Surrealist Technique: Calligramme…some wicked sh**.

This is really weird.      Crip:     first Things                I’m not going to lie,          Blue  red is the sign
how                                       blood               that                              This                            is the                  for
can                                        gangs               pop                              kinda                          sign                    the
we                                         and     Follow   up.                             Sorta                           for     bloods crew.
do                                          wars                 the                                is fun,                         the
this                                        are                      weird                         but is                          crips.
without messing up?     the                         words        very time consuming.      While

To                  tiny  ak          g wo-     And  to break
get     fit,             wo –   so –      rds.         aga-           words
the         I             rds,       me     Just       in,              to make
A  use   got          or          exi     like        ne-            the let-
to               to        bre -        stin- this.     Eed   ters work.

Now    Doing a        I don’t     I know I’m using   finish this word.  Now   Calligrame
I got          “B” is       know     mes-             to           To               I can.   I am           is a really
to              really       if me      sed              Now        get               that   fin-              tough, but
do   difficult             can fit    up w-          work.    this               all      nal-              intereting wa-
the   but does           this       ord-             can        word             do      ly a-             y to write. It
Next         now         word     s but            thing     I got              and    lmos-          pays off in
crew.  look sik.        Here.    That is how this    to concentrate      t done. the end.

It gets messed up on the blog but on my word document it looks better, and now I figured out how to show you, ahaa.

Surrartist Realist – Eileen Agar

Eileen Agar was born on December 1st 1899 in Buenos-Aires (cool). She has studied under Leon Underwood, and has attended many top notch schools for art. She’s also studied art in Paris, which is really cool taking in the fact that at this point in time (1920′s and 30′s) money issues and market crashes were high. She’s well known, and has had her work exposed in many art shows and exhibitions. Some of her work was selected by highly respected people that I’ve never heard of for the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries – London. This was apparently a showcase for artists’ art, and had an audience of approximately 1000 people per day! Her work was interrupted by WWII, but she got back on her game by the 60′s, and has even had a one woman exhibition, which to me seems really nerve racking. Think about how many people were there to just judge her. I found a link of a photograph she took, and you can see it by clicking here. She called this “Bum and Thumb Rock” and you can tell why when you see it. I found this picture really cool and funny at the same time, but I found it amazing that she found this rock, and it really is surreal.

Quotes :)

“The point, for me, is to start out subjectless. Why? Because the subject inevitably becomes a straitjacket…” – Gil Adamson

“It is hopefully clear at this point that Recordism is not an entirely new way of eating cheese. It is instead an entirely new way of eating leftover potato salad!” – William A. Davison

I remember clearly a collage of Ludwig’s featuring a woman’s head with a huge horn growing out her ear and ending in a machine of some kind. I was both mesmerized and terrified by it.” – Beatriz Hausner

Writer – Jacqueline Turner

Jacqueline Turner

There wasn’t a lot of info on Jacqueline Turner that I could find, but I did find something interesting. It was the events that happen in a morning of Ms. Turner. This post showed what goes through her mind when writing in the morning, and what she does to prepare for this task. She starts off by saying that her morning does not contain a consistent ritual. She says that her mind works differently from most writers; when she starts developing some kind of consistent pattern, her contrary nature suggests breaking it. I found this to be really cool because it shows that she doesn’t just sit down start writing for hours and hours and BAM – MASTERPIECE! No, she gets a cup of coffee (one of the only consistent parts of her mornings), and starts making a list of words; being “barely awake”. I found this to be kinda weird because what kind of words would she use to possibly make a list (:S). Well, she does, and that’s what works for her. After making her list, her next move is based on an idea she gets from reading something by Harryette Mullen: “Sleeping with the Dictionary”. I’m not sure if this is a book or an insert of some kind, but she uses it to guide her. The list she has is actually used to get her out of jams; if she gets stuck, she takes a word from her list. Now THAT makes a lot more sense doesn’t it? She ends off by saying basically, she sits at her laptop with her word list and coffee, tries not to spill the coffee, and just starts writing. I like her style, it’s really free and open; not really any restrictions on her and she’s just really chill about everything. I read some of her work in “Seven into Eleven” and I found it to be really interesting. She can go anywhere from a 20 word piece, to a 200 word piece. Some of her pieces I found a little confusing, but others were real mind bogglers. Her piece “glutton” is really attractive. The way she wrote it was really impelling, and it finished in what I thought was 3 seconds. It got me lost in time, and it really wasn’t about anything “big”; just someone drinking wine, maybe beer, and eating chocolate with some whipped cream. I think that when someone can talk about something as simple as eating and make people feel lost in time while doing it, they’ve really captured the art of poetry.

Writing Style – Poem Type

Type of Poem: Doggerel? :S

Doggerel is defined as a light verse which is humourous and comic by nature – often viewed with disdain as containing little literacy value. What drew me to investigate this type to be honest, was just the name. Doggerel? Like seriously, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you see this word; yeah, dogs. I was puzzled and thought that maybe it’s a poem about dogs, but that would be a weird “type” of poem, so I decided to investigate it, and when I found out what it was, I wasn’t really that surprised. If it has some comic verses in the poem, it would add life to it in a sense and dogs do add life to people’s lives. Maybe this isn’t the reason that the type was called Doggerel, but I’m going to see it that way. I found an example of a Doggerel poem, and here it is:

Excerpt from
Barnabee’s Journal
by
Richard Brathwaite

To Banbury I came, O profane one!
Where I saw a Puritane-one
Hanging of his cat on Monday
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.

I thought that this poem captured the definition of the type amazingly. What the heck’s a Puritane one? That word made me laugh, and that shows that this had a comic verse in it of course. I personally have never heard of a Doggerel poem, so I feel that if more people knew about this type, people would try making Doggerel poems of their own. This was worth investigating, and once again, MORE PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THIS.

Blood-Crip Dispute: Interesting Info.

• The original name for the crips was “Cribs” because of the average aged members being mostly youths
• By 1978, there were 45 Crips gangs (called sets) and they were operating in Los Angeles.
• Crips has over 800 sets with 30,000 –  35,000 members and associates (more than 13,000 of these members are still in Los Angeles)
• By 1971, a gang on Piru Street in Compton known as the Piru Street Boys was formed and associated themselves with the Crips as a set.
• After two years of peace, a feud began between the Piru Street Boys and the other Crip sets. It   turned ugly as gang warfare started happening between former allies.
• This battle continued and by 1973, the Piru Street Boys wanted to end the violence and called a meeting with other gangs that were targeted by the Crips
• After a long discussion, the Pirus broke all connections to the Crips and started an organization which is now the Bloods
• Crips and Bloods have different alphabet rules due to their dislike of the opposite gang
• So for the Crips, the words “kick back” will instead be written as “kicc bkacc” due to their rules of the alphabet.
• This occurs because the Crips don’t like the letter B because of the Bloods, so they “disrespect” it by putting a cross through the letter. Another thing is the letters CK put together in a word; they don’t like this because CK stands for Crip Killers so instead, they double the C in a word that would normally have CK (back = bkacc)

Now these were the things I found that I never knew about prior to the research. What really interested me, was the alphabetical rules these gangs have. They take the “ck” in words and change them in to “cc”, that’s kinda cool. I see now that these groups are really about respect, and the letter pairing of “C” and “K” is looked upon as disrespect. Another thing I never knew was that, the bloods were originally part of their enemies’ sets…wow. I would have NEVER guessed that, and that really shows how if pushed far enough, these sets would go against each other due to disrespect. Yes, we all have watched these groups show up on T.V, and we all have our different opinions on these people, but I see now that overall, it’s all about what they feel is “theirs” and these people are fighting for it. A lot of the violence is unnecessary, but these groups feel that it is indeed necessary, so the battles brew on. I feel that by investigating this topic further, I’ve learned new things that changes some of my views on this topic. It’s interesting to see how each gang progressed, and got to where they are today.

Beatboxing Guru – Focus on Sound ideas NOT the Sound Artist

This next video that I watched may confuse you. I know now I had to do a second post on an idea about sound, and that’s exactly what I did. This video right when watching it seems like something that I should have talked about in the sound artist area, but when you dig deeper, you GET sound ideas from this dude. His name’s Felix Zenger and this guy can BEATBOXXX. I noticed that he moves his hands a lot, which probably helps him make the different sounds he made. He also at one point brings out some old school hip hop, which I really enjoy on a regular basis. Jus the easy going flow of the beats of hip hop from the 90’s just gets to me, and this guy did just that. The way he broke the sounds down to create this theme was amazing. I also noticed how at times, he’d flip his head back or up to sorta get the right sound that he wanted. That’s a cool idea/technique to me, I think I could work with that for my sound composition. Another thing I noticed was how he used his finger to I think push his adam’s apple up and down to get a shakey effect. This is the same technique that’s used to make Spongebob Squarepants’ laugh (LOL). That was really cool to me because it gave the sound that big time sound directors probably take hours to make. They’ve got all the equipment and technology on their side, and Felix has a mic…disadvantage? I KNOW so.  I never knew that just by playing around with your throat, and moving your body around, you can get the exact sounds you want. Beat boxing is an art in my perspective, and Felix is like Da Vinci; the technique he uses is impeccable. I want to try and take these ideas that he has given me, and convert them into different sounds to create different scenarios, like the previous video I watched. Once again, I suggest that everybody take a look at this video, and just enjoy it.

Discovery Channel Sound Ideas

The video I watched on youtube showed me a lot. It’s really amazing how sound directors get sounds by doing the most random things, and then perfecting it to an even greater extent. The guy from this video smashed up a car, just to get the right sounds for a movie. The things he did were CRAZY. He took a log, and literally dropped it on top of the car, JUST TO GET A SOUND OUT OF IT. That personally made me laugh, but at the same time it’s really smart. By doing that, he got the perfect sound he wanted, and he could use it for possibly a car accident scene. The beginning talks about how sound affects our thoughts on how hard or sever a hit could be, and it’s true. Another cool thing they talked about was, using one sound for a lot of different things. He was crinkling up some kind of glass-paper. They said that he could use that for a freezing scene in a movie, a bird hatching from an egg, and of course glass crunching or something in an accident. I learned that even nature could interfere with getting the perfect sound. This particular director wasn’t fully happy with the sounds he got outdoors because he said there were birds around, plus echo from a forest. While hitting the car to get the sounds, he said that echoes would affect the richness of the sound. So he would continue his work indoors. This could help me enormously for a sound composition. By doing something simple like smacking a table or something, I can create many sounds with it. By maybe using a stapler, I can say it’s a gun shot. By dropping a couple of coins properly, I can make it sound like breaking glass. Getting a clip of an elephant on youtube…I could say that it’s the sound of an elephant (couldn’t think of anything else at the moment). But yeah, this video is really interesting to watch, and I suggest that ALL ya’ll should watch itttt.

Second Investigation: The Element Choir

The Element Choir – Element  1

First off, “Element 1” was really freaky, and a little disturbing to listen to. Either way, I actually liked it. I liked the feeling of being freaked out by this song because it actually had the sounds of the element wind in it. It had some hoots from owls which also added the eerie effect to this, which affected me a lot more than if the track didn’t include the hooting. The people screaming or moaning or whatever they were doing in the background didn’t help the cause at ALL. It was as if I was stuck in a horror movie, and I was the idiot that stayed in the house after everybody left knowing they were going to die. The funny thing once again is, I still enjoyed the piece. The Element choir has some structured, and even some un-structured pieces which are based on a system of conduction cues. This is an ensemble of people that include: concert sopranos, poets, singer songwriters, Japanese folk singers (:S), composers, and musicians. What inspires this group, is textures of sounds, voice techniques, rhythmic patterns, and even sound poetry. I like how this group has many different kinds of sound artists, just like DJ Food. It’s smart because when dealing with more than one kind of sound artist, all their techniques and thoughts on sound could be brought together to make some pretty magical pieces. The similarity of this group and other sound artists is the fact that they use sounds to make something happen. I couldn’t really think of similarities. Differences however, are plentiful. This group brings in something as simple as an owl’s hoot, and incorporates that in to their piece, which clearly caught my attention, and gave me the chills. This group also tries to explore the musical history of some sounds, which I feel is pretty awesome. And yeah basically this group was enjoyable to listen to. I don’t know if I would want to continue listening to other pieces of theirs because of the feeling this gave me, but I can’t judge the group on one freaky song. :O

First Investigation: DJ Food

DJ Food (found on Ubu Web) – Raiding the 20^th Century

This was an AMAZING track to listen to. Dj Food is a group, whose goal was to provide metaphorical food for DJ’s. This was a really cool idea to me because after hearing their track, I could see how successful this group was. I thought that DJ Food was one person, but in fact it is a whole bunch of DJ’s, producers and musicians working together to make these tracks. I’m still trying to take in how good the “Raiding the 20^th Century” track was. It had a little Jay-Z in there which I thought was SMART. Anyways, it looks like their inspirations came from other DJs, and for this song in particular all the mash ups that were posted from other DJ’s. A mash up is sorta like a remix, but it has a lot of songs put together to make one mega song. In this particular one, they took the 20^th Century sound (the thing that pops up at the end of shows like the Simpsons) and added sounds and songs to it, to make a mega song. Their influences also of course must be from other musicians, because of the songs they added in this, and the style they chose to add them in. They are similar to other sound artists because they’re using the same style that many DJs and musicians use. They had some record scratches to add effect, which is similar to many other songs. The differences however are really interesting. These guys took something that nobody usually thinks about; the 20^th Century sound, and added that at the beginning of the piece. Shortly after playing that however, they get right in to running their beats, and interesting lyrics. Overall this has made me want to look for more songs or tracks that DJ Food has released, and I feel that EVERYBODY should listen to these guys, they’re C-R-A-Z-Y.