McLuhan and Media Future

            The cigarette ads shown in class were terrible, and it amazed me how cigars were shown in such an accepting and good light. I hate cigars, cigarettes, pipes, really anything that makes smoke. I am highly allergic to smoke, whether that be cigarette or fire. My throat will slowly close the longer I am exposed to it, I have even gone to the hospital after I had stopped breathing 3 times. I just cannot understand why people still smoke today, I find it idiotic, rude, and completely poisoning to them and those around them. Then again they will die sooner, so hopefully everyone who continues to smoke will die out and cigarettes will be a thing of the past.

            The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects is 160 pages in length and composed in an experimental, collage style with text superimposed on visual elements and vice versa. Some pages are printed backwards and are meant to be read in a mirror. Some are intentionally left blank. Most contain photograph and images both modern and historic, juxtaposed in startling ways. The book was intended to make McLuhan's philosophy of media and communication, considered by some incomprehensible and esoteric, more accessible to a wider readership through the use of visual metaphor and sparse text. Marshall McLuhan argues that technologies, from clothing to the wheel to the book, and beyond, are the messages themselves, not the content of the communication. In essence, The Medium is the Massage is a graphical and creative representation of his "medium is the message" thesis seen in Understanding Media.

            By playing on words and utilizing the term "massage," McLuhan is suggesting that modern audiences have found current media to be soothing, enjoyable, and relaxing; however, the pleasure we find in new media is deceiving, as the changes between society and technology are incongruent and are perpetuating an Age of Anxiety. The Medium is the Massage demonstrates how modern media are extensions of human senses; they ground us in physicality, but expand our ability to perceive our world to an extent that would be impossible without the media. These extensions of perception contribute to McLuhan’s theory of the Global Village, which would bring humanity full circle to an industrial analogue of tribal mentality.

Curate Yourself

1) What is your reaction to the text you just read?
          I was not really interested in what I was reading. I am not a huge fan of Bob Dylan, so I had really no desire to really hold onto what I was reading. The history and story behind the song was a but interesting, but the overall short story could have been written shorter or more concise. I enjoy reading graphic novel or dialogue formatted stories, but I not a big reader more of a movie or audio book kind of person. I kept getting distracted when reading, it took too much effort to keep my attention on the text compared to other stories we have read in class, like the Goose Father, I found that story to be much more interesting. Same with some of the out of class reading, I enjoyed reading the Wonder Woman book the most, but also the graphic novels and Pride and Prejudice (that being my favorite movie to watch in class). I was not a fan of the fill that went with this reading either, maybe because I never listened to Bob Dylan, but I found movies like The East, Austin Land, the gamer one, Dead Man, and Amelia to be much more fascinating; I had also never seen or heard of most of those films and loved watching them in class.

2) What connections did you make with the story and discuss the elements of the work in which you were able to connect?
          I did not really connect with any of the story, but there was one line that stood out to me, "Every piece of gravel is unique, like snowflakes." I love snow, the cold, winter, and especially snowflakes. My senior year of high school, a family donated a couple of giant canvases, and being in AP Art I got to take one and make anything I wanted to be the center piece of the senior show. I took the saying, people are like snowflakes, each is unique, and for 2 months cut out over 100 paper snowflakes. I had to lay them all out and put books on them to make sure they are flat. I took removable adhesive spray and sprayed all the snowflakes, then meticulously laid them all over the canvas. I got a mixture of blues and purple spray paints and sprayed the entire canvas. Once dry I peeled of all the snowflakes and threw glitter all over. I titled the piece "You Are Unique" and it is still hanging in my home.

3) What changes would you make to adapt the story to another medium, what medium would you use, and what changes would you make?

          I would make it have either more dialogue and make it a movie portrayal or make is a more documentary styled piece. I would try to make it more about all of his music than one song and find out more about his life. I found the story to be boring and difficult to read, but I would not want to make the film fiction. I am a big fan of documentaries, and I love feeling like I learned something new by the end of one. Yet, I have also seen a lot of great movies that are non-fiction that are not in documentary form.

          Like the film 42, one of my favorite sport films of all time, I learned so much about the life and struggles of Jackie Robinson, but I was also entertaining and interesting to watch.I am not much of a reader but I always recommend films that reflect a true story, documentary or not. I love learning about events that have happened throughout history, about people who made a difference in the world, whether it is a bid or small difference. Saving Mr. Banks is another film I had re watched recently that fits into this genre. It is a beautiful film about the making of the Walt Disney film Mary Poppins, and I never knew how hard it was for Disney to convince the writer of the book to let him make the beloved film. I loved seeing what the studios, the merchandise and the technologies they had at that time, and I also love Tom Hanks and he played Walt Disney beautifully. There are many other films like this that I would recommend everyone see.

Games as a Medium

          Existenze is an interesting movie, from what was shown in class, I don't think I would want a bio-port in me. I did find how the gaming consuls are basically made up of organs and living tissue to be clever, but from what I have seen the movie is a bit confusing. It reminds me of Inception mixed with Alien mixed with Sword Art Online. I appreciated the take on how the movie portrayed the progression of gaming and technology, basically fusing into people. I feel that this could totally happen for I could see phones being implanted into our heads or contacts being able to record our lives. Gaming is already addicting to a point, I could imagine when gaming reaches this level people will become so dependent on technology that they will fuse it with their being to some point.

          With the reading on Tetris, I was amazed at how the game came about. Alexey made this for fun, on a computer that was extremely archaic, and in a Soviet Computer Science facility. He made this in his free time, basing it off an puzzle gam he use to play. The simplicity of the game and the overall goal is so easily universally understood that the game had to be successful. I enjoyed reading the back story of how games were coming together before Tetris was invented, which gave the story a nice structure. I also liked how Alexey made up the name for his game by fusing "tetra" meaning numbers and "Tennis" which is his favorite sport. I'm not a big gamer, but I do believe that all games are an art. I believe that anything that takes a special mind or a special practice is an art, whether that is gaming, movies, surgery, accounting, really anything the average person could not do without practice. I did use to play the one of the original Mario games on the Nintendo 64, and people had to create the game. They had to create the characters, create the world, the story, and through that art is made.

Long Form Media

          The East, deals with a span of eco terrorists and undercover agent "Sarah" goes to eradicate them yet becomes sympathetic towards her captor's cause. I wanted to finish the film in class, and plan to at some point. It reminded me of long form television with the music and fast passage of time, and with the amount we saw in class,  could see this film being 8 to 12 episodes long. My favorite part about these series is the story arcs I sometimes feel that feature films are either too long or too short and it can be difficult to find a happy medium in the amount of information given in a film. In long form television it is a lot easier to hold long complicated stories, and one can show multiple story lines with equal complexity.

          Stranger Things is the series I decided to watch, mainly because I haven't watched it since it came out and season 2 is coming out Halloween. I love the series, I find the way they set up the characters and the time the series has to let the audience gets to know the characters and really sympathize with them. My favorite character was Eleven and she isn't even really featured till a few episodes in, and I also love Will mom for she does such a great job in her role. The audience truly sympathizes with her, and I can't imagine how a mother must relate and I still can feel the pain of her character without having kids. I do have a cat though, that I love very much and thats how I related to her relentless work in finding Will. The main kids in the series are amazing too, not only the acting, but how relatable they are. I cannot think of another show that shows a group of kids so well, to the point where we understand how they think, what they believe in, their priorities, and to truly care about them in the series.

MultiModal Narrative

          Its like watching a mid life crisis, where one feels lonely with no salvation. The thoughts that you have seen it all, I had all these dreams, and I am not where I thought I’d be. Everyone sounds the same, everything in boring, yet he suddenly finds something different. Both the film and the novel followed this theme of a mid life crisis. The feeling of loneliness and the way you can suddenly stumble into an intimate relationship when traveling are large themes also. When traveling, one is open to new experiences, everything is different, thus opens people up to more intimate relations. The puppets have a split in the face that the film makers decided to not try to hide and this add a visual identity to the characters, as if they are all wearing masks. All of the characters have very similar faces, except the main man and the woman he becomes infatuated with has a different face compared to everyone else.
         The pacing of the piece is very slow overall, with stop motion the audience needs more time to read what is happening, thus effecting the overall feel of the film. The juxtaposition between the voice acting and the media is interesting, for the voices are super gestural in tone where as the puppet’s expressions are not very expressionistic, but their overall body language reads. Authorship is not pure, almost always when creating a work it is collaborative. For example, Dickens would work with his illustrators to help figure out the story or writers will work with editors who can help a lot with a work. Authorship now is more about celebrity status than its quality. Shakespeare is another example, we know that he had collaborators, many had played the parts, all we have are the stage manager’s play scripts for Shakespeare never published his work. As far as we know these versions of his plays may be completely different than what he had originally written.
          With the two films shown in class, one raises the question on why they were animated for they are so realistic to life. There seems to be a few scenes that show fantastic imagery like with the man's face glitching out in the first film and the car wrecking in the store. With the cuban film, the character design enhances the overall film for the fluidity of the drawings match the fluidity of the music. The rotoscoping is very evident, and I am not a fan of that style, but appreciate the outcome of the film. The overall content of both films is very adult, from having sex to cussing to fighting. 
       From the reading, I found the overall style of the graphic novel to be very interesting. I enjoyed the juxtaposition between the character design on the man vs the woman. The architectural design of the man enhances his inability to change where as Hana is drawn completely different, but the characters work together. The narration was written as if one could hear him, and the narrator was very different for it was his still born twin brother. The ending was frustrating, but the overall comic was enjoyable. There are three separate parts, the now, the past, and his fantasies. The fluidity of the narration and storytelling made the novel interesting and though the overall story is not the happiest one it was still a good book.

Author's Voice:

          Dead Man, Mystery Train, now Down by Law, director Jim Jarmusch definitely has a style to his films. Overall his films are similar in the style of cinematography, two in black and white, loves to follow characters walking through the environment, and staying on characters for uncomfortable amounts of time. He never hurries the story along and tend to be pretty minimalistic in set and design. There never seems to really be a clear plot, but all the stories are about a journey, but not a specific destination be the end. Dead Man, the lead guy is an accountant and goes to this tiny town for work, doesn't get the job, kills a guy, and is now on the run.

          Mystery Train has two Japanese  teenagers wanting to see the sights of Tennessee for they love rock and roll, but no set destination or goal in mind. Down by Law, the guys escape jail, but have no idea where they are going, just that they got to go. His films feel like the audience jumped into these peoples lives and are watching them in real time, no montages to condense time. Music seems to have an importance in his films as well, all playing music from the time or mentioning artists from the time. Mystery Train has a parallel narrative, three successive stories that take place in a small Memphis hotel on the same night. All of his characters tend to be loners, losers, low on money, petty, con men, yet they are all likable to a point. I would never want to know them or have any association with them, but as a viewer you don't hate them for most are not the best people but they are framed by others to be viewed as worse.

          Jarmusch seems to enjoy diving into different cultures in these films, Dead Man being the old west, Mystery Train showing the difference between Japanese and old American Culture, and with Down by Law shows a low class americans and an Italian immigrant. There is no female development, not a lot of screen time, and have no power, which I didn't enjoy about these three films. The main characters seem to be brought together through circumstances and that alone for they would never have been together otherwise, and this is the same for loyalty, everyone was out for themselves. He loves throwing in a foreign character who doesn't understand the culture they have been thrown into, and that way the audience gets to see an interesting point of view. The character development throughout the film is mainly accomplished through action and dialogue. They all are outsiders and it gives us a different point of view with a dry sense of humor and unexpected obstacles popping up everywhere. Yet, in the films it feels very empty in all the landscapes, the west and the cities all feel empty.

          Meshes of the Afternoon, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and Meditation on Violence are three films directed by Maya Deren , born Eleanora Derenkowskaia (Russian) was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.

          In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16 mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. This camera captured her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon, in Los Angeles in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. It is the first narrative film in avant-garde American film, which critics have said took on an autobiographical tone - for women and the individual. The loose repetition and rhythm cuts short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially avoids her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman's face. Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs. Very aware of the "personal film," her first piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world.

          By her fourth film, Deren discussed in An Anagram that she felt special attention should be given to unique possibilities of time and that the form should be ritualistic as a whole. Ritual in Transfigured Time began in August and was completed in 1946. It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas of the nature and process of change. Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. It was an attempt to "abstract the principle of ongoing metamorphosis," found in Ritual in Transfigured Time, though Deren felt it was not as successful in the clarity of that idea, brought down by its philosophical weight. Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.

Adaption:

          The screenplay I read was Devils Wear Prada, and I was amazed at the detail in the script. One could visualize the transitions and envision what the outfits could look like. I would choose to be the costume designer for this film is so focused on the fashion. I would enjoy researching what was in the latest shows at the time, the main pieces of fashion, and take inspiration from that. I love the juxtaposition of Andy at the beginning of the film compared to the other models of high fashion at the company. Looking at the screenplay from an actor’s point of view, I can see the how relatable Andy is without seeing a performance. The way her lines and actions are described, I see how audience members would instantly fall for her and care about her as a character. I find that pretty cool, and with a good performance from the actress, this can only enhance the movie’s enjoyment.

Goose Father


Most essential visual moments:

·      Setting: Apartment-balcony, Karaoke

·      Main theme: His loneliness, missing his family after 6 months and needed contact

·      Color scheme – cool greys and blue where the boy would have a cool palate

·      Protagonist: Gilho

·      Ages would be changed to 25 and 35

·      Scenes:

o   Need to establish that he has a family and that he is sending money to them / show his loneliness

o   The arrival of the boy – sitting on the door matt

o   He hates the goose – the boy never mentioned a goose

o   6 the next morning - boy made breakfast (uncomfortable to see a man preforming a woman’s role) – talks about his poetry

o   Walks in on the boy talking to the goose, tells him that the goose is his mom reincarnated – shows the difference in their thoughts

o   Montage – of the boy clinging to him, sponge on his feet saying poems

o   The boy felt emotional after watching a whale documentary, he took him to karaoke to cheer him up

o   Talking to wife about how weird the boy is, wife says to get a new one

o   Karaoke scene – the boy tried to kiss him, slaps the boy, boy disappears

o   He worries about the boy, telling the police

o   Goes to get a green card, man said he was so lucky, but he didn’t feel like it

o   Walking through the slums, comes across 2 prostitutes, he touched her breast but her hip kept appearing like a boys and in her eyes he say the boy – had a revelation

o   Goes to the Bar – talks about how horrid kids are these days, but they envy them

o   He returned with Taeyeong, both drunk from the bar

o   The boy is home – the snow begins to fall, there is a glow in the room

o   Taeyeong tried to pluck a feather from the goose

o   Gilho thought about killing the goose, choking it, but he didn’t – he compares himself to the goose

o   Then the goose mom scene – He asked the goose for forgiveness, he sees the goose as the boy’s mom – he sees life through the eyes of the boy

§  He saw the silhouette of a woman before he walked out on the balcony – but then when he goes out on the balcony it just the goose

§  Everything has a glow, there’s a full moon, everything has a warm glow, which contrasts the cool scheme the movie had before

o   Gilho says his final lines to the boy/ “I’ve been lonely, I’ve been lonely all my life”