Who Knows What Love Is?

                  Being a young adult that is LDS there are many expectations to date as many people as you possibly can in the hopes of falling in love. This is something I have had a hard time doing this whether it be because I don’t want to spend the money on lots of dates or because I don’t think that the best way to find someone who you care about. I feel this way because with this method, you could be dating one person one night and then a different girl the next night. It’s hard to care about someone when they just become apart of a list. I think the best way to date is to hang out with people and get to know someone before you make the leap to going on a date with them. That way you know it’s someone who you really care about and would want to build a relationship with not just put a check or an X next to their name. But what do I know. Love is complicated and that is what I wanted to critique with this piece. I did this by choosing my favorite love song, which explains the different ways in which people feel about love and then throwing in other love songs that I feel explore love in their own way and made it so that it is basically impossible to understand most of the songs and make it a very confusing mess. I did this because that is how I view love, a very confusing mess. It also explores the idea that love is different for everyone and there is no rule book that people should be following on how to find their significant other. The most important thing is to do what you are comfortable with and what you like doing. The idea for this project came from a Strawberry Switchblades song titles “Who Knows What Love Is?” because I thought that was a great question and the only answer I could come up with is that Love has many different meanings. This relates to Jenkins chapter because the audience takes their own meaning and ideas from the love songs they are listening to and apply in into their own lives. Also love songs are different for each audience member because they have their own life experiences that shape the way they listen to and think about a song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD8KP9Ojutg

Medium Specificity

Who Needs a Beat When Your Feet Just Go?

The idea to do a project on how reliant dance is on music came for me when I was watching the film Amadeus. There was a scene in which Mozart was tasked with the project of creating an opera for the Emperor but was unable to do a specific scene because the emperor had banned something along the lines of not being able to sing and dance in the same scene. This forced Mozart to do the scene with no music, which resulted in a very awkward scene. This got me thinking about how much music dictates dance and how much the beat controls the way you move.

To study this, I planned on having my friend improv a dance to a song. I had her do this to show how she was able to dance well to a song because she was able to move with the beat of the song. I then was planning on moving the music resulting in the music being off from the dance. When I went to do this part I decided to just repeat the dance on the second half of the song but to my surprise, the same dance still looked good on a part of the song she did even dance to. I then realized that even though most of the song had changed, the beat was still the same resulting in the dance to match up perfectly. Since this worked out I decided to keep it. I thought this was really interesting because I felt it furthered my hypothesis even more than my original idea because it showed that all a dancer needs is a beat and they are able to move their feet. It also was interesting to see how my friend was able to completely improv a dance to a song just by moving with the beat. Even though she is a dance major, I have had a similar experience to this where I have no dance history but often find myself dancing to music I have never heard before but am able to move to the beat.

What inspired me about McCloud’s comic was how he explained the history and evolution of comics. This lead me to think of the history of dance and how music has always been a factor of it. Even though music and dance have both evolved so much, dance is still very dependent upon the beat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY6bI3zqFQw

The Manson Family murders are some of those creepy-and-intriguing stories that are hard to believe and yet, are completely believable. Ex-con Charles Manson was the leader of the hippie cult of the Manson Family, who were involved in a series of murders and crimes¹. Mysteriously, he was also seriously involved with the Beach Boys²; he was a fan, a friend, a colleague, and a solicitor. In one confusing instance, the Beach Boys found themselves in the middle of an almost-lawsuit dealing with charges of abuse and forms of kidnapping, though it was hard for either of us to find conclusive coverage of the real story of Lotus-Flower.

It was hard for either of us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of any of the characters, so we decided to allow our imagination to exaggerate. We thought it would be interesting to write a short story based on the perspective of the two hitchhiking Manson girls. Our characters are all based on real people, but we tried to focus on what our first-impressions were of those real people and incorporate them into dramatic straw-people. Their dialogue is stiff and blunt, yet descriptive. The scenes show a glimpse of what life in the Manson home was like, using whatever little information we could gather and assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson

http://crime.about.com/od/manson/a/charlesmanson.htm

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5xjwE7gM8jjM3lBdHdXZUZrakU/view?usp=sharing