Information Space

Annie's Log, 10/27/2015:

I recently started writing for the iSchool's official blog, Information Space. My first article was just published, so this week I'm double-dipping and using that as my weekly post! Click HERE to go to InfoSpace and read it (if you want to. I mean, I'm not gonna make you or anything.).

End Log.

Dogs

Annie's Log, 10/18/15:

Dogs are great. I love dogs. They're my favorite.

Dogs love everything. Everything is the best thing ever. Including you. To a dog, you are the best thing ever. And so is a squeaky toy. And dinner time. And a spoonful of peanut butter. And a ride in the car.

It's really hard transitioning from life-with-dogs to life-without-dogs. Even though I was only home for about three weeks between the end of working at Camp Chestnut Ridge and moving up here, those were three weeks with dogs in my life.

And before I go any further, yes, of course I miss my human family and my human friends. But dogs are different. Dogs are dogs.

I had a wonderful conversation the other day with four other people in my class where we basically all just gushed about our dogs for 10 minutes while on break from lecture. We shared pictures of our pooches on our phones and talked about how much we miss having dogs. It was happy and sad at the same time.

I miss Murphy:

And Teddy, too, I guess:

I've taken to watching YouTube videos of dogs to satiate my need for canine cuteness and cuddliness. These are some of my faves:

https://vid.me/TWAX (this one is great, but not from YouTube so I can't upload it here).

Here's a dog who loves digging more than life itself.

And another dog who doesn't want to be in trouble because he loves his master.

Dogs are inspirational:

And philosophical:

Dogs are happy bundles of love with a built-in meter to show just how excited they are to see you even though you just left like six seconds ago.

Dogs don't judge you for your taste in music or your singing talent. They love to hug you and think that you're the most amazing thing ever when you feed them. They cuddle with you and sometimes when they're asleep they have dreams about running and you can watch them kick their little legs while they snooze. They're loyal and loving and goofy and great.

Dogs are perfectly expressed in the form of Dug from Pixar's "Up"

I like dogs. Dogs are the best.

End Log.

Horror, and Other Halloween Things

Annie's Log, 10/09/15

Recently, the 4th season of "American Horror Story" was released on Netflix, with the 5th season just around the corner. For those of you who don't watch the show, each season is a (mostly) self-contained series of stories with different characters and a different setting. Season 1 was a haunted house (very "Exorcist"-y), Season 2 was in an insane asylum in the 1960s, and Season 3 was a modern-day witch hunt/voodoo fest in New Orleans. Season 5, the latest season (which will be premiering soon), is set around a hotel (hopefully with some throwbacks to "The Shining" scattered here and there).

Season 4, however, was set at a "freak show." And I've been watching it. And I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss some of my thoughts. Because it's my log and I can talk about whatever.

If you have any interest in watching this season (which I would recommend if you are at all interested in the horror genre, and don't have a problem with graphic violence), go for it. I'm going to to my best to keep spoilers to a minimum, but I'm going to put this out there in case you want to watch things for yourself.

"American Horror Story" is, shockingly, known for its horror. It's a scary show. Crazy horror-movie scenarios and top-notch special effects create an atmosphere of creepiness and thrills and tension throughout each episode. Gore and jump-scares and twisted backstories abound. Sure, some of it gets a little campy or goes too far, but that's TV for you. Generally, it's a solid show. Add in talented veteran actors like Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Angela Bassett, and a number of up-and-coming stars ready to break through, and you end up with a pretty superb cast to boot.

And Season 4 set itself up to be the creepiest, strangest season of them all with its setting: following the freaks of "Fraulein Elsa's Cabinet of Curiosities" in the early 1950s. This season of the show was all about binaries. Characters either fit into one category or another: a normal person or a freak, a hero or a villain, a star or a supporting role, a member of the family or an outcast, etc., etc., etc.. Most of the characters who fell into one category found themselves striving to make their way into the other, or did their best to hide their true natures rather than be outed and thrown in with the "other kind."

Now that I've done some set-up, here's the point of me writing about this show: I wanted to discuss who I think is the creepiest, most twisted, downright scariest character in this cavalcade of monstrous figures.

Is it "Twisty," a disturbed homicidal clown reminiscent of John Wayne Gacy?

Or Neil Patrick Harris's delusional magician, slowly losing touch with reality?

What about any of the "freaks" in the "Cabinet of Curiosities," played mostly by actors with real "physical deformities?"

No, the scariest character wasn't any of these. The scariest moment of the show wasn't hearing Kathy Bates's "Baltimore accent" for the first time (which I can only describe as a random jumbling of hard and soft and long and short vowels all mixed together in an effort to sound Northern that ended up just displeasing to the ear). 

It wasn't even seeing Jessica Lange's German character "Elsa Mars" spontaneously performing David Bowie's "Life on Mars" on stage 

(remember that this show is set in 1952, while the song wasn't released by Mr. Bowie until 1971. Another character on the show sang Nirvana's "Come As You Are," which didn't come out until 1991. Then again, the creators of the show did do "Glee" so I guess it was only a matter of time before someone started singing.).

No. The creepiest character on this horror TV show was named "Dandy." 

Dandy Mott was portrayed by Finn Wittrock, who recently rose to fame as "Mac" in "Unbroken," the big-screen story of Louis Zamperini. From his first scene, Dandy set me on edge.

He started out as a caricature: a rich mama's boy who was used to getting what he wanted. To be honest, I thought he was kind of a lazy character to throw in at the time. He wanted to purchase one of the freaks from Miss Elsa because he thought she was interesting, and threw a temper tantrum when denied what he wanted only to be consoled by mommy (played by Francis Conroy, an AHS veteran).

Dandy very quickly became something more.

We see, over the course of the first few episodes of the show, that Dandy is something vile. Through what I can only describe as irresponsible, delusional coddling, Dandy has grown into a man who believes he is unstoppable. If he wants something, he gets it, either through influence and reputation or money. He's treated like a child by his mother, who blames most of his problems on boredom (and eventually on inbreeding, seeing as she married her second cousin to keep money in the family. You have to preserve the family fortune somehow, right?).

Dandy's boredom, behavioral predisposition to violence, and a set of personal beliefs in which he is akin to God, all culminate in creating a monster. A monster who looks like this:

Even worse, he is a monster whose mother continuously turns a blind eye to his misdeeds and basically enables him to keep on doing what makes him feel excited and alive: killing people. Had I mentioned this yet? He kills people. He starts out idolizing Twisty the Killer Clown and eventually evolves into a whole new beast himself. Lots of bodies. Lots of blood. Lots of crying from Dandy because he "wants to be a thespian" and everything is actually "your fault, Mother" and "I can live off of candy and cognac if I want to!" He's a charming boy.

What makes Dandy so dang freaky is his apparent invulnerability. Once he discovers this "creative outlet" for himself, he simply can't be stopped. He looks normal enough to pass as a regular person, and his mother makes sure that everything he does is covered up so that there's no chance he'll get caught. He's a murderous man-child with no impulse control, some serious anger issues, inbred genes, and a clown costume. He's terrifying.

Dandy represents a model of monster we weren't expecting to see on the show: he looks normal. Going back to the whole binary thing, Dandy is as far away from the Freaks as a person could be: he's handsome, physically fit and healthy, rich, loved by his mother, and, most importantly, lonely. He's a silent, unstoppable killer who, unlike many of the supernatural, demonic, abomination-y villains on the show, could be very, very real.

Dandy is a serial killer who could easily exist in our world. He's affluent and psychotic, which, when put together, make for a very frightening figure. He's not a Freak like so many of the main characters, but, then again, some of the most disturbing atrocities of this season are committed by "normal" people (again, this is where some spoilers are going to come in):

• A "normal" father mutilates his "normal" daughter for daring to fall in love and run away with a "Freak," condemning her to a life of misery
• A "normal" married couple commits infanticide and blames it on a mentally disabled "Freak," who is then locked away forever
• A conniving "normal" con artist seeks out Freaks to kill so that he can sell their strange, abnormal, or mutated body parts to the highest bidder.

Things weren't written this way on accident. The show hits you over the head with the whole "Freaks are normal, don't discriminate" motif in the very beginning. Yet I was surprised by the subtlety with which Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk and their team included these heinous acts. The actions themselves stick with you, but they also instill a sense of unease when you see some of these "normal" characters on-screen. As a viewer, you slowly become more and more comfortable with the "Freaks," who, at first, were admittedly a little disturbing, while simultaneously ending up with a knot in your gut whenever Dandy comes on screen. We begin to associate "normal" characters with danger and deceit, realizing that they are capable of things we usually reserve for nightmarish monsters in our dreams.

Seeing Dandy on screen began to fill me with a sense of dread, actually making me shudder once or twice when he would do something so completely psychotic that I was left in shock. He was a normal guy. He looked like a handsome, healthy hero, not a disfigured, ugly villain. Yet here he was, killing people because it made him less bored for a while. It was a brilliant side-story to throw in amidst some of the stories of the Freaks. These were no less graphic, but still felt very distant (again, bringing home the point that seeing Dandy as a monster who could easily be real is far scarier than someone who looks different than you).

And then, of course, like all shows that hook big ratings, AHS goes too far with the gratuitous violence and sex while trying to get that shock factor in and leaves me rolling my eyes at my computer screen. But in spite of that, in spite of the grandiose and the big special effects budget that can't be wasted, my point still stands. 

Dandy is, at least to me, by far the scariest character in this 13-episode long horror flick. He's a monster who looks like a man, preying on anyone who strikes his fancy and manages to get away with it because he can hide in plain sight. Stories like his are why Criminal Minds is still one of the most popular shows on TV right now: we like to glance at the monsters who live among us. The only difference is that, on AHS, there's no team of pretty FBI agents to swoop in and solve things before the episode is over. And that's more than a little scary.

End log.

 

Information Space

Annie's Log, 10/04/15:

I have done a lot of writing in my life. Like, a LOT. When I was in high school, I thought that I was doing SO much writing, what with Creative Writing and English and History classes, and then essays for college applications and scholarship essays.

And then I got to UNC. At the end of my freshman year, I had a total of 27 pages due in the course of one week. Once I was an English major, I had one semester where I had a total of 23 books (and you can imagine how much writing I had to do during THAT semester). I wrote lab reports, short stories, emails, play reviews, research papers, kvetches, articles, lesson plans, and so much more. I did a lot of writing. I wore out my laptop's keyboard. I probably set myself up for carpal tunnel syndrome and back problems.

But I discovered something about myself while I was doing all of that. Hours of typing and planning and sitting and thinking and procrastinating and cranking out work.

I like writing.

It's not so much that I enjoy the act of endlessly typing out characters in the hopes of getting a good grade on something, though I guess I do enjoy typing. (I remember taking "Digital Communications" in high school and while almost everything about it was pointless (I literally had a 100.00 average at the end of the semester because the assignments were incredibly simple), it did make me a better typist.)

No, I like words.

I like writing my thoughts out, phrasing things just so in order to get my point across. I like incorporating humor and heart into whatever it is that I'm trying to get across. I like seeing something that I've put a lot of work into in its entirety, getting to hold it, in print, in my hands.

And it's not just long projects. I really enjoy Twitter (my profile says "I like words. I think a lot. Sometimes I put my thoughts into words."). One of my absolute favorite memories from UNC was the bet between me and my best friend to see who could get more kvetches into the Daily Tar Heel's weekly "Kvetching Board." Between the two of us, we had over 125 1- to 2-sentence joking complaints published in a Friday opinion column. The DTH even wrote an article about it, which can be seen HERE.

So why am I talking about writing in this post?

Well, I recently started this (b)Log, where I get to write about random stuff every week. And I've been enjoying it a lot. So much, in fact, that I looked into other writing opportunities and, long story short, I am going to be writing for my graduate school's blog, InfoSpace!

Information Space is Syracuse University's iSchool blog. Posts are written by students, and occasionally staff, faculty, and alumni, but they all have to do with the field of Information Studies.

Every other week, I'll be publishing something on InfoSpace for the iSchool. I'm very excited to start this new project, and I'm already working on my first post. Because I like words, remember?

To end this week's post, I'd like to share one of my favorite quotes:

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead,... either write things worth reading or do things worth writing." -Benjamin Franklin.

That dude knew what he was talking about. Just look at him:

Dude.

End Log.