1st post for Idiot Savant

This will be the first of my ten reflections on the play Idiot Savant.

It has been about 2 weeks now since I have seen this play down in the village and I still seem to think about it very often. The only reason that I could imagine I have for this constant recollection is that I have to develop a reaction to this play for my fourth paper grade. The thing is that I know this is not the reason and I still am at a loss to the simple question of why? Honestly I did not like the play at all mainly because I did not fully understand it. (Granted I did have some thoughts of my own about the performance, but those will be coming in my later blogs.) I did however find the play extremely interesting and I would love to know the actual meaning behind the entire performance. As for whether my take on it was right or not, that does not matter to me, I know how I viewed the play and I think that might have been partially right in all that I was saying but it would still interest me to know the true meaning behind it all. This is because the whole play seemed to be symbolism and deep meaning. What was the point of the giant duck, why did he have to play mini golf, why did the lady come out from behind the table, why did he wear the yellow jacket? There are countless more questions that I have for this play, most of which I have attempted to answer. The fact that this play was so abstract is what makes it so difficult to answer these questions. Also, why Wilem Defoe?

If you want to stick, you have to be different

I was in the city last night and as I was walking around I noticed all of the different sounds and attractions taking place on every sidewalk and street corner. Every single street vendor and stand in the city has there own way of calling you over to them. The salvation army guy had his little bell, while the guy at the hotdog and pretzel stand banged his tongs the cart to cause attraction to himself. They are all different, even the countless people who offer to draw a cartoon picture of yourself, the guys who sell the bootleg DVDs or the people in chinatown who sell you bags and watches all day. The point is that they all have to be different for you to notice them and to remember them for next time if you so chose to go back to them. They will either follow you and tell you what they are selling, yell out prices at you, or call you over saying what they have and how it is a great deal. It is the people on the side of the street who just sit there and do not cause attraction that have the most trouble when tying to sell things. Take the people in central park or in the subways who all play music, how many of them do you actually remember? Probably not a lot because for the most part they are all the same. Granted some are at least entertaining and that makes them memorable, but otherwise you forget about most of them very quickly and easily because they are all the same. If you don't stand out then you re just another person in the city, nothing special. The people who we probably all remember, if you have ever seen them before, are the ones who dress up and paint themselves to look like statues and move and act one you give them money. I remember over the summer there was one person in Times Square who would walk behind people and mock how they walk and act if you put money into a bucket he had in front of him. I only remembered him because he stood out and was different. Granted there are many of them in the city but they all do different things. Also, notice how I remembered he was in Times Square too? It's because Times Square is the prime example of this blog post. The city is known for Times Square because there are always people there and there are constantly new attractions and things going on. Also, there are countless broadway shows being performed on a daily basis. All of this stuff makes it stand out and also the ultimate tourist attraction. This is because they do not want to see the quiet empty side streets, they want to see the action and the bright lights. After all isn't that why they came to the city in the first place? NYC is a big city and if you don't standout then you're not going to make it.

Thanks Garmin

So I was in the city last night and as I was walking past Rockefeller Center I noticed that light show going on outside of Saks 5th Avenue. They had these giant light up snowflakes on the front of the building that would light up at different times to the tune of a christmas song. I do not know the name of it but the tune is very familiar. What I noticed the most as I was watching this light show was that I could not get the Garmin commercial out of my head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9WxJ1aN42E&feature=rec-LGOUT-exp_fresh+div-HM

There are about 5 different versions of this commercial and this is just one of them. But the point is that Garmin has taken this widely known song and put there own twist on it so now whenever I hear this song I cannot stop thinking about the Garmin commercial. When I was in the city last night I could not get it out of my head. I doubt that I am not the only person who thinks this way about the song so Garmin has ruined this christmas song and taken it to a corporate level and, I feel, has taken the christmas out of the song. Thanks Garmin.

P.S. Here is another version of the song but I don't think that this has ruined the song as much because this is simply a parody which is not played very often. The Garmin commercial I see on T.V. all of the time and the fact that it is used to represent christmas in the commercial has taken away more from christmas because as in this next clip there are no reference to christmas at all. The fact that the Garmin commercial is about christmas and is just another advertisement takes away so much more from christmas and the original song itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBgHTJOsi6c&feature=related

One last note, THINK ABOUT HANSEL AND GRETEL. Don't you think that there is a connection between what I just said and with Hansel and Gretel? All Garmin did was take a widely known song and put there own twist on it to be memorable. Same thing with AT&T. They just took a widely known story and put their own twist onto it. There was no deep meaning behind it, they did the same thing that Garmin did. Use things which stand out to your own advantage! Hansel and Gretel is a classic story about getting lost and now AT&T can jump in and use their new AT&T phone with GPS to add a new twist to the story. Just as Garmin used a well known song to have the audience add a new meaning to it. This is so now every time a person hears that song they will think about Garmin and every time they see Hansel and Gretel they will think about AT&T. Simple as that, both companies have just ruined two well known pieces of art.

Stickiness really did stick

So I was out to lunch the other day with my mom since I had off from school and she began to tell me a story about my neighbor's child. We have known these people for about thirteen years now and their youngest child is about five years old. My mother was over their house the other night and she told me about how the five year old went up to her and starting singing in french. When she told me this I was comepletely surprised considering that he is only five, but he is learning very basic french in his Kindergarten class. The point of my story is that he was only able to sing french because that is how they taught him to remember what they were learning. This is probably the most productive way of teaching because if you sat down a five year old and told him to follow along with a french lesson, 99% of the time the child will remember nothing from that lesson. It is only because that they were able to appeal to him and make him learn in a way that is fun and creative that he was able to remember french. I can vouch for this in two different subjects. I learned a math equation in 10th grade to the melody of "Pop goes the Weasel" and to this day I can still remember the equation perfectly. It was the quadratic equation. Also, when I was in 8th grade I remembered how to say all of the question words in spanish through a simple song to the melody of "Jingle Bells". Even when I used to do my spanish homework I would start to hum the tune and sing the song in my head just so I could remember the words. I still remember how to say them now and I haven't taken spanish class in two years. Isn't it amazing how people can sometimes remember the most random of facts just from learning them in the simplest of ways?

The library now creeps me out.....

So today around 2 o'clock I walked with one of my friends to the Axxin library so I could drop off a book to one of my other friends who i previously borrowed it from. My friend was sitting in the cafe part of the library and as I was walking through there I couldn't help but think about our stalking assignment that we had last week. That assignment has changed my whole outlook on the library and the people in there. I mean our class was just a simple group of college kids who were given an assignment and then quietly dispered into the library. Little did everyone else in the library know that they were being watched intently by this unsuspecting group of teenagers. This is exactly why I felt a little creeped out being in there today because you never do know when someone is watching you. I'd say that our class did a pretty good job at being discrete in what we did because no one was approached by their subject or taken away by public safety for stalking. Yet the more I thought about how good our class did, the more creeped out I felt. Who knows maybe Dr. Lay had another class in there at the time? There would be no way for me to point them out because our subjects for the project were completely unaware of who we were associated with (our class and professor) and more specifically who we were ourselves. This experience has definitely changed my outlook on the library, but it will not stop me from going there. If I see someone who is watching me intently I'd probably just move to another part of the library.

What is Stickiness?

This article I feel was excellent. It served its purpose through describing itself in a way. The ending of the article pulled all of these ideas together for me, in that it created a new hypothesis for my views on this reading. This is because once I read it, it had similar effects on me about Shelley Jackson's piece, but only the part where I understood it and nothing else. It seemed to me that once I finished reading this piece I realized what the writer was doing. They were using stickiness to describe stickiness. By this I mean that the article was an example of stickiness in itself. It was creative by using different examples of stickiness (the urban legends) and by appealing to people, I felt, by being extremely simple. It most of the characteristics which were listed towards the end of the article when they were broken down into six different parts. This article definitely did stick for me. It did so much that I was able to read it in two parts, meaning that I took a break, went to my job and came back a few hours later and remembered what they were talking about enough that I could pick up reading where I left off and post a blog about it, without having to go back and reread most of it.

It even appealed to me in the sense that I agreed with what it was saying for the most part. I think that stickiness is a simple, creative story which appeals highly to people's emotions and also just their sense in general. Meaning that they simply liked it for whatever reason (comedy, truth, etc.) I think that through those ways it is the only way which you will get the majority of the public audience to remember what it is you are making a case about. There might be some people who will remember it for their own personal reason, whether they hate it or have some personal passion for it, but in order to get it to stick with the majority of the public, your case has to be extremely memorable on all levels so that it will indeed appeal to most individuals.

I like to think of the commercials that we saw in class this semester as a prime example of stickiness. If our class was asked tomorrow if they remembered what happened in both the Asian Pantene commercial and the Hansel and Gretel AT&T commercial, my guess is that they would indeed remember it. This is not because we have watched them so much, as it is that they sticked to people. They stuck because they were creative and that is the most important part in all of this. Creativity is needed whether the case is good or bad. Hansel and Gretel stuck because it was creative and different and it was also a fairly decent commercial. The Pantene commercial on the other hand was, I felt, extremely bad, yet we all remember it because it was creative and different. If we think of mass media and how much simply plain bad material there is on television alone today, there are countless cases that are terrible yet still creative. Think of last season on American Idol, the bikini girl who went to the auditions and didn't make it very far at all. Yet at the end of the season people were still talking about her even though she was such a bad singer. Also, the song "LOL :)" (yes, lol smiley face is indeed the title) I personally like, but it is just such a stupid concept of a song, but it is after all creative and this is why it sticks with people, whether they like it or not. I asked some of my friends if they had heard the song and if they liked it or not and out of the four people that I asked, three of them said that they had heard it even though they didn't like it. They only remembered it because it was so creatively bad and because of this, so memorable.

This is simply how mass media works, sometimes the worse it is, the more memorable it is. Yet this is also another way for people to get their point across to people. If you think of it, it might seem more logical for ad campaigns to use more stupid tactics in their commercials simply because they stick to people more. Geico is the perfect example because their caveman ad campaign is easily the worst ad campaign out there now, yet people still remember Geico and continue to use their services all the time. Lets hope, for the sake of mass media and advertising, that ad campaigns don't get more like Geicos and that producers will stick to using good creative ideas in their ads.

Why we stalked.....

I feel that this whole assignment, in a way, was another method to get us to pay attention. I mean that is what stalkers do, they watch every move of their subject to such an extent that it becomes creepy. This is what we did in the library the other day, we sat down, viewed our subjects to great extents and took notes on them. This project was for us to be able to be aware of our surroundings and to be able to notice the things which we would otherwise not overlook.

To me this relates to the video clip from the movie "The Pink Panther" that we watched in class last week. The whole point of that clip, for us anyway, was to think about asking the right questions, whereas the point of this assignment was to notice the right things. Our whole focus in class for the past week or so has been about taking notice, asking the right questions, and being able to deduce meaning from them. All of this is exactly what we were required to do in the library yesterday. Our worksheets asked us to take notes on what our subject was doing, provide metaphors for those actions and then to describe our own take on them (deduce the meaning of it all). having just realized all this just now when I received the email about blog, I now have more of an understanding about what this assignment was truly meant for. It was to get us to open up our senses and to be attentive.