Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Internet = Insanity?

While reading this article, I couldn't help making the connection to a certain youtube video, in which Jenna Marbles laments the amount of time she spends playing games on her Ipad.  She pretty much says (albeit more colorfully) exactly what the article says - without all the science-y stuff.  (Don't watch if offended by profanity)
I think that yeah, the internet is an issue for people.  I wouldn't say that I'm addicted, but then again, I spent about two hours over the weekend watching all the Jenna Marbles I could get my fingertips on.
Actually, if I think about it, I probably am addicted to the internet, because if I wasn't, this assignment would probably have been posted an hour ago before I got the bright idea of Jenna Marbles.  A lot of my internet time is spent on youtube.  People post movies up there, and random interestingthings (or just random things) that I would never watch anywhere but the internet.  It's a web of strange, yet entertaining things.  Some of the stuff I watch is just dumb.  It's stupid funny - cat videos anyone?
I'm not sure if 'addicting' is exactly the right word, more like 'ridiculously easy to waste time on'.  It's like disappearing for an hour or two, and then resurfacing and wondering where that time went. 
The internet is also a place for really good information, and actual intellegence, however.  most of my classwork comes from the internet, and I have to do research (internet again), and quite honestly, whenever I get curious about something, I head on over to Wikipedia, and wind up spending an hour reading about obscure things I never would have found out any other way. 
But, I was pretty surprised and alarmed at the part of the article that mentions how the internet affects your brain.  That was scary.  I don't want to be shrinking my brain, or wiring the thing in weird ways because I like watching stupid youtube videos.  My brain is pretty much all I have, and it's got to stay healthy and fully functioning.  Scary stuff, kiddies.  Turn those computers off!....maybe.

Monday, September 24, 2012

The Guardian McKay

This is a short story I wrote - the inspiration for which came from my name, Kayleigh McKay.  This is also my intellectual property, so don't steal it and pass it off as your own. Thank you, and enjoy:

The Guardian McKay

 

 

Everything was old, just old.  It was his family’s ancestral home, and it was damn creepy; generations of McKays, of people he didn’t know, had lived and died in this house.  They were strangers, they were dead, and their faded black and white faces stared at him from antique portraits on the walls. 

            There was a staleness in the air—it was still there even after he had thrown open every window in his room in desperation.  It was musty, stifling, it was history—layers and layers of it.  His grandparents hadn’t even tried to dust off the house.  There were armchairs that had been sat in a hundred years ago, that he was afraid to go near.  He felt unwanted in that house—like anywhere he sat was someone else’s spot. 

            He was stuck here for the summer, while his parents went on vacation.  It had been his mother’s idea to re-live their honeymoon twenty years later.  They had been saving for ten years to do this.  So now, he was stuck in some tiny part of Georgia while his parents toured around the country.  They would do a clockwise loop, from tourist trap, to tourist trap.  They would blow ten years of savings in just one month, and feel like rugged travelers.  Once the money was all spent, his parents would be back in New England, and they’d send for him.  Then he would be free—it would be a short flight up home and this whole thing would be done with.

            Just a month—he could manage that.

            All his clothes had been stuffed into a suitcase that now sat awkwardly in the middle of the floor.  His laptop and the puddle of wires that was his Ipod were mixed in with an old comb, hairbrush, and mirror on the dresser—this had been a girl’s room.  The walls were a peachy color, and the dresser, the chair, and the small coffee table all had lace draped over them.  The worst thing of all, however, was the china doll that watched him from the corner of the room.  There were cracks that spider-webbed across its white face, and it had the awful type of eyes that followed him wherever he went.  In addition to being scary, it was also horrifically girly.

            His grandparents were financially able to hold on to the old house by giving historical tours of it.  Because of the constant tours, he wasn’t able to do anything about the way his new room looked.  The house was always filled, not just with the history, but with about twenty additional strangers a day.  About half of these strangers were other people named ‘McKay’, people with the same blue eyes, and who knew the names of the antique faces on the walls.  If he heard a tour coming up the rickety stairs, he had to throw all of his belongings into his suitcase and hide it under the bed.  This included the fifty-pound portable generator he brought with him, because the house had never been wired for electricity.  It had been a family-owned historical museum for decades.

            It was about a week before he found that he could no longer sleep properly.  His eyes only stayed closed for two or three hours at a time.  Although he would never admit it to anyone, he had the awful suspicion that the house was haunted.  There were too many strange things for it not to be.  The floors creaked when no one walked on them, drafts blew doors shut, and sometimes he thought he heard voices talking.  But it was an old house, and, after all this time, the floorboards were allowed to squeak. 

            He started to explore the house and the grounds on his second week there.  There wasn’t much of a ‘grounds’ to explore though—just a giant lawn and a few scattered clumps of trees—and it was hot.  This confined his wanderings to the house.  The first place he explored was the china cabinet; the most interesting thing he found among the shelves was a silver-looking goblet from 1873. 

After that, it was the basement.  It took him a few attempts to successfully get down the stairs—each step he took resulted in a symphony of creaks and groans that filled his imagination with notions of a fall to his untimely death.

            Of all the places in the house, the basement was the one that felt the oldest.  Going down those stairs was like descending into the past—it got progressively mustier and creepier.  He couldn’t help but wonder: how many people had gone down these steps before he had?

            The basement was where he found it—the photograph.  It was lying face down in the farthest corner from the stairs.  There was writing—in a loopy, slanting cursive—on the back, but it was so badly faded that all he could make out was two words: “Kayleigh, 1886”. 

            It was a picture of a girl—maybe the same girl that had lived in his room and used to play with the creepy china doll.  The girl stared out at him from the past—she had big eyes, and held her head high.  He felt that this photo had been lost for years before he’d stumbled upon it—maybe he was the first person to see it since 1886. 

            For three nights, that photograph lay on his dresser and he didn’t give it a thought.  But then, one morning before dawn, his grandfather ventured into his room to wake him.  When the old man spotted it, his eyes grew wide.

            He pointed at it, “Where…?”

            The boy looked up, “Oh, I found it in the basement.”

            The old man went to it, and held it up gingerly.  “The basement, you say...This was my grandmother.”  He looked on the back, “Eighteen-eighty six.”

            “Yep…looked like it had been down there for ages.”

            “How lucky, that it wasn’t destroyed.”

            There was silence for a moment, somewhere, a door creaked on its hinges.

            “She was a remarkable woman,” continued the old man “secured our family fortune, and took care of the house when no one else would—saved the family, I suppose.”

            He didn’t give much thought to what his grandfather had said until he was loading his suitcase into the back of a taxi cab, destined for the airport.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman smiling and shaking her head.  The woman was old, and he thought it was his grandmother.  With his hand raised in a goodbye-wave, he turned and looked back at the old house.  His grandparents were on the porch, waving back at him.  The woman in the window was gone. 

            It was an inexplicable feeling, but suddenly, it didn’t seem like he was going home anymore.

Artist Talks with Patricia Bellan-Gillen

Last Thursday, I went to listen to this, without knowing what to expect.  In my head I had formed a half-idea of what I thought she looked like, and that was it.  I was actually pretty close.  I thought she was an older woman, still active, whose hair wasn't dyed to hide the gray in it.  I was right.  I'm not sure why I thought this, or how this image had come into my imagination just from looking at her paintings in the gallery.  Just some strange little thing I felt like sharing.
She started off listing the sources of her inspiration, only a few of which I was able to jot down.  Bellan-Gillen was raised Roman Catholic, and so drew much of her inspiration and ideas from the Biblical stories and myths.  Art and religion, she said, were wrapped up together in her mind.  She also likes to draw from various mythologies, and politics.  There were about a million other things she said, but they haven't stayed in my brain.
Then, she spoke about how she got ideas for various works (that she showed up on a powerpoint), and spoke about some of the symbols that were prominent across her works.
The symbol that interested me the most was Pinnochio.  Originally, the character Pinnochio is from a children's story called The Adventures of Pinnochio, published in 1883, by Carlo Collodi.  I got the feeling that the particular aspect of Pinnochio she likes to use is his iconic long nose, symbolising liars.  The 1883 story of Pinnochio is strange and sometimes gruesome, and could be compared to Alice in Wonderland. 
I noticed, while Bellan-Gillen was speaking, that she liked children's stories, and also mentioned that she liked the "silly" qualities of some of the images that appeared in her paintings.  The little flowers in the piece Bouquet, that made up the figure of the bear, were "silly".  To me, 'silly' is derogatory, so I hadn't thought of them that way.  I think that child-like, would be a better way to say it, but, I'm not going to argue with the artist.
It was very interesting to hear her talk about how she came up with her works, and when she did, it made total sense to me.  It seemed so obvious after she had said it, and once she pointed out the connections between all the images, I saw the message that was there.  I guess I felt a little bit like I had lost something, because the great mystery and confusion of 'what could this possibly mean?' was removed, but I am still free to interpret the paintings with my own imagination - I have that power as a viewer.
I could go on and on, but then that would get boring.  Bellan-Gillen is a wonderful artist with things to say.  All her pieces have an unmistakeable aesthetic, and are definitely worth looking at.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

How to be a Creative Person

I was reading this, which is an article on how to be a creative person and stuff, which I thought was cool and all, but it made me wonder about myself.  I consider myself to be a creative person, and I don't have a system to encourage it. 
It just sort of bursts out of me like a chestburster alien at random times. 
(I decided this would be more tasteful that the bloody mess that is a chestburster)

But, I guess I believe that you can train your creativity, it is, after all, a process of the mind, and the mind can be trained.  You can train yourself to look for outrageous ideas, and to follow them so that they become something useful.  The article seems to regard 'creativity' as not just a process or ability of the mind, but as a general outlook on life.  Creativity is a certain way of looking at the world - a pair of glasses that you can put on if you so chose, and, apparently, everything is more fun that way.  Less mundane, I suppose.
I've tried carrying a journal around with me, but then I either forget it, or don't feel like writing in it, or I feel weird whipping it out in public.  I feel like I look really creepy or weird if I write in a mysterious little notebook all the time.
I think that the idea of creating a space for creativity is a very valid one, it is a physical representation of the state of mind that creation is.  I'd like a creative space - but, unfortunately, I'd need to have a house or apartment or something, which I don't.  All I've got is half a dorm room. 

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Two short stories

As usual, I find it hard to understand a deeper meaning behind this story.  Is it supposed to be some sort of metaphor?  Why does the wife, Lena, have a Bride-of-Frankenstein thing going on with her hair?
Do these little details mean anything, or are they just aesthetic preferences that serve no other purpose?  I'm going to assume that this work doesn't have a complex metaphorical/symbolical thing going on - partially because it's late at night and I want to go to sleep, and partially because if there is a deeper meaning, I'm blind to it.  I guess that's the frustration of looking at anything; what does it mean?
I liked the visual images I got from reading this story, especially when the couple goes to a local covered-bridges festival.  It's during the fall, and she mentions all these colors, fall colors obviously, but also the purple and blue of his wife's clothing and her eyes.  I love talking about colors when describing a place or a time, or really anything, so this scene is my favorite.  It's peaceful, and it's before they babysit a small child, or Lena almost dies of an allergic reastion to a bee sting.
Lena strikes me as an odd character.  She has weird hair, that apparently gets passed down through her mother's side of the family, is deathly allergic to bees, and works at a poison control hotline, which is also how she met her husband; he called the hotline after getting some sort of insecticide in his eye, and then called her back and invited her to his house.
I'm sorry, but that's just weird.
It's just so absurdly strange that I'm just going to go off on a rant.  Why would the thought of dating this woman even cross your mind?  You have a dangerous substance floating around in your eyeballs!  Then, why would you act on that strange idea?  You've never met her, you have no idea what she looks like, her personality, or anything other than her name and the fact that she spends her days answering a phone and talking about poisons. 
And then why would she accept such an offer?  That guy could be some sort of murderer, or creepy stalker man.  Ugh, people.
Anyways, I thought it was interesting how the near-death experience totally reversed their perspective of having a baby.  At first, Lena wanted to, but then she changed her mind, saying that it makes you "twice as mortal", because now you have a child that can get hurt and not just yourself.
Then, her husband, who was reluctant when she first mentioned a child, describes this after his wife says that she is now certain they aren't going to have a kid.
"I felt a strangeness in my chest, as though the muscels of my heart had suffered a thousand tiny lacerations and were leaking out pain."

The second short story is, of the two, my favorite.  It is Nessa Rapoport's "The Woman Who Lost Her Names".  I found it easier to understand than the first story I read.
Both stories feature a married couple and their relationship, and a new child is an important part of it.  Rapoprt's story, however, also has a very strong cultural theme, and an identity theme.  'Sarah' changes her name so that she an marry her lover, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal at first.  But the trend of losing names affects her newborn daughter, whose name isn't ever revealed. 
I got the feeling, when the naming ceremony was being described that women like 'Sarah' have been dealing with this for centuries - it seems like a tradition, or part of the culture, for women to have this burden.
I also loved the beginning of 'Sarah' and Yakov's relationship.  I am an absolute sucker for romance, so, naturally, their perfect-sounding relationship was so wonderful to read about.  But then, as soon as he asked her to change her name, like it was no big deal, I liked him less.  To be fair to Yakov, it is a cultural thing for Jewish men to have the power of their wives, but still, it ruffled my feathers (see above).
But it's not only 'Sarah' who has lost a name - two, arguably, because of her daughter.  Yakov also, is called by a different last name.  This time, it wasn't an old tradition that took it away from him, it was his publisher.  I'm not sure what this means, but it's there, and I think it's cool how the idea of being named is continued throughout the whole thing.  It gives it, well, continuity.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Patricia Bellan-Gillen at IC

In the bottom floor of Ithaca College's library, there hangs an art show named re(Collection), by Patricia Bellan-Gillen. 
Unfortunately, I could not find picutres of the majority of the art that is part of the show, but I found a few.
 Bouquet
Graphite, acrylic, and oil, on birch panel
84x124 in. 2009
look here for close up details
 
St. Francis /Sea Changes
Acrylic, silver point ground, graphite, colored pencil on birch
96x164 in. 2011
look here for close up details
 
Iceberg/Self Portrait on the Island of Ineffectual Voices
Acrylic, silver point ground, rice paper, mirrors on birch
82x120 in. 2012
look here for close up details
 
 
The striking thing about these pieces, in addition to a strong abstract style, is their size; it's hard to get a sense of that while looking at an online picture, but the real thing is impressive.  There is something about getting dwarfed by a massive wall of colors and shapes, and then staring at it, trying to figure out what the whole thing means. 
 
The Handwerker Gallery has this to say about Bellan-Gillen's show:
 
"re(Collection) presents a provocative body of work that is elegant and sumptuous, both in form and content. This solo-show is the inaugural exhibition of the Handwerker's 2012-2013 calendar. Patricia Bellan-Gillen's work is at once sensitive and provocative, large in scale and minute in detail, earthly and atmospheric. Bellan-Gillen engages her audience visually and intellectually as she shares a lexicon of personal symbols with her large-scale collage and hand-rendered works."


 
I agree with whoever wrote this, in that the work that I saw did have a certain elegance about it.  Not the martini glass and conservative-yet-sexy-dress kind of elegance, but the sophistication mixed with aesthetic beauty.  Which is, I guess, a less exciting - although valid - way to describe the martini girl.  Her pieces have a certain 'look' about them, the tight graphite detail, and then the loose abstract figures.
She has titled this show 're(Collection)' and, though I don't remember exactly what her artist's statement said, she wanted these pieces to be about memories. 
When I look at these pieces, I think of how our memories get distorted when we look back on them.  How, when we remember, things could either be a lot worse in our heads, or better than they actually were.  For example, a child's recollection of Disneyland is probably nothing short of all the magic Disney promises you.  But that child, in 5 years, isn't going to remember how ridiculously hot Florida gets, or that he was terrified of a certain roller coaster before the wave of adrenaline hit his tiny brain.  We tend to gloss over certain aspects of things when we remember them, and distort things. 
Entering the gallery was a bit like entering a different world; it was filled with strange things that I'd never seen before.  I don't pretend to understand the art that I was looking at, but I could guess, and that is the beauty of art; it relies on the beholder to make it mean something.
 



Friday, September 7, 2012

Ten Thousand Saints...

is a book by Ithaca College's very own Eleanor Henderson, which I read over the summer.  I read it through once when I first got it, and I'm starting to re-read it because I realized that I do not rememeber anything.  Yipee.
I felt that the beginning of the book, before Jude goes to New York, had a very distinct feel.  The two boys were stuck in a rut in their lives, and they just want out.  It felt gritty and dirty; I guess that 'grunge' would be a decent word to describe it.  It felt like they were so disenchanted and restless.  I guess I connected to it really well because that's what happens to me during the summer when there's nothign to do.  I wander around a tiny and boring area, just searching for something, anything to do.

What really struck a chord with me is how Jude reacts to Teddy's death.  That section of the book was so utterly depressing that I had to put it down, and I was in a bad mood the rest of the day.  The image of a best friend rotting away in his bed, not even moving, is so powerful.  Jude just goes into a coma of misery, or even, he becomes completely apathetic to his family, an,d even his personal hygiene
I think when Jude cuts all of his hair off, it's not just a physical change, but it is also symbolic of the change that is about to occur in his life.  He will eventually strip away his addiction to drugs and physical pleasures in order to ascertain a healthier mind and lifestyle.  He cuts his hair because it's all matted and gross because he hasn't take care of it, like his body is, thanks to all the drugs he does.  It could show that, in the future, Jude is going to cut himself off from drugs.
The beginning of the book, before the drugs stop, sounds like what would've happened to Hunter S. Thompson before he figured out he was a journalist.  Wandering around, trying to find something worthwhile, and, of course, getting high at every possible opportunity.
This book is an incredible feat of human creativity; to be able to create an entire world and fill it with people that seem like they could be real.  To make them deal with tragedy in ways unique to their personalities; it's astounding that one mind - albeit, over 9 years - could come up with something that so closely mimics what life was like.
I hope to take many-a-class from Professor Henderson in the future, and I also hope that I can come out of it with a small bit of her knowledge and talent.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Creative Process.....and stuff

The Myth of Artistic Creativity
The majority of what I have read of this book chapter so far has been a description of two examples of the creative process; the creation of the mobile, and the collage.
(puppyy!)
These examples serve to show that a new and original idea evolves over time in small ways until it is fully formed and unique.
I agree with this, also, I think that ideas come from things we see around ourselves and the furnaces of our own minds.
The good-idea-process is particularly relevant to me because I create works of fiction and of poetry, both of which - if they are going  to be worthwhile endeavors - need to be original and engaging. My poetical process, the more spontaneous of the two types of writing I do for fun, is what I'm going to describe here.

Kayleigh McKay                                                                                    

The Dead of Night

The eyes are tired,
A subtle burning,
Time slows down,
The ticking clock is loud like a chime.
Lights hurt like fire,
The mind loses its hold
On the things it perceives.
The frustration of inability
To travel to the land of imagination.
Lidless eyes
Dreading the return of the sun.
The world is soft
In shades of grey,
The breeze is cool
And it carries the sound of crickets,
And the smell of rain:
A secret place is this,
The dead of night.
 
This was written, as you may surmise, in the middle of the night when I couldn't fall asleep.  The style here; fragmented images and sentances that are intended for description of a ceratin feeling or moment, is common to most of my other poems, so is not a "creative leap" where I come up with something completely new and totally different from anything that's been done before.
Poetry, for me, is a free-write session that usually describes an image or a feeling, in this case the feeling is Dear God, why can't I fall asleep?
This whole poem is basically a description of what I observed and felt at three o'clock in the morning.  I took the phrase "lidless eye" from the Lord of the Rings;
because I liked the phrase, and it also described my inability to keep my eyes closed for a significant length of time.  Then, I turned my attention to the open window at the foot of my bed, and I wanted to make it sound magical-y at the end, I had fairies and gardens in my head, so I mentioned nature-y things, and repeated the word 'and' because I thought it had a nice sound - almost sing-song - and ended by saying that it was a secret place (also because most people are alseep at that time).
So, I made no great leap of intellect while writing this poem, but rather watched as, during the writing process, the poem evolved alongside my thoughts.
I owe a bit of my style of fragmentation to Sylvia Plath who writes in a similar way, I played with the idea of a zombie; the dead of night(....get itttt?) and used the idea of a secret and magical place, none of which were previously unknown.
 
The book goes on to make a claim about creating a painting that I find to be simply wrong, and I have the biting urge to refute it.
"The untrained observer seldom sees the changes made while the work was in progress, changes which can greatly alter a work.  Nor does the finished painting directly reflect such preparatory as planning sketches or decisions about how the subject of the painting is to be arranged.  This is true for any high-quality work of art; the finished product hides from the audience all preliminary work that went into it."
The higlighted bit is what I have a problem with.  For one thing, art, by nature, doesn't conform to rules.  And there is no reason on earth why a work of art cannot display some of the process of its creation, the process itself is a form of art.  It is perfectly acceptable not to erase a single pencil line from the moment your begin on the final piece; it's a stylistic choice.
 
 
In a letter to Jacques Hadamard, Albert Einstein describes the thought/creative process that occurs inside the heads of mathematicians.  I had never really given the matter any thought, so it was completely new information.  Apparently, he thought of things in "visual and some of muscular type" and in order to explain his ideas "conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage."  Huh, I guess that I do that sometimes, when I'm trying to deal with some sort of mechanical thing, (like, how do these two pieces fit together?). 
And, in closing, I have a list of notable inventions that have been made since the 1400's (useful when you wind up on the show Jeopardy; you're welcome).  Cheers.
 



Monday, September 3, 2012

Does college make you smarter?

"At many universities, student who are academically weak and disengaged are in the majority, enjoying themselves at the expense of their parents and taxpayers."


George Leef, "No Work, All Play, No Job"

This quote is part of a series of articles about how lacking a college education now-a-days apparently is.  Reading all of these, for one who has been in college for all of one week is incredibly disheartening.  Leef is essentially saying that the majority of the people I meet here, and most likely myself, are apathetic students, and are here to party and enjoy all of the facilities and events on campus.
Naturally, he has offended me a bit, so I want to rip his argument to pieces.  But, as I'm thinking of refutations, I realize that he has a point.  Sort of the "Inconvient Truth" to the dream that is college.  If it is up to me, I would rather go to parties than sit through a Gen-Ed class; it is always easier to skate through life under the pretense that you know it all. 
My studying goal is to get the assignment done as fast as possible so that I can feel accomplished and be done with it, and long readings, instead of really thinking about them, I just try to remember as much as I can so the professor knows I actually read it (except this blog, I really am enjoying it).
Though he has put his finger on the main point, he also misses the fact that many students are obsessive multi-taskers.  We are not just at college to study one area, and to only study.  Many of us want to cultivate interests that range across all academics and many that are athletic, or simply hobbies.  My generation is, by nature, multitaskers; we can carry on three conversations at a time, two via text messages, and one over our food in the dining halls. 
So, as much as I would like to be able to say that Mr. Leef is completely wrong, he raises a very valid point.  Well played, sir.