Life Unlimited Blog Post 9 First week of Documentaries

Last week during memorial day week we began showing off the fruits of our labor in the form of various documentaries that I gotta say make me wish that I had thought of some ideas that other groups had. Most of the themes didn't really surprise me while I others blew my mind because I forgot that certain things happened in the book. I'm just happy that I had finished the book this week so that I could view the documentary while being able to make the connections to the book. The documentary that our group decided to do was one on the topic of music and life which had ranged from how a composer views music, a philosopher views music and our mentor Chris who we used to represent just a person who you could run into on the street. I thought that our interviews were interesting although when I watched the full documentary I overlooked things because I was a bit tired, so things that should have been in there had been forgotten. One thing that should have been done like the wording of the questions before we had asked them because our audio was questionable due to this one crow outside that would not stop squawking which would have cleared up some things. I also think that I should have done a voice over or a scene about how our film connected to Orfeo like most of the other documentary did. Although our documentary was kind of aimed at those who had read the book we should have made it for anyone. A good documentary which was the first one which I think was the best so far was the one about the Fourth Amendment. I had forgotten about the scene where Peter Els's home is raided for his DIY Bio kit which is actually a big scene in the book which leads to him going on the run. The documentary was well done with a clean edit and some very interesting people being interviewed including a professor from PSU. My group had tried to get a Professor but had failed to because we had not gotten a response back. The coolest thing was the animation that was included in the film it was something that made it not only unique, but had not been expected which I think every documentary should have had. A documentary I didn't think was as interesting was the one about what peoples favorite music was and how it made them feel. When I was watching it I was kinda bored and didn't see a much of a connection to the book other than people like music and that music was a theme. My problem with it was that it was the same question over and over which a lot of other groups did, but they would eventually ask like an expert and had done an interesting topic. I'm sure that that group did a lot of hard work and I'm not saying that it was bad it looked great and did better in some areas than what we had done I just wish that it had a bit of variance. Those are just some of my thoughts of the documentaries so far.

Life Unlimited Post 8 Book Stuff

This is my blog post right before memorial day I believe so no class tomorrow and I'm not sure why I am leading with that. I wanted to use this blog post to talk about Orfeo and the cool discussion we had in class on I think it was Monday. I had not finished the book at the time and I am still not finished with the book and I am currently trying to power through it because I had bought the book and while it is a hard read I find it has its moments. The discussion we had enlightened me about some of the meanings behind what he had tweeted and that last paragraph which I was assigned made me think about how we all have interpreted the reading. I mainly wanted to talk about what my partner had said to the class about our passage. The paragraph was on page 369, "When she nods, even a little, you'll head to the door and through it. Run out into a place fresh and green and alert again to whole new dangers. You'll keep moving, vivace, as far as you can get, your bud vial high, like a conductor readying his baton to cue something luckier than anyone supposes. Downbeat of a little infinity. And at last you will hear how this piece goes.". I found this to be both profound and really, really, really confusing because I hadn't finished the book yet.  My partner and I had taken the twenty minutes to break it down and we came up with several things about the passage. The first sentence we figured was talking about his daughter nodding as Els is walking out the door as the authorities surround her home in search of Els. We found that from the phrasing that it sounded like the end of the story was trying to end on a high note as if he has accepted his fate. The next sentence also alludes to this as he mentions that he feels like he is running to a new fresher place excited to move on with his life which is strange because it took him about 70 years to realize his place in the world and to accept it himself. It goes on to talk about how he or in this case he says you as if the story is being told to another person within the story will run until they have no where else to go excited like a conductor preparing to present a piece with his orchestra. This could be in reference to new beginnings and how they are exciting as they are new and when we have on we feel refreshed and ready to face the world. The next part the "Downbeat of a little infinity" I thought was a reference to how we can't be perfect or immortal, but we can come close by being with the ones closest too us and being remembered by them like his daughter possibly. The last part about hearing the piece could be in reference to his life and how you can only understand it when he is dead or how he has come to an understanding that his life was already perfect and that he didn't need to be famous to have that immortality he so desired.

Life Unlimited Post 7 GMO

The GMO debate in class on Wednesday was interesting to say the least and by that I mean pretty silent which to me meant that everyone either didn't care or some thought that they didn't agree with the side they were on. I personally don't care about the matter because growing up not knowing if there were GMO's in my food hasn't made me polar to one side or the other in the matter. I find that GMO's are useful in the sense that they help grow food faster and that they can create food with more desirable traits so that they last longer. The problem is that the companies are abusing this technology and are monopolizing it. This creates problems within business and how we view GMO's. I want to talk about some of these things because I felt that somethings that I hadn't thought about until now I should have said during class. One of these was that the Pro-GMO side kept preaching was that they can help world hunger and that is wishful thinking on their part. The problem is that because this is a business they wish to make more money and to do that companies like Monsanto create both the seed and the herbicide that they can sell in large amounts because of two reasons the terminator gene and that they have a patent on the gene. The terminator gene was created by Monsanto so that when the harvest is over the seeds cannot be used again because the gene makes the seeds useless. This is terrible because now farmers who don't do that well are forced to buy these seeds from Monsanto at terrible prices with a contract that is far too binding and controlling to be legal, yet it is. The patent they have may be the worst because it doesn't matter how much of the gene is in your crop or how it gets there, but if some is found companies like Monsanto are allowed to sue the farmers and take all of their hard earned crop. This is a problem because it is terrible business ethics even though it is within the law and that ruins the name of GMOs that could be used for much grander things, but all the companies see is a way to make a profit. Creating this "monopoly" in unhealthy for the farmers who have no say in the matter and on a large scale as GMOs will be seen as a bad business practice resulting in loss of profit. There are many benefits as well such as some of the things I had already mentioned along with what one of my classmates had mentioned which was that we send food, most likely with GMOs, to other countries that need it because it has one advantage then to not sending money which is that local warlords or those that would do harm with the money will not use the funds for bad purposes. Other benefits include that we could make GMOs potentially healthier with the right amount of technology by giving the properties of other natural foods because some foods lack nutrients that certain diets need. These are just some small thoughts of mine that I wish I had brought up during the debate.

Life Unlimited post 6 Theatrical Music and The Future of Science

Today which is Mother's day for those who don't remember the date so this post will be related to what I did today and the book. For mothers day my brothers and I went with our mom to see a performance by Cirque du Soleil at the Moda Center. The entire performance was accompanied by an amazing musical performance which I could only describe as a bit tribal with a bit of techno. The performance could be described in a few words the two I choose are confusing and darring. The performers were adorned in interesting costumes with some looking like animals and strange tribal people to red leotards. Each time the I suppose it could be called a scene would change so would the music and it would have seemingly random shifts in tempo and theme. For example at one moment the performers could be doing happy dancing and flips to a serious fighting scene while the music becomes more dramatic. This reminded me of the performance Maddy, Bonner and Els make the performance as Els's graduation assignment. I only make the parallel because the two seem to be similar in nature as both have left me a bit confused. I can only imagine that for the Cirque du Soleil composer he had the same idea flow as Bonner and Els which was to create a piece of music that could be accompanied by dance. Things like choreography and the music that has accompanied it have always piqued my interest because I've never known what comes first the composition or the choreograpy. I go to this because I wonder if it is a vice versa sitiuation where it can happen either way although I doubt that. I think the same for certain fight scenes in every movie like the mano a mano fighters where everything is put on the line. I feel that sometimes the composer must be asked to write the piece out first because of how epic the director and viewers are expecting this scene to be  due to the nature of the theatrical experiance. By the theatrical experiance I mean that these scenes are expected at the climax of the story and so they are expected to be amazing. Another thing I wanted to talk about was the news blast which was about the doctor who is about to take another mans head off and put it on another mans body. I recently watched a Let's Play where they had mentioned it briefly and so I wanted to say my thoughts on the whole thing as another part of my blog. To me this not only doesn't make sense to me acording to what I know about biology, but also as a person I don't know why you would want to research this subject. What I know about the human body is limited, but I took a anatomy and physiology class while I was in high school. The Spinal cord has a direct link to the brain and if it harmed in the wrong way you can lose control of your body below where it is damaged or instant death. So from what I can tell is that they are removing only the head severing the spinal cord from the skull which will then be attached to the body of the other man which to me has a few problems like how would a person attach a brain to a spinal cord. We don't fully understand the brain or nervous system because of how complex it is. The biggest problem to me is that the other body could reject the cells of the transplanted head. When this occurs the transplanted part will start to die and the project will be considered a failure. Those are at least my thoughts based on what I remember from class.

Life Unlimited post 5 Music Composition

Today I met with my group in order to start filming two of our interviews for the documentary project. We interviewed two people today one was a composer that Jackie knew and the other was Noelle's fiance. We interview them on two different subjects which were the ideas and composing of music and the idea of this meta physical concept called the "Octave". I wanted to use this blog post to relate the two to Orfeo and what I had learned today. First there is the "Octave" which in a metaphysical sense and how I understood it was like a set of stairs to life. Each note is supposed to represent a different step in our life at different Octaves or stages. An example of such would be birth to the age of eighteen when a person becomes an adult. One of the notes in the octave would be Do or my birth another say Mi would be puberty and the final Do would be me turning eighteen which would be me starting another chapter in my life. This can be applied to anything that changes stages I supposed or anything that has an order of events like the example that we will probably use in our documentary was ordering food at a restaurant. I compare this to Els's life in the story as it flashes back to the days of his youth and his journeying off towards his world of music. He begins with clarinet, meeting Clara, breaking up with Clara and meeting Bonner. All of these things changing who he is and how he had thought about music and then starting the cycle all over again when he had his daughter and again with the losing his home and bacteria (note I have not made it that far into the book). These things have changed him and I would like to think that the idea of the "Octave" is a good representation of how not only Els's in the story has grown, but of how we all change and grow. As for composition of music we interview a man by the name Christopher Rudolf who Jackie had know as he talked about the life cycles of a composition, the purpose of a composition, and how he would explain the feeling of composition to those who don't know much about music. The things that interested me the most was what he said about the life cycle of compositions and how he had composed things. He had said that each composition will have different life spans and examples that he had used were Bach, the Beatles and your average pop song. Bach's music he had called eternal, the Beatles he had said have had a good life span for the past forty to fifty years and most pop songs he had said die out kinda quickly. This kinda reminded me of Els's goal of wanting to create a song that people would remember or change their views on music. Rudolf when talking about writing music had said that his goal was to make people smile, but that the ideas for creating music can come at any time be based off of any emotion and take various times to write. Which I assume the Richard Powers was trying to convey through Els in the book. At least those are my thoughts on what the subject of composition.

Life Unlimited Post 4 Group Work and The Book

In Orfeo Els has very specific views on music that have helped my group decide on what we are going to do our documentary on. Our group is doing a documentary on music composition because of how prevelent it is in the story. One of the questions we are going to pose to some of our interviewees was "Why or how do musical tastes change over time?". I wanted to pose this question because in the story during Els's youth his brother tries to show him early rock and roll that Els truly ends up not caring for which causes his brother to get a little steamed. As I read on in the story his likes and dislikes in music seem to change from the influences of people like Clara, Bonner, Maddy and all of his teachers that helped him learn how to compose and understand music. The funny thing is I was listening to some music while reading this book almost at all times and it got me thinking about how my own personal tastes in music have changed over my short 18 years on earth. I wanted to ask our interviewees like the composers we are trying to get have any insight on why our tastes change whether it be that we get bored of what we used to listen to or if our ears change to the point where we just dislike certain types of music. Another question my group had posed was "How does music give meaning to life?". Els in the book from the way I percieve the book believe that music comes from everything from his relationship with his lovers to his daugther who he had written songs with. To me he seems to believe that music is life because of how he feels deep down inside. To me personally music gives a certain aspect of drama and setting to life and some of its moment or will give me an outlet that I can connect to. When I watch a movie or play a video game one of the things I will judge is music because it will always set the tone for what is currently happening on screen. One of the biggest things I come back to is in I believe it is Star Wars the Phantom Menace during the climax of the final fight where the music picks up at a high tempo as they fight on screen. Eventually they go into a room where each combatant is separated and the music stops and when it opens the music continues until they are seperated again after the master dies. This moment signifies to me how music is so important to setting a scene and how powerful it is. Music as an outlet to me is useful when I have a feeling whether it be anger or happyness that will amplify this feeling which is what assume the character Els feels like. These are some of the questions I want to pose in our short documentary because of I view them and how I want that view to change or improve.

Life Unlimited 3rd post Late Missed Debate

This post has been pushed because of several exams that had popped up and that I missed class Wednesday which was the debate about cloning and artificial organs I believe. I was supposed to be on the side against cloning and had several questions for the other side that I did not get to pose. Here are some of my thoughts on the subjects. Cloning to me is a strange idea because of how I have viewed it due to the media, film and books, so some of my opinions are based in what if scenarios as most are because a human has never been artificially cloned. A big part of how I view cloning is from the book "House of the Scorpion" by Nancy Farmer which is about a future where cloning is illegal except for made up country of Aztlan where a crime lord constantly makes clones to harvest organs from and in return he let's them have a short lived life. The book revolves around Matteo the clone of the crime lord. The book made me think about what human nature would take place in this situation were it come real minus the whole opium crime lord thing. I have a feeling that only people with power would abuse this technology by farming clones to steal their organs for later which I mentally compare to how big companies treat chickens and pigs keeping them in small spaces. I feel that if not that something worse which I think is inhumane because raising  a person that has the same mental capacity as me assuming it is my clone and cloning works that way. Another problem I see with cloning is related to Star Wars which is dumb and speculative, but I always think of order 66 which is where all the clones turn against the Jedi because it was coded in there genes. I have a feeling that other world powers like say Russia, China or even the United States. The clones arm race where we try to kill each other off by sending cloned soldiers to kill each other. For artificial organs and such I think that those are great because they are in production now and unlike the whole organ harvesting from clones no one gets hurt. The thought of me being able to go to a doctor for liver problems and him just taking my cells and throwing them in a machine that in front of me would print a fully functional liver that would replace my really bad one. In class we watched the video, which I think was a TED talk, and just seeing how they did that blew my mind. The future is now and everyday I realize that we make tremendous strides in medicine. The only problem I can think of would be over population of the earth due to no one kicking the bucket. The world is already experiencing this problem because of the advent of civilization and medicine. Other than that I can't think of a reason that organ printing could be terrible.