MIx Tape Reflection

Apologies for my near teary-eyed presentation today, but as you can imagine the project was a bit emotional. I made a mixed CD for my grandma and my mom and her siblings to remember all the good times they had with my grandfather who died last October of heart complications at the young age of 67.

I broke alot of rules used in Tripper's article and the WikiHow page.
For instance, I used songs from the same artist, back to back. Also, I lacked transitions between songs-but these were intentional. As I mentioned in class, my theme was "A Day in the Life" of my grandpa. Therefore, there are not always transitions between activities. Here is my track listing and rationale:

1. How Great Thou Art- Gospel Singers
2. The Lord’s Prayer- Mario Lanza

These tracks represent going to church on a sunday

3. Cruel War- Peter, Paul & Mary
4. Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright- Peter, Paul & Mary

Next, the family would come home and my grandpa would build in his workshop and listen to Peter, Paul and Mary.

5. Angelique-O- Harry Belafonte
6. Coconut Woman- Harry Belafonte

My grandpa would then come upstairs to see what the kids were up to, and find them dancing around the table to Harry Belafonte.

7. Down By the Old Mill Stream—Barbershop Quartet
8. Hello My Baby- Barbershop Quartet
9. Danny Boy- Suntones

Then its off to barbershop rehersal

10. Red River Valley- Woody Guthrie
11. This Land is Your Land- Peter, Paul & Mary
12. You Are My Sunshine- Soggy Bottom Boys

Theses are songs my grandpa used to play the banjo and sing to my mom and her siblings before bed

BONUS TRACKS:
13. I’ll Fly Away- The Jerry Eales Family (recorded by my family)
14. I’ll Fly Away – Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch

I really enjoyed doing this project; it gave me time to reflect on the emotions I have had since my grandpa passed, and also helped me appreciate a well thought out mixed CD, and determine that it is definitely a form of authorship.

Jerry Eales 1939-2006

Transcribing US Weekly

For my cut-up experience I brought in a bunch of my roommates' old US Weekly magazines. As you can imagine, there are lots of trashy articles I could have pieced together. Here is what it looks like:
I pictured this being read with the left column first, then the right rather than straight across. In that case, here is the transition between articles in the left column: "Shes smart and sharp-witted, and has a lot less high fronted with the image of an (unimpressive) penis poking out of smiley face-covered boxer shorts." Haha, can you tell where the transition is?

Here is the one in the right hand column: "The gold bauble, which TMZ.com claims to be worth dochine with John Mayer August 14 for an evening of flirting and sipping wine, they settled into a cozy booth."

Personally, I don't understand how anyone can cut and transcribe and have it make sense-this was hard!

Rythm Science

First of all, props to all the presenters this week, this book is hard to understand at points. In class on Wednesday we discussed a little what this idea of the influences of culture means to creativity. I guess I did not stop at this point in the book, simply because of my Human Development major background. There is a theory by Bronfenbrenner called the "Ecological Systems Theory" that explains how a person's life and personality (and therefore also their creativity) is created through the world around them. Below is a model of this theory. As you can see, there are many factors that influence who we all turn out to be, and of course this differs between people. As you can see there are many different levels at which an individual is affected by these factors, and Paul Miller is mainly talking about culture in his book, saying that we need this to reflect in our creativity to allow others to relate to us. Just take a minute to think about how each of these factors above plays into your life....how have each shaped you? How would, for instance, your parents' job choices have an impact on your creativity?

Reflection on Sampling Project

Let me first say that this is the most fun I have ever had doing an English Assignment. While I also spent about twice as long on the project as I would on a normal paper, it proved to be worth it. I really used alot of ideas from Lessig's Free Culture book to create my image about the public domain being off limits and the law cracking down on piracy.

For me, the second version (the one with all pictures from the public domain) was easier, simply because I took my own pictures. However, I feel that the first version where we could "rip, mix and burn" fully captured my ideals more and was definitely more challenging, but also more fun to create. I was able to search ideas on the internet, and most often I ended up finding more pictures that I hadn't even thought to use. This experience really showed me the value that other people's work can hold in sparking our own creativity.

Doing this assignment, and especially reading Lessig's book really helped me get a grasp on copyright policies. Overall I really think that since technology has come so far in the past few years, there definitely needs to be changes to copyright law to allow a "some rights reserved" type of society.

Just for fun, here are some of the original pictures I cropped/etc. to create my first sampling project-see if you can tell where I used them!

Free Culture

I surprisingly enjoyed Lessig's book for class. While I did write on my blog earlier that there was too much political mumbo jumbo in it, I actually ended up enjoying it by the end. While I did think that Lessig's own experience about the Eldredge case was relevant, it did get drawn out and again portray too much politics. However, I did not see this the reason that Lessig wrote the book to being with. Lessig was obviously upset about losing his case, as anyone would be, and I felt he did a great job making the reader feel like they were in the moment during this case. (Of course then in class we found out he took alot directly from his blog and plugged it into the book.)

Overall, I ended up being convinced by Lessig's argument. I do think that technology is ever changing, and that laws need to keep changing as well. There is so much creativity that will be lost, physically, if we do not do something about it now. I think that the e-books online are heading in the right direction-they limit users, but still allow users to have some privileges.

In one of my other classes we were actually talking about how one day, libraries may be obsolete due to new technologies. I would really hope this wouldn't be the case, but what do you think? Do you think we will ever see a day when we cannot take our kids to the library to pick out books on a rainy day?

Anticipating Sampling Project

I have to admit, at first I was a bit apprehensive about the sampling project. I wasn't quite sure what we were supposed to do or where are thoughts were supposed to come from. After class on Wednesday, I got a much clearer understanding of what a "visual argument" entails. It is not quite what I expected; the example in class seemed like just a simple picture to me. While there were some clear ides being represented, it was hard to get the exact concept the author was representing without his/her presence. I would assume that a good visual argument may be clear, however I think that there is always room for personal interpretation.

Also, I expected the picture to be more of a collage than this one. I was brainstorming ideas for my own project and it was alot of combining ideas or quotes from the reading into a large collage, but now I think I am going to take a different path; I'm not giving that away though. =)

Just for fun, I was going to use a poll to ask a question but I don't think there is a way you all can type in your own answers. So here are two questions, I am a huge nerd and love Halloween, post your answers on the comments if you so desire!! What are you going to be for Halloween? What was your best costume ever?

Free Culture

I have to admit, I was not thrilled to read 60 pages of a book for English class on top of every other commitment I have had this week. However, upon reading the first four chapters of Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture-The Nature and Future of Creativity" I learned to think outside of the box about authorship.

I have always considered music, television, paintings and other forms of "creativity" to be authorship, and this book gives solid reasons to continue to think this way. I really enjoyed reading factual concepts such as the dates that Disney created Mickey Mouse and the date that the radio stations were created; however I lack understanding for almost all things political. In every day life, politics bore me to death, and while I do have opinions on certain issues, I never really become interested in the hows and whys of systems or politics. Much of these first four chapters, while the examples were interesting, did express some political situations I am not familiar with.

For example, one of the main concepts addressed was piracy. Lawrence describes piracy as taking something of value to someone else and use it as your own without permission (Lessig 18). This sounds simple, right? Wrong, or at least for me. As I continued reading I found myself getting lost in the explanations as to why an instance was or wasn't a case of piracy. As I mentioned, I am not a big "think of the box" person when it comes to things such as this, but I do try. (Of course my way of trying consisted of looking to see if other posted on their blog about the subject to see if I could gain a better grasp on the material-unfortunately for me, Andy seems to know what he is talking about too well for me to understand as well, haha.)

Perhaps the reason I never think about these politics, or in this case the hows and whys of authorship and piracy is because of the last point Lessig makes in Chapter 4: "Every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy" (Lessig 61). If you think about it, there is nothing false about this statement...even if something seems origional, there was probably an outside influence somewhere on this idea. I am not saying that ll creativity is dead, but Lessig says,"The key to success is the brilliance of the differences" (Lessig 23).