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For this webpaper, I have made an artistic rendition of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", inspired by Kim Northrop's Neil Gaiman-inspired paintings. To accompany this, I have also played with my writing style. Once upon a time when I was in Year 10/11 (so the equivalent of high school freshman/sophomore), I did a GCSE course in fine art. We had to document our work, and I used this style to present the process that I used to create my piece. Within this style, however, I have used others, such as a letter format to communicate my ideas. With this documentation in the form of a "portfolio" of sorts, I hoped to parallel the method that Rebecca Skloot used to write her book. However, a lot of the things that I have written are ironic in the sense that I take the book as full "truth".  But, my final piece changes this a little bit as I use it to problematize Skloot's first line: "This is a work of non-fiction."

I've put images of the final piece and the pages from the "portfolio" here rather than embed them into Serendip as the image size was too big. Just click on the pictures and you'll see a bigger version of the piece!

Adding on to today’s discussion, I believe that no movie that is based on a book will ever be faithful to the book in its entirety because the creative team working on the movie will heighten a particular aspect(s) for the sake of entertainment. As for the statement of being original within a genre, we adapt what belongs to other people (discussed at the beginning of the semester) in the process of writing (it may be inevitable). In the case of working on a movie, it also involves the process of representation in the big screen. A good example to represent what I just mentioned is the scene where Donald asks his brother Charlie for a suggestion on how to kill someone in his screenplay and when Charlie does,his brother asks if it’s ok for him to use his idea.

-The Daily Show discusses Oklahoma's personhood bill. 

-Since children's media seems to be of interest, here is a list by Malic White at Bitch Media's End of Gender series of story books on the mulitiplicities and complexities of gender. The End of Gender series this past week has covered parenting and gender non-conforming children.

-A Mighty Girl: An entire site dedicated to positive media portrayals of girls. It looks very exciting to me as someone who read and enjoyed many of the books that are listed on the site, and as someone who continues to consume children's media aimed at or inclusive of girls. 

-A Feministing post about The Dinner Party. There isn't much to it besides stating that it exists, but considering our discussions of the piece earlier in the year, what does it mean that a well-known feminist site simply presents the piece with out any commentary?

so Melissa Silverstein of the blog Hollywood and Women gave actor Mark Ruffalo bonus points for criticising the male centric Academy Award nominations for Best Director:

"I would just like to say to the academy members: why don’t you grow a pair and vote for Lisa Cholodenko as well!".

Lisa Cholodenko co-wrote and singularly directed the film The Kids Are All Right which (inspired by her personal experience) depicts a lesbian couple meeting their anonymous sperm donor when their two (donor fertilized) children are high school age. The film won Best Film Comedy at the Golden Globes, and was nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Though not, of course, the award for Best Director--no female director was nominated. Only three female directors have ever been nominated: Jane Campion for The Piano, Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation, and Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. Bigelow won in 2009. Over 100 males have been nominated during the course of 84 ceremonies. 85 have won.

It is interesting to note that Ruffalo stated that the Academy members needed testicles--implying that only an emasculated Academy would exclude female directors. A female bodied Academy would lack the strength and guts to be radically different.

http://womenandhollywood.com/2011/01/17/hollywood-feminist-of-the-day-mark-ruffalo/

In the spirit of last week I am going to ignore the oppressive limitations of statement making and attempt to only make statements regarding the new tv show Girls which premiered on HBO last night...

The girls of Girls are all caucasian and 24: they are not girls. 

They all live in New York. 

They can work unpaid interships.

What is real for one may be terribly unreal for the rest.

Parts of Girls are excruciating to watch.

Girls is created, written, and directed by its female star Lena Dunham.

Lena Dunham is a 25 year old female.

She went to a liberal arts college.

Girls makes statements by asking questions.

Girls is not Sex and the City.

Approximately 10-15% of tv programs that go to pilot are written and created by female writers.

Of those many are written by male-female teams.

Huge, Pretty Little Liars, Being Human, The Killing, Rizzoli and Isles, The Big C. These shows and their pilots were written by female writers.

Girls is a terrible title.

Girls is worth watching.

I noticed in class that everyone's movie version of The Orchid Thief  emerged from their own personalities.  I am the most ironic romantic - a story for another time - and consequently, my movie was a love story.  I was thrilled by the idea that a writer searching for the 'facts' who seems really down to earth, who claims she isn't passionate, etc. totally falls in love with LaRoche.  Even when I read the book, I kept waiting for something to happen between them - it was killing me.  So my movie was a love story of a mismatched couple.

KT prefaced her movie with "we need something to draw people in."  KT worked in marketing; therefore she was most concerned about making something that would sell.

Anne told us that her movie is "very word based."  She took one quote from the book and made it her first scene.  Then she based her other scenes off of other quotes from the book she had picked out.  No wonder Anne wanted to preserve the book's message as much as possible - she's an English teacher.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about the significance of making a statement versus asking a question. Personally, I feel more comfortable questioning something rather than making a statement about it. I do feel that it is easier to question things because I never feel fully certain about what I am saying. Will I offend anyone? Do I really know what I'm talking about? Am I making a fool of myself? 

Besides these questions that roam my brain I feel that the biggest reason for my tendency to question is because it is much more interesting! If life consisted of statements and we didn't question even those things that we feel certain about, how would change come about? How would we learn? 

"It's not my story. It's my responsibility to Susan". -- Charlie

When I picked Adaptation up from the library, I knew that it was going to provoke a lot of rich discussion. Why? Because in a class where we've talked about the originality and authenticity of a text, it seemed really exciting when I saw Spike Jonze AND Charlie Kaufman as the filmmaker and the scriptwriter respectively. Watching the film, I started to see very purposeful and really, REALLY self-aware moments that seemed contradictory to the quote that I started this post with. 

Charlie attempts to stay true to Orlean but comes across so many personal barriers to meeting with her and finding out the truth. And this parallels the barriers to staying true to the book when you have so many huge personalities working on the same production. Is the final product "true" to Orlean? I'd say no. I'd actually argue that it fits in more with Spike Jonze's work as a director and with Charlie Kaufman (the "physical" one that isn't portrayed by Nicolas Cage!) as a screenwriter. 

Inevitably, it seems that there is no way of completely translating the book to a movie that stays true to the "original" writer. As Donald aptly puts it "We have to realize that we write in a genre. We have to find creativity in our genre." 

Thinking about the conversation we have started concerning the constructs of masculinity in our culture reminds me a lot of the scandals throughout many religious communities...these are ultimately surprising to the public, not only in their hypocritical qualities, but because they are centered around important men within that community -- previously considered as ideal models for what a good religious man is.

It seems a lot of these incidences are centered around the notion that homosexuality is a behavior that is wrong, and that no strong, religious man could identify as gay. (Why is it that being gay makes you less of a man in the eyes of so many? That is a terribly broad question, I know)

(For example, the Ted Haggard scandal a few years ago, http://articles.cnn.com/2009-01-29/us/lkl.ted.haggard_1_ted-haggard-head-pastor-church-staff-member?_s=PM:US)

...as well as the various incidences throughout the Catholic church.

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-19/world/catholic.church.abuse_1_abusive-priests-church-abuse-archdiocese?_s=PM:WORLD

It seems to me that especially in the religious world, the construct of masculinity is something that is especially hurtful.

Adaptation was entertaining.  Mostly, it seemed like a cautionary tale about the perils of telling other people’s stories, of what can happen when someone becomes so obsessed with telling a story that he becomes part of that story and truth and reality bend and everything is confusing and unclear.  In this way, I think this movie fits nicely with a lot of the conversations we’ve had in class.  Here’s something that I read this morning that I liked because it offers another way to think about how we tell and share stories: