Extreme Housekeeping (And Other Signs of the Times)

What signs tell us about behavior and expectation....

On a recent visit with to a job site on the 405 widening project in the Sepulveda Pass, I came across an "extreme housekeeping" sign that made me think about the ways we use language and image to control behavior. (Normally these construction sites are not opening to the public; I was on a field trip sponsored by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.)

For the "housekeeping" sign, see below. First let's put some display options in context.

Sometimes a sign is so obvious, it doesn't need much --- if any --- language. Here's an ad from Sri Lanka. I think we all know what it is telling us to do.

This next sign also reveals its intentions very swiftly. It's odd and sad, yet clear. They offer a service to help a family prepare a deceased person for burial. This was taken in Ghana.

This next sign is very clear and rather mean. One wants to tell the Scrooge landlord, Aw, come on, have a heart. No ball games? That's just mean.

Other times, image and text may be a bit at odds. Have a look at this:

Is it just me, or does this dog seem nearly friendly? And it's sort of fox-like, rather than dog-like. Perhaps the sign should say, "Beware of the Foxes and the Fox-German Shepherd Hybrids."

This next sign seems rather redundant. It's from Boston and has red letters for extra emphasis. I appreciate the polite "Please," but wouldn't the snow and the lack of water keep me out of the pool anyway?

Some signs promise more they can deliver. I am not sure anybody can learn English without some homework and without a bit of grammar study. Of course, my students would be glad if I adopted this secret and magical pedagogy. Maybe for their sake, I should have signed up.

This sign in Reno seems contradictory. "CCW" refers to a conceal-and-carry weapon permit: that is to say, you can keep a .32 in your ankle holster and it's legal. This hotel says its private property rights trump your Second Amendment rights.

Some signs baffle me, or require a bit of translation, even when one is in London where they speak a somewhat legible version of English. This was in a pub in Pimlico.

"Mews" used to be the cages in which royalty kept raptors for the sport of falconry, though in the UK in can mean a short side street and the apartments therein. (Now the Royal Mews are where one goes to see the Queen's horses and carriages.) "Cobbles" means the stone driveway that this pub's open-air seating spills out onto. "Mew" can also be a cat-like moaning or meowing sound, perhaps the sound one makes when one has had too much to drink, fallen asleep on the cobbles, and woken up so sick you're barely able to whimper.

Here's another one that takes a minute to follow through to its full meaning. It's from Ghana.

We call the express highways in L.A. "freeways" not because they have so little traffic but because unlike back east, there are not many tolls. If there IS going to be a road tax, it only seems fair that we all pay equally. That means that zombies and the undead have to pay their highway tolls too, just like the rest of us. Read down a few lines on this sign to come to the appropriate fee for the mummy wagon.

"NB" refers to the now-little-known abbreviation, "Nota Bene," or in English, "note well the following detail; pay special attention to this footnote." It's a rather hyper-literate thing for a sign, since even the MLA doesn't tend to use this abbreviation anymore. Watch out for those mummies, though, in or out of their wagons.

Staying fit to combat the potential onslaught of the undead remains an important factor in modern life. There's extreme skiing, for example, or "crocking" (bungee jumping in Australia in which one lands in water inhabited by saltwater crocodiles, the ones famous for snacking on humans). New to me though is the sport listed below, described on a sign on the sign of a job-site trailer adjacent to the 405 Freeway.

Somehow it makes me think of vacuuming the stairs while simultaneously rappelling down from the skylight in a Ninja costume, or maybe using a jet pack and rollerblades to see how fast I can hose down the driveway. Whatever I do, I better do it well, since "Anything less is unacceptable!!: If I could somehow combine my concealed weapons, a wagon full of mummies, and some virus-laden coconut shoots, I would have the complete package. Of course, the sign itself might be as wide as a billboard. Time now to put on my crash helmet and get a blowtorch ready, to see what can be done about the weeds in the planter. After that, we'll see how the skateboard performs in the bathtub. If I cover the bottom with a scouring pad and lubricate it all with some scum-be-gone foam, I bet I can knock this thing out in under two minutes.

Kawabunga, as the surfers used to say.

+++++++++++++++

The Antelope Valley College blog is curated by Charles Hood in Language Arts and does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees, the District itself, or Metropolitan Transit Authority, which is the organization behind the interminable freeway project on the Sepulveda Pass. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

Who's the Greatest Great Gatsby?

Scott Covell reviews the recent try at putting the novel on film

Sorry to disappoint his fans and groupies, but it's Hood here first, then Language Arts ace lit teacher Scott Covell will be on stage in a second.

We both were simultaneously looking forward to and yet dreading Mother's Day weekend this year, and it has nothing to do with our families. That's because this past weekend the F. Scott Fitzgerald estate got its last big push towards mega-royalties, when the Baz Luhrmann "Jazz Era on Acid" version of The Great Gatsby opened. Would the movie wreck the book or do it justice?

In terms of straight dollars, there's one winner right out the gate. This classic of American literature is still in copyright, and so the accountants must love it: not just whatever umpteen millions the production companies had to pay for movie rights, but now another generation of readers will be buying copies of the book. This has to be the single most profitable piece of Modernist literature of all, outselling Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Only Picasso must be more valuable per square inch. A quick survey reveals that my household has a least four versions of Gatsby, separate from whatever I have in my office at AVC. My wife the lit major has two copies, I have a hard copy I can't find, and I have a Kindle version that I ordered once to fill up the hours on a cross-Atlantic flight a year ago.

Fitzgerald was living in L.A. when he died; his last house is under what is now the 101 Freeway, though his actual site of death was an apartment near Crescent Heights and Sunset. It's now a gated unit but before it was, Bill Vaughn and I once knocked on the door. Current occupants were not pleased to have yet more pilgrims. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack tied to alcoholism and maybe TB; he's buried near Washington D.C., and I have been there too, though this time without Bill Vaughn. Covell (unless he has misplaced it) has an acorn from the grave site, courtesy of me. All of the Fitzgerald work is worth knowing, if nothing else in order to counterbalance the cruel portrait of him in Hemingway's Moveable Feast. Why though has Gatsby been raised to top-tier status? Along with Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick, it ranks as one of the most perfect and enduring novels of the entire American canon.

Like most aspects of high art, from Beethoven to Plato, Gatsby may be better known for being famous than it is appreciated as a rich and deeply moving text. Indeed, I am not sure how many people read it still, but apparently enough people have heard of it that it merits high status as a cultural reference point. Publicity in advance of the movie's release has been ubiquitous. To take two examples (one highbrow, one lowbrow), Vanity Fair ran a squib to feature the clothing recently.

It's a well-lit shot, custom made for the magazine, with a brief narrative on the right about who made which of the costumes. (Brooks Brothers, in the case of the photo.) So for Vanity Fair, the movie is about style, look, elegance. It's not whether it lives up to the spirit of the book, but how the actors look, putting the bodies of the book out there in front of us.

Yet on the supermarket tabloid end of the scale, even the Globe has stepped up to cover the movie, and in this case, turned the interpretive framework into a high school prom queen contest. Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest Jay Gatsby of them all? This one uses a studio-supplied still, though that lines up nicely with stills from the previous movie versions.

So who IS the best actor for this? Why DOES the book endure? We turn now to Covell, to look at this question in terms of what works, what doesn't work in the most recent movie adaptation.

The Great Gatsby: Keep the New Versions Coming!

At the end of his scathing review of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (released this past Thursday midnight), The New Yorker critic Davis Denby suggests that --- like him --- “ young audiences”  may not care for this latest of four Hollywood adaptations of the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  He may be wrong about that (the film did a credible 51 mil the first week), and I certainly disagree with much of his review; however, he makes a great point when he states that perhaps the novel: “should be left in peace. The book is too intricate, too subtle, too tender for the movies” (79).  

Indeed, the glorious lyrical and impressionistic writing of Fitzgerald can only be captured through voiceovers and --- in the case of Luhrmann’s film --- rather surreal moments of spiraling letters all coalescing into beautiful Fitzgerald prose on the handwritten pages of Nick Carraway’s fevered journal written years later in a sanitarium. Still, lovers of The Great Gatsby (of which I am certainly one) or not, Luhrmann offers a visual feast that is at once chaotic, swirling and postmodern, and then switches gears with more profound and subtle film-making to allow the audience to sink deeply into the rekindled romance of Daisy Buchanan and our hero, Jay Gatsby.

Having taught the novel a zillion times, and now, especially after just completing an impossible-to-publish 300-page prequel/sequel of Fitzgerald’s greatest work which I titled Gatsby’s Revenge (copyright issues, dang it), I came to the film without great expectations but just sort of hoping to kick back and enjoy myself in the visuals, music, story, and the amazingly-CGI-realized New York City of 1922.  

I found the film very enjoyable and surprising, even with its obvious flaws. The already-legendary party scenes are wild and ravishing (though I still prefer Copolla’s 1974 lavish, vaster and historically-saner parties, music and dancing), the Valley of Ashes is wonderfully realized (though a bit over-crowded methinks), but it is the romance at the core of the Great American Novel that Luhrmann captures so well and makes this film worth viewing. This second part of the novel and film --- focused on this romance --- is carefully and magically crafted by Luhrmann, but it is the outstanding performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and English actor Carey Mulligan which mesmerize us. 

How good are these? Well they are so much more spell-binding than Redford and Farrow. I like Redford, but (like many others) personally, I dread Farrow’s performance in the 1974 version every time I show scenes from it when teaching the novel.  She just doesn't present quite the right look or feel for that role. In the present version, Mulligan is lovely, and she catches the sense of vulnerability so well necessary for the character. That's fine, but DiCaprio is the one who is close to brilliant. What a nuanced, multi-level engaging persona he brings to the legendary love-struck bootlegger of the Jazz Age, Jay (Gatz) Gatsby. 

I was wondering for months if DiCaprio would be able to summon forth that warm smile of Gatsby’s, and indeed he does, while also bringing an intensity that builds in a sort of angsted momentum right up to the penultimate violent argument with Tom Buchanan at the Ritz in New York City, which Denby believes is “the dramatic highlight of [Luhrmann’s] career.” 

I saw the film in Sherman Oaks with my wife, Lori, my best friend and colleague, Mark Hoffer, and my two teenage kids, and while we had some disagreement about the first half of the film (Lori and I generally liked the first half, while the rest of them gave that part a thumbs down), we agreed the second half is worth watching and brings out some of the best aspects of the novel nicely. 

Maybe that’s all we can hope for with film adaptations of our favorite works: does the film capture “the spirit” of the text (in the language of critic Louis Giannetti), and does it at least offer a selection of moments when you go: “Yeah, that’s it! Well done!” I don’t think there’s any doubt that Luhrmann’s version achieves both elements. 

Throughout the film Luhrmann offers us glimpses of that green light on Daisy’s dock, there swirling in some sort of mythic mist: forever beckoning to Gatsby, and to all of us, with its legendary  resonance as a metaphor for the riches and success waiting for those who quest for the quintessential vision of the American dream. Like that strangely mist-hidden green beacon we can perceive clearly on occasion throughout the film, there are a number of times we can ascertain through the unique fog of Luhrmann’s vision, the true essence and beauty of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. And for me, that’s enough.

Hood's back now, just to say wow, yes, thanks. I think Covell has got this exactly right. Being more impatient than Scott Covell, I saw the movie on Friday night at a sold-out showing in Westwood. My companions were lit major wife Abbey and the famous painter (and super great film buff) Don Bachardy. Bachardy's late partner was the novelist Christopher Ishwerood, through whom Bachardy knew well W.H. Auden and Tennessee Williams and other mid-20th century heavyweight writers. That is to say, Bachardy knew the people who knew Fitzgerald and company, and so his opinion counts double with me. (Once, when I asked Don if he had seen the big Kubrick show at LACMA, he said modestly, "Well, no, but when the Kubricks were in L.A. still, Chris and I saw a lot of them.")

And my group's vote? We agree with Covell, in that all of us defy the astoundingly long parade of critics who want to trash the Luhrmann version. It may not be a great movie or even at times a good one, but it's always trying to do interesting things and it has some absolutely amazing set-piece scenes. When Gatsby is on the second floor balcony of his two-tier bedroom (the bed lined up to face Daisy's house, across the water), he throws down a rainbow of silk shirts onto the bed. I hate to say that images do things that words can't, but this is a perfect instance of a moment having to be seen, not read about. The way they fall like burnt up angels or physical dreams, the lurid, lush, amazing Technicolor rush of it all, just has to be seen to be believed. (Sorry, I hate cliches, but in this case, it's really true.)

And the thing about any movie we dislike of a book we love (which for me, includes many of the early installments of the Harry Potter franchise), if you don't like the film version out now, just wait ten years. There will always be a remake down the line.

Until then, if you're ambivalent about whether to see it at all or not, the answer is yes, ignore the bad reviews on "Rotten Tomatoes." Just go. And if picking between regular format or 3D, go for 3D. If we're going to put frosting and sprinkles on top of our cotton candy, we may as well go all the way. As Vanity Fair said (in advance of the official release), "If Luhrmann has caught a whiff of the self-delusion in Gatsby's belief in 'the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,' his excessive vision will have done Fitzgerald proud." And indeed it has, indeed it has.

++++++

The AVC Blog is curated by Language Arts teacher Charles Hood and does not represent the views of the District, the Board of Trustees, or the Fitzgerald estate. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu, and Covell at scovell@avc.edu.

Triumph and Tragedy in Boston

John Toth provides a runner's perspective on recent events

Inside the LS1 building on campus, across from the Language Arts Division office, we have a glass display case that features news articles and cartoons and public announcements. One of the weekly features is an on-going series, "What I Have Been Reading," which allows a different faculty member each time to share what's on her or his nightstand.

The most recent addition to this series comes from English Department member John Toth, whose response was so thoughtful and poignant, that it merits repeating here.

As many on campus know, John is a very serious runner, and is working on a life goal of running a marathon in all 50 states. That's pretty cool --- I always was happy just to have been able to visit each of the U.S. states, let alone do something that sustained (and healthy).

Many on campus know him, but for those who don't, here's a recent picture.

He was kind enough to let me post his "What I Have Been Reading" essay not just in the display case (where it will be up about a week or so, until the next person rotates into the slot), but here, as well.

The rest of this comes from Mr. Toth:

On my first trip to Boston to run the marathon, I read 26 Miles to Boston by Michael Connelly, which chronicles the history of the marathon as well as author’s personal journey from the start in Hopkinton to the finish line on Boylston Street in Copley Square.  The tragedy during this year’s Boston Marathon brought the work to mind as well as my own experience in 2009 and 2011 and suggested both the elastic and fragile nature of memory.

2009 was an epic fail.  Overcooked the first half and stumbled through the last 13 miles.  I was the lone walker in a river of runners flowing past the Citgo sign, Fenway Park, and other iconic landmarks of the city.  Friends I was supposed to run with were half an hour in front of me crossing the finish line.  Memories of the entire trip are clouded by frustration and shame.
 
2011 provided redemption:  my fastest marathon time on a course without a significant drop in elevation.  Achieving that kind of success there made the accomplishment even more cherished. Boston is a relatively flat, yet challenging course.  The name Heartbreak Hill suggests the physical and emotional torment that many have encountered after the 20-mile mark. Perhaps even more indicative of my performance is my splits. A successful marathon is measured by even or negative splits--the ability to run the second half at the same pace or faster than the first despite the fatigue. My second half was only one second slower than the first—perhaps the closest I will ever come to reaching perfection.  

Despite my exhaustion, crossing the finish line was pure exhilaration, an unqualified triumph.  I wanted so desperately to capture that moment. I turned around to gaze down Boylston Street and the Boston skyline.  In my euphoric state, I imagined that the skyline would always be a reminder of a hard-fought personal victory.

However, the events of Patriots’ Day this year have caused my memory to take on the character of a palimpsest.  Superimposed on my memory is the image of the same view of Boylston Street that serves as a backdrop to explosions capable of throwing a runner to the ground.  My image of triumph shattered by violence, as the bodies of runners and cheering spectators were torn apart by nails bits and other insidious shrapnel.

My heart goes out to those who lost life and limb and suffered other physical injuries.  However, the psychic damage inflicted on all those involved by this act of terrorism should not be overlooked.   Instead of a day that will be remembered with unbridled joy, fear and horror will define their experience.         

For runners, a day that should be a memory of personal accomplishment will always be tarnished by tragedy.

The Antelope College blog is curated by Charles Hood, English. He can be reached at chood@avc.edu. Professor Toth may be reached at jtoth@avc.edu. This blog does not reflect the official positions of the Board of Trustees or Antelope Valley College District.

Marthe Aponte and Aboriginal Art

the sure hand and open heart of a modern master -- or, "Come on in, the water's fine!"

AVC's French teacher Marthe Aponte is a woman of many talents. Based on her work under Jacques Derrida at U.C. Irvine, she understands the difficult and subtle linguistic theory of "Deconstruction" better than anybody on campus. (Her closest rival might be Santi Tafarella, in the English Department, or Nicelle Davis, also in English. When he first arrived at Irvine from Yale, Derrida was all everybody talked about, and I went to some of his lectures but confess that mostly I walked away baffled. His secretary though once tried to steal my office desk, so he and I were rivals from the start.)

For Marthe Aponte, her students in French learn how to have very very good accents, while those classes are further enriched by her cross-cultural Caribbean perspective, since Ms. Aponte taught in Venezuela as well. For Professor Aponte, languages are not just bundles of grammar and rules, but also are delivery mechanisms for expressing the full potential of the human spirit.

We can see attitude that in her solo show up now in the AVC Art Gallery.

(Note to others: please don't touch the art!)

Encouraged initially by Warren Scherich and other local artists, Marthe has developed a substantial body of work in a relatively brief period of time. This show then have several messages. One is the formal beauty of the pieces themselves. Another is a comment on scale and viewing distance; Aponte's art has one kind of structure and elegance when seen from across the room, and then opens up (like a close-up photograph of a flower or a drop of milk) to have other, even more beautiful, worlds hidden inside. Look at this close-up shot:

Here are some more pieces, as seen being studied at the opening reception.

And here now is a more detailed look at the surface texture itself. Isn't this just amazing? You can get lost inside of these worlds within worlds within worlds.

Another message of the show is one of encouragement and invitation. While I am happy to enjoy her pieces and want to talk her about their connections to larger artistic movements, I also think the show just reminds all of us that we do not have to "be" one thing. Marthe could have said, oh, I am too busy to make art, or too old, or too intimidated, or I have too many committee meetings. Instead, she is like a person willing to swim to Antarctica from the Pier at Santa Monica: she just closed her eyes and jumped into the water.

The results are amazing. To have such a rich and substantial solo show as is up now speaks not just to her talent, but also to her courage, and to the ways in which she is modeling a rich, creative life for the rest of us. I write every day (one to ten hours a day, in fact) but often wish I could do more with photography. Here's a recent shot of mine that I like, of a young Joshua tree spike.

I shot it one day and didn't like the results -- the lighting was off, but it was out of focus because I was holding the camera up over my head so put the truck in 4wd and went back on this same trail a second day, this time bringing a ladder. I do take photography seriously, and would like to practice is it every day. Even so, I hardly am ready for a solo show, and never even really thought that I could "deserve" one. Marthe Aponte has lit a fire under me: now I want to make not just more art, but much better art, on a sustained visual theme. It's as if she already swam to Antarctica and is standing on the shore, wrapped in a duvet, waving at the rest of us --- "Come on over, it's not as far as it looks!"

She also reminds me how much our recent visual culture still has to offer. When I look at her large, bold expanses of direct red, I am returned to my childhood pleasures of coloring a blank page with markers or crayons, and to the simple honest pleasure of color as color. It of course calls to mind Rothko, who famously said, when asked about the ideal viewing distances, that he wanted a person to get right up close --- to stand no more than six inches away, in order to fall into the color field completely.

One Los Angeles- (and recently, UK-) based artist who also celebrates color this way is David Hockney. I went to his huge show in London at the Royal Academy last year, and he deserves the reputation he has. (That show had over 700,000 visitors, limited in part by tickets, which had sold out. Longer hours or a bigger venue, and the number could have doubled.)

Hockney says --- and the Aponte show verifies it too --- that color has meaning by itself, even if it's a bit askew from so-called normal reality. Here's a small detail of a much larger panorama of a veranda in Mexico.

Getting up close to Marthe's work also brings to mind that most cliche and yet still-interesting of mid-20th century artists, Jackson Pollock.

Of course the main visual tradition she wants us to connect her work to is that of recent (1980 and after) Australian Aboriginal painting. See for example this piece, "Five Dreamings" by Michael Nelson Jakamarra and friends.

It may not be clear in the blog, but the colors are built up out of small dots, sometimes applied with a Q-tip. This compressed visual narrative tells many stories at once: it is a topographic map of landscape, it is a comment on Australian ecology, it is a family history of clan boundaries, and it's a retelling of a creation myth. Some of us may have seen Biblical art, showing a saint's death or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, but those works rarely incorporate as many layers as an Aboriginal piece manages to include.

Clifford Possum Japaljarri -- and even his name makes me envious --- includes dingo tracks, a man killed after a fight and chase, territorial claims to water holes, and clan totems, all in the same unified visual field. (There is more of course than just that; see Peter Sutton's "Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia" for a much fuller explanation of the implied narratives and sudden joys of pieces such as these.)

When these paintings first came to L.A. I remember being utterly transported by their overall cohesion and fresh visual look, as well as admiring the minute parts from which they are built.

AVC has something like that now with the Aponte show. Here is another close-up shot. Christine Mugnolo and I were joking that this level of detail would drive us batty. Yet Marthe makes it look not only effortless, but inevitable.

Others think so too; her opening reception was bursting with curious, excited people.

One of the things the AVC Gallery does well is to provide music at openings; the art piece in the background here is a bit blown out (my camera doesn't like the hot spots created by the gallery lights), but we can admire the musician's vest: he certainly fits his visual environment.

This leaves us to ask Marthe one final question, but it's a big one.

It's great that you have come this far . . . what's next?

                                               ++++++++++++++++++++

The Antelope Valley College blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, and does not represent the views of the District or the Board of Trustees. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

How to Crash a Class

advice on getting the classes you need....

This post is going up on the Friday of spring break, which means that there will be a batch of second-eight-week classes opening up on Monday.

Many of these are full (on paper) and many have full wait lists, but on average, these late-start classes are a bit easier to crash (to "get into," even if not on the wait list) than first-half classes are. That's because by now, people's interests have changed, their cars have broken down, their memories have gone ka-ploooie, their bosses have become tyrants, or their student loans have been rescinded. Any number of factors come to play, but the fact is, of the people both formally enrolled and those wait listed, more won't show up for a second-eight-week class than usually don't show up at start-of-term classes, which in turn means more seats open up for folks just trying randomly to get in.

Even so, some strategies are more successful than others for getting the class you need.

Let's admit one thing up front. If you're already going to AVC and in fact, already have a full schedule of classes, the system or structure of the place makes sense. For that student, if you see this kind of sign . . .

. . . it makes some kind of semiotic sense. If you're new to the campus, though, the sign probably says this:

. . . which is to say, it's an example of what in technical writing is called "COIK." That stands for "clear only if known." A badly written set of directions about how to change an oil filter on a car may make sense, but only if you already know how to change an oil filter on a car.

So I think most administrators and faculty "get" that you're a bit confused, a bit unsure. The invisible rules of the campus are not yet known to you. And you maybe feel a bit anonymous, a bit like just a number in a line.

In the fall especially, AVC does try to have "first week welcome booths" set up around campus, where the lost and the unsteady can get a bit of friendly direction. We don't have the infrastructure to do that all the time.

So that means to crash a class, you'll need to figure things out on your own. That's okay: it's not that hard. It comes down to five guiding principles.

Be Clear
Be Polite
Be Persistent
Play to Win
Go to Plan B

In essence, you need a favor, and as with any rhetorical situation, that means thinking about it from the audience's point of view. It's not about what you want, it's all about making sure the person you are talking to gives you what you want, which may mean reconfiguring your approach. Let's see how that works.

(1) Be clear.

If I get an email from student x (from now on, let's call Mr. X by his first name, my hypothetical student, "Bob"), and if that email says, "kann i crash ur english class????" --- and you think this is an exaggeration, but it's not --- then I am going to hit delete and move on. That's because Bob is wasting my time. I get 200 emails a day, and if Bob isn't smart enough to figure out that I am in charge of more than one class, then to heck with him, I have got to move on. I cannot get into some kind of lengthy email exchange asking Bob to specify WHICH class that he's asking about.

Instead of that, Bob should ask by class time, day of week, AND crn number for any class he is asking about. While loads vary, some teachers have up to 7 classes, and no interest in playing "guess the crasher's intentions." If you are not clear about who you are and what you want, you're at the back of the line already.

(2) Be polite.

In Europe there's a lingering formality behind  and respect for university professors, and a proper salutation for certain teachers is "Herr Doktor Professor," which is to say, Mr. Dr. Professor. It sounds odd to American ears --- we are so plain Joe and all --- but makes sense. In the humanities in the U.S., even if somebody goes straight through and gets a B.A. in four or five years, then the M.A. is still two or three years past that. In the humanities, the average length of time a person needs to get her or his Ph.D. is eight years past a B.A. Then there is a year or two or five of part-time teaching until a tenure-track slot opens up, and then at AVC, to achieve tenure is a four year review process (and even longer at CSUN or UCLA). The student trying to crash the class is dealing with somebody with an extraordinary amount of education, and that person deserves some acknowledgment. They have perhaps spent longer in preparation for an academic life than your doctor has, in getting ready for a medical career.

So when Bob emails me and says kann i crash ur english class???? he is making several errors. One of those is that he's treating me as if I am one of his best buddies with whom he texts regularly. I am not: I am somebody who has published nine books and whose graduate program was, at the time, harder to get into than Harvard Medical School. I do not need for Bob to fawn, but I do expect Bob to say please and thank you and to use the same tone of voice he would use with a judge, a medical doctor, or an elderly uncle from whom he wishes to borrow a substantial amount of money. Show me at least some medium amount of respect.

Conversely, as an instructor, I really don't want to listen to your life story. Do not email me with nonsense about how you only need one class to graduate (mine), since among other things, it pisses me off: I happen to think that English 101 is both interesting and essential, and if you brag about how you did everything possible NOT to take it, that will not endear you to me. (See above, "audience.") And saying that you are trying to get into the nursing program is no better: guess what, every third person in the Antelope Valley is trying to get into the nursing program.

Especially bad, rhetorically, is to announce a long narrative of incompetence: "Well, see, Hood, I did have the class, but then I never paid my registration fees, so I got dropped, but I didn't know it cuz I didn't check my email, and then I was going to come by and see you but my car got impounded because I never paid these tickets, and then my sister, I was going to steal her car and come to see you, but I forget where she lives--" et cetera. Again, you think it doesn't happen? Happens all the time. I soooo don't want to hear that stuff, you have no idea.

If there truly is an exceptional reason you need something (if, say, you're in a wheelchair, and my assigned room accommodates your need better than other classes you might crash), sure, of course, explain that. In general, be brief and don't tell me why you didn't pay your fees on time.

(3) Be persistent.

Instructors vary on how they handle crashing, but on average, in most classes, there WILL be an open seat or two eventually, and on average, most instructors use a modified lottery system. On average, most want you to be present the first day of classes of the new term, and then to come back a second day as well, once their "no show" slots are really just that, and not Bob's friend Joe just trying to find a parking place. Yet because systems vary, it makes sense to cover your bets. That would mean a pattern like this: the minute you realize the class you need is full, email the instructor involved. Teaching assignments vary; he or she may not end up doing it, but for now, assume the listed teacher is the right one, and contact her or him. No matter if you hear back or not, send a follow-up a few days before school starts. Most of our adjunct instructors do not have offices, and in summer, many of the full-time instructors are locked out of their offices, so if you don't hear back, it's not necessarily that the class is or isn't full or that the teacher hates you, it's that he or she may not even have access to an email account.

Next, go to the class. If the instructor has an office, you can try that before class, but otherwise, go to the room the class is held in and see what's up.

DO NOT BE LATE.

We'll cover this below but let me say it again, DO NOT BE LATE. If you are trying to crash, do not piss off the teacher by interrupting a class already in progress.

If on the first day you strike out, send a polite, short, follow-up email, go back on the second class meeting. Be polite but be persistent.

(4) Play to win.

That means you know where the class is being held, maybe even what the instructor looks like, what books you will need if you DO get in, and if you do or don't meet the prerequisites. Here's an interesting case: if I have a class with three no-show seats, seats that I can then re-assign to three crashers, and if I have (let's say) 20 crashers, then I go straight lottery. We go out in the hall and pick numbers from a hat. All 20 have some sob story or another about why this class is essential for their education. We can't use that, so I just go straight lottery. Okay, 20 people, 3 seats, and odds are not great but not impossible. I will say, "take out a piece of paper and write your name on it, picking a number between one and a thousand. Please hurry. One minute max. Hurry up, please." I want this to happen swiftly: the other 27 people who ARE enrolled are inside the classroom, waiting for the lesson to start. And of the 20 crashers, a surprising amount do not have paper and pencil ready. I can't believe it: you want to take a college class from me and you don't even have a pen? Give me a break.

Play to win: do everything you can to up your chances, including coming to class with the basic supplies.

Blame Sacramento, but the fact is, there are a lot of students out there who want the same thing you do, which is a seat in this or that required class. I've had 60 people trying to crash one English class. Play to win. Make sure the one person who gets in is you.

Last, what's your Plan B?

If the 9:30 a.m. Math 50 class has 60 people trying to crash, what's your Plan B? No point in waiting there: the odds have gone too badly against you. (Though I suppose if you could calculate odds quickly, you wouldn't need Math 50.) In any case, is there a 10 a.m. class? 10:30? What about an online class, maybe through another school?

At AVC, we now just run one creative writing class a semester, and we try to be fair --- if it is poetry one term, we want fiction or nonfiction to cycle around too. Even so, demand is greater than supply. We the way priority registration is set up now, athletes and Honors students and so on get first crack. The poetry class fills up way soon.

Plan B might be to widen horizons. Has AVC shut you out many terms in a row? UCLA Extension offers some really top-notch creative writing classes. Sure, it costs more, but at least you get in.

In my case, I also am running some creative writing events through the City of Santa Monica, in the Camera Obscura Building, 1450 Ocean. (Sometimes known as that, the "1450 Building.") That's good because course fees are low and you get to have dinner at the beach, afterwards.

Be polite, be persistent, play to win ---- and if that doesn't work, I'll see you at the beach.

______

The AVC blog is curated by Language Arts faculty member Charles Hood. The views expressed in this blog do not reflect the official position of the Board of Trustees nor Antelope Valley Community College District. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

Photography Never (Always) Lies

Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images

An art show in New York this spring has moved on to Washington D.C., and it proved so popular that its exhibit catalog sold out and had to be reprinted. The show has the straight-forward and self-explanatory title of

...which is to say (in case the image is too small to see), "Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop." (The shot above is the cover to the exhibit catalog, from which the historical examples below come. This book is very thorough and very interesting: highly recommended.)

Photoshop is one of those terms like xeroxing a document or doing a google search for a website where the specific brand new now has become a generic verb. To "photoshop" somebody into (or out of) a picture is a widely understood expression. In a group shot of Language Arts, for which I was up on a bridge, it was suggested that I photoshop myself back into the shot. Well, no, but maybe I could give Harish Rao open eyes, since they seem to be closed in every group photo we try to take.

I first learned about a prototype of Photoshop --- and I will use a cap letter, since I mean the full, legal, proprietary program, from Adobe --- from the then-AVC artist, Cynthia Minet. She has since moved on to another college, but many years ago her treatment of some of my photographs became the cover of my second book, The Xopilote Cantos. For my book about the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Costa Rica, she combined a roadside cross, vultures in a tree, and water from a swamp. (The word xopilote means "vulture" and came into Spanish from New World Indian languages.) Her blended cover image came out like this:

We may think of photoshop manipulations as a recent thing, but the art show in Washington D.C. proves that we have been messing around with photos ever since it was invented and popularized in the 1830s. From the very start of photography, subtle and not-so-subtle combinations, enhancements, and outright falsehoods accumulated.

Here is a very fun shot, from the back cover of the exhibit catalog:

That is still a popular composition. Look at this variation, from an article on Taylor Swift (26 million albums sold, if I remember correctly) from the current issue of Vanity Fair. It shows the men who have been rumored to be romantically involved with her.

Using InDesign and similar programs, these days that's not so hard to do, but look again at the original model, the wheel of men on a rooftop overlooking Philadelphia. In a pre-"green screen" age, to manipulate the physical negatives took a considerable amount of skill, and one thing the show and catalog convince us of is just how good the former generation of dark room technicians really were. The problem then as now is less a matter of making a wheel of executives balance on some poor schmuck's shoulders than the fact that the eye sees the world one way, and the camera, another.

Take this example, from Language Arts. Once a week or so, I rotate a photo of a different faculty member into a display case in LS1, along with their note about what they have been reading lately.

Here is the current person being celebrated, Dr. Rachel Jennings, who teaches English.

She was just stepping out of a meeting when I asked her to turn and look back into the room and I took her picture, and if she looks like she is trying to smile when in actuality she feels ill, that's because I later learned that was just what was happening. I didn't catch her on her best day, apparently. Cooperative sort that she is, she gave me the best smile that circumstances allowed.

Yet what I "saw" at the time was "her," that is, a human figure. My eyes know to "de-select" the over-lit grassy background behind her as irrelevant, and know, too, how to process wild variations in light. With normal human vision, I can "see" a figure in a doorway, back lit by the sun. Yet the camera struggles with this. The range from light to dark is too great. She's dark, the background is light, so what to do? The average digital camera has a narrower dynamic range than the eye-mind combo has, so the camera wants me to shoot with a flash or else reposition her, so that the scalding noon sun bleaching out the grass does not blow out the background, as it does here. She is exposed well but the background is over-exposed, making this a bad photograph.

The thing about this shot is, I did indeed mess up, but not for the reasons just listed. It's not that the tonal range is too large, it's that the tonal range is too large for my home photo printer. For the weekly "what I have been reading" series, it starts with a photo that I print at home and bring in for the display case. Fine, but there's a calibration issue between my Mac computer and my Epson printer, and if I ask the printer to take a shot like this "as is," the machine goes on strike. It does NOT want to print both Rachel plus still print the blown-out background, and in fact, rather than let the background go white, it has some kind of internal printer hissy fit, and so it then it puddles black ink on the too-light background, ruining the print.

So rather than reschedule a new shoot, usually what I do is trick the printer into cooperating. It doesn't care what the background is, it just wants mid-tones. So I cut and paste some of those from elsewhere in the image and scribble the background in that way, just enough to get the shot to print Rachel and some kind of generic background blur without puddles of La Brea Tar Pit blackness.

Here's the "quick and dirty" re-edit, as it appeared in the Language Arts weekly news case. Rachel Jennings is the same, but the white of the first background now is a blurry green mid-toned mess. It has no art or realism behind it, but at least it will print and let me get on with updating the display.

I make no pretense that this edit is at all well done, since it is not. (I didn't "photoshop it," I used a thing called "Aperture," and I am not good about how to use it to burn and dodge, to use the correct terms for what I needed to do. In a proper Photoshop class, I assume my changed background would be about a D-, it is so clumsy.)

For the glass display case, this change is fine; I won't use the changed shot when I build the Language Arts website, and I would not use it for any kind of journalism or "factual" reporting. You will not see this submitted to the Antelope Valley Press. I just had to get Rachel's face up, so I could run her piece. By the way, since we're on the topic, here is her statement about what she has been reading.

When I had a cold recently, a friend said I should rub tea tree oil on my feet. She said it would help, but was unable to explain why. Alternative medicine sounds attractive, but does it work? In Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine, Simon Singh and Edward Ernst seek to answer this important question.

Motivated by the cost to our pockets ($60 billion a year worldwide) and to our health, the authors examine the research on more than thirty treatments and conclude that we have fallen prey to quackery to an alarming degree.

In a chapter on herbal medicine, they argue that, before taking a herb, we need to ask whether there’s any proof it works, whether it’s had conventional drugs added to it (to make it appear to work), what the side effects are, how it interacts with other drugs, whether it involves endangered species, and what the opportunity cost will be if we shun conventional medicine. The book is a reminder that with medicine, as with the rest of our lives, we need to use our critical thinking skills and not be mystified by marketing.

So to come back to our matter at hand (and hopefully not get waylaid by any shyster health cures along the way), let's just wrap up the common reasons images were manipulated in the past.

One was to make a postcard, the loss of which from American lives has been dealt with previously in this space.

Lenses were such and the kind of film available was such that to make a photograph "work" on a postcard, often the sky had to be filled in or humans imported from other, less active, versions. The photographers of your didn't have access to equipment that would give the tonal range that landscape paintings had lead viewers to expect, so these photographers and their retouching editors built up a composite view, one unit at a time.

I don't think they would have seen this as falsifying history so much just as getting the scene to be legible in a postcard as it was to our eyesight.

Another layering technique was to create whimsical scenes intended as satire, not representations of natural reality. Here is a World War I-era shot whose general joke transcends era and language.

I for one admire this very much --- just don't ask me how it was done! There is a very "sure" hand at work here, one that can create backgrounds and blend scale utterly seamlessly.

Photography has been doing this ever since it started. With the arrival of the concept of the penny postcard, visual puns and tongue in cheek exaggerations found a ready outlet in vernacular photography. These are all early examples here, but in my own lifetime, variations on a trout as big as a pack horse or an ear of corn so big it needs its own flatcar were still sold at drugstores through the American West. I miss them, I have to confess. I never thought they would disappear, or else I would have hoarded them along the way. See examples below; maybe we can refer to this as the "Jackalope" school of image making.

Some photo manipulation was more sinister. This shot of Lenin and Stalin has been heavily retouched, yet more or less represents authentic history. Later, Stalin in the purges would take photo manipulation down a darker path.

In this group of five people, there is a very grim history. One by one, as Stalin had people rubbed out, he also erased their visual memory. In the last photo below, only one man remains next to Stalin. It's not that he was the last lucky man to survive, since by then, he too had been executed. It's just that Stalin decided to leave him in an image, for propaganda purposes. In those Soviet times, the photo retoucher took away people whose lives already had been forfeited to Stalin's evil suspicions. Everybody knew the unspoken implication: do a good job in the darkroom, or you will be next.

The thing is, all photographs bend reality one way or another. That's what a lens does. Here is a shot from the Galapagos, via a British art magazine that I subscribe to.

This marine iguana tail in a cloud-reflecting tide pool together make a stunning shot, and in its intended final version (as a large-scale art print in a museum exhibition), I am sure it has a very striking impact. Yet let's be honest about all of the steps involved here.

---Photographer (Mr. Salgado, in this case).
---Photographer's eyesight (good or bad, limited or enhanced by polarizing sunglasses, etc).
---Photographer's camera and lens set-up (in this case, I believe he was shooting a full-frame Canon digital SLR, and Canon cameras have their own conversion algorithms: they "see" differently than would a Nikon in the same situation, or an older model Polaroid).
---Photographer's studio computer once he gets back from the Galapagos, and the software installed on it (in his case, I would assume he uses Mac and is running Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, and that he has a crew of paid assistants to do the work).
---The image after it has been edited and pushed and cropped and dodged and burned in Photoshop (this iguana image is not straight "out of the camera"; it has been post-processed).
---The processed image after it has been converted to black and white format (maybe done in Photoshop, but there are after-market programs too; this may have processed in such a way as to quote, visually, old Tri-X film).
---The processed and now black and white image after it has been fed into a different computer and turned into a high resolution, large format film negative.
---The film negative after it has been used to produce a museum-quality print.
---The print after it has been matted, framed, put behind museum-quality glass, hung on the wall, and lit (to light and hang an exhibition well takes many days).
---The print on the wall in relation to the other images, left and right; it will read different if next to a dead child killed by a tsunami, or if sequenced in between underwater shots, or if we know that an errant polar bear is lurking nearby, gobbling up napping iguanas.
---But of course we are not seeing the wall print, we are seeing a digital version of the wall print reduced down (and probably cropped) for printing on a magazine cover, a magazine whose tonal range in print options may not match the photographer's goals.
---But of course we are not seeing the magazine, either, but rather my scan of the magazine.
---But of course we are not seeing my scan of the magazine, but rather a version of my scan that has been digitized and loaded onto the AVC blog, and which on your computer might look very different from how I intended it to look, which is potentially different still from Salgado's intentions.

In any case, we are many mediated layers away from the original lizard in the original volcanic tide pool in the ocean off the coast of Ecuador. How Uncle Joe Stalin felt about marine iguanas history does not report. He probably would have been distrustful, as he was of most everything else. "Death to the strange and the marvelous" was his motto. 

Some things we might suspect can't be photographed. What about the energy and motion that Jackson Pollock wanted to capture in his art?

Of course, he used titles like "autumnal rhythms," and so a recent shot of mine (a snowy tree in Boston, lit by streetlamps) seems to me to have a similar range of lines and color form. Not exactly the same, but close, perhaps?

And of course, these are not the trees, these are just the digital versions of the trees ... you get the point. When it comes to photography, the camera never lies. Yet when it comes to photography, the camera always lies. Or at least there is a lot of room for fiction and interpretation, in between the object, the lens, the photoshopped corrections and croppings, and the final delivery to your computer or to the museum wall. It's all fiction then, even the most deadpan and "straight" documentary photograph --- it's all fiction, and long may the fictions reign.

++++

The AVC campus blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, and does not represent the official views of the Board of Trustees or the administration of Antelope Valley College. All views about jackalopes, photo doctoring, or snowy trees in Boston are his alone. Hood may be reached at chood@avc.edu.