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TaiaI am in the Liberal Arts college majoring in psychology. I am a Sagittarius, and love to talk about music!

Essay Rough Draft Progress

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When looking at urban development a lot of times we see glorious cities. Strong, metal, tall buildings lining the map, filling the skyline around us. So much so, it might seem like that’s all there is in the world, but there is more than just what humans have created and some artists are starting to recognize this. Nature has not always been at the center of urban development, it often is considered last when building something new. Some people believe that as humans we need to connect with nature to continue to grow as a species and yet as I found through my artifacts sometimes that connection is interpreted differently. When looking at my first artifact, a photographic series called Wild Concrete, a photographer named Romain Jacquet-Lagreze studied the way nature endures through destruction. While my second artifact that deals with this same concept, challenges this idea. Whether or not it is ok to believe in the commonplace that nature will always endure through that destruction. 

The photographic series, Wild Concrete by Jacquet-Lagreze enhances and focuses on the belief in this commonplace. Lagreze has had many series focused on how nature evolves and changes but with this particular one he focused on how nature endures and even grows with urban development as its strengths. The artifact I am focusing on is what appears to be a run down apartment building. It is falling apart at the seams, there are cracks in the foundation that run up the sides. There are windows missing and pieces of concrete here and there. Yet, as you view the artifact you also see this bright green tree growing from it. The leaves are wrapping around it and at the very top you can see the tree almost seemingly as healthy as it could be. Lagreze when photographing the artifact is wanting to send out the message to whoever is interpreting it; nature will endure. Even when humans eventually leave, or die, nature will still be here no matter what. The photograph itself is being viewed and taken through a temporal lens. It has the audience asking questions about the present of the environment around us. If we are actually impacting it with our development of cities or it just seems like it. Also, the future of the environment, what is the future of cities and nature together and apart and what role does urban development play in all of this. Through these are introspective questions about time, it has viewers commonplace solidified, reassuring their widely held belief. If that blossoming tree surrounded by the destruction and deterioration of what humans built around it could endure, then why cant nature as a whole. [going to develop further on the image, look more closely of elements in the photo] 

Looking at the artifact even closer we can address it through the element of pathos that it creates. Though the photograph is not really viewed through an ethos and logos lens as it does not rely on knowledge nor builds up a sense of trust it does provoke certain emotions in the viewer. Reassurance is the first emotion the audience might feel viewing the artifact. Reassurance that what the news is reporting, what their peers are saying about the state of the environment is not necessarily true. Urban development isn’t ruining the planet, and that everything will be just fine. Whether that is actually the case or not is up for debate but the fact that even the photo itself has symbolism in it that the pathos comes out of. [going to develop more on the symbolism and how it is shown] It is this wonderful picture of a tree seemingly growing out of the building rather than on the side or on top of it. The tree is thriving, it is growing in an environment we don’t usually see trees survive in. It is hope for the future despite the circumstances and conveys a feeling that not everything is as bad as it seems. The pathos of the artifact impacts the decisions that architects and city planners are making day to day, though it might not leave a huge impact it whispers in the back of the mind of the audience and influences the course of urban development and nature. 

When it comes to my second artifact, it is a photo of Chernobyl after the nuclear explosion that challenges instead of encouraging the commonplace that nature will endure. The photo depicts what seems to be an abandoned and run down fairground.  The seats on the attraction are rusted and broken and the ferris wheel is barely holding on. Even the ground where the cement isn’t, it is lifeless. There is no grass, and the trees are bare bones with no green in sight. In contrast to the Wild Concrete artifact this photo is jarring. It visually pulls your eyes to so many places, leaving you with a despondent feeling. Taking in the rhetorical situation that this artifact takes place in it is clear that at the time… [going to expand on the pathos and examine the image even further]

Moana: Subjectively the Best Disney Movie

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“I am Moana of Motunui. You will board my boat, sail across the sea, and restore the heart of Te Fiti.”

Decidedly, this whole post is going to be me showing my whole heart because I just absolutely adore Moana in so many ways. If you haven’t seen Moana and don’t really like Disney movies it’s the perfect mix of reality with actual struggles we face everyday and that light-heartedness that comes with every Disney movie.

Moana follows the story of a young girl who is raised in a village who puts the community and each other over everything. They raise kids, farm, cook, grow, and thrive as one and Moana herself is the daughter of the village chief. From the very beginning of her life Moana has this huge thing expected of her. No matter what she has to stick by what the village has always done, and one of those things is to not travel out into the water. This first idea is what made me fall in love with the movie, we as students, kids, and adults have faced expectations from the people in our life. Expectations that we can feel the weight of everyday and yet still might find ourselves falling into a pattern of what people want us to do, rather then what we love.

(Baby Moana was so adorable)

Moana loves the sea, she has a special connection as its shown through song and scenes how much the ocean calls out to her. Her dad on the other has forbidden it and when things start to die in the village, plants going black, the soil drying out he sticks by what he has always known. Even now, older, watching Moana again for the hundredth time I can see where I become invested and frustrated with what’s happening in the movie. Why cant Moana’s dad just let her try? Why wont he support what she loves to do? Why does it seem like he doesn’t believe in her? Disney is taking these everyday problems that come up between parents and their children and framing it in such a way that captivates their audience and pulls on heartstrings.

(Te Fiti without her heart that was stolen)

As the movie progresses we see Moana start to struggle with herself internally, knowing that if she puts the heart of Te Fiti, a mystical stone that was calming an ancient god back that her village will be restored but to do that she has to turn her back on them first, by herself, and that might be one of the hardest things she has ever done. This journey of self exploration is what makes Moana such an important and loveable movie for kids of all ages and even adults can turn to it in those moments they might not know what to do. Seeing Moana learn to embrace the unknown and start her own journey, when she decides to sail a boat and restore the heart of Te Fiti, rather than the one that has always been expected of her might help someone out their own journey too.

“They have stolen the heart from inside you, but this does not define you.”

(The link will lead you to the song “Know Who You Are”)

I could write so much about this movie, how it challenges your idea of what to expect in an antagonist, how it highlights the importance of balance in family, and gives reassurance to those who might be lost with themselves. Moana is a movie I highly recommend anyone watch whether you are 5 or 25 years old, It has so many more moments and funny songs I haven’t even touched on here and can truly make you laugh or smile on a hard day.

RCL Essay Introduction

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When looking at urban development a lot of times we see glorious cities. Strong, metal, tall buildings lining the map, filling the skyline around us. So much so, it might seem like that’s all there is in the world, but there is more than just what humans have created and some artists are starting to recognize this. Nature has not always been at the center of urban development, it often is considered last when building something new. First comes where we should put this new housing, then comes “what are we going to do to lighten up the place?” Some people believe that as humans we need to connect with nature to continue to grow as a species and yet as I found through my artifacts sometimes that connection is interpreted differently. When looking at my first artifact, a photographic series called Wild Concrete, a photographer named Romain Jacquet-Lagreze studied the way nature endures through destruction. While my second artifact challenges this idea and makes us question whether this commonplace of just believing nature will endure through that destruction is the right thing to do.

Speech/Essay Outline:

  • Intro/Thesis
  • [1] wild concrete introduce it, rhetorical situation, the why for the artifact and thoughts
  • [1] Temporal/pathos, ethos, and logos the what and how of the artifact
  • [1] The over all commonplace and how it relates back to both artifacts
  • [2] intro to my second artifact, comparative element
  • [2] difference between what certain pathos, ethos, or logos each artifact creates
  • (thinking about another paragraph but not sure yet)
  • conclusion

Mulan: The Start of the Empowerment of Women

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Mulan is one of the greatest Disney movies that was made in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. For it’s time it was revolutionary, inventive and all around a heartwarming movie that taught so many lessons in it but I’m going to try an address a few of them in this blog. Usually I focus on Disney movies that didn’t turn out how they wanted it too, but this week I wanted to shine a light on one of my favorites.

Mulan is a young girl who’s living in a country fraught with war all around her. She has grown up with certain expectations of her, when she will marry, when will she grow up and start to become more a “woman” (whatever that means at the time) and yet she can’t help but feel that she wants- no needs more in life. Disney from the beginning with Mulan gives us a character that young girls can relate with, mostly every girl around the world has felt like they were being pressured into a certain image or look a certain way for the people around her. She is struggling with her identity even more as the movie progresses, the war getting closer and the expectations of her growing. Disney gives us one of the most amazing songs, “Reflection” as Mulan battles internally not knowing if who she is anymore is for the people around her or who she really is.

In Chinese culture cutting your hair can signify a huge change, or the loss of something.

Mulan, like most of us, does everything she can to find herself and with that comes in taking her dad’s place in the war disguising herself as a man and determined to fight for her family no matter what. The way Disney weaves in the lesson of how important family is and staying true to yourself is portrayed in the most amazing way. We are left rooting for Mulan and her journey of finding herself and also interested in how she is going to keep up the cover of pretending to be man surrounded by so many men while training.

Yessss

I know this blog is about breaking down the plot of Disney movies but I have to mention the song, “I’ll make a man out of you.” that beautifully shows through song how Mulan is figuring out who she is, fighting through doubts from herself and peers and even proving that she’s there for a reason and is going to show that. The way Disney uses the idea that being a man means being a certain way and switching it on its axis by Mulan doing what the rest of her peers couldn’t do was a rare thing for a movie at the time and really needs to be applauded.

I could go on and on about Mulan, every scene almost but in the end Mulan is a movie that Disney did right with. It showed her journey, her growth, her strength, and most importantly gave a beautiful representation for so many different types of people to look too.

A Love Story With a Price

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What is Beauty and The Beast really about?

I want to start off by saying that this blog is not about absolutely demolishing Beauty and The Beast, it is a movie that even I watched as a kid. Though it was not my favorite when it came on the tv I didn’t turn the channel to something else. This instead, is about shedding light on certain messages that Disney doesn’t know they’re conveying, and in this movie it is all about how Belle is characterized in one way but then almost completely different towards the end of the movie.

Belle is a independent, headstrong, and stubborn women from a French village. She lives with her father and reads as she does chores around the town. The village people ridicule her as she refuses to marry or to stop reading the books she holds so dearly. In fact, Gaston, a man who has been trying to win her favor for what seems like a while proposes to her and she laughs in his face saying she would never marry him.

reallllyyyy, she falls in love with this man?

As the movie progresses we see Belle go to great lengths to save her father who had been captured by the Beast just for trying to grab a flower for Belle. She stands up to the Beast, trading places with her father and gets throw into a prison. The Beast essentially becomes her capturer, and makes sure she knows she is not going anywhere. Disney wants the story to be one of great love like all the rest of their movies but as the story unfolds it becomes more and more apparent that the way the Beast treats Belle she should never according to her character fall in love with him. In fact for more than half the movie Belle hates the Beast refusing to eat at dinners with him until he forces her, and doesn’t even speak to him for a lot of it.

This is how how Belle is portrayed and this is how children view her until she starts to fall in love with the Beast. Suddenly it seems like the Belle we’ve known throughout the movie transitions into someone different, a women that now that she is in love looses that part of herself because Disney needs the love story to be a certain way.

Belle herself will always be an icon for the way she stands up for herself and works against the societal pressures she faces for her time. I just wish Disney could have kept that fire alive even while she fell in love.

Richard Ronzio’s Thoughts on Populism

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While listening to the elevator pitches Richards caught my eye as he presented a topic I had not heard of before with a campaign I wish I didn’t know so much about. He elevator speech was concise and packed with information that left me wanting to know more. He leaves room to address his topic fully in his essay while giving a great general sense of what he will be talking about. He address Donald Trump’s campaign through an ideological lens choosing an artifact that truly fit what he choose to analyze. Without growing into great detail, he explained populism and how it relates to the artifact and Trump gaining so much support so quickly. I liked how, though Trump greatly deserves it, he did not throw shade on Trump but stuck to what the he was trying to convey with his artifact. The pitch made it clear he was focused on looking at populism and its affects with the artifact he chose and not straying from that. When it pertains to the artifact itself I think he choose a really strong one. It has so much he could analyze in it and very clearly relates to what he is pulling from the artifact itself.

Frozen: The Villainization of Elsa

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How Disney failed at teaching an important lesson.

When I choose to do my passion blog about how strange Disney movies were, I knew my first post was going to be about my favorite childhood movie; Frozen. Frozen tells the story of two sisters Anna and Elsa and how they react and grow from their death of their parents. With the added layer of Elsa having ice powers, everything quickly turns south.

Elsa from a very young age was told to keep her powers hidden, to “Conceal, not feel” and to “Put on a show.” Her parents believed she was a danger to others and Disney convinced viewers she was too. Disney throughout the movie is trying to teach the lesson of not judging a book by its cover but what it really leaves viewers with is a sense that people different from us are strange or evil even. 

Elsa, now all grownup is about to take on the weight of being queen of Arendelle (The country her parents once ruled) as she still holds her parents lessons on her shoulders. Disney pushes the idea that Elsa can not control herself, by having her wear gloves or have to calm herself down in moments of high stress. That couldn’t be further from the truth as Elsa has held an inconceivable amount of strength after her parents death, not lashing out, and isolating her self from everyone else including her sister even though she wants nothing more to be there for her.

As the movie progresses Elsa is faced with the harsh judgement of the town as her powers are revealed when Anna tells her she is getting married with or without her permission. Immediately people call a monster, evil, and Elsa runs. When I used to watch the movie when I was younger I didn’t understand why her own people would be so mean to her. And even now re-watching the movie for the hundredth time I can see where Disney went wrong.

(The a u d a c i t y)

The moment Hans leads the charge against Elsa and seemingly takes over her role as the leader of Arendelle is where Disney lets a man villainize a female character and take control of her story. Now, personally to me, Elsa is always going to be powerful and independent, but to all those little kids watching Frozen they aren’t going to analyze the movie the way I am now.

 

Hopefully, with time those kids will grow up and view Frozen just the way I do. The story of a women who is struggling to figure out who she is and gets ridiculed for it, overcomes what people think about her and becomes stronger for it. All with her sister by her side who never gave up or doubted her.

The Abiding Strength of Nature: Artifact Pitch

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(Romain Jacquet-Lagreze: Wild Concrete series, 2014)

What connects us as humans beings to nature? I answer: Endurance.

 Many artists take the subject of nature and use it in their paintings, sculptures, and drawings to convey any sort of message they feel is most important. Artists like Romain Jacquet-Lagreze want to compare the conditions between plants and humans and the tough environment they grow out of.

When looking at this artifact there is many lens I could address it through for example commonplaces, a rhetorical situation, or a social movement study. The topic of nature is so wide but as I close in on it, viewing it as a part of a comparison with us as humans and how though not the same still find a way to endure through hardships. I can narrow down what the impact and influence of this particular artifact creates.

 

Thinking about this artifact and how it relates to our everyday lives, living in an urban environment ourselves, we can make emotional connections to the art pieces and might even find ourselves wanting to fight for a cause we had not before.

Thank you

 

 

Sources:

https://www.boredpanda.com/wild-concrete/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

The Persuasiveness of the Unconscious

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Or what Martin Luther King Jr was on about...

When looking at different commonplaces throughout history they usually pair with huge civic events that happen. Politicians, preachers, and teachers all use commonplaces to persuade their audience into listening to what they are trying to convey.  Martin Luther King Jr uses the commonplace of “dreaming” in his speech “I Have Dream” during the March on Washington.  Dreaming from a country to a classroom influences the way people act and think about the world around them. It what some people think is our unconscious desires, and leads us in life. As Martin Luther King Jr was giving his speech  he was using the commonplace and rhetorical situation that he was in to persuade people to fight for civil and economic rights. It was the height of the civil rights movement, and he needed people to be even more encouraged, and want to keep fighting for this cause that the whole country was aware of.  As the crowd was listening to his speech, they were considering the commonplace of dreaming and how his words affected and related to their own life. The March on Washington helped pave the way for the ratification of the twenty-fourth amendment to the United States Constitution and Martin Luther King Jr knew he could use the heightened emotions of the crowd for what he needed to convey. He was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement and knew how to influence the world around him.

“Why So Serious?”

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 The troubles of being indecisive

When brain-storming different ideas for my passion blog I struggled with whether or not it should reflect my more serious passions like mental health, or my more fun passions, like baking very hard desserts that never will turn out well. All I could think of was the Joker taunting Batman in the Dark Knight movie. I eventually, after several packages of cookies, decided on two topics for my passion blog that fall into the two categories. The first being “Am I crazy? Destigmatizing Mental Health,” and the second being “Disney Movies are really weird.”

Clearly they are way off from each other when it comes to how serious the topics is but for either one I would have so much to develop on.  For my more serious topic each week I would address a different mental health issue or develop on the one I had talked about the week before with the intent of trying to give a different perspective on a mental illness that might not be shown all of the time. I would love if I can help some people in the class understand depression, or bipolar disorder in a new light. When it comes to my more fun topic, each week I would look at a different Disney movie whether it be old or new and give my thoughts on how it may not be as appears and what strange lessons were given throughout it. I am horribly indecisive, should I go with the more fun topic, or deep dive into a more serious one? I wonder which the Joker would choose.