Week Seven: Existentialism, Love and the Roots of the Hipster Musical

Catherine Deneuve amidst the umbrellas

Watching Assignment: Please watch Pitch Perfect (2012). 

In Class: We will be watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) directed by Jacques Demy. After the film we will be discussing musicals, their position in pop culture and their current resurgence in movies like Pitch Perfect and Frozen.

Writing Assignment: Due this week is your discussion of the contemporary hipster. This can be a discussion of the hipster as a sub-culture, hipness as an aesthetic, or even just a discussion of something you think we should be hip to.  The discussion should include your categorization (define whatever you are discussing) a collection (examples of the phenomena you are discussing) and an appreciation (what is cool or interesting about the specific examples you have chosen).

The point of this writing is to advance your skills as a content mediator and commentator on contemporary culture. The best way to approach your discussion of this topic is to start with something you find interesting and important to your own life and work, some element of contemporary culture that sustains you and that we might not consider or know that much about. You are directing our attention to it.

Next Week's Writing Assignment: Comment on a Disney film or other production. Use the same structure as last week. Categorize, collect, appreciate. Give some context, both personal and cultural to your comment. What is the importance of the work you are discussing? What is the effect of the work? Where is it positioned in respect to other works in its category?  

Reading and Watching assignment for next week: Please watch Saving Mr. Banks (2013) dir. John Lee Hancock and Mary Poppins (1964). Read the selected texts on the course resource page.

Week Six: The Roots of Hipster

Hipster: noun, Slang.

1.

a usually young person who is trendy, stylish, or progressive in an unconventional way; someone who is hip.

2.

a person, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by a particularly strong sense of alienation from most established social activities and relationships; a beatnik or hippie.

3.

a performer or admirer of jazz, especially swing; a hepcat.

--dictionary.com`

This week we are considering the nature of the "hipster"--possibly an urban myth put into motion by advertising or alternatively, maybe a description of an actual sub-culture. As the Wikipedia article on the term explains, the underlying sense of the reference is to someone who is aware, in the know, hip. 

It's hip to be hip.

Since the 1950s, to be hip has also meant to be cool. In his observations on the mediascape of this period, Marshall McLuhan registered/projected the pattern of Hot and Cool as a significant media effect. What is "cool" is defined as the antonym of what is "hot." 

Reading Assignment: This week we will consider some core works of the hipster canon. From the links below and from this week's selections on the course resources, choose several works and read, view or listen to them. Many of these works are linked from UbuWeb which I highly recommend.

Lenny Bruce in Lenny Bruce
Warning: Offensive language, sexual references and intentional provocation. 

Lenny Bruce brought to mature fruition a style of stand-up comedy that was founded on jazz-like riffs and improvisations, personal experience, social and political commentary and a strong impression of style and attitude. This style was highly influential on most of the major stand-up comedians that followed him. Bruce was provocative in a time of political and social repression in this country. As a result he was frequently arrested for obscenity. 

William Burroughs reading the novel Junkie (1953)

Fuck You: a Magazine of the Arts (1962-65)

The City Wears a Slouch Hat Radio Play (1942) by Kenneth Patchen and John Cage

Maya Deren A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

The Text of Light (1974) a non-narrative film by Stan Brakhage 

Ron Mann Poetry In Motion (1958) poetry performance film. Classic anthology of beat poetry.

Charles Mingus Live in Belgium, Norway and Sweden (1964) concert/recording film

Jack Kerouac Poetry for the Beat Generation with Steve Allen (1959)

Interview with Painter Peter Saul with some pictures of his paintings.

Diane Di Prima Buddhist New Year Song poem

Poems by Gary SnyderA Dent in a Bucket
Above Pate Valley
Axehandles

Poems by William Everson (Brother Antoninus)
Dust and Glory
The Watchers
We in the Fields

Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Canticle for Jack KerouacAutobiography
Don't Let That Horse
People Getting Divorced

Poems by Weldon Kees
Four Poems of Fourteen Lines
1926
On a Painting by Rousseau
The Umbrella

Alwin Nikolais dance. 
Tribe
Noumenon (1953)

Writing Assignment: Be a cool hunter. Using the three primary elements of the liberal arts, classification, collection, and appreciation, write a blog post that defines the contemporary hipster. Besides an explanation of the category provide a series of links to works that help define the hipster in the 21st century. Write a statement of appreciation for each of the links you provide explaining the relevance and value of the example to the notion of the hipster and to what is hip. This is due next week, Feb. 25.

Week Five: Fiction Indexing Reality

Gia Coppola and James Franco

Reading Assignment: Before coming to class please read short stories in the collection Palo Alto by James Franco. Read as many as you can.

Writing Assignment: Using the worldbuilding based questions we have been applying the last two weeks in our discussion of the novels we have been reading, write a blog post based on one of the questions (or part of the question) and discuss either the novel by Murakami or Jemisin. The idea of this assignment is to make more concrete some of your ideas from the group discussions by putting them into writing. 

In Class: We will watch Gia Coppola's film Palo Alto which is based on some of the stories in Franco's collection. Then we will discuss elements of the adaptation of the stories into film. We will especially inquire into what aspects of the stories did Coppolla incorporate into her work, what aspects you think are important that didn't get incorporated, and what values you think are reflected in the combination of the film and the stories?

Week Four: Visiting Murakami Land

Image above is a remix using a background from Haruki Murakami Bingo an illustration orginally published in the New Yorker by Grant Snider.
  See his regularly posted cartoons at his blog linked here. .

Reading Assignment: This week I am asking you to read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. This is the most recent novel by one of the world's leading literary figures. 

We will discuss the novel in class, much like last week, and I want to apply some the same questions for a portion of the discussion, examining the novel through the lens of world building. These are the questions we will revisit:

What are the primary features of this world--spatial, cultural, biological, fantastic, cosmological? 
What is the world’s ethos (the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize the world)? 
What are the precise strategies that are used by its creator to convey the world to us and us to the world? 
How are our characters connected to the world? 
And how are we the viewer or reader or player connected to the world?”

Link to Paris Review Interview with Haruki Murakami.