Sunday, May 26, 2013

Supersize Me Questions

-Spurlock’s message about fast food is that there are much more problems and risks to eating it than the ones we notice. Also he tries to say that companies such as McDonald’s are interested in your money, not your health, and therefore you have to take responsibility. It also conveys that people now rely on already prepared foods like the ones in McDonald’s.

-He tries to prove his message’s validity, by giving facts and ideas. For example in the video someone says that in the “50s and '60s moms were in the kitchen ALL the time, never seen without their aprons, as they were always either preparing, serving, or cleaning up after one meal or another. “ Therefore comparing it to know and how people have become more reliable on prepared, canned foods. Also he interviews nutritionists, doctors and physicians. He also tries to show the American culture, of most Americans by him not exercising.   

-What he does as a director to make me believe his message is he at the end shows, how he ended up after the 30 days, and he explains what he feels.

-The flaws I see in his strategy is that he may be over exaggerating the McDonald’s issue, and also the way he portrayed Americans could have been offensive to some. 

Friday, April 26, 2013

Methaphors

“Bathing in beauty”- BBC
“Birds of Paradise”- National Geographic
“Unchained melody”- Elle Magazine
“Run the World”- You Tube
“No bottles to break just hearts” Arpege perfume
“Flying machines”- New York Times

Friday, April 19, 2013

Development of Rap and HipHop


The history of rap music, goes back to the African people (tribesmen) because of the rhythm and meaning they added to their music. When the slaves were brought to America, the slaves mixed the American music with the African beats they remembered.

 Also Jamaican Folk stories called “toasts” were poems that told stories in rhyme. They started in the 1970’s which could be spiritual; schoolyard rhymes, and beat poetry which made an influence to the further development of rap.

 

The rap music was starting to develop among black young teens, in New York City, Washington D.C and Philadelphia. Parties around 1974 in New York were featuring the early ways of rap. The song “Rappers Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang was one of the major noticeable labels recorded in 1979. As time went on, rap music started to grow . 







In the 80's many raps were mainly opinions about the difficulties faced from the ghetto life, warnings about drugs and about teenage love or lust.


The earliest forms of expression that the music can be traced back to was the sounds, and rhythm created by tribesmen in Africa and the Caribbean. 

The key ideas explored in rap music are drugs, love, crime and sexual related things. 



An example of what rap was in a quote by DMX: “For two years keep it real, hold back all tears, face your fears. Become a man before your time. Rap, but live out your rhymes. Let ‘em know what’s on your mind, then you’ll get your shine.”



Hip Hop music originated from the African American communities during the 1970's in NYC.Hip-hop is believed to have originated in the Bronx by a Jamaican DJ named Kool Herc. Herc by putting toguether rhymes over instrumentals. Kool Herc and other block party DJs helped spread the message of hip-hop around town and increased popularity of the style.



Slick Rick:

Richard Walters, "Slick Rick" was born on January14th 1965. He is known as "Slick Rick, MC Ricky D and Rick the Ruler. He was nominated to the Grammy's as a British American rapper. His career began in 1983, with hip hop. One of his admired recordings are, "Children Story" and "Hey Young World". 

He has two children, Lateisha and Ricky, from two different mothers. He is originally from Wimbledon in London, England. 

He moved with his Jamaican British family to the bronx in 1975. He got his characteristic eye patch from a broken glass accident when he was a child. 

He spent five years in prison after being charged for attempted murder and immigration. He recorded whilst he was charged the album "The Ruler's back". Also when he was in prison, his album "Behind Bars" was released.


  

Opinion:
I personally do not like rap music because, I feel it is mostly aggresive and I do not like the rythm because of the continuous pauses. I do not listen to rap music because of what it's normally expressed on the song, like drugs, sex, criticism and swear words.Also most of rap song videos and lyrics relate to sex, or are sex related. 

Bibliography:



Saturday, April 6, 2013

Island Man Analysis- Grace Nichols


Island Man Analysis

Island man is a poem written by Grace Nichols; she was born in 1950 in Guyana and is still alive today. In 1977 she migrated to England. Just like John Agard the author of the poem “half-caste” they both are of mixed cultures, and they try to show this mixture on the language in their poems.

The themes explored in Island man by Grace Nichols are Cultural identity, the difficulty of belonging to 2 cultures, feeling separated from home and not being able to distinguish dream from reality. Cultural Identity is shown when she describes the island and London, emphasising her description of beauty on the island, to show she would never forget her identity. The phrases, “comes back to sand” and “dull North circular roar” describe both setting in which the poem is set, and shows both cultures in which the man lives.

The difficulty of belonging to 2 cultures is shown when the author writes at the start “morning” showing how she does not use “the”, maybe showing how her dialect removes the articles from sentences, and how she just starts the whole stanza with one word, states her seriousness and maybe confusion. At the end of the poem, when she uses “Another London day”, shows us how difficult her life and her day is, since she just sees it as another extra thing which is not important to her.

Feeling separated from home is shown on the first stanza in the last line when it says, “the steady breaking and wombing” this could be referring to his island, where his was born which is shown through the use of motherhood imagery. This positive image shows us how he “in his head” stills keeps the memories about his island, and how now he feels his day is just “another London day”.

Not being able to distinguish between dream and reality is shown at the start of the poem when the author says, “and island man wakes up/ to the sound of blue surf/ in his head”. “In his head” shows us how it is all a dream the man is having. Also the line “an island man wakes up” suggests how he is not native to the place he is in, since he could’ve just been described as “a man”, this shows us the feeling and images the man keeps in his head about the “island” he is from.

Nichols helps us picture the island, and London trough visual imagery. The author at the start of the poem starts by telling us what time of day it is by using the word “morning”. The use of sensorial language lets us visualize the island itself. We can visualize and imagine to the sound of the sea when it says, “sound of blue surf”.  

Natural imagery is also used to describe the island. Nichols in the second stanza describes the animals, people and atmosphere of the island. She uses sibilance in the phrase “and fishermen pushing out to sea”, we can relate the “sh” to the sound of the sea, and imagine the waves crashing against the shore and the overall peacefulness. We can see how the poet tries to emphasize the beauty in the island by saying “the sun defiantly”, by using personification it lets us imagine how hot it might be, and how radiant the sun’s rays are. We can see how the island is precious and valuable to Nichols because she describes the island as an “emerald island”, we can see the comparison between such an expensive object like a gemstone and an island lets us focus on how maybe the island is rich in culture and nature and memories for the author.  

In the third stanza the author says, “comes back to sands/ of a grey metallic soar”, this is a metaphor that could be comparing London to a grey and unattractive beach, which people won’t want to go there. Also the word “grey” shows sadness and depression, which could show how the author feels about London. The use of juxtaposition between the colour “grey”, which is a dull and opaque one, creates a contrast between the “blue” description of the ocean, and its brightness, making us realize the completely different life style the man was having. We can see how the use of juxtaposition between the “emerald island” and the “north circular roar” shows us the total differences between both places. The “metallic soar” can be related to factories and industries which shows a harsh environment comparing it to the nature of the Caribbean. Also the line “to surge of wheels/ to dull North Circular roar” is a juxtaposition that describes a busy London road and shows the contrast between the island and London, and the calmness against chaos.

The poet uses different literary techniques to describe what she feels about London and the Island. The words “muffling muffling” are an alliteration to show the hesitance he has about his new home, “London”.  When the poet says, “island man heaves himself” she is using the verb “heaves” to show how unwilling the man is to get out of bed. Both repetitions of the words “muffling muffling” and “groggily groggily” could have been written by the author to show the change in mood of the island man as he moves from his dream to reality, it is turning point. This could relate as well to the change he had to face of moving from the island to London.

Enjambment is used in the poem to give the poem flow, and make it seem like a dream which flows in your head. Also at the end of the poem, the author does not end with a full stop to show how his life seems endless, and how the same feeling of unhappiness towards London would keep going on forever. It also shows how the Caribbean language is not standard English or formal, showing her cultural dialect. 

Friday, March 15, 2013

Analysing "Half-Caste" by John Agard


The poem “half-caste” written by John Agard talks about the meaning of “half-caste and how people don’t really understand how it makes people feel, in this case the author. The poem asserts the identity of the author by the way it’s written, in conventional English, and in its dialect. He tells the poem in an aggressive tone. When he says “I half-caste human being” he objects to being called by that term, since it’s impossible to be half a human. John Agard once said, "This imposition of half, half, half on a person's total human complexity implies that some sort of 'purity' has been subverted. A child of mixed race is a tangible, loving expression of human beings from different cultural backgrounds getting together - that should be seen not as something threatening, but as something enriching..." This phrase explains what the purpose to writing this poem was. John Agard tries to come forward in his poem the idea of not judging people for the racial difference, and don’t use the term “half-caste” to refer to them.


Agard’s meaning of the poem is shown also by the way that it’s written. The poem is written in Standard English, using simple words such as “Consequently when I dream I dream half-a-dream” but he also uses his dialect, to show its Caribbean accent for example he says, “Ah lookin at yu wid de keen half of mih eye” and “ah rass”. This mixture of languages expresses the idea of someone who is of mixed race.  He uses imagery and literary features to express the mixture of language. He compares half-caste to art, weather and music with metaphors. For example we can see Agard comparing half-caste to art, when he says, “yu mean when Picasso mix red an green”. This comparison to art tries to express how other everyday things can be half-caste, but in reality they only use it to refer to mixed race people. Furthermore John Agard also compares half-caste to the weather: “well in dat case England weather nearly always half-caste”. Also he compares it to music by saying: “when yu say half-caste/ yu mean Tchaikovsky/ sit down at dah piano/an mix a black key /wid a white key/ is a half-caste symphony?” Here we can see how Agard tries to ridicule the term half-caste by comparing Tchaikovsky’s symphony, such a remarkable piece of music, which makes us see how he tries and mock “half-caste”.



The rhythm and rhyme in the poem emphasizes the idea of half-caste. He tries to show us the rhythm of the poem with his Caribbean accent. There Is not a defined rhyme scheme but the rhythm that makes the poem flow is by repetition. Agard repeats the words “explain yuself /wha yu mean/when you say half-caste” this, is a way of Agard to ask us, and to make us think why we call people by that term. In the poem there is a lack of full stops and capital letters, this could be because, of how the poem’s layout is irregular.


In conclusion my impression of the poem is that it does show the message that John Agard is trying to show about the terms half-caste. I liked the poem because of how he compares “half-caste” to nature and other everyday things. I believe it would make me think again before I use a racist terms (not that I’ve used one) because, it can be very hurtful for the person I use it against. 

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Poem 1950's

Allen Ginsberg wrote the poem Howl which explains what people felt in the 1950's


Allen Ginsberg  (1926-1997)
Howl
For Carl Solomon
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,                                                                                             who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,                who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,                                                                                    who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,                                                                                     who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,                                                                                                                         who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under  the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Bibiography:
http://www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm

Cold War


The US was engaged in a ‘cold war’ with the Soviet Union. Even though no warfare was declared, things were tense between the two countries. (note: today the Soviet Union does not exist – the largest country of the Soviet is Russia)
Both countries had nuclear power and it was feared that one or the other might use it.
USSR was communist and the US was scared of the spread of communism. Anyone that appeared to be different were presumed to be supporters of communism and were ostracised. They were called ‘reds’ and it was a time of ‘red scare’.