Wonder: Fireside Chat

I believe in big things: God and ministering angels, family and FRIENDS (of the Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey variety), the wilderness and civic engagement. When I thought about this assignment, though, I kept remembering the little things; moments so small I didn’t know how I could believe in them so enormously. I believe in the purity of the day I went running with my dog and we found half a fragile robin’s egg and I cradled it gingerly all the way home, trying to keep the rain off it without crushing its tiny walls in my palm.

On study abroad in London, I wandered into a local charity shop and found a pair of Nikes, size 8.5, from the coveted Liberty x Nike collection, half price. I’d wanted shoes like these for months. When I wear them now, I say, “I know God doesn’t care about shoes, but he cares about how happy they make me.” It’s become a running nearly-joke: “I know God doesn’t care about pie, but…”, “I know God doesn’t care about hot springs, but…” But doesn’t he? These tiny things I believe in, like a robin’s egg in my hand and my dog panting happily by my feet, are His. And I believe in them quite as wholly as I believe in Him.

My desktop background is the Roald Dahl quote I shared in my fireside chat. “And above all,” he wrote, “watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.” Glittering eyes are the kind of eyes I think my dog must have when she sees a stick and sees what I don’t: running across the yard and bringing it back to her people and playfully fighting for it with her cousin and rolling in the grass after. (Listen, I just consider my dog the eighth natural wonder of the world. Don’t all dog owners?) My cousin must have glittering eyes when he looks at a trampoline and sees a pirate ship and an airplane and a school bus. My roommate must look at European history with glittering eyes because when she tells stories from her textbook, Austrian politics in the 17^th century sound swashbuckling and intriguing, dynamic and dramatic.

So I believe in glittering eyes. And I believe that God cares about my Liberty x Nike charity shop shoes. And I definitely believe He cares about pie. He believes in robins, and their tiny blue eggshells, and in girls going running with their dogs, and in gently rainy days. He believes in wonder, and so I do, too, and maybe that’s what this all comes to. My definition of wonder is synonymous with His definition of tender mercies, of miracles. Maybe I believe so enormously in such tiny things because I see something vast in them: cosmos and eternity and a good God guiding it all.

Concerned Citizen: Aubrey Schuring and Project Consent

Several months ago, I was surprised to read what an old high school friend, Aubrey Schuring, had posted about her last four years. She’d been in a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship all that time, and now, out of it and trying to heal, was speaking out against sexual assault, abuse, and rape culture, “an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused” (Marshall University).

Since the first post I read, Schuring has posted and talked tirelessly, trying to stimulate discussion about these issues. She volunteers with the Center for Women and Children in Crisis as a Rape Crisis Team member, answering phone calls from and making hospital visits to rape victims.  A few months ago, she got a volunteer position as Staff Photographer for Project Consent, “a non-profit, volunteer-based campaign that aims to combat and deconstruct rape culture by raising awareness of the harmful way with which it is regarded in society, educating our audience about the disparity of discussion of sexual assault, and promoting positive dialogue about the importance of consent.”

Schuring has created two photography series for the campaign, Face Value and The Very Best We Can. In the first, she documented the emotions of herself and three other volunteers talking about their experiences with consent. In the second, she created an anonymous survey about consent and photographed models acting out the emotions and stories shared. That’s two stories in four months. But ideally, she said, “I would be doing a project every week or two. But it’s been kind of put on the backburner because people are scared to share.” It’s understandable, she clarified. Rape and sexual assault are hard things to talk about. But if we try to talk about assault, abuse, and rape culture without attaching personal stories, people aren’t going to listen.

Even when she does share stories like her own, Schuring says people aren’t always supportive. Opposition has come from all directions, even family, although she attributes a lot of that to “a generational gap”. The conservative culture in which she is based - Schuring’s a Utah native - balks at the uncensored language and stories often used and shared when discussing rape and sexual assault, and she says people “shut down and they don’t want to listen.” So as passionate as she is about how she wants to communicate the few stories people are willing to share, she’s juggling between telling censored, dehumanized stories that people won’t listen to and the more realistic, more painful stories she wants to tell that people won’t listen to, either.

As Goldbard said in Human Rights and Culture: From Datasan to Storyland, “anyone who wishes to make significant headway on a social problem or opportunity must engage with people’s feelings and attitudes about it.” She acknowledges the importance of telling these stories in a way that even - and maybe especially - her conservative peers, family, and community can understand and relate to. “Right now,” she said, “I’m trying to find a balance.”

Face Value

The Very Best We Can

Project Consent

The Center For Women And Children in Crisis

World Building

Daniel Schindler

Rachel Lawyer

Keith Grover

Tabitha Brower

Artists' Statement:

Our activities in class prompted us to begin this assignment by creating a little bit of history for our world. Our world was a simple: a world in which elderly people are seen as beautiful in the way that young people in our society are seen today. So why is youth seen as beautiful? Youth is equated with a sharp mind, healthy body, and a sign of more years to come. So in order for old age to be seen similarly, it would have to represent those same things. In this society, old age is equated with having survived something others have not. So in our world, nuclear devastation created defects and illness in the newly born. Young people are sick and afflicted, whereas their elders are healthy. Their age indicates affluence, a long life, and wisdom.

With a backstory in mind, we were able to better imagine what kind of artifacts would manifest themselves in such a society. It was hard for us not to focus on things that we see in our own world. The glamorization of youth is often seen in the fashion, beauty, and advertising industries, and the artifacts we created are indicative of this. In a society that values age over youth, these industries which value the outward appearance and pocket change of individuals target the group that is most influential and affluent. They project the type of people that everyone wants to be. So in our magazine, advertisements, and song, we catered to that group by using simple designs, easy to read text, and images both visual and lyrical of wisdom and old age. It is an aesthetic that is created out of an underlying principle of society, inspired by this week’s viewing of La Jetee, where production design and aesthetic choices matches this pioneering science fiction film, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where fashion is based on caste systems and products such as Soma are born of a deeper cultural implication.

We strived to make ourselves a part of this world. While, yes, we were only able to create things that  we have seen or experienced, we were able to arrange them in a way that was new and tailored for our new environment. This, in a way really blurred the line between science fiction and science fact. We had to ask ourselves questions that sometimes we never asked before to enter into this new world. Questions such as: »If I was driving down the freeway, what would I see?« »Would they really wear that?«. What makes this even more interesting is that we all have our own vision on what this world would be like to us, which in some ways was challenging but in others gave our artifacts some dimension. Afterall, it would be strange if every magazine in our society is the same, but there is a common thread that illustrates a cultural trend.

       There is still so much room to grow with this project. In our brainstorming of ideas we talked beyond advertisements and fashion, and discussed how this might affect the value of art in general. In a society devastated by nuclear war, would art even exist in the same way? Would magazines still be a practical way of communication? Or even advertisements? Our advertisements reflect a value of homeopathic remedies over perhaps more complex medications. In a simpler world like the one we imagined, perhaps our artifacts would be of mediums that are completely different than that ones we experience in our society. If we were to further explore this project, we would like to completely change the medium conventions reflected here, but with the same emphasis on the affluence, wisdom, and beauty of age.

Webspinna Battle

Adam Hardy
Tabitha Brower

Austin Kleon wrote, “Steal like an artist,” a phrase he maybe stole (like an artist). We obeyed, first with the textual poaching assignment, then with the Webspinna Battle. Ideas were easy to come by and hard to agree on. Probably subconsciously recasting myself in the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I suggested an elegant couple from the 40s, arguing desperately. Adam thought of a child playing, then fighting – maybe with another child over a beloved toy, maybe with his mother. I kept seeing myself in elegant black and he kept seeing himself in the mismatched rage and confusion of childhood. We came to a compromise we both felt good about: we would play an elegant couple in a child custody battle, and as the battle wore on, we would regress, becoming childlike and ridiculous in our fits of passion. Such were the inelegant origins of perhaps a slightly more elegant idea; we would have our cake and eat it, too.

Originally, we brainstormed for very specific characters. I wanted to use clips from The Queen of Versailles and the horrible ex-girlfriend from The Parent Trap; I was going to be nightmarish and a stereotype and care very, very little for the child for whom I was fighting. Adam searched fart noises and clips of immature men; he was going to be a man-child who cared more about his action figures than his kid. But it evolved into something gentler. We found Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer protesting gently, “I want my child,” and Dustin Hoffman’s concerned, firm “You can’t have him,” and let that be the heart of the piece. From there, we reasoned, we could descend into whatever madness we chose.

Typing and clicking and laughing and maybe getting distracted by too many Flight of the Conchords clips, we found insults and comebacks and adults throwing tantrums  - “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” one screams at her WiFi. Adam was comfortable with the idea of doing everything very freestyle, while I was nervous at the thought of it. So again, another comfortable compromise: we would pull everything together into one blog post, but remix and source and scratch those clips as we wished.

We tried to keep the emotional core firm; inserted amidst the Little Rascals insults and Andy Samberg screaming, “I’m an adult!” someone sobbed, hilariously but genuinely, “I just love him so much!” and Adam Sandler calmly defended his parenting abilities. At the end, though, we wanted to show how ridiculous the whole thing felt to us – not the Webspinna Battle, but the material. The parents we ended up creating were terribly, terribly flawed and childish. My character threw the marks of her adulthood at her ex, hurling earrings and a necklace and mascara; Adam’s pulled out the toys of his youth as weapons, chucking a Hot Wheels car and a shower of tiny campaign buttons.

At the very end, King Solomon decreed from centuries before us, “Cut the living child in two.” We desperately wanted some kind of doll to rip in half at the end, but memory and time failed us and we never got one. But there was something wonderful about inhabiting this half-world between adult and child, fiction and reality, experience by proxy and actual experience. By stealing like magpies,  a little here and a little there, something shiny and something that only looked that way, we built a nest of knick-knacks that I think we’d be proud to live in.

Remixing Rubens' 'Big Girls'

“She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.”

-      -    George Orwell, 1984

I never identified as a “big girl”. I knew “big girls”, and just didn’t see myself in them. However, by 13, I was already heavier and curvier than the majority of the girls in my grade. And these days, at a size 14-16, bra size 36DD, and a weight that I wouldn’t fib about but wouldn’t be particularly forthcoming with, either, I realize I am probably seen as one.

Is that my identifier? Because the things that I see as a key part of my identity are not so obvious. But how do I tell you about being the child of deaf, divorced parents, or about being happily raised in a non-traditional family, or about being 22 and never having had a guy tell me I was pretty? I started following a different train of thought, thinking instead about facets of my identity that are not important to me but are obvious. The clearest was this idea of being a “big girl.”

Rubens came quite immediately to mind. Peter Paul Rubens, a Baroque painter in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, was known for painting beautiful, full-figured women. In his milieu, they were considered “the apogee of beauty” (Alastair Sooke, BBC Culture). And where I have never identified as a “big girl”, I am quick to identify with Rubens’ women.

In our culture, “big girls” can be cute or even pretty, but they are not and cannot be beautiful. Perhaps that is the reason I balk at the label. In the shower, my thighs definitely touch. On the beach in a favorite swimsuit, my stomach has rolls. In bed, wearing as PJs that rom-com-esque oversized men's button-down - well, it fits. But I don’t feel just cute or pretty; I feel beautiful.

Ruben’s depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, sex, and desire, has rolls when she sits. She has cellulite. She has cankles! The goddess Diana barely has a jawline. Rubens’ own wife is painted with a slight double chin. But his women are beautiful.

In Jenkins’ “How Texts Become Real”, he speaks of placing materials in “the context of lived experience. [They] assume increased significance as they are fragmented and reworked.” I fragmented Rubens’ art and milieu, pulling just his women, then considered beautiful, into today’s fashion editorials. I wanted to prove that beauty then can be beauty now. Because perhaps if you see Venus on a modern beach, her stomach folded as she sits, and still think her beautiful, you might reconsider. Rubens’ women, “big girls”, plus-size, curvy, call us what you will - don’t need to be the “apogee of beauty” anymore. Just let us be beautiful.

Historical Story: Gedogen

           

INT. - GEDOGEN COFFEE SHOP IN AMSTERDAM- DAY

Guests lounge, blow smoke, and chat. From the smoke emerges MEIKE (25), she wears an apron and greets guests as they come in. On the wall of the coffee shop is a large ornate and colorful painting of Mary on the wall with the date 1566 engraved on the frame. In a corner table sits a guest whose face is obscured by smoke. Meike makes her way over to this guest and the smoke clears, revealing ANGELA (60). Meike sits down at Angela's table.

MEIKE

It's good to see you, Angela. 

ANGELA

Well you haven't aged a day. 

MEIKE

Ha. I feel ancient. 

ANGELA

And I feel as young as we were the day we met. 

Angela pulls out a lighter and fidgets with it nervously. 

MEIKE

Forty years is too long, Angela. 

Angela flicks her finger over the flame of her lighter back and forth quickly.

MEIKE

I was beginning to think I would never see my only friend ever again. 

Angela's hand shakes involuntarily and she fumbles with the lighter, dropping it. Meike reaches out and catches it before it falls to the floor. 

ANGELA

I'm dying, Meike. 

CUT TO:

EXT. CATHOLIC CHURCH 1566 - NIGHT

Angela stands among a group of protestants outside a Catholic church. Her face is 40 years younger, but full of the same youth and spirit. A man, PETER (30), stands in front of the group and preaches. A POLICE MAN walks by and looks briefly at the protestant group, but keeps on walking.

Peter makes eye contact with another person in the crowd and nods. Angela looks over to see Meike, who looks exactly the same, nod back and duck away from the crowd. 

Meike walks around to the back of the church and Angela follows. There is a SMALL GROUP OF MEN with various axes, torches, and bats. 

MEIKE

The church is empty?

MAN 1 

Aye, sir. 

MEIKE

Be quick and get out then! 

The men storm the church. Meike hangs back a moment and after all the men are in the church, she follows. Angela follows closely behind. 

INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - NIGHT

The men are breaking catholic idols and slashing paintings. Meike excitedly joins in, grabs a torch and drops it on the altar, but Angela reaches out catches it before it falls.

ANGELA

If you burn it now, the police will see the smoke. 

MEIKE

Who are you? What are you doing here?

ANGELA

I'm protestant. Like you. 

Meike shrugs and runs off. Angela watches her as she smashes an idol. Meike looks back and sees Angela watching intently. 

MAN 2

That's everything! Let's get out of here!

Meike runs out but stops and notices a painting of Mary, the same painting in the coffee shop. She is about to slash it, but Angela is still watching.

ANGELA

She's beautiful, isn't she? 

Meike stares at the painting in a moment of respect. She takes the painting off the wall and leaves the church. 

CUT TO:

INT. - GEDOGEN COFFEE SHOP IN AMSTERDAM- DAY

MEIKE

Dying? Wh-- how? What's wrong?

ANGELA

Look at me, sweetie. I'm old now. I've been aging ever since I caught that nasty sickness in the eighties.

MEIKE

But you're hardly old enough to be planning your funeral.

ANGELA

When does old age ever kill anybody? (Beat.) I brought you something.

Angela pulls out a large brown paper wrapped package and lays it on the table. Meike unwraps the paper revealing paintings of Dutch landscapes. She gasps.

INT. MEIKE AND ANGELA'S HOME 1567 - DAY

On the wall hangs the Catholic painting of Mary. Other works of art featuring more humble paintings of peasant life and landscapes also hang on the walls. Meike sits in front of a window that opens up to a landscape of the sea. She sits behind an easel, painting the same painting she later unwraps in the coffee shop. Her painting is realistic, but she incorporates a little bit of the same flare from the Catholic painting of Mary: a gold rim of light on the horizon of the sea. 

INT. MEIKE AND ANGELA'S HOME 1567 - DAY

Meike and Angela welcome guests dressed in their Sunday best into their home. Peter, dressed in clergy attire, enters the home.

PETER

Meike, Angela, thank you for hosting services this week. King Philip is cracking down hard on any practicing protestant. 

ANGELA

It is no problem at all, we are happy to provide a place where we can practice freely and without suspicion.  

A man, HENDRIK (30), enters the house quietly. He sits among the others but does not speak to anyone else. 

MEIKE

Peter, who is that man who just walked in? I have never seen him before.

PETER

That is Hendrik, he is a new convert. He comes from a Catholic family in Germany. He is an artist.

The congregation gathers and sings a hymn. Meike steals glances at Hendrik who is not singing, but staring at the painting of Mary on the wall. Meike is suspicious. 

INT. MEIKE AND ANGELA'S HOME 1567 - LATER

After the services, the congregation socializes. Hendrik stands on the fringes, looking at the artwork on the walls. Meike approaches him.

MEIKE

You're an artist?

HENDRIK

Hmm. These are really good. I'm not familiar with the artist.

MEIKE

I painted these, actually. Well, except for Mother Mary.

HENDRIK

Yes, I know that artist.

MEIKE

You do?

HENDRIK

I did this painting. Though, I'm not sure how you managed to come across it. I donated it to a Catholic church in Amsterdam. 

MEIKE

I saved it from that church. I couldn't let it get destroyed like the others.

HENDRIK

I take that as a complement. (Beat.) Well, you're lucky to have it.

MEIKE

Oh yeah? Why is that?

HENDRIK

It's the blessing of Mary. Whoever is in possession of the painting lives as long and as beautiful as it does. 

MEIKE

Immortality? 

HENDRIK

Well, at least that's what I told the priests who bought it. 

HENDRIK(CONT.)

Just kidding. It was a donation. Either way, I wouldn't let anything happen to this painting. 

Meike smiles and looks at the painting with a deep respect. 

INT. - GEDOGEN COFFEE SHOP IN AMSTERDAM- DAY

ANGELA

We've been alive too long, Meike. I think it's time to move on. I knew what I was doing when I left that painting, and I think it's time you do the same. 

MEIKE

Angela, I've seen the reformation, the enlightenment, world wars, space exploration, and the beautiful growth of this city. And that's just the start of it. It's like just the sketch of something that will make such a deep and whole painting and I really want to see it through.

ANGELA

No one is meant to see it through. We just get to see a little bit of the process, and that itself is so beautiful, Meike. 

Angela gets up from the table and walks over to the painting of Mary and removes it from the wall and sets it on the table and replaces it with Meike's painting of the sea.

ANGELA

This was my favorite painting. 

Angela fiddles with her lighter again, igniting the flame in a nervous fashion. Finally she deliberately lights a napkin and drops it on the painting of Mary.

MEIKE

No! What are you doing!

The painting bursts into flames inexplicably and screams, as if possessing a soul. In an instant, the painting is ashes. Angela gets up from the table. 

ANGELA

Goodbye, Meike. 

FADE OUT.

THE END

            In Satrapi’s The Veil, Satrapi is forced to wear a veil she is not used to as her country seeks to establish a new order. For Satrapi, so much of her history – of her country’s Cultural Revolution – is of veils, of hiding behind things. Satrapi dons a veil and dons another figurative one as she pretends to want to be a doctor, not a prophet; her mother must disguise herself to avoid trouble.

Meike and Angela hide behind a variety of veils during their own revolution: the Iconoclastic Fury, or Beeldenstorm. Entoen.nu, a website developed by the Committee on Development of the Dutch Canon and managed by Hubert Slings of the Dutch Open Air Museum, speaks of the Netherlands’ own cultural revolution. “The Calvinists [a branch of Protestantism] believed the [Catholic] Church had to be purified of “papist superstitions”. By…smashing images of saints, they aimed to rid these Catholic symbols of their mystical value and make clear that Catholicism had been twisted into a sacrilegious puppet show of the true faith…The Calvinists believed they were restoring ties with the earlier, in their eyes more pure, Christians.”

            Meike and Angela’s involvement in Beeldenstorm forces them to don veils: to hide under cover of night and hold secretive church services in their home. Even in Meike’s coffee shop, Angela first hides in a cloud of smoke. Like Satrapi’s mother and sometimes even Satrapi herself, Meike and Angela are liberal, independent women who fight for freedom. In Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, Russell Shorto defines liberalism: “Historically, then, liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights, and not just for oneself but for everyone, every human being who breathes the air.”

            Meike and Angela, then, are two liberal women in a world slowly changing, a world of idols and smashing them. They come to live forever by saving the painting of the Virgin Mary, an act symbolic of true liberalism and representative of the colliding chaos of their time. In the present day, they remain the same kind of women. Meike even owns a coffee shop named Gedogen, a Dutch term which translates to “technically illegal but officially tolerated”- much like the Calvinists' activities originally were. The painting of Mary hangs on the wall, remembering a different side of the past, next to the landscapes that represent the sea change in art and culture that came out of Beeldenstorm.

            In the script, art heavily affects ideology, but in the writing of the script, ideology heavily influenced art. Reading Shorto’s book is what inspired the script in the first place, and it was important that Meike and Angela embraced the liberalism that so characterizes their city. The sources helped us understand the importance of art in that time, and so we applied that to the script to symbolize the complexities of the two situations and eras. The result is art that hopes to convey not just a story, but a time, a city, and an idea.

Process Piece

Hannah Hansen and Tabitha Brower

Process Piece

In Dean Duncan’s Scriptures we watch as a family’s scripture study evolves into a subtle, complex communication. As each child in the Duncan family expresses his/her true feelings about the practice, we come to see how complex a simple process can be. Similarly, in our Process piece we wanted to explore how a simple piece of communication, a text, can be stretched into something more intricate. The process of texting may not seem like a form of complex communication, but consider this: When you receive a text, do you stop to think before responding? Do you call on a friend to discuss what would be the best response? Do you say something you wouldn’t normally say in person?

Our process focused on a scenario ubiquitous among female teenagers and young adults: a college student receives a text from the guy she’s into and calls on her roommate for backup, hoping for help in crafting the perfect response. Staging this process, we crafted a fake a text from a crush named “Tim”. To add audio depth to the piece, the first student left the room only to enter when called by the second. We then stepped aside to see how they played out the potential deconstruction, analysis, and response to the text. Based on past experiences, the text and “Tim” seemed to become reality as the two roommates improvised a process with which they were very familiar.

This particular practice is intriguing in terms of pondering process. We have, many times, been in the middle of said process and become suddenly self-aware; it can seem inane. But it’s sincere, and for all its silliness, has become crucial. Our world has transformed into an arena of social media with a new vernacular, texting, and for the last several years we have learned to communicate in this new language of a hundred characters and emojis.

The concern in both the above-documented microprocess and in the broader process of learning to speak in this abbreviated language lies with the finished product, the perfect text -- at once witty and chill. It’s meant to seem natural, but like “natural makeup”, that which appears effortless is often the reverse. The process takes time, patience, cleverness.

And like in Commoner’s The Smokehouse, while the preoccupation is with the finished product, half the value lies in the process. These are important moments, bonding over things like first love. On the surface, there may appear to be little value in giggling college girls texting their crushes together or in giggling college girls recording the process. But perhaps any process that can invest a text of less than sixty words with the trembling eagerness of interest and infatuation; any process that edges you toward mastery of the right word, the right note, the right emoji; any process that edges you toward one another, laughing over a phone and mugs of tea, is a worthy one.