Stranger than fiction

I recently saw the movie "Stranger than Fiction" with Will Ferral (by the way, i didnt know that he could act). If you havent seen it, i reccomend it. Anyway, this movie made me think of a conversation we had in class about modernism, and art being self reflexive. Well this movie was definitely that, it had to with the main character, a IRS tax man, who finds himself being narrated by a woman who is writing a book about his life. This movie reminded me of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", or "Adaption", I find these kind of movies very compelling. This movie, despite other of Will Ferral's comedies, had something much more admirable about it. It was intellegent and kept me thinking and guessing right untill the end. I believe that this modern way of making movies is a move in the right direction for film.

Name Without a Face

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

This is an article about Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, and his social experiment regarding classical music.

" It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant."

I had a variety of quick reactions after reading this article. 1: Inspired by a bold experiment to see how the general public would react 2: Sadness for the ignorance by the passerbys as Bell plays some of the great violin pieces.

We all recognize names. Sports figures, movie stars, as well as composers. Too often we hear these names without really knowing their faces. An example: Last year I was fortunate to have a picture taken with the great film composer John Williams. If you ask anyone in the Film Scoring they will automatically know the name. However, as I showed the picture around I recieced the too often "Who is that?" response. Is this ignorance on part of the student? It seems essential to know these composers by their name as well as their face. This will prevent you from looking inexperienced in social gatherings. This article made me think of the evolution of ads, like we had discussed in class. Text based to picture based to logo based. The Nike symbol can immediately be recognized without saying "Nike". Is it our job to know what Nike is? No, thats why they have marketing departments to make sure that we do. Is this departure of facial recognition due to the increase of global communications? As the world becomes smaller, is personal technologies, such as the ipod, preventing us from social interaction? Relationsihps are essential for anyone's success. I think that in general, society needs to "lighten up and look up". Pay attention to those around you, interact socially with them, and stop looking at the ground. In essence we are all humans. Why should we shut out those around us?

Art in War

"All art is propaganda", repeated on numerous occasions by one of my professors. Every piece is intended to create some sort of emotional response or reaction. War is something that we all have become too familiar with, being portrayed in the news and cinema religiously. It has become a fore-front of our culture, visually, socially, and economically. After visiting the "War and Discontent" gallery in the MFA this became even clearer to me. It was interesting to see how each artist interprets the concept of war. Wikipedia defines war as:

"War is a state of widespread conflict between states, organisations, or relatively large groups of people, which is characterised by the use of violent, physical force between combatants or upon civilians. War is contrasted with peace, which is usually defined as the absence of war. "

When analyzing their works, or any work rather, you have to consider the multi-dimensional aspects of war. I believe it is not exclusive to militaristic actions. As stated in this definition it is a conflict between masses of people. It has, however, become associated with the military as clearly portrayed by the media. Each artist exploited a different topic within war. Some used positive ideas as shown by Phil Collins' dancing room. These artists use their art to "cause turbulance" whether positive or negative. Art is often thought of what is visible. I believe that it is important not to forget that music, too, is a form of this "art propaganda". Artists, ranging from Eminem to Stravinsky, push the envelope which ensues in conflict between the public and in most cases the FCC. War does not have to be militaristic. This is something that became quite clear while visiting this exhibit. All I could hear radiating from the works is..."All art is propaganda".

Grindhouse

Lat night I went and vidied Grindhouse the action packs double feature of the 21st century. If you guys have not seen it is an extremely well done flick. I admired the most was how in Planet terror how often times, like a composer would compose music to set up a scene in the movie or backup emotional events and adding color, the visual effects were composed much in the same way. I found that many time certain color blotches or "Film artifacts" accented the plot or helped convey a particular emotion or feel. You would have to see it to see what I mean. Another thing I liked was that not necessarily did the film take from certain movies but rather it exploited styles. Some of which, especially in the editing style, were things that in the past were sort of uncontrollable physical things that came with wear and tear on the film i.e. missing reels, bad splices, scratchy appearance, color blobs etc, have now been reproduced digitally. I just thought this film would be good for some discussion so please if anybody has seen it give us your impressions!

Subliminal Messages

It seems that we haven't come across the topic of subliminal messages. We see these ads everyday wither we're just walking down the street or in a super market. But how do this relate to words and images? When I saw this advertisement, I definitely wasn't thinking about tonic water, but gin, vodka, and rum. (I'm not an alcoholic and do not promote alcoholism!) Also, the knife caught my attention, the way it's placed gave me an unpleasant feeling. The spilled water made me think of blood for some reason (Basic Instinct?). Feel free to comment!

(another) Rear Window

It didnt dawn on me seeing Disturbia that it has the exact same plot line as the classic "Rear Window" that we watched for class. What suprised me most about the movie is that it actually wasn't that bad for being a direct rip off of a classic. I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone who plans to see it but the ending has a different twist making for some good entertainment. I posted a link to the trailer for anyone who might be interested.

The 6 Steps according to Scott MCloud

1. Idea/ purpose
2. Form
3. Idiom
4. Structure
5. Craft
6. Surface

What the Six Steps Mean at Berklee

In UNDERSTANDING COMICS, Scott McCloud lays out the six steps of a complete creative process. McCloud demonstrates how an artist can gain an understanding of, and access each echelon over a long period of study, but also how these steps apply to each work of art. Clearly, one cannot be said to have mastered any form of art without full knowledge and utility of each of these steps, so I want to do a little comparison of some of the majors at Berklee to see which ones are the most complete by this model (and to reassure myself about my own selection of major) I'll start with a brief account of my own progress through the steps as a musician.

My story begins with my decision to start playing the bass guitar. I had been listening to Primus records, and one day decided, that I just had to learn to play that wacky stuff. I got a bass and began emulating the sounds I heard, learning by ear alone. I picked up a lot of nimble fingered licks and flashy slap bass, and thought I was really on to something. I had grazed step 6, the surface. Here my course meandered. I went directly to step 3 and tried to create my own idiom. (The fact that my initial inspiration was Primus should tell you that I was chiefly interested in sounding completely different than anyone else) This attempt had mixed results, because I wasn't going for a musical idiom, but for a bass guitar idiom. So though I thought I was breaking new ground, I was working on a tiny little patch of dirt. It didn't take me long to realize that there were less obvious, but more important aspects of playing the bass I would need to master to actually get any gigs, such as playing tastefully, and with consistent time. These just below the surface techniques represented step 5, the craft of playing bass. Soon, I began actually writing songs, and step 4, structure, became important. (I had also made an unconcious decision about step 2, form, but that had not yet occourred to me.) Musical notation and communication, song forms, and prosody all started to slowly manifest in my repertoire. Finally, I had some real room to experiment with idioms. At Berklee, I have managed to learn -indirectly until this class- about the importance of a concept/story/message as the foundation of a song. I have now used both steps 1, Idea/Purpose, and 2, Form, as the basis for my work. I have discovered that it is possible to write a pop song that is a comment about the art form itself (that is, beginning with step 2.) This has given me extraordinary freedom, becase if I can't summon a good Idea for a song, I can write the song just for the purpose of the song. Now this can't be done effectively if it is too obvious, but think about how we all created art projects based on a single concept of visual art. I could use the solipsism inherent in any story as the basis for a song, as a comment about the song, but It won't work if the lyrics are literally a discussion of the meaning of the term.

So what does this all mean for Berklee students in various majors? Well, I have chosen Songwriting as my major, and as I have shown, writing songs not only enables me to excercice all six steps, but demands that I use all of them to be truly succesfull. Having lyrics helps, because I can use actual words to state my purpose, but lyrics are not neccesary to convey a rich emotional message, or even to make a subtle comment about art. This makes me think that any of the writing majors must have the same depth of artistry. (with the possible exception of film scoring. Unless the artist has written his own movie, he has to deal with someone else's Idea/Purpose, and might be ultimately subject to a director's creative control)
MP&E majors concentrate mostly on surface, but must have a complete grasp of the structure, idiom, form, and purpose to do their job well. Educators can't teach what they don't know. The one major that seems to be the most difficult path to step 1 is performance. A performer who never writes any music can never get closer to the core of the apple than the idiom. However, the most revered musicians are those who are known as performers, but also write music based on an idea or form that that allows them to take their craft to new levels. John Coltrane writing "Giant Steps" Is a great example. No one thinks of Coltrane the composer, but "Giant Steps" is one of the boldest statements in art, about art. The weight of Coltrane's "commentary" is staggering, it gave us all a new concept of what music, and art in general are.

Having said all this, the more important point is that the best music is created by groups of people who specialize in different steps. Very few of us can be like Coltrane, the jack of all steps, and master of at least one, and even he didn't do it all by himself. Collaboration between performers, producers, writers, and bandleaders is the best way to cover the entire spectrum of creativity, and is uniquely musical.