The thing that most interested me on the Experimental Skeleton was the Dreamachines. They made me think of a Stargate tv show episode on which the characters found something similar in an outpost that had at one time been used by the Goa'uld. The machine there was set up in the middle of a room and emitted light patterns around the room that had a hypnotic effect. Anyone getting caught up in it would stand transfixed and lose track of time passing. It's not exactly the same thing but I think the effect would be similar.
The Experimental Skeleton group seems kind of like a new wave in art, taking art out of the individualistic and sending it into the group co-op. I think this collaborative environment is a good thing because it can bring creative energies together to accomplish artistic projects with greater scope, but I also feel like art as an individual endeavor should not get lost. Often an individual person's vision can best be materialized by that single person who has the fire inside them to express what they are envisioning.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Fibber McGee and Molly-The roots of the sitcom
Fibber McGee and Molly was one of a few radio shows in the early 1930's that used stories built on comedic situations. In the 30's and 40's Fibber McGee was part of pop culture in the US. Even in the 50's and 60's many people still used some references to the show in everyday language. I remember my mom calling her closet door in the kitchen Fibber McGee's closet. This was where she kept a lot of plastic bowls that were stacked haphazardly and were prone to falling out when she opened the door. She said that was what Fibber McGee's closet did on the show. I listened to recordings of a few episodes before and the closet was used quite often. The sound effects made it pretty easy to relate to the experience of opening a closet door and having stuff fall out and hit you. It's something that I think has happened to a lot of people.
One of the great features of radio shows was that they allowed you to use your own imagination to picture scenes and characters. I think sometimes when people would see a picture of the actor who did a certain voice they'd be surprised and it might even ruin their enjoyment of the show. Some of the actors who did voices of characters that were supposed to be strong handsome men were actually not much to look. From the opposite perspective, radio allowed people to be stars as leading men and women who wouldn't have been welcome to play those parts in movies or television because they didn't have the looks to carry the role.
We might not be able to recapture the effect of the radio show but we use the same kind of imaginative input when we read a book, at least one that hasn't been made into a movie. Before the first Harry Potter movie I'm sure there were a lot of different impressions of what the characters looked like and all of the settings but once readers saw that first movie it influenced how they pictured everything for each subsequent Harry Potter book. The same thing would happen if all of those old radio shows were made into television shows. Nobody would be able to hold on to their imagined visual images because they'd have all been replaced by the "real" images broadcast on the tv. If humanity stops using their imaginative abilities will they eventually be lost, evolved out of us in successive generations?
One of the great features of radio shows was that they allowed you to use your own imagination to picture scenes and characters. I think sometimes when people would see a picture of the actor who did a certain voice they'd be surprised and it might even ruin their enjoyment of the show. Some of the actors who did voices of characters that were supposed to be strong handsome men were actually not much to look. From the opposite perspective, radio allowed people to be stars as leading men and women who wouldn't have been welcome to play those parts in movies or television because they didn't have the looks to carry the role.
We might not be able to recapture the effect of the radio show but we use the same kind of imaginative input when we read a book, at least one that hasn't been made into a movie. Before the first Harry Potter movie I'm sure there were a lot of different impressions of what the characters looked like and all of the settings but once readers saw that first movie it influenced how they pictured everything for each subsequent Harry Potter book. The same thing would happen if all of those old radio shows were made into television shows. Nobody would be able to hold on to their imagined visual images because they'd have all been replaced by the "real" images broadcast on the tv. If humanity stops using their imaginative abilities will they eventually be lost, evolved out of us in successive generations?
War of the Worlds
During the time when Orson Wells War of The World was first broadcast people were used to hearing news broadcasts break into their radio programs. There was fear of war breaking out in Europe and people were on edge, worried about what would happen. Wells took advantage of that fear by making his program sound like it was another news alert breaking into the regular scheduled programming. This made it seem like real news to a lot of people. There was an introduction of the show before it started but many people missed hearing that and it wasn't repeated during the broadcast. Many people panicked, thinking it would be the end of society. I think it wouldn't be quite as easy to make the same kind of broadcast believable today because there are too many avenues of information to consult before making a judgment. But, people can easily be influenced to believe things that aren't true and to spread rumors. It would be fairly easy to put something out on the internet and have it spread around the world as long as it wasn't something so blatantly false that it would become obvious right away and be disproved before it gained momentum. I couldn't find any information on something that happened when I was a kid but I can relate the incident from personal experience. My older teenage sister was seriously upset and worried when she heard the rumor that was circulating in the northeastern US in the early 70's. The story that was going around was that aliens had communicated by radio transmissions that they were on the way to earth to collect teenage girls to take back to their home planet to help repopulate their dwindling population. It was just believable enough that a lot of teenage girls were worried. Of course, parents laughed it off. I wasn't old enough to qualify as a teen, but I remember that upset me since I thought it'd be a great adventure to go off in an alien spaceship and live on a different planet. I'd have probably changed my mind if it'd actually happened, but I was pretty amused about the whole thing and kind of disappointed when they didn't show up to claim my sister. I can't remember what day it was supposed to be but there was a specific date that it was supposed to happen and once that date passed all the teenage girls stopped worrying. That kind of rumor could easily be spread around on the internet now and spread all over the world but maybe teenagers are a bit more sophisticated these days and wouldn't buy it.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Hippie's, free love, free speech, & women's lib
During the time between the early 1950's and the early 1970's a lot of things changed in our culture. These changes bled into the film and television industries just as those same industries took up the causes and reflected them back at us, fueling the fires of change.
After World War II life was good in the US. Manufacturing turned back to making things for peacetime life instead of war supplies. It didn't take very long before we were involved in the Korean war. During both WWII and the Korean conflict a lot of women went to work jobs that were traditionally held by men. I think a lot of them enjoyed that taste of being independent financially. That was a time when married women usually stayed home and raised kids and cleaned the house and were dependent on their husbands for any money they ever got to spend. I think these times when it was acceptable for women to work manufacturing jobs and other traditionally male jobs planted the seed in the minds of many women that later, in the next generation bloomed into the women's lib movement. It was in the mid 60's that women's lib started spreading around the country. The civil rights movement was also going on in the late 50's and the 60's. It was a period of people noticing the inequities and fighting to correct them. These movements for equal rights for blacks and women helped create the environment that gave rise to hippie's. They were anti-establishment, anti-status quo, and believed in peace, freedom to live as you chose and speak about anything you wanted to. Some of them joined together, living in communes, which a lot of people said was an attempt to do away with the traditional family unit. When the government started drafting men for the Vietnam war a lot of hippies fled to Canada to avoid having to kill people.
During this time period there were advancements in technology that allowed new things to be done in filming, better camera's, etc. Television was thriving and movie makers had to be more innovative to attract people to go out to see movies. Also, television was more tightly controlled and couldn't broadcast anything outside the tight moral standards of the average mid-west family. Movies had a little more freedom to be a little looser with morality and nudity.
Drive-in movie theatre's became popular since a whole family could pile into the family station wagon and see a couple of movies at a pretty cheap price.
After World War II life was good in the US. Manufacturing turned back to making things for peacetime life instead of war supplies. It didn't take very long before we were involved in the Korean war. During both WWII and the Korean conflict a lot of women went to work jobs that were traditionally held by men. I think a lot of them enjoyed that taste of being independent financially. That was a time when married women usually stayed home and raised kids and cleaned the house and were dependent on their husbands for any money they ever got to spend. I think these times when it was acceptable for women to work manufacturing jobs and other traditionally male jobs planted the seed in the minds of many women that later, in the next generation bloomed into the women's lib movement. It was in the mid 60's that women's lib started spreading around the country. The civil rights movement was also going on in the late 50's and the 60's. It was a period of people noticing the inequities and fighting to correct them. These movements for equal rights for blacks and women helped create the environment that gave rise to hippie's. They were anti-establishment, anti-status quo, and believed in peace, freedom to live as you chose and speak about anything you wanted to. Some of them joined together, living in communes, which a lot of people said was an attempt to do away with the traditional family unit. When the government started drafting men for the Vietnam war a lot of hippies fled to Canada to avoid having to kill people.
During this time period there were advancements in technology that allowed new things to be done in filming, better camera's, etc. Television was thriving and movie makers had to be more innovative to attract people to go out to see movies. Also, television was more tightly controlled and couldn't broadcast anything outside the tight moral standards of the average mid-west family. Movies had a little more freedom to be a little looser with morality and nudity.
Drive-in movie theatre's became popular since a whole family could pile into the family station wagon and see a couple of movies at a pretty cheap price.
Abel Gance
Abel Gance might be called the father of editing. He led the way in using new editing techniques, cutting quickly between scenes in ways that weren't being done at the time. He also did a lot of unique camera work, mounting camera's on people to get moving action close-ups. He put camera's into the action to get angles that couldn't be gotten in the traditional methods. He filmed in water to get the waves up close and he filmed with the camera mounted on a horse to get the close action shots of the soldiers riding them. He started as an actor and then got into writing scripts before getting into producing and directing.
Frame by Frame Animation
Western Spaghetti- This animation is imaginative in the use of items to make spaghetti. It almost looks edible.
One Step Ahead-The Art of Speed
You kind of feel bad for this guy when he keeps racing to beat the others to work but they keep catching up with him no matter what he does. I like how it's sped up in spots to make it seem that he's moving really fast and the other office workers just move in normal time keeping to their routine and still make it into the office right behind him.
My Animated World
This guy has everything done for him-goes to store and buys old Atari game. Uses Atari game sounds in video. It's more of a stop action video but it's interesting with a lot of old stuff in it.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Stock Market Crash
The stock market crash of 1929 seemed to have been caused by a collapse of stock market prices in the US. It quickly spread to other countries. A significant aspect of the crash was the panic that had people franticly trying to sell off stock. This caused the ticker tape system to be overloaded and stop working and then when people switched to using the phone to sell off stock the phone lines became overloaded and this lack of communication exacerbated the panic. Many people who didn’t trade stocks ended up losing all of their savings because of the run on the banks when people influenced by fear all tried to withdraw their money at the same time which forced banks to close since they didn’t have enough money on hand to pay out every depositors money. This led to establishment of the FDIC, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in 1933 which provides protection to bank consumers among other provisions.
The market crash of 2008 was significantly more minor than the one that led to the Great Depression. The numbers didn’t fall as far. The collapse of the US housing bubble seems to be what kicked off the crash this time. Banks got freer with the home loan money which led to housing prices getting artificially inflated and more people getting stuck in loans that they couldn’t afford to pay. As interest rates rose housing pricing started declining which left many people stuck in houses that were valued at much less than the amount of money they owed on them. During the housing boom mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations increased and investors around the world had invested in the US housing market. When the housing prices began to fall foreclosures started to increase and the financial strength of the banks started dropping. Defaults on other types of loans also increased.
From the middle class point of view the most significant difference between the 1929 crash and the 2008 crash is that there was no run on the banks. Even though some banks failed the FDIC was in effect so the average person didn’t feel that they were in danger of losing their savings.
Both of these crashes followed periods of intense technological development and inflation. The 1929 crash was followed in the early 1930’s by a gradual economic improvement and then a significant improvement with the start of World War II. Supposedly, we are currently in a stage of gradual improvement. Hopefully, significant improvement this time won’t require another world war.
Websites of interest:
Jazz
Jazz originated in black communities in the early 20th century. It had African and European music roots. During the time that black musicians were developing a style of music that incorporated a lot of improvisation that became known as jazz there was still a lot of discrimination especially in the south.
New Orleans was the area where many of the jazz musicians practiced their craft but black musicians had no access to recording studios there so much of the early jazz sounds were not preserved. In big cities in the north discrimination wasn’t quite as blatant and black performers were able to use recording studios so it was only after jazz had become more widespread that it began to get recorded.
Jazz is a combination of influences from African tribal music with drumbeats and call and response patterns along with the introduction of European instruments like trumpet and violin. Jazz is fluid music that often seems to combine bits of blues and spirituals.
When Dr. Martin Luther King spoke on jazz in 1964 at the Berlin Jazz Festival he said that jazz is “triumphant music” and that “Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music.”
I think that Dr. King's address is a really good explanation of the importance of jazz.
To read the rest of his opening address go to:
Other websites cited:
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