The idea of buying a flip video camcorder came to me a few nights ago when I had the most annoyingly difficult time reserving online an HD panasonic camera from the equipment center. I was panicking because I knew that the deadline for my video portrait installation project is nearing and I still don’t have footage to edit. So today I bought one so I could shoot a footage while on our way tomorrow to Rhode Island for a short trip with relatives.
from amazon.com
aside from zizek’s “violence,” i’ve been recently enjoying this book by paolo virno which paul lent me two months ago. i still haven’t returned it to him because i’m enjoying every part of it. this book is better than reading clay shirky’s “here comes everybody” that i had to read for my ideas class. i got so many things to say about that one. but not in this entry. i’m planning to buy more books this xmas that i haven’t bought but are part of the recommended list of books given by my professors this semester. the top three are cinematic mode of production, proust is a neuroscientist, and that one book by edward hallin. they’re very different from one another but if you know me, i like to mix things up. and indeed, i will buy hardt and negri’s new book for N who told me that that’s all he wanted for xmas. 
seriously, i do miss curling up in bed with a good literary book, a novel that would be able to transport me to some world, and make me forget everything. but i haven’t found that one book that excites me. N told me saramago is good but i don’t feel that way when i saw the cover. i know it’s so trivial. lol. but that’s how i choose–i read the cover and the first chapter.
also, one thing i am seriously wishing to do is finish that short story i’ve been trying to finish since i got here but never got to do because of schoolwork. also because well, media studies is different from creative writing, so i’ve been using other mental faculties. but this story is soooooo precious not to complete. i’m thinking of finishing it this winter break and perhaps have it published first month of next year. how’s that for pressure?
so here ends my requisite entry for the week. more to come in the succeeding days. i still haven’t blogged about volunteering for the internet as playground and factory conference.
Instead of writing a scholarly paper that would incorporate three concepts from theories we discussed in our Media Studies: Ideas class, my group decided to make a creative project that’s inspired by Jenkin’s book convergence culture where he partly explored the world of fanfiction. Our project is memorial fansite/shrine for Michael Jackson that is supposedly managed by a 15-year old named Tinkerbell Taylor. It chronicles MJ’s life from his rise to his fall, following the Aristotelean arch of the tragedy.
In order to gain legitimacy as a fansite, Poetic Jackson as we called the blog should also gain more comments from readers. So please, dear readers, check out the blog for my sake, and post some comments. Anything will do. It’s on its first stage so it will be fun to be able to complete the whole thing soon. I need your HELP.
Thanks. Click on the image to go to site.
Poetic Jackson Fansite
After helping me clean my room and giving me a new bed (a real one with posts and not a futon which I have been using for the past two months), my landlord and his wife handed me the address of the center near our neighborhood where I can get free vaccination from H1N1. I was grateful for their concern, but kept silent about my skepticism and hesitation with actually getting vaccination.
Indeed I sometimes get sucked in the conspiracy theory of the whole scenario what with friends calling me from California telling me to think before getting vaccination “because we still don’t know what’s in it, and there are reported side effects.” Information is power. So of course, I armed myself more by researching about this phenomenon, and yet ironically, the more I read up on it, the more I became paranoid and hesitant about getting vaccination. It is free, my landlord told me. Yes it is. That’s a relief. But why?
Not that I really want to get sick. For the past months I’ve been dreading about this illness. Getting the flu is the worst thing to experience in this season in New York. I really don’t want to go through that depressing situation. But then again, I can’t deny that I have several questions about the H1N1 vaccine.
One of the blogs that I chanced upon today talks about what’s really in it.
If you have questions about the H1N1 vaccine such as “What’s in the H1N1 vaccine anyway?” Go to this blog managed by a microbiologist. And there you can read a quick discussion.
Click on the link below:
http://promega.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/what%E2%80%99s-in-the-h1n1-vaccine-anyway/
Comment away if you have any here or there.
“Oh you’re from the Philippines! I heard it’s like paradise. My grandfather served there during the war…. Let’s see… in Suhmer…”
This is just one of those statements I often get when meeting Americans here and which have never failed to make me feel very uncomfortable. I’ve heard it thrice already spoken by different people, male and female, and of different ethnic backgrounds. One memorable one was a white American male who was too drunk to keep a decent conversation on an Octoberfest night in Brooklyn.
You might wonder how I usually respond to this statement. I wonder too. Often, I’d feel lightheaded and believe me, I would for a few seconds black-out. I know I would give a person a polite smile. But really, I am usually too uncomfortable to even give an intelligent humane response.
How can one respond to that? If you know your Philippine history, you are fully aware that during the Fil-Am war, American soldiers razed villages in Samar and Leyte to the ground, and committed all these atrocities. Of course perhaps not all, maybe the grandfathers of those who spoke to me didn’t, but if you come to think of it, war always brings out these unimaginable acts to the fore. And when these people continue to say:
“and my grandfather said the place was like paradise. lots of beautiful women.”
I already know what they are talking about. Then a surge of images about US interventions throughout my country’s history comes rushing in like surf engulfing me in drunken madness. Only then after the fact, would I realize that truthfully, truthfully, all I really wanted to say after the person asks me one last time:
“i bet it’s no longer paradise now, huh?”
I really want to respond by saying:
“Yes, it’s no longer a paradise after your grandfather left.”
Again, for the nth time, I will try to record my daily observations, academic or otherwise, on this blog as part of this self-imposed dialogue with myself and how I make sense of experiences, events, ideas and other observations of all and sundry. In a way it is also my attempt at keeping a diary of my life here in New York, in the United States of America, a place which I used to call “empire”, land of one of my “colonizers” but now which I fondly call with a hint of irritation my post-colonial parent. After all, I am in no doubt a hybrid identity, seemingly culturally-rooted in the constructed nationalist identity of Filipino, legally identified as such by virtue of the Philippines as nation-state, but equally alienated within the boundaries of the paradigm of the ideal nationalist identity simply because I am Filipino.
Yes, this sounds confusing to any reader, perhaps. But as I am already in the midst of this juncture, being here and not really here, I am forced to converse with myself such issues of identity and cultural mappings.
In a sense my observations will be colored largely by how I was shaped by the variables surrounding me as a Filipino who lived for a long time in the Visayan and Mindanawon parts of the Philippines. I emphasize such places as they hold very different characteristics compared to that of the capital city Manila. In fact, I have realized that if I had stayed longer in Manila before moving to New York, I wouldn’t have experienced such unforgettable culture shock. All urban cities have similar characteristics I bet.
But since I chose to live in a laid-back, slightly urbanized city like Davao, then it is inevitable for me to experience such cultural divide not even reading American books, and being immersed in American popular culture and education for my entire life could have prepared me for the stark differences. Yet, there are similarities lest you complain about me constantly zeroing in on the differences. And I will be talking about those differences and similarities in the succeeding entries.
found this really interesting resource for media artists. it’s a blog with a title “a blog created by.” so many cool things in this one.
This is when I said honestly in class that I really don’t know what I’m doing and that I am really lost. So when I wove this slideshow together, I just relied so much on intuition. Unlike in my other projects, especially in photography when I have really clear concepts in mind. This one straddles the emotional and artsy design structures (Laybourne’s terms for types of slideshows).
I wanted to capture these barrage of images, MTV style, related to the anxiety caused by the swine flu scare. It is more internal, I supposed. And wanted to really work within the limits of the slideshow as a medium. I edited this on iMovie because I still don’t have Final Cut Pro in my Macbook Pro. Soon, soon.
When the professor saw it, she immediately told me that there are so many images and she suggested to use black screen in some parts. I don’t know if I understood her correctly. But here it is, pillage me if you want, or comment on how crudely it was done. There’s no harm in trying.
Next week, I’ll start shooting and editing footage for my two-channel video portrait installation piece. I’m verrrrrrry excited about that. This time, I’m not lost, and I have a clear concept. Got a storyboard too.
I love learning really. Love it. There’s no end to learning.
PS: The other images on the slideshow were taken under creative commons license. There is no intention to break copyright laws.
I’m no longer ashamed of posting some of the pieces I labored on during this first phase of my journey in the graduate study of Media Studies (theory and production).
Here’s one I made for Media Practices: Concepts class. Here’s the description of the class:
The course looks at the character of different media forms, the relationship between forms, and guidelines for choosing which combination is best for a given communications project. Concentrating on design thinking, it offers an experiential tour of the creative toolset and critical precepts of media practice and is the foundation course for additional Media Practice and project-based courses. Through a series of short projects, students work with sound, the digital still image and its sequencing, lighting and the moving image and digital post-production and distribution techniques. Using simple digital tools, student designers focus on the important primary concepts of digital media making. Additional major software used professionally and in subsequent Media Practice and project-based courses are introduced, though not explored in depth. By semester’s end, each student will have completed a series of individual projects combining media formats. The course’s broad goal is to reconnect media designers to their personal sources of creativity and to help orient them to the program’s Media Practice course curriculum.
So anyway we have already gone though typography, graphic design, digital photography, hyperreal photography, among others and two weeks ago, we were required to record sound and edit and mix these sounds on Garageband. I decided to do a sound art commentary piece. Later, we were supposed to incorporate still photos into a slideshow with this sound piece. The slideshow according to Kit Laybourne’s book is not just a series of pictures put together, it supposed to have a purpose and structure and pacing, in a way like video, with all the transitions and effects.
The title of the sound art commentary piece is Disquiet. WordPress won’t allow me to post an MP3 file here. Dammit. So just click on the icon:
Here’s my explanation (sort of): read more…
