There is a little Asian lady that lives in my apartment building. Sometimes in the mornings or the evenings I see a car picking her up or dropping her off from work. Sometimes I see her in her housecoat, smoking. As she smiles and gives a little wave to me, I wonder where she works and the particulars of her life. There are some Sundays I see a woman my age, most likely a daughter, drop her off in the middle of the afternoon. They unload utensils and big pots and I imagine her and her family folding sheets of wonton wrappers over steamy little meatballs and wonder what this tastes like. They speak to each other in a frantic dialect I can’t even begin to understand. There are no subtitles in real life, and even if there were my senses can’t comprehend the symbols that pour out of their mouths.
My stereotypical self thinks that she may work at a laundry and remember that I need to clean my scarf. Instead, I decide it’s more crucial to give my fish a bath. They are my babies and just as someone would talk to a cat or a small dog, I speak to them in the morning as I am dressing, promising them food when I get home from my own menial job and that if they would die, I would cry for them.
When I finally decided to clean their water (this is what I call giving them their bath), I am angry with them and my tears mix with the fresh water. If I were really a mother, I feel I wouldn’t be kind but rather rough with my offspring, crying tears with them because I am frustrated to have to look out for this small being when I can’t even take care of myself. I imagine my mother-ish self as the typical Jewish mother (even though I am not Jewish nor pay credence to any other religion), seemingly overbearing but in the end just wanting a better life than this fish bowl I’ve know all of my life.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
My "sound opinion" Experience
I decided to brave the rain and the snow to attend the Sound Opinions College Tour's first stop at Columbia College and here are my notes:
1. The music industry is going through a seismic change (the guys say this happens about once every 100 years) so now is the time to reinvent positions within. While technological revolutions cause people to cry "foul," each turn tends to stick around. In the advent of recording, naysayers said the population would stop turning out for live music, but this did not turn out to be the case.
2. Because of these technological changes, there is an opportunity for the "musical middle class." Many great artists are the work by day, play by night variety e.g. Effigie's drummer is a prosecutor (citation needed) and the drummer for Wilco gives lessons to young hopefuls. While these guys have day jobs, they still bring in fans and audiences to their shows.
3. This being said, they do not rely on the "majors" to market and produce their work. Instead, they work smaller labels. While one major may rely on blockbuster artists to bring in revenue, many smaller labels can produce many "little" artists --> if each of these is equitable, it could prove to be profitable for the label.
4. Children + Ipods = Disposable Music: This may not be as bad as it sounds since more music can be heard this way. Yeah, yeah, these kids listen to Rhianna's "Umbrella" 15,000 times in a row, but they get tired of it and move on to the next biggest hit. If an artist is good enough on a little label, they could be the next biggest thing.
5. If you want your music to be heard, don't pass out those tired demo tapes but instead e-mail reviewers with a direct link to your single. It will be easily accessible and will grab his attention. For good measure, include an interesting story to accompany this song.
6. Don't expect the artist to do all the work, they're too busy making art. There will always be a need for a band manager to book, do accounting and the likes (hey, call me! i'm up for it!)
7. Speaking of art... there are always those die hard fans that will buy anything GG Allin pooped on e.g. if a member paints a picture, designs a clothing line, knits a scarf or stiches a quilt, it could equal revenue
8. And finally, give the piano man a tip. If you think his worth it, say so.
1. The music industry is going through a seismic change (the guys say this happens about once every 100 years) so now is the time to reinvent positions within. While technological revolutions cause people to cry "foul," each turn tends to stick around. In the advent of recording, naysayers said the population would stop turning out for live music, but this did not turn out to be the case.
2. Because of these technological changes, there is an opportunity for the "musical middle class." Many great artists are the work by day, play by night variety e.g. Effigie's drummer is a prosecutor (citation needed) and the drummer for Wilco gives lessons to young hopefuls. While these guys have day jobs, they still bring in fans and audiences to their shows.
3. This being said, they do not rely on the "majors" to market and produce their work. Instead, they work smaller labels. While one major may rely on blockbuster artists to bring in revenue, many smaller labels can produce many "little" artists --> if each of these is equitable, it could prove to be profitable for the label.
4. Children + Ipods = Disposable Music: This may not be as bad as it sounds since more music can be heard this way. Yeah, yeah, these kids listen to Rhianna's "Umbrella" 15,000 times in a row, but they get tired of it and move on to the next biggest hit. If an artist is good enough on a little label, they could be the next biggest thing.
5. If you want your music to be heard, don't pass out those tired demo tapes but instead e-mail reviewers with a direct link to your single. It will be easily accessible and will grab his attention. For good measure, include an interesting story to accompany this song.
6. Don't expect the artist to do all the work, they're too busy making art. There will always be a need for a band manager to book, do accounting and the likes (hey, call me! i'm up for it!)
7. Speaking of art... there are always those die hard fans that will buy anything GG Allin pooped on e.g. if a member paints a picture, designs a clothing line, knits a scarf or stiches a quilt, it could equal revenue
8. And finally, give the piano man a tip. If you think his worth it, say so.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
In Dreams
I often wake myself up in the middle of a dream because I am trying to control it too much and it feels like I am reading a book. A stranger in my dream is doing some sort of activity and I am writing her every move and beautiful prose of her thoughts. Anyone who is lauded for their writing says their trick is too keep a notebook by their bed and write down their good ideas if they have one in the middle of the night. I feel this takes too much energy. I’m trying to sleep, dammit, and if I’m going to get up to turn on the light, I may as well just go type it and give up any hope of sleeping. By the time this happens, that prose has disappeared and only incomplete, incoherent sentences remain.
When I am watching a movie about a writer, fictional or not, they are often alcoholic, suicidal, crazy or a combination of the three. I wonder if to be a famous, interesting writer I have to be the same and if I already am, then why have I not reached my star in the sky yet. Then I remember after my kind of psychosis follows apathy and laziness, the ability to write a complete sentence but no good ideas to write about.
On one particular night of self, I found myself watching what was probably my one hundred thousandth syndicated episode of the longest running television series in history. Tom Wolfe was making an animated cameo of himself, which was strange because earlier that day I had been telling my co-worker she’d enjoy his writing. When ever I watch this episode #384, I can’t help but to feel jealous of the downtrodden barkeeper’s poem, “Howling at a Concrete Moon.” I think it is better than anything I’ve ever written and his was meant to be funny.
There was I time I couldn’t sleep for weeks and in the pitiful minutes I lapsed in and out of consciousness, I would find myself with the overwhelming desire to check the floor by the door for a “dear Jane” letter to myself. If I were to write it what would it say? “I’m sorry but…” the letter would trail off because I would already know what I was thinking, feeling about this mess I’m in. The thing is, though, I don’t want to write a dear jane letter to myself. I want someone else to write it to me so I have an excuse to feel abandoned, to know the reason is it’s him, not me, who doesn’t have the desire to make this work, that my tortured writer’s soul has come between us.
When I am watching a movie about a writer, fictional or not, they are often alcoholic, suicidal, crazy or a combination of the three. I wonder if to be a famous, interesting writer I have to be the same and if I already am, then why have I not reached my star in the sky yet. Then I remember after my kind of psychosis follows apathy and laziness, the ability to write a complete sentence but no good ideas to write about.
On one particular night of self, I found myself watching what was probably my one hundred thousandth syndicated episode of the longest running television series in history. Tom Wolfe was making an animated cameo of himself, which was strange because earlier that day I had been telling my co-worker she’d enjoy his writing. When ever I watch this episode #384, I can’t help but to feel jealous of the downtrodden barkeeper’s poem, “Howling at a Concrete Moon.” I think it is better than anything I’ve ever written and his was meant to be funny.
There was I time I couldn’t sleep for weeks and in the pitiful minutes I lapsed in and out of consciousness, I would find myself with the overwhelming desire to check the floor by the door for a “dear Jane” letter to myself. If I were to write it what would it say? “I’m sorry but…” the letter would trail off because I would already know what I was thinking, feeling about this mess I’m in. The thing is, though, I don’t want to write a dear jane letter to myself. I want someone else to write it to me so I have an excuse to feel abandoned, to know the reason is it’s him, not me, who doesn’t have the desire to make this work, that my tortured writer’s soul has come between us.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
too beat for a creative title.
For my "writing new media" project, I chose to do a video with the files that my professor/advisor had given me to work with. I could have done a photo essay, but i work with photos all the time, so i thought that would not be challenging enough. I could have done a podcast story, but i have one for my portfolio already. it's actually a quite funny piece in the style of NPR about noah's ark that i did in 2002. So here is my first attempt at video (except the few flash animations i've done).
From beginning to end, this two minute movie took me about 6 hours. i hadn't used windows movie maker before nor have i used a time-line in years. My computer is lacking a sound card, so there is no sound to this, but i think the text works better than the actual song to these lyrics would. I like how it turned out (but please tell me if it's too karaoke!!!)
Making the words match up to some of the specific frames was probably the most complicated of all this project. There aren't very many effects - only the same two effects per clip and only two transitions in the entire video. The words, however, have a few different styles applied to different parts, but for the most part it is me adding a few extra words to the previous texts to try to tell a story.
When i figured out i wouldn't be able to use sound, i decided to use words and searched my brain for something i've read about walking or passers-by. I ended up using lyrics by one of my favorite bands, Ulver (it's Norwegian for "wolves" in case you were wondering). When their Perdition City album first came out in 2000, the were getting a lot of criticism for turning too experimental. Hey, i thought, i'm experimenting too! Perfect!
I've worked with text and images before and of course a picture says a thousands words, but this was a little different for me because i feel like i'm forcing the viewer to accept my interpretation of the images. It's no secret that sometimes i feel like a drone that has nothing to say and even if i wanted to say it, it'd get lost in the "torrent of sound and images that overwhelms our lives."
You can interpret this story whatever way you want.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
This does not compute...
The funny thing about technology is that it intensifies quickly. One hundred and twenty years ago the lightbulb was just emerging into commercialized use but I have to think of how many thousands of years before that there was no basis for the lightbulb joke. Now there is a new lightbulb that is better, faster, cheaper. One of my fond memories is of a computer game I played in late 1980’s. My dad had computers before then, but I think it was around that time that DOS computer games were becoming more popular. I was pretty much the same geek then that i am now and I had bet my dad that if he tried to hide the game in some random directory file that I could find it within an allotted amount of time. He owed me fifty cents.
If you asked me today to do what I did then, I’d have no clue where to even start. My point is that I’ve never lived without technology. Remembering that I used to know more about computers and how to write html makes me sympathize with old people who can’t use a remote.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy. It’s been many years since I’ve actually watched the film, but I know that basic plot is that some dude in some remote land finds a classic glass coke bottle and brings it back to his tribe. The tribe uses the bottle for various purposes that seem to make their life easier. This simple glass bottle was technology for them, but in the process of trying to make use of it, this otherwise peaceful tribe encounters conflicts within their group.
In some aspects, the Coke bottle fits the Instrumental theory of technology:
Yet the Coke bottle can fit within the Substantive theory:
If you asked me today to do what I did then, I’d have no clue where to even start. My point is that I’ve never lived without technology. Remembering that I used to know more about computers and how to write html makes me sympathize with old people who can’t use a remote.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy. It’s been many years since I’ve actually watched the film, but I know that basic plot is that some dude in some remote land finds a classic glass coke bottle and brings it back to his tribe. The tribe uses the bottle for various purposes that seem to make their life easier. This simple glass bottle was technology for them, but in the process of trying to make use of it, this otherwise peaceful tribe encounters conflicts within their group.
In some aspects, the Coke bottle fits the Instrumental theory of technology:
- technology is neutral, just a tool
- technology has no social agenda
- technology is indifferent to politics
- technology is rational and verifiable
- technology is efficient--it has standards and norms
- technology is transferable to other cultures
- values can be accommodated by technology but at costs to efficiency
- (http://wiki.wsu.edu/wsuwiki/Instrumental_Theory)
But there is one line in there that I am having problems with:
technology is transferable to other cultures.
I am okay with technology being an inanimate object. As far as I am aware, nobody has ever created real-life Hal. Therefore, I am okay with values being accommodated by technology, but if you throw a Coke bottle or a computer and CD-Rom out of the window of a light airplane onto some unsuspecting tribe who has never seen these things before, you’re going to end up with some ramifications. Okay, so maybe the ramifications aren’t severe and will work themselves out, but I’m just saying…
Neutrality is one of the key concepts in the instrumental theory and it points out that technology is just a tool, that this inanimate object is not scheming to destroy the world. But let’s go back to the “Gods.” What if that tool is not used how it was meant to be used? I’m sure the tribe used the bottle to carry water, but what if they used at as a club and beat someone over the head with it? The bottle is still neutral, it’s still a tool, so then we have to look to the substantive theory of technology.
This blurb goes on to say that the substantive theory pretty much blames the technology and not the user (maybe the author was reading Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”)? Hey, the bottle looked like it would do some damage, so I thought I’d give it a shot? But I regress….“According to Andrew Feenberg, a substantive theory of technology assumes that a technology's design will fundamentally change the ways in which an organization (or a culture) operates. Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan take a substantive approach to television, for example, by asserting that the design of the medium changes that way American culture operates. (See Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death,” for example.)”
Yet the Coke bottle can fit within the Substantive theory:
- technology is not neutral, it is not just a tool
- technology is autonomous--it exists beyond culture
- people are the raw materials--the standing reserve--of a technical system
- technology becomes the environment
- people can make choices about technology
- http://wiki.wsu.edu/wsuwiki/Substantive_Theory
The last two points on this list make sense to me, but only in conjunction with the instrumental theory. If the technology is very useful, then people are going to want to use it everyday and it will then become part of their environment. MS DOS? Not so useful anymore but when it was useful to amuse me, it was very much part of my environment. Same goes for writing html. When I first started to learn it, I thought, hey cool, I can design a webpage by typing in junk. Push-Button publishing came along at a good time because there was no room left in my head for .
I make choices about the technology I use. I put off getting access to the internet in my home for a year and I don’t subscribe to cable. I didn't have a need for internet before and i don't watch that much t.v. But when i decided to subscribe to the internet, the jerk at Comcast and I ended up arguing about how stupid it would be for me to pay for a bundled service when I only had use for one of the technologies. I don’t think Comcast has gotten the memo from FCC yet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_DSL#United_States) But I regress…
As with transformations in medical and other scientific technology, the uses for media technology can be good or bad, but it is not the technology itself, it is the values within the person that commands it that make it so. To the best of my knowledge, the whole concept of modernity refers to how we can progress towards the future which entails leaving “tradition for tradition’s sake” behind. I don’t find this to mean that we have to leave intrinsic values and ethics behind too. Feenberg argues “current scientific and technical knowledge has resources for a very radical reconstruction of the technological heritage if these are appropriated in the right spirit.” I agree.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
My self-designed indulgence.
"Space is emptiness"
I feel the need to fill it........
I also am perfectly content sitting here in silence...
But wait! There's more!
I feel the need to fill it........
I also am perfectly content sitting here in silence...
But wait! There's more!
http://www.myspace.com/hannahstar
(myspace.com is pretty low on the usability hardness index, so i'll leave you to figure it out.)
Did you know:
Designing a website is so easy the government can do it?
check out http://www.usability.gov/
Did you know:
Designing a website is so easy the government can do it?
check out http://www.usability.gov/
I bought myself a book, but i've been too busy to even crack the spine
By Todd Gitlin
Is there any white space left or did we fill it all up?
Friday, October 10, 2008
I Like Jokes
It was the year 2012 and the world best renowned blogger had to go one way or the other, just like everyone else on the globe. She got to the gates and followed the directions to the place where she was going to spend the rest of her eternity. The path she was told to follow took her down echoing marble-floored halls whose walls were painted with stunning murals and crumbled wads of paper hanging from the ceiling like clouds. Colored pencils and pens in every shade of blue and black inks seemingly suspended in air swayed in the breeze she made as she drifted through the corridors.
After peeking through open doors into countless other rooms ornamented in her favorite artistic styles, she finally reached a room that would be hers. The gold-gilded plaque on the heavy mahogany door read: “hannah’s brave new (media) world.” Expecting all the comforts of her previous life in the age of information and technology, she expected more than she could possible conceive. Still, she hoped no less than her eternity to be the predictably comfortable way of life to which she was accustomed.
Instead, there was only a lone silhouette behind a cold metal desk. As she presented her person in exile papers to him she asked, “What do you call the palace beyond this door that is more then I could ever dream and do I have the keys to access all of those rooms filled with culture and ideas of my wildest imagination?”
The figure shook his head slowly and replied that the only set of keys to the palace would go with him when he left.
“This will be your desk and all the tools that you are allowed to create and communicate with are prearranged to be delivered on Tuesday of next week. Here is the list of things you are selected for you, but now I must leave,” he said as he handed her a slip of paper.
The listed items were:
1 typewriter and a ditto machine.
That is all.
After peeking through open doors into countless other rooms ornamented in her favorite artistic styles, she finally reached a room that would be hers. The gold-gilded plaque on the heavy mahogany door read: “hannah’s brave new (media) world.” Expecting all the comforts of her previous life in the age of information and technology, she expected more than she could possible conceive. Still, she hoped no less than her eternity to be the predictably comfortable way of life to which she was accustomed.
Instead, there was only a lone silhouette behind a cold metal desk. As she presented her person in exile papers to him she asked, “What do you call the palace beyond this door that is more then I could ever dream and do I have the keys to access all of those rooms filled with culture and ideas of my wildest imagination?”
The figure shook his head slowly and replied that the only set of keys to the palace would go with him when he left.
“This will be your desk and all the tools that you are allowed to create and communicate with are prearranged to be delivered on Tuesday of next week. Here is the list of things you are selected for you, but now I must leave,” he said as he handed her a slip of paper.
The listed items were:
1 typewriter and a ditto machine.
That is all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
