I found Ron Burnett’s How Images Think a little hard to read. For me it was a bit dense and wordy and took me a while to dissect Burnett’s main points, especially through what I found to be somewhat flowery prose.

What caught my eye, however, was this question Burnett poses:

“Does human participation in and acceptance of image-worlds require new definitions of history and a radical re-imagining of what it means to engage with events, both near and far? Are new definitions of place, locality, and community needed? Are images a dramatic move to an oral culture[…]?”

I was really confused by this incredibly dramatic barrage of questions. I’m not sure I understand what Burnett means by this and I’d be interested to see what others think of it, because it makes as little sense to me in context as it would out of context. 

It may be because I don’t find images to be as much of a cultural phenomenon that Burnett seems to. We are a visual organism - we have eyes, after all. I think that our growing ability to preserve and share images has led to a greater ability to understand life, whether it be a picture of a kid from a country we’ve never visited or a snapshot of a newly discovered virus from an electron microscope. But by no means do I think that this requires a new definition of history - what would that even be? What does it mean to move to an “oral culture” (and are we not one already, in a sense?)? 

I found Burnett’s writing to be wrought with jargon that’s meant only to strike a chord with a certain type of person. I’m picturing a mustachioed,  bespectacled Park Slope resident reading this in his restored brownstone while drinking an organic IPA and flipping through Polaroids, but that may be just me.

Rough draft of the first radio piece on dating.

I really enjoyed Rebecca Williams’ piece on Living With Cancer, and found it to be a quite emotional and interesting story.

Throughout the three parts of the expose I found myself wondering a lot about how Williams was able to find these people that she interviewed. How do you search for people that are able to best frame the story you have in mind? Or do you let these people frame the story’s path for you? I hope to ask her about her experience in finding subjects for her stories, as well as what to do if you interview someone who ends up not being as good as a storyteller as you thought.

Obviously the challenge in radio is to provide voices that are engaging, clear, and tell a story well. I wonder how Williams is able to find all three of these in a person, or what she does if someone only fulfills half the criteria.

On a separate/more critical note, it was a little hard for me to grasp the overall structure of this story. She jumped from very scientific analyses to personal stories, but I didn’t really find an overarching theme that linked all of these pieces together in one cohesive way. I think in the end it was really interesting and well done, but at times it was hard to imagine where she was going with the story. I’d like to ask her about her thought process in structuring stories.

This week I chose to do an audio create for ambient noise, and recorded what it’s like going through the maze that is my house; and I interviewed my housemate Nina and her sister about one of their favorite childhood memories. Those, and my audio project interviews, are all on my soundcloud page.

I also did two Daily Creates. I’m glad that we had more writing-based creates this week, because I enjoy that more.

And now, off to New Orleans for Spring Break!

I’m going to avoid the vowel u.

Today I went to a baby shower for a relative of mine. She is going to have a baby girl in a month and a half so I got to hang in a catering hall watching her open gifts of diapers and rattles for quite a while. In the middle of the baby shower, the roof opened up and a villain flew down and grabbed all of the presents and then I went with my mom to get a bagel.

Everybody was well dressed, and everybody was a mess

——

Oh all the girls played mental games, and all the guys were dressed the same

 

(I’ll Try Anything Once, The Strokes)

I found the stories in Radiolab’s “Deception” broadcast really interesting, especially the story of the con-woman Hope.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the style of broadcast that Radiolab used, especially the way they layered sounds and used sound effects in their stories.

For the most part, I find sound effects somewhat effective in radio stories to add to ambiance. But I found myself distracted by the jarring background music sometimes - especially when it was paired with people talking in the background as well. 

There seemed to be a pattern of moving between two or three speakers very quickly, sometimes having them reiterate each other. When coupled with background noise or sound effects, it’s more cacophonous. I thought it was especially distracting with the story of Paul Ekman, which I think is something better told with a visual aide, especially during his description of different expressions. It was really hard to visualize what he was talking about when his discussion was interspersed with the interviewer every other second.

The most effective use of this layering was during the section on pathological liars, when the woman is asked out in the elevator. It gives a sense of claustrophobia, which I think was appropriate for that scene. Other than that, I found their use of sound effects really distracting, especially with some of the more disturbing/erratic sounds they used, like the weird guitar and digital sounds around the 47-minute mark.

I think that Radiolab’s show was well-researched and, content-wise, I really enjoyed it. However, I think that its editing made it harder for me to soak up the information, especially in comparison to the NPR story.

I did a bunch of daily creates!

I wrote a response for The Zen of Listening here.

All of my audio clips can be found on my soundcloud. I interviewed people about Aja’s question: What’s the worst thing you ever did as a kid?

In Shafir’s The Zen of Listening, one quote really stood out to me: “Listening.. is centripetal; it it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.”

When I first read this line I was quick to disagree. But as I thought about it more, and read Shafir’s reflection upon it, I thought more about what that means. “We can close our eyes, but not our ears,” Shafir says.

The author discusses how sounds envelop you and can integrate us into our environments. She romanticizes the nostalgia for radio and how it has connected communities and nationalities, even so far as to reference Benedict Anderson’s imaginary communities.

But I think there’s something to be said about how auditory forms of media can also create a disconnect - people walking around listening to podcasts and music and totally tuned out to to what’s happening around them. And as Shafir notes, after its conception, localized radio shows often created a disconnect culturally or politically based on what the shows were about.

Obviously there’s a lot of proof for how radio has united us, but I’d be interested in going deeper into how it’s potentially created discord as well.

I asked my roommate this (about myself) and she said, “Something with jelly. Something moist.”

I was also thinking of some jam-based pastry. Strawberry jam. As my roommate and I discussed, jam-based pastries (what do you call those? Are there names for them?) just seem more exciting and friendly than dry ones. Like croissants. And I like to think that I’m pretty exciting and friendly. When I want to be, that is.

Daily Create: A photo of your fondest memory?

Video #3: Life at a co-op. I live in Vail and I interviewed some of my housemates about their experiences in the co-ops so far. Check out my house, y’all.

Two Daily Creates: First, something brand new: my shiny new computer charger that I bought when my old one kicked it.

Second: Something you’ve made. I got this sweater made!

Daily Create: Upload a drawing of a place you’ve been, but NEVER want to go back to.

Ohio.

Video Project #2: A re-creation of the museum scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 

This is one of my favorite scenes of all time, from any movie. John Hughes offers a great perspective on the greater meaning of the scene in the context of the movie’s plot, especially the last few seconds with Cameron.

I decided that this would be a fun scene to do in U of M’s art museum, which I had never visited before, and I was lucky enough to have three friends willing to play these three characters. I used my iPhone to film it and iMovie to edit, which is why it’s kind of janky, but I’m happy with the end result, since it only took about an hour and a half to do the whole thing!

The Daily Creates this week seemed really sound-based, which I didn’t really buy, but I enjoyed the readings this week quite a lot. 

All of my daily creates are here.

My response to The Reality Principle is here.

My response to Writing Movies for Fun and Profit is here.

“Writing Movies for Fun and Profit” offered an interesting take on how movies are written and produced, and the formulaic process behind their success, which I have never really thought about.

If I were ever crazy enough to write a screenplay, this seems like pretty straightforward, solid advice. But I looked into this essay a little more and found out that the two guys who wrote it, Tom Lennon (who I loved in 17 Again, shamefully enough) and Ben Garant, are known chiefly for Night at the Museum, Herbie: Fully Loaded, and Reno: 911.

It’s interesting because while these aren’t movies that are really known for their stylistic nuances and charming prose, they did make money - Night at the Museum made half a billion dollars within the first five months of its premiere in theaters.

Reading an essay like this that’s written from the perspective of these two writers/actors is interesting because I wonder if screenwriters from different genres that aren’t necessarily action or comedy (which I feel like these authors are mostly referencing - though not exclusively) would approach the screenwriting process differently. I wonder what kinds of “nonconventional” (by the authors’ definition) movies exist that don’t follow this three-act formula and have still done well. I’m not much of a movie buff, so I don’t have a lot to go off of, but I’d love to discuss how the authors’ ideas can be reinterpreted. What about foreign films or non-Hollywood productions? 

I guess my main point is that while I find their advice credible, I really hated Herbie: Fully Loaded and it’s hard for me have 100% faith in the people that made that happen.

Daily Create: Retitle a movie poster to make it more accurate. This movie was so awful.

S omething H as I rate R ationale T oday

Daily Create: Create some kind of pattern of things on your desk right now.

Kelefa Sanneh’s “The Reality Principle” discusses the rise and evolution of the reality television genre. He draws from a few major publications that have attempted to dissect reality TV and make us “take it more seriously.” These statements, and his excerpts from Jennifer Pozner’s “Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV,” made me think about how we consider reality TV’s place in society, and what it means to us.

Reality TV advertising and product placement accounts for over 58% of all product placement on TV, even though its viewership lags far behind more popular dramas. It’s easy to film, low cost, and easy to advertise, which makes the genre lucrative for networks that are looking for a quick buck. Its prominence on TV has obviously skyrocketed, as Sanneh notes, but for me, its growing presence does not necessarily warrant a more “serious” analysis of what I think is the most basic definition of trash television. 

Granted, the social stereotypes and situations that we observe in reality TV can be, at times, indicative of our culture. But I think that discussing why everyone on “The Real World” is an awful person is a futile endeavor.  Cast selections are purposeful, and even if you put eight nice people in a house together for four months they’d probably end up losing their minds. 

Overanalyzing the day-to-day interactions of the women on “The Bachelor” or the characterization of competitors on “Survivor” distracts from real, underlying societal issues that aren’t going to be solved through discussion of why The Bachelor chose That One Pretty Girl over the other one. We watch reality TV it’s not reality - it’s an escape from it. Trying to derive social meaning from eight wasted 25-year-olds is pointless. 

My first video for the video project. This is what dinner at my house looks like.

I liked the readings for this week a lot - I never knew that Camp was an actual thing. I’m working on editing my first video and am hoping to have at least two up by Wednesday.

My reading response to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” can be found here.

Daily Creates can be found here.

Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” was one of my favorite readings so far. I’m a huge, huge fan of campy stuff, but never realized that it had enough of a presence to warrant academic reflections on it.

I found Sontag’s essay interesting first because I never realized that “camp” extended beyond movies and TV. Who knew that Swan Lake is considered campy (something with which I completely agree)? Her mention of things like 18th-century “Art Nouveau” Tiffany lamps and the like offered a new perspective of just what the idea of “camp” means beyond the Buffy the Vampire Slayermovie.

A few lines in “Notes on Camp” made me laugh, but are also what I find to be wholly accurate descriptions of Camp: “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious” and “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”

I was a bit confused about Sontag’s need to clarify the relationship between “the homosexuals” and Camp: “Camp taste is much more than homosexual taste,” she says, and wastes about three paragraphs comparing the relationship between “the Jews” and liberalism with the one between “the homosexuals” and Camp. She fails to offer much of an explanation as to why this clarification is warranted and I wonder what influenced her decision to include it. I know that drag queens, crossdressing, and enhanced sexuality or sexual ambiguity can be aspects of Camp, and I wish that Sontag had ventured into it more - though I suppose that the fact that this was written in 1964 may have affected the tone and focus of the article.

Despite this weird argument, I found Sontag’s article to be interesting less because of its specific arguments but more because of its existence as a piece of academic writing: she mentions in the beginning that defining Camp may tarnish the cult of Camp, which I kind of agree with. I’m not sure a deep analysis of what I would call an accidental phenomenon is really necessary, but it’s interesting to look at attempts at giving a purposeful definition to it.

Daily Create: Draw a picture of a new invention.

Daily Create: Take a photo that represents math at work in the world.

The Dewey Decimal System! God knows I have no effing clue how this works despite being forced to watch Tomes and Talismans in middle school.. but it includes numbers, so that’s math, right? (Right?)

… being attacked by a panda. I hate pandas so, so much. So I avoid zoos and the forests of China.

DS Video Project: Goals

In 2009 I took a brief (and some may say ill-fated) foray into the world of video creation, iMovie, and YouTube. This is one of the results (and my biggest YouTube hit to date, with nearly 300 views. Don’t be too impressed). This whole phase came shortly after my acquisition of a new MacBook and updated iMovie, which I used to poorly splice together clips of a local news story about a meth lab and some terrible Jennifer Aniston movie that I’ve never seen for the amusement of my cousin.

Three and a half years later I’ve been asked to revisit this stage in my life and once again venture into iMovie for class. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to make my three videos about, but I do have a few goals I’d like to meet while completing this assignment:

• Try out new iMovie features! I haven’t done much with iMovie since “Meth Happens” (where I clearly did the bare minimum) so I’d like to explore more of what the application has to offer.
• Attempt to make at least one documentary-style film. I’m not sure what the content will be - maybe life in a co-op? - but I think that will challenge my (nonexistent) video-editing capabilities.
• Make another video splicing existing ones together, and make it less terrible than “Meth Happens.” I’d like to see if I can make a video manipulation with some of the existing YouTube videos I’m a fan of.
• Emulate some of my favorite vloggers? I’m a huge fan of the Vlogbrothers, charlieissocoolike, and communitychannel (like the rest of YouTube, basically), but if I ultimately decide to make some sort of more personal video I’d like to see what I can draw from their work.

In summary: anything would be better than my first YouTube creation, but let’s hope I can take it a step further this time.

I just registered for this class so I had a lot of catching up to do, but I’m enjoying the daily creates as well as the opportunity to use tumblr outside of reblogging pictures of Naya Rivera and Cher Horowitz. Apologies to my (very few) followers whose dashboards have been bombarded with huge text posts. 

My reading response for tomorrow is here.

My review of the Michigan Public Radio website is here.

Past video/reading responses are here (“The Machine..”); here (RiP!); and here (Web 2.0).

All daily creates can be found here.