Eat. Love. Consume.

Eat. Love. Consume.

There is nothing more quintessentially American than the supermarket. It is here where Americans can exercise their most pleasurable freedom-- the purchase of products. It was with this in mind that we determined to record the process of shopping at a supermarket. By assembling these sound bytes, we discovered and documented the power of consumerism over American society. We begin our shopping trip with the one thing everyone needs: food. Starting from infancy, food becomes our most basic desire. However, food has become, like almost all other products we consume, a mass produced commodity that we see only in its final form. In "The Smokehouse," Rohan Anderson builds a smokehouse to prepare his own food. Every cut of meat comes pre-packaged, vacuumed sealed, and declared as "farm fresh." This marketing ploy has hoodwinked our nation into believing the products are naturally produced and organic. This lie is fed to citizens at a very young age, and is constantly applied to them throughout their stages of life. As our process piece continues, we enter the toy aisle. The marketing strategies here are geared towards young children using playful music and loud noises. From a tender age, kids want the latest, newest, and best toys. The new, shiny toys whisper promises of fun and adventure if they are bought and played with. They convince our children that they must have the newest toy in order to be happy. This pattern of thinking is not only observed in the prepubescent stage of life, but during the teenaged years as well. We continue past the children’s toys towards the electronics section. We mature out of children’s toys and move on to video games and movies. Movies, music, and video games litter our houses, and take up most of our time. Tirupathi Chandrupatla writes in his poem “Himalayas” of the ranges where the gods reside. No longer do we revere the ranges of the gods, but instead we worship the palaces of technology that store the latest model of Nintendo console or newest iPhone series. People will camp out over night at an Apple store in anticipation for the "next best thing." Little do these consumers know how tangled they have become in a web of lies and marketing ploys. We finish our process with the sounds of the purchase; the satisfying beep of the checkout scanner blares and we are free to leave the store, shopping cart laden with food, toys, and electronics. Our child is delighted by gifts that have been bought for them, and we ourselves are happy with the purchases made. Consuming is our happiness and happiness is our consumption. The process depicted in this project is meant to act as a mirror for our lives through which we can analyze our guzzling nature. To staunch our consuming desires, we must recognize the deceptive strategies used to trick shoppers into products. Once one understands how one is being deceived, one will learn to ignore the brainwashing messages used today and overcome their gluttony.

During our audio piece, "Eat. Love. Consume.," subtle, quiet words like "fresh," "new," and "next generation" are heard. They are said in a monotonous, computer-like tone reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. We included these sound bytes to act as the subliminal messages found in persuasive media today. These sound clips are used in the same way the lyrics of "Fitter Happier" by Radiohead are stylized.

Objects of Desire

            The first thing that struck me and bothered me when I arrived at Brigham Young University for the first time was the way that women are treated. In public, men treat women with all manner of chivalry; doors are opened, places are given up in line, conversation is polite and respectful. What drew and continues to draw my resentment, however, is the way that women are treated when they are not present. There they are measured, weighed, and assigned values in a manner similar to that found at a butcher’s amidst the various cuts of meat. The only word to describe it is objectification. They are no longer people; they are goals or feelingless items designed purely for the enjoyment of men. This disgusts me.

            It was with this in mind that I began to craft the short stories that would later serve as my presentation. I wanted to show the dehumanization and objectification that occurs every day around us. I was aided by the ideas demonstrated by the photos of Sternfeld, which were so incredibly powerful due to their connotation. I wanted to take images and words and weave them together in such a way that they can only achieve their true power when they are seen together.

            The final stitch that helped me finalize my project was a work by Grace Brown entitled Project Unbreakable, in which she photographs sexual assault victims with quotes from their attackers. I found this very powerful and disturbing and wanted to incorporate this idea into my project. My main goal was to “deobjectify” women by presenting images and stories in which women were objectified. With this in mind, I drew no faces on any of the images and removed the face of the subject from the second to last one. The only image in which a woman’s face can be seen is the last one but I felt that this solidified the message I wished to convey. I decided to use photograph’s rather than drawings for the last two images because I felt that I could not properly convey in a drawing what I wished and that it would be disrespectful to do so.

            I found it difficult to do this project because it is something that is very personal to me, having grown up with three sisters and having seen the pain in several of my friends that accompanies sexual abuse or assault. 

Good Men do Nothing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMo3Uviv-PY

There is some music which gently caresses, drawing us into its warm embrace. Some music attempts to inspire and invigorate us, driving us on with its upbeat pace and harmonic sound. And then there is my selection for this assignment, a piece which attempts neither. Merzbow’s “T-2000” draws us away from the traditional and shocks us out of our comfortable reverie of self-centeredness, something which I attempted to recreate through imagery. It was through this process that I began to learn a simple truth: more often than not, we are too caught up in the small moments of our day-to-day lives and fail to recognize the suffering of those around us.

In Dillard’s essay, “Seeing,” she explains through her experiences that we often pass through life failing to notice the things around us and that real effort is required to see. Although I generally concur with Dillard, I feel as though sometimes we need an extra push to shock us into realization and seeing. “T-2000” does just this by ignoring conventional music styles and instead painfully bruising our minds with a barrage of atonal sound. This forces us out of our comfort zones and makes us consider why we listen to what we do.

It was with this in mind that I began to craft images. I decided to create visuals that played off of this. In general I took photographs of normal occurrences and objects: swimming, smoking, an apartment. I then inserted various images of victims of the Syrian war. (It is at this point that I feel I must insert the disclaimer that, yes, I do have political opinions, and yes, they are present in this work.) Just like Otto Dix’s “The War Cripples,” this juxtaposition of the normal and the shocking is to show how often we forget the suffering of those around us because we are too caught up in our own lives and to shock us into noticing the brutalities in the world. In each of the images, there is no recognition between either the actual or Syrian subjects. The two do not overlap.

The final image, however, breaks from the traditional mold, in that it shows a statue of a woman giving a man a loaf of bread. At first, this image seems to stand alone by showing a positive action of giving. It was not with this intent, however, that the image was placed with the others. Rather, the statue is just that: a statue. The inedible loaf of bread almost mocks the starving. This can be taken further by showing that we venerate and honor the generous, but (as the other images show) just don’t have time for being generous right now.

Through Merbow’s “T-2000” and my images, I have attempted to highlight the universal truth that we are too caught up in ourselves to notice those around us. Unfortunately, this may fulfill one of the most harrowing anonymous quotes ever written: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” – Albert Einstein

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I attempt to analyze and interpret the 2012 novel, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. I find myself wondering if in the very endeavor I am journeying into the murky waters of the morally grey or perhaps even dipping my feet into the morally reprehensible. How can I, who have never experienced war or its ravages attempt to critically analyze the work of one who has? And yet, it is for this very reason that I feel inclined to write on this work for the true power of the novel lies not in its ability to personalize war but rather the characters of whom Powers writes. This personalization occurs despite of and perhaps because of the distance and coldness Powers employs when he writes of war.

Kevin Powers, like Vonnegut and Heller before him survived the horrors of war. It is thus with poignant and poetic intimacy that he describes his experiences. There are things that cannot even be contrived by the most creative of minds unless experienced. Powers writes of soldiers rubbing Tobasco sauce in their eyes to stay awake; of the wordless last moments as life seeps out of a previously breathing, healthy body; of learning important words in Arabic: thank you, you’re welcome, and bomb. These moments are powerful and yet they are not the focus of the narrative. One feels distant from the action despite the brutal, grimy language Powers employs. Rather, the action only serves to focus attention more on the personal emotional journey of the protagonist, Bartle. This is emphasized by one of Bartle’s personal quotes in which he states, “The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.”

Private Bartle is a soldier, serving in the United States Army. Near the beginning of the novel, he promises the mother of one of his comrades that he will bring her son home safely. From the beginning, the reader knows that he does not succeed as the novel weaves its way through time, place, and storyline in no particular order. We spend a chapter in the heat of battle, only to return for a moment to Bartle’s Virginia home after his return. This lack of chronological order contributes to the personal nature of the story as well. Rather than following a distinct storyline the novel follows Bartle: his thoughts, emotions, and to some extent experiences. As previously stated, this contributes to the power of the novel; we are not interested in the experiences of Bartle but rather, his reactions.

And Bartle’s personal reactions are nothing if not powerful. Bartle’s thoughts dominate most of the novel and it is through him that we learn one of the ultimate casualties of war: innocence. One particularly poignant moment occurs as Bartle takes a quiet moment amidst the rage of war to look at the stars. Says Bartle, “I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.” Later on, Bartle admits that he doesn’t wish to die, but merely to fall asleep and never wake up. The power of these statements, however, does not rest merely in the fact that Bartle experienced them, but rather in the fact that they are simply human feelings and thoughts. Although many of us have not experienced war or even its destructive influence, we do understand pain, loss, suffering, and fear. That is the human experience. Through Powers’s surreal, heartrending novel, we come to realize as Bartle puts so eloquently, “All pain is the same. Only the details are different.”

The online comments under reviews of Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds are dominated by soldiers or relatives of soldiers expressing their thanks for the novel. Many write that Powers has put into words feeling of theirs that they could not fully comprehend, let alone articulate. One can feel the influence of the novel and the cleansing effect it has exerted on these men and women. Although I do not fit this group, I do believe that the novel is powerful not only for servicemen and women. This is because the human experience is universal and Powers chooses to focus on it. Through focusing on the character rather than the story, Powers is able to show the raw emotion that we all can relate to. It is best said by Bartle, “To understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.”