I would have way more time to accomplish school work if I weren't constantly quoting movies...

So after I tried for a super-duper long time (that's an exact amount) to narrow down the choices for my mix-tape of earworms, I discovered that I simply couldn't do it. I had a plethora of songs (jefe, would you say that I have a plethora of pinatas?) and I was way too attached to too many of them so I decided to "pull over" (pull over! no, it's a cardigan but thanks for noticing!) to the theoretical side of the mix-tape road and switch themes with the hope of making it slightly easier on myself. I decided to make a CD for another one of my roommates who loves movies--especially horribly stupid ones (werewolf! werewolf? There wolf, there castle!)--as much as I do.

I had a much easier time with this topic as the pool of songs from which I could choose was considerably smaller. That being said, it was also harder to do transitions because I noticed that most movie songs tended to vary from the painfully saccharine, uber-depressing ballads a la "My Heart Will Go On" to the pump-up themes intended to leave the audience dancing, singing along, or just simply laughing, as in EuroTrip's "Scotty Doesn't Know" (God bless you and your sense of humor Matt Damon). The smaller supply of middle tempo tunes forced me to make some transitions I wasn't completely happy with, but couldn't come up with any other alternatives that I would have preferred.

I still feel like my playlist was a tad on the lengthy side and it would be hard to listen through the entire CD unless you were going on a road trip, but it really made me think about authors and all of the work they have to do to make sure their works are the appropriate length and have the right transitions. I found many parallels between the editing of my mix tape and how I normally go about editing things I write (although the mix tape was significantly more fun due to the fact that I got to sing and dance along). So, if I haven't dropped enough movie quotes for you already (that you SHOULD be able to identify if you have ANY kind of movie taste--according to me, at least) here are a couple more to keep you guessing--see if you can name them all!

"You have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger. What's the vector, Victor?"

"Phenomenal COSMIC POWERS....itty bitty living space"

"I do not mean to pry, but do you by any chance have six fingers on your right hand?"

"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily"

Add it to the list...

So add mix tapes, along with plagiarism and ghostwriting to the list of "things that are considerably harder to do than previously thought."  I'm used to making playlists on my iPod, and not really considering the order of the songs at all, due to the ease with which one can change songs.  I just make sure I've got the right genre and don't care as much about the end product because a) it's just for me and b) i can always change it--it's never permanent.  Making a mix CD for someone else, however, changes both.  I have to care what my roommate will think of it, and try to make sure that the transitions are appropriate so that the entire CD will be enjoyable to listen to--I don't have 60 tracks to mess around with (as I do with an iTunes playlist).  

For my roommate, I'm making a CD of earworms (a loan word from the German ohrwurm) which means songs that get stuck in your head and play over and over and over again.  My roommate always gets ridiculous songs stuck in her head that she of course feels the need to sing ad nauseum until the rest of the apartment is singing her horrible 80's tune right along with her.  This way, if we have a CD of all of these songs, we won't have to tolerate her painfully off-tune warbling.  I have a pretty solid idea for the tracklist and order, but there will definitely have to be some trimming come Monday (I think I have 30 songs right now).  As for you guys, any songs that ALWAYS get stuck in your head that you think I would be remiss if they were not included?  Any suggestions?

"Now here's crap"

Here's a selection from my cut-up:

Color information ("parvocellular RGCs") handedly redefined funny as the 007 wasn't bad despite in nonglaucomatous optic neuropaty is usua NBC's hit show the office canh in the all-important and can be tested with Ishihara or Hard-kily, smitten chicks will soon be de Besseges and was approximately 8% of male patients (and less the 28-year old actor is complett ahead of the decisive have congenital X-linked dyschromatopsia, ief Interviews with Hideous Men, the 2007 Tour when condition is not new and patients are usually we'll star opposite heavyweight Cristian Moreni failed in such cases the color deficit should be identifihich he plays--now here's crap.

The main pieces of writing I cut-up included an article from Cosmo about John Krasinski (better known as "Jim" from The Office), an article from VeloNews (a cycling magazine) about an up-and-coming cycling star from Belgium, and a scientific article the P.I. from my lab wrote entitled "Neuroprotection for Glaucoma." As a result of these extremely varying topics, my cut-up doesn't make much sense at all (althought this paragraph I used as an excerpt is the most intelligible). I really enjoyed finding a few humorous sentences when these all combined, because alone, most of these articles aren't very funny--the "now here's crap" came from two completely different sources and that's just how they happened to line up.

Overall, I didn't find the cut-up a very effective method for the kind of writing I would ever be doing. I can see that if you're a creative or fiction writer and need a new idea or word or even just a new way of thinking, how cut-ups would be an incredibly helpful and fast method of inspiration, but otherwise, I think it mostly just produces a lot of gibberish. Another positive note for cut-ups: ripping paper and pretending like you're making a collage in elementary school again is a VERY good stress relief :)

Mix Tape Mayhem

Freshman year, me, my roommate and two of our best friends had a Friday and Saturday night ritual in the dorm. We'd all get home from school/class or just wake up from our third nap of the day (Courtney) around five and grab some dinner at Frank's. After a delicious meal where our dirty dishes magically disappeared and became clean (how I miss those days), it was off to get ready to go out, which meant (insert trumpet fanfare here) SHOWER TIME! We lived in Kronshage and each bathroom had four shower stalls and one exceedingly loud CD player. We'd hop in the showers and blare the latest shower mix CD we made and turn up the music loud enough so we couldn't hear Courtney's tone-deaf, one-note singing. There is a definite art to the "Going out shower mix CD" and over the two years we lived in the dorms we perfected it. So here are my rules for the perfect mix CD in this scenario:

1. Everyone must know all of the words to all of the songs (i.e. REM's "It's the End of the World" works for NO ONE).

2. There must be at least one raunchy song that would be embarrassing to sing in front of your parental units (i.e. Tenacious D's F*** Her Gently)

3. The CD must contain no less than one old school Britney Spears (pre-shaving her head) or *NSYNC song that not only do you know the lyrics to, you can pretty much re-enact the entire music video frame by frame (you all know that you can mentally replay the whole "Oops, I Did it Again" video in your mind--it's okay, there's a lot of us).

4. There must be at least one song that one member of your group HATES but the rest of you love and due to the fact that it's on the middle of the track list and she has shampoo in her hair, she can't escape it (for us it was "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter--my roommate Kristen hated it to the core and we all loved how much she hated it).

5. Last but certainly not least, it should contain at least one rap song that sounds absolutely ridiculous coming out of your mouths and that you have to go on urbandictionary.com to understand half of the words that you're saying (this list of possibilities is astounding).

That's it--follow the rules and you'll not only have a great time getting ready to go out, but you'll also embarrass yourselves and annoy your dormmates--all in all, a great success.

Apparently I'm the only one...

I have read some pretty horrible books in my life--from one about a child whose telekinetic powers allow him to defeat an entire civilization of ants in outerspace to simply awful, cheesy romance novels that induce my gag reflex my roommates tell me I just have to read. I've always been able to finish them. I'm the kind of person that once I start a book, I finish it, no matter how horrifically craptastic, just so I know how it ends and that I persevered and finished it. Rhythm science is a first for me. I wasn't able to finish the assigned reading for Wednesday. Not because I didn't have time, or because I didn't try, but simply because the text was extremely off-putting and unpleasant to read. I found myself feeling like I do when I read aloud--going through the motions and "reading" but I'm not focusing on the actual words and thinking something else completely in my mind.

I know I'm in the minority of people who feel like this (I might even be the only one after listening to our discussion on Wednesday), but I feel like DJ Spooky is just trying way too hard to be different and loses a lot people who would be interested in his overall thesis simply by the way in which he presents his ideas. I don't find the hole in the book meaningful, as discussed in class. I find it irritating, and there simply so people will pick up his book in a bookstore and give it the "shock and awe" factor that might encourage people to buy it ("Cool, a hole in the book! Never seen this before--gotta buy it!"). Also, the way the text is presented on the page is extremely distracting. Reading the two inch width of text right by the crease is simply not necessary--nor are the random "illustrations" which interrupt his sentences with pictures of ghosts and playboy bunnies.

After class on Wednesday, with the interpretive ideas everyone had brought to the table, I sat down to attempt to read the book for the fifth time. Again, it was a no go. I know others love this book and it's an allegedly quick read, but honestly, I strongly disliked it (well, that that I could get through). I'll keep on trying, and hopefully I'll be able to finish it and derive some meaning from it, but as of right now, Rhythm Science looks to be the first book I've started and never finished.

Photoshop, Shmotoshop

I am technologically challenged. Simple as that. I struggle getting Microsoft Word to do what I want (anyone else have issues with the tab button?!?) let alone a complex image manipulation software. Needless to say, my attempts at visual sampling took MUCH longer than necessary and caused me to really think about what I wanted to add to/say in my project as it took me eons to actually visually portray my ideas. For my project I wanted to emphasize that copyright prevents creativity, the sharing of ideas, and the sampling of projects. The images I chose represent many areas of the arts (painting, writing, movies, TV shows, cartoons, and music). Some of the images I used represent works in the public domain (Shakespeare, Mozart) and some represent newer copyrighted works (Harry Potter, the Simpsons). Regardless of the free use clause or the fact that they're in the public domain, copyright is preventing reproductions and derivations. Congress keeps extending the boundaries of these copyrights and their length irreparably harming American culture simply because the RIAA and MPAA lobbyists (among many) use their incredible capital to pay off senators and representatives (as represented by the "blank check" in the center of the image).

This perpetual copyright and the lack of funding for free culture (or the creative commons started by Lessig) is also apparent in Kait's first sampling project. To "remix" her sample, I decided to modify it from cartoon form to real life. It is now Lawrence Lessig begging for money (and legislation and overall support) for his creative commons/free culture movement, but he is being ignored by most of the general public (as most homeless people/beggars are). I decided to only use the central image in her work to focus the attention on his plight and the condition of creativity in America (well, that and it took me over an hour to just figure out how to trace out Lessig's head and put it on a different picture).

Overall, I found this sampling project to be one of the most difficult ones for me--mostly due to my technological ineptitude (although the scathing comments from my ghostwritee during the ghostwriting experience place a close second). I also am not a very visual learner or thinker. I tend to like to use language (and rather wordy language at that) to express my feelings or thoughts on certain topics. For those reasons, I found that once again, this experience was more difficult and time-consuming than I originally anticipated. On a positive sidenote, it has given me a new appreciation for any person working with graphic arts or computers on a daily basis--if it were my job, I know computers would be getting smashed on a daily basis from sheer frustration.

Get some common sense!

The more and more I read of Free Culture the more I get frustrated with the extreme lack of common sense of so many parties involved. The beliefs of the warring sides are becoming so polarized and rigid (rather like some of our politicians right now) that they couldn’t care less about the immense collateral damage (the hindering of culture and creativity). There’s definitely many logical, reasonable solutions to many copyright problems, especially in regards to music downloading. It costs virtually nothing for record companies to post music online, yet on iTUNES and other servers it can cost as much as $1.99 to download. If the music companies would change the price to say, a quarter(ish), many more people would buy music legally instead of turning to illegal alternatives—I know I would be one of them. But instead, I think, companies keep boosting prices of online music when they think their profits are down due to filesharing, which then causes fewer people to buy their product, fileshare, and start the vicious cycle over and over again.

In regards to filesharing itself, I think the used bookstore rule should be applied to downloaded music—once it’s bought, you can do pretty much anything with it as long as it’s not reproduced and SOLD for money. Granted, every time you file share, some claim it’s a “copy,” but in reality it’s not much different than what most people do with their books and more importantly, you’re NOT making money off of it.

Also, I see this entire issue as a direct attack on technology. Years ago, people would loan each other records, or make mix tapes, or copy tapes and CDs and give them to their friends. Now, it is simply a more efficient and larger scale process, but the underlying concept has not changed since its original onset. When factories changed from using mostly people to produce their product to almost complete mechanization, there was certainly outrage at this new technology (oh,no! robots will take over the world—and that myriad people lost their jobs). Eventually, however, our society adapted to this new type of production and is the better and more advanced for it. The same can be said for music downloading. The government needs to stop intervening and allowing the RIAA’s frivolous lawsuits and allow technical evolution to occur.