The Soundtrack of Life

The junior high youth group I help out with recently began a media fast. The general idea is to cut back on the noise in our lives by cutting out cell phones, television/movies, music, video games, and internet - not necessarily ALL of those things, but one or a combination, and all within reason. Obviously the internet is necessary for homework, cell phones for family, and so on. It's only been a week and a half, but wow! I usually listen to music all the time and now there is so much quiet... I had the most productive week of my life! This fast lasts a month and I'm really interested to see how I will feel at the end. Will I think differently? Although the point of this fast isn't about moral issues, I think I might view some things in a new light. I'm losing the desire to have so much noise all the time. Television has been amazingly easy to let go of! music, not so much, but I'm working on it...
The fast has also forced me to use my time in more productive ways. The biggest change I've noticed so far is that I fall asleep a LOT faster at night. My mind is so much less cluttered at the end of the day, and I have usually gotten so much work done that I am just ready to completely relax.
I think we all know, on some level, that we are surrounded by noise most of the time. Everywhere we go, there is music playing, people talking, lights flashing, images bombarding us from every side... but how would we change if there was less? It's an interesting question... I've been pondering it quite often in the last few days. I have debated both positive and negative, felt bored and productive... what do you think life would look like?

Itt tech comericals

After watching a couple of Itt tech commericals i noticed something interesting, not only were all the people who were in the commericals male, the colors in these videos are always very bright. After seeing a couple more, i noticed a trend, they usually always showed these men with their cars, with dirt bikes, in a nice house, or at the carnival with their kids. It's like they are trying to say that these men make a lot more money now that they went to this college..and also that the college is bright, happy, and easy.
The questions i also would like to know is
-Are they trying to guilt men? One comical watched (not the one here but another one) had a man with a baby saying something to the effect that he knew this was best for his family..it's like there saying if the guys don't go to Itt tech they will be losers, or won't be able to make money or something.
-I also wonder what kind of message they are trying to send considering none of the commericals I have seen have feature a women as someone who has graduated. They usually show the women next to the man, holding him, or taking care of their child.



Video reference note: this isn't the best quality, but it's the only one i could find that shows what I'm talking about.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=37231472&searchid=3fe9f238-5074-45ee-a4b0-28b1e0f7d6e1

The Counter Post

From our discussion today I believe the better example would be Christina Aguilera instead of Demi Moore. Britney and Christina danced and sang on the Mickey Mouse Club and later became worldwide “celeb-poptarts” in the late 90’s (and present). Both created controversy with outfit choices and music selection. I’m sure no one will forget Christina’s second album and vamped up look as “X-Tina”. Or Britney’s VMA outfit and romp on stage with a yellow snake. Besides having Platinum selling albums, blonde hair and constant cleavage that is about where their similarities end. My point is, when Christina got married and had her son Max, she changed her priorities. In fact, she reinvented herself much like Madonna. She changed her clothes, hair color and even make up, to a more retro 40s glam. Her music also changed. She co-wrote many of her songs and the album itself was a throwback to the 30s and 40s. You did not see her going out with Paris Hilton sans undies while having two small children at home. You did not see her shave her head and end up in rehab. You did not hear about Christina’s husband making a rap album and staying out partying till the wee hours. Christina has evolved into a sexy, mature wife and mother. She, unlike some celebrities, put her family first and her career second. I’m not saying that Britney neglected her children (completely), but losing custody of your children and your estate is not every parents dream. I am not dismissing the fact Britney’s life choices have been exploited, but she did make them.

The Business of Being Born

I watched the movie "The Business of Being Born" this morning and it made me reflect upon many things about my three deliveries. Besides my own deliveries I also have been blessed with the privilege of witnessing and assisting in two other deliveries, but all of my experiences were in hospitals. The movie made me angry with the medical system in the U.S. related to pregnancy and delivery.
The questions it brought up were:

• Why do we always have babies in hospitals?
• Why do insurance companies have problems paying for home deliveries, when the cost is so much less?
• When, in our society, did we decide that deliveries in hospitals were always safer?

Is Britney Really Back?

I'll be honest - I've been a fan of Britney Spears for a while now. I think I just really want her to finally be happy and get her life in order - especially after all she's been through. But when I saw her new 'Womanizer' video, I started thinking about the Britney obsession. (I didn't post the video because there's some nudity, and although some would say it's tasteful, others might not agree. )

Anyway, I'm watching this video and I'm thinking, "why is she naked? It has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the video..." Maybe she's proving to the world that she's back and she's hot! So then I proceed to thoroughly analyze the entire thing, passing judgement on her for why I think she's doing all these things... and then it hit me! Maybe she's not entirely to blame.

We glorified her when she was just a kid and told her to dress provocatively so that she would make money... I believe there's a word for that...

Then we followed her every move in the media, tearing her down for any little thing we DIDN'T like and only loving her when she did something we DID like. We poured our money out on her and on tabloids, setting her up to fall - then mocking her when she did.

Bebo Norman said it well:

"I'm sorry for this cruel, cruel world

We sell the beauty but destroy the girl...

I'm sorry we told you fame would fill you up

And money moves the man so drink the cup"

How much of this mess is actually Britney's fault?

Obama Inauguration

Well we now have a new president. What an amazing point in our history. This is what Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned so many years ago. I honestly never thought i would see an african american sworn in as our president. What a proud moment in history.

Did he just buy stock?

I was just watching TV recently when this commercial came on:



It got me to thinking, what is it really about this commercial that caught my attention? First of all, there is the allegation that a baby can buy and sell stocks. This seems absurd. Sure, this is meant to signify that the site is easy to use and accessible to everyone, but a baby? It seems a lot like Geico's recognizable "So easy, a caveman can do it" motto. Is this meant to harness some of the success of those commercials?

There is, of course, the fact that the baby can talk, which just adds to the ridiculous nature of this commercial. The main intent is to attract customers to the site, but the commercial was also created to make us laugh. The vomiting at the end makes me wonder if that's really what got my attention, some crude humor?

I realize that commercials that get my attention entertain, rather than inform. I'd pay more attention to something like the above or a Geico commercial over say, for instance, a car commercial stating that their car is more roomy than the competitor's.

Perhaps this kind of commercial is simply necessary to appeal to their audience, us; something that will grab our attention and keep it throughout the 30-second spot.

Untitled

Talking about Blood Diamond in class has led me to ask myself a few questions...such as why do we feel sad and like we need to do something after watching this movie? Why isn't more being done? What would it take to make a difference? The only conclusion that I can draw is that it takes more than just seeing. I think that we must be a part of it and truly experience it in order to make something happen. Yes you can watch the movie and feel bad and perhaps do something or in most cases not, but I believe that our culture focuses on the real experience and how much of a difference it makes. In order to truly grasp the lives of a different culture we need to go there and place ourselves in their shoes and then maybe more would be done...

Zeitgeist: The Movie You Should Have Seen

*Spoiler Alert* We might all be chipped*Spoiler Alert*

So, with the closing of the current administration and the birth of a new one, there is no better time to plug an amazing film I was introduced to about 6 months ago. Now, to start I must state that I am no major taker of propaganda film or ideas but this movie is quite persuasive. The movie that I am discussing is Zeitgeist.



This amazing film is so destructive that the government has actually gone more than out of it's way to stop it from going into mass distribution. While mildly it is mildly difficult to obtain a copy of your own, I buy a copy on eBay, it can be viewed online via their website (www.zeitgeistmovie.com).

Now, the question you the reader might be asking yourself is, what does this have to do with anything? Well, having just spent the last couple of classes discussing mass media and how we are being put down by ad populum(appealing to the people) politicians, mass culture, mass reproduction and, a small variety of other things there is no better time to look at how the government might be stringing us along.

I will add however that this movie is quite pessimistic, though I will say it for the most part only raises questions, towards religion (mostly the 3 Abrahamic religions), 9/11 and, the Federal Reserve.

Our Clothes

You can tell a lot about people by how they look. It is interesting to me when people say "what counts is on the inside". I do believe this to an extent, but that doesn't mean people don't dress the part they play--or want to play (which also says something about their personality--they don't like who they are). I see people who want to be pretty, people who want to be punky/emo/edgy, people who like football, and people who like skateboarding. I see people who care what others think, and people who don't. I see people who are confident in themselves and people who aren't. I see people who know exactly who they are, and people who don't. I see the cheerleaders, band "geeks", jocks, and "nerds", those who strive to be successful, and those who are along for the ride. I see all these things every day--and that's just in our class. It may sound like I'm stereotyping, and I guess I am. Don't get me wrong, I don't really prejudge so much as observe. I just thought it was an interesting little tidbit.

"Dora Generation"

Most people who have watched preschool cartoons recently may have noticed the push toward raising bilingual children. Shows such as Nickelodeon's Dora the Explorer and Disney's Handy Manny, demonstrate a cultural push toward a nation of many languages, but most notably English and Spanish. This is a complete departure from the environment in which I was raised. Foreign languages weren't even thought of until high school. Now preschoolers are given the ability to know both languages' versions of many different words and concepts. This is a cultural shift and a way to teach children tolerance. All languages and cultures are to be embraced. Whether people agree with this shift or not there seems to be little choice but to accept it.
It is interesting to note that not too long ago Congress was trying to pass into law that English be the official language of the United States. If the debate plays out for a few more years as the "Dora Generation" ages they will most likely feel there is little need to name an official language as they have grown up surrounded by different languages.

Twilight=girls liking bad boys?

Movies, it seems there are always movies coming from books these days. The most recent one I’ve seen is Twilight that came from a book written by Stephenie Meyer. In short, the movie and book is about a girl who falls in love with a vampire. After reading a few of these books and watching the movie I realized what an odd culture we have become. We have become a culture that tells the young females to go with the "bad boys" the ones that are off limits in society's eyes. In this particular movie, it was a vampire, but it’s true, if you look at movies, cartoons, and tv shows, girls are always “head over heels” for the bad boys. Another example of this is in television shows you see the girls almost loathing the nerdy boy while running off to their jerkish boyfriends. What are we teaching the females of the generation? To me it seems like we are teaching that 1. It’s ok to put up with bad boys/jerks 2. We should put up with them 3. We should love them. I really wonder if this has an big impact on single girls, for me it didn’t but when I talk to my friends, they tell me they are more interested in the bad boys.

The New Barbie

http://www.ibabuzz.com/aparentlyspeaking/2008/07/18/newest-barbie-a-skank/
I came across this picture of a newer barbie and was completely shocked. It surprises me that this barbie is made for little girls to play with. I wonder what this is teaching the young girls of this generation. I know some may say it's just a toy and it's absolutely harmless, but I strongly believe that whatever we see or whatever we expose ourselves to has an effect on us. For example, in our text book when it talks about the certain fonts that restaurants use we seem to automatically associate what font goes with what type of restaurant. This makes me ask the question when did we begin to associate a certain font with a certain type of food...Obviously we are exposed to so many things each day without even knowing what it's doing to us and this newest barbie makes me wonder what effect it will have on the children that see or play with it...

The semiotics of snow

(Image source: Spokesman-Review)

Snow is a natural phenomenon, not a cultural one, right? Science rather than cultural studies. Still, cultural studies is interested in how people interpret their world, and all anyone is talking about here lately is the snow. It's been not only the top story, but the top three stories, in the local newspaper for more than two weeks now. And SFCC classes, which were supposed to begin today, have been postponed due to snowy weather. So...

A few observations: the unusual amount of snow this winter seems to represent two main things: the presence of community and the absence of context.

First, community: as others have observed, this season has been all about working together as a community. Very old-school and uplifting: neighbors helping neighbors, people digging or pushing out random strangers' cars, etc. I've talked more to my neighbors in the last three weeks than in the previous six months in which I've lived here; everybody's outside shoveling snow instead of inside watching TV. It's kind of nostalgic; there's almost a pre-modern feel to this existence. (Setting aside the occasional case of someone threatening to shoot snow plot drivers, or actually shooting at them.)

The postmodern part, on the other hand, is the sense of contextlessness that so much snow seems to create. In part, this is just a matter of not knowing how to interpret this natural phenonomen: what's a lot? People in North Dakota or Alaska might find Spokane's snow-fueled discombobulation kind of amusing, whereas people in Southern California, or even across the state in Seattle, might freak out after about an inch on the ground. I've noticed that the current Spokane total of about 60 inches doesn't sound nearly as bad as it does when expressed as "five feet" of snow.

Something over 20 roofs (mostly of commercial buildings) have collapsed due to snow weight in Spokane so far. Should I be worried about my home's roof (or the roofs of the places where I shop and work)? Presumably, there's a right answer, but I don't have access to it; the various news reports basically say "it just depends." What will happen tomorrow? Of course, nobody knows for sure, but our collective attempts to impose understanding on confusing data sometimes just add to the confusion: the other day, for example, the newspaper ran a story on the weather and a weather forecast, each of which put forward completely contradictory predictions. How to feel about all this is, simply put, confusing.

Then too, the blanketing of the landscape in snowy white only adds to the sense of contextlessness. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison discusses the frequent trope in American literature of an "impenetrable whiteness" (which she argues is connected to white Americans' encounters with blackness). Discussing Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, she describes Poe's treatment of "the visualized but somehow closed and unknowable white form that rises from the mists at the end of the journey" (32). Encompassing whiteness is symbolically powerful, and more than a little scary.

Think of this: a tiny, apparently weightless snowflake landed on a roof. Joined by millions of its fellows, the snowflake eventually helped create enough weight to collapse that roof. This has happened more than twenty times in the last twenty days. Tomorrow, presumably, it is about to happen again. And all there is to do is wait, and wonder.

(I'm ready for spring.)

TIME Person of the Year

My wife just bought me a copy of TIME magazine's annual "Person of the Year" issue. This year's recipient is Barack Obama--no surprise there. (I think "World Waits with Baited Breath to Learn Identity of TIME Person of the Year" would have been a funny headline on The Onion about a month ago.)


I haven't seen semiobama do anything with this so far (maybe I missed it?)*, but the striking thing about the cover is that it is a direct take-off of the famous poster series by an artist named Shepard Fairey that circulated in the weeks leading up to the election. Here's one of Fairey's posters from the series:

And here's the TIME magazine cover:

The point to be made here is not that TIME is imitating Fairey: that's beyond obvious. Nor is it exactly a "tribute," to Fairey or Obama, either one. Republicans might argue that TIME is here revealing its biases by casting the new president in a light that his supporters clearly approve. But it seems even more likely that whoever selected this cover for the "Person of the Year" issue is up to something a little more subtle.

The TIME cover uses several visual gestures (colors, the rather stylized yet realistic artistic style) to acknowledge the Fairey posters, but superimpose onto it several words and images that aren't immediately clear. If you look closely, you can see a windmill, part of an American flag, a snippet of a headline ("Breaking News: Barack Obama...") on Obama's forehead, and (more proimenently than anything else) a dollar sign, just below the president-elect's left ear. None of these images seems exactly to be a clear "message"; together, they form something that might be described as more like a "texture." They resemble the various symbolic and anti-counterfeiting design features on a dollar bill.

What message does this send? That Obama will one day be one of the honored presidents on American money? Somewhat less favorably (or more ambiguously), that the economy is the biggest issue he will face as a new president?

At any rate, it's an interesting example of a publication taking control of a candidate-sponsored image (sort of; Fairey's posters weren't "official" campaign documents, but prints were available for sale on Obama's campaign website) and using it to its own ends. Rather than saying "we're willing to present you in the way you and your supporters want you represented, Barack Obama," TIME seems to be saying "Now that you're elected, you might think you control the message, but in reality, you belong to us."

UPDATE: I didn't look closely enough; the TIME cover doesn't imitate a poster by Shepard Fairey; it is by Shepard Fairey. Almost as if Obama has, by some weird consensus, taken on a (semi-)"official" poster artist, with a distinctive style that will (presumably) be associated with the new president for some time. Hard to think of a precedent where a public figure (even beyond just politics) has been so closely associated with a particular artist or form of imagery. Semiobama doesn't seem to talk about the recent TIME cover, but they do discuss the original Fairey poster in some detail, and astutely, here.

*ANOTHER UPDATE: semiobama has now had its say on the TIME cover (and even provided a link to this blog--thanks, guys!), bringing several additional insights into the mix.