What is art?

What is art?

In my mind you can't really define it. To some people art is their own instagram photos to others its a painting of a bowl of fruit. Below are some of my favorite pieces of art. What makes them art to me is that they express something, they make me feel something. the artist let a piece of them go and that to me is what makes art.

Source

Source

Source

Am I dizzy? Usually yes but that’s only because I survive on a diet of coffee and cigarettes. So I guess you could call me Lucille 2, cause of my vertigo.


 But yes I find the internet dizzying, but that is what makes it amazing. i think that is one of the best features of the internet. It allows you to go out and find new shit all the time. It's how I found out about some of my new favorite things like Iggy Azalea, who by the way is amazing.

 The fact that we can get sucked into information black holes, is what makes the internet amazing. I love that I can start by looking a picture of a cat and somehow end up making a cheesecake two hours later.

 In fact it’s these black holes that lead me to buy three bottles of wine on the internet while attempting to do work. These black holes are amazing but they also have a negative side. Because they allow me to avoid work and or real life because I can just constantly click things and get distracted. To quote Liz Lemon

"I want to go to there."

Everyone should want to go to the internet. The craziness of the internet distracts us but it also teaches us. I view it as sort of the way of learning.

you are really dumb fo real

“The smartest person in the room is the room.” At first glance this quote doesn’t really seem to make sense. But when you sit down and think about it and maybe read a little more by Weinberger, it becomes this really cool concept. 

Well at least to me it does. Weinberger claim that it is the network that makes us smarter. It is the network that brings us this knowledge. Which to me conjures up this image of this “network” beast that just absorbs knowledge. It’s just there soaking up all that the rest of us have to offer and it’s amazing. This network connects everybody, so while you may think you are the smartest person in the room, which makes you kind of an asshole, it’s that connection that is really the smartest. 

He is promoting the sharing of ideas, he wants us to wake up and see the things going on around us. He says “the new way of knowing is becoming apparent” which makes sense to me because, no one can know everything but everyone can know something. And if we all connect and share and grow, we all become smarter. But we need this smart room, or network to do so and we need to do it properly. Because as he says if we do it wrong it will make us dumber.  

These rooms, these networks hold all of the knowledge we seek, they are to me the keeper of all things we need to know. So let’s get out there and create smart rooms and powerful networks.

Here's the thing

Let’s talk about cell phones. Recently my iPhone decided to shit the bed. So like a good Verizon customer I went to the store, they said they would mail me a replacement. They did but no one had to sign for it, so for about two hours there was just an iPhone sitting in the hall of my apartment. Which to me is bullshit, this is an item that had I not had insurance would have cost me $500, was just sitting in the cold dirty hallway. Then I decided to activate it which is supposed to happen on its own once you insert your sim card and turn your phone on. It didn't work, so I tried again and again and nothing. They told me to call them, which you can’t do if your cell phone doesn't work.

 After about an hour I found the live chat section on their website, then half an hour later the guy I was talking to get my phone to work. Which yay was amazing, except it used up all of my data and now I have a lovely overage charge. So for a few hours it work perfectly, then all of a sudden the wifi stopped working and my phone kept freezing. I had to reset it about 6 times and it still didn’t work. Then I decided to fuck it and just leave it. Now about 12 hours later, it can get wifi for about 5 mins at a time and the phone keeps freezing. So now I have to drive to Massena to go to the only official Verizon store and get another replacement and go through all this shit again. Hopefully they won’t sent me another broken one. The last time this happened my mother made someone cry and I got a free phone, so here’s hoping.

Cheesecake

            Everyone has little pet peeves, one of my biggest ones involves cheesecake. Specifically New York style cheesecake. Which is an abomination. If you try to serve me  NY style cheesecake I will either throw it and or ask for a bagel for all of that cream cheese. You see real cheesecake should be made with ricotta cheese or maybe even a nice mascarpone, not cream cheese like NY cheesecake. So if you make a cheesecake follow this recipe:

Ingredients
6 large eggs
2/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Two 15-ounce containers whole-milk ricotta cheese
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
Confectioners' sugar for dusting
Directions
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Spray the springform pan with cooking spray. Separate the eggs, placing the whites in one of the large bowls and the yolks in the work bowl of a food processor.

Add the sugar and vanilla to the work bowl of the food processor and process until thick and light yellow, about 1 minute. Add the ricotta and zest and process until smooth, another 30 seconds. Scrape the mixture into the other large bowl.

Beat the whites on high speed with the mixer until they hold stiff peaks. Fold the whites into the ricotta mixture and scrape into the prepared pan, smoothing the top with the spatula.

Bake until the cake is deep golden brown and the sides begin to pull away from the pan, about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Transfer to the rack to let cool completely. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until serving, at least 6 hours and up to 1 day. To serve, release the sides of the springform pan, dust with confectioners' sugar using the strainer, and cut into wedges.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Read more at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ricotta-cheesecake-recipe.html?oc=linkback

I think it's time we all share ourselves

Everyone once and a while NPR puts on this thing they call The Moth. It's this event where they invite people to come read something they have written and or share a story of theirs. I think its amazing, I discovered this during another class when we could review a few stories and get extra credit. I then fell in love and downloaded all the videos I could. For this blog I watched  Nancy Finton's story "I Never Saw His Face" which i found to be amazingly powerful. She tells the dark story of her almost rape and lightens the mood with some dark humor.)
One of the reasons I love The Moth is because it exposes me to all sorts of writers and story tellers that i never would have heard of if it hadn't been for the Moth. Not only does it expose all sorts of writers but it lets you hear the story in their voice, it lets you feel the emotion. It puts a face, an expression, a person to the words. It turns a story into a life experience and I think that is amazing.


)
In case that  first story was a little dark here is the first story I ever witnessed by the Moth and it is much happier. I hope you enjoy!

Because I'm a Huge Fucking mess

And now its time for a break down

This week I’m trying something  a little different, instead of going on some rant or telling you how awesome something is I’m just gonna write about what’s on my mind.

So next weekend I’m heading back to my home town to go to a baby dunking. Which normally I wouldn’t be caught dead at, I feel like if I stepped foot in a church I might just burst into flames. But My father is going to be the god father to this fat little nugget so I figure why not go home and see everyone one. Which is happening less and less now that my family has moved to Wisconsin. And I’m dreading it, not so much the reunion but the endless string of questions.

“What are you gonna do when you graduate?”

“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

“Are you gonna quit smoking?”

“What are you doing with your life?”

But the truth is I’m a huge fucking mess. I have no idea what I’m doing when I graduate. I have no idea what I want to do. I mean what can you do with an English degree? My love of swearing and cigarettes means I can’t nor do I want to be a teacher. And my love of tattoos, nail polish and skinny jeans means I don’t belong in an office. All I really wanna do is write. Which to  most people translates to work at starbucks and write a novel that will go nowhere. So all I can say is I’m just gonna cry over my bachelor’s degree.

 

I don’t have a boyfriend cause im crazy and can’t keep a relationship going for more than a few months and I get that my sister just got engaged. But back off I’m only twenty three and I’m going to die alone because cats cat kiss you back. And for some reason crazy doesn’t attract the men.

 

To answer the question about smoking. NO.

What am I going to do with my life? Everything, write a few bestsellers have my own talk show. Maybe open a bakery because let’s face it the only things I’m good at are making cookies and being sarcastic. If I’m being real I should have just went to beauty school. Hell maybe I’ll marry rich and be a trophy wife. Who knows?

Now I’m writing this as a blog post because there is no way I can say these things to my family and I need to just get it out there in the world. So I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into my crazy.

I’m out. (Since 2004)

I got a big ego, Such a huge ego...

In case you wanted to know, I shower a lot, like a lot a lot. Two or three times a day is a slow day. So when one showers as much as I do, they tend to get a lot of different bathing products. So the other day I was in the store trying to get some body wash and I looked up and noticed the body wash Dove for Men, which as it turns out is the same thing as regular Dove only it’s in a grey bottle and is like a dollar more.

Then I moved on to look a razors cause you know people shave. All of the men’s razors were blue or black and called like xtream or intense. While the razors made for women are all pink and yellow and had names like flowers. When in reality they are the same thing. Why is it that men will only buy something if it literally says for men on it? How fragile is your ego?

My biggest concern was deodorant. Everyone uses it except for the French. When looking at the deodorant, the men’s brands all had very interesting names like Swagger, which I imagine smells like balls and your parent’s disappointment. Some of the other names are things like essence, intense and dark. I don’t understand why they just can’t be called what they smell like. Then they would be called things like, locker room, sweaty socks and hormonal teenager. On the other hand the women’s deodorant has names like Paris, which yes does smell like wine and prostitutes. But the other names are just what they smell like, which makes more sense.

So I decided to go ahead and buy women’s deodorant and try it out, and maybe I just wanted to smell like cucumbers and green tea. This is really nothing new to me, I buy women’s fragrances all the time because sometimes I wanna smell like a pineapple because pineapples are fucking amazing.

After using the “woman's” deodorant I have concluded that it is in fact better because I no longer smell like a locker room. And it also works better at preventing sweat. But I still don’t understand why we need to make things have genders, if I wanna smell like a pineapple I will and if you wanna smell like swagger then more power to you. Why the fuck do we have to make things like that separate. Regardless of your gender when you buy a razor you just want it to remove hair and when you buy body wash or perfume or deodorant you just want to smell good, and what genitals you have doesn't change the way things smell

So I say fuck it, go buy what you want. Smell how you want. Fuck gender roles, the only rolls I support are cinnamon. 

I am Cher

You know what I don't hear often enough? That me and Cher have a lot in common, which we really do. We both have fake hair, we both were married to Sonny, we both have a twitter. And we are both accused of having our own language when using social media. So I figured why not take the time to make a little lexicon for my 5's and 5's of readers, so that sometimes they actually know what I'm talking about.

 

I'm known to make a lot of weird outdated pop culture references when speaking or well typing to people. And most people who are not me or my mother don't really understand. So for this short little blog post i created a little table with some basic sayings, so now if you see them you will understand them.

Things I say
Paula Abdul	Chasing the Blond Ambition	Joan,Crawford, pepsi level	Tell me what you think about me	Beyonceeeeeeeee
Things I mean
Straight up	Going Blond	bitch or super bitch	Question?	Motivation to do something, because beyonce could do it

Love is Love is Love

One of the best things about the internet is connected it makes the whole world. News stories move so quickly over the internet. With the invention of things like twitter and facebook, people hear things almost instantly after they happen. Some of these stories are really fake and some of them deserve to be heard. The one story I think people need to hear about, something that is very close to my heart, is Ellen Page.

Everyone remembers Ellen Page as the teen mom from Juno, or the architect in Inception. Not only does she have a bigger career than that, for real everyone should check out her Movie Hard Candy it’s amazing.  Page recently spoke at the Human Rights Campaign’s Time to Thrive conference. She spoke with such passion and emotion that it moved me to tears. She praises the HRC and all that they have done for gay youths. She reminds them that what they are doing is amazing and that it’s even more amazing that they don’t do it for the praise.

Near the end of her speech Page, officially comes out as a lesbian. Saying that she was tired of lying by omission. No Page has openly joked about her perceived sexuality on shows like SNL. But this is the first time that she confirmed her lesbian status. You can see pain on her face you can hear her voice crack as she speaks. This is a huge step not just for her, but for homosexual youths everywhere. It shows that you can be can and still live your dream and as tacky as it sounds life does get better. This made me get over my feud with Page after she got to kiss Joseph Gordon Levitt. Plus she can juggle and if that’s not amazing I don’t know what is.

It’s sad to know that someone’s sexuality can make headline news. That her amazing speech has become something for people to blog about. I know the irony isn’t lost on me. But because of the internet, millions of people who wouldn’t have been able to see this, will be able too. Now her heartwarming story will be able to inspire more people than ever before and it’s all thanks to the internet.

Camp it up

Everyone does a little self-promotion on the internet. In fact some people promote themselves to fame via the internet. Take for example Grace Helbig, who started out with a daily vlog called Daily Grace, her show became an internet mega-hit. I like to refer to her as one of the Queens of the internet. The other two Queens are Mamrie Hart and Hannah Hart, no relation. Mamrie host one of my favorite shows on youtube called You Deserve a Drink, which combines two of my most favorite things drinking and puns. Hannah also combines drinking and puns with cooking on her show My Drunk Kitchen. The three of these girls make me laugh on an almost daily basis.

One day they sat down and decided to make a movie. And then they did, which is huge feet for anyone let alone three youtube megastars. The movie called “Camp Takota” follows three best friends and their wacky adventures at Camp and how they saved it. The story is a little cliché, but they add their own comic twist to, making it feel new and fresh. Plus who doesn't love puns, for real? I highly recommend that everyone go out and buy it and not just illegally download it.

These three amazing comedians used the internet, youtube to be specific, to make their dreams come true. Which to me is amazing, and I know for a fact we will be seeing more of them. I for one hope to one day see them live. And I hope they continue to make movies and be flawless on the internet.

This just shows that the internet can help you achieve your dreams so take that almost every adult I have ever met that told me that I spend too much time on the internet.

Suck it.

Ps go to Camptakota.com to download the movie and it's also on iTunes.

Writing in a what what

Barry Brummett wrote an article on the three meanings of epistemic rhetoric. A while yes the article itself is interesting, some may be struggling to see why it fits into a class called writing in a digital age. Regardless of what definition of rhetoric you believe in, rhetoric is important, especially on the internet. Because on the internet that is all you have. All you can use online if your own person rhetoric. When we look at social media, where yes you can post pictures but people don’t get to really see you or meet you, the chose to friend you or follow you based on the things you say. People chose to like you based on your choice of rhetoric. 

The way you present yourself means a lot online and can affect you for your entire life. There are some people who lose jobs because of things posted on the internet. 

So now that I've establish the importance of rhetoric online, it’s time to look at Brummett. Brummett describes three different types of rhetoric, the one I believe in and the one I think fits well with this class is Ontological. Brummett describes it as

“That rhetoric creates all of what there is to know. Discourse does not merely discover truth or make it effective. Discourse creates realities rather than truths about realities. Furthermore, no reality that humans experience exits apart from human values, perceptions, and meanings.”

When you apply this to writing in a digital age, you see that everything makes sense. Even just the use of the internet can be tied to the ontological belief. The internet could have been a passing trend, but no we gave it the power it has today. And on the same note, there is no one truth about the internet, there is no one purpose for it, the internet can be whatever the user needs it to be.

 It can be a safe haven for expression, a way to find new cake recipes or just a place to look for porn. It is whatever we want it to be, whatever we make it.

Oh Na Na

Let’s talk about twitter. If we’re being honest almost everyone has one. For some reason everyone loves the idea of expressing themselves in 140 characters or less and don’t get me wrong I love twitter. But I just mostly use mine to say things about people in the room with me. Which when I say it out loud seems kind of rude. But most of the people I follow on twitter are celebrities. Using twitter gives celebrities a sort of bond with their fans that they never had before. Not only is it a way for no famous people like me to pretend they’re friends with famous people, but it gives famous people the ability to interact and talk to the public. Now one of my favorite people to follow on twitter is Rihanna. Now Rihanna is naturally very outspoken and has no trouble speaking her mind in interviews I mean just ask Ellen.

 But she has some of my favorite replies on twitter. Now while most famous people tweet to promote new movies or new albums or even to say happy birthday. Rhianna tweets to her haters some of the funniest and weird responses. She also uses it to attack the media outlets that are attacking her.

 As well as a way to express herself and her personal beliefs, most of which are about weed or butts.

 I find the whole thing refreshing, I love the fact that she uses this outlet to be 100% Rihanna and I’m sure her PR person hates it or loves it she probably gives them a lot of business. But let’s face it Rihanna doesn't give two fucks, so why should we.

 If you’re ever feeling down just go read her twitter and it will surely put a smile on your face I know it makes me happy.

Queen Bee

When we were told that we could write about whatever it is that we wanted for this blog my mind instantly went to

Yes I have chosen Beyonce. Now I bet you're wondering what she has to do with anything that we have learned about in class, the truth is she has a lot to do with it. Recently Beyonce released her fifth studio album aptly titled Beyonce.

Now she released this album with no single, no advertisements and not even an announcement. One day at midnight she just posted on Facebook and twitter that there was a CD out now. Then bam it became number one in seventy two countries. She sold this album and marketed it just using social media. With every shared post or retweet her sales rose. This to me shows how plugged in as a society we are, if people weren't always on these sites no one would have heard of this CD. But Beyonce knows here market, and she knew that people would be online, so she used her huge online presence to sell this CD. She made millions in just a few hours and I'm just sitting here like

Now this CD wasn't just you're normal CD it contained 14 new songs and 17 new videos. Beyonce can see that as a society we are moving towards things that are visual. We no longer live in a society that is okay with just hearing things or reading things, we need to see them. We live in the mindset of pics or it didn't happen. Beyonce wanted her fans to go on this journey with her, she wanted us to feel the things she feels and see the things she sees. That's why every song got its own video.

 Beyonces uses this visual medium to talk about things that are important to her. She uses this CD as a way to find and express her sexuality. She openly talks about how she struggled with rediscovering her femininity after giving birth which is something, that many women go through. She broke out of her old Beyonce mold and created a new one, she wants us to see her as she sees herself. She also uses this visual medium to talk about feminism and how we need it and the pressures that society puts on women. She knows that the best way for people to learn about these is issues is by being visual and I think she does an amazing job.

So yes Beyonce does tie into all of the things we are learning about, she is in fact a perfect example of how people use the media to spread knowledge and of course work up her sales. So why she's out there being ***Flawless I'm just like

All media work us over completly

This quote brings a lot into ones head when read, the first to me was it's not a proper sentence. But if you want to really look at the quote, even though it was written years ago it's still relevant today.Maybe it's even more relevant today. Because our society is so plugged in, I do feel that the media does work us over. Everyone today is constantly checking their phone or tablet or whatever is the new trend, we as a whole are obsessed with media. The idea reminds me of things along the lines of internet rumors. Every once in a while someone posts something online and then it travels. It travels across the internet and sometimes it makes it to things like news papers and news shows. But in reality it was just a rumor that has no merit to it. We are now a society of people who will believe anything that is presented to us. If its online it must be true, which is complete bullshit but that is how some people work.

The argument that the Internet makes us stupid isn't a new one nor is it going anywhere anytime soon. I feel like this argument comes out of fear and lack of understanding of what the Internet really is. while many from previous generations views the Internet as the mysterious thing that most people just use to look and porn and to stalk others, that's really not what it is. In the article "Is google making us Stupid" Nicholas Carr talks about how he no longer reads and that his attention span is so much shorter now because of the Internet. and that's great for him, but just because you feel like you're getting dumber doesn't mean the rest of the world is. I can tell you as an avid user of the Internet i still read just as much as i did before the Internet if not more. now there are more things to read and it is easier to gain access to information. for example now if i see something that interests  me i can google it and find dozens of articles on it and learn all about it. as much as i dislike the idea of e-readers i think they may be great for people. now you don't even need to leave the house to get new books. So while Carr may think he is getting dumber I feel like there are many others that are gaining more knowledge. It is really how you use the Internet that determines if people are getting dumber. If all you do is google pictures of boobs and skim articles then you  may be getting dumber, but if you do what i do and use the Internet to find new things and to get new books it may just be making you smarter.