4 Texts Assignment

Professor Lennon – 4 Texts Assignment

Bombing

The first text I look at was Professor Lennon’s own article “Bombing.”

The article was a powerful think piece on the macro and global phenomena of the gentrification of urban areas through the very micro observation of the diminishing rate of graffiti in Professor Lennon’s very own neighborhood of Greenpoint.

Neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg, have been going through a radical makeover in recent years, as the article notes, “Polish bakeries are torn down to make way for luxury condominiums.”

The gentrification of Brooklyn has changed much about the character of Downtown neighborhoods, fueling a boom in real estate that has made the area completely impractical to everybody except the wealthy yuppies or those from wealthy families. The author notes, “we cannot afford the rent that has been pushed to $1650 that my next door neighbor, a white twenty-something semi-college student who likes to play his drums when not playing X-box at 3am in the morning, somehow can afford.”

A simple drive through Greenpoint along Bedford Avenue will show a revolution of classy wine bars, upscale restaurants, and expensive kids boutiques. My husband and I call this the Bugaboo crowd (Bugaboo is a very expensive stroller.)

The author contrasts the gentrification through the work of two graffiti artists. The first is the self-named Miss 17 and is a throwback to the graffiti of old. The style harkens back to the 70s when there was much poverty in New York and the graffiti was a reflection of those hard times. Miss 17 graffiti is a rebellion against the establishment, by giving a voice to those who don’t have one. Miss 17 personally fights against gentrification by having her (maybe he – we don’t actually know) name sprayed on a fancy condo, which will lower prices and lower the overall value.
Paradoxically, on the other hand the author highlights the world of another graffiti artist called Banksy he is a cool artist who is a savvy self-promoter, a post-modern graffiti celebrity who has his own publicist and invites Hollywood celebrates to his shows. Unlike Miss 17, Banksy sells his works for millions of doors. Hailing from England he sprayed a work on a disused building in Brooklyn on North 6 between Wythe and Kent. Ironically the owners of the building did not realize and painted over the work.

Cleverly once the piece became famous one development team actually
used Banksy’s image to promote their condos, interestingly the company edited the more distasteful element from the art. The aim being to show yuppies that the area is still cool and that graffiti as an art form is still embraced and the area still has character. In realty this is manufactured fake cool, aimed at upping the price of real estate. The author notes that as Miss 17 becomes increasingly more hidden this is emblematic of a neighborhood who can no longer afford her to life there.

For me page 4, is the interestingly because in this section the author discusses having a child and that being with the baby late at night caused him to see more of Miss 17’s work. However I feel the author himself is actually changing like the neighborhood. Perhaps Miss 17 represent’s a connection to a former life and as family life has forced the author to contemplate New Jersey therefore the essay is in fact more person than even the author may consider.
A nice postscript could be that given the economic downturn, which has occurred since the article was published, Miss 17 may actually have a victory and professor Lennon could now stay in his beloved Brooklyn. It looks like the faded paint of Miss 17 may actually be rearing its strangely ugly head once more.

Jarhead

Author Anthony Swofford’s book, Jarhead is a biographical account of his experiences in the first gulf war, where he served as a Sniper within a Platoon of Marines.

The book is very poignant given the current war with American troops still inside Iraq and considering that the US has experienced many casualties. On the other hand as Swofford depicts the first Iraq war as very different, troops experienced little actual combat.

In fact the most noticeable thing in has war memoir is the scant lack of war. In place of war Swofford focus on the everyday amost bland exploits of a marine. The books goes into great detail on the sexual frustrations of troops and how they mentally deal with boredom. Even the handwriting styles of letters from random women become something to fantasize over.
Thus if the reader wanted to buy this book to get the gory details of war they have bough the wrong book. In actuality Swofford’s experience is one of almost no action whatsoever. He describes a sniper as being, “bored to death on the roof.”

I found it very telling when he notes with irony about how Israeli cites like Tel Aviv see more action than him and he is supposed to be on the front lines. In reality soldiers like Swofford are trained to be killers, yet the ony thing they kill is time.

As they reflect on their lives in a, hostile barren land. the landscape reflects their own empty lives as they begin to go crazy and worry about things which they can’t control like a girlfriend supposed affair or a mother’s re-marriage without notifying her son.

For me the book can be best summed-up by an incident toward the end when following a US air force’s air attack, they encounter the burnt and mutilated bodies of badly trained Iraqi soldiers. One of Swofford’s comrades begins repeatedly battering a corpse. Sawford notes, “I understand what drives Cocked to desecrate the dead solider - fear, anger, a sense of entitlement, stupidity, ignorance. The months of training and deployment, the loneliness, the boredom, the fatigue, the rounds fired at static targets, the night of firewatch, and finally the letdown, the easy victory that just scraped the surface of a war.”

Thus the book gives an honest portrayal of sliders and is both complementary and also negative. These are human beings made into killers the army made them who they are, in the end Swofford notes, “if you don’t kill you’re not a marine .“ In reality I think Swofford has learnt that the opposite is in fact the truth.

Black Watch

Black Watch is a play written by Gregory Burke for the national theater of Scotland and played around the world to great acclaim.

The Black Watch is a Scottish army regiment based in Fife and is a unit with a proud history. The army is part of the fabric of the neighborhood may people living there have had parents and grandparents who have served.

The play moves between a pool hall after the war in Fife and the war in Iraq. Moving between the past and the present gives a scary foreboding sense of what fate is to come on the soldiers.
The play does have some familiar war themes, as we get to bond with a unit of soldiers and become part of their lives learning intimate personal details about them. Thus we get to hone in on a small story within a much bigger picture. This only makes the story stronger because we see how the war at large and the US lead Iraq war effects this small non-American unit with a strong historical background.

Reading the play I found some of the same themes as Jarhead. This being that war is not so heroic and in fact it can actually be rather mundane and boring. The unit spends most of the time in Iraq reading mail and making fun of each other. The dialogue in the play was hard to follow because it sticks to the strong Scottish accents and manner of speaking. But there is much humor to be had in the cursing and funny stories, which reminded me of the movie Trainspotting. When the soldiers arrive they are told to take cover as they were being fired on, the Sergeant comically notes, “They’re just saying hello. You fucking shitebags,” while the a solider respond’s, “You’d think they would have fucking let us get unpacked before they attacked us.”

The play focuses on the local story of the Scottish government plan to merge the black watch with others Scottish units – the unit itself is the biggest casualty and we feel the impending doom throughout the play. We actually don’t experience a suicide bombing on the unit – choosing instead to focus on the death of the Black Watch unit itself rather than its soldiers.

For me the text, which best summed up the play comes at the end. An Officer who try’s to talk a character into staying in the army notes “It takes three hundred years to build an army that’s admired and respected around the world. But it takes only three years pissing about in the desert in the biggest western foreign policy disaster ever to fuck it up completely. (Beat) But you did not hear that from me.”

In the end the Back Watch is very personal as the character Cammy notes at the end. “I fought for my regiment…I fought for my mates” The Black Watch is a small casualty in an unfortunately war that has had many.


The Pilowman

The Pillowman is a play by Martin McDonagh and is complex, disturbing and also darkly funny.
The play begins with the character Katurian blindfolded in a cell, his blindfold is removed because, “It just looks stupid.” Katurian is then interrogated by two policemen in what is an unnamed “totalitarian state,” which has many twists and forces the reader to question their own morality.

We find that Katurain is a writer who has written 400 stories and it is because of his stories that he is being interrogated. This makes the reader very sympathetic until we discover that these stories are about the murder and torture of children. Moreover we find than there has been copycat killings based on these stories and that the policeman think that Katurain himself maybe involved. Katurain defends himself saying that, “the only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story.”
This forces the reader to consider some moral questions is it really he job of a storyteller to tell stories or does a story teller have a responsibility to not influence an audience in a bad way. We then find out how the stories are connected to the murdered, these stories are almost funny in how crazy they are.

The play goes on to explain how Katurain retarded brother Michal has confessed to the murders and Katurain is forced between trying to save his brother from execution and trying a save his own stories. Michal’s justification is that fact that he suffered years of abuse from his own parents and was raised by his brother and almost felt that the stories were like a guide book for him.

The play has an interesting twist we fact that Katurain had not killed the children but had killed his parents in response to their abuse of his brother when he was young. The abuse was actually an attempt to make him better writer.

The play actually blends fact and fiction and the author begin to take part Katurain begins to wite the play itself. As he’s being executed his concocts a story that he is the pillowman who comes to Michal as a child and tells him about the abuse he will suffer and notes that it would be better for him to be killed. Michal responds that if he is killed his parents wouldn’t abuse him and that this abuse was the inspiration for his bother stories, which is, loves so much so it would be better for him to be abused.

This last inter-action is so moving and powerful, for me sums up tee entire play because with this we can almost blame Katurain for all the murders because he chooses the abused which will lead to murder and an excuse for his great writing. However if he does not choose this he will have to kill his own brother. Either way death will ensue so perhaps the message is that you cant stop destiny.