getting started

I'm lucky I work in the industry I'm looking to evaluate. I have hands-on experience and connections to the representatives of the brands that shape the footwear industry. Aside from hundreds of footwear catalogues and technical speification sheets for several shoes, there's a lot of promotional material that goes out to customers - a direct insight into a companies' motivation to push a shoe or lack thereof. There's a lot of exercise physiology and biomechanical research going on right now concerningthe shod vs. unshod foot and how it behaves in the running as well as walking process, and databases in EBSCO like SportDiscus and the ACSM database have great representation of this ongoing trend. There's a lot of information riht now since this movement is so huge, so I think this paper is all abot filtering the outspu and making sure sources are reliable and unbiased about the industry.

back to barefoot.

 I think there's a wide variety of definitions I would want to write a whole paper about, but I'll explore one really familiar to me that I struggle with everyday to get the brain going on this one. I work at a running shoe store, and my job is pretty much analyzing the gait of the customer, and custom-fit runners, walkers, and exercisers in shoe that fits their unique needs. The concept that has been most challenged in the industry I work with is that of the ideal running shoe. Companies like Asics, Nike, Adidas, etc. have owned the footwear market for years making really cushioned and supportive shoes for people who want something "comfortable" and doctors make orthopedic inserts for virtually any foot ailment. Sounds right? Here's the problem:

Feet.

Your foot is perfect the way it is. People complain about flat feet, high arches, and cramped up toes. It's hard to believe that people even survived without huge, fluffy, supportive, corrective shoes, right? Wrong. It sounds kind of silly to think our feet can't even support themselves. Your feet were made with the intention of supporting your body exclusively. They can walk and run and jump all day long. That being said, most of us have been wearing shoes on our feet since we were crawling. There are hundreds of muscles and tendons in our feet that function just like those in our hands - where they should be able to function independently. A foot raised without a shoe does an awesome job of supporting itself, gripping the ground, proprioceptive ability (think: stepping on a lego with bare feet), and efficient running and walking. Obviously, we can't just develop the strength of 20 years in shoes overnight, but there's first steps for everybody. Not everyone needs to buy barefoot shoes and run marathons. Bodies are made to run barefoot. Bodies are not made to run on concrete or without a gradual training plan. I think this redefining of footwear for fitness over time will change the face of running and walking shoes as we know it. Ever since Nike came out with the Free running shoe in 2005, almost every company has come out with a response, even as small as lowering the ratio of heel stack height to forefoot stack height. Over time, less running injuries and less injured runners will needs treatment if we go back to barefoot.

In-Class: The Forrest

The Redwood trees here just might be poking holes in the clouds that would otherwise be drifting by, but instead are pinned down by spears of pines. These pines coat the floor of the forrest along with the paved pathway that once could be seen below it. The pavement winds casually between the trees, but some of the most aged trees lifted up enough root to let the pavement wind seemingly through the wood as it stands - exposing dozens upon hundreds of rings showing age. Massive and hauntingly vacant holes in the sides of these trees were once home to any imaginable woodland creature, but now they only have space to call their home.

The pavement that winds through the otherwise thick foliage appears to have been abused by millions of feet, wheels, tires, and raindrops. The path it takes seems too long and too far gone. The twists and turns it makes don't appear to have a clear end destination in mind. "Scenic Route" was the name it was given, demeaning its purpose to one of just wandering or crime.

When all that is organic is all that is on the ground, a shiny car key stands out more than it would in any other place. There wasn't a car here at this point in time, and the car probably isn't in any sort of reasonable radius to the key. This key wasn't here on purpose. This key was left behind. The only other man-made sign of life tto be found within yelling distance from this key was a decrepit plastic cup. This cup was the red kind, white inside, bumps all around to ease the grip. This was the kind of cup you don't just use with dinner. It was the kind of cup you find at a bad party and when you're done drinking, you play with it enough to break it, and then throw it away: a similar fate to the one this cup found.

There was one tree in particular that had finally served this forrest long enough. It gave up its reign in the San Francisco skyline, and laid itself down right across the pavement path it had bonded with the past few years. Perhaps it just wanted to give itself to the land, or maybe it was a warning to the next visitors to the path who left behind a new kind of home. Trees and cars don't seem to agree on much, especially when push comes to shove. The self-sacrificing tree had met its match with the last car to wind down the path, perhaps too quicky. The car came to a forceful stop at the same place where the tree had given up just hours before. The ones responsible for the car driving were gone, but the now foregone vehicle had become a new home for the wanderers of the forrest and the creatures surrounding it. What was once a trunk now plays shelter to a small group of birds who once called the tree home.

The edge of the forrest was bordered by a fence. This fence was new. Brand new. The tree that gave its life to this fence was freshly gone. This fence was apparently just for looks, because it wasn't high enough to keep out anything but the lowest 3 feet of wind through the forrest. Just over the fence extended a stretch of field that was being worked over by dozens of colossal machines, flattening, paving, excavating, and smoothing. A highway laid in the horizon line that abruptly ended right before the forrest began - or moreso where the forrest was about to end.

In-Class for 10/27

Talk aboout what went well with your paper and what didn't go as well. What writing exercises helped? What didn't?
I don't think this paper came along as easily as the last one for a few reasons. With the space assignment, there was a lot of room for imagination and argument because I was the only one who experienced that space in the wat that I did at the time that I did. With the movie paper, the sources of information were definitely more concrete and the arguments had a be a little more solid. Also, I had a harder time finding a film in the first place. I went with one I enjoyed from the get-go because it was a very happy-go-lucky-feel-good documentary. It was a little more mindless than I would like for it to have been - but I suppose this is all about learning experiences anyway, right? Either way, I really appreciated  the quoteburger exercise. It wasn't a super new concept for me, but at that point I was really struggling with overall length and content of my paper. I felt like I had a few solid ideas, developed them, and had like 4 pages. The more thorough introduction and analysis of the quotes gave me a lottle more direction to give the quotes some body.

quoteburger

Benjamin Franklin satirized British policies toward America by writing a letter that argued, "A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges." While Franklin jokingly suggested that Britain should rid itself of its outermost provinces first, he directly targeted how Americans should feel toward the monarchy that disenfranchised them.

I'm a big quoteburger fan. We got beaten around with "blending quotations" in high school, and I think they did a pretty effective job. I have a hard time looking at a stand-alone quote without wanting to fix it now. I think it takes a lot of the work out of reviewing and analyzing works because all you have to have is a good eye for words. If someone can just pick out a string of words in a really pretty order, and then understand the intent of the phrasing the author has, quoting isn't too tough. Quoteburgers are all about context. I think tabloid writers and newspaper editors are professionals at liberal quoteburgering. They can take almost anything a celebrity/official said, throw it in some new quotes with an artistic set-up, and say something completely new and different. I hope to get a little QB-ing in with reference to the NETSationals. The dancers have awesome little snippets in their 60+ years of conversational experience - so their quotes are priceless.

where to go from here

This workshopping experience was very productive - I had a lot more complete than I did the last time around with the space analysis essay (The page requirement certainly helped.) A lot of the changes were oversights in a grammatical sense, where I couldn't quite figure out the wording I was looking for to get through my thought process. All of teh comments were really helpful, and I intend to use all of them. The direction the paper is taking is where I want it to go, and I hope to bring in a few more characters for the sake of specifica and a few more outside sources with credible reviews since this film was a Tribeca Film Festival release, not a first-run theatrical. Also, there were comments about doing some more work on common stereotypes of elderly people and how the characters in Gotta Dance defy those stereotypes.

where to now?

          I should probably get going on that here pretty soon. The prewriting is really productive - I feel like I have a lot more things to write about than I did writing the space analysis. With a work that so many people have seen and reacted to there's a lot more in the public domain to reference as far as arguments. I would like to study up a little more on the team themselves and poke my head around for some outside reviews to see where the points of controversy hit with people who actually make a living by reviewing film. I might also explore the possibility of checking out one other film I haven't seen in a while and see if I get immediately inspired to start this process over again on a new topic. We'll see. I need to get my thesis for this film to take more of a stand than introducing the general themes of the film and collect some quotes from the interviews that support all of my claims. It might be nice also go go back through my favorite scenes (since I watched it on Netfilx) and screen-shot the still images of the most poignant settings to see if I can do a little visal analysis on camera work.