mon 5/16 response to lecture

today kip talked about some buildings. he talked about mores which are accepted conventions taht embody the fundamental values of a socio group.  he talked about different personas. some examples he gave or reiterated were tehching hsieh and nikki s. lee. i really like nikki lee's work, here are some photos:

from trailer trash, to stripper, to chola, to ghetto, to prissy rich, to lesbian, to old woman, to skater girl, to everything in between, nikki does it all and does it damn good.

free form

the rest of this year and next year are going to be crazy. june 20, just ten days after my last final, i'm going to sweden, and some time in norway, with my family. my dad's heritage is all of scandinavian descent, primarily swedish, and we practice many traditional swedish practices. we are going to be gone for 20 days . Then, just a little over a month later, i am moving to florence for the entire school year. it's going to be sweet dude! i'm going to take amazing art and fashion classes. lafe's gewwwd. here's a pic of the university i will be attending:

5/10/11

there are a few other classes i am taking in addition to 7a. i am taking anthro 2, intro to cultural anthropology. it's pretty cool, relatively easy, n.b.d. then i'm taking an intro to fem studies class which is iight, not my fav, but it's easy as well. additionally, i am taking a soccer class, which occurs twice a week right after our 7a section, which is why i always look so sporty and have my cleats with mehh cuz i'm BALLIN'. i'm also playing for two IM soccer teams.

wednesday Free Form

here's a really good cover for "I Want You Back" (Jackson 5) by Discovery

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLmZ2hLakJ0

i've been suuuper into this song lately. i just blasted it earlier because right now we have these enormous speakers in my house that we borrowed. they're really huge, fancy, propped up on stands, with a sound managing board. it's been awesome blawesome extra awesome on the awesome blawesome to have them! i hope the dude doesn't ask for them back for the rest of the year! here's a pic of me jammin to this song demonstrAtin them speaks earlia 2day:

what i was also doing earlier was figuring out my classes for florence, italy in the fall. my plan is to go to florence for fall and take art and fashion classes and then go to barcelona, spain for the rest of the year to take regular classes. after talking with my mom, however, i'm thinking i should maybe only go to florence for the entire year because everyone says that just when you get to know the place you're studying in, you have to move. also, florence has a fuck ton of art and fashion classes that we do not have here, and i would really like to take as many as possible. some of their art classes include anything from water color and pastel to fresco painting and restoration to mosaics to marble sculpture to digital sketchbooks and on and on and on. they even have an entire category of jewelry making classes, art/building restoration classes, photography, fashion photography, all sorts of fashion and design classes, interior/exterior design classes, and oh so much more. it's also cool because you take field trips to places, such as the costume design museum for one of the fashion classes i'm applying for. anyway. this is awesome blawesome extra awesome on the awesome blawesome.

time sequence narrative shiiit

what I ended up doing for my time sequence thing is different than the ideas i posted, but it has to do with the photos of my disposable camera that i talked about. i tried to get the walgreens people to give me a cd but they messed everything up a bunch so i had to take pics of my photos to post here (but will have them in person in class to show). the original photograph (i mean they're both originals, but the one i took first) was taken last summer one morning before summer school as i was leaving the house. it is a photo of an eaten rose with one solid flower standing high and proud next to a ladder and its adjacent shadow. the photograph is one of my favorite photographs i have ever taken. just earlier this week when i was sitting outside, i noticed that the ladder was positioned next to the rose again, only this time the rose has all its leaves, none eaten at all, and it was in the afternoon. i did my best to retake the photo, but ostensibly it is different from the one last summer in the morning. of course i like that they are different and like the positioning of them together.

the story behind this rose has to do with a girl who lived with us last summer. her name is jessica, sicka as we call her. she and her boyfriend adam were hopelessly in love, true soul mates in fact. the rose was purchased by adam for sicka after they got in their very first fight of their whole relationship. i remember this distinctly. the fight was about gay marriage, which adam was temporarily against, and sicka (who is bisexual) being mad at him for this and not wanting to be married in and under a catholic church while adam, who grew up in the religion, always assumed he would. the next morning i remember well. adam came over with this rose plant in his hand putting his finger against his lips saying "shh" as he snuck in her room and put it by her bed. it was a small rose plant, no blooms yet, in a plastic pot. it was planted by the side of our house a week later.

the poor plant struggled for a long time with the aphids who just tore apart its leaves and none of us thought it would pull through. but the rose persevered, proving us wrong as it shot up a little bloom against the wall and grew into the beautiful flower in the picture, janky leaves and all, charmingly juxtaposed with the ladder and its shadow. and their love continued to grow; sicka left to move in with adam and her sister, amber, took her place in our home.

to this day, every once in a while, a single bloom springs up against the house, always in the same exact spot, always alone. 

too soon is too soon, even for soul mates. adam and sicka's relationship ended about 2 months ago in bewildering heartbreak, unanswered curiosity, and tremendous sorrow. for both. 

sicka moved back to santa cruz, she graduated last year and was working hard and waiting for adam to graduate while she was still here. this rose, however, lives on at my house and is the symbol of a beautiful tragedy. i like to think that the growth of this plant's leaves is a sign of adam and sicka's personal growth apart from one another. 

2 months ago they said they will still marry each other in 5 years. i wonder if they will. and if not, their love survives in the living beauty of this rose bush. 

Respons to kips lecture #6

this was sah-weeet!!!! dude. i LITERALLY TELL EVERYONE I SEE TO COME TO MY ART LECTURE WITH ME BECAUSE YOU WILL BE MIND BLOWN. and still, no one has yet to come despite the fact that the mindblowing has yet to cease!!!! i did not expect to have performances at all! i really enjoyed all of the spoken word student performances. i especially liked the 1st one by chanel, the one by some dude with the glasses, and the one about her "pineapple". it was so powerful to watch these people who are regular, normal kids (you can tell before and after they present) transform into some powerful embodiment of language that completely transcends all that you previously sub-consciously presumed. Beau Sia was cool too. i was not too particularly moved by his pieces but he did warn us that this may be the case and we should have seen him the last like 5 times he performed. spoken word is one of the oldest forms of creative expression (oral tradition), predating the written world and includes everything from monologues to storytelling to performance poetry and all that lies in between. this actually relates to chapter 9 of understanding comics when scott talks about how all media of communication are a by-product of our inability to communicate directly from mind to mind. "media is meant to convert thoughts into forms that can traverse the physical world and be re-converted by one or more senses back into thoughts," spoken word is a prime example of this.

time sequence narrative shiiit

so i'm not sure if this worked or not, but there were supposed to be four videos that were over a period of time of a couple hours that show just how fast how the hours go by, but i'm two or three got deleted and i don't even know if these vids i uploaded will work or not....so fuck it