PSU-Party School?

          When I first plugged in my headphones and started to listen to the podcast I felt the reporters were being a little biased. Here they were sitting up in the early hours of the morning waiting for drunk college students to walk by so they could use them as examples. However, I also felt the woman's annoyance at them was justified. Why does she deserve people peeing in her yard and ripping signs off of her street. On one hand I can sympathize with her because it really is unfair that she should be subject to this because she lives in a college town. On the other hand I can understand how it is to want to do crazy stupid things and be young. When your friend is peeing in the grass next to someones lawn you often don't stop and think.....wait, how would the person feel if they knew she was doing this? Instead the only thing on your mind is that you want to have fun, or really don't want to see your friend pee her pants.

          I believe that there was a sense of balance throughout the piece so that even when Penn State maybe wasn't portrayed in the best light, the reporters did relate to the students and admit they were the same way when they were younger. I also feel that even though there were heavy parts in the podcast there was a bit of humor to lighten the mood. For me, I feel as if the party scene was portrayed fairly accurately. There are still bus rides on the weekends where drunk people sing songs and you can still see people doing dumb stuff like stealing street signs or throwing garbage cans. The part where the guy at the frat was saying he just wanted to get the girl drunk so he could take advantage of her was funny and probably true. A lot of my girl friends want to get drunk and have fun and a lot of the guys want to get the girls drunk so they can have fun later.

          The most shocking and provocative part of the podcast for me was when they were talking about all the deaths that have occurred at Penn State due to drinking. I think the scariest part of it was the "averageness" off all the nights and how it could relate to anyone. As humans we have this thought process that it will never happen to us. We will never go to jail because we'll never be dumb enough to do something that will put us in jail, we'll never get in an accident because we're really good drivers. However, I feel the podcast did a good job showing how this could really happen to anyone because it's not like the people who died did anything crazier than what we do on our weekends. They didn't drink any more than we do or act crazier than we do. This was enlightening because it made me think, if these people did the same things that we do then what is to stop us from becoming like them?

Defining Art

           Art isn't like baseball or video games. OK, well bad examples but my point is that art isn't easily defined. While we have set characteristics of what a video game is and why swimming can't be considered baseball, how do we say what is or isn't art? Some people consider poetry or music to be art while others believe that only paintings and drawings can be considered art.  And even when we look at different paintings and drawings there is still confusion as to what is art. Do we consider abstract paintings to be art or a mess of paint on a canvas? If we consider music to be a form of art is rap music art or simply people talking fast?
       I believe art is an expression of ones self or of anything really,that takes skill and imagination. Therefore, art can be dance, song, poetry, stories, sculptures, paintings, pictures and more. My reasoning is that it takes skill to dance, sing, write stories or poems, to paint, draw, make a sculpture and capture a scene just right so that it expresses what you want it to. While doing all these things you are also putting yourself out and expressing yourself or what you are going through. This is why art is often something that historians look at to see what history was like.  Stories like the Grapes of Wrath capture the hard times that people faced during the Dust Bowl in the 1930's and the sense of desperation that they felt. Maybe I'm going too far but my point is, if you look at art you can get a sense of history through what people were feeling during that time.
   
One of my favorite works of art is called Relativity by M.C. Escher. http://www.scottmcd.net/artanalysis/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Escher.jpg

My first reaction when I encountered this lithograph in one of my art classes was a sense of uneasiness. I wasn't sure if I liked it or not because I didn't understand it. Why were there so many staircases and which way was up? Was there even an up, down, left or right? After I got over my initial confusion I realized that I liked the painting because it was so provocative and open to interpretation. It wasn't like the usual paintings of fruit or people, instead it was unique and mysterious. I believe the title Relativity is appropriate because you decide which way is up or down relative to where you are standing. Though  impossible, it depicts a world in which the normal laws of gravity don't exist and this impossibility displayed in art is interesting to me because art is one of the places where artists can make the impossible seem possible. I would definitely classify Relativity as art because it is an expression of life that took skill and a great amount of imagination to make the impossible seem possible.