Up all night, sleep all day…

“There is no question that the experience of beauty, primarily an experience of the senses of seeing and hearing, is personal and mediated by the cultural and historical context.  What is beautiful to one is not to another.”  This waterfall is beautiful because it’s peaceful, and just…eye catching.

The Brooklyn Bridge is a beautiful work of architecture, and this picture with it and the river is awesome.  The twilight colors and skyline shapes make it.

The Manhattan skyline…of course this is beautiful!  The sunset colors are extreme, mixed with the “city of blinding lights” and the building shapes (esp. the Empire State building up front)- it’s manmade beauty at its best.

This popular picture of a mother giraffe kissing its baby is not only cute, but I think it’s also beautiful, showing how the bond between a mother and baby isn’t just apparent with people…

“In its most profound sense, beauty is said to engender a salient experience of positive reflection with regard to the meaning of one’s own being within natural life.  An ‘object of beauty’ may be anything that reveals or resonates with a personal meaning.”  I personally think this Harley Davidson is beautiful, even though it’s not what some would consider “classic beauty”.  I happen to love motorcycles and the freedom they can symbolize- that and the color red, mixed with the shiny chrome is…appealing, haha. 

 Appropriation- the act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others’ meanings to one’s own ends.  Cultural appropriation is the process of borrowing and changing the meaning of commodities, cultural products, slogans, images, or elements of fashion.  In addition, it is one of the primnary forms of oppositional production and reading, when, viewers take cultural products and rewrite or change them in some way.

Here is my example, and obviously this woman wasn’t really dragged, just seems to fit:

 Original Time Magazine cover:

 My replication:

Experimenting with uploading an image the correct way…MG4AG anyone?

Aaand it’s working, yay…

 Here’s the lovely layer photo exercise that I did with photoshop…

There isn’t a lot of media that has avoided my attention for the most part, since it’s basically a driving force for my age group, and being a communication major, there’s a lot of emphasis on it.

The one thing I have been a little closed off from lately is the internet, surprisingly.  I’m living in the Residence Inn and we don’t have a desk in our room like I did on campus last year.  Not having wireless internet, I instead have the ethernet cable attached to the jack in the kitchen and it goes to our room, which can be a pain, because my roomate occasionally trips on the cord.  It can also just be a pain to have to bring the computer in the kitchen to work at the table, because the battery only lasts about an hour or so, and my battery is plugged in under my bed which leads to me going under and moving all my boxes of crap to unplug and replug it.  Ha, yes it’s annoying.

Actually, I guess newspapers would be another media source I’m lacking in.  I see them, but don’t bother to read unless it’s one specific article, because the important stuff is either on the internet news sites, or news channels (which I watch more often at home than at school). 

Books are one type of media I used to read ALL the time, but since I’ve had to take so many literature classes and do boring required readings, it’s made me lose interest.  I think many people have gotten so called “ADD” when it comes to reading, as there are other things like television, computer games, and video games that keep their attention span longer.

Billboards are one thing I have been noticing more, especially living off campus and driving around often.  My major and art/advertising certificate also accounts for that I guess, checking out how things are done.  Not to mention ad campaigns have lately been using more humor and sarcasm…

“Auf Wiedersehen” is actually the name of a Cheap Trick song, which is why I found it amusing: