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I DREAMED I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT--PAST SIMULATIONS
[ORIGINAL G, FALL 2009]
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"Education helps one cease being intimidated by strange situations."
--Maya Angelou
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
ORIGINAL G
Fall 2009
While previous simulations had been set in (more or less) specific times and places, Original G (the title is of course taken from Ice-T's seminal rap hit, O.G. Original Gangster ) took a different path in examining the response, in three separate historical periods/locations, to the death of Charles L. "Sonny" Liston. Liston was a terrifyingly dominant heavyweight boxer perhaps known best (and unfortunately) as the fighter beaten twice by Muhammad Ali in circumstances strongly suggesting he threw both fights.
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For his entire career, Liston was closely associated with the criminal underworld and the mysterious circumstances of his sudden death led some to conclude he might have been murdered. Members of the class participated in one of three groups: the Promoters (operating in the 1960s and 1970s); the Nationalists (roughly, in the 1980s); and the Moguls (in the 1990s). The Promoters' chief concern became the "death" of Liston and its effect on an upcoming early 1971 bout with George Chuvalo, while the Nationalists were concerned with rehabilitating his image as part of a youth charity campaign, since (according to class decisions about the simulation) Sonny Liston had not actually died in 1970, but his death had been staged so he could be relocated to the witness protection program. The third group, the Moguls, represented the entertainment industry trying to use Liston's image to defuse the East Coast-West Coast rap wars of the 1990s.
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The previously untried strategy of working from different historical periods to examine the "same" raw material (which was the idea of one of the students who had taken the course before, Megan Woodruff [Truck Stop at the End of the World ]) proved spectacularly successful. An added constraint placed on the solution to the simulation's problems was that each group could, in planning and executing their external organizational communication campaigns, use only the technology and communication channels that would have been available to practitioners at that point in history.
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All three groups did outstanding jobs defining characters, practices, resources and processes that fit perfectly into their respective historical periods. Also to the students' credit is that they found a unique and creative way to combine all three periods into a final performance, staging it as a combination of live and recorded enactments compiled in the form of an invented "whodunit" documentary (Mysteries Unsolved ).
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Fun Facts and Trivia
-- The inspiration for Original G came from Nick Tosches's excellent book The Devil and Sonny Liston (which was one of the required textbooks for the course) as well as Mark Knopfler's Song for Sonny Liston.
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-- The character of Sonny Liston (Martinez Nathaniel) achieved the dubious distinction of having been the only simulation character (so far) to have "died," then to have been brought back to life, only to die again.
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-- The name of the sleazy boxing promoter Johnny Dough (Greg Russell) is a play on the universal designator of the anonymous, "John Doe," as well as a reference to Johnny's extremely materialistic view of the world.
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