I have often wondered what I should do when cats, dogs, and various other animals lay on my wrapping paper (or school work or books) and won’t move. Now, I have an answer.
I’m not saying that this is particularly rhetorically savvy or anything, but, I mean, look! The cat just lays there!
(And, yes, my brain is good and fried at the end of this semester. ;)
Did anyone see any zombies at the mall this weekend? Smell any stink bombs? Was there a special Critical Mass in your neighborhood? Trickster performances? General harlotry?
I’m curious, because today concludes Carnivalesque Rebellion Week 2010:
A few people start breaking their old patterns, embracing what they love (and in the process discovering what they hate), daydreaming, questioning, rebelling. What happens naturally then, according to the revolutionary past, is a groundswell of support for this new way of being, with more and more people empowered to perform new gestures unencumbered by history.
Think of it as an adventure, as therapy – a week of pieing and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will put up posters in our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience. And on November 26 from sunrise to sunset we will abstain en masse – not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.
“Buy Nothing Day” has been celebrated for over a decade now, a protest against the celebration of consumerism known as “Black Friday.” I’m a fan of the alternative, and not just because of how much this scares me:
Buy Nothing Day has a lot of appeal, and I know plenty of people who observe it for reasons more or less anti-consumerist but not necessarily proactive. This year, though, Adbusters seemed to be kicking it up a notch. Then again, carnivalesque rebellion doesn’t come from a journal, but from local jammers…
So, my fellow local rhetoricians, what did you see?
If so, for holiday festivities, consider toasting with one of the poems collected by the Poetry Foundation:
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
For all you staid and stodgy grammarians out there, take that:
“When Confucius was asked what would be the first thing he would do if he were to lead the state—a never-to-be-fulfilled dream—he said, Rectify the language. This is wise. This is subtle. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. Finally, words must be so twisted as to justify an empire that has now ceased to exist, much less make sense. Is rectification of our system possible for us?”
Ever wonder about those subconcious cues advertisers and designers use to draw us in? TheVanBlog discusses the shape of things and how we like or dislike them in “Building an Emotional Connection with your Audience: Anthropomorphic Forms Part I.” Read it and enjoy! I did.
With all the controversy about the building which will have Islamic prayers on Park Place in New York City (yes, that was very carefully worded), I thought it very pertinent that I pass along this this article from The Huffington Post by Matt Sledge. In it he discusses the use of the term “Ground Zero Mosque” and how it is being used to draw people into a certain way of thinking. An interesting read, to say the least.
The LXD (legion of extraordinary dancers) is a new web series on Hulu. This series endeavors to tell a story comic book style. There is the wise old man who narrates all his wisdom at the beginning of each story and then we see how each person or group came to be included in this “Legion of Extraordinary Dancers” while unraveling the dark and dangerous bad guys at the same time. So, essentially we have this conflict between these two groups of dancers (think hip-hop West Side Story) who we have not yet been seen doing much battle, but a little bit. For example, the webisode “The Uprising Begins:”
This particular use of dancing as combat reminds me of the Zulu Nation, the primarily ’70s/’80s to today hip-hop movement which called for more dance offs, rap offs, and DJ competitions and less gang violence. It’s even in Guitar Hero. If you’ll notice from the following clip, the difference I see is that Zulu Nation used dance and hip-hop as a form of uniting the community:
The LXD specifically creates a chasm between two groups of dancers rather than uniting them in the joy of dance. You can see this in the story line of ”Antigravity Heros.” Two friends find some special warehouse that gives them the ability to dance like no one has danced before. When one friend is invited to the LXD and the other friend’s invite gets stolen, there is jealousy in the “other friend’s” face. The emergence of one of “The Uprising’s” main characters implies that this guy is going down the evil path and will most likely be facing off against his friend at some point.
Now, the series is still going, so I can’t say that it’s foreshadowing because I haven’t seen the entire series, but having seen many a narrative played out, that is my educated guess as to how it’s going to go. Also, at the beginning of this clip, the two friends practice a form of capoeira, which was a form of dance that involved fighting/martial arts type of moves (and let me tell you from personal experience, it is not easy). Choosing a form of dance where these two friends appear to be fighting just tells me that they will be fighting/actually dancing competitively against each other in the future.
So, the idea of dancing rather than fighting is not a new one and the acting in this series is not the best I’ve seen by far, but I find the intent to recreate this idea important. It’s as if we as a society want to express our aggression, struggle, and conflict, but without the permanence of actual death. I’m interested in seeing how this story will play out–will there be the continued trite binaries of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, etc. or will there be unity in a shared enjoyment? Is this purely a simple dancing super hero comic book or an exploration of our own humanistic desires?
In any event, they sure can dance:
There’s a fascinating conversation happening in Britain right now on the rhetorical aspects of being overweight. The BBC just published an article that debates the merits of calling patients “fat” or “obese,” with health professionals evaluating which one will help move patients toward a more healthy weight:
The debate appears to hinge on motivation, with some health professionals advocating for the term “fat” with the argument that it will ostensibly shame them into improved weight management. The flipside, of course, is that the pejorative connotations could reinforce a negative self-image to the extent that is demotivates.
Professor Steve Field, of the Royal College of General Practitioners, makes an insightful remark about the rhetorical consequences of the term obese: “I think the term obese medicalises the state. It makes it a third person issue. I think we need to sometimes be more brutal and honest.” Field’s comment can be applied more broadly, I think, to the host of conditions that are now in the process of “medicalization,” with “disorder” being attached to a wide-range of conditions that not too long ago were tagged with more colloquial descriptors–and perhaps should remain as such. The DSM-IV is replete with new classifications like “personality disorder” and “caffeine intoxification disorder.” This trend toward medicalization is largely a rhetorical process and thus signals the need for understanding it along those lines, I would argue.
Best Friends Animal Society, who runs Dog Town, often refers to these rescued and rehabilitated dogs as “homeless” on their website, which I find a tactful use of syntax. The term “shelter dog” carries an innately negative connotation, because, let’s face it, nobody wants to be in a shelter while “rescue” isn’t entirely appropriate either because the dog still exists in a state of fluxes and hasn’t been found that permanent home yet. The great thing about the word “homeless” in this situation is that it describes the animals’ state of being and reminds you that you could potentially fix that problem. Clever. Very clever.
And, just for fun, Dog Town + Emmylou Harris (why not?):
Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
2008
