Late-night ramblings, my thesis symposium, and an opinion — but not in that order

TPS Report #1413a.02: "Spread" by Andre 3000 of Outkast is currently the greatest song ever.

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Yesterday I helped with UT's entry into the Pioneer 48-hour DVD contest. A pre-assembled squad of UT filmmakers was given a movie prompt at 2 p.m. Friday and had to turn out a polished DVD, complete with short film and bonus footage, by Sunday at 2 p.m. No small task. Justin's roommate David was one of the primaries on the project, and he recruited Justin to help design the DVD and me to take the behind-the-scenes pictures. They also turned their little blue house into the most crowded movie set since . . . some movie that had a notoriously crowded set.

Anyways, I grudgingly shook off a hangover and got to the set about 12.30 or 1.00. The crew had been filiming for about four hours already. Justin and David left the set before noon to begin editing and DVD layout at an editing suite in on campus. I showed up and started snapping pictures, mainly trying to avoid getting in the way. I snapped for a couple hours, then went to the editing suite and snapped and finished off roll #3. One-houred the film. Was scanning by 5.30. The pictures came out surprisingly well. Probably 15-20 good ones out of about 70 — an unexpectedly high ratio. Spent all night scanning, adjusting, writing mildly humorous captions, formatting the photos for the slide show, putting up with obtrusive faculty supervisors and aggressively choadish directors interfering with the editing process. But in the end, shit sure looked like it was coming together. Justin did a great job with the DVD menu, featuring one of my photos. David put together a really great DVD intro. And Jason, who was doing the capturing, was very pleased with the footage that was coming in. I even came up with the title of the movie, Obi Squeaks By. The movie's a light, hopefully funny piece about a mouse named Obi who foils a robbery. The real accomplishment of the project, of course, was so many talented people putting forth such a frantic, concerted effort to generate a remarkable amount of media in a very short amount of time. I can't wait to see the final cut, maybe get me a copy.

I notice I've given my efforts on the project maybe a little too much prominence — really I was one of the non-essentials — but I'm pretty proud of the work I did and even more proud to have been included in the project. As I tire of school and it's multiple simultaneous obligations, it was greatly rewarding to be part of a team that was working hard to produce a tangible product. This feeling, to a lesser extant, must be responsible for my signing on for more duty with the Texan, and I'm realizing more and more how much I want to focus on one, maybe two, things in my life. No, let's definitely say two. Photography and writing. I’ve neglected my photography this semester, but this project reminded me how much I love it and how good I am at it, if you’ll excuse the vanity. I came in from the project at around 3.00 in the morning, even after falling back an hour. I was so jazzed up from the work that I sat down here and started free-writing, with the intention of posting it. But it ended up running too long, topping off at over 2,500 words before my brain gave in to exhaustion and my eyes began to swim. I will post the portion I liked best below, because it relates to my thesis symposium. I also wrote quite a bit at Mojo’s tonight, and I’m hoping this develops into a verbose habit. My thesis symposium and the DVD project have given me a taste for production — concentrated production. Maybe this is just me ramping myself up to get my thesis done, but regardless, I find it semi-enthralling to work toward a single finished product rather than the never-ending mini-obligations of school.

Unfortunately, due to a computer snafu, I lost all the scans of my photos before I put added the captions. I will post two, with captions, that I happened to upload to my webspace in the process of putting together the slide show.





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As for the thesis symposium, you can see the rough draft of my presentation here, although it's a little long. Props to Sue, who months ago pointed out to me an essay from which I quote extensively.

I received positive feedback on the whole, but I walked away from the thesis symposium with a rather odd feeling. I tried to describe it last night. Here's the pertinent excerpt.

It’s been an odd weekend. A lot of shit’s happened, none of it particularly monumental, but it all feels somehow related. Every day passes so quickly, it’s hard to see when one makes any progress at all, so it’s also hard to see when one started to fall so irreparably behind. This is true of many things, most obviously with schoolwork, but I want to relate it to something more personal than that.

The weekend started to unravel on Thursday, after my thesis symposium. I had really psyched myself out about the presentation, probably because I was ashamed of how little I’ve done on my actual thesis. I spent an inordinate amount of time leading up to this week on collecting quotes for my symposium paper and for crystallizing the ideas I wanted to present. About 48 hours before the symposium I glanced at the manual and saw that one should plan on two to three minutes for each written page, or at most a six-page paper. I had been thinking a minute per page, a figure I pulled out of the sky. Lord knows I couldn’t trim back my ambition, so I couldn’t scrap the paper I’d started. It ended up being nine pages, but I was proud of it. I wanted to make sure I got it all in, so I read fast, and I was chained to my text, when usually I speak off the cuff. Even though my symposium was well received, Trimble did point out those two deficiencies in my presentation. His criticism was more than justified, and he had plenty of good things to say, too, but I’ve always been a perfectionist and inclined to seize upon what went wrong whenever I put my ego on the line.

Trimble’s criticism (and seeing two presentations that were everything I hoped mine would be) cut the legs out from the work-buzz I was riding. I go through the same cycle whenever I put myself through heavy-duty creative work: I start by amassing a bunch of information, probably more than I need, and letting my ideas run wild. On the excitement generated by all the ideas, I launch into the project. What comes out is inevitably scattered, and I spend the bulk of my time slowly crawling along, seeing which ideas can actually fit. Many must be chucked, of course. Then the comes the hump, the point when my body and my brain are tired of working and I must either heavily caffeinate myself or get some sleep. Usually I sleep. Then, I wake up as early as possible and rush to finish, entering a state of near euphoria, often convinced (probably because I have to believe it to finish) that what I’ve created is great. Of course it’s never perfect, and when this euphoria fades and I can see my work through more objective eyes, my heart-sinking disappointment always causes me to enter a period of doubt about my ability to ever create anything worth reading again.

These feelings were beginning to stir immediately after my symposium, but I was distracted by the other presenters. The second session (I was in first) was much more relaxed on time limits than mine, which was obviously a little frustrating. But the presentations were really good, and I kind of got excited again just being around some talented, motivated, creative people. It really makes me happy to see that spark in people. I found out that the girl who sits next to me in my Caribbean Lit. class was presenting last. Her name is Laura; she’s writing poetry and taking pictures for her thesis. I’ve been a little intrigued by this girl ever since I first saw her. Her face is gaunt in a very delicate way, with light brown skin, huge dark eyes, and short black hair that’s wispy, kind of like cotton. Her smile is slightly shy and a little humble-looking when she tucks her chin toward her shoulder, but still rather endearing. Even before I knew her—I had a large lecture class with her years ago—I wanted to study her face. Really, I wanted to photograph it: she appealed to me on an aesthetic level, rather than a sexual one. I tend to think that beauty lies in the face and sexuality exudes from the body, and this girl is too skinny to be sensual. She’s not unhealthy, just hardly there. In all honesty, she’s spindly in a way that reminds me of a Dr. Suess character. On top of all this, I’ve enjoyed sitting next to her. She’s smart and she does her own, peculiar thing, like reading a book for our class in it’s original Spanish because she dislikes translations, even though she doesn’t speak Spanish. So I was looking forward to her presentation. By the time her turn came up, less than 10 people remained in the room—one of whom was the moderator, one her advisor, and two her parents. We pulled our chairs into an intimate semi-circle to listen to Laura read her poems. Under soft yellow lights, she began to read her simple, thoughtful verse, and I was impressed by how closely her tone, her topics, and her voice—in short, her art—matched her personality: which is to say that she is a very, very good poet. Then, at one point in a long poem, she smoothly interwove a verse in Italian, which she speaks fluently. I relaxed and listened to the lyricism of her Italian, of which I didn’t understand a word. What began unintelligible soon fitted itself into a sad, lilting rhythm of striking eloquence. I have a copy of her poems laying somewhere around here, but it wouldn’t be the same to print the words without her voice. Who knows, maybe her poetry isn’t actually that good—I’m hardly an qualified judge—but listening to her read it was one of those singularly enjoyable experiences that is beautiful because it is subtle and unexpected, and because I needed it.

That's a ton of material for one post, so that's all for a while. In the meantime, go get the new Outkast record. While Big Boi's CD is great, I think Andre's is a fairly touching work of art.