A Year of Seconds - 7 - January

Obligatory New Year's post, but I loved it because the entire town came alive with car honks instead. It was deafening.

And then the following night was wine and video games. You just can't plan for what you're going to get.

Game nights

Home made burgers (from scratch!)

Home made pasta (FROM SCRATCH!)

Being brought home by a wonderful friend who literally drove me over an embankment; his justification: We're not the first ones.

Middlescott Sketch Battle for days!

Climbing polls in acting lab.

And then road trips to Canada for East Asian cuisine (& it's vegan too)

So it was a full first half of the month.

I don't know what else to say...yes, I do.

Thank you.

A Year of Seconds 6 - DECEMBER

Today, let us discuss December.



There it is.

I finished my Nanowrimo! But, not the project. The project turned into an epic historical fantasy extravaganza, the likes of which I am still reeling from. I am afraid for how long I want this single "novel" to be. Think hundreds and thousands of pages. It has been done, but this is like my second project. Scary tree.

I went to a few more tree lightings.

Got an award for my writing from Nano friends (and a date).

Found my Breakfast Club. Turns out in a room full of theatre kids, I am cool enough to be Bender.

Saw some fantastic student art. Keep making kids, you're better artists than most of us.

Went to a few more game nights.

MADE A FUCKING SOUND STUDIO. That was rad.

Worked on a holiday show. That was amazing. It goes in my credits. I PLAYED THE GRINCH.

I wrote and starred in a short film, which was amazing.

Had some classy meals.

Had some not so classy meals.

And then went and celebrated New Year's on Campus Martius done right.

The End.

of the year.
Not me.

A Year of Seconds 5 - November

Today, we discuss November,



Nanowrimo, of course, began! Hit my 50,000 wordcount on Anne Shakespeare. But, it has turned into a bear of an historical novel. 50,000 words was barely cutting it. It may be a series or a tome or I just need to edit it waaaaay down.

Write ins galore, I met some really lovely people through them.

Art galleries to boot!

Offbrand pringles are terrible, guys.

Out campaigning for the election: Regional Transit. We need it guys, we need it.

Drinking AFTER the election. For days.

Amanda Fucking Palmer guys. She is just magical.

Tree lighting and dinners at home. Still art.

So many silks classes.

Tree lightings at home.

Games for days.

And the holiday show.

To name just a few.

A Year of Seconds 4 - October

Today, we discuss October,



There...it happened. Now, what?

I went to my first ever Hand Egg game at Wayne State. That was a trial and tribulation, if for no other reason than I was introduced to tailgating culture, which let's be honest, I do pretty well. But, more importantly, I met my personal superhero: a dancing man, dressed as a Viking warrior in a line dance.

I ran over four miles to reach the end of Open Streets Detroit, which if you haven't gone out to support local community programming, you really should; it is free and also the only way that they can show that these programs have value.

I seen the Gilmore Girls craze at Avalon and got me that free coffee.

Also saw my first sunrise in years--GETTING UP EARLY!

First look at AltSpace, which everyone should definitely check out.

Game nights and pumpkin carvings for days.

So many pumpkins!

Writing letters.

Directed for the first time in years.

Was a part of an immersive experience.

Started my aerial silks classes.

Threw something off my balcony, which was amazing--THREE STORIES.

Played pong at the local Target, which immersive advertising is the way of the future.

And finally, finally, finally, hosted a Halloween gaming experience. I AM IN THE MAN IN BLACK.

A Year of Seconds 1 - July

Today, we discuss July,







I went walking...a lot!



The most feral child scream I ever heard. Seriously, this kid volunteered for EVERYTHING during the show.



The Rosa Parks bus is held at work!



I found some pretty spectacular sights, including a couple of street festivals (the band playing) that I didn't know Detroit held (Atlanta has a million of them).



The Underground opened and closed its 3rd season, which I got to see all of, but didn't have to lift a damn finger (it's a pretty amazing thing to see these things come and go).



Pokemon Go took the world by storm. I captured a Pikachu in Campus Martius!



We started an artistic fellowship at the house.



Star Wars came back to the big screen (the grainy bits).



I saw a puppet theatre perform Ubu Rex.



It was a pretty full month.

A Year of Seconds 3 - September

Today, we discuss A Year of Seconds p.3,







This was September.



In it, I was employed by my now, dear, dear friend, Erada Svetlana, who I am sure is a Russian spy novel waiting to happen.



I worked with my dear, dear sister Sarah Hawkins Moan and her lovely husband David, who is one of my best friends in the world. I read and listened to Little Women in the span of a few days because I was so committed to the show and the idea of being "cool" in art.



I went "Up North" in Michigan for the first time in four years of being a resident here.



I went on walking tours of the Eastern Market district, trying to find all of the murals on my own. I found a lot of them.



I went walking so far that I found some of my old haunts in New Center Park. For those who don't know that is a long ways, about two hours of walking (one direction) from Eastern Market.



I revisited some places. I had some great planning sessions with the members of YFH and...yeah. It was great.



It was miserable too, don't let social media fool you, but I have decided to use it as a positive reinforcing tool rather thanremember all of the negative that swells in my mental, mental life.



Thank you. Good Night. I hope you're happy.

PTSDetroit l I am an unoriginal by Miles Boucher

Today, we discuss me.







There I am!



Hullo, me!



Anyway, this was an excerpt from our work on PTSDetroit, otherwise known as Plant the Seed, Detroit.

It was hosted on January 20th, 2017 and started at 7:00pm (Eastern).

That day I had watched the Inauguration as had approximately 30.6 million according to the Atlantic.

It was hard to see.

For those who couldn't watch, you should watch it.

For those who can't here is the transcript, provided by the Washington Post



It was hard to watch; incredibly divisive for a president.

But, what could you expect?

I had decided weeks in advance, my audition for PTSDetroit, if you will, was to lift out a chunk of text from President Donald Trump's Inaugural Address and see what could possibly be done with it.

I figured, we had chosen the date of the performance anyway, let's make it significant with the day.

It would also prevent me from over planning or overcooking my performance.



In the end, I had to back away.
I couldn't use his actual text.

For performance reasons.



So I turned to why I wanted to do it in the first place and what I ultimately concluded was this:

I wanted it to be something true.



Something true.



On this day of days, I wanted something that was said to be true.

I didn't want it to be half-truths and half-lies.

I didn't want to hear something to appease the fan base or congratulate conservatives or console liberals.

I wanted people to really think and consider just what had happened and our actions in letting it occur.



So I went with Shakespeare.

Henry VI part 2 as a matter of fact.

John Cade's Rebellion: 

a populist leader who ultimately through his brash and insolent nature almost overthrows the monarchy, but is ultimately executed in a garden by a loyal knight of the crown, all but nameless in his cowardice until he dies. 

And is beheaded.

I don't know why I thought it would make a good substitute, but the bravado and the appeal to almost dream-like promises seemed accurate.

So I ran with it.

I copied it down verbatim into my journal and then wrote bookends for it that would be absolutely true.

What came out was a critique on truth.

A critique on the hashtag culture that we are living in and the horror of the reality of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom, which foretold:

"People choose their facts nowadays."

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it.

I hope it made you think; it certainly has made me think about what it is we are all doing here.

Please, please, please, love one another and love yourselves.

Ultimately, the demagogues perish because they are alone.

They cannot help but be alone because they drive a wedge between everyone until they are the only ones left.

It happens all of the time.

Stand together. Stand up. And take care.

How Scary is Human Anyway? (Trollhunter: Where Jump Scares Fear to Tread)

Today we discuss Trollhunter,

Source

Where man fears to tread.

I love this movie and for the longest time, I couldn't exactly put my finger on why. 

I rewatched it as a part of fellowship, the sharing with a community of artists, and I think I finally figured it out:

The trolls are not the monster.

 Trolls:

So we start the entire experience following an amateur Norwegian film crew attempting a big scoop for their university. 

They are plucky, young, and nervous: you know...the audience. 

So they go through the gorgeous Norwegian countryside in search of a bear poacher, which they establish early on is a very bad thing. 

The kids follow a man called Hans (bear poacher) as he goes deeper and deeper into the wilderness only to discover he is out hunting trolls. 

This is about thirty minutes into the movie and we haven't seen anything yet. 

No jump scares.

Not a damn thing. 

And around this point my inebriated compatriots are just about ready to turn this film off and why aren't we watching something else god bless it?! 

And then this happens...

And the entire game changes!

Suddenly there is action and desperation and a really well done transformation scene I was not expecting from a B sci-fi flick.

Suddenly we are excited to see what happens next.

Well, the kids follow Hans after that and start believing him, which leads us to our next bit:

The Hunters: 

This is Hans.
And he has been doing this job for too long.

He reveals that there are different types of trolls and they cause all kinds of problems, but ultimately, they are just animals.
Animals with a lot of aggression and life span, but animals still.

He is a bully.
A redeemable bully, but any one who goes into a tunnel system and murders dozens of troll mothers and children and fathers for an underground train is not a nice guy.
And he knows it.

Suddenly, we start seeing the truth of the movie:

The trolls are not the monster.

The bureaucracy is the real monster.
It is the cold, calculated, almost farcical cover up of a breed of animal that nobody believes exists, but is absolutely willing to exploit.

Things like a bear cover up:

Source

Where government officials bribe a Polish paint delivery company to shoot a bear and smuggle it across borders and deposit it on the site of a rampaging troll to hide the mess.

Here are the Polish bear hunters on the issue:



It is absolutely preposterous!

The trolls are not the monster! The bureaucracy is the monster here.

The Team.

But, the story keeps devolving.

The kids have the footage; they can go public any time they want.
The cinemotographer (Tomas Alf Larsen) wants to turn back.
Tomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), the reporter wishes to press forward.
Johana (Johanna Morck) wants to stay together.

They all follow along with the ride to see where it all leads...



It does not end well.

The kids are way out of their depth.
However, they follow behind Hans (Otto Jespersen) with full faith that he will lead them right.

They end their story on the side of the frozen wastes high in the Norwegian wilderness.

And there they meet the mighty Jotnar:

Source

It is a giant, perhaps 200 foot tall beast that is on a psychotic rampage.
Suddenly, we believe that we are justified in our original feelings toward the trolls.
This thing needs to be put down.
And why?
Because it is killing things, driving the other creatures away: the other trolls, you know the good ones.

See it is usually at this point I check out of films.
Films like:
Warm Bodies that explore this Us vs. Them mentality often have a simple solution.

Here we have the protagonist white male character in "R" and his inexplicably relateable zombie cohorts:

Zombies! (people)

Source

 These are the "people," the ones that we are going to relate to throughout the entire film.

Next up:

Humans! (other people)

Source

These are the ones that we are not rooting for.
They have a military fetish and big guns and blowhard attitudes, so we do not like them at the start, but our protagonist does.
We will inevitably come to understand and respect their ways or they ours because hey, they look like us.

The Lovers (they're people too!)

Source

How will their love flourish?!
Simple...
By introducing someone worse than both:

The Boneys (the real zombies)

Source

These guys are alien and other and weird.
They don't talk like we do.
They don't look like we do.
They are scary and mean and I hate them and why don't they all just go ahead and die already!

That is the argument of the movie.
Accept the other.
Love the other.
That is how love springs.
But, not too other.
Those guys are weird and still deserve to die.

If you are wondering why this sounds familiar, this structure is used in a bunch of films.
So I assumed it would apply to Trollhunter.

The Kids (our people)

Source

These guys are sweet and nerdy like me, I like them and want them to succeed. 

The Trolls (the other people)

Source

These guys are mean and scary at first, but ultimately prove they are too big and dumb to know what they are all about.
I can't hate them.

The Lovers (they're people too)

Source

How will their love work?!

Simple, by introducing a bigger, scarier troll:

The Jotnar (the real troll)

Source

Except it wasn't.

It wasn't that way at all.

See...it has rabies.
You heard that right rabies.

The Jotnar is a rabid animal.

And they put it down.
And Tomas and company are there to witness every moment of it.

At this point in the film everybody tends to get real quiet.
The humans survive, there are more scuffles that happen.
The rest of the plot, an abrupt edit, some attempt at credits.

But, for me, where this film really shines is the idea that the simplest answer isn't quite right.
See, I would maintain that

The humans are the "Other"

&

The trolls are the "People"

No other movie has so successfully masked the idea that the monster we are chasing the entire time are the ones holding the camera.

At no point in The Blair Witch Project do the kids put down the camera and think:

"Maybe we are just terrorizing an old lady in the woods."

That just doesn't happen in modern horror.

Trollhunter may be a mockumentary making fun of the documentary style of films like The Blair Witch Project as Roger Ebert maintains.
But, I must disagree entirely with his assessment that this film is designed to make light of the genre and therefore, does not fail as a comedy, but succeeds as a tragedy.
This film is about extinction.
This film is about the horror of what we do to the planet and how ignorant we all are and how ignorant we are kept by bureaucracy.

I sincerely hope you will take my recommendation and watch it.
It's available on Netflix for pity's sake.

Conclusion

Trollhunter is a horror film in its truest sense. 

Many horror films rely on a monster, an "other". 

This character is removed from us by things like: 

Death as in the case of The Unborn

or 

Belief as in the case of The Exorcist 

or 

Understanding as in the case of The Poltergeist

These movies (some of them timeless classics) can be distilled down to a single moment or event or person or thing. 

That is okay, sometimes that is good story telling as in the case of Bram Stoker's Dracula or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 

However, movies like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining can aim at a certain feeling and provoke something deeply internal within all of us. 

The atmosphere and the sense of a thing disturbs us more than anything.

We are presented with genuinely unknown and unknowable factors that drive us to despair.
That is true fear and true horror. 

Movies like The Shining do not rely on jump scares for their ability to inspire horror.

Instead, they rely on carefully crafted methods of disturbing or displacing the observer.

Dramatic shifts in camera or sound create dissonance with the mundane nature of the present moment. 

Ultimately, it boils down to an atmosphere and a writing style that provokes deep internal distress.

I do not think that Trollhunter lives up to The Shining. 

However, I do wish to contend that it is in a similar class or genre of film.

Where horror is treated as it is in life: a thing ultimately unknowable and unappreciated upon first viewing, but is deeply unsettling and causes inner strife. 

The trolls are not the enemy, but neither are the people.

The truest enemy of people and troll population is a bureaucratic establishment that is sprawling and impossible to contend with. 

It drives and forces everyone to do what they do for things like salary or compensation or prize money, but punishes the troll community at every turn and by extension, their human oppressors. 

This is the main tension of the film that is ultimately unresolved.

Hence, my unease.

Hence, my horror. 

"Depressed? Just Shake it Off!" says my Brain (OR Lessons from Sabrina Benaim's Poetry)

Today we discuss Sabrina Benaim...

Explaining my Depression to my Mother.

Whoa.
This was the subject of our last fellowship.
I am told.

I am told because I was crying alone in my bedroom.
I was crying alone in my bedroom because I couldn't get out of my bed.
I couldn't get out of bed because my depression was sitting on my chest like a demon.

I could not attend fellowship.
In lieu of that, I write this because we all need better stories.
I was the kid who couldn't get out of bed due to depression.
Now, I intend to be the kid who attends fellowship through his depression.

The performance.

I love this girl; I think she has some serious chops.
Her poetry is moving and interesting, always coming back to the mother image and describing in simple terms her depression.

However, I do not dig her performance.
It is very raw, very faltering.
She takes a bunch of catch breaths because she cannot support the long and lengthy thoughts that she so well articulates in her writing.
Nevertheless, the passion she drives home over and over carries her through to the end where she ends with:

"Mom still doesn't understand! Mom, can't you see that neither can I?"

The depression

That, for me, is the crux of it.
Even if I stand here and describe every sensation of the night that I experienced, I don't think that I will ever truly understand this heinous beast inside of me.
I will never understand my depression.
It is a chimera

"Some days it is a bear holding a butterfly/Some days it is the bear!"

 So here are some actual texts from the night of fellowship:

-I'd like food
-But prefer to make it together
-But prefer to be left alone till I've eaten
-But can't bear the silence
-But can't talk
-I would have preferred to have been part of the [fellowship]

What can you or your loved ones do with that laundry list?

I have been told that depression is sometimes described as the porcupine disease because it is very hard to love someone with thorns.
The more you hug them, the more they hurt, but the more they need it.

 The anxiety

"Anxiety is the friend that depression felt obligated to bring to the party and I am the party, Mom"

I don't know why they seem to be so interconnected.
Depression and Anxiety.
Almost everyone I know with one has the other to some extent.

Why is that?
I really don't know.
Maybe there is someone out there who can explain it to me.

All I know is that when I am feeling low, I am also feeling anxious, hyped up, worked up to such a degree that I can barely sleep at night.
A week ago, I spent the entire night playing through an entire game of Portal 2 in one sitting.
Yesterday, I knew I was doing better because it took me three sittings to beat Dante's Inferno.

Some days I use my anxiety to be productive.
On the same night I beat Portal, I stayed up till seven in the morning rewriting a script and reformatting it in its entirety.
That should be up on my Patreon soon.
And why?
Because I had time. Because I was tired at not going to bed and feeling like I hadn't done anything.
When other people started getting up for work was when I realized that I had a problem.

No.
That isn't right.
I knew I had a problem in hour two of playing.
When I realized that I was tired, but wasn't nodding off.
I knew that I had a problem when I got to the point I wanted to stop and still did not stop.
I knew that I had a problem when I beat the game and still did not stop.
I know that I have a problem.

But, what am I to do with knowledge?
If knowledge is power, then why am I still sinking instead of swimming?
Because knowledge means nothing without practical application and how do you apply what you have learned against the instrument where you learn?
How do you build up a foundation under a crumbling mind?

The mother

I cannot divorce this poem from my own relationship with my own mother.

I was shocked at this poem because it is eerily similar to conversations that I have had with my own mother. 

The sad part is, I don't even blame my mother for not understanding.

How can anyone else understand mental disease if they have never experienced it when those who are suffering cannot find ways to articulate it outside the realm of art? 

So I point to my art.

I point to other people's art and hope that a sliver of a flicker of recognition passes through others and they say: 

"Oh, I get it."

In lieu of that, I have this suggestion:

The answer

Neil Hilborn. Joey.

"If you remove money from the equation, Joey would have been painting elk on cave walls. People would have fed him and kept him away from high places because god damn, look at those elk. I think that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill aren't just related, they are the same gene, but try telling that to a bill collector."

All that separates us from the Stone Age in Neil's poem is money.
I love that.
Everything about civilization is about the money, but at the heart of the human condition is

1. Community
2. & Art

This guy is my superhero.

I mean that literally.
He has other poems and there are other stories of people who don't want medication for their mental illness.
You know why?
Because they do not see themselves as mentally ill.
They see themselves as super-powered.

• They can see alternate planes of existence
• They can hear the thoughts and minds of others
• They can sense or go places no one else can

Those are the powers of superheroes. 

Characters such as Francisco Ramon: 

Source

OR Jean Grey:

Source 

OR Kurt Wagner:

Source

DISCLAIMER: 

I am not arguing against treatment for mental diseases.

I am not arguing for the abandoning of mental institutions or mental care or medication. 

World governments are doing that en masse, and although not the subject of this article, are absolutely the subject of a future one where we look into just how much we care about people mentally.

What I am arguing for is a change in perspective.

I know of no artist that doesn't suffer from mental illness.

Think about actors:

• We work 60 hour weeks
• for a job with no set pay/benefits
• for a limited time (anywhere from 4-12 weeks)
• where we are unemployed at the end of it
• where we can be fired at any point for any reason
• & is actively under/unregulated

It would take a particular type of person to want to go into that profession.

Nevertheless, these jobs are important. 

To quote everyone's favorite teacher John Keating: 

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

-Dead Poet's Society (1989) 

Art is necessary. 

It is so, so necessary.

I know because it keeps me alive. 

Every day when I think about going walking until my legs fall off, of vanishing into the dark where no one can find me, these tales, these stories, sometimes my own are the things that pull me back from the edge. 

To paraphrase Neil Hilborn again:

1. At the heart of humanity is community.
2. And at the heart of community is art.
3. And at the heart of art is the artist.

If Joey were born in a different time, then he would have been taken care of.

People would look at him and think him inspired by the gods, or the muses, or whatever else is out there.

People would have looked after him because he was a holy man or a shaman or a dream interpreter or a doctor of the ragged edge of society. 

That is what artists are. 

That is what those suffering from mental illness are. 

We aren't mentally ill, we're just magic. 

We spin something out of nothing and sometimes we pay a price for it. 

I'm tired of paying alone.

Sometimes I just want to be kept away from high places.

Sometimes I just want somebody to say: look at those elk. 

That is the best I can offer coming out of an episode. 

Take care of yourself.

And take care of your sha-persons. 

They need it. 

How do you do that?

*shrugs*

From Sister to Murderer and Other Tales of Love (Adapting Kafka's Metamorphosis)

Today, let us discuss The Metamorphosis.

Mine!

He looks like he's excited.

So this ties in to my work on adaptations.

To give a brief idea:
I think adaptations are usually terrible.
I have an old article kicking around somewhere:

Adapting Dracula (Why Epistolary is a Four Letter Word) (Boucher 2015).

In it, I outline a lot of my concerns when it comes to adaptations.
Namely:

• The story works in whatever medium it originates (unless you are in a living medium like theatre, in which case you might be screwed)
• The story may work (better) in another medium
• Changes to the story are necessary to make it work in the new medium (books to film)
• "faithful adaptation" is a meaningless phrase

I had a wonderful discussion with Bailey Boudreau, Artistic Director of Slipstream Theatre Initiative about adaptations the other day. 

It boiled down to figuring out what made the theatre, at the time, immediate/important, what was the author attempting to do at the time of writing and attempt to do that in the time in which we currently live. 

Now, I believe this has some thorny problems:

1. You cannot argue objectively about history and therefore anything that occurred surrounding a theatrical piece has to be considered correlative, not causative
2. And it is almost impossible to determine  what the author intended
3. Therefore, any and all choices are still based in our own personal artistry. 

I wrote an article consumed with the problem of author's intent:

Plague Alert: Author's Intent (Why I Blame Toni Morrison for Helping me Think) (Boucher 2015)

It boils down to: 

• The author intended something while writing
• The art stands separate from the author (if it is good)
• The art cannot stand separate from the audience's interpretation
• Therefore, what is our interpretation?

At the time I was working on Turn of the Screw by Henry James, which, unfortunately, never materialized.
Maybe a work for a later time.

But, I was later approached by Slipstream Theatre Initiative to help assist to direct, write, and produce their Penny Dreadfuls.
We had some brainstorming meetings and I threw in my hat hoping to direct and ended up writing for it instead.
I had no idea what I was doing, but was excited for the project.

The Penny Dreadfuls

In years past, the Penny Dreadfuls had been adapted from older sources (like much of Slipstream's season). 

Last year they had a carnivale feel where the production company (in the scenario) was performing in order to lure everyone into the back room so they could unleash a monster upon them. Much like Pippin!

Source

This year, the talk was more of madness, transformation, and subtler things. 

Immediately Metamorphosis jumped out at me, but I couldn't say why. 

It was always something that I wanted to work on, so I suggested it. 

Luna, the lovely director said that she was excited and off we were to the races. 

The Process

I feel I should be pretty explicit here: 

I had no idea what I was doing. 

I felt really awful for everyone around me. Much of my life I feel like I am bouncing off of walls people already told me were there. So there is that.

Anywho, a few weeks out from opening, I had neither solidified a script, nor cast, nor rehearsal, nor tech, nor anything. I was pretty boned. So I settled down to read the text. 

The reading.

Anyone read Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis? 

If no, here is a really great Blog featuring synopsis and one of the best comic summaries EVER: 

A Great Book Study: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

In it, Gregor awakes one morning to discover himself transformed into a giant vermin. That's pretty much it. He wakes up and he is relatively okay with it.  His family kills him.

A lot of metaphors happen here about isolation, depression, anxiety, and dehumanization, but really that is it. He feels like a bug or some sort of monster and everyone treats him like one. His family still feeds him sure, but they are no longer sure it is him. 

Eventually, through neglect and downright abuse, Gregor lies down one day and dies, leaving his family a little bit wealthier and a little bit happier. 

The Realization

That is it! I really did not feel comfortable with it. 

To be honest, I get really uneasy every time that I read the text. 

I couldn't say why when I was in high school, but something profoundly disturbs me about the family's response to Gregor. He seems like such a nice bug. He loves and cares for his family. Why can they not recognize him? Why can they not see him for the the caring creature that he is? 

And that is when it hit me: 

The story is not Gregor's...

The moment that I hit that realization I knew I had something.

Tadashi Suzuki writes beautifully in his The Way of Acting and other collected texts that in order to do justice to a production he tries to:

Tell the story from the most compelling perspective

OR: to put it another way:

Ask the question, "From whose perspective should this story be told?"  

He did this very famously in his Women of Troy, a play about the women mourning the sacking of Troy and the horror that they endure after its fall. 

Now, remember the Trojan War lasted for ten years...

For ten years these women had already witnessed war literally at their gates.

Now, it was inside, running rampant and destroying their homes, their families....their babies.

Tadashi Suzuki, a masterful director, set the Trojan Women in the mouths of Japanese women in Japan...after the Holocaust. 

Source

Those women needed to tell this story in this way at this time. 

I was so moved when I read what he did. 

I cried. 

On a New York City subway, I cried while reading a theatre book.

I was the crazy person that day. 

(The photo isn't from his acclaimed work, but it gets the sensation and it was directed by him La Dame aux Camelias)

So that question has stuck with me for years now. 

• "Whose story is it?"
• "From whose perspective should this story be told?"

I had a clue from the final paragraph of the translation: 

All the time, Grete was becoming livelier. With all the worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but, while they were talking, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady. They became quieter. Just from each other's glance and almost without knowing it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for her. And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the first to get up and stretch out her young body  (Kafka). 

*shivers*

The argument could be made that it is the parents' who are the aggressors in Gregor's torment and the objectification of Grete at the end.

I think the case could be made and I know I certainly made it in high school.

However, upon further reflection, the setup between the two siblings could not be clearer in Kafka's prose:

1. Gregor: the lowly, virulent vermin, crawling across the floor, sticking to walls, hanging from the ceiling, feasting on refuse, collecting no income, sitting idle, or otherwise playing and becoming an unnecessary burden for the entire family
2. Grete: the exact opposite, young, vibrant, musical, industrious, hard-working, jovial, and pleasant to see. 

So that was the basis of my thought. 

We have the one (did you know that the original title Die Verwandlung translates more literally to "transformation) transformation into beauty and the other into beast. 

However, what to do with it now that I had my cornerstone. 

The Concept

Considering the story from Grete's perspective opened up a whole new avenue of ideas.

Of course she told Kafka's Metamorphosis. She had spent the better part of a year, isolated in her own home, chained to caring for a beast that had almost certainly devoured her brother. 

No wonder she had insisted on calling it "Gregor". No wonder she wrote the whole story making "Gregor" as kind-hearted and well-meaning as humanly possible.

He is the closest thing we have to an existential saint. 

It's all a lie. 

Grete told a lie to save her brother's memory and very selfishly explain away the last year of her life. 

With those ideas in mind, I started crafting a piece that was in that vein. 

The Script

So the script was designed with Grete as the protagonist.

She would be the lens through which the audience would grasp the narrative. 

She needed an adversary, Gregor would do. 

Her parents proved too irresistible not to write into the narrative. 

But, where/when would I set the action? 

Dramatis Personae

GRETE: A youthful, vibrant young woman. She has been kept like a china doll by her mother, her father, and her brother. She is strong and curved like a violin.

GREGOR: He is dead. An enormous and virulent vermin. He begins transformed. There is no way to know what he was before.

FATHER: He is dead. A man lost and losing more of himself each and every day, but with a core of iron somewhere under his flabby exterior.

MOTHER: She is dead. There is not much to say of her. She loves her children. She is sad when they are gone.

The answer occurred to me after I wrote the character introductions: after the event. 

Gregor is already dead.

So are her parents.

Everyone is dead save Grete, but the story still carries on. 

It provided too many interesting things to play with. 

• Who was telling the story? 
• Only Grete? 
• How? 
• Who would play with her? 
• How would she get them to play? 

All sorts of possibilities.

And we explored a few of them during rehearsal. 

The production was really remarkable, but I have no artifacts to present here. 

Only my words. 

However, I was fortunate enough to be able to present my rough draft as a workshop performance last week at Young Fenix Fellowship. 

I plan to host more, but the central question was: 

Does the play work as a standalone piece and should it be expanded? 

Overall, audience response was largely positive. I think there was some serious confusion based on the reading of the stage directions. I write lengthy stage directions that are meant to help more than they hinder. I don't think I always succeed.

Take a look:

Excerpt from After the Transformation by Miles Boucher

There are hundreds of newspapers. All carefully arranged. They are in piles, in stacks by date and time and organized by geography. There is a system to this. It is a very complex, but comprehensive system to the person who made it, but to no one else. 


The newspapers wait. 

Enter Grete

She leaves

Enter Grete

She leaves

Enter Grete

She feels it. That was it.

She paces out the room. She takes its measure. This takes time. 

It is an (un)satisfactory room (depending on the day).  She works with it. She places herself in the ideal spot. She places the audience in the ideal spot. This takes time. 

She lays herself down for bed. This takes time. Perhaps she starts with a newspaper. Perhaps she doesn’t. She makes for herself a pillow, a bed, a sheet, etc.

When everything is perfect she begins:

GRETE: One morning,

She pauses to fix a corner.

One morning, when Gregor…

Did it move? No? Again.

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

Vermin.

Vermin.

Vermin.

Vermin.

That was it.

Moving Forward

I think that I would like to rewrite it, cutting much of the superfluous stage directions while keeping the bare bones and see what is left.

Afterwards, there are at least a few moments that were and are definitely rushed as far as action goes.

Some of the scenes where Gregor kills his parents are really solid and tight, but I think there are moments to explore between the siblings.

How do you communicate with a wild animal and how long does it take?

Stuff like that.

So that is about where I am at with the piece. I am excited to keep workshopping it and continue to present it at YFF and elsewhere.

Anyway, that is my critique of my own work and an explanation of what I have been doing with my fall.

I hope you all enjoyed it!

Auf Wiedersehen!

Bibliography 

Kafka, Franz. "Metamorphosis." Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, 13 May 2002. Web. 3 Dec. 2016.

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If you like my work here or elsewhere, consider clicking on the link above and supporting me there.

For those who don't know, Patreon is a community funded artistic community.
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There are higher ones than that, but seriously anything that you can afford is greatly appreciated.

I am posting this here today because this is the first day of my new campaign, which means...that's right...
PATRONS GET EARLY ACCESS
So no new posts today.
I know.
SO sad.

But, today is just as good a day as any to get started and support me on Patreon!

Thank you and have the best day!

13th (How Slavery is Alive and Kicking in the US of Netflix)

Today, we discuss Netflix's 13th

Yeah. It's that kind of show.

Review

So to review:

This documentary is brilliant.

Summary:

The documentary is about the U.S Constitution's 13th Amendment.

For those who weren't in Ms. Johansen's AP I/II U.S. History class and had to have each of the Amendments memorized here it is:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."-13th Amendment to the Constitution

Now, what does that mean?

Well, to give you kids some knowledge, there was this little thing in the United States.

It was called slavery.

Slavery

Source

So from the very first slave ship, which populated Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, the South prospered for the wealthy, white landowners.

Whereas the poor, criminalized, and displaced whites and blacks did very poorly indeed. 

Source

Source

Slaves were used primarily on plantations in the Southern coast where the land was fertile and vast. 

Tobacco and cotton plantations were the most profitable. 

However, the exhaustive process of collecting cotton by hand was time-consuming.

Cotton is grown in pods and the fiber must be separated from the seeds in order to be processed.

One of the large reasons slave labor was in such demand was because of the amount of time it takes to do this. 

According to Bailey: 

"Prior to the invention of the cotton gin...cotton production languished. So dismal were the prospects of an expanded market for raw cotton that southerners agreed in 1787 to a constitutional compromise that prohibited the importation of slaves into the U.S. after 1808"

And then there was this guy: 

Source

Eli Whitney. 

The inventor of the cotton gin in 1793

Source

"With the aid of the hand-operated gin, one person could clean 50 pounds of cotton in a single day, instead of the one pound that was possible without it." (Bailey)

This machine mechanized the entire process of collecting cotton save for the, you know, actual collecting of the cotton. 

And that is where slaves came in. 

Source

Source

• "Only 1.5 million pounds of cotton were produced in 179C [sic].
•  Within ten years after the invention of the gin in 1800, 35 million pounds of cotton
• was produced
• By 1840 the figure had grown to 331 million pounds.
• Just prior to the civil war in 1860, the amount had reached an astonished 2,275
• million pounds" (Bailey).

So slavery became of vital importance to the Southern economy.

It helped to fuel the textile revolution that was happening in the North. 

It produced roughly 40% of all raw industrial materials for Britain (Bailey). 

According to Deyle: 

• [Slave property] was roughly three times greater than the total amount of all capital, North and South combined, 
• Three times what was invested in manufacturing,
• Almost three times the amount invested in railroads,
• Seven times the amount invested in banks. 
• Equal to about seven times the total value of all currency in circulation in the country
• Forty-eight times the total expenditures of the U.S. federal government that year.
• By 1860, slave property had even surpassed the assessed value of real estate within the slaveholding states (Deyle 60). 

By the time of the Civil War, there were an estimated 4 million slaves in the United States. 

Slaves made a total of 13% of the U.S. population according to the census performed in 1860. 

All but a fraction of them existed in the South. 

In the end, slavery was abolished under the 13th Amendment., which is the subject of the documentary.

Because it wasn't abolished. 

This is not the land of the free...not by a long shot. 

Read it again:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." -13th Amendment to the Constitution

The Argument

There can be no slaves on United States soil, save for those who have been convicted of a felony or a crime. 

Those people can be slaves. 

The moment that they introduced that as premise, I saw the horror of what would unfold: 

As a result of the Emancipation and the Abolition of slavery in the United States, there was a federal government that openly condemned slavery.

However, at the state level, many states supported the idea of what came to be known as Jim Crow laws. 

These laws led to: 

Segregation and bigotry and violence against anyone who was stigmatized as different:

Blacks, interracial couples, mixed children.

Source

This intense interest at the state level of overt racism and ambivalence from the federal government led to the Civil Rights Movement: 

Source

Source

Leaders like Malcolm X, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, who became symbols of a world on the brink of change.

By leading non-violent (and sometimes violent) protests, coupled with suits to the government, they were able to affect new legislation to be passed. 

So much so that President John F. Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act in 1963

Which, after his assassination, led to his successor Lyndon B. Johnson to push along with leaders like Dr. King, Dorothy Height, and others for the bill, which passed in 1964. (Source)

It assured among other things that there would be no discrimination based on the color of one's skin. 

Much of the language may even be familiar to you under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,: 

"Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" -Source

And that is where most of my history books stopped.

But, it went on in a much more subtle way: 

President Nixon's "War on Drugs"

Source

 President Nixon's campaign promises: 

• "Crimes of violence will double by the year 1972
• More police: better-trained, better-paid, and better-equipped
• New laws, new tools to root out organized crime
• A new respect for law, a new determination that when a man disobeys the law, he pays the penalty for his crimes. Some of our courts have gone too far in weakening the peace forces in this country as against the criminal forces, and we must restore the balance

There were others. 

There were many others.

But, these were among the more pertinent ones in the documentary and our current national sentiments. 

Now, the importance of the "violent crimes" statistics were so important to Nixon and his campaign. 

According to the UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) Program  estimates that the rate of crime: 

• In 1960 for violent crimes was 160 per 100,000
• In 1968 for violent crimes it was 298 per 100,000
• Whereas the population had only grown by 20,000,000 from 179 million to 199 million (UCR).

However, the makers of 13th draw attention to an important cultural event: Baby Boomers. 

Baby Boomers are generally understood to be the generation that immediately followed the end of World War II (i.e. babies born in the period of 1946-64).

This chart illustrates their arrival: 

Source

At a remarkable rate of 3.5-4.0 million babies born almost every year from 1946-1964 an estimated 72 million baby boomers were born during that time period. 

By 1968 nearly 20 million were turning/turned 18. 

The makers of 13th suggest that this trend in the population dramatically increased the statistical crime rates and inflated the fear surrounding such crimes. 

For those curious about today, violent crimes have been steadily falling from their peak in 1991 of approximately 758 violent crimes per 100,000 to approximately 383 violent crimes per 100.000 last year (2015).

That is with an increase in population of roughly 70,000,000. (Ibid)

Due to this disturbing trend in the statistics, President Nixon signed into existence The Controlled Substances Act. (CSA)

Long Title: An Act to amend the Public Health Service Act and other laws to provide increased research into, and prevention of, drug abuse and drug dependence; to provide for treatment and rehabilitation of drug abusers and drug dependent persons; and to strengthen existing law enforcement authority in the field of drug abuse.

The CSA under its provisions in Title II (termed The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970) discusses how to create, monitor, and enforce drug categories and laws, how to schedule them, repeal the schedules, reschedule, research, etc. 

President Nixon through executive order created an administration called the DEA (Drug Enforcement) to oversee the provisions of the CSA and Title II The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Control Act. 

According to CSA drugs are broken down into Schedules of which there are five.

These definitions are pulled directly from the DEA website:

Schedule I drugs: substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.

Schedule II drugs: substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a high potential for abuse, with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence. These drugs are also considered dangerous. 

Schedule III drugs: substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Schedule III drugs abuse potential is less than Schedule I and Schedule II drugs but more than Schedule IV.

Schedule IV drugs: substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a low potential for abuse and low risk of dependence.

Schedule V drugs: substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with lower potential for abuse than Schedule IV and consist of preparations containing limited quantities of certain narcotics.

Basically: the lower the number, the more strictly regulated and controlled the drug needs to be due to its high potential for abuse, both physically and psychologically. 

Schedule I drugs include, but are not limited to: heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote

Most notably HEROIN: a drug which has a 23% instant addiction rate, can cause fatal overdose, spontaneous abortion, contraction of hepatitis or HIV, collapsed veins, infection of the heart lining and valves, absesses, liver or kidney disease, etc. (Source)

Lies in the same category as CANNABIS: a drug which may have a 30% "problem use" rate according to the same statistics, can cause similar lung infections and cancers as regular tobacco use and has literally never caused an overdose...ever. (Source) 

"No death from overdose has ever been reported." -Drug Enforcement Administration

Okay. Seems a bit weird. But, whatever. What else made the list? LSD? Ecstasy! Who made this???

Perhaps what is more concerning is what didn't make the list or rather what made a lower Schedule. 

Schedule II substances include: Meth! Fucking meth beat cannabis! Cocaine?! 

Now, to be fair, it is described in the definition (see above) that "these drugs are also considered dangerous."

What else is in this category? Glad you asked: Vicodin, Oxycodone, Adderall, & Ritalin...

Now, I am not a medical expert. I am a performer and would-be writer.

But, the fact that cannabis is even in the same category as any of these drugs is ridiculous.

The fact that Schedule I & II have a difference is big: Schedule I drugs have no medical use and Schedule II have high risk for potential abuse. 

Therefore, the drugs in Schedule II must have a medical use. 

You read that right.

Exactly one medical use: 

Methamphetamines are used to treat ADHD

Cocaine is used to numb the mouth and certain areas before procedures by medical professionals

Now, to be fair, I was not able to find a medical use for heroin.

But Marinol is a derivative of THC (the active ingredient found in cannabis) and is a Schedule III drug, which  means it can be prescribed medically. Marinol is prescribed to increase appetite in HIV/AIDS patients and those undergoing chemotherapy. 

In fact, in 1971 President Nixon appointed The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse.

Roger O Egeberg suggested that cannabis be put temporarily on Schedule I list until the Commission's report was heard. 

In Schafer's report to Congress, he reported that: 

"The existing social and legal policy is out of proportion to the individual and social harm engendered by the use of the drug. To replace it, we have attempted to design a suitable social policy, which we believe is fair, cautious and attuned to the social realities of our time" (Nahas). 

Their design for a suitable social policy was they recommended two pertinent changes to the federal government with regards to marihuana [sic]: 

• Possession of marihuana for personal use would no longer be an offense, but marihuana possessed in public would remain contraband subject to summary seizure and forfeiture
• casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration not involving profit would no longer be an offense

They suggested making it legal for recreational use, but still don't do it in public.

In fact, in a special note at the end of the commissions statement before Congress: 

"Considering the range of social concerns in contemporary America, marihuana does not, in our considered judgment, rank very high. We would deemphasize marihuana as a problem." (Nahas)

The President and his staff did not remove cannabis from the list of Schedule I drugs. 

The Drug Enforcement Administration monitors these controlled substances and their uses and their abuses across the nation. 

They also graciously tell the penalties for abuse of these controlled substances: 

Federal Trafficking Penalties

Seriously, if you have time to browse it, just do it. It is one of the most shocking reads I have ever gone through.

There are three tables. 

The first names specific Schedule I/II drugs including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, PCP:

• You can carry up to five times the amount of cocaine as heroin in order to receive the same penalty (no less than 10 years to life imprisonment and $10 to $25 million)

The second table is pretty generic penalties for all other Scheduled drugs from tiers I-V.

The third table is entirely devoted to Marijuana and similar drugs (Hashish oil)

• It has similar if not identical restrictions and penalties as the worst on Table I including, but not limited to minimum sentencing (not less than 10 years to life imprisonment) and a similar fine ($10-50 million)

Granted, the amount of cannabis one has to hold to incur such penalties is ridiculous. 

A LITERAL METRIC TON OF CANNABIS. 

And granted, I am not a drug dealer, nor a law enforcement official. I do not know how much of each drug is a likely amount. I don't know how much more likely it is to find 1 kilogram of heroin versus 5 kilograms of cocaine versus 1,000 kilograms of cannabis. 

The point I am trying to illustrate is that these seem like woefully balanced scales with cannabis being treated as among the worst offenders in both the level of its control and even in its execution within the penalties (with heroin coming in at a close second). 

Why might this be so?

According to the makers of 13th, there may be a reason. 

Richard Nixon through executive order created the federal organization the Drug Enforcement Agency, in order to establish a single unified command to combat "an all out global war on the drug menace." (DEA.org) 

"You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did" (Baum).

-John Ehrlichmann President Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief

Now, to be fair, there are too few to corroborate this quotation. 

The only instance of it being cited is in Harper's Magazine by author Dan Baum who did the interview.

But, it does paint a stark portrait. 

The mandatory sentencing issued by the "Narcotic Control Act of 1956". 

The act introduced the idea of mandatory minimums:

• Whoever commits an offense, or conspires to commit an offense, described in...for which no specific penalty is otherwise provided, shall be imprisoned not less than 2 or more than 10 years and, in addition, may be fined not more than $20,000. 
• For a second offense, the offender shall be imprisoned not less than 5 or more than 20 years and, in addition, may be fined not more than $20,000. 
• For a third or subsequent offense, the offender shall be imprisoned not less than 10 or more than 40 years and, in addition, may be fined not more than $20,000.

These removed the ability for judges to take into account the mitigating circumstances of each case and instead imposed necessary sentencing or blanket sentencing across all cases. 

Later in 1970, this was repealed, but in 1986 it was reintrodued by Reagan under the "Anti-Drug Abuse Act"

Source

To make a long story long: the legacy continued.

• Increased police force
• Increased funds
• Increased militarization of the police force
• Increased minimum sentencing

It all piled up until what you eventually had was a system in place that punished the poorest and most marginalized groups in our society for recreational drug use.

To be fair, everyone gets punished for recreational drug use, but some are more punished than others. And therein lies the trouble.  

That is the argument of 13th.

Relevance

Many of you might be wondering how this applies to us.

If you are, then I have to say, you probably aren't my audience. 

Recently (November 15th) on National Public Radio  in their segment: Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Evan Osnos who recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker entitled "President Trump's First Term."

In it, he consulted many legal parties about what the President-elect's term might look like given his campaign promises. 

He started the segment with this: 

"The political science on this is pretty clear, and it tells a very different story, which is that if you go back over the history of the presidency, you find that presidents tend to achieve the majority - the overwhelming majority of the things that they set out to accomplish when they were candidates.   So the sort of classic study on this was by Michael Krukones who, in 1984, tabulated all of the campaign pledges of all of the presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, and what he found was that altogether they had accomplished 73 percent of the pledges that they said they would. This has been replicated in other studies all the way up to the present where PolitiFact, which is a nonpartisan fact-checking site, has evaluated the campaign pledges by Barack Obama and found that he has achieved at least 70 percent of them."

Politifact that tracks President Obama's campaign promises: Obamameter at 70% (as of this writing)

Politifact that tracks the GOP's campaign promises: GOP pledge-o-meter 68% (as of this writing)

I have attempted to illustrate that President Nixon fell in with that trend. 

What he campaigned under is exactly what he accomplished. 

Gross and Osnos go on to illustrate that this may not be done simply because they wish it so from the outset. 

Quite to the contrary, many politicians make statements, campaign promises that they may not whole-heartedly believe in, however: 

"And that gets us back to this kind of the core discovery that surprised me most which is that even when candidates don't seek to do the things that they actually said they would on the stump that the internal momentum of politics ends up forcing them to do things that are more emphatic or more absolute than perhaps they might have originally imagined."  

In a wider study Francois Petry and Benoit Collette discovered a similar trend across forty years of records and two continents: 

"We find that parties fulfill 67% of their promises on average"-(Isbaum Abstract)

Wide variation between parties, regimes, and countries were also denoted (Ibid). However, with greater amount of reporting and statistical date available, the trend continued towards the two-thirds. 

Why/how is this relevant?

President-elect Donald Trump campaign promises:

• Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and ultimately jail his political opponent Secretary Hillary Clinton
• Build a wall across the shared border between the U.S. and Mexico and have the Mexican government pay for it
• Pull out from the Transpacific Partnership and NAFTA (global trade deals) 
• Renegotiate the Iran Deal
• Repeal Obamacare and replace it with a privatized insurance solution
• Defund Planned Parenthood
• Save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cutting benefits
• Temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States
• Stop spending money on space exploration
• Allow Russia to deal with the Islamic State in Syria
• Target and kill the relatives of terrorists
• Bring back waterboarding
• Deport 11 million undocumented immigrants

Some stark similarities have been drawn between the presidential candidates (13th was published in October 2016) and some moments of historical significance.

I'll leave that to tantalize someone who has made it this far into watching the bloody thing.

I really haven't given anything away besides the major argument: slavery did not end with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

In fact, all of the research I have presented is my own and hopelessly skewed in an attempt to illuminate what the creators have discovered in their much more impressive work. 

Conclusion

For my own sanity.

For the sanity of all the other people of our community:

How about we see some black and brown people in beautiful or even ecstatic pictures as opposed to what we normally see on the news and media?

This is a selection of images from the DIA's 30 Americans exhibit

Specifically the work of Kehinde Wiley: 

 You can check out his work and others like him at 30 Americans at the DIA. 

Also here is his website.

Bibliography

Bailey, Ronald. "The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States. (Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin, 1793-1993: A Symposium)." Agricultural History 22 Mar. 1994: n. pag. Web. 19 Nov. 2016.

Baum, By Dan, By Kiera Feldman, By Walter Kirn, By Elena Ferrante, By Andrew Cockburn, By Daniel Asa Rose, and By Fred Bahnson. "Legalize It All." Harper's Magazine. Harper's Magazine, Apr. 2016. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

"Civil Rights Movement." History.com. Ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty. A&E Television Networks, 2009. Web. 19 Nov. 2016.

Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Why Was Cotton ‘King’?" PBS. PBS, 30 Oct. 2013. Web. 19 Nov. 2016.

Gross, Terry. "Could Trump 'Undermine The Legacy Of The Obama Presidency' With The Stroke Of A Pen?" NPR. NPR, 15 Nov. 2016. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

Imbeau, Louis M. Do They Walk like They Talk?: Speech and Action in Policy Processes. Vol. 15. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009. Print. Ser. 2.

Nahas, G. G., and A. Greenwood. "The First Report of the National Commission on Marihuana (1972): Signal of Misunderstanding or Exercise in Ambiguity." Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. U.S. National Library of Medicine, Jan. 1974. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

Osnos, Evan. "President Trump’s First Term." The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 19 Sept. 2016. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

"Richard Nixon for President 1968 Campaign Brochure." Richard Nixon for President 1968 Campaign Brochure. 4 President Corporation, 1 Jan. 2000. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

"Vital Statistics of the United States." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 27 Feb. 2013. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.