Oct.26 In-class Notes (Real Talk)

Key word: macabre

Topics can be used:

Jade Simmons' project:
Specific value of found stuff when it's incorporate into art/rhetoric, etc.
http://urbanremix.gatech.edu/

Cornel West:
Pain, difficulty, mortality as central to reality, realness, truth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West

Hip-Hop:
Poetics/ ethics

Jade Simmons's Lecture Notes

Rhythm of the way to walk is important. Three Hollywood artists and also President Obama do well in walking.

When practicing football, rhythm is also essential.(The flexibility)

Simmons played hand games with a student in lecture to show the simple concept of rhythm.

In Simmons art works, two cultures collide, piano and electronics.

Rhythm in healing gave so much power in ancient culture.

Urban Remix project--to record unexpected samples in rhythm

Reality TV: a dearth of talent and the death of morality

Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it tells us things about ourselves; or ought to.

It is good to be bad.

Add the contestants’ exhibitionism to the viewers’ voyeurism and you get a picture of society sickly in thrall to what Saul Bellow called “event glamour”.

If we are willing to watch people stab one another in the back, might we not also be willing to actually watch them die?

Comments: “Reality” TV with “direct” appearance is essentially unreal.  To a certain extent, all humans are voyeurs. These “voyeurs” want to watch something “evil” to fulfill their emotional needs. So participants in reality TV become devious, exhibitionistic and bad in order to achieve their final goal—fame. For the participants, they, on the screen, are not their real selves since they will do something that they will not do in their daily life. For the society, the mean and lying people on the show are not able to motivate the “voyeuristic” viewers to improve society.

 There are also some Reality stars in China. The following is a video in Youtube talking about the two China’s most hated Reality stars.

Shield （Page 106-111)

Reality TV

Different people get sucked into reality shows for different reasons.

Our primary goal is to make a show that's compelling.

There's no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.(Is there even narrative?)

We want our viewing or reflect our complicated, messy, difficult, overloaded, overstimulated lives.

In Charles instructs Mrs. Flanders to stop moving, he's altering the world in order for it to match what he wants to paint, rather than shaping his painting to reflect what's actually occurring in the world.

The success of the genre reflects our lust for emotional meaning. We really do want to feel, even if that means indulging in someone else's joy or woe. We have a thirst for reality(other people's reality, edited) even as we suffer a surfeit of reality(our own--boring/painful).