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sirphillipcranestanaccount · 1 year ago

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Since phillip is so uncomfortable shopping for adult items in person, I imagine he does his adult shopping online.

What about this scenario, Hyacinth notices a discrete package from a adult online store on their counter top.

She recognizes the senders name because she has ordered from them before.

Hyacinth saddles up to Eloise and teases her about the purchase and asks what she ordered.

Eloise looks Hyacinth dead in the eye and ask what's she talking about.

Phillips ears are bright red.

What is Eloises next move? What about Hyacinth?

Do the sisters end up wrestling on the floor?

What do you think poor Phillip tried to order?

I decided to make this into a little mini fic. So, you know, feel free to read more.

"El, I have that book you were asking for!" Hyacinth said as she waltzed through the door of Phillip's (and she supposed Eloise's, now that her sister had officially moved in) house.

Eloise walked into the entryway from the kitchen, a perplexed look on her face.

"Hyacinth? How did you get in here? Did the twins not lock the door?"

"Oh it was locked, I used the spare," Hyacinth smiled and raised the key in her hand, "You might want to find a better hiding place than behind a wobbly brick on the stoop. Who knows who could just waltz into the house."

"I'll keep that in mind," Eloise said flatly, turning back to the kitchen, "come on in, not that you needed my invitation."

"So, what are you up to? Where are Phillip and the twins?" Hyacinth asked, taking a seat at the kitchen island as Eloise returned to what she had been doing before her sister walked in.

"Phillip is doing some school supply shopping with the twins, and I'm cutting orange slices," Eloise said, picking up a knife and gesturing to the cutting board that held a combination of orange slices and uncut oranges.

"And... you are doing that...why?" Hyacinth asked.

"Amanda has a soccer game this afternoon and it's her turn to provide snacks," Eloise said, slicing an orange in half.

"Look at you," Hyacinth grinned, "from independent woman to soccer mom in less than a year."

Eloise looked up and gave her sister an inscrutable look, somewhere between an indulgent smile and a complacent grin.

"If you would have told me nine months ago that I'd be cutting orange slices for a child's soccer game, I wouldn't have believed you," Eloise chuckled, "but I can't say I'm not pleased with how everything's shaken out. I love Phillip and I love the twins. So I'm more than happy to slice up oranges for them."

Hyacinth shifted in her seat, "Well, I'm happy for you El. I'll get out of your hair, I just wanted to return the Chomsky book I borrowed"

Hyacinth really was happy for Eloise. She liked Phillip and the twins were an absolute hoot. But when she looked at how happy Eloise was with Phillip, and how happy her best friend Felicity was with her boyfriend Geoff, she couldn't help but feel a little... empty.

That empty feeling dissipated, however, when Hyacinth went to set the book down by a pile of mail and saw a package with a return address that she recognized.

"Well, what do we have here?" Hyacinth said gleefully, reveling in the opportunity to embarrass her sister.

"What?" Eloise said, looking up from her oranges.

Hyacinth lifted up the package and quirked her brow, "Atlantic innovations?" she inquired.

"That must be something for Phillip, I don't know why you're so interested," Eloise said, shrugging and looking down to quarter an orange.

"Oh I'm sure it's for Phillip," Hyacinth laughed, "Or maybe in place of him? Is he going out of town for a botany symposium or something?"

Eloise put her knife down, "Hy, what the hell are you talking about?"

"I know it's a sex toy, El," she said in an indelicate whisper, "I've received several discreet packages from 'Atlantic Innovations' myself..."

Eloise was about to open her mouth when the front door opened. Phillip came into the kitchen carrying a couple of shopping bags, as the thumps of two pairs of feet clamored up the stairs.

"Hey El, we're back," Phillip said, walking over to place a kiss on Eloise's cheek, "Do you want some help with the oranges?"

Phillip then followed Eloise's line of sight to Hyacinth.

"Oh, hey Hyacinth, to what do we owe the pleasure?" he said, settling his arm around Eloise's waist

"Hy was just dropping off a book she borrowed and snooping through our mail," Eloise answered before her sister could get a word in edgewise.

Eloise felt Phillip's arm tense once he saw the package in Hyacinth's hand. She looked up to see his jaw flex and the tips of his ears start to turn red. Ah, so the package was for Phillip.

"However she was just leaving since she knows we all have a very busy afternoon, and don't have time to answer her probing questions about the household's correspondence, " Eloise continued, knowing that if Hyacinth had a chance to sus out the situation, Phillip wouldn't be able to look her sister in the eye ever again.

"Yup," Hyacinth grinned as she set the package down and gave it a gentle pat, "I'll be on my merry way. Good to see you Phillip, give the twins my love."

Just as she was about to walk through the kitchen doorway she looked over her shoulder with a diabolical grin and added: "Have fun you two."

As soon as she heard the front door shut, Eloise turned to Phillip and immediately asked: "So what's in the box?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," Phillip said, avoiding eye contact and turning more crimson by the minute.

"Hyacinth clocked the fake return address right away and knew it was from an online sex shop," Eloise explained.

"Oh god," Phillip said with a grimace.

"And I know I didn't order anything," Eloise continued, wrapping her arms around Phillip's neck, "so I can't help but be incredibly curious about the contents of this unassuming box."

"It was supposed to be a surprise," Phillip said, leaning his forehead against Eloise's.

"I got all the surprise I needed today by learning about my baby sister's online shopping habits, I don't know if I could handle anymore," Eloise said with a laugh.

"It's uh, saliva-activated lubricant." Phillip let out underneath his breath.

"Saliva-activated lubricant?" Eloise inquired looking up at him, eyes sparkling with curiosity.

"Yeah, so, when it comes into contact with moisture, it starts to tingle," Phillip responded blushing and looking away.

"Interesting...." Eloise said, standing on the tips of her toes to whisper in his ear, "I can't wait to try it tonight."

Phillip smirked and kissed Eloise's ear "Me neither."

#l&f au #l&f asks #philoise

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jasontoddiefor · 3 years ago

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Title: infinitely varied Ship: obikin Summary: Sometimes your husband decides to develop an artificial intelligence capable of free choice and something called a soul and succeeds in the middle of a Thursday night. Or, more concretely: he's in the middle of succeeding because said intelligence first has to learn how to speak.Also known as Obi-Wan and Anakin teach a tiny program called A.H.S.O.K.A. how to be something more than lines of code via the power of linguistics. AN: Happy birthday @ghostwriterofthemachine

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Noam Chomsky

Life was a query of expectations, margins on doorframes, bucket lists, first loves, broken hearts, and happy middles because only fools would settle for a happy ending when they had so many decades left to live. The thought never failed to bring a smile to Anakin’s face, no matter how frustrated, remembering the simple way Obi-Wan had proposed. There had been no fancy dinner, particularly stunning outing, or anything resembling outlandish romantic gestures. Anakin would have appreciated them because every act would have been colored by Obi-Wan’s love, but now, older and wiser than the rash youth who’s fallen in love at first heated debate, he preferred the way their proposal had actually gone down. A quiet Sunday morning, eating breakfast together on the sofa while the news droned in the background from Anakin’s old radio, a hesitant “I don’t need forever, but I want the present”.

And, well, for all his genius, Anakin could be a bit of an idiot sometimes, but not when it came to this.

Married life was interesting.

Somehow nothing changed, except also everything. They had bought a real house, moved out of their old apartment and made more compromises than Anakin had ever thought himself capable of, for they hadn’t been like fighting an uphill battle but dancing together. It had made him happy to paint the entrance hall in the shade of green Obi-Wan preferred if he got to paint the kitchen in the light blue he wanted.

Obi-Wan got the attic for his office where his antique book collection looked right at home, and Anakin got the basement where the hum of his servers and the generator powering them annoyed nobody else.

It was as close to white-picket-fence as it could be with two queer men, no kids, a bratty cat, and an anxious dog under one roof. His childhood self would be appalled to see how much Anakin, always the whirlwind, had settled. To a nine-year-old, Anakin probably looked very adult.

Anakin, however, did not feel very grown-up, banging his head against his desk in the middle of the night. Obi-Wan had gone to sleep hours ago, and so had Anakin until inspiration had struck and he’d snuck out of bed to return to his favorite project.

A.H.S.O.K.A may not be a child, but Anakin certainly could relate to exhausted parents when they complained about their children in endless repetitions. To this day, Anakin didn’t know why his mother figured it would be great parenting to encourage her WarGames obsessed kid to dig into the world of artificial intelligence when WOPR nearly started a nuclear war, but he’d forever remain thankful.

Or, he’d resume being thankful when he could finally get A.H.S.O.K.A to learn. He’d rewritten her code a thousand times. It was his ever-constant companion, from his first awful-looking early 2000s website to its current incarnation. A.H.S.O.K.A could solve simple logic puzzles, given that he fed her enough data. Her solutions to tasks could be downright hilarious, but they were not enough. He wanted her to be smarter, better, capable of gaining true understanding.

Perhaps, it was a dream for the future and not a Thursday night.

Anakin didn’t have any work tomorrow morning as he worked as a freelancer, so he could afford to pull an all-nighter. But his dear husband had planned a nice afternoon for them, so Anakin should call it a night or a morning as a glance at the clock told him.

Staring at the many lines of code again, Anakin sighed and leaned back in his chair and took another sip of his by-now cold tea. Obi-Wan would definitely complain that Anakin had snatched his favorite mug once he got up and couldn’t find it in the kitchen. Anakin had bought it at the last linguistic convention Obi-Wan had taken him to.

Language is a process of free invention, it read in delicate cursive before the rest of the quote disassembled in pure chaos.

Huh.

Now there was a thought. Anakin got out of his chair and left the basement, haunted by fixed principles and infinite combinations. Up in the attic, carrying Obi-Wan’s computer downstairs again, Anakin thought on interpretations and free creations. He was as giddy and nervous as he’d been on the morning of his wedding day, which had started similarly early. Connecting Obi-Wan’s computer, and more importantly, the priced result of his thesis, to Anakin’s server felt a little like unwrapping birthday presents.

language_acquisition_prediction.exe

Enter.

II.

Obi-Wan was not surprised when he woke to an empty bed. Anakin had a habit of suddenly pulling all-nighters or getting up early before the sun even thought of rising. Given that he couldn’t smell breakfast yet, Obi-Wan deduced that Anakin had pulled an all-nighter again. He slowly crawled out of bed to avoid disturbing Artoo and Threepio sleeping to his feet. Obi-Wan was pretty sure he shared his bed more often with his pets than he did with his husband.

He walked down the stairs to the ground level and went by the kitchen to prepare himself a cup of tea. To his displeasure, Obi-Wan couldn’t find his favorite mug and so had to settle for another. After another thought, he decided to make a second one for Anakin, lavender this time so Anakin would hopefully crash after breakfast. He put both mugs on a small tray together with a couple tomatoes. Obi-Wan usually wasn’t one for eating a full breakfast on workdays – that was the influence of Anakin and his mother’s kitchen – but he was the expert in smalltime snacks. With both in hand, he walked down the second flight of stairs, down to the basement. As expected, he found Anakin at his desk, clinging to what was bound to be a cold cup, staring intensely at his screens, which were running one program or another.

“Good morning,” Obi-Wan greeted him and kissed Anakin’s cheek.

“Mo-orning,” Anakin replied, a yawn interrupting him halfway. “Wait, what time is it?”

“Eight,” Obi-Wan said. “How long have you been up?”

“Uuuh.” Obi-Wan didn’t need to see Anakin’s face to know the answer. “Did you even go to sleep?”

“I did sleep for a while!” Anakin argued. “But then I had an idea, I mean, look at this!”

Obi-Wan gave the screens a closer look. Despite common misconceptions, he was not technically illiterate. Privately, he blamed the fact that Anakin was quite well known for his tech know-how and Obi-Wan tended to talk more about literature given that he was filling in as a lecturer in the British Lit. department. Nevertheless, Obi-Wan had gotten his professorship with a program he’d written, and the code currently displayed on the screens looked very similar to a section that had given him stress nightmares. “Is that my thesis?” he asked.

“Yes, sorta, partially?” Anakin replied. “I kind of took it apart a lot and maybe corrupted it a bit, but that’s not the important part! Look what she’s doing with it.”

She could only refer to one person, intelligence. There were a few constants in their life, their new house the most recent one, and Ahsoka was probably the longest. Obi-Wan didn’t know why Anakin hadn’t set her aside already, he was happy enough to leave other started-never-finished projects lying around, but the last time he’d even just suggested such, Anakin had looked heartbroken.

Obi-Wan looked at the screen Anakin was pointing at and began to read.

script input: inhibition auditory input 1 designation skyguy: /ˌɪn.ɪˈbɪʃ.ən/ auditory input 2 designation professor: /ˌɪn.hɪˈbɪʃ.ən/ analysis: mismatch diagnosis: outstanding

script input: better auditory input 1 designation skyguy: /ˈbet̬.ɚ/ auditory input 2 designation professor: /ˈbet.ər/ analysis: mismatch diagnosis: rhoticism? query: define

The text continued for a while, though apparently Ahsoka only picked out the mismatched parts in her analysis.

“Is that ‘Must have done something right’?” Obi-Wan asked, the connection between the words suddenly starting to make sense.

“Yes!” Anakin grinned. “I wasn’t quite sure how to teach her sounds properly because I hadn’t equipped her with a sound analysis program before and I figured that if babies just learn by listening to their parents, Ahsoka could learn by listening to us.”

“So you fed her audio of us singing?” Obi-Wan wasn’t sure whether to be impressed, confused, or just plain tired but decided to settle on confusion for now and let the course of the conversation determine where they’d end up.

“That too, but I actually just started by playing old voice messages. I figured getting her used to just one phonetic inventory would be enough for now. Honestly, for the first hour, I wasn’t even sure whether that would be of any use because she had no symbols to connect the sounds to, and I thought using the IPA might bias her.”

Because, of course, Anakin never deleted any of Obi-Wan’s voice messages and just kept them on his phone. The fact that he just glossed over it as if it weren’t anything special either made Obi-Wan smile.

“It’s cute that you think we have the same inventory,” Obi-Wan commented. “But continue. You just let her listen to sounds and then? Don’t tell me you gave her written texts.”

Anakin rolled his eyes and confirmed another one of Ahsoka’s queries before answering. “No, I gave her the IPA then and let her listen to the full inventory and then analyze which ones we use.”

That made enough sense. Obi-Wan was reasonably sure it was a great deal more complicated than Anakin was lying it out right now, but it was still within the realm of possible and not downright sci-fi. There were enough programs that could analyze speech and filter out patterns, recognize even emotions and tone. Feeding data to a computer wasn’t too different from the way babies learned, though, as far as Obi-Wan knew from talking to people with children, they didn’t like their progeny being compared to lines of code.

“And you accomplished this by feeding my thesis program, which is meant to predict the language acquisition of children, to Ahsoka?”

“Yes, that, uh, happened more or less,” Anakin said, his nose scrunched up just so that Obi-Wan knew he wasn’t certain. “I’m pretty sure I like, wrote some of it down. Not all of it because I knocked out at like 4 a.m., which resulted in pretty interesting inquiries on the great vowel shift.”

Obi-Wan froze. “She’s asking about the great vowel shift?”

There was a difference in the size of the Atlantic between analyzing sounds and recognizing a six-hundred-year-old change in pronunciation.

“Not really,” Anakin said. “She just noticed the patterns? And had inquiries? We’ve been following up on it since, mostly by also giving her written text, but I think that might have backfired and confused her a bit. I’m thinking of synching up the input with a visible feed so she’d learn to associate an actual object with the sound, but I’m not sure whether that wouldn’t just lead to her matching data instead of actually learning its relevance. Can teach an AI what an apple looks like, sounds like, tastes like, but that doesn’t mean you can teach it what an apple is and all that.”

Anakin smiled impishly, and unfortunately, despite his generally messy appearance, Obi-Wan still thought he was handsome. “Please don’t cite my book back at me like that.”

Closing his eyes for a moment and pinching his nose, Obi-Wan tried to focus. This was not how he expected to start his free day. He needed to wake up and possibly grab his notes to sort out this mess. This almost made him wish the car was still wrecked and Anakin would spend all his free time fixing that. “Did you have to start her on English of all languages?”

Anakin was fluent in two other romance languages; it would have been much easier to deal with a French AI than an English one. Sighing, Obi-Wan looked at Ahsoka’s latest question and promptly frowned.

script input: bear auditory input: /beər/ match found: bare analysis: mismatch diagnosis: failed word formation query: bear = bare? query: deletion >bare<?

“How long has she been doing that?” Obi-Wan asked.

“Doing what— oh, that’s new.”

So Ahsoka had jumped from matching sounds to text to comparing sound to words and then referencing those words against one another. That was a logical step, but also a step Obi-Wan wasn’t quite sure she should be doing without prompting.

“She thinks bear and bare are related because they have the same sound. Didn’t really expect that turn of events. Should I show her those are two different words?”

“Does she even know what a word is yet?” Obi-Wan asked in turn.

“No.”

“Then teach her what a word is first— after breakfast. I want your pancakes.”

“You never want pancakes on a Friday.”

“My husband also never decided to rope me into teaching an artificial intelligence morphology before.”

Obi-Wan needed a proper meal for this. He could talk to his students on an empty stomach, but he could not deal with the latest brand of Skywalker insanity without something sweet first.

“I haven’t—”

Ever the negotiator, Obi-Wan decided to shut Anakin up with a kiss. “After breakfast.”

Ahsoka’s many questions could wait for an hour.

#star wars #obikin #obi wan kenobi #ahsoka tano #anakin skywalker #fanfic

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localites-community-blog · 5 years ago

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If you can't learn a language, learn from the language.

“A different language is a different vision of life�� – Federico Fellini

Alanguage holds in it the history, values and perspectives of a culture. In spite of its intangible nature, a language is so strong in it’s resources, it can bring the mindset of a country or a city to another through mere words. Today, we are going to talk about language – a little bit about how it shapes us and a little bit about the local languages around the world that will intrigue our minds.

The language we speak influences the way we think and feel. A culture heavily influences it’s language and similarly, once learnt and passed down, the language keeps affecting the way people think in spite of major changes in the culture of the society. For example south asian languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali, or Bengali have different words for maternal or paternal aunts, the people in their immediate families or their in-laws, as they are the holders of the collectivist cultures and the role of all family members is unique. On the other hand, English or other western languages such as Spanish or French, have only 8 unique words for different types of relations, as a result of their individualistic cultures. Today, even when we see people living in nuclear families in Eastern countries, they still oblige to their roles and responsibilities towards their family members, as people from a collectivist culture would do.

Another famous example that cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky uses in her Ted-Talk “How Languages Shapes The Way We Think” is how ‘a bridge’ is a female noun in German but a male noun in Spanish. This influences the way German and Spanish speakers describe a bridge. While German speakers are more likely to use stereotypically ‘feminine’ adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘elegant’ for describing the bridge, Spanish speakers are more likely to use stereotypically ‘masculine’ adjectives such as ‘strong’ and ‘long’ to the same bridge.

Now that we have a sense of the little nuances of language that, let us also look at some fascinating languages and language habits around the world.

Let’s take ourselves to a little Turkish village, where the people have their own secret language – the whistle language or the bird language. This is a village full of people who don’t need words to communicate but have their own systematic and sophisticated form of whistling to talk to each other. The ‘geographical’ significance of this language is that it allows the villagers to communicate with each other through mountain terrains and easily get themselves heard from far away. These are 10,000 people who whistle all day. Take yourself back to a moment where you found yourself whistling and humming. It is one of those moments when we act like our natural child self and just enjoy ourselves, isn’t it? Well, if you ever get a chance to meet one of these 10,000 villagers, you will be greeted with the same warmth and playfulness as that of a child or even a bird. UNESCO recently declared it as an endangered language in need of protection, encouraging the villagers to hold an annual festival to celebrate the language and even encouraging them to keep teaching it in local schools.

Moving to a different part of the world, the basins of the Amazon river in Brazil used to host the Mura language. All of its dialects are extinct now, except the Piraha language. The interesting thing about the Pirah is that it does not allow recursions or nesting – a linguistic property that allows inserting phrases into phrases. Such as one can say, ‘The chairs are broken’ or add a phrase to it and say, ‘The chairs that were blue in colour are broken’. Pirah grammatically does not allow this adding information to information.

What makes it interesting is that all languages in the world tend to follow a universal grammar – a term coined by Naom Chomsky – that are certain traits or rules that appear in all languages irrespective of their area of origin. Any language, created out of the human mind, would allow recursions or nesting of information. When Danny Averett found out that Pirah doesn’t seem to allow for recursion, it brought a lot of linguistic theories to question. The bottom line though would be that every sentence in Pirah will have to be extremely small and simple. It might be tempting to assume that the users of these languages are simple minded but that’s not true. The culture emphasises on the ‘here and now’ of their reality. A lesson in mindfulness, that they did not have to learn through a million books or Yoga courses, but simply came to them as a result of their language. The language also does not have any number words or colour words. They simply use words similar to ‘dark or light’ and ‘many or few’, hence probably showing us how they simply don’t feel the need to concretely compare things at all times.

The Guggu Yimidhhir language spoken by the an aboriginal community in Australia do not speak of direction in terms of left and right, but always in terms of east, west, north and south. Most languages have an ego-centric way of giving directions. This means when you need to ask someone to walk or put something in given direction, you ask them to do it their left or right in relation to the person. However, in Guggu Yimidhhir , you wouldn’t ask someone to hold a cup in their left or right hand, but in the cardinal direction their hand is in at that moment. The speakers are hence always oriented and know where the north, east, west and south are. If the speakers of Guggu Yimidhhir are asked to arrange pictures or events in order of time, they wouldn’t arrange it in left to right as we do, but from east to west as the sun goes. Their sense of direction and time is not fixed in themselves or to their bodies, but fixed to the land they live on.

Languages have a life of their own. There are thousands of languages around the world, and some studies say that one language is dying each week. As travellers, keeping our ears open, and paying attention to how sentences feel different when locals translate it for us, could tell us as much about their culture and values as a heritage site would do. Locals who are old, might tell you about the languages they used to speak as children, and how they have changed or disappeared. You may not necessarily walk yourself into the most ‘ancient’, ‘fascinating’ or ‘erotic’ languages, but you will definitely find languages , irrespective of whether you understand them or not, trying to tell you their own stories through their tones, gestures and loose translations. People who speak different languages will pay attention to different things depending on what their language requires them to do. Paying attention to local languages will not only enrich you with their view point, but giving you a deeper insight into how your language, and hence the way you look at things or the way you think, is different.

“Just learning to think in another language, allows you to see your own culture in a better view point” – Gates Mcfadden

Join the global community of localites and learn from locals how they are connected to their langauges and how much it matters to them. Download the community app from Google Play or App Store and start your journey today!

Thanks for reading.

Have a good day! localites - travel the real world

#localites #Localitescommunity #hirealocal #hire a tour guide #localites community hire a local hire a tour guide travel and earn earn from travelling

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here-there-be-drag0ns · 6 years ago

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It's A Good Kind Of Madness

The first thing Curtis saw when he when he stepped into Midnight Caffeine was her. She was leaning against the decorative bookcase in a tank top and ripped up jeans. She was shivering. Of course she was. Sandy Hollow got cold after sunset and the sun had set hours ago. He wondered why she didn’t put on the flannel shirt tied around her waist.

She looked up when the bell above the door rang and his eyes met hers. She seemed to stand straighter. He pulled out his earbuds and looked away, choosing instead to approach the tired-eyed barista behind the counter. “Small coffee, one cream, two sugars,” he requested. The barista nodded and tapped a few buttons on his screen, then silently moved away to busy himself at the coffee machine.

He spared the girl a glace out of the corner of his eye. She was staring at him. He looked away.

The barista put his coffee down on the counter. Curtis passed over the cash and took a seat on one of the plush chairs.

He groaned and rubbed his eyes. His psychology test tomorrow was going to suck. He’d been running on six hours of sleep for the past three days. Staring at the ceiling for hours was getting boring.

When he blinked his eyes open again, someone was standing in front of him. The girl he’d seen before lowered herself into a chair across from him. He startled, but she didn’t seem to take notice.

“For 10 p.m. this place is busier than I would have expected.” She said nonchalantly.

Curtis paused for a moment and looked her up and down. He realized that although she was wearing makeup, it didn’t coat her face the way most girls he saw wore their make-up. Her brown eyeliner accentuated her deep blue eyes. And her hair was dyed similarly. The end of her braid – swept loosely over her right shoulder – faded from brown to a brilliant navy blue.

He gathered himself and smirked. “You must be new in town. Welcome to Sandy Hollow, a town full of insomniacs,” he swept his hands around the shop, gesturing to the clusters of people around them.

She laughed. “I’ll fit right in, then,”

Curtis chuckled. “I’m Curtis,” he said extending a hand.

The girl tilted her head down almost imperceptibly. Looking up through her eyelashes in a way that sent shivers down his spine, she took his hand. “You can call me Ava,”

“Alright, Ava, what brings you to Sandy Hallow? We’re not quite a touristy place.” He asked, mulling over her word choice. Was her name actually Ava? Or was it just a name she gave people until she got to know them?

Ava shrugged, humming. “I’m checking out the campus for this coming semester. Switching colleges.” She waved her hands in the air. “Change of scenery and all that,”

Curtis nodded and sipped his coffee. “I can’t tell you much about the scenery, but Jordan University is pretty good.”

Ava furrowed her brow. “Are you new here too?” She asked.

“No, I’ve lived here my whole life. Why do you ask?” He said, confused.

Ava’s mouth had dropped open. The look she gave him made him shift in his seat. He dropped his eyes down to the coffee in his hand. He took a sip and met her incredulous gaze again.

“You’ve lived here your whole life and you never explored?”

Curtis shook his head.

“Why not?”

Emotions swirled in his gut, clichés he’d tried to explain before, a feeling he couldn’t put into words, an explanation that he could. “It just… doesn’t feel right to do it on my own. Exploring is something that I want to share with someone else, if that makes sense,”

Ava nodded, threading her fingers together in her lap. “It does.” She stood up and stuck out her hand. “Come on,”

Curtis blinked dully at her hand for a moment, his brain sluggishly trying to process what was happening. “What?”

“We’ll explore together,” she said.

“Together,” he said, nodding. He smiled and took her hand. She hauled him to his feet. “Let’s go then,”

The street was dark and quiet under the moon. A few houses had lights on, but most windows showed no signs of activity.

“So what do you study?” Ava asked, hands in her pockets. Curtis could see her fighting back shivers and was tempted to offer her his sweatshirt but she didn’t seem like the kind of girl to look for clichés.

“Psychology,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve also got a minor in creative writing,”

“’Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,’” Ava murmured.

“Noam Chomsky,” he said with a jolt. Eyebrows raised, he looked to her and saw her smirking back.

“Also a psychology major, but I have a minor in songwriting.”

“Written any hits yet?” He asked curiously.

Ava laughed. “I’ll get back to you on that one,”

“Okay, okay,” he snorted. “So what’s the plan here?”

Ava paused and seemed to think a bit. “You said this is a town of insomniacs, right?”

Curtis nodded. “I did, but it was a bit of a general statement-”

“I want to see how busy it is downtown. It’s…” she flicked her wrist up and tapped the screen of her smartwatch, “almost 10:30. I’m curious,”

He considered downtown Sandy Hallow for a moment. It wasn’t much, just a slightly more business-oriented couple of streets in the small town, but he could think of a few stores that were probably still open. “Okay, let’s go,” and he took off running.

He heard her shriek but she was laughing, and so was he. She caught up to him quickly with long, fluid, powerful strides and his breath caught. She was intimidating and beautiful; a lioness chasing her prey. He started to notice the lean muscles in her arms and realized they must be the power in her legs too. She was almost overtaking him and yet she didn’t seem anywhere near out of breath. Beautiful, he thought again, beautiful.

The colorful lights of downtown painted the pavement a myriad of colors. Curtis slowed and doubled over panting. She jogged back toward him, having overshot by a few steps.

“You,” he wheezed, “are fast,”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” Ava said with a smirk.

Curtis gestured vaguely at the storefronts around them, varying in lights on or off. “Where to?” he asked. He was curious to see where she chose to go.

She set off on the sidewalk ahead of them, pushing past several groups of people, swinging her hips and her head held high. Despite having lived his whole life in Sandy Hollow, Curtis felt as if she were showing him around instead of him leading her. “There,” she said, pointing at the music store across the street. The light was on and he could see various instruments in the window.

He crossed the street with her, thankful for the lack of cars on the road at this hour. Most people walked after 9:30, anyway, so it wasn’t much of a surprise.

Ava was nearly pressed against the glass windows of the store. Her eyes were blown wide, a grin on her face as she examined the guitars set out for display. “They’re beautiful,” she said.

Like you, Curtis thought.

“We can go in if you’d like,” he said instead, drawing her attention to the ‘open’ sign hanging on the door. She was inside before he could even realize she’d moved. He laughed and followed her inside.

She was walking slowly between guitar models, running her finger around the edges, plucking a string and watching it vibrate before moving on to the next one. Finally, she stopped in front of a pretty acoustic guitar. It was a warm golden brown with an etching of leafy vines crawling up the front and decorating the fretboard. She picked it up and turned it in her hands so that she held it as if she were playing it. Then she put it down and checked the price, nodding.

There’s no way she’ll buy that now, Curtis thought. He was proven wrong a few moments later when Ava purchased not only the guitar, but a gig bag with backpack straps, and a notebook.

“How did you afford that?” He asked incredulously. As a college student, he could barely afford rent. He would never be able to buy a guitar.

She shrugged, adjusting the straps of the bag. “I do gigs outside of my usual job. I have some money set aside for treats like this.” She seemed to ignore his stare. “So, to the desert?”

Curtis leaned back on his elbows, smiling. Ava was playing her new guitar blissfully and her voice was just as beautiful as she was. Her eyes were closed and her lips quirked up into a smile around the words of the song and he could not look away. Even with every star in the sky visible against the darkness, he could not stop watching her.

She paused and scribbled something down in her notebook, open in front of her crossed legs. She brushed away some sand that had blown onto the pages. There wasn’t too much sand as the deserts nearest Sandy Hallow were more rocky than sandy. Currently, he and Ava sat on an overhang that looked out on the rest of the desert.

“Your song is beautiful,” he said softly.

She smiled and tucked some of her hair behind her ear, pulling it out of reach of the breeze. “Almost. There are some adjustments I need to make.” She closed the notebook slowly, leaving her pencil between the pages she had been writing on.

“What about you? You have a creative writing minor, don’t you?” She asked. “Have you written anything?”

Curtis paused. The last time he’d shown people his poems they’d thought he was crazy. Ava, though, might not. In fact, Curtis realized, she was the most likely person to give him some actual feedback. He nodded. “Some poems,” he said, pulling his phone out and opening one of his poems.

She took the phone gently and read through it. Her face remained passive as she read and he felt his heart quicken its pace. What if she didn’t like it? He shifted forward to sit in a mirror pose to her.

Finally, she handed him back the phone. “It’s very good. Provocative.” She said, tilting her head. “Your word choice is incredible. It painted a clear picture while also leaving some of it up to interpretation. All I would say is that it almost sounds like you wrote it with a Thesaurus.”

Curtis pursed his lips. He decided not to tell her that he had. She didn’t need to know that. Definitely not.

“Maybe switch out a few – not many, just a few – of the more complex words for a more common synonym.” Ava tapped her lips. “You know, you could probably make a song out of that. We could perform it,”

Curtis smiled. She’d given him useful feedback. It felt so good to hear someone actually talk to him about the poem rather than around it. He laughed. “Perform that? In Sandy Hallow? They’d think we’ve gone mad,”

She laughed and leaned toward him. “Maybe,” she admitted, “but it’s a good kind of madness.”

He hummed in response. “Maybe it is.”

Ava didn’t pick up her guitar again. Instead, she shifted to lean against him. He could almost feel her shivering. He cautiously put his arm around her, giving her time to tell him not to. She didn’t. He pulled her closer and tipped his head back to stare at the stars.

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selenafreshfriendkidoaf · 3 years ago

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Characteristics of Linguistics

What is the language? Language is an arrangement of semantic signs that has importance and that can be decoded between individuals who utilize a similar framework. There is a wide variety of dialects as per each culture all over the planet, which are sent through language, which is the natural limit of the individual to articulate itself thoughts in a verbal (oral or composed) or non-verbal (gestural, notorious or illustrative) way.

Characteristics of Linguistics

The semantic sign is a bunch of phonemes that structure words or signifiers , that is, the words assign a component or thought. The idea that the word produces in the psyche of the speaker is called meaning. Contingent upon the language, various words or signifiers assign a similar component or significance. For instance, house in Spanish or house in English are utilized to assign a design with dividers, rooftop, entryways and windows where individuals reside .

Language attributes

Oral language can happen inside the system of exchange. Among the principal qualities of the language, the accompanying stick out:

It is theoretical and expects language to show. It is social since it permits individuals to convey and communicate their social qualities in every age. It is coordinated in light of language structure, or at least, the guidelines that manage the right utilization of signs. It is inconsistent as in there is no specific connection between the word and the item or thought it addresses. It is in steady correction of language structure to go with the progressions and advancement of human existence. It is dynamic since it for the most part integrates new words over the long run . What is semantics? Etymology is the science that concentrates on the indications of human language and is partitioned into three kinds:

Graphic phonetics. The part concentrates on the design of the language and its components, for example, sentence structure, which are the standards and standards that put together it; phonetics, which are sounds or phonemes; morphology, which alludes to how a word is framed; punctuation, which alludes to how words are connected with one another; semantics, which alludes to the significance of words; and pragmatics, which alludes to the setting that impacts the translation of implications. Verifiable phonetics. The part concentrates on the development of the language and the changes of the connections between words after some time. Additionally called diachronic etymology alludes to what occurs over the long run. Applied Linguistics. The part concentrates on etymology comparable to different areas of study, like brain science , humanities or nervous system science, so it changes or applies with a specific goal in mind for each situation. For instance, neurolinguistics is connected with the investigation of the mind and its capacities, and ethnolinguistics is connected with the investigation of language and its variety in a specific sociocultural setting. Chomsky hypothesis

For Chomsky the comprehension of the language is dependent upon the capability of the person. The American etymologist Noam Chomsky (1928 - present) fostered a significant hypothesis called generative or biolinguistic sentence structure , which depends on the investigation of normal language from an organic and transformative point of view. Recognize language capability from language execution.

His review zeroed in on grammar, that is to say, on the connections between words that happen inherently because of the presence of a psychological design that permits us to comprehend and deliver any assertion in any normal language . Chomsky's hypothesis is interdisciplinary on the grounds that it includes, notwithstanding semantics, science , hereditary qualities , neuroscience and psycholinguistics, among others.

Chomsky contends that the translation and comprehension of semantic sentences is dependent upon the skill and extralinguistic standards of an individual, for example, mental limitations or the conviction framework took on.

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queernuck · 7 years ago

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Pat Tillman Becomes Partisan Symbol in N.F.L. Conflict

The New York Times published an article about Pat Tillman and his widow, and while it’s liberal bullshit, it’s at least mildly tolerable liberal bullshit. Here is the article in full, but I put the text below the cut in case you wanna read it. It doesn’t have the tweets embedded in the article but it still works as an alright framework for talking about Tillman in a radical context.

For the many people who believe that N.F.L. players who kneel during the national anthem are disrespecting American armed forces, Pat Tillman was a perfect symbol.

But Marie Tillman, who was married to Corporal Tillman when he left a lucrative contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army, has asked the hundreds of people invoking him in the debate over the players’ kneeling to stop “politicizing” his memory.

That group included President Trump, who on Monday retweeted an account praising the memory of the Cardinals’ star, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, and calling for a boycott of the N.F.L.

It was just one of many dozens of tweets over the weekend that contrasted Corporal Tillman’s service with the demonstrations during the national anthem, which started as a way for players to call attention to racial injustice. For those who viewed the gesture as spoiled or self-absorbed, Corporal Tillman represented an antithesis.

By the time Mr. Trump added his voice, the pushback had already begun, as people pointed out that Corporal Tillman was a less-than-convenient symbol for pride in the armed forces. After he was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, the Army initially said that Afghan militants had been responsible. It took nearly five weeks for the Tillman family to find out that he had been fatally shot by Army Rangers.

After Mr. Trump’s retweet, many also pointed out that the former football player had been a critic of the war in Iraq and of President George W. Bush. Corporal Tillman was an intellectually curious, independent thinker interested in World War II and the works of the left-wing professor Noam Chomsky.

On Monday, Marie Tillman, who rarely speaks publicly, said that her husband deserved to be remembered as a symbol of unity.

His service, she told CNN, “should never be politicized in a way that divides us. We are too great of a country for that.”

“The very action of self expression and the freedom to speak from one’s heart — no matter those views — is what Pat and so many other Americans have given their lives for. Even if they didn’t always agree with those views,” she said. “It is my sincere hope that our leaders both understand and learn from the lessons of Pat’s life and death, and also those of so many other brave Americans.”

The transformation of multidimensional men and women into one-dimensional symbols is not an internet-era phenomenon. But social media, with its emphasis on the visual and symbolic and an often limited word count, has accelerated the process by which a person comes to represent a single idea.

And while other athletes are now able to use social media to push back, speaking for themselves on Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere, Corporal Tillman cannot.

Jon Krakauer, who wrote about Mr. Tillman’s life in his 2009 book, “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman,” was astonished by the soldier’s depth.

“I thought he was probably an interesting story, but I had no idea how interesting and complicated he was until Marie confronted me with his journals,” he told The New York Times in an interview about the book. “He was so different from the way he had been publicized.”

#Pat Tillman #Arizona Cardinals #takeaknee #nfl #football

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stretchjournalemerson · 6 years ago

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Everything is Politics: The Role of the Essay and the Democratization of Media

By Eitan Miller and Kathleen Grillo Hilton Als, author of The Best American Essays, opens up a conversation about stories from magazines, journals, and websites. In his introduction he says, “But the essays of the future start with questions, generally political in nature, and if you don’t think so, think again” (Als xxviii). The term “political” is a broad one. While obviously some essays discuss overtly political issues, we believe that Als is describing a greater phenomenon. “Politics” shape a person’s life and the questions they ask. Als writes that essays are “generally political,” but beyond that, all essays have some basis in politics.

Apart from the simple partisanship of left vs. right, politics is the basis for life in any society. The way that society is governed and its freedoms or restrictions create individuals’ identity and shape their being. The political background of a given country shapes the writing an individual can create. In her essay From Silence to Words, Min-Zhan Lu describes her complex relationship with writing, language, and identity given her experiences in communist China and learning English. Lu directly analyzes how the politics of her country shaped her writing and thinking. She uses language, a key factor in anyone’s life, to exemplify the split world she lived in. The politics of the world she grew up in directly affected her everyday life as a child and what she wrote as an adult. This revelation affects all of us, not just those who grew up in communist China. American “democracy” shapes our lives in more ways than we could possibly know and creates the foundation on which our writing stands.

Hilton Als’s essay was possible solely because of the politics surrounding his life. As Als grew, he utilized experiences from his childhood when writing books that started a conversation about societal issues such as gender, race, sexuality, and identity. This essentially made his books contact zones where he brought issues to light in order to educate and inform those unaware of their position within those issues. As Pratt defines it, a contact zone is a “social space[ ] where cultures meet, clash, and grapple” (Pratt 34). The politics of Als’ life, defined as the way his mind was formed by the governmental structures and influences he grew up with, shaped what he wrote. As with Lu, who talked about language, a large part of what she thought about language came from the politics of her country. Als was born into a country that shunned him for his race, his sexuality, and his size. And so, the essays Als wrote focused on these issues. All writers, whether they write academically or personally, touch on subjects that matter to them and that they have encountered at some point in their life. Where they grow up, who they grow up with, and what ideals they grow up with shape what writers want to speak about. Famous essayist Joan Didion is known for her narrative memoir-style essays and novels. She wrote about various topics that impacted her life, as all authors do. Her life, as described in Goodbye to All That, includes moving halfway across the world by herself to becoming one of the top journalists in her field. This is undoubtedly linked to the politics of her society. Although implicitly, Didion wrote about feminism as Lu wrote about language and Als wrote about racism. They grew up in different circumstances, different times and places, and this is reflected in their essays. The politics of their life, whatever they may look like, continued to influence their work well into adulthood.

Like the other authors, Noam Chomsky was greatly influenced by the politics of his life. In a biography, Christian Garland describes Chomsky: “Chomsky continues to be an unapologetic critic of both American foreign policy and its ambitions for geopolitical hegemony and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism, which he identifies in terms of class warfare waged from above against the needs and interests of the great majority” (Garland). However, Chomsky’s primary work is as a linguist. Furthermore, his essay Prospects for Survival describes the limited chance that the human race will survive for an extended period of time. On the surface, this is a scientific and logical argument given the history of other species, but Chomsky describes the role of politics in the imminent destruction of the human race. He writes about nuclear war and climate change, both political issues, as shaping the human experience or eventually lack thereof. His experiences, as shaped by US politics and the political linguistic dominance of the English language, shaped his ideas, prompting his various essays.

Clearly, essays, while diverse in content, all ask questions and are based in politics. But, there are many ways that discussion can be staged. A relatively recent development is the “video essay,” a form where the creator can present an amalgamation of pictures and videos with a narrated analysis that is generally targeted towards a YouTube audience. This medium is particularly effective when discussing visual matters such as TV and movies because the viewer can witness the pertinent content. In the TED Talk below, a YouTuber who goes by the alias of “Nerdwriter” describes how video essays impacted the genre of the modern essay. Watch specifically from 5:05 to 7:26, though the entire talk is fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ald6Lc5TSk8

Evan Puschak (Nerdwriter) touches on the fact that video essays, in addition to being a convenient method of intertwining various types of media, are far more democratic than “traditional” forms of the essay. Platforms like YouTube allow users to reward and share good content, making information and analysis accessible to all people with Internet access. This democratization of the essay in its various forms is an important development, arguably the most important development of the modern essay. Even other forms of digitally shared essays share this democratization, taking power away from a “moderator” and putting it in the hands of the people. Accessibility is key to any successful essay because essays are meant to be read.

In his book The Best American Essays, Als writes, “Of course [the essays will] be made up of many things including questions, images, and gestures” (Als xxviii). The essay itself is hard to define. From the point of view of a high schooler taking AP courses, the essay consists of five straightforward paragraphs. However, the essay has many different forms. Academic essays written by the authors of this piece include How the Korean Wave Is Crashing Over America by Kathleen Grillo to Alternative Oppression: A Look at the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict by Eitan Miller. These works look at a variety of social and political issues such as race and religion through the lens of media, and are very clearly “political.” On the other hand, essays like those styled after the works of Joan Didion and the authors of this piece have a more narrative style. It may appear that these “essays” are contrary to the definition provided by Als. Didion, as well as our essays styled after her, is not outrightly political. However, they both still find a basis in politics. Didion’s works bring in issues of feminism and the effects a particular geographic location has on a person. Issues of equality and how society is constructed are based in the politics behind the author's life. Would Didion’s essays be the same if she grew up in a communist country? The essays we wrote in her style, though independent, both describe the transition from high school to college. For each of us, we find ourselves thriving in college more than high school. And although not directly stated in either essay, it asks the questions: Why are colleges, especially high tuition institutions, better for individual growth than high school? What is the effect of education on a person’s life? How do money and the government play into the education a person receives?

Clearly, politics shape society, society shapes the self, and the self expresses ideas through writing. Logically, essays have to be based in politics. Authors are raised with implicit biases that come from the people that surround them, including the politics of the world they grow up in. And when authors write, they carry those biases within their writing. Even if they’re not choosing a side overtly, what they choose to write about is a bias in itself. Als used the stereotypes and prejudices he faced growing up in his writing. Lu struggled with a family life and country that was split, and reflected her struggles through language. Didion discussed the challenges she met as a woman moving from home and back. All authors were born into a certain political circumstance. And, while politics is most commonly viewed in direct relation to the government of a country, the power of politics is so broad that it seeps into everything. Even our most basic thoughts are founded with a certain political ideology. Because of this, it is impossible to say that essays are not based in politics. So what is written, no matter who writes it, when they write it, or where they write it, all comes down to politics.

Works Cited

Als, Hilton. The Best American Essays 2018. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Brockes, Emma. “Hilton Als: 'I Had This Terrible Need to Confess, and I Still Do It. It's a Bid to Be Loved'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2 Feb. 2018,

Chomsky, Noam. “Prospects for Survival.” The Massachusetts Review, 2017, pp. 621-634. www.massreview.org/sites/default/files/06_58.4Chomsky.pdf.

Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem: Essays. Picador Modern Classics, 2017.

Garland, Christian. “Noam Chomsky.” The Decline of the Democratic Ideal, chomsky.info/2009____-2/.

Grillo, Kathleen. How the Korean Wave Is Crashing Over America, Intro to College Writing WR-101-13, Emerson College, 21 Nov. 2018.

Lu, Min-Zhan. "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle." 1987. College English 49(4): 437-448.

Miller, Eitan. Alternative Oppression: A Look at the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Intro to CollegeWriting WR-101-13, Emerson College, 21 Nov. 2018.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 1991. New York: Modern Language Association P, 1991: 33-40.

Puschak, Evan. “How YouTube Changed the Essay.” TEDxTalks, uploaded 9 Jun. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ald6Lc5TSk8.

#politics #art #multimedia #language #essay #eitan miller #kathleen grillo #stretch2019

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grandisputri-blog1 · 6 years ago

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IMPOSSIBLE TO LIFE WITHOUT LANGUAGE

Begitu mengerikan membayangkan kehidupan tanpa bahasa. Manusia hanya akan memenuhi kebutuhan biologisnya sendiri ─ individualistis. Hanya tahu rasa lapar dan perlu mengisi perut untuk bertahan hidup. Bahkan berhubungan seks untuk menghasilkan keturunan pun menjadi kebutuhan tersier yang sulit dicapai karena tidak adanya produksi bahasa untuk berinteraksi. Sehingga adanya generasi menjadi hal yang utopis. Memburu – makan – beristirahat, begitu seterusnya menunggu renta dan mati. Apakah kita bisa hidup tanpa bahasa? Jawabnya, bisa, namun tidak akan berkembang. Sebab ilmu pengetahuan tidak akan tersampaikan tanpa bahasa. Kita tidak akan sampai pada zaman serba canggih seperti sekarang. Manusia akan selalu menjadi makhluk primitif tanpa bahasa.

Tapi ini semua tidak akan terjadi. Mengapa?

Untuk menjawab pertanyaan di atas, kita berangkat lewat pertanyaan,

“Bagaimana manusia bisa berbahasa?”

Berbicara asal muasal terciptanya bahasa tentu akan berkaitan dengan sejarah. Mari kita mengulasnya sebentar.

ASAL MUASAL BAHASA

Pada abad ke-17 SM, spekulasi manusia terhadap bahasa dikaitkan dengan takhayul. Para ahli bahasa memulai penelitiannya dengan pertanyaan, “bahasa apa yang pertama ada di dunia?” Andreas Kemke menyebutkan bahwa Tuhan di surga berbicara dalam bahasa Swedia, nabi Adam berbahasa Denmark, naga berbahasa Perancis, dan menurut Goropius Becanus bahasa di surga adalah bahasa Belanda. Di Cina, kura-kura diutus Tuhan sebagai pembawa bahasa. Di Jepang dan Babilonia, bahasa berasal dari masing-masing Tuhannya. Ras Hindu menyakini Brahmana yang mengajarkan bahasa dan tulis menulis. Kemudian orang-orang Mesir bersikeras menjadikan bahasa Phyrgia sebagai bahasa pertama di dunia hanya karena tuturan pertama yang muncul dari seorang bayi yang mengeluarkan kata ‘becos’, bahasa Phygia yang berarti roti. Para ahli bahasa sampai pada suatu kesimpulan bahwa kajian bahasa ini tidak lagi relevan dilakukan karena terus menekankan egosentris dari suku-suku tertentu.

Tidak berhenti disitu, para ahli melanjutkan penelitiannya pada abad ke-18 SM dan berhasil menelurkan beberapa teori yang belandaskan insting manusia. (1) Pooh-pooh theory, dipelopori oleh Darwin yang mengatakan bahwa bahasa merupakan ekpresi emosi manusia. Contohnya, perasaan jengkel mengeluarkan udara dari hidung dan mulut “pooh” atau “pish” atau kekinian orang menyebutnya “huft”. (2) Dingdong theory, dipelopori Muler yang mengatakan bahwa kesan pertama yang diterima oleh indra yang menstimulus keluarnya tuturan yang sesuai. Orang-orang pada zaman primitif mengucapkan “wolf” ketika melihat serigala. (3) Yo-he-ho theory mengatakan bahwa bahasa pertama lahir dari kegiatan sosial. Pada zaman primitif orang-orang bekerja masih mengandalkan otot mereka untuk mengangkut kayu. Aktivitas ini secara alamiah membuat pita suara mereka bergetar sehingga menghasilkan bunyi “heave” (angkat), dan ketika lelah menghasilkan bunyi “rest” (diam). (4) Bow-wow theory disebut juga onomatopetic theory yakni bahasa muncul menyerupai tiruan bunyi guntur, hujan, angin, sungai, ombak yang melahirkan bahasa seperti menggelegar, mendentum, mendesir; juga kokok ayam, cuitan burung, dan bunyi itik yang melahirkan bahasa berkokok, mencicit, dsb. (5) Gesture theory mengatakan bahwa isyarat mendahului ujaran. Suku Indian pada mulanya berkomunikasi melalui isyarat tangan dengan suku-suku yang tidak berbahasa. Teori ini mengingatkan kita bahwa bahasa bukan hanya ujaran lisan dan atau tulisan. Teori ini pun sarat akan kelemahan, seperti tidak berlaku pada tempat gelap atau dalam keadaan kedua tangan yang penuh membawa barang. Sehingga mendorong orang-orang mulai berkomunikasi dengan isyarat lisan.

Paparan di atas sebenarnya belum memasuki ruang ilmiah. Sekarang kita kembali kepada pertanyaan sekaligus pernyataan yang paling awal bahwa manusia tidak akan hidup tanpa bahasa. Saya mencoba memaparkannya dengan lebih ilmiah.

Pada hakikatnya, manusia dan bahasa berkembang secara bersamaan. Coba kamu telisik, selain fisik, apa yang membedakan kamu waktu bayi dengan kamu sekarang? Ya, kemampuan berbahasa. Celotehan-celotehan kita saat masih bayi tidak bermakna apapun. Lalu, apakah yang mengantarkan kita dapat lancar berbahasa seperti sekarang ini?

Karena manusia memiliki OTAK

Eh, sebentar. Bukankah binatang juga mempunyai otak? Ya, manusia dan binatang sama-sama memiliki otak. Namun perbedaannya, otak manusia dianugerahi sebuah blackbox yang dinamakan LAD (Language Acquisition Device).

Jadi yang benar adalah, karena manusia memiliki LAD di otaknya.

LAD merupakan sebuah piranti pemerolehan bahasa yang terletak di bagian otak sebelah kiri (hemisfir kiri). Hemisfir kiri memiliki kemampuan yang lebih dominan dalam menangani masalah kebahasaan, karena didalam hemisfir ini terdapat empat daerah besar yang dinamakan lobe; lobe frontal, temporal, osipital dan parietal. Masing-masing lobe ini mempunyai tugas dan peran yang berbeda-beda. Lobe frontal bertugas mengurusi masalah yang berkaitan dengan kemampuan kognisi, termasuk bahasa. Pada daerah lobe frontal terdapat daerah wernickle yang bertugas memahami pesan yang masuk ke otak dan selanjutnya pesan tersebut akan dikirim ke daerah broca yang bertugas menanggapi pesan tersebut. Jika digambarkan menurut Chomsky, begini lah LAD bekerja:

Sadarkah kita bahwa semakin dewasa maka kosakata yang dikuasai pun semakin banyak. Nah itulah kinerja LAD. Bukan hanya menyimpan berjuta-juta kosakata ke dalam memori, menurut McNeill LAD juga melakukan kerja pengolahan bahasa seperti mengorganisasikan peristiwa bahasa ke dalam variasi yang beragam, misalnya setelah kita mendapatkan kalimat “Ibu memasak nasi” kita akan mencoba memahami struktur kalimatnya sehingga menghasilkan variasi dari kalimat tersebut dengan mensubstitusi setiap jenis kata yang menyusun kalimatnya seperti; “Ibu memasak mie”, “Ayah memasak mie”, “Ayah mencuci mobil”, sampai kepada kalimat kompleks “Ibu Andi memasak nasi dan mie di dapur ketika Ayahnya mencuci mobil di garasi”, dan seterusnya.

Nah, kondisi ini yang kemudian dikatakan bahwa manusia secara kodrati memiliki bakat bahasa.

Seiring otak manusia terus menjalankan kerja nalarnya, maka manusia pun akan terus berbahasa. Sebab bahasa merupakan entitas daya nalar manusia. Bahasa melambangkan pikiran atau membangkitkan pikiran. Bahasa digunakan manusia untuk menyatakan pikiran, gagasan, obsesi, perasaan, kehendak, pada waktu berpikir/bernalar, berkhayal/berimajinasi, berkreasi, berangan-angan. Maka tidak heran bila kemampuan berbahasa dijadikan barometer intelektualitas seseorang.

Manusia berpikir, manusia berbahasa. Maka ilmu pengetahuan ada. There’s no life without language. And for every single person,

“words are free, it’s how you use them that may cost you”

#history of language #language #berbahasa #bahasa #manusia #LAD

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lettiespencer-blog · 6 years ago

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Essentials of Cultural Anthropology A Toolkit for a Global Age 1st Edition Test Bank

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Chapter 04: Language

MULTIPLE CHOICE

1. Whereas many animals, such as dolphins and great apes, communicate with each other through gestures and sounds, only human language utilizes both sounds and gestures as well as a complex system of

dance.

warnings and alerts.

symbols.

chemical information.

ANS: B DIF: Easy REF: What Is Language and Where Does It Come From?

OBJ: Discuss how anthropologists define language, distinguishing between human use of linguistic symbols and other forms of nonhuman communication. MSC: Remembering

2. According to the text, studying the patterns and importance of sounds as spoken by a group of people helps linguistic anthropologists

decipher meaning.

identify how emotions are conveyed through nonverbal communication.

determine how long a specific language has existed.

understand the elements and rules of a particular language.

ANS: D DIF: Moderate REF: What Is Language and Where Does It Come From?

OBJ: Summarize how anthropologists study the rules and elements of language through phonemes, morphemes, syntax, and grammar. MSC: Understanding

3. Archaeological evidence that offers clues to the origins of human language includes the

fossilized brain casts of Neanderthals that show the anatomical features for speech.

existence of the FOXP2 gene, which is also found in chimpanzees.

careful study of nonhuman primate sounds and gestures.

discovery of fossilized human remains that are almost 2.5 million years old.

ANS: A DIF: Easy REF: What Is Language and Where Does It Come From?

OBJ: Describe how human language is thought to have originated, drawing on archaeological and genetic evidence. MSC: Remembering

4. We sometimes “signal” interest in someone without the use of words, which is part of how we establish a relationship with another person, possibly a lasting one. How would an anthropologist describe our behavior?

displacement

kinesics

morphology

paralanguage

ANS: C DIF: Moderate REF: What Is Language and Where Does It Come From?

OBJ: Illustrate the role of paralanguage and kinesics in communication, and discuss how electronic messages have attempted to pass along emotional information. MSC: Applying

5. Part of how we establish intimate relationships with others stems from the words we use, but sometimes words cannot convey everything. At such a time, we may unknowingly resort to a system of body movements as well as a collection of noises and tone of voice in order to fully convey our

interest.

emotions.

sadness.

enthusiasm.

ANS: C DIF: Moderate REF: What Is Language and Where Does It Come From?

OBJ: Illustrate the role of paralanguage and kinesics in communication, and discuss how electronic messages have attempted to pass along emotional information. MSC: Applying

6. Anthropologists refer to sounds that make a critical difference in meaning within a language as

paralanguage.

phonemes.

morphemes.

grammar.

ANS: C DIF: Moderate REF: What Is Language and Where Does It Come From?

OBJ: Summarize how anthropologists study the rules and elements of language through phonemes, morphemes, syntax, and grammar. MSC: Remembering

7. The system of human communication based on a set of symbols and signs with learned and shared meanings is called

grammar.

productivity.

paralanguage.

language.

ANS: D DIF: Easy REF: What Is Language and Where Does It Come From?

OBJ: Discuss how anthropologists define language, distinguishing between human use of linguistic symbols and other forms of nonhuman communication. MSC: Remembering

8. Based on evidence from Benjamin Whorf’s research with the Hopi, a Native American group in the southwestern United States, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that

the human brain is hardwired for organizing language in a universal manner.

thought is rooted in language.

language occurs independently of thought.

thought occurs independently of language.

ANS: B DIF: Moderate REF: Can Language Shape Our Ways of Thinking?

OBJ: Differentiate between structuralist theories of language, such as the work of Noam Chomsky, and the hypothesis proposed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. | Explain how ways of classifying information or expressing cultural ideas may shape the way we think.

MSC: Understanding

9. The ________ of any language refers to names, ideas, and events that offer a kind of catalog of what is spoken and can be compiled into something accessible to others.

dialect

lexicon

grammar

syntax

ANS: C DIF: Easy REF: Can Language Shape Our Ways of Thinking?

OBJ: Describe how the focal vocabulary of a particular group of people expresses names, ideas, and categories that are unique to their way of life. | Discuss how languages can evolve over time, and how changes show up in a language’s lexicon. MSC: Remembering

10. Words that have what we might consider an obvious meaning can often hold completely different meaning to others. The word dead, for example, might seem obvious to us, but signify an affliction to others, which demonstrates how language is

organized into recognizable archives.

connected to local stories and cultural values.

embedded into texts and stories that are universal in nature.

separate from the local folklore.

ANS: B DIF: Difficult REF: Can Language Shape Our Ways of Thinking?

11. In part because the Hopi language has verb tenses that differ from those of English, Benjamin Whorf’s linguistic research suggested that the Hopi people of Arizona have

a worldview where past and present represent lived reality and the future is hypothetical.

been able to retain their cultural traditions.

a worldview that keeps past and present as entirely separate concepts.

the same conceptual idea of time as everyone else with a different worldview.

ANS: A DIF: Moderate REF: Can Language Shape Our Ways of Thinking?

MSC: Understanding

12. Linguistic anthropologists would label new words that have emerged during the digital age, such as mouse, modem, download, and e-mail, as part of our generation’s ________ vocabulary.

cultural

emotional

focal

tonal

ANS: B DIF: Easy REF: Can Language Shape Our Ways of Thinking?

13. Anthropologist Laura Bohannan discovered in her attempt to translate a classic text from English literature that

an underlying universal grammar that all humans share facilitated her work.

it is straightforward to translate stories across different languages.

accurate translation of Shakespeare is best accomplished through sign language.

the meaning of the story became lost as the original meanings of the English words could not be easily translated.

ANS: D DIF: Moderate REF: Can Language Shape Our Ways of Thinking?

#Essentials of Cultural Anthropology A Toolkit for a Global Age 1st Edition Test Bank

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vershininvvv-blog · 7 years ago

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Autism as the rigidity of subconscious.

Autism as the rigidity of subconscious. Abstract Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder which is characterized by deficits in social and communicational areas, and unusually restrictive patterns of behavior. By looking at the nature of those deficits and other deficits commonly associated with ASD, and by comparing strong and weak points inside those areas of deficits, it can be concluded that most (if not all) of them are connected to the formation and transformation of subconscious (automatic) skills. Socialization is the major area of defisits among people with ASD. According to diagnostic criteria it includes. 1.Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions. 2. Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication. 3. Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers. As we can see all of those areas demand the development of complex subconcious skills, requiring high amount of intuition and contextual fluidity.As the "Sally Ann" false belief test (Baron-Cohen, Leslie , Frith, 1985)(1) shows, children with ASD show the deficits in the so called 'Theory of Mind", which can be described as the ability "to put oneself in others shoes" , or monitor what other people might be thinking. On the other hand , Dot and Midge test (Peterson, Slaughter, Peterson, and Premack, 2013)(2) shows that given enough incentive to concentrate children with ASD can consciously guess what the other person's beliefs might be. Communication and Language acquisition is another problem area for people with ASD. As we now know(Chomsky, 1965, Pinker, 1994)(3,4) language is acquired instinctually in childhood. And perhaps for those people with ASD who acquired language later than usual , the process was more akin to studying a second language by neurotypicals. And even to those people with ASD who didn't experience a delay in language acquisition more intuitive areas of language', like pragmatics, still causing problem. On the other hand, higher functioning autistics can have higher than average knowledge in more formal and explicit areas of language such as vocabulary, hence the term 'little professors' coined by Hans Asperger himself. Intense interests and restricted patterns of behaviour might indicate that once certain skills and knowledge are acquired exercising them can be highly rewarding psychologically. Perhaps, the most extreme example of which will be stereotyped or repetitive motor movements (stimming). On the other hand , some people with ASD are well known for their innovative thinking. Temple Grandin's observation (Grandin, T. 2006)(5)about specialized ways of thinking(visual, pattern, or verbal) might indicate that once preferred method of thinking is established, it can develop quite rapidly, sometimes to the point of preclusion of the development of other important skills. It's also well known that most people with ASD have difficulty coping with change which again requires complex re-routing of automatic processes. Motor skills is yet another set of mostly automatic skills, which is also a common problem area for people with ASD. The study by Mostofsky et al. (2009)(6) suggested that the decreased cerebellar activation in the HFA group may reflect difficulty shifting motor execution from cortical regions associated with effortful control to regions associated with habitual execution. Additionally, diffusely decreased connectivity may reflect poor coordination within the circuit necessary for automating patterned motor behaviour. And yet again , we can find examples of excellence in the specific areas of motor skills among people with ASD (sports etc.) Conclusion. It might be presumed that the symptoms experienced by people with ASD can be explained by the general impairment in the formation(and transformation, once they are formed) of wide spectrum of subconscious skills (automatic processes) and by consequences of this impairement. Those subconscious skills can be compensated for by similar skills , but more specific and demanding higher levels of attention and conscious effort. The need to use such skills, at least partially, can explain higher levels of stress among people with ASD and ASD most common comorbids : anxiety disorder, depression, and OCD. It can also be presumed that many cases of intellectual disability associated with ASD are mere consequence of those deficits in subconscious skills, and can be avoided if timely and adequate ways to solve or bypass those deficits are found. 1.Baron-Cohen, Simon; Leslie, Alan M.; Frith, Uta (October 1985). "Does the autistic child have a "theory of mind"?". Cognition. Elsevier. 21 (1): 37–46. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8. PMID 2934210. 2.Peterson CC, Slaughter V, Peterson J, (May 2013) Children with autism can track others' beliefs in a competitive game." Dev Sci PMID:23587041 DOI:10.1111/desc.12040 3.Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press. 4.Pinker, S. (2007). The Language Instinct (1994/2007) . New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 5.Grandin, T. (2006)Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism. Vintage; 6.Mostofsky S. H., Powell S. K., Simmonds D. J., Goldberg M. C., Caffo B., Pekar J. J. (2009). Decreased connectivity and cerebellar activity in autism during motor task performance. Brain 132, 2413–2425. 10.1093/brain/awp088

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hardtostudy · 7 years ago

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis  consists of two associated principles:  1. Linguistic determinism: our thinking is determined by language  2. Linguistic relativism: people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently   1. Linguistics - Grammar - Philology  linguistics - from latin lingua = languages —> study of languages  - its object of investigation is language from the point of view of its structure and function  Crystal - defines linguistics as the scientific study of language, also called linguistic science  Widdowson - defines linguistics as the name given to the discipline which studies human language   Grammar - everything known about human language, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and lexicon - the rules for constructing words and sentences in a particular language, or the branch of linguistics studying this   Philology - study of language, but only in its written form - it studies language texts - its subject of study is the language and its literature, so we can distinguish Slovak, English philology. 

2. The purpose of linguistics 1. to explain language  2. to provide some explanations of the complexity of language by abstracting from it what seems to be of essential significance.  3. To provide models of language which reveal features which are not immediately apparent  4. To discover universals concerning language  3. Synchronic / diachronic linguistics synchronic - presents an account of the language as it is at some particular point in time  diachronic - traces historical development of the language and records the changes that have taken place in it between successive points in time, it is historical    Prescriptive / descriptive grammar  Prescriptive = grammarians' attempt to prescribe what speakers' grammatical rules should be, rather than what they are  - it has 2 features (typical):  — 1. It presents an oversimplification - a particular form is right or wrong  — 2. It considers a very small part of the grammatical structure of English or any other traditional language with a similar prescription.  Descriptive = a linguist’s description or model of the mental grammar, the units, structures, and rules of speakers of a particular language  - the attempt to state what speakers unconsciously know about their language   Universal grammar = the principles or properties which pertain to the grammars of all human languages  - universal in the sense, that it is available to all humans; grammar - it helps people acquire the specific grammar of the language they are to learn

4. Linguistics in the system of sciences - linguistics is a social science that shares common ground with other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, psychology and archeology.  It also may influence other disciplines such as communication studies and computer science.  Linguistics is ultimately concerned with how the human brain functions    5. Language  - language is the basic means of human communication.  Chomsky = considers a language to be a set of sentences, each finite / infinite and constructed out of a finite set of elements  Block and Trager = define language as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates  Hall = defines language as the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral - auditory arbitrary symbols.  F. de Saussure = according to his structuralist approach the term language can be interpreted in three ways:  — la langue - a system of signs used by the members of a language community for communication and thought  — la parole - the utilization of the means provided by the system of signs for the formation of concrete utterances and for conceptual thought  - an individual phenomenon, a concrete manifestation of langue uttered by an individual in a given moment  — la langage - a complex linguistic entity, as well as the ability of the language user to use the language; to implement a certain system of signs for communication and thought  - it implies both - langue and parole   6. Source of human language  Divine source = a theory which says that language was given to humans by a divine source - god in Christianity etc.  Natural sounds source = there are 2 theories:  1.) bow-wow theory - based on suggestion, that primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds (onomatopoeic words) which early men and women heard around them (cuckoo, bang)  2.) yo-he-ho theory - is based on the suggestion, that the sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that phys. effort involved several people and had to be coordinated  - it places the development of human language in some social context  Oral - gesture source = connection btw. physical and oral gesture - finest a set of physical gestures was developed, as means of communication —> then imitating of motions of communication by human tongue, lips   7. Properties of language (human)  Displacement - the ability of human language users to discuss topics remote in space / time.  Arbitrariness - there is no natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning, it is a matter of convention  Productivity - the potential number of utterances produced in any human language is infinite  Cultural transmission - language is passed on from one generation to the next so that we can build on knowledge of our ancestors  Duality - language is organized at 2 levels simultaneously - 1.) Physical level - individual sounds, meaningless elements. 2.) Level of meaning  Discreteness (Discontinuity) - we produce sounds which are clearly separated from each other - each sound in the language is treated as discrete  Freedom from stimulus control - our ability to say anything, including nothing, in any situation 8. Spoken and written forms of language  - priorities of spoken lang. over written language:  1. Historical - spoken form was evolved first, there is no human society known to exist without the capacity of speech  2. Biological - human beings are born with certain preconditions for acquiring language and to produce and recognize speech sounds.  3. Functional - important for communication, we rather speak than write during communication, wider range of purposes  4. Structural - structurally more basic - it only permits certain combinations of sounds, whereas there is a totally unpredictable potentionality of combining of letters   Medium transferability - a property of language - language is independent of the medium in which language signals are realized   9. Competence and Performance  Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker - listener who knows the language perfectly  Chomsky separates competence (an idealized capacity) from performance (production of actual utterances)

  Competence - cognitive skills necessary for the construction and understanding of meaningful sequences of words, consisting of:  — 1. Grammatical competence - ability to recognize and use lexical and syntactic patterns  — 2. Communicative competence - ability to use gram. competence to communicate effectively  — 3. Creative competence - ability to exploit the other competences creatively - uniquely  — 4. Textual competence - ability to join all 3 competences  performance - mechanical / motor skills necessary for the production and reception of language    10. The functions of language  YULE  Interactional - how humans use language to interact with each other, socially or emotionally  Transactional - humans use their linguistic abilities to communicate knowledge, skills and information.   JAKOBSON

 1. Referential (denotative) - to convey message or information 2. Emotive (expressive) - to express attitudes, feelings, emot.  3. Connative - to persuade and influence others through commands  4. Phatic - to establish and maintain social relations  5. Metalingual - to clear up difficulties about intentions, meanings  6. Poetic - to indulge in language for its own sake   M.A.K. HALLIDAY  1. Ideational - to communicate ideas, to express the content of an utterance referring to people, places, actions, events, states, qualities, and circumstances.  2. Interpersonal - to establish and maintain social relations, to influence people’s behavior, and get things done, to express the speaker’s feelings, attitudes, and opinions  3. Textual (discoursal) - to create texts, to link ideas being expressed and to make them hang together - passages to coherent messages   11. Micro and macro functions of language Microfunctions:  1. Physiological - to release physical energy  2. Phatic - for purposes of sociability  3. Recording - to record things 4. Identifying - to identify and classify object, events  5. Reasoning - as an instrument of thought 6. Communicating - means of communicating ideas  7. Pleasure - to give delight   Macro functions:  1. Ideational - sec halliday  2. Interpersonal  3. Poetic - to indulge in language for its own sake  4. Textual - see halliday   12. Language as a system of signs  - Language is a system of conventional signs, all aspects of whose structure - phonology, morphology, etc. - exist ultimately to serve the sovereign function of conveying meaning  - Language is unique when compared e.g. to mathematics, in that it is able to express virtually anything that is conceivable - this extraordinary expressive power depends heavily on certain crucial properties of its constructive signs, notably their arbitrariness, linearity and disceretness   F. de Saussure conceives the language as a system of signs. In addiction it is the result of universal human ability of speech, it is arbitrary and socially conditioned. Therefore it is a supra individual abstract and hierarchical system of signs, their inter-relations, values and combinatory possibilities.   F. De Saussure has developed his conception of a linguistic sign within the general theory of semiology (the theory of signs). He distinguished btw. a concept and an acoustic image. They are components of mental nature associated in brain. The acoustic image is not conceived as a mere physical sound, but rather its trace, or reflection in our brain. The concept is even more abstract. Both components are mutually conditioned. Later Saussure replaced the original terms with a new couple: signifiant for the acoustic image (the signifying component), and signifié for the concept (the signified component).   Pierce - 3 types of signs:  Icons - depend on physical similarity (photo)  Indexes - internal relations (smoke - fire)  Symbols - signs based on conventions   13. Linguistic sign, Saussure’s approach, features:  - For Saussure, any linguistic sign is made up of a signifiant / signifier / - it concentrates an common features, general realization - that is an acoustic image; and a signifié / signified / or a concept - even more abstract, object that appears in our minds when we hear or read the signifier.   Characteristic features of linguistic sign:  a) Arbitrariness - no natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning - it is a matter of convention  b) Linearity - linguistic signs cannot be at the same point on time axes - no words can be pronounced at the same time  c) Discontinuity - sign results from connecting a concrete sequence of sounds of a particular language with a concrete and delimited segment of the nebula  - the sound material of language is amorphous (compared to an undifferentiated nebula)   Linguistic sign = a bilateral unit, having both - form and meaning  - According to Saussure, every linguistic object has two aspects:  — a linguistic form (the signifiant, or signifier)  — and a meaning (the signifié, or signified thing)  ex.: the English word dog has a particular form (a sequence of three meaningless phonemes DOG) and also a particular meaning (a specific kind of animal). The two together make up a single linguistic sign in English   14. Bilateral theory of linguistic sign  According to Saussure the linguistic sign is a bilateral unit, one component of which (the signifié - that what is denoted) is formed by the motional aspect, denoted as concept, and the other component (the signifiant - that what is denoting) is formed by the acoustic aspect denoted as acoustic image. The linguistic sign in this sense is bilateral and only as a whole, as a unity of what is denoted and what is denoting, can it stand instead of the object of extralinguistic reality.  A bilateral linguistic sign, both components of which are structured, is an ideal object existing in language as a system serving not only for communication but also for denoting real objects, as well as for denoting thought values or in a wider context cultural values of mankind, and for storing them.   15. Ogdew + Richard’s semiotic triangle  Semiotic triangle is used to explain the relationship between concepts, symbols and objects. The key point is that a symbolic representation of an object can never refer directly to object (referent), but only through concept (thought) within the mind —> no direct relationship between the symbol and the referent, what is represented by dashed line   Relationships within the semiotic triangle:  1. Designation - relationship between referent (object) and reference (concept)  - reference describes referent  2. Signification - relationship between sign form and concept  - symbol symbolizes concept (reference)  3. Denotation - relationship between sign form / referent - sign form denotes the object   Denotative versus connotative meaning  a) denotation - the central meaning of a linguistic form, regarded as the set of things it could possibly refer to - general (dictionary) meaning  b) connotation - a non-central word meaning acquired through frequent associations (additional, associative) factors affecting connotation:  1. Territorial - dialectisms and regionalisms, national standards, ethnic variety  2. Social  3. Stylistic - may involve differences in origin, domestic vs. loanword  4. Temporal - dated or archaic vs. neologisms    16. Type and Token relation  - to identify an element as a token is to recognize it as a particular and actual instance of a general and abstract type  Type: Is a class  Token: Representative of the given class  - a given class relates, to a type, of which the classified object is a token   17. Phonetics and Phonology  Phonetics - the study of sounds which is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds, as well as those of non-speech sounds, and their production, audition and perception  - It deals with the sounds themselves, rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages  - Speech sounds are studied from three different points of view, which correspond with three main branches of phonetics: acoustic, articulatory, auditory   Phonology - is science of language inreotigating the sounds of language from the point of view of their function in a language system  - it is concerned with how the sounds alternate, as well as issues like syllabe, structure, stress, accent and intonation.

18. Acoustic, Articulatory and Auditory Phonetics  — Acoustics studies speech sounds from the point of view of the transmission of the speaker’s output in terms of psychical characteristics (more form, intensity, periodicity, noise)  — Articulatory studies speech sounds from the speaker’s point of view in terms of the articulatory organs and processes involved  — Auditory studies speech sounds from the point of view of the hearer in terms of the physiology and psychology of perception    19. Cardinal vowel scheme  The system of cardinal vowels represents standard reference points for identifying vowels based on tongue position along two dimensions: front vs. back AND high vs. low.  - Cardinal vowels are not sounds of any particular language, they are artificial constructs.

20. Phoneme, allophone, phone  Phone - a sounds - the basic unit of phonetics.  - a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties   Phoneme - the basic unit of phonology.  - it is a complex of phonic features, I.e. articulatory, acoustic and auditory features, which enables the users to differentiate a certain sound from every other sound as an independent, noninterchangeable unit capable of meaning full distinction.  - is not a bilateral unit, it has a form, but it doesn't have any meaning, it only has a distinctive function.   There are four main approaches to phoneme:  — 1. the mentalistic or psychological view (J.B. de Courtenay)  - phoneme is the ideal sound at which the speaker aims  — 2. the physical view (D. Jones)  - the phoneme is a family of sounds satisfying certain conditions:  a) the various members of one family must show phonetic similarity to one another  b) no member of one family may occur in the same phonetic context as any other  — 3. The functional view (Bloomfield, Trubetzkoy, Jakobson)  - phoneme is the minimal sound unit by which meaning may be differentiated  - meaning differentiation is taken to be a defining characteristic of phonemes - therefore the most important role is assigned to distinctive features.  — 4. the abstract view (Sapir, Hjemslev)  - phonemes are essentially independent from the phonetic properties associated with them for example H and ei as occurring in sanity - sane represents one phoneme because they are related by morphological alteration.   Allophone - a variation in the way any phoneme is realized in actual speech - the different manifestations of one phoneme   21. Vowels, Consonants, Diphthongs  Vowel = a sound that is produced in such a way that air stream can pass through the vocal tract without a noticeable obstruction  - all English vowels are voiced, they are characterized by:  — 1. the duration of sound: short - long  — 2. Character of lip opening: spread - neutral - rounded  — 3. Position of tongue during articulation: high - low, front - central - back   Semivowel - English has two sounds /j/ and /w/ which are phonetically vocoids, but which in English function in a consonant - like way.   Diphthong - a combination of 2 vowels produced one immediately after the other, with no intervening stopping of the air stream and the two sounds glide into each other closing / centering.   Triphthong - a glide from one vowel into another and then to a third, all produced rapidly and without interruption  - closing diphthong + a added at the end   Consonant - a speech sound produced by a partial or complete obstruction of the air stream by any of various constrictions of speech organs.  English consonants are characterized by:  — 1. Manner of articulation (the kind of structure)  - plosires, affricates, nasals, fricatives, laterals, flap, roll, glottal stop  — 2. place of articulation (relative position of two movable parts or a movable and fixed part)  - bilabial, lablo-dental, dental, alreolar, post-alveolar, palatal, velar, glottal  — 3. Opposition voiced-voiceless (depending on the vibration of vocal cord)  — 4. Position of the soft palate - oral, nasal   Aspiration - modification of consonants  - the delay of vibration of the vocal cords after the production of a voiceless consonant  - there is a short period of air stream heard as a ‘h’, e.g. pin.   22. Distinctive features, complementary distribution, minimal pairs  Distinctive features = the features which are common for allophones of one phoneme, which allow to distinguish it from all other phonemes.  They may be - relevant (necessary for creation of sound), irrelevant (not necessary, e.g. aspiration)   Complementary distribution  - two phonetically similar sounds cannot occur in the same environment, that is why they cannot contrast in the same environment —> so they are not separate phonemes, but allophones of one phoneme.  - if we replaced one allophone with another allophone of the same phoneme, the meaning of the particular word would not change —> not distinctive.

Minimal pairs - minimally different pairs of words, such as pet and bet, that differ by only one element.  - if we can replace one sound of the word with another sound to form a different word - we have found two phonemes of the language - commutation test.   Trubetzkoy phonology - Theory of oppositions  3 rules:  — 1. If two sounds of the same language in the same context cant be replaced without the change of the meaning, they are different phonemes.  — 2. If such a replacement is possible without interrupting the meaning of the word, these sounds are facultative variants of a single phoneme.  — 3. If two articulatory and acoustically related sounds can never occur in the same environment, they are combinatory variants of a single phoneme.   The theory of distinctive features is based on a binary principle (absence vs. presence of a distinctive feature). The contrast between the presence and absence of a feature, or between two distinctive features is called opposition. One of the pair of opposition is always marked, the other being unmarked.   oppositions in regard to the whole system:  — 1. Unidimensional oppositions - the base common for both phonemes in opposition does not occur in other pairs of phonemes (t - d - the only plosives alveolar — 2. Multidimensional op. - the base common occurs in more than two phonemes (p-t-k- oral plosives voiceless)  — 3. Proportional op. - the relation between two phonemes occurs in several pairs of phonemes (p-b, t-d, k-g)  — 4. Isolated op. - the given relation between two phonemes does not occur elsewhere (r-l)   oppositions can be constant or neutralizable as to mutual relations between the members of the opposition:  — 1. privative oppositions - the difference between the phonemes is based on the presence vs. absence of a particular distinctive feature - marked member (presence) and unmarked member (absence of the part. feature) e.g. voiced and voiceless consonants having all other features in common (d-t, s-z, v-f).  — 2. gradual op. - the members differ by a different degree of a feature (e.g. closed - half-closed - half-open - open vowels)  — 3. equipollent op. - the members of the pair differ in several features (e.g. the difference between p and f)

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foodselfiesandstuffblog · 8 years ago

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The New Yorker: The Provocateur Behind Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Issa Rae

Melina Matsoukas, a director of music videos and television shows, had just returned home from a trip to Cuba when she got a call from Beyoncé, asking her to direct a video for a song called “Formation.” Matsoukas had directed nine of Beyoncé’s videos, and considered her “family.” But this assignment was unusually demanding. Beyoncé was working on “Lemonade,” a deeply personal “visual album” that touches on betrayals in black marriages—her parents’ and, reportedly, her own. “Formation” would be the first single, and an introduction to Beyoncé’s new aesthetic: both vulnerable and political. She wanted to release the song the day before she performed it at the Super Bowl, which meant that Matsoukas would have to submit a video within a few weeks. “It was the fastest delivery I had ever done in my life,” she told me.

When I visited her loft in Hollywood recently, Matsoukas opened her rose-gold laptop and pulled up the video. The brassy opening beats began as Beyoncé crouched on the roof of a police car, wearing a red-and-white blouse and a matching skirt: evocative of the rural South but made by Gucci. Matsoukas, who is tall and thin, with dark hair and high cheekbones, radiates a disconcerting hyperassurance. (She’s a Buddhist, with a fluctuating practice.) She is, as she says, “very loud and New York,” but her apartment projects an almost hermetic cool: Africanist art, a golden skull on a shelf, a tar-splashed vanity mirror.

After Matsoukas agreed to direct the video, Beyoncé invited her to her house in Los Angeles, and explained the concept behind “Lemonade.” “She wanted to show the historical impact of slavery on black love, and what it has done to the black family,” Matsoukas told me. “And black men and women—how we’re almost socialized not to be together.” This was a fraught subject for Beyoncé. She and her husband, the rapper Jay Z, are among the most famous couples in the world, and they had long been surrounded by rumors that he was unfaithful. Beyoncé considers herself a feminist, but for black women feminism can be a tenuous balancing act—advocating for women’s rights while supporting black men against racism. Black feminists have often been forced to pick between being politically black or politically female. “It’s an unfair struggle that only black women can understand and relate to,” Matsoukas said. With the “Lemonade” album, Beyoncé was publicly calling out the men in her life, an unexpected and, to her fans, thrilling decision.

The video for “Formation” would be an anthem of female and black empowerment, set in Louisiana, where Beyoncé’s maternal grandparents are from. “We spoke about the South, New Orleans, her mother’s history as well as her father’s,” Matsoukas recalled. The concept suited Matsoukas, who is known for videos that retain contemporary hip-hop’s commercial glamour but feature black women as the heroes. While the lyrics offered a certain amount of feminist swagger—Beyoncé promises that, if a lover pleases her, she “might take him on a flight on my chopper”—there wasn’t an obvious story line.

As Matsoukas develops an idea for a video, she spends hours browsing online and through art books and magazines, looking for images that resonate. “I treat each video like a thesis project,” she said. Stacks of old sources are piled behind her couch: books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Noam Chomsky, and C. L. R. James; back issues of Wallpaper; math and science textbooks from college. For the “Formation” video, she found ideas in the work of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Octavia Butler. She began to conceive scenes of black history, from slavery through Mardi Gras parades and the Rodney King protests. “I wanted to show—this is black people,” she said. “We triumph, we suffer, we’re drowning, we’re being beaten, we’re dancing, we’re eating, and we’re still here.” She wrote out a treatment and sent it to Beyoncé in the middle of the night. Within hours, the singer had written back to say that she loved it.

Matsoukas, looking for a set that resembled a plantation house, rented a museum in Pasadena and decorated it to summon “Gone with the Wind” and “Twelve Years a Slave.” Then she had her art director “blackify” the house, hanging French Renaissance-style portraits of black subjects. Films about slavery “traditionally feature white people in these roles of power and position,” she said. “I wanted to turn those images on their head.” Matsoukas planned technical details to create a sense of verisimilitude, shooting some scenes with a Bolex camera—for a “grainy look,” like that of documentary footage—and others with a camcorder. She hired a camera operator named Arthur Jafa, who had been the cinematographer of “Daughters of the Dust,” an iconic 1991 film about Gullah women in South Carolina whose focus on black sisterhood echoes throughout the “Formation” video.

Matsoukas had two days to shoot Beyoncé, between her rehearsals for the Super Bowl. She devised a scene of Beyoncé performing on top of a squad car, as it slowly sank into the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. “I wanted it to be a police car to show that they hadn’t really shown up for us,” she told me. “And that we were still here on top, and that she was one with the people who had suffered.” She shot the scene on a Los Angeles soundstage, with an artificial lake backed by a blue screen made to look like New Orleans. A crane on a barge suspended a camera overhead while a lift lowered the police car, and Beyoncé, into the water. Matsoukas operated another camera from a speedboat. “Everyone was scared, because the water was cold,” she said. “And Miss Tina”—Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles—“is calling me, like, ‘You’re going to give her pneumonia, and she has to perform at the Super Bowl.’ ” Beyoncé, who was wearing a wetsuit under her clothes, didn’t complain.

In the first edit, the video ended with an image of Beyoncé sinking into the water, but the singer wanted the final note to be more uplifting. A friend of Matsoukas’s had recently joked about the “black-girl air grab,” an incisive gesture made with your forearm upright as your fingers stretch toward the ceiling and then close in a fist. In extra footage, Matsoukas found a portrait of Beyoncé sitting in the plantation house in a white dress, half in shadow, air-grabbing as she faced the camera. “It just felt so perfect,” she said. She spliced it in after the drowning scene as an emphatic last gesture.

The response to the video was immediate and contentious. On Slate, a documentary filmmaker named Shantrelle Lewis accused Beyoncé of profiting from tragedy, writing, “Are we in need of mainstream blackness so badly that we’ll mistake its exploitation for validation?” Police unions throughout the country protested, saying that Beyoncé had an “anti-police message.” But the video was enormously popular among fans and critics, winning a Grand Prix Lion Award, at the Cannes Lions Awards; Video of the Year at the B.E.T. Awards and at the MTV Music Video Awards; and, earlier this month, a Grammy for Best Music Video. “I didn’t know the video was going to incite all those conversations,” Matsoukas said, closing her laptop. “But I was very pleased it did.”

In the “Formation” video, a black man wearing a yellow T-shirt and a black Stetson rides a horse through a deserted alley, edged with shrubs and red brick walls; his white Adidas sneakers are fitted with spurs. The scene was inspired by Matsoukas’s maternal grandfather, Carlos, an Afro-Cuban preacher and musician, known to friends as “the Cuban Nat King Cole,” who rode in rodeos in Harlem and the Bronx. “We’d see him on his white horse, and he was just this regal-looking black cowboy,” she recalled. Her maternal grandmother was a Cuban maid, who brought her six children from Havana to New York after the revolution. Matsoukas’s paternal grandparents were Greek and Polish Jews living on the Upper West Side. Her parents, David and Diana-Elena, met through one of Diana-Elena’s brothers, who had encountered David in a socialist student group.

Matsoukas was born in 1981 and grew up in Co-op City, a sprawling housing development in the Bronx. Her father worked as a carpenter, and her mother taught math in a local high school. When Matsoukas was eight, the family moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, but as a teen-ager she often returned to the city to go clubbing. “I was just trying to be grown,” she recalled. “Young girl trying to do too much.” She read Malcolm X and Assata Shakur, and listened to socially conscious hip-hop by Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest. “She’s always been an old soul, and she’s always been confident,” her mother told me. “I sometimes had to remind her, ‘Melina, I’m the mother here.’ ”

In high school, Matsoukas began taking photographs—including portraits of her friends, dressed in Afrocentric clothing—and she went on to study film at N.Y.U. and cinematography in the graduate program at the American Film Institute. She admired the directors Spike Lee and Mira Nair, and imagined making films that documented the lives of people “who look like me and think like me.” Her college thesis was a music video featuring a friend who was a singer, filmed on the subway and in an apartment building in the Bronx that her father owned.

Her first paid gig—two hundred and fifty dollars—was a video for a song called “Dem Girls,” by her cousin the rapper Red Handed, in Houston. “It was just in the hood, doing hood stuff,” she said, laughing. The result, which featured an assortment of preening video girls, was distinguished less by its imagery than by its precise focus and framing. Matsoukas shot in black and white, with split screens showing contrasting views of the same scene: gold-chained rappers playing dominoes set against children running through the grass.

After she finished graduate school, an agent named Inga Veronique got her a job directing a video for Ludacris and Pharrell. The song was a strip-club anthem called “Money Maker” (“Shake your money maker like somebody ’bout to pay ya”), but, Matsoukas said, “I wanted it to feel rich.” Borrowing from fashion photography, she posed models in front of bright-colored backdrops and lit them as if for a photo shoot; to accompany one chorus of the song, she created a montage of gleaming watches, sunglasses, and stacks of cash. Veronique said that the video was “fashion-y without beating you over the head with fashion.” The song went to the top of the hip-hop charts, and the video drew attention from the industry.

In 2006, on the night of the MTV Music Video Awards, Matsoukas met Jay Z and Beyoncé at a club in New York, and Jay Z hailed her as a rising star. Matsoukas shook Beyoncé’s hand and told her, “I’m coming for you.” Two months later, Camille Yorrick, a record executive who worked with Beyoncé, called to ask Matsoukas to direct four videos for a forthcoming album. “I had only done four videos in my whole life!” Matsoukas said. “I was really scared.” Still, her work appealed to artists’ managers. “The thing that stood out to me about her early videos was the way she made people look,” Yorrick said. “She just made them look really beautiful—people of color, white people, it didn’t even matter.”

As Matsoukas made videos for such singers as Whitney Houston and Jennifer Lopez, she often relied on highly stylized settings. Generic lyrics could yield generic imagery: she set Lady Gaga’s “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” in a moodily lit mansion filled with piles of money, and Robin Thicke’s “Sex Therapy” in a moodily lit mansion filled with acquiescent models. Her videos were often less concerned with narrative than with what the film theorist David Bordwell has called “world making.” Unlike other directors, she selects the wardrobe for a video, and creates mood boards of clothes and accessories for her performers. “Fashion is as much a character in her work as everyone else,” Yorrick said. She is also unusually capable of coaxing performances out of musicians. “She knows what she wants, and she knows how to command a set,” Yorrick went on. “She’s a negotiator—she negotiates her way to the best product.” Beyoncé said of Matsoukas in an e-mail, “She is a force, deliberate and methodical.”

When Snoop Dogg asked Matsoukas to make a video for a song called “Sensual Seduction,” in 2007, she took the job with trepidation. A few years earlier, Snoop had released a film, called “Doggystyle,” that blended hip-hop and pornography. “You walk into that kind of situation and you’re, like, ‘He’s a pimp—I don’t know how he’s going to react to a female director,’ ” Matsoukas said. She envisioned a video that was radically at odds with Snoop’s usual work: an early-eighties throwback, in which he would dress up in outrageous suits and wigs and perform with a keytar. She won him over, she said, with playful enabling: “In order to make artists feel comfortable in a space they’re not normally comfortable with, I go along for the ride.” By mid-shoot, she had Snoop shirtless and dancing. “I remember being, like, ‘Well, we want to attach this weave to your beard,’ and he was, like, ‘Sure, glue it on,’ ” she said.

In 2011, Rihanna asked Matsoukas to make a video for a song called “We Found Love.” By then, Matsoukas had grown tired of making videos that simply conjured a mood. “I had done a lot of performance-based stuff, and I just wanted to tell stories,” she said. She admired David Fincher’s work with Madonna, which felt like four-minute melodramas, and she was drawn to experiments like Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” a cinéma-vérité chronicle that follows a drunken, coked-up lowlife through a night out in London—fighting, vomiting, groping women—until, in the last scene, the lowlife is revealed to be a woman.

Matsoukas drew up a treatment for Rihanna, which evoked “Romeo and Juliet” and “Requiem for a Dream”: a depiction of a relationship charged with drug-fuelled passion and domestic violence. To play the male lead—“that man we all want but we know we shouldn’t fuck with,” Matsoukas said—she found an amateur boxer from London named Dudley O’Shaughnessy. On the set, a farm near Belfast, the chemistry between Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy arose out of improvisation. Before the first scene, Matsoukas recalled, Rihanna “was in her trailer getting ready, and he was on set waiting, and of course we were behind. So when she came out there was no time for formal introductions. It was, like, ‘O.K., take her hand and run, and get lost in it.’ And then I was, like, ‘And if you feel like it, maybe kiss her.’ And he did—they kissed on the first take.”

Two years before the shoot, Rihanna’s boyfriend, Chris Brown, had assaulted her in a car, and pictures of her bruised face had filled the tabloids. Rihanna’s fans saw an uncanny resemblance between Brown and O’Shaughnessy. Matsoukas denied that the resemblance was intentional, saying only that the video “was based on my terrible love life and obviously her terrible love life and every woman’s terrible love life.” Nevertheless, the violence of the onscreen relationship can feel unsettlingly reminiscent of Rihanna’s real-life assault. “She was open to taking it there,” Matsoukas said, “and with being honest and showing what life really is.”

On the set, as Matsoukas prepared to shoot an argument between Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy in a parked car, fans crowded around them. Matsoukas warded them off with a bullhorn, then slipped into the back seat to coach the performers as a cameraman shot from outside. In the scene, Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy can be seen screaming inaudibly at each other. “They were saying the most nonsensical things, like ‘Your pants are too tight!’ ” Matsoukas recalled. “But veins were popping out.” The owner of the farm eventually grew uncomfortable with the spectacle, and evicted the crew. “I wanted it to feel free, and like they were living life, and Rihanna took off her shirt,” Matsoukas said. “That was probably a bit too much for him.” But the video helped Rihanna establish a grittier image. And it earned Matsoukas a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video, making her the first solo female director to receive the award.

Two decades ago, the music video looked like a dead art. MTV was steadily losing viewers, as young people turned to purchasing or pirating songs online. But the rise of video-streaming services, in the late aughts, again linked the success of pop songs to videos. In 2015, Americans streamed more than three hundred billion songs, most of which were videos—an increase of a hundred and two per cent from the previous year. Matsoukas now checks her work on a laptop with a compact twelve-inch screen. “I like to see a video through a computer or through a phone to make sure it looks good at its worst,” Matsoukas told me. “I hate when you perfect something for the ideal way of consuming things and then when you see it on YouTube it looks like crap.”

A pop star is the head of an enormous business that sells one product: herself. Matsoukas’s clients have to trust her to present them in a way that feels artistically gratifying and also inspires people to buy their music. Hype Williams, perhaps the most inventive video director of the nineties, once said, “At the end of the day, what we do is technically supposed to be a marketing tool as well as something creative.” Female artists, especially, are drawn to Matsoukas because she guides them in bolder directions, attracting new attention. “She has the ability to hit the nervous system,” Malik Sayeed, a cinematographer who worked on “Formation” and “Lemonade,” said.

In 2012, Natalie and Elliot Bergman, the siblings who make up the band Wild Belle, asked Matsoukas to direct a video for “Keep You,” a lovelorn song about a cheating partner. Matsoukas’s treatment portrayed a turbulent relationship between Natalie, who is twenty-eight and white, and a prepubescent Jamaican boy, who, between bouts of philandering, clutches a Teddy bear, sucks his thumb, and swaggers around in a Boy Scout uniform. “When we saw the treatment, we were a little bit taken aback,” Elliot told me. “But we also trusted Melina.” Elliot recalled being persuaded by Matsoukas’s intensity on set: “She’s in your face. She’s yelling at the top of her lungs, and she’s right in there with the kids dancing on the car, dancing harder than any of them.” By the second day of shooting, Matsoukas’s voice was almost gone.

“Keep You” is Wild Belle’s most-watched video on YouTube, but controversy doesn’t always benefit Matsoukas’s collaborators. “I like to create provocative imagery,” she told me. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it goes awry.” In 2012, she directed a video for No Doubt’s “Looking Hot,” a Wild West fantasy, in which the singer Gwen Stefani appears tied up and wearing a feathered headdress. As the video goes on, she dances around a fire, sends smoke signals, and writhes on a tepee floor with a wolf. The American Indian Studies Center, of U.C.L.A., responded with an open letter describing the video as “the height of cultural misappropriation,” suggesting that it recalled “nineteenth-century paintings advancing the ethos of manifest destiny.” A day after the video was released, No Doubt took it down.

Matsoukas’s videos have also drawn criticism for being derivative. In 2011, she directed Rihanna in a video for the song “S & M,” in which the singer danced in latex fetish wear, brandished a whip, and led a man around on a dog leash. The provocation worked: even as the video was banned in several countries, it received tens of millions of views on YouTube. But later that month the artist David LaChapelle sued Rihanna, claiming that imagery in the video had been plagiarized from his photographs. (Rihanna settled the suit.) During the production of “Formation,” Matsoukas intercut her own footage with shots of New Orleans from a documentary about bounce music called “That B.E.A.T.” The documentary footage had been licensed from the company that owned the rights, but the filmmakers were still startled to see their imagery subsumed in a different, and much higher-profile, production. Abteen Bagheri, the director, tweeted that the use of the footage was “not cool,” adding, with apparent resignation, “It’s the sad reality of the music business.” Matsoukas said that she was hurt by the criticism, but she also suggested that the pop-culture industry thrives on borrowing. “I’ve also seen stuff that I think looks similar to mine,” she said. “People are influenced by similar things. I try to stay away from close references.”

There are very few women of color working as directors in Hollywood, and Matsoukas has sometimes felt that she was not taken seriously. “People will challenge you and try not to listen,” she said. “The director of photography will try to get over you and say, ‘Oh, that’s not possible—we can’t light this way,’ and I know what the possibilities are.” If a camera operator won’t film a scene the way that Matsoukas wants it done, she will step in and shoot it herself. Paul Hunter, a veteran director who helped found Matsoukas’s production company, told me that he “loved her sense of style and cinematography and thought that she had a really special eye.” Without missing a beat, he added, “It doesn’t feel like a woman is directing it; it feels like it’s just a top professional.”

But, as a black woman in an industry dominated by white men, Matsoukas has an unusual affinity with her most frequent collaborators. Beyoncé wrote to me, “I feel safe working with her and expressing or revealing things about myself that I wouldn’t with any other director, because we have a genuine friendship and I trust her artistry.” Their first videos together were playful and unambitious: a teaser for the song “Kitty Kat,” in 2007, was a minute-long vignette of Beyoncé vamping in a leopard-print bodysuit. Over time, their work became moodier. In “Why Don’t You Love Me,” from 2010, Beyoncé drinks Martinis and screams lyrics into a Princess phone, her mascara running, like a deranged housewife from “Valley of the Dolls.”

Matsoukas set the video for the 2013 song “Pretty Hurts” at a fictional beauty pageant, focussing on the ways that beauty standards affect women. She gave Beyoncé bulimia, and shot a scene of her throwing up in a bathroom stall. (Though, even then, she didn’t fail to make her star look captivating.) “They’re cool girls who play together,” Dream Hampton, a filmmaker and music writer, told me of Matsoukas and Beyoncé. “Melina is very supported. Black filmmakers don’t generally get to play in film—it costs too much money. But Beyoncé is willing to invest.”

Matsoukas has also become close with Beyoncé’s family; she has directed videos for Solange, and in 2014 she spoke at her wedding. “One of the special things about our friendship is, nine times out of ten we are on the same wavelength,” Solange told me. “Her being a black woman being able to tell those stories in such a bold, unique way is really rare.” In “Losing You,” from 2012, Solange wanted to feature sapeurs, an informal society of Congolese men who compete to have the most ostentatiously stylish outfits. Matsoukas recalled that security concerns prevented them from shooting in Congo, so they moved the shoot to South Africa and invited some sapeurs. “We really had no money,” Solange said. “We didn’t have a real plan, because we didn’t have a full production team.” For a scene in which Matsoukas wanted magazine clippings on the walls of a night club, she and Solange worked with the crew to cut up magazines.

Last year, on Solange’s thirtieth birthday, Matsoukas posted a tribute to their friendship on Instagram. She recalled their first meeting, on a conference call, when “I thought you were high but later realized you were just a slow ass talker,” and a moment of bonding when they “ate mad sushi and became sisters.” In the post, Matsoukas described the “Losing You” video as “one of the best pieces of art that I’ve ever made.”

When Matsoukas started working on the “Formation” video, mainstream black artists were showing unaccustomed interest in issues like police brutality. “The people rose up, and the artists were so behind—the artists were still navel-gazing,” Hampton told me. “Because of the Black Lives Matter movement, artists are not relevant if they’re not talking about what’s happening in the streets.” One of the most arresting scenes in “Formation” depicts a black boy facing a line of white policemen, doing what Matsoukas calls a “peace dance.” The camera cuts to a wall emblazoned with graffiti, which reads “Stop Shooting Us.” “I wanted to talk about police brutality and talk about us dying and us being killed, but do it an artful way,” she said. The boy was supposed to dance shirtless, but he had arrived at the set in a black hoodie. Matsoukas told him to keep it on. When Beyoncé saw the footage, she questioned the change. “I was, like, ‘Please let me keep it,’ ” Matsoukas told me. Beyoncé acquiesced. The singer and her dancers then performed at the Super Bowl wearing black berets and militaristic leather that resembled Black Panther attire.

After the performance, Beyoncé told Elle that she was not anti-police. “I have so much admiration and respect for officers and the families of the officers who sacrifice themselves to keep us safe,” she said. “But let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice.” The backlash was intense, with extensive Fox News coverage and police unions threatening not to provide off-duty security for Beyoncé’s “Formation” tour; in response, the Nation of Islam offered its own protection. Matsoukas worried about the heated reaction. “It’s kind of scary,” she said. But she doesn’t regret her choice of imagery. “When they said ‘Formation’ was anti-police, I was, like, ‘So what are you, pro-shooting us, then?’ ” she said.

Beyoncé funded the “Lemonade” film herself, allowing for a kind of artistic control that few black artists have experienced. Despite boycotts, the album sold more than two million copies. It was first released on the music platform Tidal, of which Beyoncé is co-owner, helping to attract more than a million new users in a week. The “Formation” tour promoted her other ventures: Before one performance, I watched two extended ads for her sportswear line play on the giant screens. Other black musicians Matsoukas has collaborated with—most notably, Rihanna—espouse the same message of economic self-determination. We have money now, their lyrics suggest, so we’re going to build a kind of power that has been denied us. “Malcolm X, during the Nation of Islam years, was absolutely a capitalist,” Hampton said. “Elijah Muhammad’s idea of self-determination and independence was very much linked to black capitalism.” With Matsoukas’s help, Beyoncé has made the idea of capitalist liberation an essential part of her presentation. The last lines of “Formation” encourage listeners to put business before feelings: “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.”

Matsoukas is now working on her first television show, an HBO series called “Insecure,” which grew out of the comedy writer Issa Rae’s Web series “Awkward Black Girl.” The show is a sendup of Rae’s trials in work and romance, and a love letter to South Los Angeles, where she grew up. Most music-video directors hope to eventually move to film and television, which offer more prestige and creative scope. Few are successful. “The industry discounts music-video directors as being all style, and so it makes it hard for executives to see beyond that,” Paul Hunter, the veteran music-video director, said. Another director in the industry told me, “In videos, you can do quick cuts and pretty shots because it’s exciting just to look at Rihanna or Beyoncé’s face. When you don’t work with big celebrities, you can’t get away with that.”

Rae requested Matsoukas for the job, but told me that she and Matsoukas sometimes clashed on how to balance authenticity and glamour. “Her taste is more elevated than mine,” Rae said. “A lot of our biggest battles come from me wanting this to be grounded, and we end up meeting halfway. She comes from a more heightened world, and I’m self-proclaimed basic.” Matsoukas, who is an executive producer of the show, brought on Solange as the music consultant. Where the Web series was amateurishly filmed, with nondescript interiors and haphazard lighting, “Insecure” is artfully composed and glossy. The characters’ travails play out in a shabby-chic apartment, a glass-walled boardroom, or a South L.A. mansion—environments that suggest excellence rather than a struggle to get by. For a sequence in which Rae’s character pursues a love interest at a corny open-mike night, Matsoukas found a historic club with swirling tile mosaics on the walls, then painstakingly lit it to flatter the actors. “She’s a perfectionist,” Deniese Davis, a producer on the show, said of Matsoukas. “It obviously wears everyone out around her, but I think when you see the end result you always appreciate it.” “Insecure” received six N.A.A.C.P. Image Award nominations, including best directing in a comedy series. The show recently began preproduction for a second season.

One afternoon, Matsoukas and Davis took Matsoukas’s black Range Rover out to scout locations for B-roll. Davis drove while Matsoukas, wearing a rose-colored blazer over a lacy camisole, skinny Levis, and peach heels, shot video on her phone. As reggae played on the car stereo, we headed to Leimert, a mostly black neighborhood in southern L.A., with palm-tree-lined streets and tidy bungalows and ranch houses in pastel shades.

Rae had made a list of places that were significant to her when she was growing up. The first was the Vision Theatre, a vaudeville-era landmark facing Leimert Park that has been in the midst of stalled renovations for two decades. Matsoukas shot only the building’s green tower, avoiding its dilapidated façade and shuttered windows. “We’re trying to show Leimert and Inglewood in a nice way,” Matsoukas explained. “To show that it is a vibrant community that has a lot of culture. It’s where the black people are.”

The next site, in a nearby plaza, was a concrete fountain, with a flute in the center streaming water. “That fountain is not poppin’,” Matsoukas said. She studied the fountain warily. “Maybe a moving shot from the street or having someone pass through it,” she mused. “The trees kind of frame it nicely.” But there was a limit to what Matsoukas would work with. Rae had included on her list a doughnut shop that she had frequented as a kid. “I’m, like, ‘I’m not shooting the Krispy Kreme,’ ” Matsoukas said. “I don’t know how to make that look good.” ♦

The author of this article is Alexis Okeowo, she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. She is working on a book about people standing up to extremism in Africa and is a fellow at the New America Foundation. This article was originally published on NewYorker.com

#melina matsoukas #Beyonce #rihanna #Issa Rae

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painterontheshore · 8 years ago

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Chimps and language

Washoe was a young chimp reared by Allen and Beatrice Gardner in as ‘childlike’ a manner as possible, where her caretakers used a sign language based on the American Sign Language of the US deaf community.

Washoe (c. September 1965 – October 30, 2007) was a chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using American Sign Language

In Washoe’s case the acquisition of the basic language took about four years. Her ‘words’, like the words of sign language, were gestural signs; for example, holding the fingertips of one hand together and touching the nose with them meant ‘flower’, while repeatedly touching the fingertips together meant ‘more’. By the age of around 6 years Washoe was credited with some 160 signs, which she would combine into communicative utterances such as ‘gimme flower’, ‘more fruit’, ‘tickle Washoe’, ‘comb black’ or ‘baby mine’. The Gardners also noted that Washoe learned signs that involved touching parts of her own body quicker than signs which were merely traced in the air, possibly because of the tactile reinforcement from the skin touched. Washoe’s achievements were considerable. Kortlandt writing in 1973 comments:

The Gardners generously allowed me to watch Washoe in some experimental sessions at an age when, according to them, she had already ‘spoken’ more than 100 different gestural words. I was deeply impressed by what I saw. Perhaps the most convincing of all was to watch Washoe ‘reading’ an illustrated magazine. When, for example, a Vermouth advertisement appeared, she spontaneously made the gesture for ‘drink’; when, on the next page, a picture of a tiger appeared, she signed ‘cat’. It was fascinating to see a chimpanzee ‘thinking aloud’ in gestural language, but in perfect silence, and without being rewarded for her performance in such a situation.

(Kortlandt 1973/1992: 74)

Gardner and Gardner (1978) themselves did not underestimate what they had managed to achieve through their intensive coaching of a young chimpanzee; nor were they inclined to underestimate the theoretical significance of what had occurred:

The results of Project Washoe present the first serious challenge to the traditional doctrine that only human beings could have language . . . [Washoe] learned a natural human language and her early utterances were highly similar to, perhaps indistinguishable from, the early utterances of human children. Now, the categorical question, can a nonhuman being use a human language must be replaced with quantitative questions; how much language, how soon, or how far can they go.

(Gardner and Gardner 1978: 73)

The claims of the Gardners and other ape language researchers have not, however, gone unchallenged (e.g. Seidenberg and Petitto 1979; Terrace 1979). As Andrew Ellis and I have written in the past, no one seriously doubts that chimps can associate together meanings and arbitrary signs both in comprehension and in production, but most people would want to say that there is more to language than naming. Language orders its words into structures – rule-governed sentences. Sentence structure indicates how named concepts relate one to another. English uses word order for this purpose, so that ‘The psychologist teases the chimp’ means something different from ‘The chimp teases the psychologist’. There is no strong evidence for consistent, productive use of word order or any similar grammatical device by any of the signing chimps. Terrace’s (1979) chimp Nim Chimpsky (a name with obvious connections to Noam Chomsky) had a preference for putting certain signs in certain positions (e.g. ‘more’ at the beginning of sign sequences, and his own name at the end), but otherwise his choice of sign order was quite random.

Nimp Chimpsky

A feature of animal displays in the wild is their extreme repetitiveness. Wilson writes:

If a zoologist were required to select just one word that characterizes animal communication systems, he might well settle on ‘redundancy’. Animal displays as they really occur in nature tend to be very repetitious, in extreme cases approaching the point of what seems like inanity to the human observer.

(Wilson 1975: 200)

Such repetition (e.g. ‘Me banana you banana me give you’) was characteristic of Washoe and other signing apes, though it is largely absent from the language of young deaf or hearing children. Ape signing is also highly imitative. Close analysis of Nim’s signing at the age of 2 years revealed that 38 per cent of his signs were imitations of signs recently used by his caretakers. Unlike the imitations of children, which are far fewer than this and decline with age, Nim’s imitative signs reached 54 per cent in words by the age of 4 years. Further, only 12 per cent of Nim’s utterances initiated interactions; the remainder were produced in response to prodding by his teachers.

Other criticisms levelled at the chimp research include an excessive reliance on a small number of oft-repeated anecdotes; somewhat generous criteria for what constituted a correct response in formalised naming experiments, the possible contribution of natural, unlearned gestures an the lack of extensive, ‘raw’ transcripts of chimpanzee conversation. Perhaps the most intriguing criticism is the paradox by Chomsky himself when he writes:

In some ill-considered popularizations of interesting current research, it is virtually argued that higher apes have the capacity for language but have never put it to use – a remarkable biological miracle, given the enormous selectional advantage of even minimal linguistic skills, rather like discovering that some animal has wings but has never thought to fly.

(Chomsky 1976: 40)

If chimps are capable of acquiring language, why have they not done so of their own accord? The only viable counter to this argument is to propose that the natural lifestyle of chimps is one that does not require language. Hewes (1973a, 1973b) and Kortlandt (1973/1992) have suggested that only with the switch from fruit picking to hunting did language become advantageous to man because of the group coordination needed. Put quite simply, Kortlandt claims that fruit pickers ‘have less to discuss with one another than cooperative big game hunters’. But this is just one view as to how verbal language developed in man. Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals suggests that verbal language has developed using ‘soundproducing organs . . . first developed for sexual purposes, in order that one sex might call or charm the other’ (1872/1955: 355).

So we can see that this work with chimpanzees had one other direct effect – it led to serious speculation about the origins of language for the first time in perhaps a century. (In 1866 the Societet de Linguistique de Paris had banned papers speculating about the origins of language. These papers were very much prompted by Darwin’s convincing case made in The Origin of Species (1859/1971) for the evolution of man from more primitive species.) But now it was no longer the case that, as Charles Hockett (1978) put it, ‘one person’s whimsy was as good as another’s’.

In a seminal paper Gordon Hewes (1973a/1992) presents a coherent argument that the first form of language must have been gestural in form and the chimpanzee research by the Gardners is critical to his argument. He suggests that some early precursors of man, the australopithecines, had similar brain size and cultural accomplishment to existing chimpanzees and gorillas and therefore ‘it is reasonable to credit the australopithecines with at least the cognitive capacities of existing chimpanzees or gorillas’ (1992: 66). Existing chimpanzees could acquire a creative gestural language (with considerable effort it should be said); therefore, early man probably had the capacity for a gestural language. Speech, on the other hand, would have required a good deal of brain reorganisation before it could become dominant. Therefore, Hewes argued that ‘a preexisting gestural language system would have provided an easier pathway to vocal language than a direct outgrowth of the “emotional” use of vocalization characteristic of non-human primates’ (1992: 72). His argument is that speech as a system of communication (Hockett’s design feature of ‘use of the vocal–auditory channel’) had a number of significant evolutionary advantages over manual gesture and that is why it became predominant:

the vocal–auditory channel is practically a clear channel for communication, whereas the visual channel, as the prime modality for human and all higher primate perception of the external world, is subject to continual interference from nonlanguage sources. Unambiguous decoding of gestural messages requires a fairly neutral background, good illumination, absence of intervening objects (including foliage), relatively short distance between transmitter and receiver, and frontal orientation. Making manual gestures is slower than speaking, requires more energy, and prevents the use of the hands for any other activity while the message is being transmitted; decoding sign-language message is also slower, even among trained deaf persons.

(Hewes 1992: 70)

Hewes also presents a further interesting argument, that gesture

did not merely persist as a kind of older, retarded brother of speech, but gained a new lease of life in the Upper Paleolithic period and thereafter, with the birth of drawing, painting and sculpture, as Leroi-Gourhan (1964–5) and others have observed. Such art forms can be regarded as ‘frozen gestures’, akin to the air-pictures of sign language, but traced or formed in durable media.

(Hewes 1992: 71)

This old visual–gestural channel, Hewes argues, became

the preferred mode for advanced propositional communication in higher mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences and technology, in the familiar forms of algebraic signs, molecular structure diagrams, flow-charts, maps, symbolic logic, wiring or circuit diagrams, and all the other ways we represent complex variables, far beyond the capacity of the linear bursts of speech sounds.

(Hewes 1992: 71)

According to Hewes, this is where gesture ended up – as a system to be used in more complex and more specialised communication but not in everyday communication where speech was triumphant: ‘The vocal–auditory channel continues to serve the needs of close, interpersonal, face-to-face communication, in song, poetry, drama, religious ritual, or persuasive political discourse.’ He draws attention to the somewhat sparse literature on how gesture and speech relate in everyday talk and argues:

Gesture did not wither away, but persisted as a common accompaniment of speech, either as a kinesic paralanguage for conveying nuances, emphasis or even contradiction of the spoken message (Birdwhistell, 1970, La Barre, 1964, Hall, 1959) or in situations where spoken language fails because of inaudibility in noisy places or, more often, where there is no common tongue.

(Hewes 1992: 71)

But just look at the terms he uses when he describes the use of gesture in everyday talk – ‘not wither away’, ‘common accompaniment of speech’, ‘where spoken language fails’; gesture here is very much second best.

Thus because of developments elsewhere, the system that had no ‘withered away’ became interesting and important, all because of a young American linguist called Noam Chomsky (he was only 29 years old when his first major book, Syntactic Structures, was published in 1957) and those determined to prove him wrong with a couple of chimpanzees and several years of intensive tuition. This new research into hand gestures revealed a great deal more than could have been imagined at that time. It was not just about nuance or about communication in noisy places, but an essential and integral part of all communication; indeed some might say as much a biological miracle as language itself. And David McNeill (2012) recently has used this new theory of speech and gesture to challenge all of the prevailing models of how and why language originated in the way it did.

—Geoffrey Beattie

From “Rethinking body language: how hand movements reveal hidden thoughts” de Geoffrey Beattie, pp 53-58.

#chimpanzee #language #noam chomsky #geoffrey beattie #gordon hewes

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glaucussubmerged · 8 years ago

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“It Was A Very Cynical Reasoning” --Zizek on Trump

On why he said he would vote for Trump: “It was a very cynical reasoning”--if Trump were elected, the Democratic party would have a revolution.

On Morality: “Although a Marxist (chuckles), I am a very serious moralist, here. I think that public morality-or rather customs-how we are allowed to speak in public, matter”

He thinks the Republican party will splinter after time under Trump.

“I like intelligent conservatives.”

He quotes T. S. Eliott, as an “intelligent conservative”: “Sometimes in religion the only way to save orthodoxy is through radical heresy.” In reference to the rebirth of the (orthodoxy of the) Democratic party.

Left liberal capitalists embodied by Clinton (nothing against her personally) and the people who go to Davos are coming to an end.

Quotes Noam Chomsky’s (he doesn’t like me) idea of manufacturing consent to explain the danger of nationalist ideologies in America, then Britain (Brexit), then France, then Poland, and so on.

All of these phenomena are deeply ambiguous.

Trump and Bernie pull from popular support-(cf. Clinton’s failure).

“Let me be very precise here: I’m not playing some stupid Marxist cards in the sense of radical left new Communist party--No!--I’m only thinking about some kind of reinvention of the good old welfare state with a new internationalism.”

The ultimate failure of the left is Jon Stewart and John Oliver who use satire and patronize the “ordinary man” which has the same “post-factual” implications and results as Trump lying.

(After denouncing liberal pressure towards multiculturalism as understanding others to see that they are “not boring”) “For me true multicultural tolerance is: I don’t understand you; you don’t understand me; can’t we nonetheless be nice and kind to each other?--The difficult thing is to--for me to tolerate you in your difference, not trying to swallow you to understand you.”

Interviewer: “I read an article saying you[Zizek] and Trump were actually quite similar: both provocative, eminently quotable, but strip it away and you’re actually quite similar. Does that bring you out in a cold sweat?” (leans in with a sly grin)

Zizek (visibly agitated): “You see-You see,” (leaning forward, points vigorously) “This is--No!--because this is what I’m criticizing.” (continues pointing vigorously, in time with the explosions of breath that are his words) “This is the left post-factualism.” (After pointing, turns to the front, arms to his sides, shakes his head with a wide-eyed expression while flattening out his palms to face the front as well in a gesture of disbelief) “I write a book (extends his arms heavenward gracefully pulling them apart as if to unfurl the vast amount of pages before your very eyes) of one thousand pages about Hegel (unfurling gesture repeated at eye level), nobody counts that (exasperation).”

youtube

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] The Ritual

My story of the ritual that we all performed that night doesn’t start there - it starts back, way farther back. See, I first met Mitchell and Jennifer at Burning Man, back in 2011. I had traveled there to see what it was like - that was all I was about back then, seeing what life had to offer. I had escaped from a very restrictive religious household and family when I was seventeen, so for the next ten years after that I traveled, explored - myself and society - and enlightened myself. That’s what led me to Burning Man that year, and Mitchell and Jennifer were of the same mind, so I guess that’s why we connected so well.

Like, on my second night at the festival, there I am in their tent, sitting with Mitch - with his lanky body and shaggy shoulder-length hair - and Jenn - just as skinny and with long, long raven-black hair and dark brown eyes - smoking cigarettes, just talking about…everything. Life, the universe, everything.

“See, what I think,” Mitchell said, taking a drag off his cigarette, “is that there’s so many lines drawn between everything, you know?” Jennifer started nodding vigorously in silent agreement with him as he said this, and as I tried to grasp what he was getting at. “Like,” he continued, gesturing with his hands, “there’s all this division. I don’t like that, and neither does Jennifer. We believe in breaking down the walls and the lines between us. We’re all a human family, and we should all live like it. If someone’s gay, or they’re poly or asexual or whatever, who cares? They’re human, and that’s what matters. They deserve to be treated with respect, and I’ll fight anyone who thinks different. I mean, that’s a big reason why we’re both socialists - the inherent emphasis on the dignity of the human being, no matter what.” When he finished, Jennifer murmured a ‘love you, babe’ and leaned over to peck him on the mouth.

Honestly, I was in love with everything he was saying. It was so refreshing to me, having come from the background that I did. I let out a chuckle and nodded vigorously. “I feel you, completely. I’ve seen what restrictive and narrow-minded mindsets can do to people, and I can’t stand against them hard enough.”

Jenn and Mitch’s eyes and smiles widened a tad, in that I-think-we’ve-found-a-kindred-spirit way. That was just the beginning, but as we spent more time together throughout the entire festival, a real friendship was forged into being.

Anyways, fast forward to 2014. The year we we performed the ritual, and everything changed for the worst.

By this time, we were all living in Vancouver. Jenn and Mitch were living together and working together at a leftist bookstore downtown. Me? I was working as a graphic designer for a major firm headquartered on Burrard Street (aka, the Business District, as I called it). I mean, pretty bourgeois, yeah, but it paid the bills and I loved doing it - I was always a deeply artistic person, even as a youth.

So I’d gotten out of work early Friday afternoon and decided to drop by the bookstore to see Jenn and Mitch, see what our plans for the weekend would be. It was a warm and sunny day, and everything was shining - Vancouver didn’t come off as cold and gray, like it usually did, but rather, there was this glowing, yellow brightness to everything.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d just decided not to go there that day, if I’d just decided to go home and not talk to Jenn and Mitch that weekend - which happened sometimes, as I got busy with work or just needed alone time - if things would have been different. Then I stop myself, because running what-ifs like that through your mind will only hurt you and drive you insane.

I approached the bookstore, a neat-looking little storefront with two wide glass windows showcasing their featured books - from the looks of it, some David Harvey books along with Zinn and Chomsky. I opened the door and stepped in. The interior of the bookstore was this huge, open space, but it really didn’t seem like it because every wall was packed with bookshelves, with more bookshelves filling the bookstore and stacks and stacks of books all over the floor. Basically, it was every book nerd’s dream.

I stepped inside and peered around, finally spotting Jenn ringing through a transaction. She finished as I approached, and as she spotted me, her eyes lit up and she came rushing over to me, a big smile on her face.

“Adam!” she happily exclaimed, embracing me in a tight hug.

“Hey, Jenn. Is Mitch around?” I asked, looking back and forth to see if I could spot him.

She shook her head. “He’s out dealing with an order. But,” she shot out, her smile getting even wider, “I have the best idea for what the three of us could all do over the weekend.”

I raised my eyebrows and stuttered out a ‘Okay, sure’, since that was exactly what I’d come by to check about.

“Okay!” she said excitedly, gesturing with her hands. “Mitchell got this summoning ritual from this friend of his over the Internet. We perform the ritual to summon a spirit and invite it into our beings - mind, heart and body, to commune with it on a deep level.”

I nodded slowly, to indicate I was following along with what she was saying. I wasn’t surprised - she was always into various forms of spirituality - not organized religion at all, but spirituality, sure. It wasn’t quite Mitch’s thing, but he loved seeing how passionate she would get about it, because he loved her. It wasn’t quite my thing either, but I thought it was interesting, at least.

So I finally said, “Sure, sounds great, sign me up. Just call me when you want me to come over, okay?” Jenn nodded vigorously, huge smile still on her face.

At that moment, her boss called her over, and she said, her tone apologetic, “Look, I gotta go. But I’ll call you, and I’ll tell Mitchell you droppped by!” I smiled and nodded in acknowledgment, and she turned around to hurry back to what her boss was calling her over for.

Long story short, the next evening I was on the floor of Jenn and Mitch’s bedroom at their place, a cozy little one-bedroom apartment in one of the more affordable parts of town. Our hands linked together, we were within a circle had been drawn around us on the wooden floor in chalk, with various occult symbols drawn inside of it. There were six candles lit all around us, and a bowl of clear water in the center of the circle we were sitting in.

We’d already performed most of the ritual, and what remained was…well, it kind of skeeved me out, but like I said, I always try to be open-minded - it’s one of the things I pride myself on. Jenn released my hand and Mitch’s hand, and picked up a knife laying before her. Holding her hand over the bowl, she slowly cut a lengthy line into her palm, and, turning her palm over, bled into the bowl. I watched as the blood ran into the water, turning it a murky red. As the blood spread throughout the water, Jenn spoke the final words of the ritual - the part the instructions called ‘the prayer’.

“Blood to blood, we call thee to thyself - we invite thee into our whole being, come. Oh, blessed, come.”

When she was finished, she quickly pulled her hand back, wrapped it in gauze, and…then we waited.

And waited.

We ended up waiting for forty minutes, and nothing happened. Mitch was the first to break the silence.

“Sweetheart, looks like it might have just been a dud,” he said apologetically, his face adopting an I’m-sorry kind of look.

Jenn, her face looking glum, nodded. “Yeah, I guess it was just something made up. I was really hoping, you know?” she said, looking at both me and Mitch, a sad expression on her face. With that, we cleaned everything up, had some pizza and watched a movie, and then I headed home at the end of the night.

The first strange things that started to happen occurred a week later. Jenn invited me over for a Yes, Prime Minister marathon (they loved British comedy). So, I go over, and right away I notice something wrong with Mitch. When he greeted me, his eyes were wide open, like he was wired on something. Now that was weird, because one thing about Jenn and Mitch, they were 100% drug free - they didn’t want their minds being influenced by that kind of stuff. Not only that, he was…twitching. All over. His eyes, his arms, his hands. It was weird.

“Hey, buddy…you okay?” I tentatively asked. And he reacted. He snapped at me that he was fine, and with that, turned around and hurried into the living room.

I followed and, not wanting to push the matter, let it lie. So we’re watching the show, and he…God, it was just so weird. Mid-way through the marathon, he starts sobbing his eyes out, his eyes wide and staring at the TV screen. Then he starts gnawing on his hand. At this point I nudge Jenn.

“Jenn, what the hell’s wrong with Mitch?” I asked, a concerned look on my face.

She looked at him, then back at me with a very confused look on her face. “He’s fine,” she said, somewhat indignantly, as if I was being rude. I tried to press the matter but the way she looked at me, I knew she didn’t want to hear it.

I stayed there for another half hour, and in the end, I left. I couldn’t take being around all that - it was too surreal. The entire time I stayed, and then after I left, my mind kept going back to that ritual we performed.

As I traveled back to my place on transit, my mind ran over the…well, the crazy possibility that the ritual had worked. Like, I dunno, it was crazy as hell. But…it just seemed to coincidental. Mitch and Jenn never would have ingested any narcotics, I knew that much for sure. And they had never, in the three years I’d known them, acted like that. And if it was something like mental instability, why had Jenn not noticed? That’s what got me and had me even entertaining the possibility that we’d summoned some malevolent force from beyond. But, as I couldn’t quite make sense of it, I decided I’d sleep on it.

When I got home, I found myself getting a killer headache. It got bad enough that I had to stop and lean on my kitchen counter. I figured it was just, I dunno, me getting sick or something, so I popped a couple Tylenols and that was that. Then I went to bed.

That night, I dreamed that I was in this dark, empty void of nothingness. Not floating, just standing on this dark, invisible floor, surrounded by…nothing. But in the dream, I felt - I knew - I was being watched. And then, almost as if on schedule, right in front of me, two giant eyes - as if part of a giant, invisible face - blinked open, staring directly at me.

I woke up, my heart pounding. What was that? It wasn’t even really scary, but it still bugged me a lot, for some reason. It was about that time that I realized I was laying on my kitchen floor. Looking around, and cautiously picking myself up off the floor, I tried to work out how I’d gotten there. And then it clicked - sleepwalking. I had a problem with sleepwalking when I was a kid, so this must have been it recurring. Kind of weird, but whatever, I’d see a doctor about it in the next couple of days.

But on my way back to my bed, my cell started ringing on my bed stand. I picked it up and saw that the call was from Jenn. I picked it up, and right away, her sobbing voice could be heard from the speaker.

“Adam! Adam! Oh God,” she said, her whispered voice punctuated by sobs, “please, please, you need to come over. Mitchell, he’s…he’s…” and then, her voice rising into a scream, “Oh My God!” And then the line went dead.

That was it. That did it. I got dressed as quickly as I could, and caught a cab over there. Following someone into the building who was walking in as I walked up, I quickly made my way to their apartment. As I approached their door, I could hear Jenn screaming and loud banging and crashing noises coming from inside. Preparing myself for anything, I opened the unlocked door and raced in.

There, in the living room, with a video camera on the mantle recording everything, was Mitch standing over Jenn’s body and her bruised, crying and terrified face with a knife. His shirt was off, and I could see self-inflicted wounds all over, still bloody. He turned and looked at me, a crazed look in his eye. I knew I had to act. I knew I had to. So I ran at him.

He swung the knife at me but I ducked and grabbed the wrist holding it. I tried to wrestle him to the ground, as Jenn’s hard, scared sobs filled the room. But…he was strong. He had a strength I’d never conceived he could have had. He drove me against the wall, smashing me into it. But I fought dirty - I smashed my forehead against his nose, causing him to stumble backward as he yelled in pain, dropping the knife. I thought that gave me the upper hand, but he ran against me, driving me into the wall again, the pictures hanging on it clattering to the ground. We struggled for what seemed like an eternity, before I managed to trip him and get him on the ground. But he…he wouldn’t give up. He kept moving all over, struggling with every ounce of strength. He was fighting like a mad man. I…I had to do what I did. I grabbed his head, gripping it with both hands, feeling my fingers tight and warm against his skull, the flesh squeezed between my finger tips and his skull. With him struggling beneath me, I lifted his head, and - my heart pounding in sheer terror and angst, and tears running down my face - smashed it onto the ground hard…

Immediately after I did that, he went still. Panting hard, tears in my eyes, I looked over at Jenn to see if she was okay, and…and I saw…I saw her lying there still, her body covered in blood, stab wounds all over. I stared at her shock, my heart pounding. The blood was slick and wet, covering the entire half of the floor she was on. The stab wounds were clear and visible, looking like raw meat that had been butchered in the meat department of a grocery store. Anxious and scared, I yelled her name. “JENN!” I didn’t know what the hell was going on. She was just fine minutes ago, what the hell happened!?

I got up to walk over to her, but almost immediately tumbled over as I blacked out.

I woke up in a hospital bed, handcuffed to the bed. As I groggily blinked my eyes, the Nurse attending to me hurried out and returned with two uniformed officers of the RCMP, or Royal Canadian Mounted Police - a tall, thin one, and a short, stocky one. They looked at me like…like they hated me. This cold, icy look in their eyes.

“Mister Livingston, are you feeling better?” The thin one asked.

I nodded slowly, still confused. “Yeah, yeah I am…why am I handcuffed to the bed?”

“I’m Sergeant Brockman, this is Corporal Phillips,” the thin one said, motioning to himself and his partner. Still that cold, icy look.

“What happened?” I immediately asked.

“Sir, we need to ask you some questions first, if-” Brockman said before I cut him off.

“What the hell is going on!? Where’s Jenn!? What happened to her!?” I shot out, angry, my voice rising. Why were these people messing with me like this!? I wanted to know what was going on, what had happened.

At this, the officers’ eyes widened in a look of surprise, and they glanced at each other. Brockman whispered something to Phillips, and then they looked back at me.

“Mister Livingston, I think you should see this and tell us how you can explain it all,” Brockman said, pulling out his phone, tapping at the screen a bit, and then playing a video for me.

The video was timestamped as being around the time I found Mitch about to murder Jenn. Only…they weren’t fighting at all. They were sitting on the couch together, cuddled up and smiling into the camera. Jenn started talking about how she and Mitch were doing, what their plans for the future were, and more. It soon became apparent that this was a video message to her parents. And then…then I came into view.

I walked between them and the camera, a knife gripped in my hand. Mitch and Jenn’s eyes went wide with fear, with Mitch holding his hands out and asking me, very calm, to put the knife down. And I…well, I responded by jamming the knife into his neck. In the video, I was moving quickly and forcefully, as if I really meant to do what I was doing. So fast it seemed like I was in a craze, I idly thought as I watched in a kind of stupor. Blood was spurting everywhere and Jenn scrambled backwards, screaming. Then I ripped the knife out and grabbed her arm, and then, throwing her to the ground - exactly in the spot where I saw her dead body lying that last night - crawled on top of her, straddling her body, and, lifting the knife high and then bring it down fast, drove it into her over and over. I…I don’t want to describe the rest. I can’t. But, the video showed me viciously, brutally, murdering my closest friends. And then, after I was finished, I collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

I looked up wild-eyed at the officers. I tried to explain what happened - that I didn’t remember any of that. I explained what I did remember. But I could tell, even before I finished, that they didn’t believe me - that they wouldn’t, they couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense to.

Long story short, I was charged with first degree murder. It became a very well-publicized case. The court shrink examined me, found me mentally competent, and I was found guilty. Life without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

Ever since then, I’ve thought so hard about what happened. I now know that something did answer our call that night. And it…it changed how I saw things. Changed how I perceived things. Made me see Mitch acting strange, and then all that other stuff, when none of it was happening. And the worst part is, I…I think it did it just to toy with us. With me. To have fun.

I don’t have Internet access, so I’m relaying this to my brother to post for me on the Internet. I just…I need to say my piece, to present my side of things. Because it needs to be said, even if no one will ever believe me. I owe Mitchell and Jennifer that much.

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