"we pledge allegiance to rock and roll..."

i want to write a thesis on this!

In his 1987 culture war manifesto The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom [...] sees music as a generational obsession with no historical equivalent. It is "society's greatest madness." Literature, film, technology, career choice...nothing defines the young identity as thoroughly as musical affiliation. We pledge allegiance to rock and roll, the lowbrow howlings of cosmetic revolutionaries and pelvic ministers. The beat of rock music is the beat of sex, and the fandom of twelve year-olds is their premature induction into sexual maturity; Bloom's nightmare is young children singing "Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?" They cannot authentically be erotic, so they just gyrate and masturbate and spoil all their potential. It's not the loss of innocence or lack of family values he laments, but that the soul under these conditions becomes really boring. All the erotic tension that used to keep us tight like a bow, hungry with a desire that motivates us to transcend the mundane, is dissipated by premature ejaculation, so to speak. Eros used to fill kids with wonder and longing. Now it is all wasted like so many dribblings of ejaculate on the sheets.

the awesome part? this is the introduction to an album review for Britney Spears' recent attempt to reintroduce herself into the realm of pop cultural relevance.

"... Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the 'conquest of transcendence' achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

It reflects the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system, in spite of everything, delivers the goods. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things."

-Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964), p.79 (in the Beacon Press copy) 

amazingly, online here.

read this book

(a note to Self:)

read this book: 

The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements 

by Jules Boykoff

it uses "squelch" in the title! (my descriptor of choice!)

-stephanie now

post-thought: also these books...

STUDENT DISSENT IN THE SCHOOLS (eds. Irving G. Hendrick and Reginald L. Jones)

COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN AMERICA (Thomas Bender)

great research tool!

yes, i am writing this at 4:54 in the morning. no, i haven't slept yet.

this is because even though i pledged to stay away from computers, i couldn't help the fact that the next 25 pages of my senior project are due in a week and i JUST started seriously devoting time to it again. i finally cleaned up my desk and found a way to set up my laptop so that i'm not constantly hunched over it and cramping my neck and wrists (tho the new set up seems like more of a strain on the eyes, even though i would've suspected distance from the screen would be a better practice. *shrug*)


so i started reading today. and making reading lists. and stacking the books on my reading lists on my desk and surrounding shelf and floor, so that my reading lists have literally manifested themselves into piles of work to do. it's kinda nice having them in discrete piles and knowing i have to work thru them one by one. seeing the piles shift in size makes me feel like i'm spending my time in some productive way.


with an endless soundtrack of pleasant, unobtrusive music (tonight it's been a mix of Joseph Arthur, Sandro Perri, Asobi Seksu, Ben Folds/Five, and now Beach House, which is GREAT for winding down and sinking in) and a stack of post-its, i've been making some headway.

AND, i found this great research tool for my Firefox browser that might've just saved me tons of time and saved my day:

hello friends and scholars -
i wanted to share this computer tool with you. i've found it useful for organizing my research because i've been accumulating so many resources and articles, that i was having a hard time keeping track of how everything connected. i used to keep dozens of .rtf files with url's and article annotations in them, but those became impossible to search and ended up just confusing me!

zotero is great b/c it's like del.icio.us (another links/tags manager) but has more layers for organization and helps you generate citations. and it's more user

friendly than RefWorks (and you can keep using it after you leave Miami). i've found the folders function to be the most useful, since i can bundle online articles

in .doc or .pdf formats and sort them according to which chapter of my thesis i'm writing.

anyway, check it out: http://www.zotero.org/


i hope it helps you with your various projects and saves you some stress.

happy researching,
stephanie

hello, Mongolia!

sain baina uu!

that's "hello" in Mongolian. or "Сайн байна уу" to be truly authentic. (that's Cyrillic for those keeping track at home!)

i'll be in Mongolia in a matter of days, researching participatory education and its role in community-based conservation efforts in the Mongolian steppes.

when i first decided to do this, ppl kept asking me "why Mongolia?" and aside from a superficial knowledge of the nomadic lifestyle (which fascinates me, as someone studying communities, their formation and role in education) and what i'd been told about the conservation of their wild horses, i didn't really know...

but after some research, i'm getting pretty excited. Mongolia is one of the few countries that remains relatively un-modernized. and the Mongolia i'll see will be much more authentic than the experience of this travel blogger, who had this to say about Mongolian food:

"Many tourists seems to think they are somehow obliged to try local food to get a feel for the local ... food. I have only got two things to say: "you're not" and "don't"."

he instead recommends eating Marco Polo pizza at the Circus everyday, which is what he did. hm... somehow i think i'll fare much better. i'll be living out in the steppes (the grassland) in an authentic Mongolian ger, which are basically tents made of felt!

(that stuff on the roof is cheese made from goats' milk. notice the lack of trees and brush in the background. the desert steppes are fairly devoid of coverage. = makes for interesting (read: awkward) restroom breaks...)

and i'll be meeting and working with nomadic herders on local conservation efforts, particularly the projects to reintroduce the Wild Horses,

a.k.a. Przewalski’s horse (or takhi), these horses have struggled to survive, altogether disappearing from southern Russia and the edges of China, where they once roamed. there are only about 1500 worldwide, and mostly in Mongolia, where the herding lifestyle of the Mongolian ppl may have saved them.

and the Pallas Cat, endangered b/c efforts to control the erupting rodent population, which is stressing the already over-grazed grasslands, with rodenticide may cause inadvertent poisoning of the Cat population.

(aren't they cute?! they hide out in burrows (as pictured), which is how they catch their prey. we're not likely to see one in real life, but i've been training myself to look for the little tufts of white ear fur - the most we might hope to see. more info and another picture here.)

anyway, i have more research to do. this experience comes with a Course Reader that's dense at best, and a whole lotta packing to do. let's see if i can stuff all my belongings for an international adventure into just one rucksack and a purse and still manage to carry it onto the plane!

-stef!e


p.s. for a description of what i'm doing, see this.

rhizomatic

sorry for the lack of posts, but lately i've been working on my thesis.

in fact, i'm making some impressive progress in gathering my resources. though no actual research has commenced yet (i haven't read a lot of the information i've found due to the sheer volume of it), i have some very interesting plans for the future, once the motivation strikes me.

allow yrself a small peek into my world, if you dare...

my recent research, as bookmarked on del.icio.us, includes some interesting theoretical discussion of Situationist, anarchist, and Marxist applications in daily life and practice.

-> has inspired much fevered and passionate writing, the makings of the beginning of a chapter of my thesis! sample below:


"Students for Staff [has] created an educational grassroots movement from the ground up, cemented with bonds of friendship and respect. We learn by doing together. Students for Staff (re)writes its text every day, and preserves/sustains itself through the passing down of histories of experience through individual relationships. The content of these experiences are found in the web of interactions extant among the members of this community. Because of the lack of a hierarchical power structure (as in the capitalist model), every individual has responsibilities and potentialities, multiplied by their roles in the community, and their commitments to its individual members. The potential for growth within such a community is thus exponential; as each member interacts and forms relationships with every other member, the strength of the connecting fibers mushrooms. The power in grassroots organizing is its rhizomatic potential: lateral roots whose blossoms continually reappear, never able to be stomped out."

--> this inspired by the philosophy of the rhizomatic:

[from Wikipedia:] The term rhizome has been used by Carl Jung as a metaphor, and by Gilles Deleuze as a concept, and refers to the botanical rhizome.

Carl Jung used the word "rhizome", also calling it a "myzel", to emphasize the invisible and underground nature of life:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. (Prologue from "Memories, Dreams, Reflections")

Furthermore:


Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the term "rhizome" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. In A Thousand Plateaus, they opposed it to an arborescent conception of knowledge, which worked with dualist categories and binary choices. A rhizome works with horizontal and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and linear connections.

so, as you can see, i'm keeping busy.

back to the grindstone,
stephan!e

chance imagery

i read part of George Brecht's "Chance Imagery" [.pdf] today. i found the part about "randomness" particularly interesting. allow me to indulge:

"chance images are characterized by a lack of conscious design. [...] in general, the reason for the importance of randomness for purposes of scientific inference will be the same as the reason for its importance in the arts, that is, the elimination of bias." [Brecht, p.17, emphasis added]

this got me thinking about the relationship of randomness and sense, and how meaning is derived mostly from the proximity of certain images and sounds, the creation of contexts.

this is why experimental film can sometimes frustrate me, b/c it seeks to explode these meaning webs, drawing attn to the mind's assumptions by playing with them, with arbitrary constructs.

if art as i understand and conceive of it is unique in that it presents the artist's meaning, that there is a message hidden within for the viewer/audience, then the frustration i have with chance-imagery IS the very fact that it removes bias.

bias is what i go to art for. if i wanted to go to something cold and free from personal perspective, i'd go to science.

but anyway, the thot i had that would change my understanding of chance-imagery would be something along the lines of the jots pictured on my hand:
if i were to film an ordinary day in the ordinary life of an ordinary person, nothing spectacular, nothing worth judging, just something simple that ppl would watch and think, 'oh, how ordinary...' that is, if i could capture on film something that would not elicit strong bias or intimations of bias, just an omniscient passive observer lens recording an average daily occurence, then i could invert its meaning (or lack of meaning) with a parallel chance-imagery version of the same day.

that is, it would be two complementary film records of an ordinary day:
1. the linear (real) version, which would be conventional, and free of bias. &
2. the nonlinear/ subconscious (surreal), which would use chance-imagery. in this film, i would record footage of all the random things i find along the day while filming/ things my subject might come across randomly on an average day: magazine ads strewn on the street, a lost scarf strewn on the grass in the lawn outside, the used condom found in the parking lot, the sign blinking "cookie ugh" instead of "cookie dough" and etc. these chance images would provide meaning, rather than erase them, and would instead construct a narrative that perhaps wasn't even there to begin with.

what kinds of thots come to one's mind as one finds trash and treasures on city streets while walking about in an ordinary day?

that would be the subject and crux of such a film exploration.
-stephan!e

early starts

hear here, here hear!

it's 9 am on an ice-tinged saturday, and i have begun official work on my thesis!

today, we shall flesh out the outline, determine which research will be necessary before i can begin writing the first chapters, and --i hope-- have a rough understanding of democratic educational history and philosophy.

the goals for this semester's research:
-history/philosophy of democratic ed
-timelines and maps and lists
-case studies (my educational autobio, Highlander School, Central Academy)
-field work (local school, local U, local community)

first nuggets of the day:
the language of education. education vs schooling. learners vs students. mentors vs teachers. finding ways to make language "work."
the pedagogy of the oppressed. schooling can be oppressive. teachers use grades as leverage against undesirable student behavior. grades and favoritism as ways to silence challengers. we become slaves to grades before we become wage slaves. (we're always slaves!)
"educational reform" = my death blow. i want to integrate theory and practice, toward a more empowering and effective (rather than efficient) system and method of education. but as long as i'm open about what i see as egregious flaws in the educational process, i will be met with heavy criticism and hostility. no one wants to admit they're doing things wrong, or concede to an undergraduate. no one can acknowledge that i have experience in the educational system enough to be a critic of it.
why split my experience in education into hierarchies, levels of understanding? why limit the study of higher education to the graduate level? this assumes an undergraduate cannot understand what they experience on a daily basis? must i really have all 4 yrs of undergrad under my belt before i can be a critical, conscious student of higher education?
why are we always looking back rather than simply looking? if i can examine it closely now, why wait until it's even further away?

and these thoughts from a classroom experience last thursday:
relationships of power - students become afraid to challenge/ to speak their mind
-they learn to love convention and obey rules. there's safety in rules. there's safety in passivity. to submit is to be safe and invisible in passivity. to speak one's mind is to challenge the teacher's authority, to make the banking method difficult, to interfere with the completion of the teacher's job. to be vocal is to be a terrorist.
-students sacrifice their intellectual freedom for safety, both in the classroom and in life

the nature and nurture of blogging

school's been getting me down lately, because they (the administration, the bureaucracy, "them" who are not "me" or "us") won't let me take the classes i want and need to research my thesis.

basically, the line they give me has been some variation on "So... it sounds like you're interested in X. I recommend studying X before you write your thesis. But we don't have classes in X, and the ones that are necessary we won't let you take, so you'll have to independently work on it yourself. But you shouldn't work by yourself, because you could get lost. But I don't have time to help you. But you should study..."

since school can be so depressing, let's not think about it, and turn our attentions instead to an informal institution of education, the internet...

i've been asked by many friends and professors for my opinion on what i see blogs doing for democracy. on the one hand, we have (for us with internet access) unlimited opportunity to self-publish and voice our opinion. we have as much freedom and place in the great digital mesh of voices as big corporations and established news zines for our own work. this has potential for revolutions and subversions of established publishing powers and authorities. unfortunately, the blog has increasingly become less a medium of value and dependable journalism, and more a cheap and instant way to distribute porn, spam, and the mundane stories of extra ordinary individuals in their endearing self-assumed importance.

and don't get me wrong, i saw myself falling into the latter category too. that's why i dropped the other blogs and have been working hard to keep this blog about "significant" things (i.e. not my personal life or my day to day activities, but about breakthrus, however minor they may be, or nuances for my senior project).

= i'm a serious blogger now.

and rather than bore u with too many rantings about my institution of higher "learning," i shall wax philosophical about personal communication and the internet.

i've had too many relationships depend on email. i meet many ppl who insist on emailing as our only form of communication. which is fine, b/c i hate the phone, and there's a certain comfortable familiarity with our computers that i think enables us to email/IM/text one another so easily. in fact, most of my most meaningful relationships have been through email (i can think of at least 5 really good friends who i got to know and continue to know thru email).

is this not in a way sad? why are we so interpersonally starved that we must maintain barriers of metal and wires between us? why are we so comfortable to talk about ourselves to a nameless anonymous void called the blogosphere when we could easily step next door and sit down with a friend and talk face-to-face instead?

b/c we're scared of being intellectuals, of being thinking, feeling humans. we're robots, don't you know? and horrible exhibitionists. everyone's vying for a piece of that 15 minutes. even me. and a blog is such a quick dirty way to do it.

here's a conversation i had with my friend matt a while ago. we discussed this theory over, what else, an online chatting service. i think we came to some pretty revealing conclusions.

beep beep
blah blah
-stephan!e

---> he has some thoughts on myspaciness too!

12:37 AM Matt: wow, you're pretty prolific with your blogging

me: how's that now?

12:38 AM Matt: you write a lot

me: oh. i guess.

12:39 AM i thot you were referring to my many blogs

i have like 5 now...

i have commitment issues
[...]

you want the perfect url name

and then maybe you don't like the username you chose or something

it's pretty ridiculous

12:44 AM Matt: it's like the slightly more mature older sibling of livejournal

me: i know

12:45 AM but i have more respect for bloggers than livejournalists

i mean, that's just so obviously narcissistic

Matt: true

me: this way we can at least be subtle egoists

Matt: haha, yeah

12:46 AM that's what's so great about it, you can write about yourself without feeling like you're forcing yourself on anyone, since its voluntary

me: exactly

and it's like being semi-published

12:47 AM there's at least some validity to it

12:50 AM Matt: there's something about this whole idea of personal blogging that's so interesting... the idea that you put your personal thoughts out there for the entire internet to see

me: yeah definitely

Matt: stuff that you wouldn't tell the people around you

me: i mean, you wouldnt' publish your diary, right?

i know1

12:51 AM Matt: you'd think not... but apparently we do

or would

me: i'm more honest on my blog than i am to my friends and family in person

exactly

what is it about the perceived anonymity of the internet that allows us to abandon our inhibitions

perhaps it's because we feel no one is watching and reading

but isn't that sad?

we're a generation that assumes no one cares

12:52 AM Matt: but on one hand, i think i kinda want someone to be reading

me: yeah but does anyone?

Matt: just someone i dont know

me: we all crave audiences, few of us get any

Matt: an anonymous admirer

me: yup

Matt: yeah, there's probably not

me: it's so narcissistic

Matt: but there could be

you never know

that's the genius of it, i guess

me: what self-absorbed bastards all of us are

12:53 AM Matt: haha, what else is there

me: right right

i think a lot of it is seeking validation too

you feel more real and alive when you see other ppl noticing you

Matt: yeah, definitely

12:54 AM me: how else are you sure you're not living a dream?

12:55 AM Matt: yeah, how else can you form/maintain a self-image

me: i know, we have to rely on others to help us shape our selves

how sad and pathetic we all are

Matt: i'd like to think it's at least endearing sad and pathetic

12:56 AM me: haha i guess it is

Matt: *endearingly

me: you have to work for the endearing tho
[...]

we've grown up not believing anyone cares about us

so what do we become?

whiny emo exhibitionists armed with liejournals and myspace accounts

or blogs and facebooks, if you're classy.

;-)

1:00 AM Matt: ha, exactly

time travel is easy

yesterday, i showed you pictures from travel books i found from my childhood.

today, i share more intimate glimpses into the past.

first, pictures from this book i made in Montessori school*:
the scribbled "copyright" on the inside cover indicates that i made this in 1995. that was a full 12 years ago. the book is a delicate creation titled "Grown-ups always do everything!" and features 20 unique pages of pencil drawings paired with different privileges of the older class i envied as a 9-year-old imprisoned in the educational system.
it is handbound: as i remember, i drew the pictures in sequence in a booklet of salvaged computer paper, then folded the pages together, made holes in the crease and threaded them together. i then glued the end pages to the covers, which were cardboard pieces i covered in a soft fabric (you can see this detail in the photo).
(for those interested in the art of self-binding, this is a simplified version of case-binding.)

what i find most interesting was the "about the author" on the back inside cover:
notice how i mis-typed my own birthday (Dec 26, not 29) and how my goal "is to someday be a famous writer." where did that young girl go?

---

finding this treasure brings back fond memories of elementary school, and being left to my own devices, i recall spending recesses and afterschools playing with paper materials, making countless notebooks and sketchbooks of various sizes and colors, giving them to friends and family, keeping some for myself for later writing. i determined to use every book i made for a story or novel (as i said, i had dreams of being a writer. and evidently, a self-published one.)

i once gave a boyfriend a hand-bound book i made in 8th grade, a unique gift because i had marbleized paper for the covers, and bound it in japanese style, with a beaded tassle bookmark.

---

seriously, where did that young dreamer go?

finding these relics from childhood makes me feel sad for dreams i've let go. but it also gives me renewed faith in the person i am. and a sense of duty to the past.

but the past is merely a distant present. and the future is the present is the past. why leave book-binding in the past? why allow self-publication to be a left-behind childhood dream. i'm self-binding my senior thesis. let's call it a tribute to the dreamers.

tomorrow: more pictures from the past.

to the past, and its presents,
stephanie


*note to self: research the Montessori method for your senior project. according to Webster's, the Montessori method emphasizes developing children's "natural" interests, rather than following a strict formal curriculum. this has interesting developmental implications, and is as close a method to facilitated autodidacticism that i can think of in an extant institutional setting.