Music and Memory

For me music and memory have always gone hand and hand. I'll randomly hear songs like "Spiderwebs" by No Doubt or "Tonight, Tonight" by the Smashing Pumpkins and I'll instantly be transported back to my neighbor's bedroom sitting at the edge of the bed playing video games and listening to the music blaring out of the stereo that was much larger than his small bedroom needed. The really interesting thing about it is that there are certain memories that I don't even know that I've saved, that will be suddenly knocked free by a song.
There are also certain albums that will always remind me of particular times in my life, specifically vacations. I associate every vacation I've been on in the last six years with an album, or at least a particular song. In 2004 when I went to Florida it was the album "So Long, Astoria" by The Ataris. In 2005 when I went to England with my Grandpa I listened to the album "Almost Here" by The Academy Is..., In 2006 when I went to Hawaii I listened to a compilation of unreleased demos by a band called Brand New. At first I didn't try to create such a close association between vacations and music, but after a while I began to notice that if I listened to the same album the whole vacation it helped me remember my vacation better, especially when I listened to the music. Now I'm glad that I have these close associations. It is nice because occasionally I'll get sick of the Minnesota cold and will miss Hawaii, or I'll get nostalgic and miss the time I spent with my Grandpa in England, if I'm ever feeling down, or in one of these bad moods, I can simply throw on Brand New's demos or "Almost Here", and it is easy for me to remember happier times and shake my bad mood quickly.
I've got to admit that my memory through music has tempted me to pull a John Cusack from "High Fidelity" and sort my music collection autobiographically, but haven't had the courage to attempt it yet.

Local News

While searching Kare 11's video vault for some worthwhile news to analyze I became frustrated. The first handful of videos I came across didn't qualify as news, in my opinion at least, the stories ranged from two brothers who taught a two minute cooking class, to a goose that had imprinted on to a human, and now flew beside him while he drove his boat. While the cooking class may have been informative on some level, I don't think a salsa recipe really warrants time on a news broadcast, they have the Food Network and daytime TV for a reason, that is the time to show cooking, not during the few precious moments when busy people are trying to gather information that is relevant and important to their lives. After sifting through more puff piece videos I thought I had finally found a few worthwhile videos put they all turned out to be more or less about the same thing. One video had the heading of "Bus Stop Drop a big success", the video then went on to say that the Toys for Tots charity had seen a 40% drop in the amount of donations when compared to 2008's numbers. In the story the reporter interviewed a Marine who was working for the charity. The Marine gave ideas for donations, then told a story about when he had given a GI Joe to a young boy through the Toys for Tots program. The next video that came on was nearly the exact same story, it talked about donations being down 40%, this time they interviewed volunteers working at the donation tent who again shared stories about how Toys for Tots has helped others. The obvious reason for these reports was to raise awareness that charities are effected by hard times economically. For each of the stories they interviewed volunteers to give viewers a sense of who is helping these organization and how both the volunteers and the children have been positively impacted by the Toys for Tots.

My experience on the Kare 11 website is exactly why I don't watch local news. The only real news I ever watch is CNN when I'm getting ready in the mornings, or occasionally the Colbert Report and The Daily Show, but I don't watch any of these with any real consistency. Instead I get my news from my Blackberry through an application I downloaded from the Associated Press. I love the application because it has sixteen different categories for news, including showbiz news and wacky news, I'm glad they include these as categories because for the most part I don't care about the news in either of these categories, but unfortunately 90% of the news on the would qualify for one of these two categories. Another nice thing about the AP application is that it has a local news section as well, so if I feel that none of the stories in the other categories relate to me I can switch to the local section and read articles from the Pioneer Press. The final real highlight of the application is that it updates constantly and the application updates itself as new stories come in. After having this application for a few months it has been hard to watch television news because of the reasons I mentioned before, either the stories are non-relevant, or they are the same story over and over again.

Paranormal Activity Ad

The ad I analyzed was the trailer for the movie Paranormal Activity. I think this commercial is genius and I have to admit that I went to go see the movie based solely on the trailer. The trailer uses filmed audience reactions from an early screening of the movie, and people in the audience seem like they're losing their minds they are so scared. I love being scared, and I love scary movies, unfortunately I haven't been scared at a movie in a long time. Seeing the reactions of people jumping out of their seats,biting their nails, and pulling their hair out made me envious, I wanted to be that scared too. The obvious solution, go see paranormal activity. After seeing the movie I appreciated the commercial even more. The movie itself has very few scary scenes, so the editors of the ad must have used most of the reactions from the same parts of the movie, put together in a way to make it seem as though the movie will have you jumping out of your seat the whole time.

Fantasy Football Fanatics

My roommate is an avid fantasy sports fan. He's the GM of a fantasy baseball league in the summer, has multiple fantasy football teams, and even talked me into joining a fantasy hockey league so that there would be be enough teams. He lives for his fantasy sports, and during the fall months it is nothing but football. He takes his fantasy football league very seriously (if his fantasy football team has a bad week it seems to effect his mood all week),and so do the other people in his league, he receives countless calls from other members of the league every Sunday, either to brag about how they're team is doing, or to ask if he had seen a certain play. Recently his brother and a few of his brother's friends have been coming over to our house on Sundays to watch football because we have the NFL Red zone channel, which airs nothing but football for eight straight hours. A fantasy football players dream. Each Sunday my roommate and his friends gather around the TV in time to catch the kick off of the early games, each with a laptop resting in their laps ready to start clicking away so that they won't miss a single play and so they can follow all of their players simultaneously. The next eight hours are spent relatively devoid of any real conversation, mainly just screams or groans in reaction to a play. What few conversations there are are all very brief, and not much attention is given to the conversation, most of the attention is still lost glancing up and down between television and computer, as if there were a tennis match being carried out between the two screens. An entire room full of people seem to be completely oblivious of each other as they focus intently on the games and stats as they flash across the multiple screens in the room. When the games have finished they finally find time to talk, and the conversation that has been pent up for hours comes bursting out. Some are ecstatic about winning their match up for the weeks, other distraught and cursing their team, or the refs, or their own poor roster decisions. When everything is finalized and there are no more games for the week my roommate immediately begins to look ahead to the next week. He'll look to see who he plays next week, who his players are matched up with, and beginning to decide who he will start in his next match up, and the cycle begins again.

Voice thread

Here is my voice thread. I decided to talk about the stereotypes surrounding Irish people, and how Irish people themselves seem to be encouraging these stereotypes, almost embracing them as a part of their cultural identity.

Here's the link http://voicethread.com/share/671215/

Hey I can finally post videos. Awesome.

Natural Born KIllers Analysis

The clip I analyzed was from the film "Natural Born Killers". I analyzed the scene using the rhetorical/audience approach, and the postmodernist approach. The scene is a satirical sitcom meant to comment on a number of different things including the repetitive narrative of sitcoms, as well as modern society's desensitization to abuse and violence. The scene opens with a knock off of the beginning of "I Love Lucy" and introduces the scene as "I Love Mallory". Rodney Dangerfield is then introduced as her father and from his first line he is very rude to his daughter, and the studio audience laughs each time he insults Mallory. Later Mallory and her father get into an argument, Rodney Dangerfield then begins threaten Mallory telling her that he'll beat her, as he's threatening her some "Leave it to Beaver" sounding music begins to chime in and creates a contrast, or even a disconnect between the music and what is actually happening in the scene. Rodney then precedes to sexually abuse her verbally and physically in a truly disturbing scene. When Mallory final breaks away from her father and runs up stairs, the audience begins applauding Rodney Dangerfield as if they had truly enjoyed the scene. It is very reminiscent of scenes from Married With Children when the audience applauds Al. Later in the scene Woody Harrelson shows up and receives a roaring applause from the audience, much like any beloved regular from a sitcom. This satirical scene calls our attention to how sitcoms use in-studio audiences to help position their viewers, and almost creating a mob type mentality to reinforce their position . Rodney Dangerfield is doing these horrible, uncomfortable things, and in direct opposition to what the real audience is feeling the in-studio audience loves the unbearable scene, laughing and applauding the whole time. The scene almost forces the viewer think about the scene critically by including the studio audience and their bizarre reactions to the scene. It encourages the viewer to think for themselves, rather than simply going along with the studio audience's reactions.

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed0Y3D2F-ow