Evolution of Myself as a Trickster

  First when the school semester started I didn't even consider hip as being anything more than an element of the heirarchy and as such something that wasn't worth my time.  As the semester went on my resentment continued but changed format with my hatred going towards the hip idea as being the personification of cool.  By my first essay though my hatred had died down to a flickering flame of dislike and my first essay started to address the rebellion against the orthodoxy and opposition to the norm within fashion and social interactions.  By the second essay my hatred was completely gone within the context of hip being used within the social structure of any civilizations.  I expressed my new beleif in my own hipness within the form of the Trickster, what I call the epitome of hip.  Now, while I still do not believe it to be a valid topic for an english class, I do not hold any resentment to the complete rejection of the orthodoxy in purist hipness.

Annotated Bib #2

  Once again, as in my last essay, I will be emphasizing the Trickster figure.  The individual I will be representing this time is Bill Gates, the owner of Microsoft.  I will be using three points to determine Bill Gates' effect on hip in the future.  First, I will be be examining his past to determine and express what makes him a Trickster, and therefore hip.  I will use the same basic points as outlined in my second essay with some modifications that I have since thought of.  Then, I will look through his express philosophy to show whether or not he is truly hip as I have outlined.  And last, I will express what I think he will contribute to hip in the future and how he will affect it.

Biography.com
"Bill Gates"

  My first source is a biography of Bill Gates on biography.com.  In examining his past I will be able to make an educated guess about his future contributions to the hip ideal.  The source is mostly useful to my first point but it also has some relevance for my second point.  It rates as one of my highest ranked sources and is extremely useful in constructing my idea of hip's future course.

The Feminine Hip?

"That whole obsession with hip is like collecting records or whatever.  It's more of a male thing." (Gordon, 239)  John Leland asserts that women have a small role in the evolution of hip in his book, "Hip: The History".  He tells us that Hip is a sexist, misogynistic and male-dominated playground but also asserts that the Hip ethos is decidedly feminine.  Put simply, the realm of Hip, in Leland's mind, is within the population of feminine males.  "The chronicles of hip, as told by men, often play like T.E. Lawrence's adventures in Arabia, in which the only female characters were the camels, or like Miles Davis's autobiography, which could be a how-to manual for aspiring misogynists." (Leland, 240)  He further states that females either are the angels of stories or the demons or don't exist at all within Hip's literature.
After some thought I've concluded that he is not completely wrong in his assertion of a sexist Hip but that he is too generalized in that same assumtion.  Throughout the book he assumes that race is the sole factor in hip and "Once Upon a Time" that may have been true but I believe in the past 30 years or so females have taken on a greater role within the evolution of Hip's persona.
That said, it is a fact that the hip ideal is the ideal of the rebel and women have, in the past, been unable to rebel in almost any way.  Gregory Corso said, when asked about the male clubhouse, "There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock." (Leland, 242)  This treatment in the past obviously would have made the emergence of hip women difficult but that is definetly no longer the case and hasn't been for several years.
In short, I'd conclude that in the past hip has been extremely sexist.  However it has gotten better in recent years and will continue to do so at a faster rate than the main stream.

Irony at it's Best

I consider myself to be pretty prideful.  Usually I think of myself as being outside of the system and somehow better than it.  At the beginning of this semester I thought exactly that when our teacher asked us if we were hip or not.  I couldn't fathom that I'd be judged by someone else's measuring system.  It is therefore extremely ironic and humorous to me that I now consider myself to be a Trickster which is like the "God of Hip".  This opinion, while not neccessarily untrue because I actually fit almost all of the requirements, was formed due to my pride.  My subconscious thought was that if I can't be outside of the system I must be at the top of it.

"All This and Rabbit Stew"

I watched all of the cartoons posted in Week 10's folder and was stuck between the banned Betty Boop cartoon, "Making Stars", and the Bugs Bunny cartoon, "All This and Rabbit Stew".  I have decided to use the Bugs Bunny cartoon because it is more relevant and I enjoyed it more than the Betty Boop episode.  This cartoon had strong manifestations of the white idea of black racial identity.
The black hunter in this cartoon is portrayed as lazy in the beginning of the episode.  He is dragging his feet and his speech is slightly slurred as if to portray his inability to speak clearly.  Later the cartoon's theme changes to represent the stereotype of black ignorance when Bugs Bunny first misdirects him purposefully by literally pointing him in the wrong direction.  The poor trickee, the hunter, is then shown as a "sucker" to further cement his portrayed ignorance.  Later Bugs Bunny tricks him while running away by taking the same route over and over again, through a hollow log, then rotating the log so that the end point off a cliff.  Bugs Bunny does this several times until the point that the hunter actually does fall.  The episode ends with Bugs Bunny tricking him into a dice game and taking all of his possessions.
I beleive that there is some love in these cartoons due to the fact that they poke fun at all groups of individuals.  I would definetely agree with Check Jones assertion that, "You must love what you caricature."  The assertion of the racial descriptions in cartoons as being crude stereotypes of racist origins, while true to some extent, no longer holds as much validity as it did in the past.  The characters were just designed to be amusing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P5jyyxCgIo