Director of Athletics, Recreation and Intramurals leaves to fulfill the position of Assistant Vice President for Athletics Development at Villanova University
George Kolb to
... to be continued
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
on language
When I think about the different languages and the all that is lost in translation I visualize chaos. It calms me down to think about it in the bigger picture: even when speak the same language, and we grew up speaking that language, and we are very familiar with all idioms and nuances, we still can't be totally sure if we are speaking the same "language". What I mean by that is that every person has their own meaning for a variety of concepts that we believe are understood by all in the same way. In the clip, she uses "love" as an example. We could use "despair" and still it would be impossible to determine if we are or not talking about the same feeling. Mostly because we use language to communicate our understanding of the meanings we attribute to these words. And I say words because before we give them meaning, they are just these agglomerates of signs (letters) that together make an audiovisual symbol (the word as we read it and say it).
Language has always been an important part of my life, but until I watched Waking Life (this excerpt), I had never thought about it the way I do now, as a flawed system. In a way, it's sad because it exposes our inability to communicate successfully and predicts a world of no real connections, where all that is said, written, acted is simply an attempt to say, write, act the idea we have deep in our minds. However, just like we can't be sure we all disagree on what love or happiness or guilt are, we don't know if our rough tries aren't successful either. We'll never know.
Language has always been an important part of my life, but until I watched Waking Life (this excerpt), I had never thought about it the way I do now, as a flawed system. In a way, it's sad because it exposes our inability to communicate successfully and predicts a world of no real connections, where all that is said, written, acted is simply an attempt to say, write, act the idea we have deep in our minds. However, just like we can't be sure we all disagree on what love or happiness or guilt are, we don't know if our rough tries aren't successful either. We'll never know.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
regarding others
It was only after I left the classroom on Friday that I realized why I had one of Goya's The Disaster of War drawings stuck in my head. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag uses that collection as an example of a representation of human atrocities.
Not so much of Diane Arbus - a long time favorite of mine - , but the NPPA photographs struck me as excellent portraits of human suffering. Then something clicked and I thought "of course, Sontag!".
So what do those photographs mean? What is their purpose?
Sontag says that the meaning of a photograph is "never to be found in the photographer's intentions but in the desires society brings to it and the uses that society puts it to". Images can only talk for themselves so much, and it's the viewer, who is interpreting them, that adds meaning and purpose.
She adds that these images (of war, conflict, suffering) increase the awareness of war, but, contradictorily, that images contribute to our "callousness" because of their repeated exposure. Seeing the degree of violence in the front might be eye-opening, but it's also harmful in the sense that it can numb our senses to that kind of exposure.
In Living Life Trying, David Hogsholt's lenses captured Mia's dichotomous life of pain and pleasure so well it touched me like Eddie Adams' photograph of the National police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Viet Cong member. It might be just me, but violence that isn't physical numbs us much more than what's explicit.
Not so much of Diane Arbus - a long time favorite of mine - , but the NPPA photographs struck me as excellent portraits of human suffering. Then something clicked and I thought "of course, Sontag!".
So what do those photographs mean? What is their purpose?
Sontag says that the meaning of a photograph is "never to be found in the photographer's intentions but in the desires society brings to it and the uses that society puts it to". Images can only talk for themselves so much, and it's the viewer, who is interpreting them, that adds meaning and purpose.
She adds that these images (of war, conflict, suffering) increase the awareness of war, but, contradictorily, that images contribute to our "callousness" because of their repeated exposure. Seeing the degree of violence in the front might be eye-opening, but it's also harmful in the sense that it can numb our senses to that kind of exposure.
In Living Life Trying, David Hogsholt's lenses captured Mia's dichotomous life of pain and pleasure so well it touched me like Eddie Adams' photograph of the National police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Viet Cong member. It might be just me, but violence that isn't physical numbs us much more than what's explicit.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
MTV Europe Music Awards "rickrolled"
Original Article from BBC:
Rick brands MTV win 'ridiculous'
Eighties pop star Rick Astley has branded his surprise victory in the best act ever category at the MTV Europe Music Awards as "ridiculous".
The singer beat U2, Green Day and Christina Aguilera to the gong, which was voted for by the public.
He said: "I just felt it was a bit of a daft award.
"How can you present the best act in the world ever especially when you've got Paul McCartney on the show as well? It was just a bit ridiculous."
Although he played down the victory, the singer said he was very pleased that the public had voted for him.
"They mentioned the phrase "rickrolling" (a phrase coined after his hit Never Gonna Give You Up was hidden behind a variety of fake web links as an online prank) last night and I think MTV were thoroughly rickrolled," he said.
"I really appreciate all the guys that did vote for me but I also feel for all the artists who got rickrolled a bit last night because there were obviously some people there that perhaps deserved it more than me.
"You've got people like U2 in that category and Christine Aguilera so it's a bit of a funny one."
Despite his famous win the singer said he had no plans to make a return.
He added: "I don't have the desire to come back with a new single. I still do gigs and sing my old tunes and pretend I'm 21 again for an hour which is nice.
The '80s pop star also admitted that he was a big fan of talent shows such as The X Factor.
He said: "The one thing I like about X Factor and those shows is the people are getting to say what they want.
"They're actually voting and it's down to them at the end of the day.
"I genuinely think Daniel (Evans) has got a lot of fans because what he does, he does well.
"It shows you can't decide what people want at the end of the day. You can try and ram it down their throats but you can't."
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
You said, "I love you," I said, "Wait." I was going to say, "Take me," you said, "Go away." The movie that changed my life could be resumed to the quote above. A film about love, jealousy, pretension, and the unpredictability of human feelings. Truffaut's masterpiece cannot be underestimated, though. It's not just about a love triangle and "bros before hos". Of course the characters are interesting - and completely fictitious -, and the plot, of course, is very entertaining, but what actually caught me in this movie was the way Truffaut conducted the twists and ironies in the story, sprinkling it with wild actions and radical images - Catherine's whimsical ways, mostly. And how the scenes are visually constructed following the actual facts, with sudden ups and downs, rough cuts, how narration is so extensively explored and how sensible and beautiful some o f the scenes are, like the most famous one of the movie, seen above.
Personally, "Jules et Jim" changed the way I perceived and appreciated films, for it was the first time I saw something so different from everything else, so powerful and subtle at the same time. It also changed the way I perceived people, love and relationships, in that order. People seemed more human, more likely to be mean - not by meaning to harm anyone, but by beiyng selfish. Love seemed much deeper than I had ever realized: it struck me as something impossibly controlable and wild, that no one could even fully comprehend. Relationships became much more fragile for me, and I was able to see the thin line between healthy and sick, and the result of years upon years of frustration, confusion and madness.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
That the print journalism industry is being forced to make some drastic changes due to the expansion of internet, everyone knows. The key issue in this discussion is how. Just throwing the print edition content online has been proved not to work, and lots of people have absolutely no idea of what they are doing.
I started reading the NYT online in 2006, to exercise my vocabulary and have a better, more reliable news source than my hometown's newspaper. I've been noticing great advances in the multimedia aspect of the NYT online: videos, podcasts, personalized news, and the also personalized daily update by e-mail. You get just what you want to know about, and they still give you the option to read everything that was published on the print edition.
My local newspaper has done basically the same: interactive graphics, videos, neighborhood specials, a whole section for high school and college students, reader concerts and theater reviews and the "picture of the day", - all very well put together by a model that uses, as stated at Editors Weblog, "Cross-platform planning, budget and promotion". In other words, Zero Hora, the newspaper owned by RBS group, refers to the website, which gives the reader access to TV produced content, and the TV stations advertise the radio stations, and the radio stations promote the print edition. The converged approach adopted by RBS makes everything run really smoothly and it seems to me this is the future of media: integration, convergence, "organicity" - something analog to a body, with organs that have different functions but the same objectives: transmit the information to the receiver.
The Wired article says that opening doors for the reader is the way to go for print journalism. The NYT has been doing that since they started to publish average people's wedding photos on their print edition. Of course nowadays the reader wants more than the passive appearance on the paper. The reader wants to be part of the paper, part of the tv, part of the radio - and that's where we can see internet has spoiled us: we can't be satisfied without interactivity. And this is, in my opinion, combined with a converged environment like RBS', the key to success.
I started reading the NYT online in 2006, to exercise my vocabulary and have a better, more reliable news source than my hometown's newspaper. I've been noticing great advances in the multimedia aspect of the NYT online: videos, podcasts, personalized news, and the also personalized daily update by e-mail. You get just what you want to know about, and they still give you the option to read everything that was published on the print edition.
My local newspaper has done basically the same: interactive graphics, videos, neighborhood specials, a whole section for high school and college students, reader concerts and theater reviews and the "picture of the day", - all very well put together by a model that uses, as stated at Editors Weblog, "Cross-platform planning, budget and promotion". In other words, Zero Hora, the newspaper owned by RBS group, refers to the website, which gives the reader access to TV produced content, and the TV stations advertise the radio stations, and the radio stations promote the print edition. The converged approach adopted by RBS makes everything run really smoothly and it seems to me this is the future of media: integration, convergence, "organicity" - something analog to a body, with organs that have different functions but the same objectives: transmit the information to the receiver.
The Wired article says that opening doors for the reader is the way to go for print journalism. The NYT has been doing that since they started to publish average people's wedding photos on their print edition. Of course nowadays the reader wants more than the passive appearance on the paper. The reader wants to be part of the paper, part of the tv, part of the radio - and that's where we can see internet has spoiled us: we can't be satisfied without interactivity. And this is, in my opinion, combined with a converged environment like RBS', the key to success.
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