Final Reflection

Final Revision

Kevin Figueroa Midterm Reflection – my midterm reflection

Shirts – My Original Essay

For the week I had planned to spend finding footage for this project—footage that would go along with the storyboard I wrote for it—I ended up flying to Puerto Rico with the majority of my quite large family. Parts of my family that hadn’t seen each other in years gathered in Ponce for one person: my grandfather. We were celebrating what we were told would likely be his last birthday.

After hours of Premiere Pro tutorial videos and scrambling to find meaning in footage of my family that I felt could relate to my project, I didn’t feel that what I had finished with was representative of the amount of work I’d put into it. I preferred for people not to see it. I’m not embarrassed of my work; I just don’t want my peers to see work that I don’t feel is ready for presentation. I guess it’s just what you’d expect from someone who changes their shirt thrice a day.

The video essay is meant to explore a simple idea: that what is on the outside does not always reflect what is on the inside. Instead of the footage I had meant to find, most of the footage is of my time in Puerto Rico with my family, spending a week together in a way my family never had before. Though it was my grandfather’s wish to see his island one more time with his family, the journey was not a sad one, and the essay, I hope, reflects that.

The subject matter in Lia Purpura’s “Autopsy Report” is well-suited for the visual language Purpura employs in her essay; in it, the human body—already a familiar subject—is compared to a wide and wild variety of images. Ribs become “ice-shelves, sandstone” (1), the body she inspects “turns to marble before us” (3), and layers of fat seem “yellow as a cartoon sun, as sweet as sweet cream butter” (6). These comparisons are rather unexpected, as things which might normally be considered off-putting or distasteful or —the innards of the human body—are made to seem rather ordinary, and, at times, even elegant.

The perspective of the narrator does much to direct the attitudes of the reader toward the subject material, as well. For example, Purpura describes how she laughed when first introduced to a row of bodies. That she is taken by the “weird gestures” of the bodies, which “looked entirely staged” (3) causes the reader to view the scene as less gruesome as they adopt the viewpoint of the narrator. Visual language in “Autopsy Report” works to soften the harshness of real autopsies. Images of a human organs assembled on a table, of a brain being held firmly to prevent its “jiggling,” or of bullet holes tearing open a chest are not ones commonly associated with heaps of fruit and constellations. Purpura’s decision to do so is a bold one that allows her to tackle a difficult and rather grisly topic in an appropriate and accessible manner.

The first thing I noticed about video essays—from a general standpoint, at least—is what I felt was a bit of a disjunct between the number of separate media being used. Written essays, being one medium, are the smoothest essays in regards to communication, if only because of our ability to go back and clarify certain points. Audio essays use sound effects in a way that is meant to enhance the dialogue. But video essays, on the contrary, force your senses to compete for attention as two sometimes difficult-to-connect  stories unfold before you: one for your eyes, and another for your ears.

Steven Chen’s Grandpa has perhaps the most startling contrast between what is being said and what is being shown, at least at its beginning. The surreal dinner being had would be a shocking scene speaking volumes on its own; the boy at the head of the table, dressed in and painted blue, exudes loneliness and stands out in his silence while surrounded by rambunctious conversation from his red-dressed companions. Moreover, it was interesting to me that the conversation being had at the table was in Cantonese, and the four men and women painted and dressed in red appeared to be caucasian. This image clearly illustrate’s Chen’s internal conflict between his split Asian and caucasian ancestry, and the way he faces his own confusing heritage.

When we discussed using music and sound effects in audio essays in class, one point that was brought up was the importance of avoiding using sound as a way to cover up flaws or weaknesses in an essay—essentially, the importance of using effects in a way meant to enhance what is being said, as opposed to repeating it or reinterpreting it. Chen, I believe, does this well with the mix of video imagery and dialogue. His use of old-time footage of his own family creates a closeness to the subject matter, a very personal intimacy with his grandparents, even though he himself feels an enormous distance between himself and the Cantonese half of his family. Chen claims near the end of the video that he does not seek answers, but instead seeks discussion and dialogue between himself and the relatives with whom he has not yet been able to communicate more than superficially. I feel that Chen’s video keeps up a sort of dialogue with itself in the way that Chen explores his own desire to learn about his family while creating an artistic project that, in being created, brings Chen closer to his grandparents.

In all honesty, I couldn’t stand Yoder’s use of music in her essay, and for several reasons. It seemed (to me, at least) that many of Yoder’s musical selections were often disjunctive, and did more to stand alone as musical excerpts than to complement the essay. Yoder’s choice to have the ominous church choir playing under her voice was a somewhat ironic move at the beginning of her essay, considering she spends that first part describing the aspects of her growing up that she detested: growing up in a “hippie intellectual Mennonite utopia,” the redneck teens, the casual racism that was a regular part of her daily life. It also felt rather unnecessary to have full stops for the church choir between parts of the essay; around 3:15, the choir dies down and disappears while Yoder speaks, then comes in strong once more just ten seconds later—this felt unnecessary.

Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, “The Kitchen Sisters,” bring up how they search for ways to incorporate music into their essays in a fluid way that does not “compete” with the voice of the speaker. Yoder’s musical choices sometimes felt more like repetitions of her essay, instead of illustrations or mood-setters or atmosphere-builders to complement it. When Yoder talks of listening to “Jojo’s chant of ‘Let me freak you,'” she then plays exactly that part of the song (6:06). Although, to Yoder’s credit, the country-style music she chooses are inserted much more casually and relevantly than her hip hop choices. The country-style acoustic guitar playing and sounds of kids yelling around 4:45 feels appropriate and guides the listener’s focus towards images of whooping country kids shooting guns into the air and leaping in the beds of pickups. Unfortunately, these good choices are quickly overshadowed by the almost comedically upbeat and powerful hip hop songs that provide too sharp a contrast against Yoder’s happy-but-not-energetic tone.

I saw a pattern in Yoder’s essay, where she makes a reference to a particular song or artist, plays a piece of that song to illustrate, and then leaves the song playing in the background, only to eventually die out. It’s a pattern that I felt didn’t enhance the essay as much as give it another layer that felt more like an interpretation of what was being said.

Jonathan Mitchell, in his essay, writes about the importance of music having a real purpose. Mitchell brings up an important point: music should only be added if it’s significant that it be added. Bringing music into a piece only to distract from other, less appealing aspects of the recording is a waste and a distraction. He writes that music should give an essay “deeper meaning, resonance, and clarity;” while I feel that much of Yoder’s essay resonate more clearly with the musical accompaniment, I don’t believe it’s meaning and it’s clarity were improved by Jodeci’s sensually singing, “I wake up feeling horny” into my headphones.

One of the first things I noticed about Wheeler: he uses a lot of adjectives. His listed descriptions of the different hands that have passed over the Church foyer’s pews are heavy on the descriptions (the reachy grabby hands of babies, the bony hands of the aged, the strong cold hands of pallbearers). Even though we discussed in class that this may be inadvisable because it doesn’t sound like real speech, Wheeler’s voice for storytelling feels appropriate with his descriptions.  He often uses repetition  in his descriptions in a way that sounds more like poetry than prose at times. The music he keeps playing in the background, what sounds like a soft hymn, carries Wheeler’s story along like a light fog, creating an ominous, but barely perceptible atmosphere. Wheeler’s pauses are rarely silent; they tend to leave “just the already-established ambience of the scene for a few seconds or more” (Biewen). His pauses come between introductions of new images in scenes, allowing the listener to allow the scene to enter their minds before having a new one revealed; he stops briefly between sentences when he describes his mother’s vomiting in the night, then describing her looking for a bottle of pills, and then himself, hearing her and then falling back asleep. Each image is one swift scenic punch after another, and the pauses between them are meant not to build suspense, but to allow a moment for the listener to appreciate what has been said.  When Wheeler tells of leaving when everyone is praying for his sister, and he says, “I’d be the only one to blame” the pause that follows is one that feels as though Wheeler has stepped  away from the audience and is taking an entirely introspective moment of guilt and shame.

Although Wheeler’s voice never actually sounds the way I’d assume he’d be speaking in real life, every he said sounded natural. Nothing sounded scripted, and there were moments where he swallowed audibly, as if the emotions were real. As we spoke about in class, Wheeler seemed to be speaking as the best version of himself; with flawless descriptions and perfectly placed pauses. In fact, Wheeler’s diction is far enough from normal speech that it begins to sound more and more performance-like. At times, Wheeler’s essay begins to sound more like a spoken word piece or slam poem.

Obviously, this is being posted quite late; I do apologize, reader, for the fact that time management is not—and, indeed, has never been— my forte. Better late than never, I suppose (“and better on time than late” is what my response to that would be).

David Antin’s “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto” is immediately recognizable as a unique piece of work; being devoid of any punctuation and relatively carefree with its spacing, the essay is more a jumble of thoughts and words that reads much more like conversational dialogue than narrative text.

The essay uses many of the same tools and techniques that other essays we’ve read have used—the overlying plot of the mattress-buying that serves as the infrastructure for the more universal concept of accepting one’s own ignorance and forging ahead in spite of it is reminiscent of Lovell’s “invisible cow,” and personality and life are brought to the narrator through the particular manner in which he narrates. However, the essay is somewhat of a phonetic one, in that the text is formatted to imitate the undulations and fluctuations of a person’s voice. The large spaces placed between words are not random; they feel like pauses and breaths being taken by the writer. Oftentimes they sound more like a live-streaming of thought processes—when the man begins doubting himself in the mattress store and says he’s “bailed out,” he doesn’t actually leave his wife, but the reader becomes aware of the narrator’s thoughts in a way even his wife is not aware.

Seeing an essay written with such liberal use of formatting is somewhat liberating in my own essay writing, particularly when I consider having to record myself reading my own essay—I am often keenly aware of the dissimilarity between my written voice and my actual voice.

As a side note, it’s amusingly ironic that the last of Kern’s tips for writing for broadcast is “Check for typos.”

In his essay, Antin takes a perfectly innocent and un-inspirational event and reminds the reader that a philosophical stance can be taken on even the most mundane of things. Antin observes the details of his mattress-purchasing experience, and sees that there are patterns of thought and emotion that are intertwined with everyday life. Just as Antin notes the cyclical  nature of his life through his going through different mattresses and seeing no real change, one could seek patterns of thinking and feeling in our own lives. It is this type of writing that answers questions that few people stop and realize they have.