The politics of the image

Today you read about and listened to people debating the ethics of publishing a "selfie" photo of the Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. At issue is the question of glorifying, or at the least humanizing a monstrous act.  Does this image make us reflect on the fact that "the boogie man" can be among us, he does not necessarily stand apart and call attention to himslef by projecting a monstrous image.  Or, on the contrary, does it create a barrier to reflection by being so controversial that we may react with visceral outrage , not caring to explore the issue of images when so many lives have been destroyed.  Today you will reflect on what you have read and listened by exploring the issue yourself.  Take a stand and join your voice is discussing the politics of the image.

Meanwhile, take a look at some iconic Rolling Stone covers of the past.

 

Now how does Tsarvaev fit within the framework of these images?

For a look at famous covers, click here

Postcard from a new frontier

As the thermometer plummets and the days darken, I don't envy the protesters of the Occupy movement camping in  their makeshift tents, eating their watery porridge.  The thought of all of that communal living makes me want to crawl into my bed with my warmest duvet with a DO NOT DISTURB sign posted on the doorknob.  I am not a fan of tams tams and free hugs.  I own mutual funds, I hate car pooling and occasionally I throw cardboard in the regular trash.  In other words,   I am a stakeholder and beneficiary of  our capitalist system.

And yet.  I am fascinated by the Occupy movement and a supporter of the protesters.  Occupy Wall Street and its transborder cousins grew as a result of economic turmoil that is wreaking havoc on all classes, races, ages.  Although I readily admit that I participate in the system, I firmly believe in reforming it.  The economic crisis and disenfranchisement of a generation may be the key arousing us out of our apathy and empowering us to demand a redistribution of wealth and power.  We don't have to revolutionize society, we have to create a more fair and caring one.  There are  simple changes that can be implemented in order to become more inclusive, more just, and more sustainable.  The Occupy movement can be an intrument of these changes.

And so, I am enjoying the uncomfortable confrontations between the Occupiers and City Hall, between the voices of change and the condescending  pundits of the mainstream media , between the leaders of a new mentality and the gardians of the ideological status quo.  I agree to occupy this experimental space where people everywhere are joining together to map out a new territory of possibility.  Just let me bring my duvet.

The politics of images in the media

A lot has been said about the way the media construct images of beauty, of masculinity and of minorities.  For example, television and magazines consistantly present images of femininity that are either unattainable for the average woman in terms of impossible beauty standards or in terms of the superwoman who is both perfect wife/mother.

But lately I have been hearing and reading critiques of the way media choose to present images of disasters.  These types of images present a helpless victim/saviour hero dynamic which simplifies the complexity of crisis .  This simplification of disasters  results in a public that is both misinformed on important issues and perpetuates the stereotype of peoples of the developing world as victims.

For a thought-provoking discusssion of the way that the media are portraying the famine in Somalia, listen to Q  "What's wrong with this picture?" . You can also read one of my previous Decmber 2010 blog posts on a related issue, Band Aid and the famine in Ethiopia "There's a world outside your window"

Be Proactive!

Well, a new school year has begun, it's the perfect time for a fresh start.  It's a great time to spend money too and all the stores encourage us to buy: new clothes, new school material, new appliances, new electronic goods, new makeup, new apartments!

The new school year is also a time where many of us take stock of ourselves, of our appearances, of our habits and of our insecureties:  we believe in self-improvement.  Advertisers prey on this desire for perfection and even though we are more media-savvy than previous generations, we are still willing to buy a piece of fantasy in order to boost our self-esteem. 

Let's take a look at an ad for a product I'm sure you've all seen heavily marketed on tv.  What are people really buying when they order this product?

Fantasy Island

Dear Diary,

Well, it's been 3 months since the shipwreck and still no sign of rescue.  What's that blog I read so long ago?  If only I could be anywhere but here...

God I'm hungry.  If I have to eat  tuna sushi  one more time I will go crazy.  It's enough to turn me into a hunter.  That wild turkey is looking mighty mouth-watering right now.  What's that old saying?  "if you teach a man to fish..."  Damn you and your proverbs Nick Moroz!

 What I could really go for is one of those Boston Cream donuts from Tim Horton's.  I'm so desperate, I would even settle for the strawberry flavour.  Well, all I can do is fantasize.  At least my French Laundry Cookbook survived the disaster.  Let's see:  Salad of Globe Artichokes with Garden Herbs and Gazpacho, Roasted Rib Steak with Chanterelles, Pecorino Toscano with Roasted Sweet Peppers and Arugula Coulis, Chocolate Fondant with Coffee Cream, Velouté of Bittersweet Chocolate with Cinnamon-Stick Ice Cream....ah, I can only dream.

I have discovered ways to relieve the tedium of staring into the turquoise water all day long.  A useless pocket-full of soggy as-yet-to-be-used Dooly's tickets inspired me to devise a variation on pool which involves coconuts and bamboo.  And just for fun I am making up my own language .What I really miss is music.  If only could listen to The Clash (London Calling), or Tom Waits (The Early Years) or Bach's Cello suites (Anner Bylsma) or even The Scorpions, the time would pass more quickly.  Instead, the other day, a pristine copy of Super-Mega-Dance-Party Hits 2011 washed up on shore.  What the---?

Am I hallucinating?  Is that a viking ship I see on the horizon?  No, too many sails.  Now see a dude on board. He's got dreads, he's carrying a sword...it's...no, it couldn't be..yes, it's him, it's really him, it's

Jack Sparrow!  Yo ho and a barrel full of rum!  I guess someone really did receive my message in a bottle.  Jack!  Over here!  Help, get me off of  this island!  Teach me how to wield a sword, to outsmart villains and make them walk the plank, to outwit my enemies.  Oh, Jack take me on a pirate escapade!

You know, I think I'll miss my little island.

Well, Jack and the Black Pearl  beckon.  Farewell island, you've taught me so much.   Another adventure awaits.

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine

Last month, when I opened my RRSP statement, I was quite pleased to note a 9% increase in my Global Energy Fund.  On the other hand, when I fill up my gas tank twice a week at $126.4/litre I feel a lot of pain.  And when I see images of unrest in the Middle East, I cheer for the victory of the people over the forces of oppression and cringe as pro-regime forces attempt to crush the popular movements and I am forced to admit to myself, as if I didn't already know already, that it's all interrelated. My mutual funds, my car, my CNN, my MTV, my iPhone, my grocery cart are all links in a chain that bind us from our safe -haven of  insouciance to the rest of the world.  My conscience has known this for a long long time but the recent world events that are turning me into a news junkie have made me conscious of my conscience.  I can no longer look away.  I can't go on living as if my actions have no impact on the world.

The paradigm is shifting.  I am struggling with the following question:  how can I continue to live my life as if I am not concerned when the world is in such upheaval?  Are you familiar with the old  R.E.M. lyrics?  It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

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But...I. don't. feel. fine.

I watch in awe and despair as the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis transform parts of Japan  into an apocolyptic ground zero.  And yet, life goes on here.  For example, the night after the earthquake, I watched the news in horror and then stayed up until midnight filled with guilty pleasure, licking the dregs of leftover chocolate fondue while watching Sex and the City: The Movie and revelling in its irreverent silliness.  I am a terrible, frivolous person!

The other day, my kids were incessantly bickering over ipods, iphones ,the  Wii and the laptop.  I couldn't take the spoiled sense of entitlement any longer so I sat them in front of CNN, made them look at the images of devastation from Japan and lectured them:  "You cannot fight over your personal entertainment choices when there is a nuclear meltdown on the other side of the world.  Banality is immoral boys!"  Its the post-apocalyptic parenting equivalent of the old standby:  "Eat all the food on your plate--don't you know there are children starving in Africa?"

I believe in resilience, in social justice, in the victory of the good over the forces of evil.  But today I feel like a helpless spectator with the uneasy knowledge that I am, in some small way, involved in the world.  And as R.E.M. plays in an endless loop at the back of my mind, a line from the prophetic William Butler Yeats (Ireland)  poem The Second Coming emerges to the forefront:  "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."

If you are in a doom and gloom mood like me, I invite you to ponder  the entire poem, written in 1919, in the disillusioned aftermath of WWI.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed in the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!  Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocky cradle,
And what rough beast, its now come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

There's a world outside your window

For my last blog post for this course I wanted to write about Christmas but when we started talking about hair last week I thought I might want to write about that too.  Amazingly, I have found the perfect intersection of the two subjects!

You all must know my all-time favorite Christmas song Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid.  But are you familiar with the context in which it was written?

It is 1984.  Internet does not exist yet.  Although CDs are becoming popular, most teenagers still buy vinyl records of their favorite bands and those who are really fanatic about their records protect the record covers in plastic sleeves and arrange them on shelves in alphabetical order.  Sony is king and all youth walk around with Sony Walkmans and earphones stuck to their ears.  Producing and taping customized cassettes is a popular past time.  In basements everywhere, adolescents are discovering Atari and playing Pac Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong.

On the international front, the Berlin wall still separates East and West and Tiananmen Square is 5 years away.  The term genocide is mostly applied to WWII and Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia are horrors that cannot  be imagined.  No one has heard of CNN, RDS, or other 24-hour news channels.  In Ethiopia, famine threatens to decimate the population.

The images from Ethiopia were shocking and, in evolution of the role of the media in ending the Vietnam War in the 70s, the mass media had a large role to play in influencing public opinion on the fmaine issue.  In England, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats decided to mobilize his musician colleagues to create a song and dedicate all proceeds to ending the famine.  In a flury of urgency, the song was written and recorded within a week and released just in time for Christmas.

I love this song and this video.  Although there are elements that merit criticism--the naive,Western-centric, imperialist view of Africa, the conflating of Ethiopia into "Africa" and the claim that it`s "where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow"--it still represents a turning point for me who was 15 at the time.  The line "there`s a world outside your window" sums it up and it represents the beginning of my awareness of international issues that continues to this day.

Watch the video at least twice.  First, savour the complicated, edgy, choppy, gel and hairspray overloaded, dyed, shaved and bobbed  80s hairstyles!  My own hair look was definitely of the times: a choppy style, long in the front, dyed blond with lots of Sun-In, hairsprayed and underneath the long hair on the right side, a shaved strip that followed the contours of my ear from front to back. Can you spot Sting, George Michael, Phil Collins, Boy George, Simon Lebon and Bono?  I love how all of the members of Band Aid look like they just got out of bed!  So far from our plastic artificial world in which we live.

Then, enjoy the video for the message, delivered by all of that extraordinary artistic talent.  I still get shivers when I hear it for the first time of the season every December.

Merry Christmas gang and all the best for 2011!