MP4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7N98tck14w&feature=youtu.be

These pieces of sound are recorded in my apartment. I wanted to record the sound of some small things happening around me to reflect my daily life. There are boiling water and the click sound of the button when I use my kettle, the running water when I wash my hand, and the knock sound when my roommate place her Chanel nail polish bottle when she was coloring her nail (I love that color). I share a lot of things with my roommate: our nail polishes, our snacks, and our tea (we boil water and make the tea), we tried different facial mask and so on. My apartment is a typical girls' house with a nice roommate and that is want I want to reflect in the project.

Blog 9

Carver’s article tells a story about the wife’s “childhood sweetheart” spend a night is the couple’s house. The story ends very suddenly when Robert taught the husband to draw a Cathedral. The husband was apparently dislike Robert and was jealous of him because Robert’s close relationship with the wife. I can understand the husband because I would be mad under that situation. But I think at the end of the article, the husband’s emotion has been remitted, that was probably because Robert was a good person. This is how I understand the storyline. The author merely described what happened in the past, what was going on in the house, and what the conversations was. The way the story was narrated enabled me to think about, exactly feel, what changes were taking place to the husband. It was just a story.

 

As long as the author didn’t describe much emotional things about the wife and the visitor, it was hard for me to understand what is going on with their thinking. How I can develop an opinion was to through the husband’s point of view, which was the only focus of the story, I think. So I really what to know what exactly happen to the husband when they were drawing, how the drawing change the person’s opinion.

Wallace

The article is about to think with freedom. As a commencement address, Wallace’s speech is shocking at first then becomes very inspiring. I agree with that “the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people…” Because of the difference conditions we grew up, although we are receiving a kind of “standard” education, the way we think differs a lot. One ridiculous experience I have was that through all my middle high and senior high school, we are asked to do some literature comprehension. The comprehension means, in the exam, a sentence of a literature work is picked up from the reading we have on the exam paper, and we were asked to answer to question suck as: what is the author thinking about? Or what might be the reason why the author said this? It was not unusual for me to get a zero on these questions. My answer never matched the point of view of the person who provided the standard answer to these questions. The author didn’t provide any answer, but someone else was telling us that “the author was thinking this way” But how? How could someone say no to my comprehension on a literature without the author say no? We need some attention and awareness and discipline and also to truly care about others when we want to think with freedom, but if there is someone telling us to think in a exact way, I might not be able to follow.

 

I may not be able to understand the young fish and old fish story might very well. By saying “this is water”, does the author mean education? Or it is just a kind of awareness? Well, there is no exact answer, I believe.

Wexner Center visit

Annie Leibovitz

The exhibition can be two parts in my view. The first part was the photographs of famous persons. The second was some pictures of stuffs and landscape. While both of them were amazing, the second part resonated with me.

I'm not familiar with most of the persons in the photographs, but I still recognized Michael Jackson (my dad listened to him when I was very young), Michael Jordan (I watched NBA when I was about six or seven), Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, Obama and Michelle Obama, Nicole Kidman (one of the most famed actress in China), Scarlett Johansson (my favorite face in Hollywood), John Lennon (a great music artist who I feel hard to understand) and Ono Yoko (she is much harder to understand), The Rolling Stones, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Queen Elizabeth II (where I randomly picked up my English name) . That's all the faces I could recognize in the exhibition. I was shocked that the picture of naked John Lennon with his wife was taken by Leibovitz. For all the other photographs, what I could do was to guess what they might be thinking in the picture and why they took that one. There was a series of photos taken of four women around their 30s to 40s. In the first four they looked very ordinary, one of them with her children, and one wore glasses, I can still remember. In the other four pictures they dressed performing costumes, with heavy make-ups, almost naked. The contrast between these two groups was impressive that I won't forget it for a long time.

In the second part, there was some stories or memory attached to each photo of a staff, furniture or landscape. The three picture of the Yosemite Valley, the landscape of the vegetable garden at Monticello, Jefferson's home impressed most. I could feel the attractiveness of travelling. Travelling is different with tourism. My ideal travelling is to take a camera and take pictures of scenery and items to record memory all along the journey. Money is necessary but not too much is need for purpose of travel and of course I don't require starred hotel. I thought a lot while sitting in front of the photos. The exiting part for me is that some people like Annie Lerbovitz can record some pieces of history and connect it with her own memory, and the method is photograph.