the Internet if you know me; I don't remember why I got the book on church symbolism, other than it was really cheap and I thought it would be a useful resource to have in my library--I've gotten my $3 worth. It has to do with Resurrection, the spirit and baptism.
While treasure hunting at the local thrift stores, I found another piece of religious visual rhetoric for a quarter. It's a bracelet with roses alternating with lilies and has a Mary medal at the end--I know roses and lilies are associated with Mary, but absent that reference, it appears to be a sterling silver bracelet that I can make fit my wrists and I like flowers. When I got it home, I discovered there are various depictions of St. Christopher, the Misercordia, etc., on the flip side of each flower. I'm not Catholic (I probably would be if it weren't for the theology--the ritual and visuals certainly appeal) but I thought the bracelet well worth what I spent.
Several others ooh and aahed the stole so far (a number of women quilt and one had made my friend his Good Friday stole), associated the phoenix with Fawkes in the Harry Potter novels, and then my friend brought up the eagle and its symbolism. He pastors a dual parish (two churches) and the younger church had gotten most of their their paraments from the older congregation. One of these has an eagle, but other than representing the Gospel of John, he wasn't sure what the meaning of this bird was (and if for St. John, it would be on a white background, which this wasn't--he thinks it's purple, which is Lent or Advent). Not a problem--I looked it up in my book (you really don't need the Internet if you know me; I don't remember why I got the book on church symbolism, other than it was really cheap and I thought it would be a useful resource to have in my library--I've gotten my $3 worth. It has to do with Resurrection, the spirit and baptism.
While treasure hunting at the local thrift stores, I found another piece of religious visual rhetoric for a quarter. It's a bracelet with roses alternating with lilies and has a Mary medal at the end--I know roses and lilies are associated with Mary, but absent that reference, it appears to be a sterling silver bracelet that I can make fit my wrists and I like flowers. When I got it home, I discovered there are various depictions of St. Christopher, the Misercordia, etc., on the flip side of each flower. I'm not Catholic (I probably would be if it weren't for the theology--the ritual and visuals certainly appeal) but I thought the bracelet well worth what I spent.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Zombie brands
This is a new one. I was trying to find the Xerox corporation graveyard ad and found references to it (no visuals). One of the websites was a World Intellectual Property Organization newsletter written by Timothy J. Lockhart. He writes about the death of trademarks--nothing new there--but at the end of the article he talks about Zombie brands (formerly known as ghost or orphan brands). These are marks that "die" (the registration is allowed to lapse, is sold, etc.) but are resurrected for the same or similar products. Some examples are WHITE CLOUD toilet paper--acquired by Procter & Gamble, but was phased out because P&G also owned CHARMIN toleit paper, and then sold to Wal-mart as a private label. A company is looking into looking into resurrecting the BRIM coffee brand, but for caffinated as well as decaf coffee. More info is at http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2009/06/article_0010.html
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