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‘Diversity Day’

۱۳۹۶/۰۱/۰۲ by سبزآبی Leave a Comment

Reflecting on the ‘Diversity Day’ episode as a specific instance, one could argue ‘The Office’ commonly operates to destabilize ethnic stereotyping using strategies that are effective in what Stuart Hall refers to a trans-coding of the meanings often conveyed by racial stereotypes. This in turn works in leading those meanings to “slip and slide […] into different directions.” (۲۷۰) 

Through his iconic last name, corporate’s diversity ambassador, Mr. Brown, plays out a central stereotype which is outwardly perpetuated by Michael who naively presumes his name serves the sole purpose of putting his political correctness to test. This is a behaviour Michael repeatedly displays including when he asks Oscar if he would like to be addressed by something less offensive than ‘Mexican’ or when he tells Stanley he is in a ‘colour-free zone’ and does not view him as another race. The immediate reminders that there is nothing wrong with using the words Brown or Mexican is an attempt to “construct a positive identification with what has been abjected”, a reminder to accept and celebrate difference. (Hall 272) Mr. Brown embodies this idea further by suggesting that they re-enact an offensive comedy routine repeatedly performed by Michael, this time “with a more positive outcome”.

Similarly, the roles of the two binary opposites are reversed when Kelly reacts to Michael imitating the East Indian accent by unexpectedly slapping him in the face and walking away, briefly shifting the power dynamics at play. Michael’s shocked response perhaps echoes nothing but his embodiment of the new position: “Alright she gets it. Now she knows what it’s like to be a minority.” Having been physically violated, Michael seems to be – as Hall puts it – “trapped in [his] stereotypical ‘other’.” (۲۷۲) Same can be deciphered from how the concept of heroism is derailed and defined within an entirely opposite framework. While HERO at first stands in for what feels like a synthetic, ingredient-based recipe for diversity comprised of honesty, empathy, respect and open-mindedness, Dwight is quick to point out contradictory notions such as the claim that a hero kills people and is “born out of a childhood trauma or a disaster that must be avenged.” While he may be referring to a typical super-hero in Hollywood (as another example of an infrastructure operating on ethnocentric ideologies), it’s not a coincidence for his reversed definition to share elements with how a ‘terrorist other’ in defined within yet another relevant binary structure. 

Additionally, in spite of dismissing corporate’s strategy as ineffective, shallow and impersonal and undermining Mr. Brown’s authority figure by mocking and later ripping up the commitment he is forced to sign, Michael establishes diversity as a more personal and deep seated matter, sharing the following views before he gets his team to revisit the topic in a different style: “Was there any emotion? where was the heart? where was my Oprah moment? […] he got us half way there, he got us talking.” The office staff are then asked to engage in a team exercise in which each performs stereotypically in order to correctly hint at the racial label the others wear blindly on their foreheads. Michael asks everyone to deliberately provoke one another and “stir the pot”, pointing out “this is real life”  and not a game. As the interactions continue, they become increasingly forced, insensitive and uncomfortable, something that the characters and the viewer experience in unison and shares elements with Hall’s idea of contesting representation from within. (274) By embodying the stereotypical system of representation in an exaggerated manner, the participants come to a new awareness on the unsettling realities of their time and are forced to look at them up close as a way to “make the stereotypes work against themselves”. (Hall 274)

Stuart Hall defines the final trans-coding strategy as one which “accepts and works with the shifting, unstable character of meaning, and enters, as it were, into a struggle over representation, while acknowledging that, since meaning can never be finally fixed, there can never be any final victories.” (۲۷۴) ‘Diversity Day’ depicts this theory in the variety of ways in which it tackles and frames diversity and representation, alternating within a spectrum of inappropriate, poorly handled jokes, critically engaged observations, sheer political correctness, as well as superficially enforced formalities that are mocked and dodged.

Work Cited

Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. 234, 259, .: SAGE Publications, 1997. Print. 

Filed Under: انگلیسی, توصیفی * descriptive, دیدگاه و اندیشه * point of view & thoughts, مقاله * essays

Serendipity

۱۳۹۶/۰۱/۰۲ by سبزآبی Leave a Comment

 

A Response to the ‘VOICE OVER Mind’ Sound Event Visit at the Western Front Society on March 9, 2017

It’s shortly past 5 pm. I’m cranky and mentally exhausted. With my day stretching thin all the way since 5:30 am, the idea of sticking around till 8 and powering through another several hours before hitting the pillow is as irritating as it gets. I pull myself through space and reluctantly into a nearby coffee shop, trying very hard not to pass out as I look over the ‘VOICE OVER Mind’ sound event details. Out of the two choices left, this one starts earlier and is closer to work. Nobody needs to know the unambitious thought process behind that choice.

As always, I look up every name and detail I can soak up, trying to prep for the variety of awkward moments that are bound to happen. My brain isn’t having it. The words conjured ancestors, ethnomusicologist, physical embodiment of song and spontaneous choral composition briefly stick out, only to fade away. I don’t know what to expect. I randomly wonder if becoming an ethnomusicologist is as complicated as the word itself? Something tells me I’ll be using it in a sentence tonight and saying it completely wrong. Strangely, the thought doesn’t bother me. Nor do I beat myself up when – later on, in a serious conversation during intermission – I call it an ’anthromusician’ instead. Why on earth make a point of using this word though? That must bear some significance on my connection to this event.

Jump to the first half of the performance: DB Boyko, Western Front’s New Music Director and Curator, leads the VOM Choir through what she calls an “improvisation and spontaneous choral composition”. The vocal components are diverse and fragmented. They don’t blend in as seamlessly as one may expect in a choir performance. 

Well, the title of the work did read ‘Unusual Singers and Extreme Vocalists’. 

A faint headache starts wobbling around in my head. The unsteady amplitude and over abundance of sounds start to make me tipsy. So much for avoiding the bar!

I notice the choir members are in their socks, dressed in unassuming, casual outfits. I ask myself if that has any bearing on my first impression. Am I a conventional audience member? Can attire and appearances sway my judgement? Is there a message behind that gesture?

The visual and theatrical aspects of the choir performance hold my attention, so does the brightly lit TV screen in the apartment window across the street. As the performance continues the various vocal elements become less choppy as a whole. I zoom in and keep a close eye on DB’s individual hand gestures, eyes flipping back and forth in anticipation of which of the voice artists she’s about to tap next.  The headache slowly turns into a pleasantly numbing sensation, one that stretches my head to the size of the dark space we’re in. The apartment TV screen draws me in and fills my entire field of vision.

The electro-folk composer, Bill Young’s performance pulls me back to the stage. The VOM Choir sound suddenly reveals a holistic new quality against the backdrop of Bill’s electroacoustic soundscape. 

The eclectic, nature-inspired tunes and voices reverberate in a synthesis rippling across centuries, oceans and continents. 

Everyone is asked to leave the concert hall for the break. We return to a transformed space. Windows are sealed off and the stage is brought to the centre, there are candles and two bright red rugs adding a warm, intimate touch. I sit where the choir members stood before, frame of mind slightly altered with a touch of booze. 

Julia Ulehla, ethnomusicologist, opera singer and vocalist, along with guitarist, Aram Bajakian, walk among the audience as Julia shares words on the Eastern European, Haitian and American folk songs they are about to perform. She’s beaming as her slender figure visibly trembles. There’s a rule I like to see broken. ‘Calm and Composed’ is overrated. She occupies space organically – with bizarre postures and uninhibited movements as though conducting an intense current of some sort. And she does physically embody the melodies she’ll go on to sing and perform. The rest of the performance is wrapped in a surreal sonic fog that blankets over my mind. Traditional folk songs that are completely foreign and yet familiar on a deeper level. Pieces of her heritage she resurrects from a book her great-grandfather wrote back in Moravia, Czech Republic in the 1940’s. Songs and their stories transcribed.

The melodies tap into layers of my psyche I am not sure belong to this life time. The voice transports me beyond anywhere my imagination or memories could have carried me. I am at once anchored and carried away. At once present in the moment and lost in distant times. I wonder if there is such a thing as transcending spaces through one’s ancestral roots. I can no longer say there isn’t. 

This feels like an ancient deja-vu spanning centuries, oceans and continents. A twirling of all that is future and all that is past – 

and the blurry line where they meet. 

Transitioning to a new folk song, Julia invites us all to join her on the floor. It only feels natural to follow along. Sitting down on the soft carpeted floor, I become a piece of a colossal circuit.

I remember the socks and feel like I’ve discovered the connection. The ground is our shared point of connection to planet earth. A common point of unity, regardless of where or when we come from. 

I feel grounded and whole.

Filed Under: انگلیسی, توصیفی * descriptive, داستان * story, دیدگاه و اندیشه * point of view & thoughts, شعر * poetry, صدا * sound, عکس * photography, فیلم * film, کلاژ * collage, مقاله * essays

The Wolf – To Kill is not to Hunt

۱۳۹۵/۱۲/۱۸ by سبزآبی Leave a Comment

 

As someone with no real gaming experience, it took me a while to find an RPG game that I could navigate and connect with. Frustrated with all the commonplace violence and what seemed to me like time-consuming navigation rules and unnecessarily dashboard complexities, I picked ‘The Wolf’ from among the many I ended up installing on my phone. I attempted going beyond the confines of the game through several tactics such as connecting with other online players in unusual ways such as attacking them or sharing my thoughts on killing the innocent animals. Despite embodying a white female wolf meant to hunt in order to climb the game levels and enhance her various skill levels, I tried acting uncharacteristically by chilling in nature and in between the bushes while watching small animals roam around, bathing under the waterfall, keeping a grieving deer company and staying put when approached by a herd of sheep which eventually ended up killing me. 

 

As time passed, however, and I was subjected to the power and violence of the larger animals which I was not yet at a level to confront, I slowly channeled the feelings of defeat towards the smaller animals and found myself torn between whether or not I should be killing them to collect points. Needless to say, I alternated between killing and holding back and, what is more interesting, I caught myself going back to check my dashboard and redeeming points for higher skill levels more and more frequently.

 

Curiously, even as a ‘fake player’ who happens to be very skeptical of the gaming in general and was playing simply to complete an assignment, I was interestingly shaped to start adopting the very rules I was initially disinterested in and was disciplined through a layout that kept things boring and uneventful unless I moved around and kept me in a weak position unless I started hunting for points. 

 

As an aside and my most interesting find on how the game was designed to shape my perspective in normalizing the act of killing, I realized my chat comments were being censored for using the word ‘kill’ while other players were well trained to use the term ‘hunting’ instead. Needless to say, it did not take long before I myself started viewing the main activity of the game as ‘hunting in nature’.

Filed Under: انگلیسی, دیدگاه و اندیشه * point of view & thoughts

Reinventing the Wheel

۱۳۹۵/۱۲/۱۱ by سبزآبی Leave a Comment

 

Undecided on a location with interesting sonic spatial qualities, I spend my entire day off curled up at home pretending not to procrastinate. Annoyed and blaming it on the unwelcome snow, I hurry outside to collect the mail when I catch myself fascinated by the densely packed snowflakes floating in space and melting on the ground. It’s around 6 in the afternoon and the constant noise of car engines and tires running up and down the busy road in front of my home is nothing I don’t normally tune out.

Today, though, I am keenly listening for ideas. The sounds I normally experience on a daily basis have a different timbre and quality. They bounce off the wet ground and blend in with the muffled white silence of the snow. I start noticing the nuances of different tires hissing as they roll across the wet pavement and the sound of engines with different pitches and amplitudes moving left or right and dissipating into the distance. The ambience starts to take over my sonic experience and give it a rhythmic quality.
The traffic noise soon starts moving farther away as snow continues to screen everything off, shifting my focus on to my immediate surrounding and increasingly more inwards.

I can feel the hypnotic buzz of silence unwinding my mind and feel at peace with this space.

To capture this oddly satisfying experience in such an ordinary spatial space, I pick my sound object from a recording I did while practicing random notes on the Sansula instrument. Working my way through various editing techniques, I recreate the sense of movement and skipping left and right through space while trying to capture the different sound quality and pacing of each passing car.

The soundscape briefly picks up into a faster pace only to dissipate into a comforting space of peace and contemplation.

https://soundcloud.com/user-248701876/reinventing-the-wheel-fvim-333-mahsan-abedi
 
Sound editing techniques used:

– panning right and left
– fade in and out
– repeat
– pitch shifting
– cutting
– overlap
– reversal
– paulstretch
– tempo change

Filed Under: انگلیسی, توصیفی * descriptive, صدا * sound

Silence of the Lambs’ through a Psychoanalytic Lens’

۱۳۹۵/۱۲/۰۶ by سبزآبی Leave a Comment

As one of the several fascinating sequences of Silence of the Lambs, the one where Clarice and Lecter meet for the first time is interesting for the way it – through a gradual shift in the power dynamics at play- arguably negates the ideas of cinema apparatus and spectatorship explored in Christian Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier. 

As the narrative unfolds, I, the spectator, by now sutured snuggly into Clarice’s place within the film’s universe, keenly await the spectacle of ubiquitously encountering a serial killer and, though intrigued by the extreme safety measures and warnings, imagine nothing but remaining in control and gaining insight into Lecter’s mind. It goes without saying, the last thing I expect is for Lecter to direct his gaze back at me or get under Clarice’s skin. This assumption ties in with Metz’s notion of the “all -perceiving subject” who gets to remain the sole perceiver of everything projected onto the screen. Everything but one: her own self, as if looking through a glass but never into a mirror. (215) “It is always the other who is on the screen; as for me, I am there to look at him. I take no part in the perceived, on the contrary, I am all-perceiving [… and] all-powerful.” (۲۱۶)

Furthermore, in a Scopophilic context, I expect to enjoy what Metz calls the “segregation of spaces” (۲۱۷) just like is formally conveyed in the film, where – mirroring me as the spectator – Clarice seems safe thanks to the several gates and a final sturdy glass screen separating her from Lecter’s reach. I too get to stay unexposed in my solitude, “simultaneously quite close and definitively inaccessible” (۲۱۷) to any potential vulnerability.

The sequence of events that follow, however, reveal a power dynamic bizarrely contradicting Metz’s theories. As Clarice makes her way over to and stops in front of Lecter’s cell, the editing and cinematography techniques quickly proceed to depict an evenly weighed power play, with a series of over the shoulder shot, reverse shots that are more or less equally paced. What was positioned as a self-assured observation into a mentally ill mind is unexpectedly brought to a halt at the sight of Lecter’s contrastingly calm, composed and charming demeanour and turned instead into an equal exchange. This in turn gives way to Lecter’s eventual shift to a position of dominance, initiated by the moment he looks down as he cleverly processes the brief encounter and the accreditation details to conclude that Crawford has sent him an inexperienced trainee. The shots that follow contain several formal elements that point to this shift of power. Clarice is asked to sit down while Lecter remains standing and begins to dominate the screen through increasingly lasting ECU shots as the camera draws the spectator closer in on his sharp gaze, as if to echo his earlier utterance of the word ‘closer’.

As the spectator, I am sequentially terrified, captivated and disarmed by Lecter’s gripping gaze and shrewd perception, paralleling the way in which the narrative leads Clarice to open up to him. While she is closely observed and examined through the telling holes on the glass screen (perhaps a reference to the voyeur’s keyhole), Lecter’s teasing gaze is aimed back at me so vividly, it briefly renders him live, present and fully capable of looking back. It is him – not me or Clarice – that manages to transcend the fourth wall (thanks to the holes in an appropriately transparent screen), coming to life momentarily, undermining the idea of the ‘segregated space’ and poking holes in what Metz describes as the actor’s absence during the projection stage. (216)

Work Cited

Christian Metz, “The imaginary signifier,” in The Film Studies Reader, Ed. Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings, and Mark Jancovich (London: Arnold Press, 2000)

Filed Under: انگلیسی, دیدگاه و اندیشه * point of view & thoughts, مقاله * essays

Still Creek – Burnaby Lake – A Soundwalk

۱۳۹۵/۱۱/۱۵ by سبزآبی Leave a Comment

 

https://soundcloud.com/user-248701876/sets/sound-walk-still-creek-at-burnaby-lake

I pass by parts of the Still Creek on my daily commute and what I find fascinating about it is that I have caught it wrapped in crisp morning fogs a few times. This has always been from all the way up on the Skytrain though, so doing a sound walk around the area seemedlike the perfect idea. Though I didn’t get to do this on a crisp early morning.

۱ . Starting off at the Sperling, Burnaby Lake Skytrain station, I make my way to the corner of Sperling and Winston and cross the road towards the overpass. I walk across the winding ramp and all the way to the middle. Standing midway on the Bridge right above the highway the only distinct sound I hear is from a large truck loudly backing out of a parking spot. The traffic hum and everything going on in the factory nearby is quietly bundled into a faint hum that doesn’t match my expectation for the industrial space I’m in. Everything is uncharacteristically peaceful.

۲٫ Crossing the bridge and taking two lefts and a right along the trail, I am brought to a complete stop in the middle of the woods to watch the train speeding past nearby.The loud and rather intrusive whistling noise creates another sharp contrast among an otherwise quiet environment, standing out from the greenery and the small body of still water that separate us. I stick around and listen for the chaos to come to an end.

۳٫ Continuing along Sperling Ave., I arrive at a bridge crossing the Creek, to my right there is narrower dock stretching across the water parallel to the bridge. A man crouching over the edge seems to be staring down at his own mirroring double. I hurry across the bridge and take the first right into a side trail to reach the dock. The water is, as the name suggests, truly still and the stillness is echoed in the air, ears feel pleasantly plugged. Neither the man’s fishing rod nor the two ducks swimming in the distance come close to making a sliver of sound. Everything is on mute and we both somehow know to go along with it as we exchange friendly nods.

۴٫ Making my way back to the main trail, I continue straight for a short distance before I start hearing different birds chirping nearby. Standing in the middle, one can follow their conversation from one side of the road to the other. My footsteps start crunching along as I approach and observe a small pond partially covered in snow.

۵٫ I keep going till I arrive at the Archery Range on the corner of Sperling and Laurel. The Kensington Avenue traffic can now be heard much more clearly. A large number of geese are silently feeding, not making a single noise until I start walking among them. Every once in a while a car whooshes by on Laurel street.

۶٫ Back on Sperling I keep walking and take a left on the first hiking trail opening up into the woods. I carry on till I see a wooden bridge to my left. The icy leftover snow gently crushing where I step, I hear running footsteps approaching. A man and his dog thump along the wooden bridge athletically and turn to my right, their footsteps quickly fading away. My footsteps carefully cross the bridge till I’m on the other side of the Creek again. Other than a muffled engine humming through space, I hear a large group of geese flying together, their sound dissipating in the growing distance.

۷٫ I cross the Creek back and follow the runner’s direction to my left. It’s not long before I arrive at the side of an empty soccer field. Seems like another silent episode until a plane slices the shell open. Silence is resumed before it’s interrupted again with another plane flying above. 

 

The Sound Walk feels complete.

Filed Under: انگلیسی, توصیفی * descriptive, صدا * sound

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