Remix Culture - Moulin Rouge

When looking for an example of remix culture, there is no more obvious example than Baz Luhrmann's 2001 film adaptation of Moulin Rouge, starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. The film's most obvious cultural remixing comes into play during the musical numbers that put modern pop-culture melodies parallel to the main song. The fast-paced montage that introduces Nicole Kidman's character features a medley of songs including Julie Styne's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Christina Aguilera's version of "Lady Marmalade", and more songs by David Bowie, Madonna, Elton John, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Brian Eno, Dolly Parton, and the list continues. All of these popular songs are strung together along with "the Can Can". 

Moulin Rouge provides an example of cultural remix in terms of musical selection, and a variety of filming techniques, transition from black and white to vivid colors, and a modern remix of the very accurate portrayal of the time of the Moulin Rouge; a revolution in art, music, and entertainment infused with modern references to bring a relatable excitement to the subject matter for the audience.

Adaptation of a scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk2l0vt-IF0

The Medium is the Massage: The Missing Page-Information Overload

Defining Works and Characteristics of Generation Y; A Response to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

         Generation Y, the Millennials, the Net Generation, Generation Next, the Echo Boomers; a generation of post-“nineties kids” and pre-Google glass, a generation in which nerds are cool, but actual intelligence might be going just a little too much against the popular, dare I say “hipster” norms (a label that has become unavoidable unless you hide yourself from all other human or virtual human interaction, which will most likely make you the ultimate hipster of all; you just won’t be around to hear everyone else talking about it). This can set the tone for many different generationally related topics and rants, but the one that I would like to address is how the labels of “hip”, “cool” or anything along those lines are just as vaguely defined as what can be related to my generation as a whole. So many factors have been added into what Generation Y, and every individual in it, determines to be important or relevant.  

This generation is one in which “the Generation Gap” has filled in, with tweens dressing in their parent’s vintage clothing and a large number of stragglers from Generation X that try to adapt to skate-pop styles and use social networking sites as a place to post awkward family photos and essay-length updates. It is all very confusing; a statement that I think, unfortunately, describes my generation. Generation Y might be the first generation who’s characteristics have spilled over it’s own age group and into the previous one. We have somehow managed to corrupt those older than ourselves into caring about our pop-culture more than their own. My aunts and grandmother are able to have lengthy conversations about the latest winner of American Idol, when I ask the question, “that show is still running?”  I am already over it. I find there to be, on the simplest level, two ways that current works of literature, film, music, or pop-culture can “define” the Millennial Generation; the works that are such an unavoidable part of pop-culture that nearly everyone has a knowledge of them, and the works that maybe not everyone knows about but are actually profound pieces of work that address the issues of the generation (Pop-culture vs. High Culture).

         Pop-culture reins supreme in the land of Generation Y. We can barely eat it up as fast as it gets shoved in our faces. The age of multi-tasking between reading a current event, while checking Facebook and emails and Instagram…and texts…and Netflix…and watching the news…and writing a blog post. Overwhelmed is the new “whelmed” and underwhelmed is being asleep. Defining pieces of our popular culture include films such as Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Star Wars- The Phantom Menace and the following prequels to the series, American Pie, Napoleon Dynamite, Michael Moore films, The Social Network literature including Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Harry Potter, and the world of “Teen Paranormal Drama.” We have all watched Harry Potter grow up with us, and seen the last days of classic Nickelodeon cartoons transition into our obsession with South Park.  These are what makes up the glue that holds Generation Y together as a unique group. Harry Potter, Nickelodeon shows, and the works of Lemony Snicket are the foundations of many of our childhoods and are things that evoke a strong nostalgia in any of us to the time of our childhoods. The prequels to the Star Wars series are horribly defining because they clearly display a turning point toward an industry with focus on visually stimulating entertainment taking precedent over accuracy in plot or character development (the successes of such things that lead to the popularity of the first trilogy).

         When it comes to individual taste and ever-increasing subcategories of our culture, it is easy to feel a lack of belonging in Generation Y. Finding piers of the same age who enjoy the same genres of film, music, and literature must always end in compromise. I don’t mean to say that we have more defined personal tastes than those of another generation, but that there is so much to choose from and so many mediums through which to discover something new that there is no way to say who’s taste is more characteristic of the generation than that of anybody else. Those who do find their favorite novels, films, visual and musical artists through other means than the popular media make up a large part of Generation Y’s high culture. In my own experience I have found the most mentally stimulating commentary on current events and the trails that every Millennial must face to be in the form short films, as independent documentaries or video blogs, and in the lyrics of largely overlooked musical artists. As a Millennial, film findings that have struck me more personally about my generation are those that expose aspects of the agriculture food production industry, i.e. Food, Inc. and some less infamous including Farmageddon, King Corn, and Samasara. Samasara is a silent, time-lapsed documentary that does not need any words to show the process of food production and the incessant market of consumers that maintain the cycle. The issue of over-consumption and the benighted masses of our generation that sustain corporate food producers is one that I consider a defining characteristic of the age of Generation Y however, I find the films that try to expose these corruptions to be a part of our culture that is on a positive track. 

              In the field of music, there are countless artists releasing culturally and politically relevant lyrics into the airwaves everyday, and some of he best have gone unnoticed. The genre that I find to have some of the most generationally sapient artists, not dissimilar to the structure of beat poetry and cultural commentary found in Ginsberg’s Howl, is that of freestyle rap. This is definitely not a part of our popular culture, but I cannot think of a work that relates more to both Generation Y and the abstract commentary in Howl than the lyrics to the song None Shall Pass by Aesop Rock. The lyrics discuss the fears, manipulations, fixations, and reactions that Generation Y has to popular media, politics, and current events. Mentions of iconic events, films, and people (references to the film, I Heart Huckabees, the icon Evel Knievel, police brutality happenings, American border patrol policy, conformists in the music industry, etc.) to our Generation are what make it a defining work. The abstract language is much less discernable than anything in mainstream hip-hop, but the lyrics (posted below) address this topic too.

         The battle between Pop-culture and High Culture is one that I see as a defining characteristic of Generation Y on a large scale as well as a personal level. Pop-culture remains as an adhesive that maintains a level of commonality between us, while High Culture and individual taste can be a struggle between personal cultivation and detachment from the whole (pop-culture and social networking).

                                     

                                       “None Shall Pass” by Aesop Rock


Flash that buttery, gold

Jittery, zeitgeist, wither by the watering hole

What a patrol...

What are we to Heart Huckabee?

Art fuckery, suddenly?

Not enough young in his lung for the waterwings?

Colorfully vulgar poacher, out of mulch

Like, "I'm a pull the pulse out a soldier and bolt."

(Fine...)

Sign of the time we elapse

When a primate climb up a spine and attach

Eye for an eye by the bog life swamps and vines

They get a rise out of frogs and flies

So when a dogfight's hog-tied prize sort of costs a life

The mouths water on a fork and knife

And the allure isn't right

No score on a war-torn beach

Where the cash cow's actually beef

Blood turns wine when it leak for police

Like, "That's not a riot it's a feast. Let's eat!"

[Chorus:]

And I will remember your name and face

On the day you are judged by "The Funhouse" cast

And I will rejoice in your fall from grace

With a cane to the sky like, "None shall pass."

[Verse 2:]

Now if you never had a day a snow cone couldn't fix

You wouldn't relate to the rogue vocoder blitz

How he spoke through a NoDoz motor on the fritz

'Cause he wouldn't play rollover fetch like a bitch

And express no regrets, though he isn't worth a homeowner's piss

To the jokers who pose by the glitz

(Fine...)

Sign of the swine in the swarm

When a king is a whore who comply and conform

Miles outside of the eye of the storm

With a siphon to lure out a prize and award

While avoiding the vile and bizarre that is violence and war

True blue triumph is more!

Like, "Wait, let him snake up out of the centerfold."

"Let it break the walls of Jericho."

"Ready? Go!"

Sat where the old, cardboard city folk

Swap tales with heads like every other penny throw

[Chorus:]

And I will remember your name and face

On the day you are judged by "The Funhouse" cast

And I will rejoice in your fall from grace

With a cane to the sky like, "None shall pass."

[Verse 3:]

Okay, woke to a grocery list

Goes like this:

Duty and death

Anyone object, come stand in the way

You could be my little Snake River Canyon today

And I ran with a chain of commands

And a jet pack strapped where the backstab lands if it can

(Fine...)

Sign of the vibe in the crowd

When I cut a belly open to find what climb out

That's quite a bit of gusto he muster up

To make a dark horse rush like, "Enough's enough!"

It must've... struck a nerve so they huff and puff

Till all the king's men fluster and clusterfuck

And it's a beautiful thing

To my people who keep an impressive wingspan even when the cubicle shrink

You got to pull up the intruder by the root of the weed

NY chew through the machine...

[Chorus:]

And I will remember your name and face

On the day you are judged by "The Funhouse" cast

And I will rejoice in your fall from grace

With a cane to the sky like, "None shall pass."

A Reaction to Lethem's Girl in Landscape

             Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape is a novel that marries the unconventional mixture of Western and Science Fiction in a manner that blurs the lines of genre expectations and keeps the reader open to the strange outcomes that may happen as a result. All preconceived notions that one may have (including myself) about a Science Fiction novel, elements of weird, eerie scenes and grotesque figures in a foreign context, as well as the heroic, masculine figures, dynamic drama and exploration of unexplored territory typical of a classic Western are seamlessly fused into one larger entity that, while keeping the defining characteristics of both, also expand upon each other in a manner that throws both stereotypes out of the genre-specific window. Lethem does so successfully by emphasizing the imagery of a Western (more specifically, John Wayne’s film “The Searchers”) landscape with it’s vast and cloudless prairie terrains that evoke the feeling of freedom and the urge for adventure and exploration. He applies this classic imagery with something new and peculiar, but identifying to the genre of Sci-Fi; the mutated figures of the Archbuilder community and the esoteric societal norms of their so-called “town” that they claim to be a part of.

            The reason that I, the reader, was able to accept not only the elements of the Science Fiction “genre” preset in the novel (as I generally keep my distance from most things entirely fictional) was because of the manner and the constancy by which Lethem managed to shift between first-person narrative mode that kept me at the same learning pace as Pella and a third-person omniscient that kept me from knowing too much about the other characters. This allowed me to maintain interest and accept the new Sci-Fi qualities of the novel, just as Pella was adjusting to them as an outsider.

            I found elements such as Lethem’s subtle blending of genre norms, the classic tale of acquiring adulthood, and the young female point-of-view to be the most defining characteristic of Girl in Landscape, as well as the most personally relatable. The role that Pella plays as a young girl, not only adjusting to her surroundings as a normal teenager has to, but trying to adapt to social interactions that take place on a different planet, not to mention with the addition of a new species (as if interactions between men and women don’t sometimes seem foreign enough). Her struggle is relatable; everyone has felt alienated, felt as though they are the only one acting maturely, possibly too maturely such as during Pella’s encounters with Efram Nugent, felt as though they have been misplaced within their physical and their social surroundings. This novel highlights these universally awkward moments of pre-adulthood in a context that makes me glad that at least I have only had to deal with these social situations within human relations.

            I developed empathy and sympathy for Pella, as well as the other children, and even the Archbuilders on some occasions as they are described to be child-like in maturity toward the end of the book. I empathize with their frustration of being misunderstood because of their own lack of credibility or the manipulation they are subjected to by the human adults. I sympathize with Pella’s urge to escape into the body of a household deer in order to try to better understand what exactly is happening in the community. After the death of Caitlin, it seems that there is no turning back for Pella, every circumstance she has but subjected to has forced her to take a stand for her own opinions.

            While more obvious themes of Western classics and the Sci-Fi frontier dominate the plotline of the novel, the defining characteristic that stuck out to me as the conflicts in the novel resolved was the universally relatable narrative of adaptation to loss and misplacement, the mixture of discomfort, both physically and mentally, that one must encounter when entering adulthood or moving to a new home and especially when both occur simultaneously. The loss of a parent and the discovery of self are experiences that have their place both separately and within each other and this is something that I found Lethem to convey beautifully within the character of Pella and her struggle to assert herself as an adult and an individual in a place where both of these have seemed to be duties neglected by the other inhabitants.

            I read the book in under three separate sittings and was captivated by Lethem’s handling of such sensitive subject matter. I am glad I was pushed into taking the leap into a new sub-genre of novel and found the characters and the plotline to be evoking in multiple ways.

An Excerpt Reading from Hammett's The Glass Key

How Illustrations Alter the Act of Reading

            The act of reading is significantly altered in the way it is perceived when illustrations are added, as in the manner of a comic strip or graphic novel. When the elements of setting, character appearances, and imagery are shown instead of being left to the reader’s imagination, the pictures are all used strategically in portraying the scenes specifically to the way the author wants the audience to see them.

In this respect, the use of imagery in comics will often manipulate the audience’s perceptions of a subject. Images will show the protagonist with iconic features and the villain as a menacing opponent. As in the case of Tin Tin in the Land of the Soviets, this is illustrated clearly as Tin Tin, the small, innocent, yet heroic reporter and his trusty dog sidekick, Snowy, are relentlessly pursued by the Soviet authority. The characters of the Soviets are much larger than little Tin Tin and always have a stern expression on their faces. The images given to the audience show bias toward Tin Tin and manipulate the reader to form negative denotations for the Russian leadership.

The inclusion of Snowy, the talking dog sidekick, is somehow more believable in the form of a cartoon illustration. As a cartoon, Snowy can take on a more humanistic persona without any doubt from the reader. He provides a point of view that gives both comic relief during times of action, as well as a cute and likeable character that the audience with sympathize with. In written text, this guileful tool would not be as effective on the audience. Cartoons and illustrations alongside text provide an appropriate outlet for anthropomorphism that would otherwise have to be described in depth terms in writing, as opposed to merely placing a thought or speech bubble next to the animal or object so that it may participate in dialogue as a human character does.

Comics like Tin Tin give insight to how the author, as well as the author’s culture, perceives countries and world issues during their time period and often as propaganda in order to persuade the reader to adopt the same opinions on the topic. The inclusion of pictorial images gives a heightened sense of entertainment to the story, as well as broadens the scope of the audience. As a reader, I feel that I am more unquestionably accepting of the author’s purpose and opinion in the story because it is presented in a less “serious’ manner.