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.