Sputnik is Dead!

My soundscape for CPT 20. We were given the task of creating and telling a story without narration. This is my effort, it portrays me getting in my car to leave for practice, us practicing then sitting around afterwards.

Band Practice

Being socially responsible is something we must all practice, this digital story was intended to show what throughout my life has influenced me to be a socially responsible person.

Landscape Shot

Depth of Field

Extreme Close-Up that Evokes Emotion

This is one gutsy guy, I don’t neccisarily agree with all of it (the abortion, im completely pro choice and the section on profanity because in my opion the concept of having “dirty words” is riduclous but i digress) He really hit home on this and for uber liberals it may be hard to swallow..
A prayer given in the opening session of their Senate. It seems prayer still upsets some people.. When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard:

Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those
who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed
our values.

We have exploited the poor and called it
the lottery.

We have rewarded laziness and called it
welfare.

We have killed our unborn and called it
choice.

We have shot abortionists and called it
justifiable.

We have neglected to discipline our
children and called it building self esteem..

We have abused power and called it
politics.

We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions
and called it ambition.

We have polluted the air with profanity and
pornography and called it freedom of expression.

We have ridiculed the time-honored values
of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts
today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Amen!
The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest. In 6 short weeks, Central Christian Church, where Rev. Wright is pastor, logged more than
5,000 phone calls with only 47 of those calls responding negatively. The church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa and Korea.

words words words words blah blah blahblah…blahahaha words words words… im sick and tired of this..

Micheal Moore in my books is a modern propagandist. Although he brings many points to the mass media that need to be brought forth his movies are not something to look at with a closed mind. His leftist ideals practically ooze from the screen so with SiKO as with his other documentaries you have to be careful what you accept at true. SiKO is his debunking of the American   system and HMO’s. He does a great job of comparing the “seemingly corrupt” American system with the wonderful and rich socialized systems of other countries. It all seems very one sided, this movie was very interesting and quite good, you just must be very careful when viewing.

He does a sort of comparison with the Canadian health care and the American’s private system, by following a young American woman who crosses the border to get Canadian care. Michael does a good job of glorifying our system and our love for our system all in attempt to villainize the American system. I really enjoy our system and feel we have reached a decent equilibrium. It is not as glorious as the movie makes it seem, wait times are long and some taxes are a little steep, but the benefits we reap outweigh the problems that come with privatized health care, its nice not to have to deal with an HMO and worry about being approved or not. I’m glad our system is not like the the French, i have a feeling their taxes are unmanageable and the quality of care is sometimes less than satisfactory. So I am happy with our system, we have reached a good equilibrium, we don’t have to fear being left to suffer or pay out our nose.

I really admire Mike Rowe, he seems like a real person which is hard to come by on television. He is the host of the hit Discovery channel show “Dirty Jobs” and has had a prominent career narrating and hosting numerous other shows.  His main theme during his TED Talk was one of the working class hero, a personality he encounters every episode of Dirty Jobs. Mikes Rowe’s stance is thus: work has become something we all have learned to despise and shy away from, and that maybe following your passion is not always the best life choice. He senses there are blue collar workers that are looked down upon because of the jobs they hold, he sees these good people everyday and does not see a reason for this.

I feel our ill response to work is natural not learned, procrastination is something we  all do  in our daily lives, it is especially obvious at young ages. We are not learning to shy away from work, that is a natural response for anyone, we are learning to look at work as something below us. Class systems are becoming increasingly prominent and we are being taught that “manual labour jobs” are not something to strive for, but i feel in spite of this we still have the ability, no matter what our societies situation to work hard even if procrastination is a factor.  This leads into me agreeing with his point that sometimes following your dream isn’t the best, this in my opinion is down to complete common sense. If you want to be a rock star or NHL player you should probably change your mind set and strive for something attainable, like maybe a pig farmer if the option arises, it seems to be a good business to get into. On the other hand if you are the pig farmers son and have no interest in the business, and if you have a strong interest in something else go in that direction, again it is all down to common sense.

So called “manual labour” and “blue collar” areas are ones i feel every person is capable of getting into, the reason they don’t is not because they are afraid to work, but because they are afraid of the social stigma attached to working in them. For every happy person that is making a healthy living off of hard work, there is someone behind the scenes that hates how their lives turned, it is all completely a personal journey. To sum up everything, i feel life is a game of common sense and chance, we can’t live by what society teaches we must keep a sensibles open mind. There are workers, creators, academics and a very large area where all three over lap,  therefore we just must go with the flow. Trying not to fall into the class system is what we must avoid, that is the biggest problem that plagues us today, our balance between work and/or academia is not.  Life is complicated, it is a sea of confusion and unanswered questions, we must rely on intuition and common sense to help create a better world for others and a better life for ourselves.

The grit, and concrete of the ground slid underneath my left foot as it pressed down to move me forward, it continued to my right, my left and again back to my right. The movement was fluid and unconscious, quick paced with a feel of strong necessity. This was all because I was in pursuit, pursuit of you. I wanted, I needed to break through the reflections of you and have something solid,  solid to handle and manipulate. This was not the only problem I had to face, nor was the most important on my ever expanding itinerary, but I was pulled forward. Suddenly I stopped with an urgency that resounded with everyone around me, I had forgotten they were even there, I was confronted with an ever changing kaleidoscope of faces and emotions that filled every nook and cranny of this area to its entirety. I gained my bearings, up was up and down was down unlike it had been until now.

I soon recognized the patterns of your jacket in front of me. Forward my arm went with a quiver, to sense you in any possible way. He then abruptly moved forward with a skip and a jump towards the same prospects I had in mind. He was (in my early visualisation) a man who gave the impression of being easily forgotten, I had allowed my emotions to cloud perception. Fighting through it all I saw he was the perfect make and model, his similarities to myself seemed large. Loathing and panic played a dramatic and peevish tune on my heart strings. All thoughts inside me expanded to an immeasurably large size and then as you returned his touch, they shrunk back with a blink to an equally small size. I realized my deepest fear, the seat next to you was already reserved, the seats all around you would be reserved and the placement of our bodies would not, by a great margin, be as equal as I had hoped only moments ago. I turned and waited, for what? I don’t exactly know, astoundingly it never came. I dropped my eyes to look at the left foot who had so eagerly brought me to all this mere moments ago, it again began to move me forward, left, then right, and left again…

We all know that music can effect your mood, change the way you feel and change your perspective of the world around you. If you have listened to any type of music for any amount of time you will most likely also know that music is strongly linked to memories and the emotions these memories bring along with them. I have always known and felt this equation  music>memory>old emotion=current emotion very very strongly  all throughout my life. For example I have a hard time listening to bands I was really into at certainrough patches in my life, I also had to be very careful about listening to music when my grandfather passed away recently because I knew these bad memories would be attached to whatever I listened to for months or even years.  

I still find it  very hard to listen to certain music that is attached to events thats  happened many years ago. As this articlestates, in my mind [What seems to happen is that] “a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our [my] head.” It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye.”  Sometimes for me things become so vivid and the emotions so potent that it is unbearable.  

I just tonight  began to wonder why these connections are there and why they can be so strong?  It so happens there is a region in our brains near the forehead that is responsible for this, it’s main function is to detect changes in music signature and timescale but it also reacts strongly when a song has autobiographically relevance. It goes on to explain that this musically enduced phenomenon within our brain is so powerful that terminal Alzheimer’s patients when introduced to a personally relevant song will react in positive ways. The researchers are looking into this as a to improving the quality of life for these people.  Yet another reason to love the wonderful combination of rhythm, melodies and soul that is music.

 Music in my opinion is one the most powerful means of entertainment, powerful for the creative, practical and academic mind as well as the soul and emotions. With all this power it seems we should see music in every school system so it can keep young minds active and growing, opening them to new worlds of creative prowess, intellect and design, but do we see this? In man cases we do not, it may be that music is being treated with the same discrimination as technology is within the schools. Or it may be it is the current generation that doesn’t view music as powerful in any form, hearing only constant streams of computerized beats being pumped out of the radio? Whatever the problem is I hope to soon see it corrected so the powers of the music medium can be used properly by everyone to help improve their and others lives.