On Friday we lost my amazing sister Eloise to cancer. She will be missed.
Archive for the 'Life' Category
4 of the most awesome people from 4 of the most awesome TV shows, together at the Emmys.
This was originally an email I sent to friends and famliy:
I just donated $40 to the Obama campaign. It’s not much, but small donations like that are part of what has made his campaign unique and special. Regular people are funding his campaign, not huge corporations with special interests.
I decided to donate to Obama because I have become very passionate about politics over the last year or so and believe that he is the change that this country needs to start moving in the right direction again. I was encouraged to donate by my brother Warren, who has been sending the campaign regular monthly payments for a quite a while now. Since I can’t vote, this is the best way that I can help. With Obama as president, we can rebuild our image as the moral leader of the world. Obama will be able to reverse the disastrous mistakes made in the last 8 years.
I lost all respect for McCain after he chose Governor Palin as his running mate. It is an incredibly shallow choice which exposes McCain’s attempt to attract white woman who supported Hillary Clinton during the primaries. Not only is the choice of Governor Palin purely political, she is also someone who believes that abstinence should be the only form of sex education taught in schools - even while her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. She also doesn’t believe that women should have the right to an abortion, and doesn’t believe in evolution. She also has very little experience, with her foreign policy experience consisting of being next to Russia.
I believe that a good president is smart and surrounds himself with people who are educated about important issues, and who may sometimes have conflicting points of views on various issues. This worked very well with Kennedy and his advisors during the “ExComm” meetings during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even though Obama does not have as much experience as McCain (although certainly more than Palin), I am confident that he will surround himself with smart people and be will have an open mind and make the right decisions on important issues. McCain, so far, has surrounded himself with Governor Palin and her family of 7 (Soon to be 8.) while Obama has chosen Joe Biden, someone who has over 30 years of political experience under his belt.
So, I support Obama not just because I don’t like McCain (specifically what the political process has turned him into.) I support him because he is educated, smart, and understands the lives of Americans in a way that McCain never will. How is one supposed to understand what Americans affected by the mortgage crisis are going through when they themselves have 8 houses? After all, shouldn’t our president know about some of the problems being faced by the people they govern?
I’m typing this from my brand new iPod Touch! It’s the new one that just came out the other day. It is AMAZING.It’s an iPod that plays music, podcasts, movies, and TV shows. But it’s also so much more! Photos, web browser, email - and with applications - pandora, last.fm, AIM, games. It has most features of a basic computer!
Soooo awesome. More later.
So I started school Tuesday and it’s my Junior year of high school which means colleges, colleges, colleges. Colleges emailing me, colleges mailing me, first PSAT score, upcoming PSAT test, SAT next spring, SAT classes, colleges just not shutting up! But then I realized that I will be going a college - one of these colleges, in less than two years. Yikes.
But Junior year is cool. I have all new teachers and my first official free periods twice a week. That’s fun because I get to go to the Library and just completely like… you know, like get a head start on my homework and… type in Word documents… and.. uh… other… awesome stuff like that… that doesn’t include facebook because of awesome website blocker software. Yay for useless computers.
This is the one-minute personal piece that I did for the film program I just completed. It was supposed to be non-fiction and represent some sort of idea or philosophy about who we are.
Okay. I saw the new Star Wars-ish movie yesterday. It’s not like the other Star Wars movie. It’s a cartoon. It takes place in between episodes 1 and 2. It’s not expected to live up to the other movies. It never could. It’s sort of a combination between the 2D animated Clone Wars TV series and the movies.
But everyone wants for it to be a Star Wars movie! It’s not! it’s a take-off of an upcoming animated Star Wars TV show. The original show was great, and I think that this movie sets the new series up to be just as good as the old one. No, it’s not a Star Wars movie but I still had a lot of fun. Everyone is expecting too much of it.
It was good, Saturday morning cartoon (or whatever you call it) fun. Not a Star Wars movie. Of course, being geared at kids it’s mostly just a bunch of battles and a lame story to go with it. But I enjoyed it and I think the TV series will be just as good. One of the main things people are saying is that the animation is terrible compared to Pixar. That’s true. But it’s not because of low budget or cutting corners. Lucas has all the money that he needs. It’s stylized. They’re not going for a natural look, they’re going for a stylized, exaggerated look.
And loved the look. The movie looks great and the cinematography is surprisingly good. Yes, I had low expectations but I seriously had fun during this movie. And it was funny in an incredibly cheesy way. Mostly it was just the battle droids being silly, but it worked. Oh, and the pink clone troopers were also pretty funny.
This isn’t Star Wars movie, it’s a Star Wars adventure for kids. And I think it serves it’s purpose well. There. I said it. Take that Rotten Tomatoes.
Okay. You know how there’s really good rock music that are much longer than any other regular rock song? Especially in classic rock, there are so many great songs that (luckily) go on for a long time. For instance:
Hey Jude (7:04)
Jungleland (9:35)
Layla (7:06)
She’s Gone (5:19)
They’re all awesome songs because - well, they’re awesome - and they also go on for a while and really rock out and do guitar solos and other awesome stuff. So now here’s my idea. What if they made versions of other great (although shorter) rocks songs that go on for that long? I’m talking 10-minute guitar solos - just an artist completely going crazy with their song.
Kind of like the live version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps* that was played during the concert for George by Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney. It’s 6 minutes and awesome. Couldn’t artists come in to a studio and play their songs - but 3 times as long and just be going crazy? Kind of like the TV show Abbey Road, except a more fine-tuned version, and also kind of like those “Unplugged” albums, except instead of mellowing down songs, they go crazy with it.
I’m saying this because there is so much good music that would be so much more awesome if they went on for more than 4 minutes. I’m sure there are a number of reasons why the 3-5 minute range is so popular - but wouldn’t it be awesome? So, what songs would you like to be awesome-fied?
*Click the play button to hear the song in a cool Yahoo flash player
I’ve written previously about why I blog, even though I have such a tiny audience. In that post, I estimated that I had less than 10 regular/casual readers. And then five people commented on the post, saying how much they liked my blog and wanted me to keep doing it! But, the way I see it, all of these people come to my blog for different reasons.
My family comes here to know what’s going on with me, but others may read because they like a specific topic that I write about - whether it be movies, music, links, or technology. And then I got to wonder, who likes what, and why? Should I write more about my life (what I’m doing this summer, pictures from trips, etc.), the newest iPhone, The Dark Knight, or my latest movie?
I don’t plan to completely change the focus of the blog, and I can guess pretty well who likes what. But I think it would be interesting for people to say what they like for me to write about the most and why. Again, I’m not going to do anything drastic - I’m just interested. I think that I’m still naturally going to write about whatever I feel like just because it is, after all, my blog.
Tell me in the comments.
We just finished the trailer for the Cello movie for my film program thing. It’s by me, Jesse Medalia-Strauss, Nikki Dodd and Kellon Innocent. The actual movie…. well, we haven’t started editing it yet. But we will… soon.
Sorry about the funk wavy stuff when the camera moves. I think it has something to do with how Vimeo compresses the video. To see a better version, watch it in HD.
I am now in my second week in a film program that is the result of a partnership between the NYC Department of Education and the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a part of the “Summer Arts” program that encompasses programs focusing on all sorts of specialty arts (photography, dancing, film, etc.)
So every day for the past week and a half I’ve woken up kind of early and gone to Stuyvesant high school (where it’s being held) from 9 to 3. Kind of like school - only I want to be there and the things we’re being taught I actually want to learn about.
So far it’s been a lot of fun, and not nearly as boring as these film programs sometimes end up being. Well - the lesson about how a Mac is different from a PC and the basics of Final Cut Pro was boring but beyond that I’ve actually been learning some very interesting and exciting things.
Until now we’ve only been working on small practice films, but starting this week we’re beginning work on our major project for the summer: A 5-7 minute movie that takes place in a specific neighborhood of New York City and focuses on a certain sub-topic, assigned randomly. There are 5 groups and about 20 kids so groups of 3 and 4 are each making this movie together. My group’s sub-topic is music.
We had two “pitches” - A documentary idea and a narrative idea. The staff would choose whichever one they thought was better. Our documentary idea was about street musicians in Central Park (which the staff allowed us to consider a neighborhood) and why they do what they do and what their effect is on the park.
Our narrative idea (which we like a billion times more) is about a young man living in Brighton Beach. He never pays any notice to the violin player who plays music every day on the boardwalk, which is on the main character’s way to work. But one day the musician is gone and the main character sees Brighton Beach in a completely different way. What used to seem like an exciting and vibrant neighborhood now seems dark and ugly.
I don’t want to give away the ending because - guess what - we got the narrative idea (yay!) So I guess that you’ll just have to wait and see the movie yourself then.
I just uploaded photos to Flickr from our trip to Florida next week. There are only a few, much less than I should have taken - so few that I think I completely left out a few people from my photos. (An accident, I swear!)
Okay, so we talked about this in history class a while back and it always keeps coming back to me, in the back of my head. This idea keeps nagging me in different situations I find myself in and I have to let it out. First, a definition from Wikipedia:
The human condition encompasses all of the experience of being human. As mortal entities, there are a series of biologically determined events that are common to most human lives, and some that are inevitable for all. The ongoing way in which humans react to or cope with these events is the human condition. However, understanding the precise nature and scope of what is meant by the human condition is itself a philosophical problem.
On the first day of history class this year, my teacher started by asking us what we thought the human condition was. Well, no. He really asked us what the nature of the human condition is, basically if humans are naturally “good” or “bad.” And that idea has been bugging me ever since.
Evidence that the nature of mankind is bad can be seen in war, torture, greed, and selfishness. However, evidence of the good in mankind can be seen in small day-to-day things, like sharing food, giving to charity, even just doing someone a favor that doesn’t directly benefit you. So the question is: Which are we? Are we naturally good or bad?
You may now be asking why it has to be one or the other. The idea is that one of these, either the basic good traits or the basic “bad” traits of humans is a result of the type of society they live in, and the other is what it means to be human without society. This is important because if we understand the human condition, we can make a better society and therefore live better lives.
Communism is one type of society, and it assumes that people will want to work for the better good and will trust each other. But virtually all attempts at it have failed. Capitalism encourages greed and selfishness. But it seems to work. That would imply that we are naturally “bad.” But at the same time, wouldn’t a friend of yours do something for your just because you’re friends? Doesn’t that mean that we’re also good and don’t just care about ourselves?
I’m not really sure what I think. Feel free to post what you think in the comments!
