Blogging Around

This is in responde to Mary's blog post about the loss of simplicity in modern music, and references Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire" as an example of the older, better aproach.

You've really nailed it on the head here, Mary. Besides the fact that I love this song, I absolutely agree with your observation about the loss of simplicity in music today. I think that's why I'm so fond of artists like Jack Johnson, who often sing plainly with just a guitar in hand. I mean, half the time I listen to music, I zone out and let the instrumentals bring me to some place in my head. I do some of my best thinking to the soundtrack of Prokofieff's concerto for cello, which is very complex, but mostly contained in a lone cello with little orchestra involvement. I mean simplicity is beautiful in music, and it's a sign of our obsession as a society with always being productive that we can't stop outselves from shoving five minutes of singing into a three minute song. If you look at classic songs from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, you'll rarely find one more than three minutes long. Nowadays, the standard has risen to about six minutes. We need a musical reality check!

This is in response to Chen's post about the rock version of Pachelbell's Canon in D, which emphasizes changes in music over time.

Haha I LOVE this video. I have ever since I saw it a few years ago, back when it was a youtube sensation. I don't know if you'll know this, but after this video came out, some record company or other decided they wanted to sign this talented kid, so they ceaselessly searched for him. I mean, as you'll notice, he doesn't show his face. I'm not sure if they ever found him, but I found it interesting. Anyway, this song is really a cool interpretation of a classic song. I'm not even sure why it's considered Christmas music. Some people use it for their wedding. But yeah, interpreting songs that have been done in one way for a really long time is just as original and difficult as writing the song yourself. It may even be harder to do...

iMedia: Levi's Commercials

I first saw the "America" Levi's commercial from the Go Forth campaign in a movie theater during the previews. I was slightly dumbstruck by the complete change in their approach to advertising. The usual Levi's jeans commercial consisted of gorgeous models wearing little to no clothing besides their signiture 501s, often integrating some sexual appeal, mythological theme, or a combination thereof. Basically, I would classify them as gratuitous. But this new one was amazing; you need only watch it to see that their sophistication and creativity level shot skyward at an impossible rate. It was artistic; historically relevant, yet refreshingly modern; frightening, yet optimistic. In short, something I'd never seen before from a company as commercial as Levi's.

I think "America" and "O Pioneers!" inform our culture of the relevance of recent history and the power of the individual versus the whole nation. I mean, where else would the public, so engrossed by their XBOXs and iPhones, hear Walt Whitman (who happens to be one of my favorite poets; I've had an excerpt of his writing on my facebook page for over a year) in a reading of some of his classic works? This ad exposes themes of rebellion and strength similar to that of the 1960s and the Vietnam war, while also keeping their message culturally relevant. Instead of implying that wearing their jeans will make you a supermodel and irresistible to the opposite sex, it emphasizes that Levi's has been there throughout history, witnessed it, and stayed strong. After all, the company has been around since 1853. I see the commercial as implying unity in the face of adversity while forcing us to see the mindnumbing change in our culture and outlook on the world since the last major crisis. Frankly, it's impossible not to see, what with their use of an image of an interracial couple, for example. The ad campaign is a striking sort of duality: eerie, haunting, intelligent, and most importantly, effective.

What struck me instantaneously upon viewing it, however, was not all of that. That came after, as I really thought through what I had just seen. My immediate reaction was how unbelievably cool the video was. The masterful artistry of the black and white scenes, the color scenes, the lighting and outdoor setting, the historical photography and the modern actors, the scratchy recording of classic American poetry, it all overwhelmed me. I left feeling confused that the commercial was even trying to sell me something, and therefore, more interested in the campaign as a whole. Something just worked through the ad; it was that ellusive je ne sais quoi. And to be honest, it left me, and many others, wanting more.


"America": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdW1CjbCNxw
"O Pioneers!": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG8tqEUTlvs&feature=related

Connections: Medieval Thinkers and Religious Extremists

Life is a balance of the forces around you, forces that are black and white and every shade of gray. Most thoughts and ideas fall somewhere in the middle, but not always. In my opinion, those that are a lovely and pure gray are ideal; they're not too extreme, not too conservative. I know some people would be cringing at that assertion, shouting that I don't believe in anything enough to support it with wholehearted commitment to a cause. This leads into the somewhat surprising struggle between the extremes and the middle.

The premise of King Lear is filled with power struggles and idea clashing between the Renaissance thinkers and the Medieval thinkers. King Lear, the person with most of the power according to the state, is bent on tradition and stability, keeping with the way things have always been done. He is very medieval in his ways. His opposition comes from those that disagree, namely his older daughters, Goneril and Regan. They are clearly Renaissance thinkers, and also quite Machiavellian in nature. Despite their selfish actions, they represent the middle shade of gray in this argument. Renaissance thoughts centralize around individualism and scientific discovery. During their time, this was considered very extreme. But in our society, Renaissance thinkers are more common and popular. In my opinion, this is the best way option.

Similarly, on the news we often hear about religious extremists causing trouble and terror around the globe. Their name says it all: they're extreme. They believe in only the fundamental guidelines of their religion and leave no room for progressive thoughts and actions. The people who tend to be in the middle religiously are the people I'm surrounded by everyday in my community. The suburbs are not where one would expect to find a terrorist hiding out. We collectively represent the "middle", ranging from religiously indifferent to very observant.

The reason for the religious distinction is an inability to agree between the extremists and the middle. This is the exact same as in King Lear, where the extreme Medievalists are dead set against the middle Renaissance thinkers. The significance of this connection is the unusual nature of it. Normally, the opposite extremes hate each other, or at least argue and fight. It's not often that an extremist in something is offended by another person's neutrality. But this is illustrated in Shakespeare's world and our modern world. Both concepts are alike in the fact that they're a bit unexpected, and thus important to keep an eye out for.

Dialectics: War and Creation

In the Broadway musical Rent, one of the characters, Marc, says "the opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation." Despite being housed in the middle of a somewhat cliché rebellion song, which consists of dancing on tabletops at a restaurant and singing about "sticking it to the man", this line exhibits insight beyond its surroundings.

So what is the reason for this divergence from the classical duality of "war and peace"? In theory, war is the definitive opposite of peace. One is violent and ruthless, the other is cooperative and prosperous. However, I think the reason for this lyric and everything it implies is that theory is not always the absolute authority. Something can be perfect in theory, but if it doesn't translate to actuality, then it's meaningless. In my opinion, war can be driven by the pursuit of peace, and I think it often is. Even when war is retalliation for an act against a country, for example, the base beliefs are that one party would bring peace if they were in power and perfect circumstances were set up.

This new idea of "war and creation" being opposites makes a lot of sense. Creation is never the direct goal of war; often, it's an indirect one. For example, if the Arab nations can destroy the Israeli state, then they can create their own Islamic "empire". War leads to destruction, then possibly creation. But never just creation.

So is there a possibility of a dialectical "third option", one which unites these very different concepts? I'm not sure if war can ever lead directly to creation without destroying first; it also depends on your definition of both destruction and creation. Does it have to be something you can see, feel, or touch? In the future, when our wars have become electronic like so much else in our society, will an attack on a database count as destruction? Or is everything technological just a series of electrical signals which are never destroyed, just rearranged? In the same way, would an addition to the internet really be created? How do you sense what is not within our capabilities of perception to feel?

Perhaps this unity of war and creation would be the exact equation for peace and prosperity, the ever-elusive utopia. If there was a way to wage war without destroying, just bringing about the creation of newer, better, and stronger institutions and people, then war would lose its bite, its horror. And this leads to the final question: is this possible in actuality, or is it just another theory?

Metacognition: The Kite Runner Essay

In my essay, my main focus was on a somewhat overlooked character. There are pages and pages about Hassan, Amir, Baba, and even Sohrab, but very little about Rahim Khan. Therefore, my method of thinking was to focus on the "little guy", the character who is not as important in quantity, but the most important in his qualities. The main effectiveness of this way of thinking is that it causes the reader of the essay to have a minor "A-ha!" moment when they realize that they knew all along about your claim or thought, they just didn't quite articulate it in their mind. It just hovered right below the surface.

I like the way I thought about the character in my essay, but if I could write a more involved essay and delve deeper into him, I would want to fabricate a history that explains why he acts the way he does. But that would have taken too many pages
and too much speculation and psychological analysis for the parameters of this essay.

I really like that my thinking focuses on someone deserving of focus, cheesy as that may sound. There's something self-rewarding to giving credit where credit's due; in this case, it was to the powerful support of the character Rahim Khan. He truly deserves to be admired for the actions he takes in the book, especially because I found Amir so unrelatable and frankly despicable. I mean, I'm aware of how cliche my idea can be, but I simply don't care that much. It was a point I wanted to make about a character I really liked. And that makes it worth writing about, in my opinion.

Blogging Around

Obviously, I posted this on Graicey's blog in response to her post about the book, The Most Dangerous Game, and how the human need for survival can drive people to extreme measures that some can fathom and others find impossible:

Wow, Graciey, I really agree with what you said here. I've never read the book, The Most Dangerous Game, but I've been told the premise and discussed it with a friend once. One of the reasons I'm so interested in psychology and the limits of the human existance goes back to my family history in the Holocaust. Most people know that my grandmother survived both Auschwitz and Terezinstadt concentration camps, I mean, I bring it up sometimes in class discussion when it's relevant. But I don't know if people know that I think about it more than I let on. I drive myself crazy analyzing the choices of the Nazis who killed so much of my family. And it frightens me a little, but I've realized that they obviously didn't view the people they killed as human beings. And I bet once they started killing, it got easier and easier. I've come to the unfortunate conlusion that it's ignorant to assume that all people view life in the same regard as we do in the "civilized world" of today. If one can shift their mind a tiny bit, all the normal rules simply don't apply. These people are in an entirely different league. And Graicey, sorry for being so verbose, but your entry really got me thinking! :-D

The second comment is in response to Merrick's post about nature vs. nurture in determining whether Assef is a true sociopath:

You bring up a good point here. Assef must have been influenced by his environment; after all, I know people who have a sibling who is their polar opposite, just a genuinely horrible human being. There's no genetic explanation for why one child turned out so right and one turned out so wrong. This must apply to Assef; his parents seem to be respectible people. Also, I usually forget to look for the reasons behind Hitler's extermination of Jewish people. And when I think about, I'm sure there were members of Hitler's family who turned out to be fully functioning members of society, not leaders of a Holocaust. I always just see him as a "bad apple" or someone who is just wrong in the brain. But there's really was an economic depression and times were desperate in Hitler's Germany. And we all know what desperate times call for...

Connections: Assef and Bellatrix Lestrange

The Taliban, a key player in Afghani history and the book, The Kite Runner, are an extreme Islamic group who caused the deaths of thousands over their seven year reign. The death eaters, characters in the Harry Potter books, are a ruthless group who would go to any lengths to please their master, Voldemort, and to cause the most destruction among the wizarding world. These two may seem very unrelated, but they're more alike than they seem...

In Amir's journey back to Afghanistan in The Kite Runner to adopt his nephew, he encounters the Taliban in a soccer stadium. During halftime at the match, they publicly stone a man and a woman to death for adultery. Later on, Amir has to deal personally with Assef, a Talib and childhood enemy. Assef describes how he enjoys causing pain and "ethnically cleansing" Afghanistan of those he and his organization have deemed unworthy of the title of Afghanis. As I read this, my mind jumped to the Harry Potter books and how the death eaters, especially Bellatrix Lestrange, want to get rid of mud-bloods and blood-traitors and others who "dirty the name of pure-blood wizards".

The similarities between Assef and Bellatrix are uncanny: both are individuals acting on the orders of others above them, yet they are natural leaders and hold a certain power over those they associate with. They both strive to be the most devoted to their causes and they are capable of more sadistic actions than the majority of the people they intimidate.

Now, to get down to the roots of their actions. Assef was born to a privileged family in Afghanistan. His father was Afghani and his mother was German, and all the neighbors knew him as a handsome, respectable boy. He was slightly psychopathic as a child and became a rapist at an unusually young age. He seemed to enjoy hurting people because he liked the way they cowered to him. He idolized Hitler and the Nazis, yet he was able to come across perfectly when he was around adults. Similarly, Bellatrix was born to a family of purebloods, giving her a sense of entitlement that she held above others. This ultimately caused her to follow in the paths of many of her kin and become a death eater. She aged and spent time in Azkaban, and by the time she broke out of prison, she wanted nothing more than to be in Voldemort's service once again. She enjoyed torturing Neville Longbottom's parents into madness and made a sport of killing muggles and wizards alike. And despite the terror she'd inflicted, her parents and most of her extended family were proud of her accomplishments.

Obviously, the situations in which these two characters became the way they are anything but similar; Assef grew up in a country where fighting had been a way of life for centuries and Bellatrix lives in a fictional world where the limits of one‘s imagination are tested. What I find most interesting is that such different situations can breed such similar results. It seems that no matter the time, place, or circumstance, there will always be self-righteous people who are willing to cause pain and kill others to make themselves feel like god.

And now we’re led into that dreaded debate of nature versus nurture. The results of this comparison seem to suggest that nature is the cause of such atrocities in the world as genocide and holocaust. But culture and environment can be a contributing factor, illustrated by the similarities in Assef and Bellatrix’s childhoods. Personally, I think counting nature and nurture as mutually exclusive occurrences is naïve, that they are both necessary to breed the types of villains we read about in books and watch in movies. And then there are those who say that we’ll never know the real reason behind why people are the way they are. But the thing I think is most important to remember is that no matter how they come about, people capable of horrific deeds will undoubtedly affect our lives forever.

Best of Week: Culture in The Kite Runner

In our class discussion of The Kite Runner this week, we came across the idea of culture in societies and how important it can be to deciding how to live your life. Previously, Amir fell in love with Soraya Taheri and wanted to talk to her, to get to know her, but he had to be careful of the gossiping of the other Afghans at the flea market and her semi-oppressive father. Finally, he got Baba to put speculation to rest with the formal ritual of asking Soraya's father for permission, something nearly unheard of in our modern American society, before the General was willing to consider Amir as his daughter's suitor. There were also other aspects of the Afghani culture which required careful contemplation before action, mostly regarding Soraya's image. Because of some mistakes she had made when she was much younger, many of her fellow Afghanis didn't consider her trustworthy, or even worthy to be a bride. Their culture guided Amir and Soraya's life for this entire section of the book.

This idea was so powerful to me because it seems foreign, yet I know it's not. It shocked me that in the United States in modern times, people still have to ask permission of their parents and elders before they can make decisions about their own life. I'm so used to the adults in my life telling me to be independent and to make my own choices in order to be a strong individual. But the adults in The Kite Runner want Amir to be anything but completely individual. They even slightly scorn both his and Soraya's career choices as a writer and teacher, respectively, because it's not the best they think their children can be. The adults are so focused on how they appear to outsiders in this foreign country that they would deprive their own children of happiness and passion for life.

It may seem cliche, but upon seeing how life could be for me if I were a slightly different person, or born to slightly different circumstances made me really appreciate what I have. I can be whatever I want, see whoever I want, live wherever I want, and like whoever I want. No one is standing over my shoulder, telling me what to do. I really am lucky to have this, as now I see that many people don't.

I'm not sure I'm going to "use" this knowledge, per se, but I know that it made me see what should have been apparent. And I know I've come to this same realization in the past, but everytime I do, it sparks something new in me. In the past, good things have come from the realization about how fortunate I am, like increased learning about things that I'm passionate about and trying new things, simply because I can. It motivates me to take advantage of every opportunity I have to better my future. The way I see it now, it would simply be irresponsible not to.

Carry It Forward: The Kite Runner

In English class, we are reading the very powerful "faux memoire", The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. A central theme of this book was apparent to me in chapters seven and eight. After the kite running of the winter of 1975, Amir watched Hassan get raped by the neighborhood bully, Assef. As Amir watched, his mind basically shut down on him, too driven by fear for his own fate to make the decision to help his closest friend. He ran away, not thinking about the future, how the fear would catch up to him, or Hassan's well-being. His only thoughts were for himself.

I felt the power of this choice as I continued reading, and time after time, Amir avoided the conflict. He had dozens of opportunities to tell someone what he had witnessed and perhaps regain some faith in himself; each one passed without significance. You could tell that the truth was eating at him from the inside. He couldn't bear to even see Hassan trying to get his life back on track because it meant Hassan was healing from what he couldn't.

Fear dictated his life. It was apparent to me that he would never heal from this one traumatic experience because he couldn't face it head on. He slid past it repeatedly, but no one can ever run away from a problem for long. This is what I will carry forward into the future from this section of the book.

I know that I am a cautious, calculating, and rational thinker most of the time. I'm almost robotic in my thinking. I see a conflict, I weigh both possible outcomes, and I make a decision based on which path will cause me the least amount of pain. But after reading this section of the book, I see the flaws in the way I think. If I only do what will cause me the least amount of pain, I'm neglecting everyone else. I mean, we're all a little bit selfish, deep down, aren't we? However, it's necessary to do something difficult to lessen the hurt in the long-run for the people you care about.

I see now that I cannot let fear of pain or failure drive my life, because what life is that? Living in fear of everything will rob me of friends, relationships, and experiences, and those have value to me. Therefore, I must carry this into my future, to use for any little problem that makes me want to curl up and hide: The more I run, the longer it takes for the problems to catch up with me, but they will catch up with me in the end, and they'll be much more painful the longer I deter them. It's simply not worth it to deny pain. Bravery in the face of my fears is what must drive my life from now on. It'll be difficult to achieve, but it's completely worth the effort.