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Some of my inspirations (Pictures+Video)

So for the last couple of weeks I've been scouring the internet for some inspiration for my performance of both Slob and The Man. Here is what I've been thinking thus far:

-For Slob I was mostly inspired by Randal Graves, one of the main characters of Clerks.



Altogether he's not physically that slobby but in terms of work ethic and attitude he is a total pig/slob and I was thinking of including some of his dress code and blatant disregard for how others might view him in my mental picture of who the Slob really is.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e_XQ86-Ni4)

As for The Man I was thinking of trying to incorporate a couple different characters as influence.


First, I figured it would be inappropriate if I didn't include one of the biggest representations of oppressive authority figures in a suit if I didn't have some Agent Smith in the performance, particularly with how he stalks X at one point
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_0SYH7O1bo)
(As for The Man's cackles I thought Smith could also be influential http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNkrF43SZEU)



Another influence for The Man's hunting of X and Id I had was the Blue Sun Agents (aka the Hands of Blue) from Firefly. Just something about the way they could emotionlessly prowl throughout an abandoned section of a hospital and silence any witnesses was really creepy which I always saw as the vibe The Man had when about to pounce on X
(this was the closest I could find to the actual scene on the show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUpjsp9UvAM)



The final bit of influence I had for my picture of The Man was Jim Moriarty from Sherlock. Unlike the last two, not only is Moriarty well-dressed but he's completely psychotic and always manipulating events from behind the scenes to keep the heroes down and keep everyone on their toes
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOGXSFK3Xsw)

Hope that helped y'all and I would love some feedback on whether I should take these characters one way or another.

Nail'd 'em.

http://youtu.be/HQtIearBLAE

"...fucker had it coming"

-Jo

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


— Wendell Berry

This... is Paradise; We can load anything we like...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGZiLMGdCE0

Calvin and Hobbes

A Good Thing to Get

Watch this really great video.

This video is hilarious, but also captivating to me.  I think it relates to The Grand Poobah whenever I hear Jo describe the play as an exploration of how we relate to others and the world around us, and how we assimilate those influences to create identity and meaning in our lives.  The boy in this video relates to the world in such a specific and compelling way.  Formally... "Hello, this is jedialex17, here with another Star Wars toy review."  Objectively... "Let's get a closer look at the figure."  Valuably... "Everything's just good about him."  Spatially... "And here's his arm."  Capitalistically... "It's really a good thing to get."  Economically... "They're really hard to find."  Relationally... "It's cool if any of you have one like this."  Critically... "I really recommend you get one if you can find it."  Artistically... "Just look at the detail on his eyes."  Categorically... "It's just a really amazing... well, it's not a figure, it's an alarm clock."  Familially... "We have to get a new piece for it, but my dad can fix it, so..."  Temporally... "We're gonna fix the wires at some point, if we can find a part ever."  Linguistically... "That's really all I can say."  Culturally... "Until next time, keep collecting, may the force be with you, bye."

All this is to say, this kid's interests lie in a very specific place, and he is totally invested in incorporating tools from the wider world to explore that place.  Why do you think he's making this video?  He must have been watching the Antiques Roadshow on TV, or seen "professionals" review collectibles online.  He took that critical framework from its original context, displaced it, and made it apply to his life.  Now that the review framework is decontextualized, it becomes really funny to us as it is applied to a Jar Jar Binks Alarm clock.

This process can be called "catachresis".  That word means "the misapplication of a word, especially in a mixed metaphor."  This kid takes the Antiques Roadshow formula, without their "expertise", and misapplies it to humorous results.  But... I would argue that catachresis is how all meaning is created, and how we all learn.  We take meaning we found elsewhere, rip it from its context, bastardize it, and make it our own.  We do this over and over and over again until it stops being funny or stupid (being a little kid means people are either laughing at you or ignoring you) and starts making sense to other people or yourself.  This is why culture is always changing.  Every time we do even little things like use a word, any word, we create a new context for it and violently change its meaning.

This is what the Poobah explores.  The text tries to make manifest a journey through a specific set of these associations in order to cobble them together into a new and funny and stupid and catachrestic commentary on how our associations, especially in college, change us and make us who we are.

May the force be with you.

-Ryan Rebel

DINER AMERICANA

THIS IS AN OLD DINER like the ones Cody and his father ate in, long ago, with that oldfashioned railroad car ceiling and sliding doors - the board where bread is cut is worn down fine as if with bread dust and a plane; the icebox ("Say I got some nice homefries tonight Cody!") is a huge brownwood thing with oldfashioned pull-out handles, windows, tile walls, full of lovely pans of eggs, butter pats, piles of bacon - old lunchcarts always have a dish of sliced raw onions ready to go on hamburgs.  Grill is ancient and dark and omits an odor which is really succulent, like you would expect from the black hide of an old ham or an old pastrami beef - The luchcart has stools with smooth slickwood tops - there are wooden drawers for where you find the long loaves of sandwich bread - The countermen: either Greeks of have big red drink noses. Coffee is served in white porcelain mugs - sometimes brown and cracked. An old pot with half an inch of black fat sits on the grill, with a wire fryer (also caked) sitting in it, ready for french fries - Melted fat is kept warm in an old small white coffee pot.  A zinc siding behind the grill gleams from the brush of rags over fat stains - The cash register has a wooden drawer as old as the wood of a rolltop desk.  The newest things are the steam cabinet, the aluminum coffee urns, the floor fans - But the marble counter is ancient, cracked, marked, carved, and under it is the old wood counter of late twenties, early thirties, which had come to look like the bottoms of old courtroom benches only with knife-marks and scars and something suggesting decades of delicious greasy food. Ah!

The smell is always of boiling water mixed with beef, boiling beef, like the smell of the great kitchens of parochial boarding schools or old hospitals, the brown basement kitchens' smell - the smell is curiously the hungriest in America - it is FOODY insteady of just spicy, or - it's like dishwasher soap just washed a pan of hamburg - nameless - memoried - sincere - makes the guts of men curl in October.

-Jack Kerouac
From Visions of Cody

My college experience in song

When Jo asked us to think about our college experiences, this song seemed to fit:

Drunk Girl - Something Corporate

Not purely because of the lyrical content, but also because of how the song feels to me. It feels incomplete and indecided and wondering, as though the singer is somehow missing out. There's also a lot of resentment, anger and bitterness about the past in this song - honestly, something I feel about college. I second-guess my college choice, and for me, what "should" have been a great time - best years of my life, right? - really hasn't been.

Identity Précis

Let's talk names.  First, Id.  I am quoting J. Hillis Miller who is quoting Sigmund Freud:

If writing--which consists in allowing a fluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper--has acquired the symbolic meaning of coitus, or if walking has become a symbolic substitute for stamping upon the body of Mother Earth, then both writing and walking will be abstained from because it is as though forbidden sexual behavior were thereby being indulged in.  The ego renounces these functions proper to it in order not to have to undertake a fresh effort of repression, in order to avoid a conflict with the id.

I'm not sure who that emphasis belongs to (Miller or Freud), but it doesn't belong to me.  Anyway, Freud is basically saying a pen is like a penis and paper is like a vagina, or some such thing.  The heteronormativity that is, I'm sure, inherent in that statement is not really important though.  What's super interesting here is this imagery of text as sexual congress; text is embodied.  Let me throw a text from Barthes into the mix and then I'll talk about Id.

The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense.  In these cases, there is no tear, no edges: a gradual unveiling: the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy's dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction).  Paradoxically (since it is mass-consumed), this is a far more intellectual pleasure than the other: an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end), if it is true that every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father--which would explain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of nudity, all collected in our culture in the myth of Noah's sons covering his nakedness.

This excerpt from Barthes' The Pleasure of Text is dense as hell, and I can try to parse out the whole thing with you if you want me to (I don't know what it all means).  But the important thing is that Barthes talks about two types of reading, although he only describes one here.  The one he describes is what is typically thought of as reading--reading for plot, reading toward an end.  This is a striptease--the following of a narrative arc in the hopes of encountering a Truth (or genitals) of the text upon its completion.  Barthes doesn't like this so much.  He's into the other kind of reading, reading for pleasure--if we're going to follow the bodily metaphors, this is like Freud's text-as-sexual-congress, I think.  The pleasure of the text is not linear, it doesn't seek the Truth, it's not a clean arc.  It's messy, bodily, pleasureful.

Why is this important to Id?  Well, let's think about Id's name.  Freud structures the psyche into three interconnected segments: the id, ego, and superego.  Ego is more or less consciousness.  Superego is internalized rules and values--the conscience, socially constructed, that keeps your bodily impulses in check. The id is those impulses.  Drives, urges, desires, etc.

Here's the catch.  The Grand Poobah's Id is actually a raging superego.  He's so repressed (sorry about the masculine pronoun, I figured since we were being heteronormative already I'd just go for it).  He hides away all of his impulses in favor of following the proper path that society has set out for him.  He's the opposite of an id.  He is the negative of his name, the opposite of his identity.  He is defined negatively.  A confusion, a paradox.

He is constantly attempting to encounter the Truth via his text collecting.  He thinks he will achieve transcendence via striptease.  Much of the Poobah is about his growing realization that he will not achieve capital T Truth Transcendence, but instead needs to let his id off the leash and have some damned pleasure in the text he is reading/writing/creating!  He needs to give into the messy, gross, exhilarating, private, imperfect sexual congress of the embodied text.  He thinks Paradise should mean Truth but it doesn't.

Now, X.  I am quoting further from the rather postmodernist literary theorist J. Hillis Miller.  He is talking about how readers cannot single out and compartmentalize different categories of interpretation in reading:

The same terms must be used in all regions.  All the topoi overlap.  Neither the critic nor the novelist can, for example, talk about sexual relations without at the same time using economic terminology (getting, spending, and so on), or without talking about mimetic representation (reproduction), or about topography (crossings), and in fact about all the other topics of narrative.  The language of narrative is always displaced, borrowed. . . . Take, as an example of this, the letter X.  It is a letter, a sign, but a sign for signs generally and for a multitude of relations involving ultimately interchanges among all nine of my places [ed: he gave nine example categories earlier in the essay].  X is a crossroads, the figure of speech called chiasmus, a kiss, a fish, Christ, the cross of the crucifixion, an unknown in mathematics, the proofreader's sign for a broken letter, a place marked on a map (X marks the spot), an illustration (as when we say, "See figure X"), the signature of an illiterate person, the sign of an error or erasure ("crossed out"), the indication of degrees of fineness (as in the X's on a sack of flour or sugar), the place of encounters, reversals, and exchanges, the region of both/and or either/or ("She is my ex-wife"), the place of a gap, gape, or yawning chasm, the undecidable, the foyer of genealogical crossings, the sign of crossing oneself, of the X chromosome, of crisis, of the double cross, of star-crossed lovers, of cross-examination, of cross-stitching, of cross-purposes, of the witch's cross, of the criss-cross (originally Christ-cross), and of the cross child.  X is, finally, the sign of death, as in the skull and crossbones, or the crossed-out eyes of the cartoon figure who is baffled, unconscious, or dead: X X.  In all these uses, the "ex" means out of, beside itself, displaced.  The real and visible rises, exhales, from the unreal, or does the unreal always appear as the intervening veil or substitute for the absent real, as, in stanza 18 of Wallace Stevens's "Man with the Blue Guitar," daylight comes "Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,/Rising upward from a sea of ex."

This quotation might seem overwhelming, but the crucial aspect is that Miller is playing.  It just so happens that he's playing with a sign, X, that is particularly relevant to the Poobah.  Our very own X has a name that, like all names, has manifold, endless meanings.  But unlike all names, X's name is the sign of signs, a meta-sign, a stand-in for all signs.  X is a variable, a sign in the most abstract sense.  X is all about play, X is all about signs.

I'm a little fuzzier on X's character arc than I am on Id's, to be honest, but let me spitball for a while.  X has the opposite problem of our friend Id.  X doesn't have any trouble letting loose with pleasure and embodiment.  He's filled with all of the many interpretations of himself.  His backpack contains everything he's ever encountered in his life, all his experiences that he hasn't let go, because he knows they're all a part of him.  Unlike Id, he's letting himself become his own person.  His issue is that he doesn't restrict himself at all--he's all the things all at once.  Can one play too much?  When one can no longer focus on what's important, or what could be important, then I suppose the answer is yes.  X thinks Paradise is a full-on orgiastic bacchanalia, when what he really needs is a bit of direction.

You folks should talk to me about these character projections, and how they relate to the theoretical texts I'm foisting upon you.  If you want.  But to round things out, here is a picture re: The Grand Poobah in a really shitty bunny suit.

OLD. SCHOOL. PATERNAL?

The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said, to Talk of Stuff

Welcome fellow Poobah people.  I have created a space in which we can more comfortably share longer form textual and pictorial and video communiques.  Post whatever you want here.  I'll post things and probably put links on the facebook page when I do.

Read as much or as little as you can, unless I specify your character in my post, in which case you should especially probably read it.

This blog will be good for us, like a pill that is small and good for you.  Like in Ozzy and Drix!  Except that pill was pretty big.

I'll probably post some stuff tomorrow.  Meanwhile, let me ruin your childhood.