Ravens

Everyone is a consumer. As much as we would like to think otherwise marketing has an effect on each and everyone of us. We are all part of a demographic where some marketing agency has been hired to reach us. Counterculture, artists, writers, scientists, anarchists, taggers, hipsters, 18 - 35's, film makers, mathematicians, etc, we are all just a group. While many get out of the high school clique mentality, marketers do not.

Yet for as long as time has passed advertisement has existed. We can even go back to when bartering was the trade of choice, we have been influenced by a description and look of a product. The giant watermelon that's cheap and bright green but infested and spoiled on the inside. The washed and waxed sports car that has a spotty engine and no transmission. The sparkly bronze sword over the grimly looking steel blade. Appearances are everything and our buying decisions are made off of them. However, we seem to have entered a new age of consumption.

Look at an ad and tell me if you ever just see the product. Clothes I can understand. You want to show how people look in it. Same goes for makeup and some other wearable products but look at everything else. Every ad has a person in it. These people are beautiful. Straight from Greek workshops they are sculpted figures of Adonis and Helen. An ad for Glad Wrap has a very attractive 35 year old women and her "two kids". Who knows if she even has kids or even if she's 35. But man my cucumber lasts for weeks before it gets bad.

Paris Hilton uses a pink Motorola phone. Was the phone bought by many because it has a quality piece of software, gets good reception, contains many necessary features or is it because in the newest issue of US Today Paris Hilton was seen talking on it after being paid X amount by Motorola for that exact photo-op. Viral. These phones are sent months before to "it" celebrities on the basis they will be seen with it. Why advertise when People Magazine is doing it for you. Coach Handbags got more advertisement in a month then they did in their entire history from the amount of people with them. Now every Sue, Jane, and Tom has a Coach bag and everyone is looking for the next big thing.

Stop worshipping celebrities.

Stop treating them as some sort of sun deity, a walking god, holding them to a platform of righteousness and dignity that you can not even hold. You scuff at Brittany getting drunk when two nights ago you did the same thing. You call Lohan a slut and last week you slept with two different people in the span of three days. Yet you were only having fun. Is this a job for them?

People make mistakes or decisions and all honestly they are allowed to. Celebrities just do it in fancier places with more money and with less repercussion. Just because the judicial branch holds them to a different standard does not give us the right to be judge, jury, and executioner. Stop with the terms and stop with the labeling. You're only angry at yourself.

TV and print is a reflection of yourself. You are disgusted with how those in the limelight act. Yet they are yourself. You made the puppet in your image and now are shocked he's misbehaving and lying about it.

You are disgusted with what you have become. What out society has become. We're ashamed that when our ruling bodies lie to us we don't go after them or care. Instead we go after adoption of third world babies and deaths of playmates. Stop and look at yourself for once. Slow down and smell the napalm.

We never had a royalty. We rejected the notion of honoring a symbol of a country that has no power. And yet we have begun to treat Hollywood as our Buckingham palace. Our Queen is some random actress. Our king is the hot singer. Our prince is the most current "hot" director. Our princess is the latest trust fund heiress. People have died from this. You killed Marilyn Monroe.

The ravens have left the Chinese Theatre; prepare for invasion...

Stop following trends. Stop following the made path. To use a cliche, take the road less traveled by. You are middle class. Similar to past countries, the middle class dressed and acted like the current elite in hopes that they too would be equal. Acting like the upper does make you the same. You have more in common with those below you then with those above you. They don't like you. They mock you. Stop adding fuel.

Dressing like the National Inquirer will not put you in it. It makes you boring. It makes you unoriginal. It makes you a poor copy of someone who is just copying someone else. Trends all come from some place and mostly it is from those who have their eyes open. Look and you'll see all around you the latest trends years and months before. It's amazing what occurs when you open your eyes. Open your eyes and listen, a world will be unleashed you never knew existed.

Hard work, diligence, and luck is what gets you to the top. Why was a king a king? Someone in his family long time ago had those three qualities and now is family is coasted. Let them coast. Change the system from within. They are blind to you. You can take over.

I hope the ravens never never return...

I have odd taste in music

March Madness

Jeppers H. Christmas. 2 games have been completed and I'm already 0 - 2. God damn it!

I'd give you freedom if it was free

I was reading "V for Vendetta" tonight and the attitude of the book, along with some of the secular reactions to the Catholic church has gotten me in an odd shape. While I consider myself liberal and at times extreme - I believe in over taxation, health care for all, education for all, food for all, shelter for all, and most of all freedom. It's difficult for me to believe we live in a world where a man on the street can be dying of hunger and celebrities are force starving themselves to meet a fixed weight ideal set by the standards of society. Only the rich have eating disorders.

I go to school, I go to work, and I go to bed. I socialize, I read, and I write.

Yet what for?
Where am I going?
What am I trying to accomplish?

At times I feel the need to rip of the chains set my parents and myself and reject everything. Pick up my can and my pen and tear apart the fabric of falselessness and overlay it with messages of truth and reality. Anarchy seems at times to be the way to go. When all said and done, whatever exists we can start again. Somewhere we went wrong. I'd hope that in the end we will make it right, yet I know we won't.

It's a shame that children exist whose only taste of milk is from the hard nipples of swollen breasts atop a bloated defiled corpse.

The city is a canvas

I have a wonderful weekend planned out that I am excited for but before I leave and get ready to go I wanted to post this wonderful trailer for what I feel is going to be an amazing documentary.

David Choe - Documentary

If I had to pick any art form I respect and love more then anything it is graffiti. Few people know this as I don't advertise it, but seeing a tag, a stencil, sticker or a killer piece laid out on a building just puts a smile on my face. It seems to be the one art form where function steps down to form. The tools used does not allow for one to focus on the details but rather the artist must focus on the message. Speed is essential. This is one of the reasons I have been drawn to contemporary art and stream of conscious writing/poetry. The labored writer pales in comparison to the free flowing writer. Editors rue the day for the laboring, carefully constructing each sentence, each word is hand picked. Yet it lacks any emotion. It's stagnate.

I have heard contemporary literature called journals in novel form. The beat writers of the late 50's and 60's exemplified this two-fold. However, where they failed was their work was still just as pretensious as Dickens. It didn't strip down the constructs of literature but merely moved it in another direction. There is few contemporary writings that truly shift words into another dimension ala modern art. I feel this may have to do with the nature of writing itself and how these mediums are looked at.

When we are kids we can paint, we can draw and color. It may not be the best and at times does not look like anything but yet it is creative and ours. It takes us years to learn how to write, it takes years to learn how to write well, and it takes years and sometimes never happens to learn how to write interesting. As an author goes through the process he infuses in himself a smug feeling of self-worthy due to his own innate and labored over talent. The artist does not need to know how to write. Two artists of two different countries with two different languages understand each other. Two writers in similar instances cannot. While we struggle to modernize literature and move it forward, we need to figure out how is writing is perceived. To modernize art do we have to go backwards and build a form of graphical nature of writing? To modernize words, do we need worldly symbols for all to understand? Do we need to treat writing as a picture? Words have allowed man to become who man is today. But it also has allowed man to separate himself from his fellow man. Was this meant to be?

Dios Mio

I saw Los Muertos last night at the Eastman House and it was beatiful, pretensious, pointless, and riveting all at the same time. I have been unable to get it off my mind the entire day and I just feel the need to write all my views on the film before I either forget them or they become more of a jumbled mess.

"Los Muertos" is the second film from Lisandro Alonso, who is known around the world (especially in France) of his realistic documentary style movies about everyday life. This movie in particular follows the journey of a prisoner, Argentino Vargas, to deliever a letter to a friend's daughter and see his own daughter. Simple concept, simple exceution, but the film speaks volume in it's simplicity.

The film starts out suddenly with an out of focus camera moving in between leaves and branches in a forest of Argentina. Yet the camera picks up three bodies, two of them are children dead, and there is a third who appears in the distant and then walks past the camera. It is important to note that Vargas was convicted of murder, the reaosn he is in jail. Yet the viewer can see these bodies as either the work of Vargas in the past, work in the future, or just a sign of something that Vargas saw that drove him to do what he did. We never get this question answer but due to such a scene, whose implications are unknown, we are left in a state of disarry.

Even when we see Vargas, who is in every single scene but one, we feel uneasy about him. He's old, grizzled, smokey eyes, and very quiet. He walks with a childish limp, dragging his feet as he goes from place to place. His posture and attitues are also child-like, indicating that he has been in prison for a while and has not matured much. The camera also seems to feel indifferent about him as well. The cemra does not keep pace with Vargas, it moves slower, doesn't move when he does, or simply just backs off and shows something else we might find more interest, such as the forest that overlooks the river. Try as we might, we can never connect with Vargas. Similar to how Vargas cannot connect with the world. He has been in prison for many years. He left a daughter, who we later find out has a younger son and daughter herself, and she too has left them. As he goes through different episodes on his trip back - buy a gift, buy some bread, have sex with a prostitute - he acts shy and afraid of these people as he seems not to fully understand what is going on. Even his interactions with his grandson is emotionally stunted.

Really though, I think Alonso's main theme throughout the film was on isolation and freedom. In prison, Vergas was confined to a fenced in area. He slept in a small room alone, had to eat out of a tupperware, days spent drinking mate and watching inmates play soccer, and drink from a shared cup of water. Even in the scene he was confined. The cmera was placed very close and rarely left his sight. For seconds it was placed just to watch Vargas sitting and watching. Yet when he leaves prison, the camera becomes free, similar to Vargas. It begins to zoom out, more wide shots, it moves up and down, left to right, back and front. At times it moves out of the presence of Vargas. No longer is the viewer stuck with Vargas, we have a chance to leave his side if we so decide. Yet while we are free, the feeling of isolation overwhelms us. As the camera shows the enitre river and Vargas and his boat is such a small pinpoint on it, he is surrounded by forests on all sides. So while he is free from confinment, he is now a prisoner of his own lonliness and isolation. His prison is now the free world that he can not relate to. This is where I feel the forest is important. Only in the forest, where amny of the peasnats live, can someone be free and confined. Grounded by the forest arround them, they have the ability to do what they want to do. Yet what comes from that is poverty.

The film is diffently not for everyone. It is slow and at times nothing happens. Yet at the same time I was drawn to the ritualistic nature of it. From what I hear Alonso's other film "La Libertad" follows a similar style and I need to head down to Global and grab it.

Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeck

Alot has gone on in the past few weeks, too much to actually write it up in detail so I'll summarize in order of good and bad

Good: I've moved to a house in Park Ave and I love it
Bad: I hate city parking

Good: Every week a new concert pops up that I buy tickets for. I'm broke due to a music shop being walking distance and my need of seeing live music
Bad: No one has heard of half the bands and I feel pretensious and smug and an asshole when I talk about them.

Good: I got the new Royksopp cd
Bad: There's a horrible drum and bass inspired track and it's more dancey then jazzish.

Good: I started work on a 9000 piece puzzle
Bad: I want to buy the 12,000 piece one next

Good: I don't have to pay for school anymore
Bad: Nothing at all bad about that

Good: I get to see Coldplay, Rilo Kiley, Bloc Party, the Kills, and Sigur Ros in a 10 day span
Bad: Sigur Ros and Bloc Party / The Kills cost me as much as the Coldplay / Rilo Kiley show

Good: I'm traveling to Penn State / Philly in 2 weeks to help a friend move
Bad: She's moving

Good: For the first time in three years I spent an entire day playing a videogame - Resident Evil 4.
Bad: I beat it