The Secret Language of Comics

Tag: sk10

Daydream Believer

Student Posts

Source: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/a-hermit-at-prayer-209174

My mix is mostly comprised of songs about a subject conceiving of fantastical things, as opposed to songs about fantastical things on their own. The general theme of my mix is daydreaming, though I put special thought into how I ordered the songs. Taking a cue from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, my mix opens with The Doors’ The End which ironically represents the beginning of the day. The next several songs address themes of daydreaming or projecting a fantasy onto mundane things, as is the case for Pale Blue Eyes and Real Love Baby, or perhaps where it does not exist at all, as is the case for Manifest and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. My mix ends with George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass followed by The Beatle’s A Day in the Life representing the end of a day of daydreaming.

Sketch 10: Mix Tape

Playlist through the ages

Student Posts
Album Cover
1. Whistle (While you work it), Katy Tiz

2. Locked Away, R. City, Adam Levine

3. Hall of Fame, The Script

4. Team, Lorde

5. All I Do is Win, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Ludacris, T pain

6. I Took a Pill In Ibiza, Mike Posner, Seeb

7. Once I was 7 years old, Ben Schuller

8. Don’t Let Me Down, The Chainsmokers

9. Panda, Desiigner

10. Rap God, Eminem

11. This is America, Childish Gambino

12. BabyWipe, Ski mask the Slump God

13. High Hopes, Panic! At the Disco

The rhetorical situation I am engaging with is how to best capture my childhood. The playlist I linked to was a playlist I have had since 6th grade. Since then, I have added songs that I enjoyed listening to at the time. As time passed, the playlist became a record of my personality, my character, and me as a person through music.

The crudely made album cover is a bunch of “me’s” from 6th, 8th, 11th grade, and now. It is to represent my growth throughout the existence of this playlist and the defining periods of my life that were best captured by the playlist.

In reality, this playlist is two and a half hours long so I had to cut it down significantly.

Sketch 10: Mix Tape

Student Posts

The playlist that I created focuses on songs that I listened to when I was younger. I decided to pick this genre of music as well as this time frame because it reminds me of a simpler time when the music that I listened to was a true source of fun and entertainment. This presented the issue for me of finding songs that I not only enjoyed as a child but still would like to listen to now. I think that it is hard to gage how a person’s music taste may change as they grow up but there is a strong power that is given to songs that establish feelings of nostalgia. Once there is an outlet for reminiscing, it is clear that a person can gain a certain level of creativity and happiness from this place. Overall, I found this assignment to be very fun and enjoyable.

Link to Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/28PwEMiTRVVKyWNmVTBZ6J?si=b3f0e4d1a5f3457d

Peking Impression

Student Posts

It’s been a while since I left Beijing – a city where I spent my childhood and the most golden of autumns in Chaoyang. However, I’m intimately connected to the city when meeting its people, viewing it in media, or just recollecting my own memories. Therefore, I would like to display my impression of “Peking” (not the real Beijing city at this moment, but the “elsewhere” I once know of.)

  1. First Coronation – My Kindergarten always plan trips to walk around the Forbidden City, a place people used to say to call “a wonder”; I used to believe they were dramatizing because it looked like “just a usual bigger house”. Yet now I know it really was a wonder, not only because it’s “bigger”, but due to what it symbolizes for this nation over hundreds of years of imperial power’s reign up to this point.
  2. Er Huang + Peony Pavilion – One Peking Opera and one of the genre’s best modern abstractions.
  3. 4,5,6, – No comment.
  4. Some of the city’s rock stars in the 80’s and 90’s are the best, many of whose works were performed in Tian’anmen Square, invoking great popularity.
  5. The best adagio in the history of humankind expresses my wish for it to remain peaceful and preserve its colors in this chaotic time.

Sketch 10: Mix Tape

Sketches

Due: 4/17

Tag: sk10

This week, I want you to think about using audio for particular rhetorical situations by creating a mix playlist with a group of songs.

Rules (all of which are breakable, if you have a good justification for why):

  • I usually think of a mix tape as about an hour of music, but for our purposes let’s aim for 45 minutes or so
  • Preferably no more than one song by a single artist
  • Create some kind of consistency and an audio progression as someone listens from beginning to end

Just as giving a speech, writing an essay, or publishing a photograph are rhetorical acts, choosing particular pieces of music in particular situations can also be a rhetorical act — and choosing to curate a specific list of songs that you put together in a particular order, with a particular emotional or intellectual affect in mind, is certainly a rhetorical act.  In the case of the music mix you are producing for this assignment, the rhetor is you, the medium is your playlist, and the audience is probably your peers in the class (though you can decide to address some other, fairly specific, audience if you would like).

There is a lot of music in the world, and there are lots of ways to combine music together and lots of people doing so. If you are struggling to come up with ways to craft your mix, I encourage you to either respond to a very specific rhetorical situation (“a mix for my good friend who just went through a bad breakup,” for example, or “a mix to apologize to my friend for not locking up his bicycle when I borrowed it so it get stolen”); come up with a very specific narrative or emotional hook that you want from the songs you include in your list (“songs about the summer” or “songs to prepare for exams to” might work well as hooks that are topical right now); and/or to make up some specific rules for yourself to spur greater creativity (“My Halloween mix can only include songs with the word ‘pumpkin’ in the title” or “all the songs need to include the words ‘new’ or ‘old’” or “every song must be 2 minutes and 42 seconds long“). As Robert Frost once said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” so creating rules for yourself about choosing songs might help you to structure the game that you’re playing to make it more fun.

What do you have to turn in?

Create your playlist however makes sense for you — it can be a Spotify playlist that you share via a link; you can use Mixcloud (which will also import Spotify playlists) or Soundcloud; or you can record your vinyl onto MP3s and upload those files to Google Drive or send them to me to host on my server, then embed them on your site from there. Publish a post on your site with the link(s) to the playlist and a numbered track listing that names the songs and artists.

Your mix tape needs an image to serve as the album cover. If you were recording your mix onto cassette tapes, I’d ask you to use gel pens to draw a cover that you’d stick into the little plastic case, but you’re not, so instead create a square image that has the title of your playlist and that serves as a compelling visual representation of your mix. Do not just use the image that Spotify automatically creates from the album covers included in the mix — design your own album cover.

Finally, write a reflection to accompany your mix — explain the rhetorical situation you are addressing, what rules you established for yourself, and how you went about solving the problem your rhetorical situation presents. Articulate the choices you made and why you made them. Finally, think about your mix as an argument (even though it’s not a direct, academic argument) — what are you conveying in your mix and how?

css.php