Whats up with me? (Status Update)

"Transmissions From Camp Trans"
The claim is that just because they are transsexual women, they should not be excluded from joining MWMF. the style that it was written in seems to be Rogerian.

"Dark Webs Goth Subcultures in Cyberspace"
The claim here is that Goths use cyberspace to communicate with each other, shares beliefs and ideas and to also weed out posers. This style is Toulmin.

"The Truck Stop as Community and Culture"
The claim here is that truckers can be compared to cowboys. This seems like the classical style.

"House for the Homeless"
The claim is that eventhough some people are homeless it does not mean that they are worthless and lazy. This is Rogerian.

Where im at in the paper?
I have done most of the reasearch, but i still would like to visit another fieldsite because i need more observation. I still need to get my ideas together, organize my research and come up with a claim.

My question for peer review is: Does the rest of my paper stick to the theme?

My fieldsite

What is going on in the field site?
When you first walk into the afterlife club, immediately you are engulfed in the smoke. Inside people are smoking while listening to the music which was very loud. I was not used to the sound of the heavy beats so it took me a while to get used to it and not make weird faces because I did not understand the music. Some people were sitting by the bar ordering beers and other alcoholic beverages. Then you had the people who were dancing intensely to the bands.
How do the members of the subculture interact with each other?
The people of this subculture interact like others at a club. They greeted the people who they knew with open arms and they were just free spirits. When the different bands came on stage and started playing a song, everyone immediately started yelling and getting extra excited because they all knew what song the band was about to play.
What details, behaviors, and surroundings did you have questions about?
I had questions about why they people there danced they way they did. How they understood the words to the music they were hearing.
At first, I was a little hesitant to ask the people about a question I had because they were all so wrapped up in their own worlds but I had a friend with me and she helped me out. I asked how they were able to listen to the music and understand the words and also why they danced the way they did. Basically, she told me that they got used to it. They have been hearing the music for so long that it just comes to them naturally and they cam tune out the music and hear the words. The reason they danced the way they did is because they just flow with the music. They are not conscious of who’s watching because they are all doing the same things. After going to this one little club, I still feel I need to find another field site because I felt it was a little one-sided because it was a musical environment.

Prison Performing Acts

The author chose to go dierectly to the place where this criminals are being redirected towards a postive way of life. What makes this a good fieldsite is that he was able to go directly to the place where these criminals carry out their somewhat normal lives. He was able observe them in natural environment. The observations that the author made were that most of the criminals do not like to go back and explore their past life. They all say that they are better people now rather than to do back and acknowledge the things that they did to get them to this place. He also said that they felt like cowards for doing those harmful things. The interview techniques that the author used was that he just sat down and talked to them one on one. He just casually talked to them which made them more comfortable to give up information even when they were reluctant to do so.The norms and values of this culture were pretty evident. Almost all of the residents did not graduate high school and some have as low as a third grade eduation. This is also another reason they are here to get some help in these ares. They have the same routines everyday that they must abide to like for example, every time they go for their acting sessions they must be stripped of all their clothing to ensure safety. Their values have changed from their time before entering this place to now. The believe in being eduacted and peaceful and changing for the bset to come.

Subcultures

Topic: Punk Alternative Culture
Sources:
O’Connor, Alan. “Local Scenes and Dangerous Crossroads: Punk and Theories of Cultural Hybridity,
Popular Music, May 2002.” JSTOR. January 4, 2008. Sun Microsystems. 13 Mar. 2008 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=02611430%28200205%2921%3A2%3C225%3ALSADCP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8


Tsitsos, William. “Rules of Rebellion: Slamdancing, Moshing and the American Alternative Scene,
Popular Music, Oct. 1999.” JSTOR. January 4, 2008. Sun Microsystems. 13 Mar. 2008 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=02611430%28199910%2918%3A3%3C397%3ARORSMA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

Pinkus, Karen. “Self-Repretation in Futurism and Punk, South Central Review, Summer 1996.” JSTOR.

January 4, 2008. Sun Microsystems. 13 Mar. 2008 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=07436831%28199622%2F23%2913%3A2%2F3%3C180%3ASIFAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O



Nyong’o, Tavia. “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and
Queer in the 1970s, Radical History Review, Winter 2008.” EBSCOhost. 13 Mar. 2008 http://ezproxy.gsu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=27788277&loginpage=Login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site


Linden, Amy. “PUNK 365, Bust, Jan 2008.” EBSCOhost. 13 Mar. 2008
http://ezproxy.gsu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=27619263&loginpage=Login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site



Reflection: I really liked the Rules of Rebellion: Slamdancing, Moshing and the American Alternative Scene because the title was very catching. This article gave me more insight on what different things I could talk about within this subculture. I liked how they presented not just one aspect of this culture. But then this in itself presents a problem because I need to figure out the focus of my paper. It does seem like it has a lot of information for me to look through which is always a good thing. They talk about punk music and how it influences kids to act this certain way. So overall, I feel like this is a great place to start.

Frances Farmer

Before going to the library on Wednesday, I had no clue how many resources were available to us. Of course I knew about the books, Galileo and other commons things you find in the library, but there are so many different databases and articles just waiting to found. The word I was assigned to look up was Frances Farmer. At first, this was difficult because when I started looking for information on her, nothing came up but France and farmers. Most of the articles, I had found were not available for viewing. This really affected my task because I was not able to get five sources for this assignment. So I still have too look for more but at this time I could not. So I just went with what I had at the time. I found a good bit from this first author and I tried to provide background information and on the others I just gave a brief preview of the things she has been in.
Frances Farmer was a major actress in Hollywood during the 1930-1940s, but she wasn’t just known for her movies. Frances had a scary past, rebelling against many people wishes for her. She often did not get along with her mother, who was very controlling which lead to this child-like rebellion. She was placed in a mental asylum, where she claims of being abused while subjected to insulin shots everyday. She could never really keep friends and then died at a fairly early age of 57, in 1970 of cancer (Waites, Kathleen J.). Frances Farmer not only was an actress, but she wrote her own autobiography and eventually ventured out into Broadway. She was in “The Golden Boy” with Luther Adler (Osbourne, Robert). She was most noted for the film, "Frances", which was based on her turbulent life which then turned into several television and broadway shows (Storhoff, Gary).

Who Produced Hip Hop vs. America

The topic of my paper is based on the series aired on BET, “Hip Hop vs. America”. Since this was not an ongoing television series it was very difficult for me to figure out what person actually produced or directed the show. My first instinct was to go to the library since it is full of sources and not just the internet, although the internet is one of the largest databases for information and it is very convenient. So when I got to the library, I remembered that I did not know the producer of my topic. With this setback, I had to first start my journey by finding out who thought of putting this show on air. Well, what I concluded was that BET sponsored this mini series and they were the forerunners for this program. My first search started with of the course the very popular website, google.com. This time, google.com was not so helpful because it really only gave the website, which I already knew and it pulled up Wikipedia, which just gave me information about when it first started. I wanted to find some information that would help me with my rhetorical appeals for my paper, but with this limited information I was not able to do so. Of course this did not make me happy because I knew that that information would help me out a lot for this paper. After all, that is what this paper is based on. When I went to the official website for BET, I was able to learn a little bit more about what they were all about. It took me a minute to find where that particular information was located on the site. After my searching on the internet, I decided that there was nothing else I could really do next considering my situation. Why must everything be so difficult for me!!!

Dizzee Rascal-the London King

Dizzee Rascal is from East Bow England where he grew up in a rough neighborhood. As a child he often got himself into trouble, stealing and robbing. He was also expelled from school. It wasn’t until a teacher introduced him into the music scene, did he start to rap. He style is very different than the ones we have come to know in North America. His music is a mixture if garage and hip hop, with a lot of samples from heavy metal, rock and guitar sound. The garage style is the most popular type of rap in the inner streets of UK. Dizzee raps about the things that go on around him every day. He was raised by a single mother and by having this experience he was able to produce one of his singles which was predominately underground. In one of his songs he talks about a young London girl who spent her life partying, doing drugs, and having sex with many men. Throughout the years she earned the title Jezebel, which means slut, whore and many other shameless names. I think this helps define how Dizzee is able to intertwine his culture with the hip hop culture because he is talking about real life things. Growing up in London, he observed what was going on and he took it to heart to tell a story about how life is there. Although he may be all the way in London, Dizzee does not escape the violence that sometime does come about with being a rapper or should I say just being successful overall. I believe that because of this violence many people may say he has street credibility because he endured the incident. This ties him into the hip hop subculture of violence, which again ties his culture with the big community of Hip Hop.

Peer Editing

Today’s peer editing session went quite well. I received a lot of positive feedback about my paper. The one thing I like about peer editing is that you are able to gain different perspectives about each individual’s topic, which allows us to write from a different angle when we go back and re-work our essays. I also like the constructive criticism. We are able to help one another without being harsh. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to discuss specific problems with me and my partner’s paper. This was a setback because I did not get a clear understanding of what my partner saw as problematic points in my paper. Based on what little time we did have, I hopefully will be able to go back and look through my essay and fix some problems. Next time I think we should make the revision process a week because this way if I do not finish in class, I can take it home and look over it more thoroughly instead of rushing through it in class. Overall, I feel that even though it is a good thing to do as far as catching mistakes that one would not see on their own, we cannot possibly give the greatest amount of feedback in this one class period.

PCU's Fallacies

In the movie, PCU there are many fallacies that are presented throughout the film. The one that stuck out to me the most is that this movie commits the fallacy of Ad Populum. This is an emotional appeal that speaks to positive ir negative cnocepts rather than the real issue at hand. This is shown when the "cause heads" are protesting about eating meat. They are attacking the people that choose to eat meat and saying that they are bad people just because they choose to eat meats, instead of just trying to help raise awarness of the effects of killing animals.

For the Love of Adventure

The Death of an Innocent is the story of a college student Chris McCandless better known as Alex. He was an excellent student in high school, excelling in almost everything thing he put his mind to. He was a cross country star and everyone looked up to him because he was a natural born leader. But there was something a little peculiar about Chris. He had an obsessive passion for things and would not let anyone defer him from what he wanted to do. Most would say he was crazy for some of things he did but others would say that he was just a passionate soul. I do feel that in this day and age, people like Chris still exist.
Chris was a successful college graduate of Emory University. He was an intelligent young man just like many other college students around the world. After he graduated, he took the money that he had left and instead of splurging on a car or other frivolous things, he donated all of it to the bank and started his summer trip around the world to find out about things that did not make sense to him such as world hunger. While most people think that this is a crazy idea, there are those to this day who feel passionate enough about something that they would do any and everything to get it done. I also feel that some people do impulsive things for the adrenaline rush and just for the simple fact that they want to achieve something on their own and that is exactly what Chris was trying to do. Explore life on his own. This is why some kids go to college, to find their purpose in life and maybe Chris’ purpose was to explore new ideas. They may stray off a couple times to try their own thing but eventually they do find their way back, it just so happens in the case of Chris he did not get that chance.
Yes, it is true that society today is very materialistic. We value the power of the dollar and what it could do for us. The very thought of just giving up $100 let alone $20,000 makes me cringe, but if was enthusiastic about the reasons behind me giving up the money I would do it. Chris did not feel the need for the money so he did something else with it to make it useful. Many people give to charities all the time and even though they may not have the same intentions they do it anyway. As a society, we need to go back to the days where everything was not about the money but let’s face it, everything cost and we do not want to give up what we have earned.
To say the very least, yes Chris’s adventures may have not been well thought out and a little bit irrational. But he was doing something he truly enjoyed and who are we to take that little bit of joy he had away from him by calling him delusional. There are others like him out there and if they are doing what they love then they should do it.

Marketing/AIDS

Even though the clothing company may have produced an image that does appeal to the consumer eye and would surely bring them more attention because I have probably walked passed this store a million times and have not paid it any attention, I personally do not feel that this gave them the positive feedback they were expecting. I know that they were trying to raise awareness for aids and to get people to support by buying their clothes but I think they should have tried a different approach. They could have just used words or even put symbols and picture on some of their clothing to help but not use this picture. When I look at this picture of this family, the first thing that pops into my head is not any type of clothing. Instead, I want to turn the other way because it is such an alarming photo. I would want to go inside and ask them why they had this outside of their store. I would not buy the clothing from the store but instead, I would find an organization to donate. This picture just makes me cringe because the guy lying on the hospital bed is in so much pain and his family endures the same pain. Millions of people have this disease and have to suffer with it for a very long time, while this company is just sitting there. The picture also makes me want to learn more about AIDS in general and spread the mews to others so that we can all be well-informed about this epidemic that is slowly killing our generation. Although United Colors of Benetton thought they were doing a good deed as far as putting the message out there, I feel that they should have thought more about the emotion behind this image and the millions of people they were representing and considered how they would feel being used in this way. Yes, the do want people to know that the disease is out there and that it is not only a gay man disease but I feel that they should not be used for advertisement. This company did not take into consideration that this issue is such a personal subject and should not be treated lightly. Most people have personal experiences with AIDS and to know that a clothing company is using this as a marketing strategy would upset them because they know that only a small percent of the profits go towards AIDS research and that they would gain most of the money. I feel that it is all about what you value. Should you use such a strong image to raise awareness and get what you want at the same time or should you just do it to raise awareness to help millions. Most companies use strategies such as this just to make a dollar. Despite the fact that their moral judgment was lost a little in the marketing plan, they probably were successful at getting people’s attention and I am pretty sure that some stopped in to buy the clothing thinking they were contributing to a great cause but ultimately the were just part of the plan to gain money.