my shot at a box, part 1

So I took Donna's challenge and tried to create a "basic box" (though nothing meta- like something on composition itself or teaching). My idea was informed by a story I've been following intently: the Supreme Court case involving Joseph Frederick, the high school student in Alaska who wrote "Bong hits 4 Jesus" on a banner in defiance of his school's administration. Dahlia Lithwick has a great summary of what's went down so far on _Slate_: http://www.slate.com/id/2162161/

I'm following the story because it deals directly with free speech, something dear to me, and the issue of free speech in K-12 schools is something I've done research on (particularly the Tinker case), as well.

The image I chose is a photo of the musician Liz Phair. It's from a copy of a magazine that I have. I actually used it as the cover art for a bootleg of hers called _Pottymouth Girl_ (I thought it was appropriate). The words to the left side are the lyrics to "Canary," a song from Phair's first (highly influential) album, _Exile in Guyville_. The song is interesting to me for many reasons, but one thing that *I* see Phair doing is drawing a parallel between a child *performing*--like a canary ("I learn my name/I write with a number two pencil/I work up to my potential")--and the persona *performing* feminity (I clean the house/I put all your books in an order/I make up a colorful border)--like a canary. Then she goes back--the image evoked by "I clean my mouth/'Cause froth comes out" is one of childhood once again, of having one's mouth washed out with soap. The implication, then, is that she is being treated like a child, just as women in general are (and have been) often treated like children, that their voices are often censored or silenced. (_Exile in Guyville_ is, in fact, a song-for-song female response to the Rolling Stones' _Exile on Main Street_, and Phair was about to establish her reputation, even perhaps more so than P.J. Havery and Courtney Love--and pre-Alanis Morissette success, by the way--as arguably *the* emotionally honest, sexually frank female voice in music, following the path blazed by Patti Smith, Kim Deal, etc.).

So the move for me was to intersect this notion of women's voices being shut out--as part of their regulation to the status of quasi-children, as their somehow being inferior to men--in the past (and some could argue rightly still in the present) with the question of free speech for *actual* "children" (the term itself is highly problematic, as childhood as we now regard it is largely a cultural construct of the emergence of the leisure class--but this is highly digressive... I can, however, expand on it if any one is interested) and for adolescents, those in the liminal stage between childhood and adulthood.

So free speech is foregrounded--a topic that I'm passionately invested in, and it's tied to an image of and lyrics by Liz Phair, an artist whose work I adore; and both are then tied to an explicit statement on free speech by Noam Chomsky which appears underneath the image. Chomsky has had a huge influence on my thinking--and to me this quote states plainly my own beliefs on the freedom of speech and it ties back directly to the case before the Supreme Court.

More bong hits 4 Jesus, please.