Just About Time to Say Good-bye

We’ve just about reached the end of the road for this semester, and it’s time for one last blog post! In this post I let you know my top three blog posts for the semester, and I give my final reflection on the class.

My top three blog posts are:

http://hip2basquare.blogspot.com/2011/02/this-is-what-you-shall-do-begin-with.html

This post was our second assigned blog post. In this post we were required to write our own personal ethos.  This is my statement of how a person should live their life, what they should value, whom they should scorn, what to question, and how to act “rightly” in the world.

http://hip2basquare.blogspot.com/2011/02/identity-time-knowledge-and-hemingway.html

This post was a free post but was written in response to Scott’s “suggestion” in class that we should examine Hemingway’s “The Killers” for elements of hip. In this post, I analyzed this short story for references to time, knowledge, and identity.

http://hip2basquare.blogspot.com/2011/02/fitting-square-peg-in-hip-hole.html

This post was a free post in response to Scott’s suggestion that we might want to post a copy of our first essay in its entirety. I posted my essay, along with a disclaimer that I wasn’t entirely happy with the finished product.

I selected these three posts as some of my best work this semester because I feel that they exemplify good writing in general, and good writing for the web, specifically. In each of these posts, I worked really hard to make sure that I hit the target set up in the assignment. I did this by carefully reading each assignment to see what elements were required, and then I wrote based on those elements. When done with the writing, I critically read each piece to make sure that I had answered the questions posed, instead of getting off track on one of the many rabbit trails that present themselves whenever I begin to write. I made sure that I employed the guidelines provided about best practices for writing on the web, including making use of photos and/or graphic elements, keeping paragraphs short, writing for scannability, making good use of topic sentences to hook the reader, and just generally producing a post that was pleasing to the eye. Though I don’t feel that the essay post made for a great blog post from the standpoint that it wasn’t written specifically for the web (though I did try to make my intro for the post web-worthy), I include it as some of my best work because I ended up being really proud of that piece once it was finished. (It didn’t hurt a bit that a couple of my friends told me it could easily be used as a eulogy at my subject’s funeral someday!)

I’m not sure that my ideas of American pop culture have necessarily changed since the beginning of the semester. Though I necessarily live within it, I really had never given much thought to its effect on me. Mostly, I recognized that trends tend to repeat themselves, and I still feel that way. The idea that “everything old is new again” runs pretty deep within me. What I have gained from this course is an appreciation of the forces that shape American pop culture. It has been interesting to learn about the racial roots of “hipness”, and to recognize that being “out there” and bucking the status quo actually has become the status quo, in a manner of speaking. I still struggle with the idea of a constant present because I simply cannot disconnect my logical mind from the habit of seeing that present actions will have a monumental impact on the future. However, I can see how this idea is a great mechanism for capitalism, forcing an ever-present need for the “new and improved” product without the realization that in the near future it will be obsolete.

I worked hard in this class this semester to be a good participant in order to benefit the other students and to gain insight into the thought processes of others. I also worked hard to produce writing that would meet expectations as presented in assignments. I believe my strengths as a writer and thinker are analyzing the information presented and drawing conclusions between related points. I also like to try to put my own biases aside and view issues from the other vantage. I would venture to say that my weaknesses surface in the inability to be as concise as I would like to be in my writing. Trying to put the idea of “less is more” into practice can be difficult for me when writing.

I think that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and that has been my approach to this class this semester. Since I attended class every time we met (is there a prize for perfect attendance?), did all the required reading, participated in discussions to the best of my ability, met deadlines for writing assignments and garnered top grades, I think my performance merits an “A” for the semester. I would hope that if I were to be given a “report card” for this class that one of my comments would be “a pleasure to have in class.”

Annotated Bibliography for Essay 3

Annotated Bibliography

Baldwin, Kristen. "The Accidental Movie Star." Entertainment Weekly 987 (2008): 20-26. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. This article details Tina Fey’s unintentional route to appearances on the big screen, fulfilling multiple roles in life at once – mother, comedy writer, small screen actress and big screen actress. It also illuminates how female viewers can relate to her character on 30 Rock and she serves as a role model to many. I will use this information to support my point of how Tina Fey is shaping pop culture through her work.

Clark, Cindy. "Funny Lady Tina Fey Gets an 'SNL'-Style Salute." USA Today n.d.: Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. This article details the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which Tina Fey won in 2010. I may be able to use some of this information to support my claim of a long history of comedic accomplishment and a forecast for continuing this into the future.

Freydkin, Donna. "The Inimitable Tina Fey." USA Today n.d.: Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. This article discusses Tina Fey’s many life roles including comedy writer, actress, mother and non-fiction author. It also talks about her impressions of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin impressions and how that made her a pop-culture staple. I plan to use this to explore how political satire can shape the political process.

Heffernan, Virginia. “Annals of Entertainment: Anchor Woman.” newyorker.com. The New Yorker. Condé Nast Digital. 3 November, 2003. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. This article focuses on Fey’s early work at Saturday Night Live and work on a screenplay (which ultimately was produced as the movie “Mean Girls.” I will use this article to explore her role in the male-dominated industry of comedy writing and her tendency to buck the status quo.

 Halperin, Mark, and John Heilemann. "The Uncertain Future of Sarah Palin." Time 175.3 (2010): 42-43. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Apr. 2011. This article looks at the possibility of Sarah Palin’s participation in the 2012 Presidential election. I plan to use this article to look at her influence on the Republican party and to explore the possibility of her future impact on pop culture as a public icon.

Leland, John. Hip: The History. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print. This book analyzes the history of the evolution of American pop culture and provides the basis for a definition of “hip”.  Mr. Leland serves as a reliable source due to his history of writing about pop culture, and the exhaustive notes and index included with the book are indicative that this work is based on solid research and not merely opinion. I plan to use extensive quotes from this book to establish my personal definition of hip for this essay.

“Oprah Talks to Tina Fey” O, The Oprah Magazine. Harpo Productions. February 2009. Web. 18 April, 2011. In this interview article, Oprah and Tina discuss her role as the first female head writer for Saturday Night Live and the show’s misogynistic past. I will tie this in to the misogyny seen in “hip”. I will also use information from this article to discuss Tina’s background and education and detail the different ways she has expressed her identity and roles.

Palin, Sarah. America By Heart: Reflecctions on Family, Faith, and Flag. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Print. In this book Sarah Palin discusses her values in light of American history, recent events, and our culture. I will use this book to look at the values that drive her actions, which in turn should help me forecast her future course in politics and pop culture.

---. Going Rogue: An American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Print. This book is Sarah Palin’s memoir, written and published shortly after the 2008 election. It details her early life and education, her entrance into politics, and her experiences as a highly-public working mother. This book will help me define her as a woman who bucks the status quo on many different levels, as well as providing information on the various reinventions of self she has undergone over the course of her life and career.

Traister, Rebecca. Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print. This book contains a chapter that details Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live impressions of Sarah Palin, along with other pop culture parodies that impacted the 2008 election. I will use this to look at the impact of pop culture, specifically political satire as trickterism as a mechanism for shaping public opinion and political matters.

Westfall, Sandra Sobieraj. "The Palins Get Real." People 74.19 (2010): 56-61. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Apr. 2011. This article looks at the Palin family and their recent entrance into reality tv. I plan to use a quote from this article to talk about Sarah Palin’s view on having the opportunity to influence the thinking of others.

Women have hips, but somehow it's not enough

            “That whole obsession with hip is like collecting records or whatever. It’s more of a male thing.”

– Kim Gordon

            Hip, as I’ve defined it this semester, is gender-blind. If hip is the reinvention of self as an expression of individuality, without regard to the past or the future, and involving knowledge or awareness not common to all, then anyone can be hip. Regardless of race. Regardless of political party affiliation. Regardless of religious beliefs. Regardless of gender.

It is interesting to me that John Leland chose to devote a whole chapter to women in his book, Hip: The History, just to say that women play a minor or side role, while at the same time declaring that hip is more feminine than masculine. Huh? 

            Perhaps this is just one more way of exploring the contradictions of hip, and the blurring of lines between different things. Certainly, in many ways, there are more differences between the genders than there could possibly be between races.

            Case in point: our discussion on the differences between men and women in ability to simply walk away from their offspring, and so cut themselves off from both past action and future consequence.

            In looking at “hip” as the creative force of popular culture, and asking the question “Is Hip indeed a sexist, misogynistic, male-dominated playground, or is there more to Hip than that?” I agree with the viewpoint that was expressed in class that since Hip is a reflection of popular culture, and our American culture has historically been male-dominated (with related complications of sexism and misogynism), Hip can’t help but reflect those influences.

            I think Kim Gordon’s answer to the question of hip is the perfect reply. She is basically saying, “I’m a woman and I don’t even care if all these men are focused on what is hip. It does not have any bearing on me.”

The hook of hip and a look towards the future

Our discussion in class on Thursday was interesting. Sort of. I think the most interesting thing about it was the conclusion that maybe John Leland just wanted to write a book about race relations in the history of America but needed a “hook” to get people to read his ramblings. So, he entitled his book “Hip: The History” and led his prospective audience to believe he was writing about popular culture. What a trickster!

 And now we draw the semester to a close by projecting hip ten years or more into The Future. So, I guess the question in my mind is should I pursue the idea of “hip” as a representation of popular culture? Or should I follow Leland’s lead and project race relations 10 years from now?  Urgh. Maybe the biggest question of all is will I be able to escape my past and reinvent myself as an idividual who never thinks about "hip" again?

Cartoons and Race in America

I have watched a lot of cartoons in my lifetime. I grew up in an era when Saturday mornings were cartoon time. As in, we did not have access to animation 24-hours a day, seven days a week, as I know many of my classmates in this English class (and my own children) did. We watched Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, The Roadrunner, Mighty Mouse, and Super Chicken. We also watched a lot of Disney. Never once did we see that we were being exposed to racism in our Saturday morning entertainment.

Maybe that’s because the heart of cartoons is the art form of caricature. Merriam-Webster has this to say about caricature:

1car·i·ca·ture noun

\ˈker-i-kə-ˌchu̇r, -ˌchər, -ˌtyu̇r, -ˌtu̇r, -ˈka-ri-\

Definition of CARICATURE

1: exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics

2: a representation especially in literature or art that has the qualities of caricature

3: a distortion so gross as to seem like caricature

(Dictionary and Thesaurus)

Caricature is, by its very nature, exaggerative and distortional. It is not a picture of life as it is, but rather life skewed to the ridiculous. I guess I have a hard time finding the insult in something I know is not intended to be a portrait of life as it is or life as it ought to be, but rather is a portrait of life distorted.

In an attempt to meet the expectations for this blog assignment, I watched all the cartoons posted on Blackboard and decided to take a careful look at “All This and Rabbit Stew”. This cartoon features a hunter who is a black man, portrayed as a bumbling “sucker”, who is hunting Bugs Bunny. Taken by itself, it is easy to point out specifics in the cartoon, such as the physical characteristics of the hunter that seem to almost play on minstrel blackface, or the end of the cartoon where the hunter is distracted by the opportunity to play at a game of dice rather than continuing to hunt his prey, and cry “Racial prejudice foul!”

On the other hand, when looking at the cartoon listed on Blackboard simply as “Bugs Bunny”, where once again, Bugs is being hunted, again by a bumbling character, this time a white Mountie with a speech impediment, the viewer is less inclined to want to raise a cry of “Foul!” (Unless you have a pronounced lisp – then you might take offense at the character of Elmer Fudd.)

Why is that? Maybe it is simply the perspective of sensitivity. I think that perhaps, at the time these cartoons were created, people were less sensitive to issues of race than we are now, having had the benefit of the Civil Rights Movement in our history.

Works Cited

Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. 2011. Web. 06 Apr. 2011. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caricature>.

A couple more random thoughts about Bamboozled

·         It was very interesting to me that in the movie, Bamboozled, there were only three white characters prominent enough in the story to merit names and 2/3 of them believed they were black and the other 1/3 of them had made it their life’s work to become an “expert” on being black.

·         If the takeaway from this movie is that race is an essential element of each individual, therefore not subject to changing no matter how that person may wish to reinvent themselves, then the conclusion we have to draw is that reinvention can only apply to behavior. You can not control WHO you are; you can only control HOW you act.

Whole Lotta Trickery Goin On!

If a person watched only the first half of Bamboozled, they would probably come away from that experience convinced that Pierre Delacroix was the trickster. He manipulates his situation by creating a minstrel show, Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, as a way of trying to get one over on his boss and the network he works for, in order to get fired which would release him from his contractual obligation to the network.

In doing this, he appears to display many of the attributes of the trickster: He undermines the unspoken rules of the culture with regard to race. He pits his intelligence and wit against his racist white boss, who holds the power in the situation. He seeks to enlighten the masses with his show, expecting the audience to respond with outrage. Certainly, he creates chaos, as depicted in the scene where the Reverend Al Sharpton and Johnnie Cochran lead protests against the show. He plays on long-held stereotypes and assumptions of the audience (though he makes the mistake of believing that the audience didn’t really subscribe to those stereotypes).

Had the film ended with Pierre’s dismissal from the network known as “CNS”, and his landing a writing job with another network, where his efforts to launch a new show that would cast black people as intelligent, positive role models, we would all applaud his skill as the trickster in getting over on the folks at CNS. But somewhere along the line, Pierre’s efforts at playing the trickster went horribly wrong, and the situation spirals completely out of his control. He ends up dead, and so do several other characters.

Maybe the real trickster in this film is Pierre’s assistant, Sloan. After all, she is the only one who went into the creation of the show with her eyes wide open, and unlike Pierre, she was able to still keep that focus, even after the show was a success instead of resulting in Pierre’s dismissal.

On the other hand, maybe the racially-insensitive boss, Thomas Dunwitty, is the real trickster. He is, in the end, just about the only character in the movie who has not suffered some sort of loss by the end of the film. In fact, it’s not a far stretch to imagine that for him, life goes on as usual after the deaths of both his writer and his former star, as he viewed their talents as “nothing special” and easily replaced.

If this movie is considered a modern commentary on the trickster figure, I think the message is that you’d better be careful when you set out to play the trickster because things may not turn out the way you foresee and your trickery may backfire on you. Then the joke is on you.