I have never been put in a position where I could not move forward because I did not have the finances to afford to. I’m not saying that I got everything I wanted growing up, but I have always lived in nice houses in gated communities and I can even afford out of state tuition. My parents have worked very hard to ensure that my siblings and I would never be limited in our goals because of money. This is something I have always tried to not take for granted. I do all that I can to justify this privilege that not everyone can have by always taking advantage of all that I can.

I’ve never had to think about money. It just seems like a game to me. I don’t allow myself to get caught up on what seems like unnecessary spending but I pay it to the Man when rent is due or my tuition bill comes in. So it frightens me to think about after school. Bob Herbert writes,

“Young men and women who remain unemployed for substantial periods of time find it very difficult to make up that ground. They lose the experience and training they would have gained by working. Even if they eventually find employment, they tend to lag behind their peers when it comes to wages, promotions and job security.”

I fear my lack of experience. I fear falling into a ditch and not being able to get myself out. Graduation was already scary enough without the threat of unemployment. My parents will not support me forever, nor would I want them to. My ability to provide for myself and gain self-respect feels like it being taken away from me. If I am not working towards something, I am not living. Maybe I’m putting a lot of weight on a job, but it is much more than that. It includes a lifestyle, a goal, an opportunity, and a promise.

Young and Old are Facing off for Jobs:

“Younger people are taking an extreme pounding,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “It’s worrisome because they’re not developing the experience and the soft skills that they’ll need and the nation’s economy will need.”

Most of my peers are not as fortunate as me financially but in the end, we will run into similar problems once we try to join the work force. But more immediately, students around me are feeling the economic pressure and rise in costs that may ultimately force them to drop out of school. This breaks my heart and makes me feel incredibly lucky at the same time. Is there resentment? Sometimes I think so. It’s one thing to have empathy for students in hard situations, it’s another to thing entirely to be going through the experience with them. It’s impossible for me to completely relate to them on that level. I feel guilty.

Music is a huge part of my life, which is true for most people. Music can mean nostalgia. It can resurface that time when you drove with your friends down the highway, naked and enjoying the feel of the humid outside air blasting in from the open windows. It can be all the times you would dance with your father while standing on his shoes. It brings people together socially and communally. It’s that Queen song pumping out the stereo and everyone knows the words. 

These are the the beginning thoughts for my final project. I would like to interview people (probably college students, although I would try for a greater pool) and ask them why they listen to music, how they listen to music, where they listen, and even why they listen to the music they do. Is it a choice? What are the benefits of being familiar or associated with certain genres or artists and what do we hope this says about the image we want to present? Is there a musical caste system? Where do you fit in?

I will start by trying to answer these questions myself.

I don’t take music at face value. 

I listen to music because it makes me excited. I try to think about how music has been received historically; whether it’s protest songs in reaction to political happenings, a means to unite a group of people, a voice for those who don’t know how to speak, a pivotal mark in pop culture, or an expression of artistic creativity. I respect the power music has. It is not stagnant. Most of all I can appreciate that even though a song may never change, I do change and so does the way I grasp any given song or album over time. Music makes me more self aware.

Because I am always looking for self improvement and more discovery, I will actively seek out music that is not limited to Top 40. I am not interested in formulas, a hook, or a place in pop culture. This excludes me from using mainstream music as a way to relate to most of my peers, but that does not mean I feel left out. I just choose to listen to consume music for different reasons.

I like the music I listen to because I chose what I hear. It is so rewarding to hunt for music and to find something that sustains me spiritually, emotionally, artistically, and physically. It’s not a win every time but I’ve always believed that you feel the most satisfied when you achieve something by doing it yourself. While I don’t actually make the music myself, I am still rewarded when I learn about why a musician writes the way they do or use certain instrumentation. Learning about their goals and intentions can inspire my own, and then the music becomes something more to me than a catchy chorus. This exchange is organic. It becomes more than a sum of its parts and more than any formula or sale prediction can measure.

Handsome Furs-(It’s not me, it’s you):Handsome Furs-(it’s not me, it’s you)

This is a video by video by sarah rara and luke fischbeck of lucky dragons, music by glaciers.

As promised, here is one way I decided to be creative during my Spring Break. It would be interesting to take this a step further and try again, when school is in session. I’d like to see if people would participate.

Filming and editing done by yours truly, music by Harlem Shakes.

I came across this article from the New York Times : Before Spring Break, the Anorexic Challenge

“Basically today I went 24 hours without food and then I ate green beans and a little baked ziti. Frankly I’m proud of myself, not to mention the 100 situps on the yoga ball and the 100 I’ll do before sleep … Yey for me.”

It is no surprise to hear this kind of talk around me, but what I hadn’t considered before were the networking cites encouraging this type of talk and behavior. There are hundreds of pro-anorexia web sites that support a lifestyle with eating disorders. MySpace, Xanga, and Livejournal all host pro-anorexia content.

“The online pro-ana networks can be especially dangerous, experts say, because participants can offer irresponsible advice behind a mask of anonymity. Several eating-disorder therapists interviewed said they considered all the pro-ana material on the Web highly dangerous, particularly when spiced with the spirit of a contest.”

In earlier posts I have discussed and presented evidence of the power of these social networking sites. It frightens me to realize that while you can be your own worst enemy, it is incredible easy to find people to encourage distructive behavior and feed your own insecurities with their own. The additional weight will crush us.

With the exception of a weekend trip Brooklyn, NY, I spent the majority of my Spring Break in Amherst, MA. I did not go to a bunch of parties, I didn’t binge on alcohol, I did not obsess about my weight, and I did not watch the television showing me all of the things I should be actively participating in as a twenty-one year-old college student. 

I rode my bike, made a movie, learned the beginning steps of the Charleston (I’ll post a video of that later), baked cookies, and made a hop scotch path with chalk across a cross-walk on the UMass campus. 

Stay tuned for videos from my version of an alternative Spring Break.

I never thought that I would jump on the social networking enthusiast boat, and I’m far from thinking it could replace basic physical, mental, and spiritual interaction with another person. Yet I am in awe of the possibilities that networking can achieve. All of a sudden, organizing a massive protest or exercise is relatively easy. I keep track of groups like Improv Everywhere, which is a New York City based group involving thousands of ‘undercover agents’ who cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places”. 

In support of my earlier post, anyone interested in having a silent dance party in the UMass DuBois Library elevator? Maybe facebook will help get the word out.

Harold Rheingold mentions in the article Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies:

If I had to reduce the essence of Homo sapiens to five words, “people do complicated things together” would do. Online social networks can be powerful amplifiers of collective action precisely because they augment and extend the power of ever-complexifying human sociality. To be sure, gossip, conflict, slander, fraud, greed and bigotry are part of human sociality, and those parts of human behavior can be amplified, too. But altruism, fun, community and curiosity are also parts of human sociality−and I propose that the Web is an existence proof that these capabilities can be amplified, as well.

This is an article about a Facebook-driven event involving dancers in a major train station in London:

 LONDON, England (CNN) — Thousands of dancers jammed a major London train station in a Facebook-driven “flashmob” mimicking an advertisement for a phone company. And the event last Friday evening was so successful that another is planned for next Friday in Trafalgar Square in central London. Plus, a group has been set up to organize another one at Liverpool Street Station a week later.

Videos posted on the social-networking site showed Liverpool Street Station completely filled with people, counting down the seconds until the clock showed 7 p.m., then dancing to music on their mp3 players as the hour struck. The sheer scale of the event came as a complete surprise to the organizer, a 22-year-old Facebook user who identified himself only as Crazzy Eve. “I was watching TV and the T-Mobile advertisement came up and I thought, hm, let’s get my friends down to Liverpool Street and do a little dance,” he told CNN by phone. He posted the event on Facebook and invited his friends, who invited their friends, he said, and so on until thousands of people had been told of the plan.

“At a quarter to seven people just flocked into the station like someone opened a plughole and the water went out,” he said. “They just kept coming in like sheep. As it grew and grew, I just thought, ‘This is going to be huge.’” 

I’m in a couple of film classes, one at UMass, another at Amherst College. Recently I’ve been thinking about space in my films; how it is occupied, how bodies are created within a space and how bodies create the space. What actions are encouraged, discouraged, or don’t even belong and what signs or ideas dictate these rules and guidelines? Space is a container. Maybe we should challenge these invisible yet understood labels and create a new context.

Here are some ways people have acted:

Check out sites Urban Prankster, Improv Everywhere, and PrangstGrup for more.