So, I ended up enjoying my stay at the symposium a bit more than expected -- always good when learning tastes better than usual, right? -- and so I ended up checkin' out three oral presentations (actually a few more but they weren't life-altering, I felt :p (Brook's being exempt from this, of course)):
"The Virgin and the Unicorn:The Conception and Birth of an Original Performance Piece in Smolyan, Bulgaria" by Kinsey Keck, DELILAH FUCKIN' YALE GOIN' DOMINGUEZ!!!, and Emily Everidge
"Deep in the Heart of Texas Monthly: Glossy Cowboys and the Performance of Texanness" by Brennan K. Peel
"Comedic Intervention: A Rhetorical Criticism of T.I.'s Road to Redemption on MTV" by Alex Caple
I then also went and checked out the posters and was taken by Andrea Plybon's "Mind Over Music" and Nicholas Parker's "Torture: Is there a Justification?"
I'll go ahead and give my spiel over the oral presentations first -- but to just preface over the oral presentation format in general: I hate the damned only-ten-minutes-or-death increments -- how am I supposed to learn anything in ten minutes and more than that, have an intelligent question to ask over the material that I haven't learned?
This complaint follows me for everyone of these otherwise fascinating topics. Delilah's presentation was about her group's experience with traveling abroad to Bulgaria to work on a truly liberal arts form of acting. They had all spent time researching different classic styles of acting (my favorite being the Trickster, although I didn't get much on that given, argh, the time limit), paying especially close attention to images of actors and acting techniques that they found in the form of everything from pottery to paintings to manuals. Then they all met up in Bulgaria -- the mythological origin of theatre -- and they, along with dozens of other students from all over the place, came together and quilted up what they'd learned from these different styles to apply them to a single story written by Leonardo DaVinci: The Virgin and the Unicorn.
How cool is THAT?
to learn how to move from stagnant images
a patchwork of the ancient to see a mosaic in the new
groups acting as a whole, a unified member
I don't know why, but I just haven't been able to get over the idea of learning how to move from studying an image -- something doomed to never move again, something alien in its oldness teaching modern youth how to contort their bodies in perpetually shifting and flowing spaces
a quilt of theatrical proportions :]
As for the Glossy Cowboys, I actually hadn't planned on going to this one but having a recommendation from my new advisor, Dr. Bednar, (and seeing as I have almost no fellow American Studies majors) I decided to drop by and see what Brennan was up to. Turns out, it was a far more fascinating subject than I'd anticipated -- again, pleasant and tasty.
He started out with three major areas of focus:
the magazine Texas Monthly in and of itself
the tension it creates with actual Texans
and
the ways to try and resolve this tension
The magazine claims to be "the NATIONAL voice of Texas" and yet it also defines Texanness as the upscale and the cowboy -- two things that the majority of Texans are not, seeing as the majority of Texans are poor urbanites. Did you know TX has the highest percentage of uninsured people in the country?
And yet the magazine is the 116th highest grossing magazine in the country (I think, perhaps just Texas, but I'm pretty sure it was throughout the entire country) and won the National Magazine Award in 2003 proclaiming it the best magazine in the entire country for that year -- the Pulitzer of magazine awards, effectively.
But what really got me going was this idea that maybe this is just a small, much more polarized example of the tension within the entirety of America where the bourgeoisie keep throwing out propaganda for the lifestyles obtainable only by the rich and powerful while the majority of Americans are middle class to poor and just struggling to get by let alone purchase $7,000 cowboy boots just because John Travolta made it cool.
Then, of course, there's the coolness of the identity paradox that Brook C. came up with (and which Brennan very astutely addressed) about people finding themselves stuck between trying to be individualistic by not being Texan while at the same time trying to be Texan so as to not conform to the rest of the country -- a struggle between individual, regional, and mass cultural identities -- SO NEAT!
Hooray for the American Studies majors! :D
And then there was Alex Caple and T.I.
Now, I'll admit, I had no idea who T.I. was before this presentation but Alex is just such a fantastic presenter, speaking so conversationally and confidently and clearly, very easy to follow. So I ended up learning about T.I. the rapper/businessman who was arrested for illegal gun possession and then praised all up and down MTV for his contributions to his community even though it's all part of a mandatory community service sentence on top of his potential jail time. Essentially the presentation focused on the ad campaigns released about T.I. and how the televising of his community service made him more of a comedic hero rather than a redemptive thug or shameful convict.
Awesome. He hasn't even served his time yet and he's already being praised for his rehabilitation. That's definitely a role model I want for my children.
Then, of course, there's the poster presentations, which, I'll admit now, I definitely didn't enjoy as much as the oral presentations. But I paid some special attention to Andrea Plybon's "Mind Over Music" because I actually helped out with that one a bit (a VERY tiny bit) at its inception. It's a really awesome program, similar to what our group has been doing with the kids at the Boys and Girls Club where she goes to a local elementary school and stays after with some kids and works with them to put music in a multitude of different settings and thus make it more accessible for them, more sensible and useful. This is a particularly important and even noble program, I think, since music programs all over the country are hurting right now -- something that makes absofreakinlutely no sense to me given the sudden concern everyone seems to be feelin' for kids' failing math scores. C'est la vie, oui?
As far as the Torture board is concerned, I just thought it was neat considering our earlier discussions about torture warrants and whether or not those were justifiable. :] everything's connected, right?
The web of our lives is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together -- Mr. Shakespeare
peace out for now, cool kats
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