I have played the alto saxophone at a SuperBowl:
I have played the piano at numerous recitals (those pictures are a wee bit too embarrassing and will not be viewed by the general public).
My love and passion for music has taken me around the world. I have met so many wonderful people and done so many great things. But the real joy I derive from playing music and performing in front of crowds is that feeling that the audience gets. That's my paradise.
(In fact, I'm actually listening to famed composer Hans Zimmer's Pandora radio station as I type).
I ride a motorcycle and while I know it is "illegal" I still listen to music as I ride.
For me music obtains the same kind of aura that Walter Benjamin's writes about. Music is art. Music is element and emotional. Music provides people with feelings of both sadness and happiness, much like any sculpture or painting. Music can be composed as a painting. That has aura of its own. And in that sense music has that lasting effect, that aura.
I have been blogging for quite some time, now. I almost don't want to attach a number to it because, well, I honestly don't know. But what I do know is that it's not often that my creative juice get to flow as organically as they have with the five assigned blogs. Just the mere Idea of the intertextual and cross-pollinating effect of the entire classes blogs, interacting with each other and having a hyper-lynxed conversation with each other, was amazingly creative. I never really had to be conversational with another blog. And I like that. Most blogs are independent beings because the authors of most blogs try so hard to trend set, while being the most creative, fresh and new. But the co-dependense that was asked of me in order to complete the blogging assignments was a welcomed challenge. It's also nice to other ideas and the passions of some of my pupils. I think five blogs is just enough (well, that is five blogs within the structure of a six week course). The word requirements for each blog is very reasonable. 200-300 words gave me the ability to not feel pressured with a heavy burden of writing for writing's sake. And there was really a bevy of reading material on top of the various videos we watched in class that went a long way in offering a massive amount of content to draw from, on top of out classmates blogs themselves. I looked forward to each and every blog assignment. I write mostly as a hard news reporter and so it felt good to be able to take off my journalist hat and put on my creative cap. Writing is important, especially for the people in this major. So, it was refreshing to finally have a class that really allowed me to embrace my creative side in a way that really felt like I was creating something of my own. And I feel like having the capability to interact with the other class blogs was an added bonus. If I was to offer any suggestions I was say that you could give a little bit more detail as far as the direction of which you want the first blogs to go in. If I'm being completely honest, I was a little bit lost on the first assignment. And perhaps that is not all your fault because I can be a little bit slow sometimes. But again, If I were you I would show some examples from last semesters blogs or perhaps create a mock blog yourself. That way you can diminish some of the confusion that might exist going forward. And again, If I'm being completely honest, students always have questions but for some reason we never want to actually ask them. I should've asked. The blogger application is also a really good blogging platform. There wasn't really a huge learning curve at all and I am a person who always thought Blogger was was too convoluted. Again, I don't know how anyone else feels about Blogger and I don't know if you have a choice on whether to use another platform or not, but in my opinion, Blogger is as intuitive as it gets. It was very easy to upload the videos and pictures. And I didn't have any trouble using the mobile version. Anyway, I really enjoyed the creative writing experience. I honestly didn't think that there would be as much writing as there was in a What IS A Text course. I came think that the course would be primarily filled with a heavy reading load. I was pleasantly surprised. And I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it.
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