Blog #10: Fish Out of Water

My First Time At A Death Metal Show

When I told my boyfriend about my “Fish Out of Water” assignment his eyes lit up. “Babe, I have a great idea.” He said. “You always drag me to swanky bars with your girlfriends, you can come to my friends metal show this weekend.”

This sounded like an awful idea, not only do I hate metal, but I really, really hate metal. But I figured since I “drag” him to my “swanky” (this is an major exaggeration on his part) bars, I would see what a metal show was all about.

The term “Fish Out of Water” seems a little sugar coated for how I felt.

We arrived at 7 p.m. Iron Maiden songs were the only ones I recognized from the stereo as the first band set up, and this is only because my brother is a huge fan and would always play their music.

The show was at the Blue Lagoon in Santa Cruz, this bar is known for being dirty, filled with sleazy people, and having cheap, bad drinks. Just being there, I felt out of place.

As time went by, more and more black-clad metal heads arrived and milled about on the sidewalk. My skinny jeans, brightly colored top, and five-inch heels made me stick out like a sore thumb, but no one seemed to care about my presence.

Around 8 p.m., the first band went on, and played some interesting music under a red light in the dimly lit bar. My boyfriend said it wasn’t death metal. It was too slow. I think he categorized it as “doom.”

One thing I learned from this experience was there are many more sub-genres to metal than I ever realized. And the fact that the songs were in Spanish made no difference, given you could not distinguish words from the lead singer’s guttural vocals anyways.

At one point my boyfriend looked over at me, and just started laughing, apparently I looked like a deer in headlights, eyes wide and mouth just slightly open in awe.

After the second band and my second drink I felt a little bit more comfortable. I actually knew one of the musicians in the band, so even though I didn’t really enjoy the music, it was fun to watch him rock out on stage.

Around 11p.m. I had my fill of metal for the night, and probably my lifetime. It was definitely an eye opening experience, to say the least.

Next time I try to get my boyfriend to go to one of my bars, I’ll think twice about dragging him, in order to get out of going to one of his.

Word of the Week:

Word # 10

1. Malevolent

2. The Art Of War by Steven Pressfeild

3. Though it feels malevolent, resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same law as the stars.

4. Wishing evil or harm to another or others, showing ill will, ill-disposed, malicious.

5. His failures made him malevolenttoward those who were successful.

Targeting Audiences

This is a two-page ad for Juicy Couture fragrance from InStyle magazine. Both sides of the ad claim “Do the Dont’s,” on one side the “Don’t” is “SPOIL YOURSELF” and the other is “ SHOW OFF.”

The intended audience for this ad is women age 18-35 and are into fashion. Juicy Couture is known for being an expensive line so they would be at a middle or higher income level to afford it.

The women targeted could be students to working professionals who enjoy going out, being social, love fashion, don’t mind spending money, and want to feel, smell, and look pretty.

Since the tagline in the ads claim “SPOIL YOURSELF” and “SHOW OFF” it might also target women who are a little more shallow and conceited. They might live a lifestyle of caring a little bit too much about appearance and showing off that appearance.

I don’t believe education level has anything to do with it, since girls in high school to soccer moms to celebrities all love Juicy Couture.

The key message in the advertisement is to be pretty, smell good and have fun doing it. It’s more of an artistic ad and it’s on thicker matte paper and is two pages long, which lets you know that Juicy Couture can afford to run more expensive ads.

It’s intended for a less involved audience because there aren’t many words or instructions.

It’s an eye-catching and unique ad. There are no celebrity or expert source in the ad, just pretty models showing you that by wearing Juicy Couture fragrance you can “SPOIL YOURSELF” and “SHOW OFF” too.

Blog # 9: Japanese Internment

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America declared war on Japan. All the Japanese immigrants living in the U.S. at the time became suspect as people who could aid and abet the enemy or even become enemy combatants.

On February 19, 1942, soon after the beginning of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered the round-up and relocation of 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage to one of 10 internment camps, officially called “relocation centers,” in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. More than two-thirds of the Japanese who were interned were citizens of the United States.

The U.S. internment camps were overcrowded and provided poor living conditions. According to a 1943 report published by the War Relocation Authority, Japanese Americans were housed in "tarpaper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind."

One of the thousands of internees was Ruth Asawa, the creator and artist of the Japanese Internment Memorial in San Jose. Asawa was 16 when she was forced into the camps with her family. She and her family were placed in the horse stalls of the Santa Anita racetrack. In her mural, an image of the horses being removed from the stalls and hundreds of people filing in, stands out, among others.

For many, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life caused irreparable harm. For Asawa, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life.

In 1994, when she was 68 years old, she reflected on the experience: "I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am."

The memorial created by Asawa is a two-sided panel that sits in front of the federal courthouse in San Jose. The piece depicts scenes of immigration, internment during World War II and the current Japanese-American community.

San Jose was a significant location during the Japanese Internment. San Jose was a huge farming community, and had a very large Japanese population. It was one of the first stops when the government ordered the gathering of people of Japanese heritage. San Jose State’s Uchida Hall was once a transfer point for Japanese Americans to internment camps.

I think that Asawa really connected the memorial to San Jose by including the family crests of the residents interned from Santa Clara County.

Her images and recreated scenes tell the story of the Japanese immigrants from their arrival in the U.S. to the end of the internment period.

There are stories of closed shops, burned belongings, and lost loved ones. Barbed wire surrounds Asawa’s pictures much like the Japanese were surrounded in their camps. There are large guard towers shown in the center of the memorial and the cramped and uncomfortable living conditions can also be seen.

I believe this country has overcome much of its racial and ethnic bias that would trigger interning a whole group of people based on their ethnicity, although certain groups still face discrimination. After 9-11 Middle Eastern people were discriminated against unfairly and some even lost their jobs or were shunned in their communities. This shows, that as a country, although we have overcome some bias, we haven’t overcome it all, and some people never will.

Word of the Week:

Word # 9

1. Chit

2. Scrabble game

3. N/A

4. A signed note for money owed for food, drink, etc. A brief note

5. You must hand in a chit stating your expenses before you receive any money.

Blog Post #8-IMHO

When kids talk about school being intolerable they are usually referring to test, reports, and homework, but when Pheobe Prince told her friend “school has been close to intolerable lately,” she wasn’t talking about the schoolwork. She was talking about the months of bullying she had endured; the bullying that got so vicious that, at only 15 years old, she took her own life.

Nine teens were indicted on March 29, 2010 in connection with the girl's death including: two teen boys charged with statutory rape and a clique of girls charged with stalking, criminal harassment, and violating Phoebe's civil rights. These charges came almost three months after Pheobe’s younger sister found her hanging in the stairwell of their family home.

I have heard and read many stories like Pheobe’s, and sadly this is not the only story of a teenager taking her/his own life because of the anguish brought on by bullying and tormenting. Bullying is becoming a disturbingly frequent occurrence in not only schools in the U.S. but all over the world, and it’s time to put a stop to it.

According to a study done throughout 13 countries by Yale School of Medicine, there are connections between bullying, being bullied, and suicide in children and teenagers. Suicide is the fifth leading cause of death among those 5-14 years old, the third leading cause of death among those 15-24 years old, and among young people aged 10-14 years, the rate has doubled in the last two decades.

I believe not only are the kids being bullied at risk, the kids doing the bullying can have effects lasting long after leaving school. Youth who bully frequently during adolescence are more likely to be aggressive and to have criminal records as adults.

I know most people think bullying is just part of growing up, but research done by The International Bullying Prevention Association, shows that 50% reduction rates in bullying are possible.

So why is it still happening? Why aren’t schools doing more to protect their students? And why do kids think the only way out is by taking their own lives?

Stop Bullying Now! a program started by The International Bully Prevention Association did a three-year study in Colorado schools in 2005. The program was to help youths and adults in school districts, schools, and communities intervene in and prevent bullying through training, networking, practice sessions and other strategies.

The findings show that bullying declined over the three-year initiative. The percentage of students reporting that they continued to bully others fell by 12 percent. Physical bullying dropped by 9 percent and verbal bullying, which included cyber bullying, decreased by 5 percent.

I believe that we implement programs like these in schools across the country and the world we can put a stop to bullying and even save a life.

Word of the Week:

Word #8

1. Grievances

2. The American Dream by Jim Cullen.

3. Most of us walk around with some sense of grievances that sparked the conflict-- taxes on tea, something about stamps--but the list is hard to keep straight because it is essentially trivial.

4. An actual or supposed circumstance regarded as just cause for complaint.

5. The students filed a grievance because they believed the university denied them free speech.

Blog Post #7: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

In ZZ Packer's book of short stories titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, I chose to read the story "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere."

The title refers to the main character's coping strategy, namely pretending to be somewhere else when the pain she is enduring becomes too much. “I remembered the morning after my mother’s funeral. I had been given milk to settle my stomach; I’d pretended it was coffee. I imagined myself drinking coffee elsewhere.”

In this story a character, Dina, remembers a moment when she ran away from a boy who offered to carry her bags home from the store. Instead of accepting the offer, she remembers running off in fright, dropping everything in her hasty flight because she was afraid he'd see the shabby neighborhood she lived in.

As a college student, she is a similar woman, though she uses dark humor and sarcasm to separate herself from her classmates at Yale instead of physically running away. Dina lives in a fantasyland, where she needs no one. But in reality she has no one.

Packer uses very detailed descriptions and paints a picture of her characters and she uses similes and metaphors to help the reader envision exactly what she is try to convey.

“The girl turned to me, smiling weakly, as though her triumph was not in getting me to open the door but in the fact that she was able to smile at all when she was so accustomed to crying. She was large, but not obese, and crying had turned her face to color of raw chicken.”

Her use of humor and sarcasm also helps the reader get a deeper connection into the minds of the characters. During orientation games, when she is asked what inanimate object she would like to be, Dina replies "a revolver." As a result, she is referred for psychiatric counseling and assigned a "suicide single" dorm room.

Packer uses a variety of descriptions and writing techniques to engage her readers, and they work, you can lose yourself in her stories.