October 11, 2005

Podcasting

I'm kind of unimpressed by podcasts. They have been touted for many reasons, most of which aren't very revolutionary. The idea of putting spoken-word audio (i.e., a radio show) on an iPod to listen to later is not particularly novel. The real revolution, if there is one, lies in the feeding of the podcasts. Streamlining the process of getting that audio onto your iPod or other digital music player, letting it be something that can happen passively, is a real improvement over the alternative, but even so this phenomenon strikes me as just the modernization of a practice that has been going on for a long time, with nothing seriously new added.

Taping video or audio for later viewing/listening has been going on for several decades, in some form or another. The digitization of the process makes it easier (automatic, even) to do the recording, but I don't see how the new distribution channel substantially changes anything.

Posted October 11, 2005 02:08 PM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 5 | Permalink

Concerts, Events, my father's Godmother

I didn't do any single standout event that I could write about this week, so I'll attempt to cull all the little mini-new experiences I had and mash them together into something that counts as my new experience for the week.

Starting on Saturday night, I saw the band Graham Smith at Tonic, a bar just south of Houston on the east side. It poured on Saturday night so there weren't that many people in the bar and there was also a large puddle in the middle of the room, right in front of the stage. Going to a concert in New York is not new for me. In fact, I wrote about seeing the Spinto Band for my new experience in week two.

I also saw Graham Smith again last night (Monday night), when his band played at Mo Pitkin's. Going to see a band twice in a row is, perhaps surprisingly, also not a new experience for me—I saw the Spinto Band two weeks in a row, too. My new experience was the dawning, while watching Graham Smith play last night, that I have come to appreciate music in a completely different way than I used to.

I was a late bloomer, musically. I bought my first CD, Smashing Pumpkins' double Melon-collie and the Infinite Sadness, my junior year of high school. I made up for the lost time with the intensity of my devotion, however. From that point on I was hooked, always searching for something new and obscure to listen to. At that time, music was an enveloping thing for me. I gave a lot to it, and took a lot out of it as well. I derived vitality, self-confidence and meaning from those songs that I would listen to for hours, probing the lyrics.

As much as I was into music then, though, I wasn't really a concert-goer. This is partly due to circumstance: the nearest city that could draw any band I ever wanted to see was 85 miles away. Despite this, I never really enjoyed the music as much as I did when I could hear it on my own terms. I wasn't a spontaneous enjoyer of music. This is not to say that I didn't have fun at the shows I went to. I did, and when I would get back to my bed late at night it wouldn't be just my ears that were buzzing. My whole body was alive, having sponged up the energy of the event. Looking back on those concerts, they were great.

At the time, though, they only ever really affected me when I heard songs I already knew by heart. In the distortion and confusion of your typical punk-rock show, the subtleties of the melody get lost unless you already have them running in your head. I used to be fond of saying that I had to like a band before I saw them, that I never really fell in love with any band the first time I heard them.

Lately, though, for really the first time that I have ever noticed it, I've been drawn into a songs hooks from the first chords of its bridge. Last night I saw a band for the first time, and though I didn't like all their songs, there were a couple that immediately struck me, and I didn't feel like a poser anymore bobbing my head to their beat. The reason I came back on Monday to see Graham Smith again, in fact, was because I was instantly in tune with his songs, and had to hear them again. The setlist was little changed from the previous show, and I found that after just one listen, I already recognized lyrics, hooks, bridges, etc. It was great.

My father's godmother, an amazing 91-year-old woman, lives on the upper east side and I try to make a point to visit her every time she's in town. I used to live in Boston and I would visit her every few months when I would take the Chinatown bus down to New York. Her name is Margie McBain.

Margie had a stroke about a year ago so she has lost some control of her faculties, and sometimes has trouble remembering who people are. My dad warned me that I might be surprised if I was expecting her to look like she had when I last visited her a couple years ago (he had seen her earlier in the summer, so he knew firsthand how she was doing). Margie was bedridden and the stroke had made it so that she couldn't really use much of the left side of her body.

I had to sit on the right side of her bed and lean in close to hear what she had to say, but we were able to carry on a pleasant conversation. I mostly regaled her with stories of what I, my sister, my parents, my relatives had been up to lately.

Posted October 11, 2005 01:49 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 5 | Permalink

Sequential Images: Diamond Knights Video

Sai (whom I worked with to do a composite image last week) and I created a video narrative, using sequential images taken with our digital cameras. The idea was inspired by Sia's music video for Breathe Me. You might recognize the song as the music that was played during the ending sequence of Six Feet Under's final episode.

We spent all day Thursday "filming." Basically, we put our cameras into continuous shooting mode and then biked around the city. I took 3rd person and external shots, and Sai had his camera velcro'd to his bike's handlebars for 1st-person biking footage. We set up a few special scenes, too, like the opening scene, which we filmed using a tripod in front of Sai's apartment as he brought out and assembled his bike and then rode out of the frame. There's a tiny glitch that you can see where Sai hesitates for a second as he is tightening his front wheel. This is because my camera's flash memory started to get full, which greatly slows down its ability to take pictures. I had to have him freeze and wait for my camera to catch up before we could continue shooting.

The other special scene was the crash sequence. We filmed this a number of different times to get the timing right, and there were a couple of sequences that didn't make it into the final production. The sequence with Sai going overhead is one that I'm pretty happy with.

The most difficult part about the whole process was probably the editing. We used iMovie to import sequences of images (from iPhoto) and then converted them into movie clips that we could arrange and cut as we liked. This was not such a problem (though iMovie has some idiosyncracies that we had to acclimate to), but it became really difficult to keep things moving at the right tempo when we started to attempt to use the musical cues for our scene changes. Ordering the clips and timing them right so that they work with the music changes was difficult. In the end, though, it is pretty clear that it was important that we did so. The piece is so much stronger when it plays right with the music.

Posted October 11, 2005 01:27 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 5 | Permalink

October 09, 2005

Understanding Comics

This week we read from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Will Eisner's Sequential Art, both pieces of writing dealing with timing and rhythm in comics.

As an infrequent comics reader, I have only thought superficially about the structure rather than content of comics. Perhaps that is why I was so struck in reading these twin articles at the incredible depth of the form. I have read comic books, but probably not for about a decade, and the only other comics I read have been Calvin and Hobbes, the newspaper funnies, and a few graphic novels (Maus I and II and a brilliant book I discovered this spring called Blankets, which I will return to later). I realize now, after having watched McCloud pick apart the elements that go into comics timing, that I had been aware of a lot of these devices already, if only subconsciously.

As I said, I read Blankets, by Craig Thompson, in the early spring of 2005. The book is a plaintive tale of first love found and lost, and as I read McCloud's descriptions of gutter spacing and panel placement, I remembered more and more how it was more than simply the content of the novel that affected me, it was also the layout. Thompson does an excellent job with the pacing. I remember in particular a full page image of the young lovers together in the snow at the edge of the woods (similar to but not the same as the title page), and the size of that panel created the lingering effect that it had, and without it one might miss the longing and sadness in that moment.

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson, was my favorite comic during my early teens, and then I rediscovered the strip in early college, this time equipped with the vocabulary to get the half of the jokes I had missed the first time around. The pacing of those strips was also very well done. There are borderless panels, wide panels, Calvin and Hobbes leaping out of the bounds of their panel, and so on. I was unaware at the time of the way these different structures affected the story, but I now realize they were crucial elements.

In honor of what I read, I created my own little comic. Click to enlarge.

Posted October 9, 2005 02:46 PM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 5 | Permalink