DONE

wow! I can't believe this is the last blog post of my college career! i am thankful to bjorn for introducing all of us to the concept of blogging, and making it a little less scary. hopefully we can use our blagoblag skills to get ideas out onto the cyber web post-degree.

well, it has certainly been an eventful year. a full two semesters of poetry workshop and online bjorn classes, plenty of sewing down at the costume shop, and i even got to design my own musical.

although, sorry media relations, i would have to say african drumming was the most fun i have had all college. i leave you with this clip, be well comm dudes.

some world music

live music is still a form of media, yes? maybe it itsn't mass media, but it can help you think globally. khakatay, bridgewater's african drum ensemble, is having a concert this thursday.

for those of you who haven't been, it's an interesting time for sure. sound just fills horace mann auditorium, and people start getting into the groove.

if you go, you get to see yours truly wearing a dashiki:

so check it out! this thursday, at 8:00, in the Horace mann auditorium, located in Boyden Hall.

baraka

my roommate is doing a paper on non-verbal documentaries, and i thought the fine readers of my blog would like to hear about that genre. it's a cool one. theres a lot of time lapse in these movies, along with footage of landscapes, ruins, aboriginal cultures, and animals. The footage of all the scenes from around the world puts together an abstracted narrative as the film goes on, connecting themes but never with words, only with images and emotion. it's pretty cool. would recommend checking out. here's a cool scene from it:

filming is over (if you want it)

well, the zombie movie is shot and ready to be edited :). this is my favorite part of the filming process, mainly because i don't have to do anything. and boy did i do a lot on the set. i've only done films where one person needed specialty makeup, and here i was doing eight actors faces in various states of decay. then, we were short a zombie so i had to roll around in the dirt eating helpless campers myself.

here is some of the makeup i have done before, on an emerson student's film. it is supposed to be a shot for shot remake of the winkie's scene in david lynch's mulholland drive (the effects makeup doesn't manifest until the end):

Crispy Crepes (An Excerpt from Mulholland Drive) from Adam Talaid on Vimeo.

calling the undead

oh hi blag. i'm really excited about working on zombie makeup next weekend

should be a good time. i'm doing my zombie makeup research right now. i'm thinking grey zombies, because they have a more "freshly dead" look, which is easier to pull off. i need to make ten or so zombies, which is unfortunate because each zombie takes about a half hour to do. hopefully i can get some extra hands on board for this project, so we don't spend the whole day applying makeup-with no time to shoot!

hollar at me if you have sfx makeup experience :)

reminds me of atari

thanks to user generated content on the internet, i think more people realize you don't need to have a piece of media that has a high production value for something to be pretty or entertaining. i came across these videos that, other than figuring out a basic algorithm, probably weren't too hard to make, but are still fascinating to watch:

HEADIN DOWN THE HIGHWAY

hey all. so this is media studies class. so i'm going to talk about a movie.

EASY RIDER!

i saw it a couple days ago with my boyfriend. SO GOOD! it's a low budget motorcycle film produced in 1969 by dennis hopper and peter fonda. also, jack nickelson is in it.

they drive across the country on motorcycles, trafficing some sort of drug in their gas tank, and have 60's related shenanigans along the way. communes, pot, getting yelled at by conservative southerners, its all there.

but what struck me most about this movie was the message. that freedom is a word that gets thrown around by patriots, but once they see a person that is truly free, they get scared and hate those people. the movie is about trying to find the american dream, trying to find freedom. it truly resonates with the change that happened in the 60's.

what it made me think of was...does my generation have a movie like that? that one movie where you are like, wow, that's the message us young people are trying to get out. the only one i can think of that does that for me is idiocracy, but even still that movie isn't too serious.

well, how bout it? do we have a movie like that? or are we too spread out; opinion wise, entertainment wise, to have a strong unified feeling about anything?

too much gender representation homework!

it's tainting my worldview as we speak.

not that it's a bad thing, but thinking so much about how females are represented in culture and the media is affecting my conversations with my boyfriend.

sorry fellow classmates, but it's personal relationial antecdote time:

we're driving in the car, and we're talking about a close friend that reccently switched/discovered her sexual orientation, who is now dating a baker named cate. adorable.

"hey" I ask, "did you ever think that lynne was a lesbian?"

"well, i kinda got that vibe from her. see, you're either a girl or a chick. chicks act all prissy and stupid, and girls can act that way sometimes but they're mostly smart and can hold a conversation. lynne was never in one of those two categories, she was more of a tomboy"

his comment sounds worse when i type it out, actually. he really didn't mean anything by it, and said those words in the casual sort of social commentary way that you see when they discuss the different lunch tables in "Mean Girls". but it got me heated, truth be told.

"do you have any other way to categories people with vaginas? what about lady, or woman? what about just saying female?"

he didn't know where i was coming from. but i think word choice is important when talking about the opposite gender, especially when talking to the opposite gender about their friends gender choices. it would be like saying there are only dudes and bros in the world.

am i just being an overly sensitive girlfriend? should i not dish out relational dirt in a blag for my online class? you be the judge!

paper brawl

so apparently media mogul Rupert Murdoch acquired the Wall Street Journal and is making some changes to compete with other newspaper enterprise The New York Times. Where most newspapers are laying off reporters and editors, Murdoch is expanding, and will have a paper that has full color pages and is "fiesty", according to the man himself.

Now, I heard about this because it featured on NPR yesterday morning, and as usual, they took calls from listeners so they could voice their opinion on air. Some people were afraid that the New York Times would have to keep up with competition by making their newspaper fluffier, and have less dense (and informative) articles. Some felt that any competition is good competition.

what do i think? well, any competition is good competition if there are more than two competitors. When you just have two media giants duking it out, inevitably it will turn into an arms race and the newspapers worry about copying each others style instead of producing an accurate piece of journalism.

basically, the newspaper business is fucked. what else is new?

poetry post

hello blag. again.

i find it difficult to update this blog as frequently as i should, because i am always signed on to my other blog, petite poems. my other major being english, i like to explore creative writing. which isn't, i guess, a form of media. i have been writing a poem every day (almost) since april. i'm almost up to 300 poems!

poetry could be media if it was wildly famous. like how they usually recite a poem during the inagural address, or other important ceremonies (o captain, my captain!)

but what i like about poetry is the aloneness it requires. i can't sit in a room and read poetry with my friends, like i do with watching 30 rock or the news. its a one on one experience, that can shake you if you let it (and you probably need to read good poetry too. like petite poems! jkjk). so i'm glad it's not part of mainstream media. i'm glad i have to go to the basement of a divebar with a bunch of 20 somethings and pay three dollars to hear a slam. its liberating being off the grid.

not-so pretty in pink

are puppet boobs immoral?

these very-fake mams were banned from posters in colorado springs. they belong to the puppet lucy t. slut, a character in the musical avenue q.

i ask you, what is so wrong about puppet titties?

these tata's have been replaced with wholesome looking pictures of other puppet cast members. but if you ask me, that poster is even more dangerous. what if a nice wholesome family bought tickets to this event thinking it was for children? that would be a hoot.

how fake does cleavage have to get for it to be okay for the midwest?

what about theater?

so, one category i have found to be ever-presently absent from our textbook, discussions, and general popular culture is the world of theater. why is that? i mean, most of the popular shows out there (the lion king, billy elliot, mama mia, hairspray) are adaptations of stories found in other media genres - what is popular on broadway are re-hashed plots. so they have nothing new to say, right?

well...I don't think that popular theater being nothing new or special merits this form of media to get the ax. there are a few things to consider about theater:

- the actors can look directly at the audience. there is a real-time connection with what is going on on stage
- art direction in theater can be more abstracted, surreal, and downright freaky than films, who need to focus more on attention to detail
- a lot of plays/musicals have a message, that may not translate or thought to be said in other forms of media

- theater takes a unique set of skills to pull off amongst cast and crew
- on a community level, it is more approachable, and becomes a visceral way for towns to get together. nothing beats watching friends/family play pretend in greasepaint.

don't get me wrong, i'm not a theater freak. i'm a costume designer, but it's not my life. i just think theater has lost its place in our culture as a high art, and also as a media genre in general. just because you don't download it doesn't mean it is worthless.

and by the way, the images you see are a show i designed reccently for BSC, "the dinosaur musical". so i have a bias. but screw, it looks good, right?

papers obsolete?

in nancy van leuven's PR class, it was suggested that papers are becoming less necessary in preparing us for PR careers. projects on social media sites, such as youtube or a blog (like this one!), are skills that can be applied to public relations.

now, the english major side of me really likes piling over old books and researching historically significant literature, and doesn't want knowledge of flickr to be a necessary skill set for her job. but there is a way i can cheat myself into liking it.



i love words. how they are used, what they are supposed to mean, what they really mean, when they are said, and who they are said by. learning how to communicate professionally or otherwise has so many more platforms with the advent of the internet. there's facebook, twitter, what comes up when you google your name, your e-mail address, your blog, and so on. they all have are a different genre of self-projection, with their own styles and sense of rules.

we are the robots

Is this media related or me talking about my love life?

A gentleman caller has asked me to watch a documentary with him. Since it beats pulling out my eyeballs just yet over my senior seminar, i have happily conceded. This film has mystery, intrigue, and looks like peoples faces get blown off in some of the footage. The title? Naqoyqatsi. Meaning, "life as war".

I googled a quick wiki synopsis, and the film is about how humans have moved from a natural environment to a completely virtual one. Since this is a media studies class, and I nothing outside of the virtual world, as far as i can see, constitutes as media, i thought it relevant!

How do you feel living in a digital world? Connecting with thumbnails of people you may or may not have seen in the flesh? In a way, it's liberating. You can touch base with friends faster, you can download all of your media in an instant. You can even go grocery shopping online.

The importance of knowledge is nothing to take lightly, and the internet, if nothing else, is a wealth of information. But somewhere, i think we forgot what it means to be human. To feel grass under your toes, to create something without posting it, to be alone.

I get anxious when i'm not by my phone. If my computer is in the shop, I am permanently crabby until it is restored. And I'm what you might call a light user of technology. I'm not on facebook and i rarely watch shows online. But still i feel that need to be connected at all times.

Is that natural or am I a product of the digital era? How will this influence digital natives?