ESSAY: EXPLORING THE SELF AND THE SOCIAL CHANGES THAT SHAPE IT

The self is a concept that we are more than we appear, and that the self is a singular concept which is either a spiritualistic entity such as a soul, a purely biological and physical entity such as the human anatomy and body or that we are a mental kinetic force that transcends full understand such as the human mind and personality.

         In this project various opinions will be gathered to try and form a cohesive argument for why the self is the latter of the three above options. Using theories of celebrated great minds and an analysis on radical social change in the modern era the self should be dissected and analysed to be the personality and not the other two entities with reasons provided.

ESSAY: SONG FOR A DARK GIRL

Poetry Analysis

Song for a Dark Girl is a poem written by Langston Hughes that describes the scene of a black girl who discovers the body of her lover battered, beaten and hung from a tree in the ‘Black Belt’ region of Southern America.

Way Down South in Dixie

(Break the heart of me)

They hung my black young lover

To a cross roads tree.

The poem begins every first line of a stanza with the same line which has a mood which is commonly associated with Blues music. This fits perfectly within the time period the poem was written (1927) and also coincides with what was popular within black culture at the time.

ESSAY: BARACK OBAMA AND THE REVOLVING DOOR OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

The election of Barack Obama was ear marked as a cornerstone in American politics and in the American nation as a whole. The campaign’s foundations were a simple one-word promise: Change.

            There are two sides to Obama’s speech, as there are to most things. The first feeling invoked by reading the speech is a powerful force of the people’s voice calling for the reform of their country, but with that sweet sentiment comes the sour. Towards the end of the speech he speaks about reclaiming the American Dream and for something to be reclaimed it must be lost or hijacked, and it has been both. So at the centre of this hope swelling speech comes the ugly truth that even now America has failed to realise one of the foundations on which the nation was founded.

The Child Heart

When london chases the wolf,
the wolf comes home to dine,
your small children he'll engulf,
and drink their blood as wine.

The inch high bears will growl
if you walk on black squares,
tip the glass to hear them howl,
or steal it and to be made theirs.

The white rabbit scarlet born
will lure you into a lion's den,
if you remove his paw's thorn
the ruby knight will rise again.

copyright 2011 - J. Farmer

A segue of noticeable proportions

A blog post I wrote last year that slipped through the cracks, found now.

London is one of those cities that never sleeps, correct? I feel like it's true, and I also think I'm taking aboard alot of it's attributes. But the problem with moving to a large city is that you're alone. Not in the physical sense, this is probably the most people you'll ever be surrounded by at any given time but socially and emotionally you're alone. You're new, you know nobody and in true to form stereotyping nobody has time for those people.

I'm sleeping odd hours, my boredom and loneliness seeps into everything around me. I don't feel depressed, just alone and I do know how to tell one from the other. Everything is so different that intimidation is absent and replaced by a sense of wonder and marvel, fear rarely encroaching. Even now as I'm writing this, the city has it's own rules, the night isn't black but orange and it isn't silence but echoing of speeding automobiles. It is the city that never sleeps but who lays with the city or is it as alone as I?

The flat is an oddity, big but small and odd but common. Most first flats aren't meant to be amazing and this one surely isn't but it is hardly terrible. But it is empty, roommates yet to move in, a cat that grows more restless and irritated after coming from a country life. The worst part is expecting and waiting for darkness to move as if locking doors was an process designed to help the children sleep. I am no longer considered a child and nor feel like one but I now find it harder to sleep, whether its lack of space or the constant gushes of traffic or just a mattress yet to be worn in. Either way, sleep is rare in the night, usually a day affair not that the city is any safer during the day.

Those I expected to be around me to keep me company, aren't. Missing in foreign countries longer than they originally communicated, some busier with their new lives and some busier with work lives and worst of all, the methods of reaching out are more limited these first few weeks than originally considered. The only few strands of internet are costly, unpredictable, badly behaved and spent on the priorities. Relaxing does not enter my life because the means to do so are floating over the edge that I appear to be stuck on.

You would expect somebody to be less presumptuous in the position that I reside but it is naught. When you move to close a distance, you'd expect those closer together to actually get, well, closer. But the one you move closer towards then decides they want the void between to reappear, every way of not saying that they don't want you. Whether it is gift wrapped with the loneliness or the matters of the heart. I guess what you expect to be the beginning is just a stalled thought that what you want to start ever will. Maybe some things just stay as they are, forever.

If only the city slept.

Fanning the fire

My first memory got me thinking about exactly what defines my ambitions and talents.

It's distorted (like most memories are) and its a mash up between the feel of a wax coat I hated but was forced to wear whenever in fresh air. And the fact of knowing that Cartoon Network was channel 52 on cable and that's the only channel number I ever knew or watched on cable. My childhood was defined by a place I used to go to often; called Library Gardens close to where I lived, Cartoon Network was something I watched daily because I loved stories, in fact I remember copying the blurbs of video cases to paper to understand all these long words that were so important they had to be on the box. Unaware at the time they were just a small summary and mostly lists of movies the voice actors had worked on before the current.

The last massive thing to influence me creatively as a child was easily the N64's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The more I speak to people about it, the more they recall their first time playing it like they were recalling the first time they had sex. I remember being at a friend's house (this is the Zelda recollection not the sex one) and he was playing what I now know to be the dungeon inside the Deku (Elder) Tree, which happens to be the first level. I remember in vivid detail him getting from the middle of the dungeon to the end and it took ages and was engrossing to watch because it was something I'd never seen before, a 3d fantasy game that took my interest (the things I take interest in, even then, were rare and had to have a certain quality or I dismissed them. At that young age I didn't have this explanation for it, I was just labeled a picky child).

But seeing this game really made me want it, I remember having gone to I think it was Argos and they had those set ups where you can play a game right there and then, and I remember just pleading to have it bought for me. I don't remember when I first got it, but I do remember my stubborn pickyness was thought to be 'special needs' in the school I was in, and because of this I was bought a strategy guide for the game, which I found then and now incredibly insulting to my intelligence and instead of reading it I kept it for when school bored me then I'd take it out and read the parts I already knew to myself instead of reading about whatever thing I refused to be reading at the time. Reminiscing does make me amusingly aware that my stubbornness was not only fully present at that age but instead of people trying to engage with me, I was just write off as special needs. That as a standard of teaching children really irks me, even now.

But back to the point, Ocarina of Time was the first game that I played and was in awe of the story as well as the game, it was this tight package of creative visuals, amazing storytelling and great pacing. It's still my second favourite video game of all time, the first being the sequel to this game which was MUCH MUCH darker.

I can't imagine what life would be like if I wasn't exposed to these games, I mean I would obviously have an interest in story but it was a really a flicker that was fanned into a cyclone of fire by Zelda, it could have easily been extinguished. I could be someone completely different, I could probably have been brainwashed in the various religious schools I attended (my gut wretches at the thought) or I could have grown up to be what a friend regarded to be the devil's work: an estate agent. I'm glad my early childhood was like this otherwise I'd probably be a lesser opinionated prick and more of a naive fool. I prefer the former.

Bow Down or Bow Out

There is this new agey contraption you may have heard of, it's aptly named the Internet. And this 'internet' is the result of several computers being linked together globally to provide a wealthy of information but now it's expanded into the realm of social interaction or social networking.

Now the result of all this online social networking has resulted in a rapidly evolving version of social behaviour, you can call it internet culture. Basically imagine the trends the general population go through, shoulder pads, the word 'spiffy', perms and Thatcher *shiver*. Now imagine how those cycles take years to move on, then respin it take months maybe even weeks.

That is internet culture.

The language, the hot spots, the tools of communication all evolve at a rapid rate. Can most of you techno-geeks even remember a time before MSN, Myspace and Bebo. Two of those three are now dead in the water, but at a time they were the hottest property in all the land, a golden goose couldn't excrete a more valuable property. But now, a regular goose easily could. Timing is everything.

One of the best and my personal favourite things about internet culture is called a meme. The term Internet meme (rhymes with cream) is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. So this can reference movies or simple internet phrases like "DO NOT WANT" "GTFO" and alot of content from the movie Mean Girls which features in easily 60% of memes now.

Internet culture as much as people knock it does have some invaluable uses. Though the internet is full of the most diverse and niche communities, it also it bound together by our human nature and when we all band together the effects catapult beyond cyberspace and smash into the real world. Some are amazingly inspiring, some are bonkers.

Justin Bieber, first seen on Youtube by tens of thousands, their views and spreading word of him through social networks resulted in him getting a record deal and now he's everywhere, love him or want to bash his head in with one of his seemingly prepubescent fangirls; he is the direct result of internet culture.

Ted Williams, Ted was a homeless man who was catapulted by YouTube. Ted has what is famously dubbed the 'Golden Voice' he would say things in his epic voice for cash (imagine the voice that does voice-overs for voice trailers and that's the same type of voice). A man paid Ted money to speak in his golden voice for cash while the man recorded him and posted it on youtube, it went viral within 24 hours. Basically 4 millions views in under 24 hours that's almost unheard of. As a direct result he now has a job, a house, money and a career. All because of the internet.

There are many many more cases in which the internet has changed people's lives.
This post came out because of two things that really sparked my mind. One was a friend of a friend whom I got into a fight with, the cause being that on Twitter he was peeved people did not have the etiquette to say goodbye before they removed him from their streams of people they wanted to read about (or unfollowed for short). He was saying how the internet must be a bad thing because it doesn't have a phonetic style of manners reflected from the real world. This bugs me because that just isn't what the internet is, there are no paper doilies or fine china here. There is no need for it. Let it be put this way, the word Hello was created specifically when the telephone was invented because people would call one another with no way to begin the conversation. It all seems abit alien now, doesn't it? The thought of not having hi, hello, hey in your vocabulary. The point is when new means of communication arrive, new pieces of language come with it. Nobody has a phone call like they write a letter, nobody has an internet chat like they have a phone call or like they write a letter. We have our own rules here, and they don't have the book ends we call hello and goodbye.

The second thing is marketing, so many big companies that do marketing for popular brands treat the internet like some of nuisance they have to address at some point, when in fact the internet is one of the best places for advertisements but also for launching intangible products like music. Music piracy is something I'll get into another time. Something going viral is one of the biggest ways to create a following for a product, Lady Gaga is the most recent example of an artist using the internet to help drive her career forward and it has taken on the internet's own speed of culture evolution. By coupling with the internet with a full understanding of it, two years into her career she is as strong if not stronger culturally than Madonna or Britney was half a decade into theirs. The sooner larger companies learn to accept that internet is the strongest thing in existence for marketing, the sooner they will stop going bankrupt and/or into government administration or liquidation.

A simple way of summing this post up is
get on board
or