Sunday, November 6, 2011

Acknowledge Your Lizard: Reinvent Yourself in Today's Society

Read this:
Seth Godin's "Brainwashed: Seven Ways to Reinvent Yourself" (will open PDF)

To acknowledge the lizard is to acknowledge the little piece of our mind that has the second thoughts about doing something different.  Often the people that are successful are the ones that are doing something different and doing it well.  To get there, we must know that the lizard is always present, but by understanding it, we can learn to avoid it and get to where we want to get, breaking through a textbook society and avoiding living cookie cutter lives.  Connecting to people around you (physical or virtual) is one of the most important things an individual can do.  Not only will each individual benefit by way of the whole community’s collective intelligence, but also having the support of a community in whatever endeavors each individual may take can make or break and idea.  Being generous is another huge important concept.  Within a community and in life, often what goes around comes around.  With this, if one is generous with their ideas, creativity, and care, their generosity will spread like wildfire, making the community as a whole better off.

Throughout this here blog that every student in the Scripps College of Media Arts and Studies must build during their time in Mdia203, we are challenged with fairly open-ended assignments that exercise our mind in processes of creativity and analysis.  In many cases, we must find and select a bit of media, whether it’s a video, a song, a classic that we love, or something that we just stumbled upon in the efforts of completing the assignment.  Whatever it may be we must be confident and selective in our decisions; we must take our lizard within and shove it to the side.  In acknowledging our lizards, we must overcome the fear of scrutiny and follow through in our drive to do something different.  Personally, I feel that I have overcome my lizard in the selection in some of the material I have examined.  When we get to choose any scene from basically anything that we are able to work from and complete the assignment, naturally I (hopefully most others, too) tried to think out of the box to present something that I truly love that others may not have seen or heard.  I landed on the “Dental Hygiene Dilemma,” an excerpt from Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels, a very avant-garde work.  I know that the whole thing is pretty out there by just about every standard, but I enjoy it and had a good time dissecting it.  In lieu of the lizard concept, Frank Zappa is a prime example.  He made highly academically technical but socially unacceptable music and art throughout his lifetime.  Many considered him a genius and many a nut, but regardless he was confident with his creations (just watch some of the work he did with claymation artist Bruce Bickford).
Being primarily for class assignments, this blog is not really intended to connect with more than the ones grading these posts.  However, it is on the Internet.  This means that really anybody can access it as long as they are able to find it, so there is potential for this blog to spread across a mass audience, connecting people, and in turn somehow benefitting social welfare.  However, due to the nature of this blog and the lack of personal effort to springboard promotion and the spread of this information, I don’t really see it happening.  Regardless, because it’s on the Internet, it has the potential for mass connection.
            This blog is pretty generous, I’d say.  It presents the reader with thought-provoking ideas along with some useful information in the ways of dissecting certain elements of creative media.  Being in today’s technological age of information, this blog adds to the unbelievable amount of information available at our fingertips.  Perhaps, when people see this and learn how color, light, and shape creates mood for a character or how to storyboard a scene, they will be better off.  Also, perhaps it will inspire them to make information available to others just as was available to themselves, adding to the greater good and our people’s collective abilities and intelligence.
            These assignments and this blog help to make us media students more well rounded in our fields with just that much more experience under our belts; just as this class, as well as the 203-204-205 cluster aims to do.  While some of these assignments are very time consuming and monotonous, many were fairly enjoyable and did help me to gain practice in various aspects of the field and in different ways of creatively thinking.  In retrospect, good job.

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