See Dee

I'd have to say that this was yet another project on which I spent a lot more time on than I originally thought I would. It's pretty amazing that this "more creative" approach (as opposed to writing a paper) actually makes a student learn and spend more time with the content while incorporating things that most people like, such as music.

That said, the general theme for my CD was "remembrance", as in a CD dedicated to a friend/relative/someone who has passed away or dedicated to help you remember that person. I think Jena and maybe a few others did one with the same theme. Why do this? I originally got the idea after reading of the passing of Kanye West's mom and hearing the song "Hey Momma". Although I didn't use this song, it did get me thinking about my own friends and family. The songs were ordered beginning with a couple songs I thought represented the bleakness and hopelessness one feels when going through a loss. Then came the "climax": one song I thought was among the most emotional I've ever heard, relating to death. Afterwards, the songs gradually became lighter and more hopeful, thus completing the figurative "circle".

I also noticed that the songs which started with a single guitar and/or vocalist all had different tones, and arranged them such-also choosing certain songs because of the way they started.

1 Mad World-Gary Jules
2 Seasons in the Sun- Terry Jacks
3 I See A Darkness -Bonnie "Prince" Billy
4 Hurt-Johnny Cash (cover of NIN song)
5 Time of Your Life-Green Day
6 Light Up-Snow Patrol
7 Dance With My Father-Luther Vandross
8 Where'd You Go-Fort Minor
9 Wild Horses-Natasha Bedingfield
10 A Little Pain-Olivia
11 Thank You-Dido
12 Pacific Wind-Ryan Farish
13 Now We Are Free-Lisa Gerrard

All in all, I think this project did teach me that making a successful Mix tape/cd required the same elements of composition, notation, selection, etc. as writing and organizing a paper or even drawing a work of art would. Choosing songs in of itself is a window into the author's own mind/body/soul.

I was going to try to remember and post my liner notes and reasons for selecting each song, but instead I'm going to ask anyone who reads this to figure out which song was the "climax", as well as any comments about the selections (as I'm sure there will be).






P.S. If any of you get the time, I urge you to try and youtube some of the songs up there. The videos really add to the feel.
I'm watching the basketball game right now, and Jimmy V was mentioned. This was his speech.

Mix n' Match

I admit, I was a little confused as to what to do with the cut-up project.

It was innovative. It was unique. It was something I hadn't done before. It was also very weird. I didn't accomplish much during the class in the computer lab. The magazine I brought in was a Sports Illustrated, which was not the best textual source to use due to it's numerous, ill-placed pictures, which unevenly parted the text. Nothing I tried in class was coherent, so I went back and tried again with some other magazines and old text books I had lying around. Using the method of taking half of each page, I did manage to make some coherent lines of text:

Modern day historians did not make committees to serve more than one purpose.
There were some partial exceptions to assign separate tasks to separate officials.

Yeah, although this doesn't exactly make the clearest of sense, it was the most coherent text I could produce.

All in all, I didn't expect much from doing this project, but it is always curious to physically see how language, words, and text can be intertwined and related, even when coming from seemingly different sources. "Such is the beauty of language."

It would have been maybe more beneficial to have spent more time on this, but I think that is something we all can do on our own as well.

Science of Rythm

My thoughts on the book we are reading in class, are mixed.

From one view, I do think that Spooky does present a somewhat compelling view or argument on sampling, albeit in a really abstract way. His use of scientific terms mixed in with philosophical ideas along with personal experiences and of course, his djing profession, combine to bring the reader a "unique" view of sampling and creativity concerning technology.

On the other side is the issue of the book, if you can call it that, being unreadable due to its lack of clarity, a clear argument, or a cohesiveness. I always thought that there should be a line drawn that seperates "art" from random abstract junk. I'm not saying this book is the latter, but I don't think it is the first, even thought it might represent a topic about the first. Is it different? Yes. Is it artistic? Probably. Should it pass for a book, a proper reading of "rhythm science"?

I don't know.

Remix

For this remix, I took Mandy's first picture and basically tried to find opposites or denials of each specific image that was in the whole picture. I made them a little transparent so one could see both the original and the covering denial of the image simultaneously. I know, I'm that good. (not really).

Sampling some sweet, sweet copyright.

So it's a sampling project you want.

As Sunday morning/night approached, I realized I had no clue what to do for this project. Thinking back to the graffiti example in class, I could feel the creative juices, with the help of some Red Bull, beginning to flow. I should never be confused for an artist, but I was determined to make copyright look good. Real good...Copyright never looked this good before.

Needless to say, that didn't really happen. With a full head of eccentric steam, I Google image-searched for "Copyright symbol", and didn't stop until .002 seconds later, when this crazy search was over. I chose a really neat symbol, because they all looked so different, and clicked "copy/paste" knowing I had the freedom to take at will anything I so desired.
After this, I spent about 10 hours on facebook.

Fresh off my google searching, I opened up adobe fireworks ready to dominate. Too bad "fireworks" dominated me. I had had very limited experience with photoshop in the past, but I mainly relied on any image editing via ms paint, which consisted of drawing lines all over the place. After tinkering around with various buttons and hoping for the best, I ended up with this:Yes, it's the Soviet hammer/sickle along with the scales of justice portraying some sort of conflict or balance, along with the US Flag and Constitution in the background reminding the viewer where copyright LAWS lie relative to our culture and freedom-concerning copyright.
I think.

Public Domain images aren't as nice as non-public domain images. That's why this looks like...not as good.

You can decide for yourself what that is "saying". (duh)

Getting to the real core of this overly long post, I did like this project a lot. Forcing us to use non-public domain images in the second picture made me realize the extent to which copyright stretches on the internet, and also why the second picture was harder to make. I personally liked the first picture the best, especially since it took me a good chunk of time just learning how to use the basic tools of adobe. My concept of copyright has not changed, just reinforced. This project brought abstract, visual elements to a highly literary, rigid, and lawful concept that is copyright. It was fun to do this and learn how to use the computer things at the same time. These class projects are continuing to surprise me, and I like it.

History Lesson

"To lose our long tradition of free culture, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and ultimately, our freedom to imagine."

As a final word on Lessig, I do believe that the book is an important analysis of the constraints placed on society and "creativity". This issue might not have a huge impact on us now, but in a few years when someone down the road is an aspiring director/writer/musician/etc. and has to deal with copyright, these ideas will become all the more important.

I am a firm believer in the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it". I don't think Lessig touched on how other civilizations or cultures handled the issue of creative property, but it would be worth a look into. What did they do? Where did they go wrong? How did they correct it? What are we doing wrong? Are we doing anything wrong? Asking these questions in relation to copyright is crucial in trying to understand our present and our future. The people that are asking these questions, such as Lessig, are why our future concerning creative property, is not hopeless.

Common Sense

Reading this book reminded me of a lecture by John Stossel("the 'stache), which I attended a couple days ago. The main point(s) of his lecture included
-lessening government controls (because:_)
-government controls usually end up hurting the people they are trying to help
and more importantly,

-government controls and regulations hinder new improvements and discourage experimentation and creativity

In the book, the idea of common sense was cited as reason for ruling against an airspace/property law, to protect the commercial enterprise. Even though this covers the main topic/thesis of the book, I'm still going to repeat: Where is our common sense? Where is the voice of reason when the consumer, the very people the companies are making a living off of, is being violated?

Plagiarize This

Almost as much fun as plagiarizing was, even more fun was telling everyone my homework was to plagiarize at will.
"I'm going to the library to pick out a book and completely plagiarize it for my paper."
...
"You're what?"

At first glance, I thought the assignment was going to be easy. When I actually got down to writing though, I realized that it reminded me of ghostwriting in the sense that I had to camouflage my writing in order to blend in with the plagiarized text. Furthermore, as a huge hint to anyone who's reading mine, I didn't know exactly how to go about blending my own text and the real text in-so I made up whole paragraphs instead of slyly inserting words or sentences and rearranging the syntax. Unfortunately for me, I do think my plagiarism should be somewhat easier to detect because of this.

Finally, I also did not feel a sense of guilt as some others said they felt in class. I did feel somewhat more detached, but objectively, I knew I had to plagiarize for the assignment and I did. I went to the library with a specific purpose in mind to pick out a random book, discredit that author's work, and use it as my own. As "cold" as that may sound, if it was the assignment, I had no choice other than to do it, and I didn't have any lingering doubts about it.

When I think about it, the difference between plagiarism and non plagiarism is a couple quotation marks and some brief annotation at the end stating where those words originated from. That's all it takes to change from receiving an "A" on a paper to getting kicked out of school.

I didn't like it

For my ghostwriting paper, I used my friend as the writer to base my work off of. Now I'm no Shakespeare when it comes to writing, but trying to emulate my friend's work was painful. Granted he's not a "writing" type of person, but when the first sentence of your sample paper starts with a run on sentence-you know you're in for a fun time.

Since I knew his writing style somewhat well before this project, I had a slight idea as to what I would be doing. As a concrete example, I borrowed a paper he had written previously on a somewhat broad subject and started from there. Naturally, when one approaches a very open ended project like this, one has to choose to write about a topic the author has almost no idea about. That's why I chose abortion (and the consequences on society of abortion), yes abortion, to write my "fictional" research paper on. I have no idea why I chose that topic, and more specifically the effects of abortion on society, to write about. Maybe I needed to get in touch with my inner pregnant woman dilemma, that all guys need to do...or not.

Run on sentences, random questions in the middle of the paragraph, improper use of quotations with no citations, and way too many pronouns were just some of the land mines I had to not only step on, but plant in the paper myself. Coming from a very structured, organized approach to writing and having to ignore that same "subconscious" writing voice in place of a looser, more liberal style was difficult to say the least. I could compare it to Tom Brady being forced to copy the form and throwing style of a high school quarterback. That inner "instinct" would tell him to keep his foot or hold the ball differently than the high school quarterback, yet he would have to ignore it. I also remember some others saying the same things in class.

Combine all that with subject material that I knew next to nothing about, and you have the ingredients for a winning paper. I just hope there was no permanent damage done.

Don't tase me bro!

Reading the university rules for academic misconduct made me feel like I was out on parole, scared that a "investigating officer" could raid my room for suspicious documents and send a whole SWAT team to tase me. (Don't tase me bro!)

It's always fun to see what different "communities" regard as particularly vicious and dirty tactics. We all live by a general set of guiding principles and common law, but the real fun starts when looking at the rules, both written and unwritten, in these smaller "communities." For example, in the sports circuit (except for baseball, which doesn't count as a true sport), steroids are the lowest form of cheating a player can instigate. Floyd Landis recently lost his tour titles because of this.

In the world of academics, plagiarism takes the place of steroids. Intellectual theft seems to be regarded as even worse than physical theft, with most of the critique and criticism directed at students. Where are the subjective microscopes for when professors poorly or even fail to credit the students who do most of their work for a publication? Issues like these are why plagiarism is not as clear cut as say steroids, for example.

I would be interested to see the university policy on plagiarism in say, music or the arts, but I wouldn't want to get tased.

When there's something strange in the neighberhood, who you gonna call?

There's not too much to write about this week, that I haven't already said. The authorship in popular media project went smoothly, so it's on to "ghostwriting".

Having just read the "Artful Deception" article, some things come to mind:
Not wanting to discredit ghostwriters, but if you really don't like it, don't do it. The very fact that there's a business for ghostwriters and ghostwriting makes it clear that just like anything else, it's a business. And of course, where there's a business, there's money involved. No one is forcing ghostwriters to ghostwrite. Simply put, ghostwriters are employees who get paid to do their job.

As for the issue of celebrities not writing their own books: that was not a big surprise to me. After all, they don't get paid huge amounts of money because they can write well. Politicians, in the same aspect, are politicians because they know how to sell their ideas and market themselves. They made their names because they can "sell" the words written for them.

That being said, issues of completely discrediting the ghostwriter or authoring something after the author's death are a bit ridiculous.

Only in today's world can a guy still write books years after his death.

Aura + Caffeine=This Blog Post

We're all meeting in the computer lab in 7 hours. That gives me and my "aura" plenty of time to blog out a good post. I just hope I don't wake my roommate up typing this.

Never really having looked at literature or any sort of work of art from the angle that we're discussing it now (Barthes, Walter), I have found it to be pretty interesting. The printing press, camera, tape recorder have all been pretty useful in my opinion as well as to anyone else who isn't Amish. From what I took away in Wednesday's class, I am led to believe that there is "aura" in this blog post, as well as every other single blog post, idea, picture, piece of work that is being produced for the first time. So the printing press, camera, and tape recorder all are responsible for killing aura because they take away the presence of originality and in essence, creativity. Modern technology has many benefits, but killing originality and creativity isn't one of them.

"Mechanical reproduction", according to Walter or someone in the class, "changes the reaction of masses towards art." This is pretty big. I didn't know one could incorporate something as doctrinal as the political practice of Marxism into an article involving something as abstract as "aura". Spreading the "wealth" of art to the common masses for the price of originality is an idea which seems obvious, but which I would never have related to Marxism.
I definitely didn't learn that in history 101.

I also wikipedia'd this to try to cleverly tie this into what we're doing in class tomorrow, and somehow incorporate it into this post. That didn't work out as planned, and neither did the conclusion of this post.

It's Wednesday and I'm Tired

So I'm posting on this blog as part of schoolwork. This is pretty interesting.

I spent the last 15 minutes trying to remember my password, so that wasn't a good start. It's Wednesday night which means I had English early today and am pretty tired after classes, sports, and a new martial arts/dance program which I just joined on a whim. I just had some late dinner, so what better time to write this than after a very unhealthy meal.

Speaking of eating, I didn't get to "digest"(hehehhehe) the articles we read in class today (Barthes) as well as I would've liked. I think I did a somewhat decent job of finding his thesis for the first article, but that's about it. It was pretty odd to read something relating to taking the author out of the textual picture completely, in an English class, but it's a new way to look at things so that's always good. Besides those articles, I think I've settled on Finding Forrester for my author/movie project. I remember it was a deep movie from when I saw it a while back, so it'll be nice to expand on it. Sean Connery also has a cool accent.

That's about it, I'm going to spend the next half hour trying to find the homework in Learn@UW because I'm bad with computers, so more English for me.

Hi

Hi, my name is Raj and this is my blog for my English 201 class. I will be updating this once every week with something that relates to the class.