Skip to content

Bresland, Bresland, Glass Reflection

That was creepy.

Ira Glass spoke of two parts of an anecdote: the momentous action, and the moments of reflection. When reading and then listening to John Bresland’s piece, the momentum and reflection paired well, as if they sparred and bowed and dignified their…illicit purpose. I liked both parts and the entire piece. It was well done and documented Paris faithfully. Layers of metaphor coalesce that only unraveled on the listen.

But I treated the listen as a second reading. To be honest, Bresland didn’t add much to the original story in his aural reproduction. I understood the creepy, sexualized undertones in the original text; they were only made aural in the remediation. That’s a transformation, to be sure, but why make it? What mood or metaphor escaped the textual that was recaptured in the aural?

The action and reflection balanced well in both formats of the story—but again, why make two versions? Yet I ask this when I think of (half irked) Baroque art. Rembrandt, really. When working with drypoint and etching, he made countless versions of the same thing. The medium was visual, but the principle is the same: remediation, modification, remixing, but with the same genesis.

That’s probably the point. And Glass would agree. Remixing allows definition and redefinition—the modification is both the action and the reflection.

css.php