Process Writing

For the most part, writing reviews came pretty naturally for me, especially movie reviews. I think this was mainly due to writing about something that interests me and being able to integrate a lot of my own personal voice, satire and humor into my pieces. I particularly enjoyed improving my articles each week by finding that mix of context/commentary and reducing the use of second person. At times I found this to be a little frustrating (especially after reading Kael’s work – argh!), because your instinct tells you to address your readers but after a while I became more conscious of this and was able to fix my pieces accordingly. Another thing I found really frustrating was coming up with an idea for my final project. I found it hard to narrow my focus and really clarify my point, and in general, I was really frustrating in writing the article from start to finish and throughout every revision.

Writing in this course really increased my confidence in being able to produce pieces that my readers found enjoyable and humorous. My main goal in this class was to demonstrate my sense of humor and give my opinion on light issues such as movies in a manner that my peers could relate to. I think I was able to do this. Additionally, I think this course taught me to be more concise in my writing.

Always Swinging for the Fences (Final Piece)

By John Flemming

Step into the batter’s box. Keep your eye on the ball. Leg kick. Shift weight forward. Follow through. Swing for the fences. Strive for perfection. Repeat.

This was all in a day’s work for Alex Rodriguez, one of the most prolific hitters in modern day baseball, and until recently, the game’s bastion of hope to restore the most sacred of baseball’s records – career homeruns – into the hands of a “pure player”. Now add: avoid the press; meet the press; talk to the press; apologize to fans.; get embarrassed; promise to stay clean; move on; strive for perfection; repeat – to Rodriguez’s job description.

Rodriguez was recently discovered to have used steroids. A shocker, no doubt, to the legions of Rodriguez fans and baseball fans in general, leaving them in disbelief and understandable outrage – for the hope of finding a clean, great player from the steroids era was lost.
It’s perhaps not so shocking when the current nature of American society is taken into consideration. Capitalism in the last couple of decades has spiraled out of control, thanks mainly to the implementation of deregulating economic and political policies. And, it has teamed up with digitalization and globalization to push economic, physical, and mental standards to levels, that for the most part, are unattainable without artificial enhancement, breaking the law, cheating, or in some cases, all three.

Anywhere you look, society’s standards have exceeded the capacities of its members to meet them. Somewhere down the line, the ends became so important that people forgot about the means, allowing for all sorts of questionable methods to be employed in the so called pursuit of happiness.

On campuses around that nation, college students, neglecting moral issues and concerns for their well-being, abuse highly controversial cognitive-enhancing medications just to get that desired GPA – with or without a prescription. A daily dose of Ritalin and Adderall has replaced the natural brain foods of yore; no need for that healthy breakfast before a test. Besides, with one pill you save yourself adding those pesky calories!

And it’s all about watching those calories now too. Well, it’s about looking like a movie star regardless of what one’s ever-dominant genes have in store for them. From 2005 to 2006 there was a 7% increase in cosmetic surgeries, totaling in more than 11 million Scarlett Johansen breast augmentations, J-Lo butt implants, Sharon Stone nose jobs, Angelina Jolie collagen injected lips, and Daniel Craig peck implants.

Businesses – think Wall Street – driven by greedy CEOs and shareholders’ demands for out-of-this-world profits, have led to the implementation of risky business philosophies, some of which are out-right illegal, and have paved the way for a grave economic recession.
In some instances, the economical demands placed on businesses have compromised the professional integrity of whole industries not traditionally motivated by profits. Ever since the Tribune Company purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2007, the newspaper’s near annual revenue of $200 million dollars has been deemed insufficient and journalistic quality considered expendable.

Alex Rodriguez is but a mere microcosm of the larger societal problem, just one amebic manifestation representing the devolution of the organic fiber. It’s just that his case is so fascinating. Because, no matter that he is one of the most naturally talented individuals to play the game: Rodriguez at the age of 18 played in his first major league game starting at shortstop for the Seattle Mariners at the hallowed grounds of Fenway Park. No matter that in 2000, Rodriguez signed a staggering ten-year deal worth $252 million with the Texas Rangers, which, at the time, was the most expensive contract ever awarded to an athlete in sports history.

Rodriguez, though possessing the rare natural skill, attractive physique, and insurmountable financial success, still succumbed to the callings of a perverted culture of competition to be better than good, more good than excellent, to be excellently perfect. In his own words, “I felt a tremendous pressure to play and play really well. I felt like I was going up against the whole world. I just signed this enormous contract”.

Boy, and has he been excellently perfect – at least as close to excellently perfect with regards to baseball statistics. Rodriguez has assembled some of the most prolific offensive seasons in the history of the game combining for career totals of 1,605 runs scored, 2,404 hits, 1,606 RBIs, and 553 homeruns. He is the only player to hit 150 homeruns for three different teams – the Mariners, Rangers, and Yankees – and he is the youngest player to reach the elite 500-career homerun plateau.

Yet, the interesting thing about this age of artificial enhancement is that everyone wants to make it appear like they achieved their goals without aid. That’s why Rodriguez never admitted to steroid use until being caught, why banks kept mum on their foreseeable predicament, why celebrities and everyday people keep their cosmetic alterations a secret and why students don’t reveal to their parents the black market origin of their new study guides. Individuals, it seems, want to say they did it through struggle, hard work, and merit even though they took the short cut; we want to have our cake and eat it too. It’s the American paradox of the 21st century. But, the only people we are fooling is ourselves. Because as soon as people realize you took the easy way you are discredited, trivialized, and asterisked. Just ask A-Rod.

Alex Rodriguez, though statistically in the same rank of baseball legends Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris, will never be idolized and revered with the same romanticism. The Babe did it on hot dogs and beer; now A-Rod did it on a clandestine mixture of Primobolan and who knows what other mad-scientist concoctions.

If Alex Rodriguez couldn’t resist the pressures of society to exceed his natural potential at any means necessary, then what’s in the cards for the child of working class parents, who try as he might, still struggles in math class, never receives Valentines, and is always picked last on the playing field?

New York Times Defense

New York Times Defense
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/movies/06Watc.html

For my New York Time’s defense article I choose to analyze A.O. Scott’s review of the recently released film, Watchmen. Scott chose to open his piece with a very interesting format: his lede immediately projects the reader into his “but”. With his first two paragraphs, he manages to capture the readers attention and at the same time give them a very brief, but clear, opinion of the movie.

His lede states, “Dr. Manhattan’s existence is busy and fairly melancholy, but I do envy him his ability to perceive every moment of past and future time as a part of a continuous present” and is immediately followed by “If I had that power, the 2 hours 40 minutes of Zack Snyder’s grim and grisly excursion into comic-book mythology might not have felt quite so interminable”.

The rest of the article is structured by a juxtaposition of his perspective with that of a hypothetical “mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate”. He uses this technique to illustrate and further his claim that the movie is out of touch and irrelevant with the current times and would only provide anything of substance for this hypothetical moviegoer.

Scott presents details and context from the movie much later in the article in a rather unnecessarily lengthy way – but perhaps it feels this way because he was so quick to give his opinion and the reader is left with nothing to look forward to. Almost ironically, Scott’s own work begins to feel “interminable”.

He concludes his piece by refining his opinion of the movie suggesting it is better suited for an immature audience that dwells in the comic-book realm: “Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up”.

Live Performance Review

The Acabellas and Premium Orange Winter Concert Review
By John Flemming

Dalton auditorium had a human ebb and flow to it, threatening to burst open the exit doors at any second. Every single seat was occupied and the aisles littered with eager bodies searching for an inch of floor to make do for a seat. The ushers stopped admitting people into the event ten minutes before its starting time, turning away dozens of angry individuals – who, like those denied before them, tried every trick in the book to sneak in but to no avail.

The volume of individuals that attended was matched only by their high expectations for the soon-to-begin show; after all, the Acabellas and Premium Orange troupes are an esteemed organization in the Kalamazoo College community. Certainly, previous performances have merited this distinction.

Fashionably late, the Acabellas took the stage first in front of the roaring crowd. The pitch whistle, always curiously entertaining to those who can’t hear the difference in pitches, was blown and the always-effervescent ensemble of ladies started their performance with a beautifully done rendition of “Help!” by the timeless Beatles.

The next few songs were short of memorable, but the ability to recreate, and sometimes enhance, songs with a few concerted “hmms”, “ho0os”, and “dip-dos” coupled with sometimes brilliant singers never ceases to amaze. Particularly, “Strawberry Wine” by Deana Carter, stood out as the Acabellas’ best number with Kristine Sholty using her delicate yet passionate voice to capitalize on the song’s slow, melodic peaks and valleys typical of country songs.

However, while the Acabella performance was enjoyable, it was severely hindered by the fact that they elected to include songs that they sang during their fall performance like “Disturbia”, “It’s Raining Men” and the inappropriate but uniquely vulgar “Baby Got Back” by the musical genius of Sir-Mix-A-Lot (or, as he now prefers to be called, Jonathan Coulton). While this last song seems to be a crowd favorite amongst the college students in the audience, it sometimes can cast an awkward cloud over the family-filled auditorium.

After intermission, the co-ed Premium Oranges, who always seem to present the better performance – and most certainly did – started their half of the show with “Morningside” by Sarah Bareilles. Like the Acabellas, the Premium Orange troupe included songs from their fall show: “Desperado”, “Kiss From a Rose” and “Viva La Vida”. Unlike the Acabellas though, they improved on these numbers by having Daniel Tobes and his deep, soulful voice sing “Desperado”.

And, as usual, Brendon Schramm delivered his amazing rendition of “Kiss From A Rose”, that literally left members of the audience, some who hadn’t had the fortune of hearing him before, shaking their heads and muttering “wow”. Tanav Popli’s convulsionary spectacle put on during his “Vida La Vida” number, invoked images of Joe Crocker, and Popli’s enthusiasm and energy went a long way in carrying the number, which at times struggled with hitting the right notes.

Overall, these two choral student groups produced a very entertaining event that establishes their place with some of the other great Kalamazoo College productions like Frelon and Monkapult. But, as mentioned before, they should be cautious with repeating songs because they may turn away loyal fans that interpret their lack of new material as taking the audience for granted.

Final Project Rough Draft (but not really)

Disclaimer: I'm only using about 60-70% of this draft for the workshop. I will be posting a new rough draft by Wednesday, so kind of disregard this one.

Draft #1:

During the long and hazy summer months of my childhood, probably when I was about five or six, I remember spending countless hours in the backyard hitting baseballs off of a tee. Ball after ball, I’d try to out-do my previous long drive. In the backyard I’d stay, until my mother summoned me for dinner. Reluctantly, I’d tread back to the house, pants stained green, hands tainted brown, but not before I got that one last satisfactory hit – that pretend-you-are-in-the-world-series-walk-off-homerun hit. I was consumed.

If I were lucky, after supper my dad would come out and pitch to me; it was the highlight of any given day. It was during these live pitching sessions with my dad, during these formative years, that I learned the fundamentals of competition and the importance of success. “Swing for the fences” my dad would say.

It was a phrase that many kids playing in the age of tee-ball stardom heard over and over again and came to own as their personal manifests. Swinging for the fences - hitting homeruns – in our minds, was the sacred embodiment of the ultimate athletic achievement; it was the tangible measurement of your worth and place within our society’s little culture of competition.

The phrase not only became applicable to various facets of our lives but synonymous with similar phrases invoking the attainment of material success through competition, struggle, and hard work. If you weren’t swinging for the fences, you were shooting for the stars, and if you weren’t doing that you were breaking a leg, but you were always striving to achieve something. Thinking back, these idioms were our introduction to capitalism – like Sesame Street capitalism, or something of the sort.

I use to imagine one of my favorite baseballs players, Alex Rodriguez, growing up being told by his father to swing for the fences. I imagined this incantation resonating in his mind right before parking one of his five hundred and fifty three homeruns in the upper-deck of some mythical palace of baseball.

When I was six, Rodriguez at the age of eighteen, played in his first major league game starting at shortstop for the Seattle Mariners at the hallowed grounds of Fenway Park. Since then, Rodriguez has assembled some of the most prolific offensive seasons in the history of the game combining for career totals of 1,605 runs scored, 2,404 hits, 1,606 RBIs, and 553 homeruns. He is the only player to hit 150 homeruns for three different teams – the Mariners, Rangers, and Yankees – and he is the youngest player to reach the elite 500-career homerun plateau.

After spending his first seven seasons with the Mariners, Rodriguez filed for free agency in 2000 and eventually signed with the Texas Rangers. At the time, it was the most expensive contract ever awarded to an athlete in sports history: a staggering ten-year deal worth $252 million. In his three seasons with the Rangers, playing in the favorable climate and hitter-friendly park of Arlington, Rodriguez posted some of his best power numbers: between 2001 and 2002 he hit the most homeruns ever by an American League right-handed batter in consecutive seasons (109).

At the end of the 2003 season, Rodriguez was traded to my favorite and hometown team, the New York Yankees. To me, it was a match made in the baseball heavens: one of the best players to ever play the game was now playing for the most storied and successful sports franchise in history. If I had deeply respected and admired Rodriguez’s talent before, I was now required by Yankee Fan Oath to idolize him along with the ranks of other Yankee greats like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris.

Alex Rodriguez’s greatness was only amplified in the aftermath of baseball’s steroid era. The past few years have seen some of the last two decade’s best players’ names surface with connections to performance enhancing drugs. Roger Clemens, Jose Canseco, Miguel Tejada, Jason Giambi, Kevin Brown, Gary Sheffield, and most importantly Barry Bonds, the new all-time homerun leader, are just a few to have been identified. Missing from these lists was Alex Rodriguez, the apparent heir to the career homerun title, who was consequently tapped as the new bastion of hope to bring back the most sacred of records into the hands of a “pure player”.

Unfortunately, to the dismay of many, Rodriguez was recently discovered to have used steroids. Unlike other players before him, Rodriguez came out to the public and admitted his usage. However, this new development left the legions of his fans and baseball fans in general, in disbelief and understandable outrage. The hope of finding a clean, great player from the steroids era was lost.

Why would one of the greatest, naturally talented players have resorted to cheating? Why was his raw ability that allowed him to enter the major leagues fresh out of high school not enough?
Maybe, it was a personal thing, like wanting to inflate his career statistics to a level unreachable by the next generation of players. Perhaps this was one of the reasons, but I’m guessing it was the nature of American society that pushed him and all the others to cheating. The last twenty years have seen not only baseball, but also all sports contracts rise at unprecedented rates. The average MLB salary in 2005 was $2,632,655; compared to the average salary in 1985, which was $371,571, this represents a long cry from today’s standards.

Not coincidentally, this period of twenty years are usually considered the beginning and ending of the steroid era, an era in which records were shattered and re-shattered at rates never seen before in the previous hundred years of the game. It is arguable that this highly competitive and highly compensated era of baseball forced many players to take extreme measures. It perverted a healthy culture of competition into an anarchic free-for-all, in which team owners, federal regulators, and players themselves all turned a blind eye to the chronic problem of cheating in the name of competition.

But this phenomenon isn’t unique to just professional sports. No, capitalism in the digital age of globalization has pushed economic, physical, and mental standards to levels, that for the most part, are unattainable without artificial enhancement, breaking the law, cheating, or in some cases, all three.

Shareholders’ demands for out-of-this-world profits have led CEO’s, particularly on Wall Street, to implement risky business philosophies, sometimes out-right illegal, that have paved the way for a grave economic recession. College students, neglecting moral issues and concerns for their well-being, abuse highly controversial cognitive enhancing medications just to get that desired GPA.

It is obvious that society’s standards have exceeded the capacities of its members to meet them. Somewhere down the line, the ends became so important that people forgot about the means, allowing for all sorts of questionable methods to be employed.

Whereas I was consumed in my love for the game, maybe others were consumed too much with the singular goal of “swinging for the fences” and “shooting for the stars”. Maybe in the ad nauseam repetition of these phrases, people like Alex Rodriguez, and society in general, forgot that if you swing too hard you might just throw out your back.

Thirteen Inches Too Tall, Eight Pounds Too Heavy, Four Hours Too Long of Pure Arrogance

By John Flemming

The show opens under an arc of Swarovski crystals. Enter, stage right, Hugh Jackman, the world’s sexiest man alive – yes, even sexier than Obama! Apparently in the realm of appropriating levels of sexiness, accents go a long way these days. Speaking of accents: as soon as Mr. Jackman opened his mouth to speak, revealing those beautiful, artificially whitened choppers, I was instantly reminded “I’m so fortunate I get to listen to his Aussie accent for the next three hours of my life”. Scratch that. Make it four hours.

And what was his first utterance? Well I can’t be entirely sure but from what I could comprehend I think it was a reference to something he has no real working knowledge of, nor is affected by: the economy.

So, under the glimmer of a hundred thousand crystals and in front of a live audience with a collective GDP that rivals that of small countries, Mr. Jackman and the writers of the grandiose 81st Oscar ceremony possessed the audacity to suggest that their little production was being affected by the economy and thus experienced significant budget cuts.

Goodbye, Hugh’s entrance by - fuel-efficient, nonetheless - jetpack apparatus. Goodbye, the resurrection of showbiz great, Houdini, who was going to provide a satisfying demonstration of Mickey Rourke’s magical reappearance. Goodbye, five ton dropping of gold leaves by the single living flock of Californian Condors at the end of the first song of Oscars: The Musical.

America will have to settle for Oscars Lite, for Oscars 64 calories, for Oscars blue-light special. America will have to settle for your mockery of low budget, expenses cutting lifestyles. America will have to digest your insult of individuals who break a sweat not because of the auditorium spotlights or because they get paid six figures to dance around like idiots waving their smooth, impeccably manicured jazz hands, but because they’ve endured the hardships of a trying job and still have to worry about putting food on the table.

The shameless hypocrisy of Hollywood is enraging. They inject their two-cent normative prescription for the economic crisis every chance allotted to them – which are many, due to the inexplicable importance given to their opinions (remind me again, who is that actor with the PhD. in economics? You know, that one guy…with the hair and the eyes. I guess I must have been mistaken; that guy, has a PhD. in scientology) – yet, who are they to preach realistic practices of fiscal responsibility?

As the camera pans the nervous faces of the noble, honorably nominated celebrities before the sacred envelope is opened and the winner announced remember that their anticipation is alien. It is not the same anticipation that many Americans feel when they see such an envelope. These actors aren’t nervous that inside that envelope is a bill that can’t be paid, an eviction notice, a pink slip. No, these actors are nervous because they might be so fortunate enough to receive a golden trophy that validates their vanity. A 13 ½ inches tall and a robust 8 ½ pounds of golden insult that many would pawn off to supplement their next paycheck or lack thereof.

Web Edition Extra!
A Few Other Thoughts:

• Who thinks Hugh Jackman is better suited for Broadway? I do. The creators of the new X-Men film should consider making it a musical and employing the limited talent of Jackman to its full potential.
  

• Downey Jr. or Jack Black would have made excellent hosts. Or even perhaps Ben Stiller as a comatose Joaquin Phoenix; the less bull excrement out of these celebrities' mouths the better for society (usually) and the shorter of an awards marathon.
  

• "Angelina is like my favorite person of all time" - Miley Cyrus. Wow. It is obvious that this 16 year old has never cracked open a history book or any book for that matter. No MLK? No Gandhi? Nobody of moral substance? Yet another instance of the American education system failing our generation. Idolize the sensational, void-of-historical-importance individuals and forget the exceptional people who have sacrificed so much for the advancement of humankind.
  

• When did Goldie Hawn become a body builder? Is it me or she looked ridiculously buff? Has she been hitting the gym with some MLB team trainers? Maybe Hugh was right about the 'roids. Someone assemble a Senate investigative committee.
  

• Someone please remind Jessica Biel that the Oscars are not a college toga party.
  

• John Legend sounded awful. Never, ever, under no circumstances, allow him to sing outside of a recording studio where that "magic" that makes him seem like a good artist happens.
  

• James Franco and Seth Rogen killed it. Especially James Franco, who's performance in Pineapple Express and in last night's skit was outstanding. This was one of the few truly enjoyable moments of the night.
  

Kael Critical Essay (Revision)

By John Flemming

Pauline Kael is often regarded as one of the most influential film critics of her time and perhaps of all time.

Fellow critics, like Francis Davis, suggest that Ms. Kael was revolutionary because she possessed “the nerve – to go to bat for a good movie that’s been given up for dead by its distributors” (p. 25). Renata Adler concedes that in her earlier work, Ms. Kael “seemed to approach movies with an energy and a good sense that were unmatched at the time in film criticism” (p. 327).

It has also been suggested that Ms. Kael, in her critiquing of films, produced an art form of her own characterized by her outspoken voice, intellectually sound prose, and enthusiasm for the medium she critiqued. This idea of critics creating their own art that stands alone from the reviewed work resides in Oscar Wilde’s intricate argument found in The Critic as Artist.
But for all of the high praise given to Ms. Kael, it seems as though as the years passed, people overlooked her increasing arrogance and tendency to be unoriginal.

To create art requires a degree of improvisation. It requires that the artist produce something from almost nothing, or at least from the readily available materials at hand. The problem with art or improvisation is that the artist, focusing solely on one medium, can only produce original works of art for so long. After a while, it seems impossible for the artist to avoid becoming repetitive and stale.

Renata Adler in her essay House Critic argues that no critic can devote himself or herself exclusively to reviewing one body of art; for though they may begin their careers writing at the “highest level…what happens after a longer time is that [they] settle down” (p 326). And this is exactly what happened to Pauline Kael. Her later works became as Adler described them, worthless.

For decades, Kael returned to the same mannerisms hundreds of times over to the extent that they became clichés. Her apparent extensive knowledge and what Adler describes as “knowingness” started to come off as rather pretentious with far-fetched allusions, which only explicably served to show off her prowess: “It’s true that one remembers the great scenes from the nineteenth-century Russian novels…there’s a consistency of vision in Turgenev or Dostoevski or Tolstoy” (p. 336). Kael seems to have written unnecessarily long pieces to demonstrate her movie knowledge (and general knowingness) and these frequent transgressions into the realm of “indescribably reflections on ‘art’ and ‘artists’” detracted quality from her work.

Ms. Kael arrived at a point in her career as a critic where she wrote about everything except what she was reviewing. She used her column as a stage to demonstrate the abuse of rhetorical devices, which serve only to “enlist [the reader] in a constituency” (p. 335). Another of Ms. Kael’s plethora of annoying faults was her insistence on using words such as “we” and “you” – words that aspiring critics are taught to vehemently avoid, words, that when used by Kael served to illustrate her growing arrogance: it was either submission to Kael’s self-proclaiming infallible opinion or to be the misguided dissenter.

At one point, Ms. Kael arguably produced works of substance. However, as Alder has pointed out, her act became old and fostered a miasma of self-indulgent righteousness that is insulting to the art of criticism. Ironically, in Afterglow, Ms. Kael states, “you tend, when you improvise, to go back to the same themes. You talk around the same subjects, and it’s often not as fresh as you imagine it is” (p. 69). The problem was that her boundless, self-delusional imagination severed ties to reality long ago.