Maddie H

Teen angst is a huge theme in most teenage movies, but Rebel Without a Cause doesn’t convey those emotions very well and it makes it hard to connect to the story and it’s characters.  

Wasabi’s song is also original in the way he performed it.  He programmed sounds through Ableton Live (a digital audio workstation) and performed them through his Midi Fighter 64 (the thing with buttons).  He’s redefined what finger drumming is for electronic musicians and fans with his complex rhythms, mastery of precision and speed for minutes on end.  This kind of music production is very new and takes a lot of skill at Wasabi’s level to sample, edit, compose, and perform music in this way.  He’s very creative with how he performs - from his advanced LED light shows, to using X-box controllers in other songs, as well as mini 4x4 launchpads which have only 16 buttons.  So while he may not have created the sounds he uses, the way he completely renovates them and performs them is undeniably original. 

One part in particular stuck out to me: “It’s easier to say you can’t when you know you can. It’s easier to let go than to hold somebody’s hand. But if you do, than you might just understand that it’s ok to not know where you’re going to land. Cause nothing’s ever over until I say it’s over.” It’s easy to give up - if it were easy to do well, no one would ever struggle.  But if you really want something (maybe it’s a relationship, a job, excelling in sports, etc) you have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone, and that’s where hope comes into play.  The line “it’s ok to not know where you’re going to land” is so true, because you must take risks in order to get anywhere in life because nothing will ever change if you chose comfort and take the easy, safe way out.  I think she meant “...nothing’s ever over until I say it’s over” to show that even when other people tell you to quit, when it seems like nothing’s going your way, it’s not the end until you decide to walk away from your goals.  Hope is the fuel for improvement, the water with which happiness flourishes, and it requires deliberate action and risk-taking for it to be effective.  In one of my books, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin had everything she had ever wanted - a great husband with two wonderful kids, a secure job, friends, close relationships with family, a house, but yet she still felt easily agitated and not has happy as she could be.  In this game of life, where everyone is striving to compete for more money, promotions, popularity, good grades, it’s easy to forget that life is better lived short but full of love rather than having a long life and realizing that you wasted it playing into the hands of the game and missing out on opportunities to accomplish your dreams.  

I chose Why Hope Matters In A World of Uncertainty by Kathy Gottberg.  After reading books of people with different experiences, and listening to hours of Inspirational Ted Talks, I decided to look for an article.   I really liked how she differentiated what hope is versus wishful thinking as well as citing the book of a professor from the University of Kansas to authorize her claims.  I learned that studies have shown that people who are more optimistic and hopeful tend to be  healthier, are more productive, and do better in school.  She explains how hope can’t just be wishful thinking, it must be harnessed and used to motivate oneself to create positive change and improvement through goals and strategies/mindsets to maintain working at those goals.  

I picked this image because of its symbolism.  I couldn’t help but notice the dark, bleak, uneven ground. The environment does not look fit at all for plant life, yet there’s a small beam of light shining on a sprouting plant.  I think the purpose of the image is to show that against all odds, despite any setbacks,  and no matter a person’s circumstances, growth and success can still happen. In the book I read, Big Love by Scott Stabile, Scott retells the loss of his parents and brother.  Despite all of his grief that came from those tragedies, he truly had hope in a better future and being open and loving towards others, and he channels this through his blog.  Rather than remain bitter and angry, he chose to use his experiences to give others hope in tough times.  

I love listening to Ted talks, so I of course turned to one to get another perspective on what hope means, what hope is, and why it matters.  The Ted Talk I picked is The Extraordinary Power of Ordinary People by Sherwin Nuland.  I love the title because a teacher of mine always reminded us that “our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”.  Everyone has the ability to do incredible things, you just have to have hope that they you are capable, that there is more to life than going to school and getting a job and eventually dying.  Nuland mentions something that really stuck out to me, about where the root of the word hope comes from.  It comes from curve, or a change in direction which he connects to how hope is about looking in directions that were not considered before.  His perspective on hope is interesting and different from others that I have researched as he is a surgeon who makes clear that he doesn’t belief in a “divine being” as he is very skeptic, but that he believes that the human spirit is what is capable of “saving the world”.  He says something profound, “...this ability that each of us has to be something greater than herself, or himself, to arise from our ordinary selves, and to achieve something that perhaps at the beginning we thought we were not capable of.”  That’s an amazing description of what hope in action is.

The two books are written by people with very different life stories, yet have the same message of allowing yourself to open your mind and heart to love, hope, and allowing yourself to be happier by deliberately doing things to improve their lives.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2961282/The-ten-guilt-free-foods-burn-calories-contain.html

From my educational experience at high school, I want real world experience and understanding of what is expected of me to make a living in the world outside the bubble I live in - the one where homework and GPA and grades seem to define your very worth as a person. I want my education to help me to build people skills, presentation skills, and work ethic. I want my education to teach me things like how to get a student loan, how to prepare for college and scholarships outside of SAT scores and being a star athlete. I want to know how to cook food that isn't mac n cheese, how to get an internship, and make a portfolio for colleges that will set me apart. I want my education to teach me how to have fun yet still be productive. I want to learn, to be challenged, to think beyond the surface.

I saw a cover online of the wii music and felt both compelled to play it and also really nostalgic. Hoping to incorporate it into my final presentation.

I heard a mashup of Moon and HNSCC by the 1975 on YouTube and I thought it was really beautiful.  I hadn’t realized that they had very similar/identical chord structures and slow tempos in the song.  I ended up making a live mashup of it by loading each song onto a different launch clip and triggering them when I wanted them to mash together :) 

Slowing bpm can make pretty much any song sound 10x better

just figured out how to program several sound samples to different keys or have one same sample on all of them in varying pitch and tempo!! :) sound sample credit: madeon