Personal Statement

When I applied for grad school, I had to write a personal statement, so naturally I chose to write about superheroes. To this day I believe that this essay is the primary reason I was accepted.

Batman and Superman. To many, they are the two most well known comic book heroes in the world. But to me, the represent the dichotomy of humanity: what we would like to do, and what we can do. While it would be great to be able to crush coal into diamonds in our bare hands or fly across the planet in the blink of an eye like Superman, mere mortals are not capable of such feats. Instead, we must be like Batman, and do everything we can to do some good in this world. To me, I’ve always seen science through the eyes of Batman: still dreaming, but dreaming about what good we can do now, with what we already know. This is why when the majority of my classmates went the way of research, I went the way of analytical work.

I have always been interested in science; even in high school, I was one of the few students who were actually interested in pursing any form of science beyond graduation. I took every science course offered and was always at the top of my classes. I was respected among my teachers as being a very capable lab student. When it came time to attend college, I chose chemistry over other sciences because I felt that chemistry offered a many more opportunities for direct use of its principles in every corner of the world and in everything that we do. Also, my father had been a chemistry student and I always appreciated his analytical abilities and felt like that was a trait that I wanted to learn.

In college, I worked hard to learn the basic scientific principles I would need later, and I always became a student that my fellow classmates relied on to be a leader in the lab groups. My hard work made me eligible for the senior honor’s program at the university, and my research in unnatural amino acid synthesis gave me the opportunity to become familiar with a number of analytical methods well beyond the scope and duration that the regular class laboratories allowed.

Since graduation, I have been employed at an environmental testing company in the organic analytical department. I have been solely responsible for the volatiles analyses we conduct, and as a result I have learned an enormous amount about the maintenance and operation of the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer as well as about the ability to analyze problems and figure out their solutions.

I believe a master’s degree in forensic science will give me the knowledge I will need to be an effective and positive addition to this growing field. It is my dream to continue to use my knowledge of chemistry and my analytical disposition in new and exciting ways, and I feel that forensic science is the best way for me to do that. Most importantly, I don’t feel that I have learned enough yet to be as effective as I could be and continued education will undoubtedly be the best course to take. As for specifically selecting the University of Illinois at Chicago, UIC consistently came up at the top of lists when I searched for forensic science programs as well as being recommended by the criminal justice faculty at my undergraduate university. And while a number of universities may offer forensic science master’s degrees, UIC has the added benefit of a big city experience. I have resided in Mississippi for nearly my entire life, and while I have definitely enjoyed my experiences, I would love the chance to live in different part of the country and in a different kind of environment.

I selected forensic science because I enjoy its practical applications as well as the tremendous good it can do in using our knowledge of science to protect everyone. As I gradually developed as a scientist, I came to understand what I enjoyed the most about chemistry: using a set of clues to solve a problem. Everyone enjoys a good mystery and I enjoy solving them.

Pieces of the Whole

I overheard one of the local improv teachers here give the following advice to a student: “shortform is for the audience, longform is for the improvisers”, which is a very distressing argument for a teacher to make and is, while very ignorant, one that comes up time and time again as an occasionally legitimate argument against longform improvisations: longform is a artistic device where nothing happens.

The AV Club published a very interesting article that explored the modern style of storytelling in some of the more “acclaimed” programming (e.g. Breaking Bad, Luck, The Sopranos). The way seasons, and in some cases, entire shows are divined now to reward sustained and completist viewing of seasons – the emphasis has shifted the emphasis to how an episode fits into the greater picture of the show. This is very similar to the way we think longform should work: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A great longform piece is enriched by the order and placement of the pieces therein, elevating it in meaning and purpose. But this means that we may sacrifice making those parts worthwhile in name of focusing on the “bigger message”. This precocious, and dare I say pretentious approach to creating is what threatens to drag any unit of art down.

Shortform's strength is also it's greatest weakness: a slavish amount of attention heaped on a single game, that comes at the expense of fitting it into the fabric of the larger piece. Shortform is as guilty of being shortsighted as longform is of being farsighted in this respect. We spend an inordinate amount of attention in a Harold trying to say “the something” that we can potentially hobble the entire production. This slavish devotion to perfection in the piece is an admirable and lofty goal, but the focus must always be on the present. The great improv questions of 1) if this is true, what else is true, and 2) if this is true, why is it true suddenly become more about the entire act of improvising, rather than just tools to play good scenes. (Del even said that the end is in the beginning.)

An over-attention to detail, one that is meticulous, even compulsive and obsessive, can derail attempts to be experimentative and explorative, stagnating innovation. The entire piece should be reflective, not the scenes. The scenes should be concrete, and something should happen in each and every one of them. These concrete blocks build on each other to create something meaningful – hollow, empty bricks build nothing of significance.

So how did we get here? Well, I have to agree with the AV Club's conclusion that “creating a lengthy, layered narrative is really fucking hard.” People like that teacher up there have no doubt seen some improv group that got in their own way of having fun in the moment and got caught up in being profound, which groups will do as they learn to master the craft. You see those kinds of shows in an audience mostly full of improvisers, because improvisers are far more forgiving of an ambitious move that completely fails than a typical non-improviser audience would be. But you don't get to the point of being able to tell deeper stories by refusing to take the risk.

A Writer's World

In An Evening with Kevin Smith, Smith said something along the lines of “the writer creates his ideal world when he writes.” For him then, he said that apparently in his ideal world, people have endless conversations about pop culture and relationships. By that same token, in Tarantino’s world, violent criminals wax philosophic and then maim each other, and in Scorsese’s criminals try desperately to keep a clear conscience in the face of doing bad things for family. Pretty cool actually. The writer allows us a brief peek into not how he sees the world, but how he wishes the world could be.

I’ve read and heard a number of times, from countless sources, that the improviser is more than just an actor in a play. The improviser is the actor, director, editor, stuntman, costume designer, set designer, and writer all in one, doing every conceivable action simultaneously. Well, if we’re technically writing our play, in the moment, then by extension of the previous corollary, then we are also showing the audience our ideal world (albeit a mutually agreed upon and group derived ideal world). This is one of the things that propels improv from just jokey stuff into a much more meaningful experience. Or as Jason Chin once said, “You have to have an opinion about what you’re talking about.” It’s not enough to merely explore mousetraps (very basic scenes; I mean, how many scenes can we have about mousetraps?) we need to explore what mousetraps are symbolic of (I don’t know, stifled domestic life?) but also to have an opinion about it. The audience doesn’t necessarily have to agree with it, but that’s okay, because stuff that you’re opinionated and passionate about makes for great improv.

Now, what I’ve said is no big revelation. I haven’t exposed any great mysteries about improv, or art, or life (not the least of which because I don’t presuppose to have any). But here’s what is important; the first rule of writing is “write what you know”, so the improv corollary is “improvise what you know”. It’s not really a big surprise that most improv pieces revolve around relationships and superheroes; look who is improvising them. When I was playing with my college group, we invented and modified a number of games to make them more superhero-esque. Why? Because were a bunch of comic book nerds. That’s what interested us. My San Diego group, the Ugly Truth, struggled for a little bit when we tried to experiment with more slow, dramatic improvised scene work. Obviously, things weren’t going well because we weren’t improvising what we liked. Show me an improv group that is struggling with a new form or technique, and I’ll guarantee that they’re doing something they don’t enjoy.

Without a doubt, I’m a big advocate of fun first when it comes to improv. A group that is enjoying what they’re doing will be immensely more watchable than a team that is doing something meaningful and hating every minute of it. Or rather, we’re not all Scorsese or Tarantino, some of us are just Smith. Find, as a group, what you enjoy, are passionate about, and interested in, and the rest will follow suit.

Elves = Virgins

Few character races are as indelible as the elf (save for maybe the dwarf). The elf has a wide reaching empire through the realm of fantasy stories; a tall humanoid with pointy ears, a forest dweller, slightly magical with heightened senses, and a master with the bow and arrow. But for all their useful additions to any group of adventurers, one question has always bothered me: are elves virgins?

So first off, we need to establish a few important facts about elves, the most important of which is their extreme age. Lord of the Rings (LotR) mythology says that elves, while they can be killed, are still technically immortal. Even non LotR canon that does not explicitly indicate immortality tends to making elves nigh-immortal, living for mulitples of centuries (i.e. still a very long time). And, like a number of other immortal races, elves remain roughly ageless (in human standards), keeping their same youthful looks, energy, and stamina, both physically and mentally. Therefore, we can make the assumption that elves may remain sexually vital, in at least reproductive terms for the vast duration of their either very long, or potentially endless lives. This is a very important point, because most other immortal or near immortal races are indicated to be incapable of reproduction; vampires (most universes, at least) and even the Highlander-universe immortals are all explicitly stated to be incapable of spawning children either among themselves or with normal humans. Now, if we assume that a single elf then is capable of living millenia (or forever), is capable of producing progeny, and is capable of producing said progeny for a comparatively long time, then we run into a very serious problem with the elven population over time.

In a normal species, reproduction is limited by the time it takes to come to sexual maturity (puberty) and then on the back end by gradual march towards death. Among humans, the lion's share of the bell curve for reproduction is focused between 16 and 51 (the average age of the last period for a woman and the onset of menopause). This is taking an average life expectancy of the modern human being 67 years of age. But part of what keeps our population stable is the ratio between death and birth rates. Too high on the death side, and the population declines in size, but go the other way, and the population grows. However, in the case of elves, when you have a death rate that is effectively zero (excepting any major wars), even a single birth causes the population to grow. If allowed to reproduce ad libitum, the elf population would grow exponentially, because a single elf mother could mother hundreds of elflings during her life, if she reproduced once per year. Allowed to deal with itself, the elf population could easily blossom and take over the world in a few hundred years, because they reproduce so readily with no deaths to offset the population growth. (Just look at what happened when rabbits were introduced in Australia – a small warren of 12 European rabbits were released in 1859, and within 10 years 2 million could be shot or trapped annually without making any change in population size.)

Now the Elves, given their longer lifespans and their reported wise natures, would no doubt have realized the potential their race has to completely dominate any planet they are on. Four elf mates can double themselves every two years, and they can do that forever. Given that elves don't want to drown out every other species (effectively killing their own species in the end due to overcrowding), elves would have undoubtedly made certain stipulations about mating (probably a maximum of one or two children per couple, like that Christopher Lambert movie Fortress) this is because the elven culture is always portrayed as wise and self-aware. But given that even small increases can almost permanently change the demographics (given that a new addition will never actually leave), what is more likely is that Elven leaders would hold a very tight hold over reproduction. For one, given that any new elves will have to become permanent members of the gene pool, the Elven high council would undoubtedly approve any mating to ensure that only the highest quality of new elf was being produced. In fact, look at the scene again from Helm's Deep when the elf army shows up to back up the Fellowship and humans, and tell me that those hundreds of elite and identical looking soldiers are not the result of controlled breeding and eugenics. Additionally, since LotR elves at the very least never die unless there is war, reproduction would likely only be approved after some elves died, or when the leadership decided it was time to increase the size of the population. (On the plus side, the massive casualties at Helm's Deep meant that there was a lot of state-dictated elf boning going on.)

So, back to the original thesis; given that Elves who are following the society-approved mandates cannot reproduce without state approval, and even then only if they meet certain genetic criteria for reproduction, and taking into account the dearth of available birth control methods (excluding Orc-skin condoms and pulling out), any attempt to copulate among elves, is a risky business, especially if it ends up in conception. (Think about how pissed Hugo Weaving was at Liv Tyler for falling in love with Viggo Mortensen in Fellowship. He's not mad because she's going outside of the race – he's mad because she is diluting a carefully constructed über-elf genetic makeup as well as potentially producing offspring that could potentially live forever, and offset the entire population balance of Middle-Earth.) Given the potential penalties for screwing with that, the only sensible solution for a wise elf is to avoid sex altogether, meaning that Legolas, and potentially nearly every elf seen in any fantasy story is likely still a virgin.

Shortform v Longform

I, like so many of my fellow improvisers, started doing improv in college, and started by doing what is commonly known as shortform improvisation. This is in contrast to longform improvisation, and though there is no “official” definition or difference between the two, the generally accepted demarcation is that longform is any improvisation that lasts, uninterrupted, for more than five minutes. Shortform is, well, everything else. Shortform is by far the most common form of improvisation, and prior to moving to Chicago, I was only exposed to longform very briefly and very sporadically. Shortform is so common, that it is even known to people outside of the improv world; I can’t think of a single person who, when describing what improv is to a friend, parent, relative, or co-worker, didn’t say “It’s kind of like ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’”

In fact, shortform improv probably encompasses a good 75% of all improv ever performed. And with good reason: it involves the audience tremendously, is almost always funny, and allows for the kinds of outrageous characters and situations that audiences have come to expect of their modern comedians. Longform on the other hand, is unpredictable, often unwatchable if performed by even mid-level experienced actors, and if it uses crazy characters and situations, often collapses into a hot mess within minutes. The difference is largely in structure; while longform has attempted to codify itself by creating forms (e.g. the Harold, the Deconstruction, the Armando), adherence to the form is pretty much open to the interpretation of the director and/or performers and definitely not necessary. On the other hand, shortform is heavily dictated by rules and structure. In fact the success or failure of a game is largely a part of how well the players follow the rules and exploit the particular gimmicks of a game. Even the names show the difference in how seriously people take it: shortform pieces are called “games”, and longform ones “forms”. The former suggests that it is solely for entertainment, while the latter suggests a larger, more amorphous thing.

I like to think of shortform as ‘improv with training wheels’. Follow the structure of the games, and people will laugh. This is important in the beginning, as it allows improvisers to get a feel for the basics of improv, get comfortable on stage and with their fellow players, and most importantly have fun. The biggest plus of shortform is that the rules are designed to make nearly every attempt funny and by definition, the game can only last three-ish minutes. Even if it stinks, it’ll be over shortly with a bell ring, and you can start anew. (Whether or not those three minutes can seem like an eternity is discussion of relativity that is beyond the scope of this article.) Longform is generally not as popular among the general population, excluding of course, the forms that are very gimmicky. (The most significant is the various improvised musical acts, which consistently draw large crowds, probably not least of which because people love musicals in general.)

Now, while shortform is a crowd favorite, it is generally looked down upon by ‘serious’ improvisers. Shortform is seen as silly and valueless to longformers, while shortformers look upon longform as unnecessarily cumbersome and often unfunny. In fact, when I first started doing improv, my group watched one of our sister-troupes perform a Harold, and we all swore that we would never bother doing it. Uninteresting and unfunny. We’ll stick to our “Dating Games” and “Stand, Sit, Kneels”, thank you very much.

One of the big improv teachers in San Diego will only teach shortform, despite interest to the contrary. I asked her why, and she said that it wasn’t worth doing improv if it wasn’t on the level of “TJ and Dave”. For the benefit of those not in Chicago, “TJ and Dave” is generally considered to be the best improv show in Chicago, which pretty much makes it the best improv show in the world. To put it in perspective, they play on Wednesday nights at 11:00 to sold-out crowds. Every week. To say that these extremely talented players are the only ones who should even bother doing longform is like saying it isn’t worth living unless you’re going to be the smartest man alive. The point that I had trouble getting across to her was that improv takes time. Carol Hazenfield described longform as the “outback”, and to be honest, it takes time to cross the outback and see everything in it. You don’t become the best gunslinger overnight – you’ve got to rob a few banks first, and yes, botch a couple too. But shortform advocates see every longform failure as proof that the art is unworkable, and indeed many groups have fallen flat on their face as a direct result of not minding the gap between thirst and sense.

It’s true that longform is more challenging; I won’t argue that. It’s a full 27 weeks into the iO’s program before they let you attempt going for over five minutes. It’s scary being up there with no safety net; no team-member standing by the bell, no built in gimmicks, and no rules. But it’s also exhilarating and rewarding – a well performed thirty minute show blows away both audiences and performers alike. I won’t say that shortform doesn’t have its place; without shortform, I never would have been entertained with improv long enough to be still doing it. And audiences will always love shortform, but shortform has limited potential. Those rules are fences which keep improv focused and ‘normal’, but also limit its creative capacity, because just beyond those fences is a whole untamed, anything-goes world of scenes if you’ll just open the gate and walk outside.

Five Things Revisited

I've talked previously about a “trademark” game and about how this game was sort of the pinnacle of why longformers hate shortform because this simple “three” minute (in actuality a 7-8 minute) game takes upwards of 15 minutes to get set up (seriously, time it next chance you get). I was perhaps a bit harsh on this game. All of the things I talked about previously still stand, and I do still think that it takes forever to get the funny, but this game is not entirely without its merits. In fact, by removing nearly every inch of room to actually improvise in by burying the performers in suggestions, the game is as bare-bones as an improv game can be, and as a result, it bears open the two basic tenets of fun, successful improv in a way no other game ever has.

So the game, for those who didn’t read/remember my previous piece, runs down like this. Get five activities from the audience, exchange out elements of each activity with wacky things (He’s snowboarding, but the snowboard is a car, and he’s wearing a porcupine. Hilarious, and wacky.) and the other players have to clue him into the activity through pantomime and gibberish. So the first concept that the game readily shows off is one of audience transposition. You see, when the audience gives a suggestion (especially in a shortform show) they already have a pretty good idea of what that suggestion means to them. (This may be the reason that longform struggles against shortform. On a deeper subconscious level, audiences recognize that they only get to say one thing for a thirty minute show, and their “one thing” may only show up tangentially, at best.)

The moment the suggestion is accepted, everyone is subconsciously forming their idea of what that will look like. Now audiences don’t perform, and most don’t even want to perform (Hence, an audience. It would be something else otherwise.) for whatever reasons. Afraid of being laughed at, making a fool of themselves, etc. But instead of them doing it, they live vicariously through the performers. They want to see their theories confirmed, which is as simple as just doing it.

The second part to this pillar is one of character consistency. One of the popular theories (ideas? philosophies?) that is being taught in workshops is one having to do with characters: basically, when a performer plays a character, people want to see that character continue being himself, regardless of the consequences. Or, “oh, that is so something blank would say/do”. Comedy, at least as far as the theory goes, comes from this character constantly confirming his identity to the audience. They laugh because they see him being open and honest about himself. They don’t laugh when the performer does something out of character and thus denies his identity. They are constantly forming an opinion of this character subconsciously, and they want to see him fit their mental image.

The second pillar is an even simpler one, and its one of performer effort. At the same time audiences recognize (generally speaking) that they don’t want to be on stage, they appreciate the fact that we are. They like rooting for us, sure, but they also love watching us struggle. They love seeing performers confronted with some outrageous situation struggling to get their arms around it. And they love to watch performers getting frustrated against the rules of the universe. There’s a game I see sometimes where reporters are interviewing someone, and they keep getting lost/confused/stuck on strange points, and the interviewer gets increasingly frustrated trying to correct them. Same principle.

Do you realize how awesome this is for us as performers? These two pillars basically say that audiences want to see us take the obvious choice and love to watch us work to get there. Performers take heart: confirm their suspicions and fight like hell, and there’s a terrific chance the audience will love it. Almost makes all that set up worthwhile. Almost.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is one of those movies you wish somebody would just shoot in the head so it would quit staggering around trying to eat your brains. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is like taking everything that is bad about a Paul W.S. Anderson movie and distilling all the good stuff away, oh wait…it isn’t like that, it is that.

Resident Evil opens just days after the first film finished, with our heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up after her first encounter with the evil T-virus and its creator, the Umbrella Corporation. The Umbrella Corporation has been secretly developing this virus, which brings dead people back to life in a secret underground facility called the Hive. After zombies in the first film overran the Hive, the Umbrella Corporation has decided to reopen the facility, allowing all the undead creatures inside to spill out into the streets of Raccoon City, where an entire population of people are waiting to become zombie food. The Umbrella Corporation decide it would just be easier to vaporize the entire city, so they seal off the entire city (which thankfully has only one entrance) and the only people left alive are a small band of police officers and civilians led by Alice. They are contacted by an Umbrella scientist who offers them a way out but only if they rescue his daughter who is also trapped in the city.

Director Alexander Witt is working off a script by the director of the first movie, Paul W.S. Anderson. In fact, he’s practically stolen Anderson’s entire playbook, yet seems to have only a minimal grasp of the source material and script. He uses Anderson’s trademark computerized maps to cut between scenes and works the entire movie like its just one big computer game, with characters bumbling about from location to location with no rhyme or reason and the bosses getting progressively harder as the story progresses. Additionally, the lickers, who were only briefly featured in the first film get only about an extra minute of screen time in this movie, which allows them to introduce: the Nemesis. Another product of the T-virus research, the Nemesis moves like Darth Vader, looks like something Todd McFarlane doodled in his spare time, and wears a black leather slicker out fit that looks like it was stolen from the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Oh, and he’s bulletproof too, which is a brilliant design innovation.

While most zombie movies usually revolve around themes of commercialism or societies that are losing individuality, Resident Evil: Apocalypse decides instead to focus on giant, evil corporations who own everything (Who released the original “Resident Evil” game? Oh, wait that’s right: Sony.) The only thing that saves this movie is Mike Epps, who has all the great lines and Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) wearing an outfit that that is definitely not standard police issue.

To put it simply: if you must go see only one zombie movie this year, wait for Shaun of the Dead. As for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the movie barely manages to pull enough entertainment to keep the masses from breaking into the theatre to eat the projectionist alive for making them sit through it.