Theory and Practice of Composition
Richard Avedon
William Casby, Born a Slave - 1963
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Q: Is this the Gordon Parks photo discussed in Rice’s article?
A: Yup.
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LEONARD FREED
New York City 1963, silver print, ca. 1963
13 3/4 x 9 1/2.
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Jazz: (Chicago) Grand Terrace–1930s, 1964, photomontage, 35 x 47 in.
Estate of Romare Bearden, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York and Munich
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Freddie Roach’s Mo Green’s Please. Cover designed by Reid Miles.
A mystory in progress.
Entertainment.
Fugazi.
An American DIY post-hardcore band that formed in Washington, D.C. in 1987. The band’s continual members were guitarists Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto (who both shared vocal duties), bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty. Noted for their ethical stance and manner of business practice, the band experienced commercial success during the 1990s while remaining on their independent record label, Dischord Records, which MacKaye and Co. formed themselves and continue to maintain in Washington, D.C. Fugazi has been on hiatus since 2002.
The band’s first album, Repeater, was released in January 1990.
A Dialogue between two high school kids.
Clov: Fugazi has to be the greatest band alive.
Hamm: Yeah, absolutely. But I wonder whether the ethos of the band precedes their musical legacy.
Clov: I worry about that, too. They only charge $5.00 for a show. They don’t do corporate interviews. They refuse to sell t-shirts and other such merchandise unrelated to the music itself.
Hamm: Yes, I agree that they certainly are anti-corporations. But I don’t believe their anti-capitalist as many young and naive punk rockers live to espouse.
Clov: What do you mean?
Hamm: They sell records. They produce a commodity and distribute the product, albeit for a consistently fair price. They Do it all themselves, hence DIY. They’re like a microcosm of capitalism, and a successful one at that, that refuses to endorse the illegitimate and unethical business practice of large conglomerates and corporations.
Clov: Yeah, and Repeater, like, totally rules.
Hamm: Totally.
Personal.
I worked at Hy-Vee Foods in high school. I was a bagger, then a cashier, and then I worked in produce. I didn’t take the job too seriously, and I often sat in back freezer on top of milk crates drinking Hee-Haw soda (Hy-Vee’s equivalent of Mountain Dew). I was dedicated to school. Not Hy-Vee.
Turns out Hy-Vee wanted to give me a scholarship for college. That was nice of them.
When Fugazi was a struggling band in a tour van, they played in Omaha at a local grocery store. It was not Hy-Vee.
[An unfinished product.]
I was going to post some kind of “April Fools’ blog” in which I planned to lambaste technology and glorify “the good old days” before computers were invented “when times were simpler” and “white men ruled academia.” Such a lark no longer holds my interest. (April Fools’ Day is lame.)
Orson Welles did an radio advertisement for the record shop I worked at in Omaha (Antiquarium Records). This was during a period when Welles for schilling for everything and everyone willing to pay. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to loiter around the record shop, always bumming change for more anodyne.
heuretic (as distinct from hermeneutic). The term itself did not enter critical discourse until Gregory Ulmer introduced it in Teletheory (1989) and developed it in Heuretics (1994). In both of these books, Ulmer observes that vanguard artists have routinely employed texts generatively. [1]
Ulmer says: “When I was growing up I hated country and loved rock” (263).
I felt the same way…. I associated country with rednecks sitting around watching Nascar and listening to Garth Brooks. In high school, my journalism instructor played me Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” and opened my eyes.
I don’t associate Hank Williams with home. I don’t associate his music with gravel, wide open plains, and AM radio. I associate Hank Williams with academia, with journalism, and with late nights writing news stories.
Syllabus. God, I would love to work music into my syllabus. But how? Maybe I could associate an early project in the semester with music, to help a student create a personal narrative or exposition (rather than an argument). Certainly, I believe that music can be used to create, complement, and augment arguments. But I’m not sure the freshman mindset is ready for such a task. I could be wrong. And there’s no way I would ever ask students to write a cookie-cutter, thesis-centered essay that deconstructs a single song (with lyrics). I can see nothing but failure and frustration resulting from such an assignment. And it’s what Diana George seems to explicitly argue against when she discusses how visual images have been used as prompts for essay writing.
Diana George: “Only rarely do we encounter a suggestion that students might become producers as well as receivers or victims of mass media, especially visual media” (18).
Ad Analysis. We’ve seen it in the writing lab. It’s never very impressive, and the students don’t seem impressed. They don’t care why the leprechaun and vivid colors help to sell Lucky Charms.
Syllabus. My hypothetical syllabus currently exists as a negative definition. My syllabus does not employ any of the techniques and assignments that I consistently read in the writing lab. My syllabus is not.
(a lazy record shop employee enjoys a cigarette. it is christmas in omaha.)
Syllabus. My syllabus does not cause cancer. My syllabus does not celebrate the birth of Christ. Though perhaps my syllabus celebrates place. Hmmm.
How to use visuals? Photos, cartoon, illustrations? Without “dumbing down” or merely “adding spice.” To invoke a sense of purpose.
Design. I’ve seen a design or two in the writing lab. They were pretty bad. A bunch of random photos thrown together haphazardly with Photoshop in an attempt to fulfill an assignment about identity. I don’t blame technology. I don’t blame the student’s inexperience with the technology. I blame the confused nature of the assignment, which seemed to understand visuals as a kind of glitter. I also blame the student’s lack of interest.
God. I need to get away from the writing lab. It has disturbed my outlook.
In times like these, what would Ghostface do?
Syllabus. The language of architecture… Form versus Function. The language of art and design… medium versus content… or better known… medium versus message. This is language to consider in a “new media” syllabus.
Remediation. Take the song “The Way We Were” by Gladys Knight & the Pips. Enter the Wu-Tang.
Can it be that it was all so simple?
