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: : : 001: MY NAME IS AUSTIN DANDRIDGE, and I work for the Ryerson Center.
002: It's kind of cool, actually. It's this after-school program, for kids where, you know, the parents both work, or there's only one parent in the picture. The Center has a bunch of audio-visual equipment, and I teach the kids how to use it.
003: Ages six through fourteen.
004: Oh, yeah, it's great. I love them; I mean, they're just hilarious.
005: I've always liked kids. I don't know, maybe it comes from having two younger sisters. I feel very comfortable being the one who's like teaching, turning people on to new things?
006: I think I would make a good dad. [laughs] I actually am really looking forward to—well, never mind, that's off the subject. [laughs]
007: Yeah, we do—well, this might be interesting to you: I have the kids do little documentaries.
008: Video documentaries. We have some camcorders, even a few old TV news cameras, one of the local networks donated them to us. So I train the kids in just the basics of it, where to point, where to look, how to shoot, and then I talk to them about what a documentary is; I talk to them about the different types of documentaries, and then I get them to do their own.
009: Oh, they're hilarious. I have a tape somewhere of some of them; I should show you. It's all like, uh, you know, one kid is really proud of his sneakers, so he did a documentary called Shoes Day! which is all like shots of him striking, I don't know, action poses, I guess? [laughs] Like kung-fu leaps and stuff? And in every shot he has the kid who's working the camera zoom in on his feet. It's like twenty shots of this.
010: Some are more traditional, I guess, kids interviewing other kids about like, what do your parents do for a living or whatever. The older kids especially are really into trying to make it “real,” like other documentaries that they've seen on TV, or in school, I guess. But the documentaries they're making at like age eight are totally brilliant and weird.
011: Yeah, I mean, Shoes Day! [laughs]
012: Let's see, what else? Music videos, that's a big one. Lots of twelve-year-old girls lip-synching to Christina Aguilera, working out dance moves, that kind of thing, very freaky.
013: Did you ever see that movie Donnie Darko?
014: Two words for you: Sparkle Magic.
015: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Totally. But, I don't know, I shouldn't make fun, I guess. I mean in its own way it's really interesting. Like you have these girls, right, and they're clearly trying to work something out here, like, uh, they're using pop culture as a tool, a tool to help them figure out how they relate to the erotic power of their own bodies—oh, great, I think I just went on record as saying that twelve-year-old girls are erotic, there goes my job. [laughs] But you know what I mean.
016: Yeah, they're on this like cusp—they're just a few years away from being recognized by society as fully-functioning sexual beings, and it's obvious that they're already trying to think about what that means, and how they're going to negotiate it, and I really feel like that process is valuable. So I throw this audio-visual stuff at them, and I guess at my most lofty I hope that they can use it to aid them in that process. But they use everything—all that pop culture crap that floats around them all gets brought into that process. They define themselves in relationship to it.
017: I guess I worry about that, yeah. But for every girl who will define herself by embracing it another will define herself by rejecting it. I think it's important for them to be aware of these different roles, and, yeah, to try them out; if they try them out they have a better sense of what they're rejecting, what it means to reject it.
018: Um, I guess you could describe it as a kind of play. Sure.
017: I don't know. Adults definitely play less. And, yeah, they don't seem to be as involved in the process of defining themselves; discovering themselves. Adults seem, ah, more fixed? Like they've already worked out their answers to these questions?
018: Uh, you know, like what is the relationship to my own sexuality? What does it mean to be in this body in this world with other bodies? Just, basically, who am I? As people move into adulthood there's this notion that we're supposed to have these questions answered, and so we just grab an answer that seems to be working and we say well, I'm going to stick with that one.
019: I don't know. I mean, those are big questions [laughs]. I don't know that they can ever really be answered.
020: Oh no. I'm not sure of anything.
: : :
:: Year entries
Index | << | 39 | >>
:: Austin entries
Index | << | 7 | >>
Further Reading:
Recent input in the Narrative Technologies weblog:
:: Gangs of New York, World-Building by Dan Hill
[fresh as of 1/21/03]
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