My Brother's Band-Project Three

The words have become dreaded to me. “My brother’s band,” words that could take the legitimacy away from the pre-famous Beatles. Seeing Banana Phonetic over and over again, and being more blown away every time by the mixtures of hair raising, face melting sounds, I struggle with the fact that I struggled to get my friends to come see them perform. To me Banana Phonetic is Banana Phonetic. To my friends who haven’t seen, Banana Phonetic is my brother’s band.

I went to Brooklyn New York on Saturday November 20th with my girlfriend Jess and my friend Bubba. Jess knew and had seen Banana Phonetic multiple times before, and Bubba had never seen or met them. We got to Brooklyn around three in the afternoon and met up with Tom, Akhil , Doty, Andy, and about fifteen other friends at a German beer hall. With Brooklyn being the hipster capital of America, or at least the east coast, the beer hall was filled with flannel shirts and fluorescent Ray Bans. The hall was a nice democratic bar with twenty foot long wooden tables allowing people to converse with a number of people at the same time, some of which people had never met. The next three and a half hours consisted of many liter filled mugs of delicious German beer, old friends catching up, and new friends getting to know each other. Along with the buzz from the German beer, talking with Tom and the other band members you could feel another type of buzz around them. They knew the Trash Bar was going to be full later that night, and they were pumped. After spending the afternoon drinking and joking, the band had to go get while everyone raged on.



The pervious time I had been to the Trash Bar there was happy hour from eight to nine in which certain beer and mixed drinks were completely free. The previous time I had been to the Trash Bar, the happy hour killed me. I warned Jess and Bubba about the happy hour and we decided to take a break from seven to eight. We stopped at a dimly lit bar across the street where the was a band playing some decent live music in the back. We sat at the bar, ordered two beers each because they were two for one, and relaxed. I couldn’t help myself from talking about Banana Phonetic’s show we were waiting to see. Jess went along with me hyping up the performance, but I couldn’t tell if Bubba was just entertaining our excitement or was actually excited himself.

Happy hour came and after Bubba order rum and coke and Jess ordered vodka and cranberry, I decided it might be smart to just order a beer. For the next hour the bar filled up with people pounding free drinks, trying to get as many in as possible with some people even double-fisting. By the end of the happy hour I started getting tired drunk. All I wanted to do was sit and the first band was coming on so I went into the back of the bar where the stage room was and sat down. Bubba and Jess came in after. The first band was two men between thirty and thirty-five and I’m being generous when I say they were absolutely horrendous. They were trying to be some kind of Irish folk-tale styled acoustic hard rock band, and it was worse than laughable. I looked to my right and Bubba was scared at this point. Scared that he was going to have to sit through my brother’s shitty band and then tell me he liked them. My ears couldn’t take the misery anymore so I went back to the main bar. I spent the next two and a half hours out there talking and drinking with friends kind of dragging to the end of the night. Playing last is where you want to be as a band, and the bar wanted Banana Phonetic to play last because out of the one hundred people in the bar, eighty were there for them; but I couldn’t sit there and drink anymore, I needed them to go on.




It was midnight and it was finally time. We had been through hours at a German beer hall, waiting for happy hour, happy hour, and three long hours of post happy hour and we finally got to enjoy some original, real music. Tom motioned for me to grab him a beer, which he usually does every time I see them, so I grabbed two beers from the bar and gave him one. He took a throat clearing swig and he was ready to go. At that moment all of the tiredness I had felt the past few hours was gone. You could feel the energy between the crowd and the stage. This is what everyone came to see, what everyone raged for all day, and they rocked per usual.


Seeing Banana Phonetic play is more of an overall experience than just listening to music. A scene infused by alcohol and drugs and the love for music. Looking around at the other people in the crowd rock their loose bodies along with you and the flow of the music; seeing Tom and Doty make eye contact followed by matching head nods saying to each other, “hell yeah.”; seeing Andy and Akhil feed off of the crowd; and ending every show with a Phish-esque jam making your body move in ways you didn’t understand, always leaving you wanting more. As I cheered I felt a tap on my shoulder and it was Bubba. I leaned over and he said, “They’re not your brother’s band anymore.”




Here are a few samples from Banana Phonetic.

Multimedia: This Land and We Choose the Moon

"This Land" and "We Choose the Moon" are both pretty advanced multimedia projects with a lot of information. They both use photos, videos, audio, and writing to tell a story. They both give you options as to what you want to look at and listen to or not look at and listen to. The stories they are each telling build up until they reach their climax at then end.

I am unsure if it was the actual story or the use of multimedia that made me like "This Land" a lot more. I thought it was a very captivating story of a journey just like "We Choose the Moon," but the personal part of it made me enjoy it more. You feel like you know the story teller, compared to the journey to the moon where you feel a connection to the ship. The fact that you had to watch the videos of the spaceship flying through space every time got a little old as well.

This Land was awesome in terms of multimedia because when you clicked on each day, you were first shown where they were geographically with a bird's eye map view, and then there was a photo from that part of the trip; along with a written summary and audio in the background. It just had everything you need to feel like you were there.

Multimedia

The New York Times article and the student article are two examples of the use of multimedia in journalism. The New York Times article is a story about the kidnapping of two journalists by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Student project is an awareness project about the post civil war in Sierra Leone, with the people there making a shift from diamonds to agriculture.

The multimedia aspect in the New York Times article is complimentary videos including one of the kidnapees' telling his story with graphics helping to illustrate it. These videos go along with detailed articles telling the same story. If you don't want to read the whole article the videos give you a good summary about what happened, and if you do read the article they help you paint a picture geographically. In the article videos that the Taliban made the kidnapees' watch are talked about, and in the videos they are actually shown. The best part about the videos was that they showed a computer generated version of where they were in Pakistan down to the exact roads. They are amazingly produced.

The Student project is a combination of articles and videos on the same page. Martin Ricard recorded the videos himself and uses them together with writing to tell his story about the rise of agriculture in Sierra Leone. First you read an article and then watch a video, and then you read another article to finish the story.

Both multimedia projects are nicely done. The only criticism I have is that for the student project you have to read and watch everything to get the full story (if that's a bad thing). The New York Times article allows you to watch the video and then go into the article for details you wish to know more about. If you have time to sit down and enjoy a full article like either of these then this isn't a problem; but the New York Times one gives you some options.

Never Disrespect the Garden.

This video is a commercial put out by the Boston Bruins. The Bruins have a series of commercials featuring their mascot "the bear" in which he teaches fans "Boston Bruins Hockey rules." My personal favorite is the one where a Bruins fan is on a date with a Canadians fan (the Bruins' division rival). When he buys her a beer, the bear looks down on him with disgust and knocks his beer out of his hands. Then the rule comes onto the screen reading "never date within the division."

The most recent commercial from the hockey rules series came about because a drunk girl kicked a hole in the bathroom of the TD Garden. The video of this vandalism came out a few days earlier on Barstoolsports.com. The commercial showed the Bear fixing the kicked in hole when someone walks into the bathroom, and then on the screen it says "never disrespect the garden."

This video is genius. It was first posted on the Boston Bruins website, and then it took off from there to other sites like Barstoolsports.com. This is definitely journalism. It shows a lot about the world of video blog journalism because you can be a Bruins fan and not understand the video when you sign onto the Bruins website; but if you are the type of person who reads video blog sites like Barstool, then this video can be great entertainment.

History of Daylight Savings

Post ancient civilizations Benjamin Franklin was not the first to propose Daylight Savings Time, but he was the first to get people thinking about it. He proposed in an anonymous letter that people wake up earlier so that so many candles weren't wasted.

Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, and then later by Englishman William Willett who was appalled by all of the people in London who slept through a summer day.

Germany was the first to use Daylight Savings Time to conserve coal during World War 1. The United States starting using it in 1918.

Today some people argue that we don't need daylight savings anymore. The Candy companies have a different perspective:

"Everyone from factory owners to retailers embraced the change. Even the candy lobby supported the new system, figuring the extra hour of sunlight meant it would be safer for kids to go trick-or-treating on Halloween."

One of the main arguments people use to back up Daylight Savings Time is to make better use of the daylight because this leads to saving energy. This is from the California Energy Commission:

In general, energy use and the demand for electricity for lighting our homes is directly connected to when we go to bed and when we get up. Bedtime for most of us is late evening through the year. When we go to bed, we turn off the lights and TV."

Michael Downing, a teacher at Tufts University and the author of "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time," says messing with the clock doesn’t really save energy. “Daylight saving is still a boon to purveyors of barbecue grills, sports and recreation equipment and the petroleum industry, as gasoline consumption increases every time we increase the length of the daylight saving period,” Downing tells MNN. “Give Americans an extra hour of after-dinner daylight, and they will go to the ballpark or the mall — but they won't walk there.”

For more on the on going controversy here is an interesting article.

The Big Picture-Boston.com

Boston.com's "The Big Picture is a section of their website that tells stories through pictures. One story was about the proposition of legalizing marijuana in the U.S. It started with a paragraph and was followed by thirty-two pictures. This is the paragraph:

With marijuana on the ballot in four U.S. states this November, most prominently California's Proposition 19, which would fully legalize the substance, the legalization of marijuana has become a hot topic of discussion in North America. If pot were to become legal in California, it is unclear how that would affect the ongoing drug wars in neighboring Mexico - whether it would increase, decrease, or have little effect on the widespread violence. What is clear is that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has declared that the federal Justice Department will continue to prosecute those who use or distribute recreational marijuana, regardless of any change to state law. Collected here are photos from the past year of marijuana in the news, for both medicinal and recreational purposes, and some of the legal entanglements involved.

The pictures showed every angle of the issue. The positives of marijuana in happiness and peace; the negatives in death and tragedy in Mexico. They show the struggle between the people who want it legalized, and the people trying to stop that from happening by arresting people and burning tons (literally) of marijuana.

The interesting part of this type of story telling is that the pictures aren't just telling a single story. They let the reader examine the photographs, and then put together a story in their heads. This is an extremely objective type of journalism because the photographs aren't opinionated, they are just photos depicting true events. Photographs don't lie, especially high quality ones like these.

Reid vs. Angle

10:05: The polls just closed in Nevada and this race is ridiculously close. From everything I have seen it is just about a split. Here is a tweet under the hashtag #Nevada:
somethingbanal: Raw exit poll data has #Nevada VERY close. 48-47 split between Reid (D) and Angle (R) #election.

Reported by the Washington Post, right before the polls closed Reid encouraged people to use twitter. "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada encouraged people to retweet, text, e-mail and instant message friends to find out if they voted."

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10:33: Apparently the lines for the polls in Spring Creek, Nevada are so long that the polls there aren't estimated to close until 7:45 Nevada time (10:45 Eastern).


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10:55: As of now reports continue to come out that there are still long lines all over the state of Nevada.
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11:10:"Nevada is so close because the two candidates are going against the only ones they can beat. If in either party there was someone other than Harry Reid and Sharron Angle they would win. There are no votes in right now from Nevada, and we'll take a break."-CNN Election Special (Television)

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11:20: All of the polls are officially closed now and votes are being counted. Here is a tweet from the #Nevada hashtag:

AmytheThompson:Numbers released say Reid ahead by 30,000 votes. Those are absentee & early voting numbers. #Election #Nevada

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11:29: Early election polls show that Reid is wining 53% to 43%.
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11:53: According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal 55% of the votes have been counted in Nevada and Reid leads Angle 50% to 45%.

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12:22: with 28% of the precincts reporting Reid is holding on with a 51.5% to 44% lead.
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12:48: Harry Reid was just projected to be re-elected as the Nevada State Senator. He gained 51% of the vote.

The Democrats kept the majority of the seats in the U.S. Senate with big wins in California, and West Virgina.

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1:45: LAS VEGAS (AP) - An Associated Press analysis of preliminary exit poll results shows U.S. Sen. Harry Reid won re-election with overwhelming support from minority voters

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