Juuust Perfect...

Thought you guys might be able to relate to this. 

Just about to save an afternoon's worth of writing onto my flashdrive when Open Office decides to crash...and then fail to recover my document. Needless to say, many items were thrown and F-bombs dropped.

Now if you'll excuse me...I think I need to go set my room on fire.  

Problems with My Paper

Alright so as far as the progress on my paper goes, I'm not too worried about it. There are only a couple of things keeping me from finishing it:

1. I still need to find some secondary sources on shamanism culture and their use of dreams. This should be pretty easy, I just have to buckle down in the library for a few hours one afternoon.

2. Currently, I'm busy finishing up a lot of other crap for other classes. Their due dates are sooner than this paper, so most of my energy the last few weeks has been spent working on getting that stuff taken care of. But after next Monday I'll have everything for all my other classes pretty much done, and have lots of time to focus on finishing up this paper and another short one, both due on finals week.

So that's really it.

Straight from the Vaults of a Dream Journal

In the bed, eyes shut. Now open – heart still beating – breath seems normal, smelling of a new day. But why so dark? How could I ever see in all this sudden darkness? Rising up from the yawning pits and folds of my sheets, I tugged the two rope-vine strings hanging near that giant, square leaf of shade that always blinds my room from any sort of morning light. It clickity-clacked, burned and hissed itself up into a nice fold – an ordered thing – to the ceiling where a slice of morning rushed through the window and warmed the carpet under my feet. And such a spring day it was, as I've ever seen.

Everyone was already buzzing. The air so crisp you could almost picture the sound of grass being cut at the park across the street, as the mower blade sweeps over every individual leaf. I heard once that the smell of it is actually a plant distress signal. And with the dewy wetness of the lawn at this hour, I'm sure it only exacerbates the scent and adds to our pleasure. The neighborhood was walking and talking, some a little faster, rolling off to work, coffee in hand, children at their waist, being dragged by the dog, but all of them busy. I turned away from the window and stretch, stretch, stretched up in the air before I walk around my house and open all the windows to let the sunshine in.

I poured a bowl of cereal after moseying into the kitchen, and sat down with a spoon in hand. I devour my cereal every morning, sometimes using three of four spoonfuls of sugar and always coming back at least once for seconds. This gives me plenty of time to think, contemplate the sunshine, and stare out the window at everyone's business.

I'm crunching away at my second bowl and watching a squirrel with his morning nuts get chased by two birds when I hear a knock at the door. It was a very strange knock, too, for such an early hour. Whoever it was on the other side rapped on my screen like a ham fisted salesman, who, having so many Christmas meats to sell, placed two in each hand and didn't leave a free one for knocking. But it's not even near Christmas, and the salespeople never show up until at least 9 a.m. So why is it so loud...and so constant?

I open the door and standing before me is the most regular looking couple I have ever seen. Surprised to find them both staring directly at me through the screen, I jumped a little as I nudged the door open. They looked new to the neighborhood, or at least I had never seen them before. All the same, they somehow looked as though they could have been here for years. Perhaps they didn't step out of the house too often. Between them was a black baby stroller, covered up from view as if to hide their child from the sun. It was such a nice morning out, I almost felt bad that they didn't crack it open a little bit.

“H-Hello” I said in the most neighborly voice I could muster at eight a.m., “How may I help you folks on this beautiful spring morning?” Both of them paused and stared at me for a few seconds as if it hadn't registered that I had been talking.

The woman cocked her head and smiled at me in a way that I only see in the toothpaste commercials. “Me and my husband were just taking a stroll through the neighborhood with our son, and couldn't help but notice that you were sitting down for some breakfast” she replied without breaking her smile, “May we come in?”

The man never moved an inch, but only stared at me with a blank, dead face and said “Yes, you see my wife and I have been traveling for some time now, and we're really just looking for a meal before we hit the road again.” I glanced behind them and didn't see any sort of vehicle. And what were they doing in this part of town anyway, and how did they know I was eating breakfast? Maybe they peeked in through the windows and saw me.

The constant stare of the couple as they awaited my suspicious reply was suddenly broken when the stroller started rocking back and forth, and heard the baby's cry begin to creep softly out from under the black canopy. The woman turned her eyes up from the stroller to me and spoke softly over the baby's cries “He must be hungry. Will you please let us in?”

Feeling a sudden swell of pity rise up for the couple, I nodded my head and said “Of course, of course, come on in! Make yourself at home. Not sure what I have in the way of baby food, but I probably have enough cheerios and milk for everyone.” I turned around and motioned with an arm for them to come on inside, and turned to walk back towards the entryway. They must have entered very quickly and quietly because by the time I turned back around to see what they were doing, they had already entered and found themselves standing in the exact same fashion as they were outside. Walking over to introduce myself and take their jackets for them, I asked “So, what are all of your names?”

The woman smiled, shook my hand, and turning to the man said, “This is my husband, James, and our one year-old boy, Oliver. My name is Lucy, nice to meet you, too.”

“Nice to meet you all, as well” I said, “Would you like some help with that the stroller?”

“Sure” replied Lucy, “Just let me grab Oliver for you real quick.” She bent down to uncover the canopy from off the stroller, and hold the fussy child. As the canopy came back I saw James leave to bar and lock the door behind us. I started to ask him what he was doing, but when I looked back at Lucy I cried out in fear, as my knees buckled to floor in horror. For in the stroller sat the most deformed, and shrivelled child I had ever seen. His skin was a morbid blue-gray color, with patches of rotting flesh that appeared to be eaten away, as if he had just been dug up after lying stiff in the cold, dead ground. He stared at me with wide pupils, and smiled a sharp, fanged smile. “Wave hello to the nice lady who invited us for breakfast” said Lucy sweetly as she picked him up out of the stroller “You won't have to be hungry for very much longer, dear.”

I screamed and desperately tried to get up and run away but I couldn't. I couldn't stop staring at the couple, or into their baby's hungry eyes. They all moved closer to me. Little Oliver slowly reaches out to my torso as they draw nearer, his palms stretched wide, his pudgy, rotting face full of innocent wonder, and pulling the shirt from off my stomach laughs in the only way a child could ever laugh on a sunny spring morning at breakfast time. In the bed, eyes shut, I can't move.    

A Connoisseur of Many Fanciful Flights and Descents, Magnificent

I have taken a change of direction, and decided instead to do my paper on dreaming. The dream world is something that has always fascinated me, and for good reason since I think it's the source for a lot of humanity's creative and imaginative resources, especially for us as writers. Dreams have acted as a wellspring of information for psychologists, story tellers, evolutionary survival tactics, and is something that every living creature throughout every age has had in common. Like so many other ideas, a paper on dreaming is something that I've always wanted to write but never gotten around to.

I really don't want to get too specific about my topic yet because I want to start out very broad and then wait and see what roads it will lead me down, and focus it there. But I was thinking for primary research, it would be interesting to get some volunteers (friends, family, myself) to start recording their dreams in a journal. The journal could consist of anything from the events in the dream to how it made the person feel. Of course, the more brutal the honesty there is, and the more the participants are willing to share their dreams, the better the results will be. From there I could maybe develop some questions to ask as well. With the raw materials, and my creative inspiration, in place already, my secondary research could take me down many different, and equally interesting, venues. Of course, there is the research done by Jung (with his collective human unconscious) and Freud (with his dream interpretation) that would give plenty of psychological background. There is also the more pseudo-scientific realm of lucid, or conscious, dreaming that has always been a personal favorite of mine. Secondary sources would be much harder to come by with this sort of thing, though. Then last but not least, there are the fascinating dream cultures of the world that place a high priority on what goes on behind our eyelids at night, and use it for practical applications in their own world. Also, the dream world is viewed as a source of many a man's mythical story origins, if I wanted to go a more literary route with it. I'm sure there have been a lot of studies done on this sort of thing.

Just a slew extremely broad questions I would like to start out with are, why do we dream? What can our dreams tell us about real life? How can we relate our dreams to our own personal experiences, and what value do they still hold? How does one achieve lucidity in dreams? What sort of connections can be made between dreaming and the human imagination? How do dreams affect our sense of spiritual awareness? I could probably go on for the rest of the page on various questions to ask, and the topic of dreaming is an expansive, but nonetheless, important one. But that's what makes this topic so exciting is the fact that there are so many questions to be asked and so many different approaches to be taken.

Final Photo Essay

Link to Photographs:

Urban Agriculture

As writers...some things seem to take shape on their own volition, as if there were some force hiding from us of a universal and potent quality that is too big to comprehend. It has to be dealt out in small servings and tirelessly searched for. It has to wear a veil so that we may only peek at it every now and again. Sometimes it seems like reality is just a reference point, or medium, through which this force communicates to us. There is a necessary filter in our minds, put in place to shadow these somethings, that we may slowly uncover little sparks of what humanity has been searching for, lest everything happen all at once and we are consumed. Yet...somehow Plato was able to escape the cave.

There are little gaps in reality, tiny glitches in the matrix that don't seem to make sense, places in the air that seem to have burped, shifted it's contents along a fault line, and revealed a crevasse descending down, down, deep into the rabbit hole. As humans, these are the places where we must look. These things we see every day that don't make a lot of sense will eventually emit shafts of light like the macro-cosmic face of God trying to squeeze through the sheer eye of a pinhole. And even these small portions are too confusing, but it's our only way of making sense of it. Out of every banality, there is something to be said. It is in these little gaps that we must look to find some sort of truth, and meaning for our lives. Our job as writers is to dive in to these holes, try to interpret towards the bottom, and resurface to name the unnameable.

What I see going on in these photos is one of those glimpses meant to be extracted from behind the curtain of reality. It is a tension creating a crevasse. The reason I've called this collection Urban Agriculture is because what I see going on in these photos resembles the tension that occurs when urban environments intrude into that of the pastoral, especially in the business of agriculture. Our romantic vision of a typical farm setting usually consists of an ideal world with bright red barns, quaint wooden fences, and clothing hanging out on the line. It's where chickens are not cooped up, cattle roam freely through the pasture, and farmer John still works with plow in hand as he sows seeds that have never heard of pesticides or Monsanto products. However, we know that this often not the case. There is a gap here that is getting wider. Reality is crumbling at the nexus of a few grain silos. What was once a symbol of abundance and prosperity is now a symbol of poverty and better days, as graffiti begins to declare war on the sides of walls. It reminds us now, instead, of a standard of life we have set for ourselves that is reaching a point of excess and unsustainability. It's all machinated. And from here, we gain access to the bottom of the well. 

Urban Agriculture: Where the Pastoral, Art, and Industrial Urbanization Meet

Here's a link to the photos, first of all. I was having trouble figuring out how to put a slideshow on here:

Urban Argriculture

I'll have to be honest, when I first set out to take these pictures, I didn't really have a particular theme in mind. I kind of just decided to go for it and see what happened. To my pleasant surprise, the theme I was apparently searching for just happened to take shape on it's own volition. I love it when life works out that way. I've included a lot more than ten, but seeing as how this was our first presentation I just decided to post all the ones I thought were worth keeping and get your guys' opinions on them. From there, I plan to narrow this collection down a little bit, and maybe even go out and take some more.

  Before I even decided on a theme, I knew I wanted to try my best to keep a sense of symmetry and order. The formal structuring of the photos helps to convey more of a sense of how farming, once a messy, work-with-your-hands job, is being transformed into more and more a corporate business, rather than one which is privately owned. The symmetrical ordering helped to conjure up the thought-out structural formalities that you might find in a city blueprint, as opposed to the more chaotic blueprint of nature. This sort of rigidly planned aspect I think helped to offer a nice tension for the context of a pastoral world that is not rigidly planned at all.

The reason I've called this collection Urban Agriculture is because what I see going on in these photos resembles the tension that occurs when urban environments intrude into that of the pastoral, especially in the business of agriculture. Our romantic vision of a typical farm setting usually consists of an ideal world with bright red barns, quaint wooden fences, and clothing hanging out on the line. It's where chickens are not cooped up, cattle roam freely through the pasture, and farmer John still works with plow in hand as he sows seeds that have never heard of pesticides or Monsanto products. However, we know that this often not the case. As the world grows larger we see a blurring of the line between urban and rural, in so far as the rural landscape is becoming almost an extension of it's urban twin, both in look and in lifestyle. Grain silos grow taller and larger as companies begin to take control. Silos start looking more like rural skyscrapers as a fast-growing nation quickly reaches a sustainability breaking point. What was once a symbol of abundance and prosperity is now a symbol of poverty and better days, as graffiti begins to declare war on the sides of walls. It reminds us now, instead, of a standard of life we have set for ourselves that is reaching a point of excess and unsustainability. It's all machinated. For once, there is now a man-made boundary that exists between agriculture and nature, and one can start to see more resemblances of an urban environment.

In the Lobby of the Secret Service Headquarters There Hangs a Picture of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Coincidence?

Richard Ross / Architecture of Authority

     


Richard Ross' photography, and especially his collection Architecture of Authority, stood out to me more than any of the other photo essays that were presented to us, both in subject matter and in form. With the orderly, symmetrical arrangement and subtle, yet, domineering and dramatic perspective of the objects in the picture, it felt like I was looking at a still from the police state love-child of Pink Floyd's The Wall and a Stanley Kubrick film (which, as an afterthought, would be a pretty bad ass combination for a movie).

By making good use of the architectural elements present in his environment, Ross projects an aesthetically pleasing, yet very disturbing perspective onto everyday objects that would otherwise remain dry and static. But still, the most interesting thing about these photographs is that in his critique of institutionalized power and abuse of authority they manage to remain absent and void of any presence of these same corrupt authority figures, or of any human life form. It's almost as if the corruption existed within the present space itself, as if it was there when it was built, as if the purpose behind this architectural design was masterminded with the principles of domination and submission, the master/slave relationship, in mind. 

The elements of action in this photograph (which happen to be furniture and other various household scenery) only create meaning from how their forms interact with each other within their predefined spaces, and therefore, paradoxically transform the viewer into a passive subject predestined by his environment. They show humanity as a majority living under the suspicious thumb of a precious, paranoid few who wish to remain this way through the guise of propaganda that tells its subjects "Be A Happy Worker!" And the only reason these elements are effective is because they lack a human presence. With bodies filling the seats of the auditoriums and prison cells, we lack a proper structural perspective on how these institutions are inherently set up to control and indoctrinate the individual. The creepy, cathartic feeling that the viewer is left with comes from the sudden realization that these are scenes and activities that we participate in every day.

What Ross is getting at is not so much that corruption of power exists within the individual, but in the established system he has created for himself that is almost doomed to breed corruption. His photos depict an almost Orwellian society of citizens who are predetermined, by simple fact of behavioral conditioning through environmental stimuli, to be unwillingly manipulated into obedience. And within these manipulative scenes, Ross simultaneously manages to also bring broad overtones of aesthetic pleasure which inspire fantastical dreams of grandeur and beautiful architectural landscapes within a man-made world, that seeks to subvert any sort of fantasy or beauty that might remain. And therein lies the trickery. It's almost as if these scenes were artificially in place before humanity, like a child's empty play set, constructed by the powers that be, which already has the Barbie dream house and the Malibu roadster, and just needs some bodies to fill the seats and carry out instructions. The only exception is that the dream house is a heavily surveillanced prison cell and the Malibu roadster is your inevitable casket hurling down the interstate at 85 mph (not that we would know the difference between dream houses and prison cells, anyway). Man is a victim in the environment of his own invention.