Come on, Vogue!

And that’s when I know/she’s gonna be pissed when she wakes up/from terrible things I did to her/in her dreams…

-Ben Folds

 

Okay, before I say much, here’s an image, linked from http://concreteloop.com/2008/03/comment-spotlight-lebron-the-vogue-cover (interesting mix of comments there, btw… well worth your time to read).

 

I’m a fan of LeBron James, though he’s not one of my once beloved Pacers. I’m not so much a fan of Gisele, as she dates that Brady fellow, but I’d like to think LeBron didn’t mean to be presented the way Vogue presented him on their current cover, and I’m not entirely sure Gisele should be comfortable with it, either.

I’ve read many comments around the net, so I won’t claim I have some brilliant observation, but my first thought was “oh, great, LeBron is King Kong stealing Tom Brady’s girlfriend.”

But let’s take a look at this cover, visually. The “real” cover, obviously, is the image to the left, while the alternate cover image uncovered by ConcreteLoop.com is  the tasteful photo on the right. On the actual cover, there’s brighter lighting (which brings the skin tone differences into starker contrast), and there are wildly conflicting facial expressions. LeBron looks angry, or beastly, while Gisele looks like she might well have been caught laughing at how ridiculous the image is. LeBron is hunched over, simian (also like one might drive with a basketball, to be fair), and he’s handling a ball. It’s a confusing composition, as I suppose we’re supposed to think we see the “essence” of the two (the intense athlete and the smiling model?) or perhaps that LeBron Kong has taken a woman as he streaks down the court. It’s also interesting that Gisele is wearing a dress that is roughly the same shade as the Statue of Liberty, not that anyone would be playing up the King Kong thing.

Contrast that to the other image, which looks like an actual fashion shoot. The colors are muted, the poses are relaxed and seem human. LeBron’s muscles are highlighted, as is his face (which doesn’t look animalistic in this shot) and Gisele’s figure is showcased without her being presented as if she is being seized and controlled (as a male, I have to say I think she looks better in the white dress, too). The composition has good lines, and other than the awkwardness of placing  Vogue’s header on the page, the spaces for the other cover text are all natural. If the image were cropped right at LeBron’s knees and some extra space were airbrushed in at the top, it’d be a perfect cover.

It looks like Vogue dropped the ball.  So to speak.

 

Sing(er) me a Song

Girl I’ve been shakin and mackin the donkey/Tryin to get to youuuuu and that monkey…

 -T-Pain, from his song with E-40. We all know what it means, but imagine if we didn’t.

I’ve been thinking a bit about remix, and I realized, as I was doing research for another project I want to attempt in the coming weeks, that one of my favorite films has an unconventional example of remix (or collage essay, perhaps).

Let me preface these clips: if you haven’t seen The Usual Suspects, and you plan to someday, don’t watch the two clips. The second on will spoil the movie for you, and the first contains perhaps the coolest line in the whole film. In fact, if you want to watch the movie someday, stop reading this entry. I’ll end up spoiling it, too.

Now then, two YouTube clips:

I gave the first one for context (and because I love the end of it), but notice how Verbal Kent/Keyser Soze/Is Spacey’s Character Either weaves his story, utilizing bits and pieces of things that are going on/sitting around. He completely tricks the police with what is essentially an on-the-fly “verbal” collage essay that utilizes the nature of remix.

As if I needed another reason to love Brian Singer…

What we do

I don’t wanna feel so different/but I don’t wanna be insignificant/I don’t know how to see the same things different now…   
-Still Counting Crows, still new album, still awesome   

So I’m about to rush over to a reading group about De Certeau (Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty). I’ve been looking at his work, thinking through the tiny chunk we read for today (and planning to finish The Practice of Everyday Life over the weekend). And I’ve been thinking about the field I’m in.

Rhetoric.

 I wonder if many of us don’t have it “wrong” on a certain level.  If you talk to a scholar in our field, he or she could probably say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if you asked “is this rhetoric?” and rambled off a list of potential topics for discussion. We know what’s in our field. Mostly. Some people argue that some of what I– and what my mentors– do is not “really” rhetoric, but I think of those people the same way I thought of myself when I, upon entering my first algebra class, pointed out that X is not a number and shouldn’t be part of math. Sure… there’s a logic to it, but it’s a little short-sighted and immature.   

I made this argument in my history of rhetoric seminar last semester, and it was received with a mix of horror and interest. So… I’m going to toss it out again for my readers. I think in rhetoric we do ourselves a disservice by not acting like our field IS a field.  

Here’s what I mean.

Go watch Stephen Hawking speak. He’s not going to spend the first half of his presentation tracing physics from the start of the field to his particular brand of science. He’s not going to explain to us how gravity was “discovered” and documented. It would be foolish; that crowd KNOWS that physics is a thing. They came to hear a genius speak about his contributions.  

If you saw this recent news story about the near-retirement-age math genius who solved the “directions to anywhere” problem (I’ll link this later– I have the bookmark at home), you won’t catch him starting by saying “once upon a time there were two numbers, and *insert name* realized that by placing a plus sign between them one could indicate a desire to join them into a single number that was the sum of the two.” In fact if someone started a lecture by doing the basic “here’s six apples. I take two. How many are left?” math explanation we all get in elementary, we’d feel appalled and cheated.  

So that makes me  think that perhaps the answer to many of our problems is to simply stop trying to justify what rhetoric is. Stop tracing back to Plato and Aristotle, and stop charting through the Roman era into the enlightenment. Instead of trying to link everything back to the origin point, let the fact that the field exists do some of the heavy lifting for you.  

I get the feeling this will still be received poorly, but I ask you to consider it. A little field confidence could go a long, long way.

Comcast fail. Life Fail.

Shout out to Bill O’Reilly/I’ma throw you a curve/you’re mad at me because I’m a thief/and got a way with words…

-Ludacris

I came, I saw, I hit ‘em right dead in the jaw.

So I apparently can’t use the Comcast website to pay my bill. *sigh* Luckily the phone works.

Julie has had a rough few days, but she’s such a trooper. I’m about to catch up my posts for the last few days. This one is just to offer one of these fun little modules from Blogthings.com. I played with several, but I ended up deciding to post this one because it’s just perfect. It’s my band name. I haven’t had the time to do this sort of study yet, but these little plug-n-chug modules are an essential part of digital identity. We need to pay attention to ‘em. I’m also a comma, but I lost the code for that one in a “need your password” WordPress wipe. OOPS!

 

Your Band Name is:

The Supersized Androids

Band Name Generator