Thursday, December 9, 2010
how would I INCORPORATE IT!?
I don't want to be overly glib about it, so I will...and then clarify.
The short answer: literature/writing doesn't exist for me without using film/tv/internet as a major part of it. So I'd use it all, and it would be daily.
It's just a huge part of who I am. Many of my cohort comes at all of this from a literature perspective, and I certainly am not naive to literature. I've seriously studied the super-idea of "literature" since about 12 years old, and I know play-writing/screen-writing and poetry incredibly well, but not to the detriment of prose. However, my first experiences with the artistic experience is through film. Without equating what I read to what I've seen, I have serious problems generating interest in myself. So my lessons by their definition default to webpages that might equate, films that better show the themes, etc. It all works as allegory for our own experiences, but film simply speaks to me in its own "better" way. As a result, when I come up with lessons, I default to what movies or tv I could use with it, or what websites would help make the understanding easier for students. Even something like Shakespeare, Shelley, Donne, or Eliot, all of whom I've loved since I was a kid...I always look at the text as one part of a much larger picture. The unsung hero to all of this is games, which I also view as a huge part of educational understanding.
So there's my strength. My default is to incorporate this all together in a lesson, and without a computer and dvd-player to help me along, I'd have some huge adaptations within myself to make. That's my weakness. My weakness isn't in incorporating all of this. It's in finding myself in situations where I can't.
My DREAM class (one of two) is teaching a year-long class on screenwriting/shooting/editing.
The second dream class is debate, but there's another story.
My default, FYI, is the honor's/AP route. Hopefully my education/background helps me there.
so that prime dream class of teaching video production and screenwriting can't exist without my defaults, and it certainly can't exist without specific modeling/scaffolding using a hundred different programs. I really enjoyed our imovie assignment, specifically the part about using photos to do it. I'd love to make that an early component: giving students cameras and telling them to shoot pictures. still photos. make a short montage of it. Something like flickr and imovie combined would also work really well: asking them to pull available images and tell a story with them isn't too far off from early directing projects i've done in early directing classes. by the same token, digital comic books would be a good primer for storyboarding.
The short answer: literature/writing doesn't exist for me without using film/tv/internet as a major part of it. So I'd use it all, and it would be daily.
It's just a huge part of who I am. Many of my cohort comes at all of this from a literature perspective, and I certainly am not naive to literature. I've seriously studied the super-idea of "literature" since about 12 years old, and I know play-writing/screen-writing and poetry incredibly well, but not to the detriment of prose. However, my first experiences with the artistic experience is through film. Without equating what I read to what I've seen, I have serious problems generating interest in myself. So my lessons by their definition default to webpages that might equate, films that better show the themes, etc. It all works as allegory for our own experiences, but film simply speaks to me in its own "better" way. As a result, when I come up with lessons, I default to what movies or tv I could use with it, or what websites would help make the understanding easier for students. Even something like Shakespeare, Shelley, Donne, or Eliot, all of whom I've loved since I was a kid...I always look at the text as one part of a much larger picture. The unsung hero to all of this is games, which I also view as a huge part of educational understanding.
So there's my strength. My default is to incorporate this all together in a lesson, and without a computer and dvd-player to help me along, I'd have some huge adaptations within myself to make. That's my weakness. My weakness isn't in incorporating all of this. It's in finding myself in situations where I can't.
My DREAM class (one of two) is teaching a year-long class on screenwriting/shooting/editing.
The second dream class is debate, but there's another story.
My default, FYI, is the honor's/AP route. Hopefully my education/background helps me there.
so that prime dream class of teaching video production and screenwriting can't exist without my defaults, and it certainly can't exist without specific modeling/scaffolding using a hundred different programs. I really enjoyed our imovie assignment, specifically the part about using photos to do it. I'd love to make that an early component: giving students cameras and telling them to shoot pictures. still photos. make a short montage of it. Something like flickr and imovie combined would also work really well: asking them to pull available images and tell a story with them isn't too far off from early directing projects i've done in early directing classes. by the same token, digital comic books would be a good primer for storyboarding.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
videos!
I apparently sound REALLY geeky when I say it, but the below video is something I imagine hearing at a werewolf bonfire.
This first video is a Finntroll song, "Trollhammeren". Any metal from this region not about burning a church will be about a celebration of some kind...you just have to remember that we celebrate with more violence than you'd think. The entire point is celebration, and every shot furthers the speed of the song - count, if you dare, the amount of times someone pulls from a skin or a stein as he dances. I DARE you. There's very little linear progression to the video, it's more about expanding on the feeling of the song, and the song itself is fairly typical of finntroll in that it extols successful celebration. If it were being used to sell the music, I'd say it would do a great job among audiences not familiar with metal: rather than subject us to the norm of seeing closeups of everyone playing and make the video entirely about them playing the song, it constructs an optimal venue, and it does so in an aggressive, but non-violent way. To the metal-virgin, it says essentially that they're just about having some fun. The sound is primal (especially the use of drums throughout the song to create the bones of the song) and it's about addressing the primitive part of ourself.
This next video is a little different.
This is an older video, it's from Morbid Angel, the album is "Domination". They're a much more "typical" metal band in that they focus entirely on death metal and their goal is to scare the hell out of you. The video's pretty old, it was the official video for the song way back when Mtv used to play music. It focuses on everything the Finntroll video doesn't: it highlights the band, from the intro shot of the drummer's foot to the guitarist solo at the end. It is made solely to sell a very dark (but cool-sounding) product.
Contrast all of that to this:
This is "The Serpentine Offering" from the Dimmu Borgir album "In Sorte Diaboli". Great album. Fairly horrid videos when you look at the bluescreen work they do. They do a sort of amalgam of the two styles shown above. They present a narrative framework for their song: that of a feudal village inundated with primitive christianity, until they're brought to task by their old "gods". This is a common thematic motif in metal, that of the old gods we've forgotten still being relevant, and still watching us. The band also throws themselves into the video as musicians, with occasionally-hilarious results. You can see this even more clearly in the video "The Sacrilegious Scorn", which I will not post here, but highly suggest you look for it - in the video the band is on a bad blue screen of a storm front where they roll dice on an old frying pan and threaten each other. The goal here is a little more simple: they're doing wish-fulfillment, placing themselves in an environment they want to actually live in. The music on the posted video has the repeated lyric, "My descent is the story of every man, I am hatred, darkness, and despair." They insert that song into the imagery of the old scandinavian christian village in order to illustrate exactly what they're talking about...
This first video is a Finntroll song, "Trollhammeren". Any metal from this region not about burning a church will be about a celebration of some kind...you just have to remember that we celebrate with more violence than you'd think. The entire point is celebration, and every shot furthers the speed of the song - count, if you dare, the amount of times someone pulls from a skin or a stein as he dances. I DARE you. There's very little linear progression to the video, it's more about expanding on the feeling of the song, and the song itself is fairly typical of finntroll in that it extols successful celebration. If it were being used to sell the music, I'd say it would do a great job among audiences not familiar with metal: rather than subject us to the norm of seeing closeups of everyone playing and make the video entirely about them playing the song, it constructs an optimal venue, and it does so in an aggressive, but non-violent way. To the metal-virgin, it says essentially that they're just about having some fun. The sound is primal (especially the use of drums throughout the song to create the bones of the song) and it's about addressing the primitive part of ourself.
This next video is a little different.
This is an older video, it's from Morbid Angel, the album is "Domination". They're a much more "typical" metal band in that they focus entirely on death metal and their goal is to scare the hell out of you. The video's pretty old, it was the official video for the song way back when Mtv used to play music. It focuses on everything the Finntroll video doesn't: it highlights the band, from the intro shot of the drummer's foot to the guitarist solo at the end. It is made solely to sell a very dark (but cool-sounding) product.
Contrast all of that to this:
This is "The Serpentine Offering" from the Dimmu Borgir album "In Sorte Diaboli". Great album. Fairly horrid videos when you look at the bluescreen work they do. They do a sort of amalgam of the two styles shown above. They present a narrative framework for their song: that of a feudal village inundated with primitive christianity, until they're brought to task by their old "gods". This is a common thematic motif in metal, that of the old gods we've forgotten still being relevant, and still watching us. The band also throws themselves into the video as musicians, with occasionally-hilarious results. You can see this even more clearly in the video "The Sacrilegious Scorn", which I will not post here, but highly suggest you look for it - in the video the band is on a bad blue screen of a storm front where they roll dice on an old frying pan and threaten each other. The goal here is a little more simple: they're doing wish-fulfillment, placing themselves in an environment they want to actually live in. The music on the posted video has the repeated lyric, "My descent is the story of every man, I am hatred, darkness, and despair." They insert that song into the imagery of the old scandinavian christian village in order to illustrate exactly what they're talking about...
sharing of music
What I listen to most: a lot of metal lately. It's really hard though, after the age of 15 or so, to try and define yourself based on music, and I say I "metal" simply because it's the one I play most often lately. I switched over from cd's maybe six years ago, and when I put it all on an external drive the count was something like 120 gigs of music, that number's now at over 200. I listen to most of it fairly regularly, and it follows the basic trends of blues, jazz, polka, classic rock, instrumental, and metal. There's just...a little bit more metal than the rest. My primary reason for listening is simple in that it's loud, violent, and shows an incredible amount of artistry/musicianship that a lot of other genres tend to lack. Almost all of the metal I listen to is scandinavian black/death/doom/progressive metal, and the latter especially (progressive) is more experimental than anything, portraying very few of the stereotypical metal-tendencies. They'll incorporate any number of instruments to a song, so long as it sounds right in the end.
Concerts - almost entirely metal. I get bored otherwise. I've only been to one non-metal concert in the last six years, and it was an acoustic by a metal band. I just really hate having to sit still and just listen to some song, and metal doesn't really do seating. There's just a large pit in the center, and everyone roams freely.
It's the anger, aggression, and cynicism that really turns me on. The entire point to black and death metal is that everything is not all right, the symbols of our society are boned, and it's appropriate to fight against it. 60's folk metal has nothing on the guy who burned a church down because he decided that christianity is the greatest evil to befall norway EVER. Yeah...he's in jail. I don't really condone the violence obviously, in terms of physical action, but I appreciate the ethos. ESPECIALLY since it's often driven by that scandinavian paganism (note that's lower-cased, pagans are not organized. idiot wiccans) that appeals to my childhood misconceptions where the myths were real...that's a whole 'nother story.
The song I'll be bringing in for this: what I'll show in class largely depends on the mood. I don't really have a singular favorite, and I don't really have a singular favorite genre. So I'll play whatever seems fitting at the time, and this also depends on whether or not I can play NSFW songs. Options:
Vintersorg
Morbid Angel
Diabolical Masquerade
Opeth
Tom Waits
Mac Wiseman
Finntroll
Sepultura
How I would teach this in the classroom: first, I don't know if I could. IF I did, it would be either from a historical perspective using tribalism as a moniker, and use something like Sepultura or Finntroll for that, or else I would do it from the perspective of creative soundtracks to personal movies, using Vintersorg as an example of symphony.
It's all very primal, and a lot of it depends on a more tribal structure. They often rebel against large governments with any kind of malicious power over them. It's sort of like the Norse version of rap in terms of what it accomplishes. And just like rap, there's a lot of commercialist crap on the market. So I could also use this in the classroom as a sort of media literacy/awareness unit and ask students to dissect different examples in order to determine why it's made. Is the music made only to be sold (a very american thing generally) or is it made for its own sake or some greater artistic purpose? What does it say when entertainment is packaged solely for consumption?
Historical context of the genre...or at least the sub-genres I listen to: oftentimes they're started in a ludditical fashion. Swedish/Norwegian/Germans who have no interest in the prevailing ethos of the modern world, and work towards a fusion between what came before and what ought to be. Oftentimes this boils down to paganism/religious freedom and a fully democratic-socialist government. I recently learned there is an actual group of knuckleheads who claim to do christian metal. That...doesn't really work. It flies in the face of everything.
In contrast to genres of metal such as american thrash, black/death metal tends to look for old sounds and infuse them into modern. Example: Finntroll is a metal band, it's also a polka band. More specfically, it's humpaa metal, using the darker and faster scandinavian version of polka as a basis for its sound.
Diabolical Masquerade or Dimmu Borgir tend to go in a different direction, using full orchestras as a spine for their songs.
Their videos...
let's just say they're not the norm. They are very esoteric, oftentimes constructing a visual narrative out of the song's narrative. If you've ever seen the show metalocalypse, you've seen a pretty good parody of this in the first season (i believe it's the second episode), where they show almost the entirety of a song called "thunderhorse" before their lead singer pulls the plug on it. The video in the episode shot for using all of the stereotypes in a bad metal video: apocalyptic, feudal system, main character as a mighty old-school warrior who beheads everyone in his way, etc. They're rarely made to be sold, often only up on the band/artist's website as an extra for fans.
Concerts - almost entirely metal. I get bored otherwise. I've only been to one non-metal concert in the last six years, and it was an acoustic by a metal band. I just really hate having to sit still and just listen to some song, and metal doesn't really do seating. There's just a large pit in the center, and everyone roams freely.
It's the anger, aggression, and cynicism that really turns me on. The entire point to black and death metal is that everything is not all right, the symbols of our society are boned, and it's appropriate to fight against it. 60's folk metal has nothing on the guy who burned a church down because he decided that christianity is the greatest evil to befall norway EVER. Yeah...he's in jail. I don't really condone the violence obviously, in terms of physical action, but I appreciate the ethos. ESPECIALLY since it's often driven by that scandinavian paganism (note that's lower-cased, pagans are not organized. idiot wiccans) that appeals to my childhood misconceptions where the myths were real...that's a whole 'nother story.
The song I'll be bringing in for this: what I'll show in class largely depends on the mood. I don't really have a singular favorite, and I don't really have a singular favorite genre. So I'll play whatever seems fitting at the time, and this also depends on whether or not I can play NSFW songs. Options:
Vintersorg
Morbid Angel
Diabolical Masquerade
Opeth
Tom Waits
Mac Wiseman
Finntroll
Sepultura
How I would teach this in the classroom: first, I don't know if I could. IF I did, it would be either from a historical perspective using tribalism as a moniker, and use something like Sepultura or Finntroll for that, or else I would do it from the perspective of creative soundtracks to personal movies, using Vintersorg as an example of symphony.
It's all very primal, and a lot of it depends on a more tribal structure. They often rebel against large governments with any kind of malicious power over them. It's sort of like the Norse version of rap in terms of what it accomplishes. And just like rap, there's a lot of commercialist crap on the market. So I could also use this in the classroom as a sort of media literacy/awareness unit and ask students to dissect different examples in order to determine why it's made. Is the music made only to be sold (a very american thing generally) or is it made for its own sake or some greater artistic purpose? What does it say when entertainment is packaged solely for consumption?
Historical context of the genre...or at least the sub-genres I listen to: oftentimes they're started in a ludditical fashion. Swedish/Norwegian/Germans who have no interest in the prevailing ethos of the modern world, and work towards a fusion between what came before and what ought to be. Oftentimes this boils down to paganism/religious freedom and a fully democratic-socialist government. I recently learned there is an actual group of knuckleheads who claim to do christian metal. That...doesn't really work. It flies in the face of everything.
In contrast to genres of metal such as american thrash, black/death metal tends to look for old sounds and infuse them into modern. Example: Finntroll is a metal band, it's also a polka band. More specfically, it's humpaa metal, using the darker and faster scandinavian version of polka as a basis for its sound.
Diabolical Masquerade or Dimmu Borgir tend to go in a different direction, using full orchestras as a spine for their songs.
Their videos...
let's just say they're not the norm. They are very esoteric, oftentimes constructing a visual narrative out of the song's narrative. If you've ever seen the show metalocalypse, you've seen a pretty good parody of this in the first season (i believe it's the second episode), where they show almost the entirety of a song called "thunderhorse" before their lead singer pulls the plug on it. The video in the episode shot for using all of the stereotypes in a bad metal video: apocalyptic, feudal system, main character as a mighty old-school warrior who beheads everyone in his way, etc. They're rarely made to be sold, often only up on the band/artist's website as an extra for fans.
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