i yearn for body art

Body art: self expression in the form of art permanently embedded onto the skin. It is articulation that will last forever on the surface of the human body. The buzz of tiny needles, quickly scratching the surface of flesh over and over meticulously hums in the private rooms. Each scratch adding to the creation, the creation that is adding to the meaning of the body it is becoming a part of. Samples of previous art are hung on the walls, laid out in books, and on papers that cover the entire first room. Ideas to be re-used and recycled for those who lack the creativity to create their own surround you. Ideas to be molded into new works of self expression are everywhere. Metal objects range from small to large are laid out in cases, on display for someone to choose them to make their statement, to be displayed no longer in the case, but now on the body.

Each room contains one- maybe two chairs, reclined and intimidating just as they would look at a dental office. Sterilization supplies, keep the art work pure, and from being contaminated. They lay in stacks on white counters with cabinets containing ink and equipment. Ink in all different colors and shades, picked to perfectly coincide with the decision about to be made. The ink that the artist uses will become a part of art's history, the ink that will express the desires and memories of the canvas, onto the canvas. As the canvas the body becomes the art. The art becomes a part of your life, permanent; like written expression. Words in a design form on the skin, in black or bright colors. A story being told from now on by the body art itself- no longer involving verbal words, but being told willingly by the canvas. The images sketched onto the skin tell a story of meaning and truth.

The story being told, in words or images, is permanently being spilled out onto the skin. Your ideas and design will forever be for the world to see, only covered by make up or clothing if the canvas chooses. Once the art is finished, it is a statement that has been made. You can’t re gather the idea or start over. An artist can however, rework the image, to create something new out of something old. But this only remolds the old creation- it will never be gone because under the new ink the old ink remains. Surgery may try to hide old stories, old images, but they will never be completely gone- just severely faded. Never gone, just faded.

My body yearns for the art. A body with art yearns for more, and more. It is no longer my body; now my body is a canvas for the art. The art reaches for my body. It is an addiction like no other, expression like no other, with permanence like no other. A tattoo is not on the skin: it’s in it.

Me and my best friends body art. Expression.

Made to Stick

Something that is sticky to me is something that could apply to my life, is shocking, and comes from someone I trust. In short, I do agree with the Heath's idea of stickiness. When I hear something about science in a bunch of technical terms, I am bored to pieces, not listening, and counting the seconds until it is over. Nothing is possibly going to stick if I am that distracted. Even to someone who likes science- most people would need the idea repeated, especially if it was very techinically described the first time to understand the concept. If you are going to make a story stick with me, you are going to have to keep it short and simple. If I am shocked, even better- because I repeat shocking stories. If the topic comes up, it is something interesting to bring into the conversation, so a shocking story that stuck with me gets recycled into my new conversation. Reusing a shocking story, almost makes you feel more interesting, because when you tell someone something shocking they are paying their full attention to you. If the person telling the anecdote has even a little bit of credibility then its all the better because you wouldn't question them twice, as you believe every word that they say. Something sticks if it makes sense. Sometimes something that sticks is a memory. A memory of something that changed your life, changed someone elses life, was especially funny, or especially sad, made an impact, any of these would stick. Stories are just memories being retold. I will never forget the day my cousin died, or the what I was doing on September 11th. I will always remember in perfect detail my trip to Spain, and when my mom married my stepdad. These memories make an impact, and whether they are happy or sad, they had shocked my life, and that is what makes something stick. The story about the children eating apples with razors in them from trick-or-treat night is something that scares people, and shocks their lives because up until this point they had not worried about their children eating the sweets over Halloween. Just like those memories made a change in my life, the parents made a change in their children's lives when they heard the razor rumor.

A Personal Observation

As I observed my subject in the library, I watched his movements, actions, and interactions. I noticed he is a student at Hofstra University, and he is enrolled in Dr. Lay's digital age course. He is a young man, who is lanky yet comfortable with himself. On the outside, he is an average height for a Caucasian male around 19 or 20. He is thin, has tree bark colored brown hair, and wears a faded green hat. His right eye is bruised, and black and green as if he was in a fight recently. The clothing he wore were baggy, and careless looking.
My subject acts as a director, camera man, and script writer. At first he walks from person to person, confidently suggesting they volunteer to participate in his film. As he stops to talk to people, he smiles as if he is almost blushing while he asks yet you can still feel his confidence. His arms swing back and forth while he shifts his weight from foot to foot and snaps his hands together. Now he acts as a camera man, taking direction on the filming layout, he listens attentively, nodding with one arm folded and the other with his hand over his mouth while his eyes closely follow the guy telling him what to do. With the camera in his hand he flows from person to person, as a real camera man would do while filming a movie.
After observing my target, I left with a feeling of his personality. He felt confident, creative, and intelligent. He is the kid who doesn't care what anyone is wearing, and he doesn't care what anyone is wearing. He wants to create something, and that project is what is getting his attention. I see him using his creative efforts in film some day, and that his confidence, and comfortable disposition will only help him get there.

Practice

Looking all around, I finally spot my subject. A young man, who I've seen many times before. He walks back and forth, interacting with everyone around him, shifting his weight from foot to foot. At first I would conclude a nervous-like quality about his stance, but no, that's not it. An air of flirtation, comfort, and creativity surround him. Almost like one of those "Ora's" you hear about people giving off, but you never see. From observing him, I'm learning a lot about his mannerisms. His hands swing in back of his body, then back to the front where they both snap followed by his fist meeting his open hand in a smack -repeated over and over. Walking from person to person asking for help or participation in the film they appear to be making, he walks with almost a swagger from one leg to the other with confidence. Although his clothes seem grungy and baggy, they work perfectly with his creative-i don't care- personality.
Stalking my target- is like the perfect warm up, for your writing. It forces you to use adjectives to correctly depict your subject. The reader will not understand or be able to create a picture of the the person you are describing if the words you use are not vivid or clear. Critical thinking, like in this activity, gets your mind warmed up. This "exercise" (pun intended...) will help you gain writers muscle as it encourages metaphors, and clarity to be used. You might think of this exercise as practice, before you write. Even my brief description above challenged my mind to think back to yesterday and write about my subject. It was my warm up for the rest of this blog. A creative warm up like this one helps your own creative thinking process get started. Similar to warm up journal entries in class, stalking someones actions and having to describe them in detail gets you in the mood to write. This stalking activity= stretching before you go for a run. The warm up or the stretch happen when your stretching your mind to think of the perfect descriptive words, or warming up your creative mind by challenging you to use metaphors. As much as this warms up you as a writer, it also strengthens your ability to create imagery for your reader. You have to draw them a picture using your words, and if you mess up- they might not understand.

Dog Whisperer

The Dog Whisperer is a talented man who understands inside of a dogs mind. The explicit example in this essay is how to be fluent with your posture and your gestures towards the dog, to help it understand exactly what you mean, and to get exactly the reaction that you're looking for. It's all about your movements, and communicating with the animal. It has to feel you, see you, understand you and it uses what you give it to figure you out. You can't be general, or vague with the dog, you have to be purposeful and have meaning in every thing you do and say and how you say and do it.
Human-human interaction is similar in its forms of communication. Humans don't rely as much on body language, however we do subconsciously take notice of important movements. How your body is positioned does set the tone for how you will be reacted to. The triad of exercise, discipline, and affection comes into play because you need to be balanced. Whether with a dog, or a human, this process is key in communicating. Like raising a child, or making a marriage work- its a work in progress that needs training, time, and routine.
In this article, the Dog Whisperer lacks the talent that he has with dogs, when it translates to humans. He doesn't relate, understand, or try to make his own wife happy. She only forces him to change his ways in order to save their marriage. A councilor had to change his way of thinking towards what a marriage, and what a relationship is. Humans are not as easily persuaded as dogs, and you can't control a human with your body language. Or can you? Some people may be easily influenced by another person's body language- scared when the other is showing anger etc. but in the case of a wife, she needs him to understand her, and to participate in their relationship. The powers he has with dogs do not translate onto humans.

Peter IS a Stitch Bitch.. ha.

Peter claims that the stitch bitch is hard to understand... maybe we just need to do a little research, so we can figure out how to unravel her. Hypertext, can easily be "dictionary.comed"
hy⋅per⋅text 
–noun
a method of storing data through a computer program that allows a user to create and link fields of information at will and to retrieve the data nonsequentially.
WEIRD. Considering I just used hypertext to explain hypertext=) tricky, huh? So that answers Peter's question about what hypertext is. We use hypertext to help explain, or show examples of what we are talking about. Hypertext is only formed using electronic forms of communication. When you have access to more than just your text, a hyper amount of text.

I think you can navigate better through stitch bitch the article, by using each piece to help answer the other pieces. Kind of like, creating a whole... out of it's parts. You have to use Shelley Jackson, to make her explain herself. Each part creates a new idea, each idea contributes to her original theory. It creates a puzzle in a way, that you need to put together piece by piece that together will eventually help you figure out what the bigger picture is.

Clear things up for me, Shelley Jackson?

1. Who is the true author of this piece? Is her name actually Shelley Jackson- as the piece is signed, or is it Shelley Shelley?

2. Why does she claim to write in multiple personalites and who is who?

3. What is the entire hypertext about? How the hypertext lies?

4. To me, she is an untrust worthy author. Why does Jackson portray her work this way?

5. Who is her monster she created?

6. Is the imposter her writing? and her actual self what is doing the writing?

Stich Bitch

Hyper-text. Shelley Jackson wrote "The Patchwork Girl" describing herself as a writer. I think she is not only describing herself, but writers in general. Jackson is talking about putting all the pieces together in order to see the entire creation. In the beginning, Jackson fights with herself and the reader about an impostor who claims to be the writer. The author tell the reader to know her as Shelley Shelley, or daughter of Mary Shelley. This is so weird. At the point I have no idea why she is using multiple personalities when her entire piece is signed Shelley Jackson. I would think this is one of those times where you are not supposed to trust the author. Next she moves on to talk about how the body is not a whole. She means that it is separated and not completely connected, because not every thing that the body does is known by every other part of the body. The next section has to do with everything happening at once, she uses examples like, "the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down". I think her word choice, "simultaneous" is the best for describing what she is talking about. Like life and death all at once. She is creating these images to portray the idea that a hypertext shares all of the information it has with you at once. It provides links to its sources and contains footnotes that allows you to find all it's information and more within one text. She is describing that when you read a hypertext it is hard to make the distinction between important and useless. The text interweaves and creates a huge confusing blanket of information for the reader. She doesn't like this. Jackson goes onto describing writing and how it's confusing textually. In her section about Reality Fiction, she talks about how fiction lies, and reality may always sneak into the writing. In every section Jackson talks about how she is not what we thinks she is. She repeatedly claims falsehoods and points out trickery in the writing. References to doubting the truthful nature of an author are made in each piece of her writing, as she points out its faults. I think this is driving me insane, so I'm going to quickly share a few of these lines. It was not how they said it was. It's not all you think it is. I'm not what you think I am. It's not what it says it is.
Yeah, she's driving me crazy. She compares us to creating a monster. The entire piece has to be based on something else. Her larger story. The patchwork needs to be put together to create the whole.

6 perfect questions

rtyjtiehuygtwf- that was dustin, (a pimp straight outta cali yo. reppin west side to the fullest.)

My questions for Collins
1. Why did the real first two lines of the poem fail? What were they?
2. Are you mocking the style of the original poem?
3. Why can't she be the pine-scent? Does that symbolize something else? Because he is very adament about it.
4. Who is the peom about? Does that matter?
5. When he begins to talk about himself and what he is, why does he pick those things?
6. Is the whole poem being mocked by the rewrite?

The Ecstacy of Influence

Influence- aka plagiarism. I don't think so. In Lethem’s essay on plagiarism, he not only defends plagiarism, but he discovers it. He realizes that artists use plagiarism all the time in different ways, either to recreate or use as inspiration. Many versions may be made of an original idea, but these versions are all copies. The copies may be better than the original- they may be completely different with few similarities or the opposite. All type of recreation are considered plagiarism because you are borrowing the original idea, however sometimes it’s worth it. Good ideas can be made better. Great ones can be expanded and remade into something new without losing the idea. Lethem found examples of recreation in cartoons, “If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist.” The cartoonists borrow other ideas and create something new, something of their own. But it has a different purpose this time. When the author changes, the purpose changes, and that makes it okay. I find examples of recreation ALL the time in music. Hip hop artists recreate older songs by adding a rap track onto it- making it their own by adding an extra beat. Lil Wayne recreates a Beatles song, Help!, adding his rap track and speeding up the beat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3tnw4GJmDo Is this plagiarism? It is clearly not his own song but is he passing it off to be? The Beatles were a very famous band with very famous songs and Lil Wayne switching it up only amped it up and made it fun for kids today to listen to. Sometimes plagiarism just renews the idea- in a form that keeps it up to date. I also ALWAYS hear just single lines from older rap songs being used in new rap songs. It borrows one idea and puts in into a completely new composition. I have heard this done by different hip hop artists and artists from their own songs, it might not mean the same thing but the exact same line is repeated. It happens here, where there used to be a song called “99 problems and a bitch ain’t one”, and there is a song now that starts saying “I’ve got 99 problems, and they’re all bitches”, this is kind of a dumb example but it was off the top of my head… I really do hear this happen all of the time in hip hop songs where artists are almost responding and including other artist’s lines into their own songs. Is that plagiarism? I think this is what Lethem was talking about, when he admitted that he would hear certain lines from books or audio tapes and realize they were apart of earlier works. Movies are the same way. They are constantly coming out with remakes of older movies with new actors and new technology. This isn’t stealing because like Lethem comments on there is that aspect of receiving permission, but it still is a redo. A new director, with a new vision, takes a script and makes it his or her own. That is one of the excellent sides of borrowing works and ideas because it makes it work in an up to date fashion that allows the work to live in today’s pop culture. Lethem uses his own examples of redone movies, but I like the example of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, which was redone in the past few years to bring the characters, and the factory setting up to date- creating a new magical place for children to imagine. Lethem basically concludes by saying that when an original idea is created it would be a waste not to share it and elaborate on it. The “artistic creation” is a “gift to the economy” and once the creation has entered into the economy of artistic creation it may appear in several forms- and many artists may share it. It is like an economic boost for artists who have something new to work with and mold into different forms of art whether that be in movies or music or stories or whatever you want it to be. I think it’s all about sharing, recreating, updating, and keeping it alive.