I’ve written and argued about this many times before, but my stance on music in movies has gotten more and more rigid as time goes on. I now firmly believe that movies would be better if there were absolutely no music whatsoever in them. Over-saturating a movie in music is a lazy attempt at forcing an emotion on you, makes it harder to suspend disbelief, and worsens the “noise pollution” of modern day sound tracks.
While there are certainly other varieties, I find that movie music tends to fall into three main categories: epic, drama, and comedy. All of which are equally awful, but lets first focus on comedy sound tracks. This type of music is the one that irritates me the most. The best way I can describe it is that a typical comedy score is like watching the movie with the director who has to point out all of the funny parts. It’s like he’s right there elbowing you in the side, smacking away at his big tub of popcorn with that stupid grin on his face, constantly calling out, “this is gonna be so funny! Watch this. Watch, are you watching!? Oooooh, that was so funny! Wasn’t that hilarious? That was hilarious!!”
Using comedic musical cues is a cheap trick to cover up the fact that the joke wasn’t funny to begin with. The same trick is used all the time in dramas. Lets say one of the film’s characters dies. Often I have no feelings whatsoever for the character, but if a little sad music is laid over the top of it, of course I’m going to feel emotional. It has nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with the psychology involved in composing sad music. If I’m really supposed to care about the character, make me care about her. Show me, through that characters actions, why I should care about her. Don’t try to trick me into being sad; I’m not stupid. If anything I’m a little upset that I’m being forced to feel sad about a character I don’t care about.
The same goes for epic, action music. I’m talking about the kind of music that is most prevalent in fantasy adventure and science fiction movies. The kind of music that is supposed to make you feel excited and inspired. The kind of music that is so incredibly relentless and overlays anything slightly epic at all. The same rule applies here; if the action is epic, the viewers will be excited, if it is not they will not be excited. Don’t try to fool people into being excited by cramming intense music down their throats. Movie music is not only annoying for attempting to force an emotion, it also detracts heavily from the experience.
If the idea behind watching a movie is to suspend your disbelief and let the experience wash over you, music makes that harder to achieve. In real life, music does not blare over some ominous speaker, providing a soundtrack to our life (as much as some people would enjoy that). And in some cases it’s just downright inappropriate. Take an action sequence for example. Lets say, for the sake of argument, that the characters in the movie hear the musical score. Don’t you think it would be a little distracting? If I’m trying to delicately scale a cliff-side, or stab some dragon in the face, the last thing I want to hear is some massive orchestra blaring away in my ear. Sometimes I almost expect the character to shout “Shut up! I’m trying to concentrate!”
There are only two times it is acceptable to have music in movies. 1) if it has an obvious source, and 2) it is played during a montage. If the scene takes place in a car, for example, it is okay to have underlying music because I can accept that the music is coming from the radio and most people listen to the radio while driving a car. If the main character is wearing headphones; let us hear what he’s listening to. But if two naked guys are standing in the middle of the desert, where the hell is the music coming from? and why aren’t they trying to find the source? and what kind of a movie features two naked guys in the middle of the desert? what a terrible example. Music is also acceptable during montages because a montage is so far removed from reality that you can do whatever you want with it. Plus montages generally lack any interesting audio, so go ahead and cover up the lack of sound with some music.
I think some of the movie music abuse can be attributed to covering up bad sound design. It’s easy to hide a lack luster Foley, sound effects, or dialogue track by smothering it with music. But this is, of course, not always the case. Big budget movies that had the time, money, and resources to develop stellar sound tracks still hide all that hard work behind awful musical scores. Probably the biggest contributor to the problem is the music editor. It’s unfortunate that the music editor generally gets the last tweak of the soundtrack. Each sound department thinks their work is the most important, so naturally they will try to make theirs the most prevalent. By giving the mix to the music guy last, you get a soundtrack with overbearing music and barely audible dialogue. This is what I mean by noise pollution in movies. There’s so much going on in the soundtrack, that often the really important parts (dialogue) are impossible to understand. The mix should be passed along like this: Foley–>sound effects–>dialogue. Obviously I’m oversimplifying the process, but the important part is that you fire the music guy. Just get rid of music entirely; it’s distracting, unwelcome, and annoying.
Now I know there are some nuts out there that actually like movie music, so here’s my suggestion. With the advances in digital video technology, it’s amazing we haven’t really started to innovate with home video formats. What I propose is a DVD Blu-Ray disc that allows you to choose which audio channels are played and at what volume. So people like me (all two of us) can turn off the music and crank up the dialogue. Make it happen, Hollywood.
I hate confrontation. I hate being angry, and more importantly I hate knowing that someone else is angry at me. I hate it so much I’m even a little skittish about honking–I hesitate to honk to remind someone a stop light has turned green. When someone yells (or honks) at me, I get this sinking feeling like, “I’m not a bad person, honest. Don’t hate me, please!” While I certainly could improve on avoiding confrontation (or at least initiating it), I want to focus more on keeping myself composed during confrontation. Nothing looks stupider or more immature than a person angrily talking down to another person. Well ok, I’m sure there are plenty of other more stupid looking things a person can do, but this is pretty high on the list. Today, had the confrontation not been my fault, I would have been rather proud of the way I handled the situation. I managed to remain calm and talk lower and slower than the aggravated woman yelling at me.
Let me back up and explain the situation. I was walking to my car when a woman pulled up near me. She was obviously trying to park in the spot I was walking through, and she clearly wasn’t happy about waiting. Now I’m no expert on shrugs, but the shrug she gave me was very much directed straight at me and said something to the effect of “What the hell are you doing in my spot!? Get out-the way before I run you down!” So naturally I gave her an innocent “What did I do?” shrug.
She returned the same accusatory shrug.
So I shrugged back, mimicking her a little more this time. She returned it again! Whatever, I continued on to my car. The woman pulled into her spot, rolled down her window, and yelled “Do you have to walk so slow!”
Before I could stop myself I blurted out “Do you have to be an ass?”
(Now at this point, dear readers, I would like to point out that I know I shouldn’t have said anything. So please, there’s no reason to call me out on it.) The woman started yelling something at me that I can’t remember except that it ended with “..and you’re just a minor, you can’t talk to an adult that way!”
Wait, wait, wait… Now I know my acne is a little out of control (thank you very much Accutane), but I am not a minor. Besides that, we all know my feelings on using your age as a means to gauge respect… Oh, I guess I haven’t written that post yet. Well I will, and then we will know my position about using your age to gauge the amount of respect you deserve (hint: age doesn’t mean shit to mean when it comes to how much I respect you).
Now maybe I should have just walked away, but for some reason I thought to myself, this situation isn’t right and I’m going to do something about it. So I approached her car. When she got out I said “I think maybe there has been a misunderstanding.”
“You bet there’s a misunderstanding!”
“I was just walking in front of you and it seemed like you shrugged like I had done something wrong.”
The woman then ranted on and on about how maybe she was just talking to her daughter about her husband (who, from the sound of it, rented some expensive porn behind her back), and that I must have a pretty big head for thinking everything was about me. Well maybe I do have a large melon, I don’t know, but what I do know is that even if the shrug was not intended for me, the snarky remark was totally uncalled for. Regardless, I simply said “Well that’s not how I interpreted it and I’m sorry we had this misunderstanding.”
That didn’t seem to appease her though and she continued to ream me. So I finally stopped her and said, “I don’t think you understand. I’m apologizing to you.”
A breakthrough; we shook hands and went on our merry little way. I was so rattled after the encounter, though, when I got in my car I was shaking so much I could hear my foot bouncing away on the gas peddle. What is it that drives two complete strangers to face off like that? Well, not exactly like that because that particular argument was only heated on one side. I’m talking about these people you see in public just going at it like animals. Why? The other day I saw a van hit a guy on a bike. No kidding! He ran smack into this guy, tossing him to the asphalt and dragging his bike under the car. The biker got up and started cursing like mad (and rightfully so), but the surprising thing was that the guy in the van got out and started yelling back at him! It was like neither party would admit fault, and the really worrying thing about it was that the guy in the van’s first reaction wasn’t something like “Jesus Christ! Are you ok!?”
So it seems I will never be able to completely avoid arguing with a total stranger, but with practice, I want to always come out the winner. The lady I argued with today probably went home thinking she’d schooled me, but she looked like an ass doing it. I may have apologized to a total douche, but I did it without raising my blood pressure.
Here it is folks, the last of my China footage. This was intended to be the first of many short videos in which Haibao teaches a foreigner how to survive in China. But wouldn’t you know it, these are actually a lot of work, so I was only able to do one. It’s a little corny and rough, but that’s because we didn’t even have a script, this was just a test to see if it was possible. In this episode Haibao teaches Mark how to spot noodle shops and order up some grub.
Changzhou was actually the first place we went on our vacation, but that’s only because it was the city I’d be living in for the next six months. So I saved this review for last in case I got more footage while living there… I didn’t. But I have pieced together what little I did capture so you can get some idea of the city I lived in. Changzhou is a massive city. It’s actually considered fairly small by Chinese standards, but believe me it’s huge. There are several distinct districts within Changzhou. My school was located in Wujin district. Wujin is much newer than most of Changzhou so it actually looks fairly nice in many areas. The only problem is there’s not a whole lot going on in this district. At least there was a Tesco… 30 minutes away from my school. Being so remote, I was quite a spectacle in Wujin district. I always looked forward to going to the downtown area if nothing else but to escape all the open-mouth gaping that goes on in Wujin.
One of the main attractions in Changzhou is Dinosaur Park. Unfortunately I didn’t take my video camera with me, so there’s no footage of it. But suffice it to say it’s a decent theme park. It’s not quite up to snuff with parks in America, but it’s pretty OK all things considered. Not to mention it has a very catchy soundtrack.
Changzhou also has several, nice public parks scattered throughout the city, but there’s really not much to tell about them. In fact there’s really not much to say about Changzhou at all. Man, you’d think after six months I’d have something to say.
If you’ve ever felt like your mp3 collection was a complete mess or you’ve ever been frustrated with your audio player of choice, then this edition of Cool Freeware is for you. I’ll introduce you to my three favorite freeware programs related to audio.
If you’ve been using Windows Media Player, Itunes, or pretty much any of the “standard” music players to listen to you song collection, I implore you to stop now! Foobar2000, while not perfect, is leagues better than any music player I’ve ever used. The greatest feature of Foobar is that it is ridiculously lightweight. This thing barely puts any load on the CPU and it boots almost immediately. I never realized just how long I was waiting for my music to start playing with Windows Media Player until I used Foobar. Itunes users will probably feel more at home with Foobar in the beginning, though the default settings certainly aren’t the best. Fortunately the program is very customizable. With enough patience and technical know-how, you can even make it look and act almost exactly like Itunes (though I don’t know why you would want to). Even without much tech knowledge you can customize Foobar to fit your needs. Some notable features are the ability to organize music in tabbed play-lists, group songs within lists by artist, and customize the displayed information on almost every part of the program. Foobar also comes equipped with a very nice tag editor and audio converter. My only real gripe with Foobar is how it handles shuffling songs. It essentially creates a random list of songs when it loads and plays straight through it. That’s fine if you never backtrack, but if you want to listen to one song again it will start running through the randomly generated list from that point again, so you’ll hear all the same songs again. Alternatively you can set the song order to “random” instead of “shuffle”, but doing this disables the back button. Also there is no way to shuffle songs in the playback queue. So if you select a chunk of songs and add them to the queue they’ll playback in alphabetical order (or however you have your music organized). It’s a small complaint, and I still think Foobar is the best audio player on the market.
You’re blaring Billie Jean over your car stereo system and you think to yourself, “I know this song is quieter than the rest, I should get ready to turn it down.” But the music is just too damn catchy and the thought quietly slips from your mind. Then suddenly the bitchin’ guitar riff of your favorite metal song nearly explodes your eardrums, “MEEDLY MEEEDLY MEEEEEE!” You scramble to turn the volume down, narrowly avoiding running down a cat in the process. You know it’s happened a million times (just substitute metal with anything else), and don’t you wish there was something you could do about it? Well there is! Mp3 Gain analyzes your mp3 collection to find the perceived volume, then adjusts the dB gain to match whatever level you set. If you’re like me you’ll constantly be changing that number though (should I go 95 dB and risk peaking a few songs or go 89 dB and have to crank up my mp3 player volume!?). Fortunately MP3 Gain doesn’t actually affect the audio data in your files. It merely adds a bit of information to the file to let whatever program is playing it know to make it louder or quieter. So you can be at ease running songs through MP3 Gain a hundred times if you so desire. Once the program has done the initial analysis, adjusting the gain is much faster because the data is embedded right in the song file.
While Foobar has a decent tag editor built in, Mp3tag streamlines the process considerably. Just make sure you change the options to read and write all tag types, or you’ll be awfully confused when your Mp3tag changes don’t show up in Foobar. One cool feature of Mp3tag is the ability to search for albums and fill in information like genre, year, and even album art. Or if you’re like me, you can strip the album art from your collection. Mp3tag isn’t exactly something you’ll need on hand at all times, but it is a good one time use to whip your mp3 meta data into shape.
In planning my vacation I thought it would be easy to spend eight days in Sanya. I could just chill on the beach, do some swimming, and all would be well. Three days in and I’m wishing I could be home already. Maybe the train ride just broke my brain, but I can’t get any joy out of this vacation at all. The biggest problem is that outside of the beach there is nothing to do in Sanya. My hostel offers all kinds of cool tours but they are way too expensive if I take them alone and I have to form my own groups. Today I finally just told them if anyone is going on any of the tours that I want to join them. Of course I doubt any groups will form that I can join; people don’t come to Sanya to see monkeys, they come here to sunbathe on the beach. Sadly, the beach is just not that great.
When I first arrived in Sanya I went straight to the beach to see what I had in store for me. The moment I walked onto the sand I said aloud, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
There were people on every inch of sand for as far as the eye could see. The beach is similar in quality to many of the beaches I’ve been to in California, just with a crowd that puts Hanauma Bay to shame. Which is too bad because Sanya is supposed to be the Hawaii of China, but it most certainly is not. Maybe at one point Sanya could comfortably be compared to Hawaii, but now it’s not even close to the same league. Tourism has pretty much driven all of the fish away, so there’s no good snorkeling. The beaches are so crowded it’s not all that fun to just relax in the sand. About the only thing that is good is the swimming. But even that I’m not able to do much of because the weather took a sudden turn for the worse on only my second day here. It’s now cloudy, windy, and too cold to get in the water. The forecast for the rest of my time here doesn’t look too promising either. Top that off with a rapidly developing cold (or allergies, not sure which) and I’m having the time of my life.
I didn’t realize just how troublesome traveling alone would be. Or how lame it would be. Seriously it’s not fun at all to travel alone. Not to mention it’s a little scary and somewhat embarrassing to boot. I just have to keep telling myself it was cheaper to come here than it was to change my return flight to an earlier date. Then I go out for a 100 yuan dinner and think there’s no way this is going to end up being cheaper.
A prolonged mental war was waged in my brain over the decision to travel to Sanya by train or by plane. Ultimately price won me over, and I opted for the train. Sadly, the train ticket turned out to be considerably pricier than what I had looked up on the internet, but I bought it anyway. Had I continued my research instead of buying the ticket I would have found that it’s actually slightly cheaper to fly. As it was, I had an overpriced train ticket in hand and was, I thought, mentally prepped for the journey.
I’d been on long train rides before, but nothing close to 37 hours. Somehow I’d worked out in my mind that it would be ok. 37 hours later, I can tell you it most definitely was not ok. There’s so much I hate about riding trains I’m not even sure where to begin. One of the most annoying things is that they like to blast loud, obnoxious music all day long. It at least helps drown out some of the ridiculously loud talking and eating, but it’s not much of a trade off. While smoking isn’t allowed in the passenger cars, you can smoke in-between them. Unfortunately it doesn’t keep it as contained as I would hope, and the whole train smelled like cigarette smoke the entire time. Combine that with the smell of the ever worsening bathroom and I constantly felt like I was on the verge of puking. It doesn’t help that many of the Chinese men think if they hold their cigarettes really low and behind their backs that nobody will notice or care that they smoke in the passenger cars. At about 10:00 the lights and music went off without warning; apparently it was time for bed, which would have been great if I didn’t have a loud snoring guy next door. Every train comes equipped with at least one, and my snoring guy sounded like a large drill with low batteries slowly and sporadically grinding its way through a thick Styrofoam board. What little sleep I did get was rough because I kept dreaming about being on a ship with a thief problem. We even came up with a cute alias for him, but I can’t remember what it was so we’ll just call him the Bedtime Bandit. The frustrating thing was that the bandit only stole stuff from me, and it was stupid stuff like one spoon or a sheet of blank paper. Sure I didn’t really need the spoon, but why didn’t he take anything from my bunkmate!? Even more annoying was that he kept flashing a light in my face just before he left that would wake me up every time. What’s really, REALLY annoying is that that last part wasn’t a dream at all. One of the train… guys… kept walking down the hall shining a light in the rooms that woke me up every time. I finally smashed another pillow in my face and solved the problem of Mr. Snores and flash light man. Until 6:20 when that damn music started up again!
Towards the end of the train ride I was literally rocking back and forth muttering to myself like some escaped mental patient. It got worse when I was informed by my hostel that they didn’t have a room for me after all, and it got really bad when the train was almost an hour late! I should have known things would go downhill rather quickly when, right from the beginning, some Chinese guy tried to steal my bed.
When I bought my train ticket I neglected to specify which bed I wanted (top, middle, or bottom), and since the ticket is written in Chinese I had to ask another passenger which one was mine. He looked at my ticket and pointed to the middle bunk; the cheapest, most inconvenient one. I wasn’t too pleased, but whatever, I’d make it work. The guy helped me hoist my stuff up to the luggage rack, and soon the train was on its way. Nobody had taken the bottom bunk yet, so I decided to sit there until someone kicked me out. As soon as I sat down the guy that helped me started yelling at me and pointing to the middle bunk. I thought it was a little odd that he would care, but I moved back out in the hall anyway. A few minutes later the ticket lady came to switch my ticket for a card. I couldn’t help but notice that she drew my card from the bottom of her portfolio. It just didn’t make sense, why would she put the card for the middle bunk in the bottom? It wasn’t sitting well with me, so I asked a Chinese friend to send me the characters for top and bottom. Lo and behold, my card said bottom. I immediately went over to the guy that “helped” me and showed him the card, pointed at the bed, and proceeded to ream him for lying to me. His friends had a good laugh about it, so I’m sure his plan was to move into my bed later (he had a middle bunk in the next room). They kept laughing and saying “ting bu dong!” so I finally yelled at them “I know you don’t understand, but you can tell that I’m mad and that’s all that matters!”
The good news is I survived. I made it through a 37 hour train ride mostly intact, and I’ll never, ever do it again. I’ve already booked my flight back to Shanghai so take that, stupid train. One cool thing about the train was that at one point the whole thing was loaded on a ferry to take us out to Hainan. Woo, that totally made it worth it. (No it didn’t.)
The same students that threw me a birthday party saw fit to throw a Christmas party in my honor. It was a very nice, touching gesture, but… it was exactly the same thing they did for my birthday. We played the same cake game and they sang songs, only this time they threw in a few extras like a cup stacking performance and some mad Rubik’s cube solving. They wanted me to try unscrambling a Rubik’s cube, but of course I couldn’t. It was even one of those four square ones to make it easier, but I just twisted it around for a few minutes before holding it out proudly in front of me and exclaiming “ta da!” Perhaps the funniest part of the night was at the beginning when one student asked if anyone could tell us about Christmas traditions in America. One guy I’d never seen before enthusiastically volunteered. He went to the front of the class and with a huge grin on his face said, “I’ve never seen a foreigner before. But today I saw one. So I am very happy.” I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or be irritated, but the first student’s response put a smile on my face when she said “Ok… but I asked if someone could tell us about Christmas traditions.”
Speaking of traditions, this Christmas and new year celebration were about as nontraditional as they could be. While Christmas is recognized by the stores with their fancy decorations and festive music, I don’t think anyone really celebrates the holiday here. They might go out for a nice dinner, but that’s about it. And that’s just what we did, if you consider pizza a “nice dinner”.
Missing out on a traditional Christmas made me realize how much I like the season. I haven’t been too festive the past few years, but you can rest assured I’ll be whipping out an itchy Christmas sweater, constructing candy homes, and throwing up decorations next year. Ew… sick, maybe I’ll just put up decorations instead. All with my family of course, because that’s what really makes the season, and what was missing most from mine.
I’ve been done teaching for a few days now, so I suppose it’s only appropriate to reflect on my experience. I’m not entirely sure what I had expected or hoped for in a foreign teaching experience, but I know I definitely didn’t get it. My expat experience felt eerily similar to my pathetic college experience. If I wasn’t in class, I was in my room. Because my school was so far away from everything it made it pretty much impossible to have any kind of a social life. Granted I was able to go downtown and spend time with my brother and his friends on weekends, but it was a little strange because I didn’t really have any of my own friends. That’s not to say I didn’t look forward to weekends or that I didn’t like my brother’s friends. Indeed I did, but it wasn’t until recently that we met some other teachers at a foreign teacher’s retreat that felt more like our friends. Which really makes it kind of sad to be leaving now, and upsetting that the retreat wasn’t held earlier in the year. But when did this become a post about my social life? This is supposed to be about teaching!
I think I’ve done enoughcomplaining about my bad classes that you can get a fairly good idea of what I disliked about teaching. While my complaints still stand for the majority of my classes, there were about three classes that I actually enjoyed teaching. Consequently these three classes had the oldest students in them. Not only was their English level much better, they were far better behaved too. But even within these classes there were plenty of students with terrible English skills. On the long, miserable bus ride back to my college one weekend, one of my students (whom I thought was one of the better ones) stood next to me smashed up against me and wanted to talk. Weather is always a safe subject, so I asked when was the last time it snowed in Changzhou, but she had no idea what I was saying. I tried asking other simpler things, but she couldn’t understand a word I said, so I just spent the rest of the bus ride in awkward silence. It was a pretty depressing conversation though because I realized then that I gave my classes way more credit than they deserved. I honestly don’t think any of my students learned a single thing from my classes. What my class did provide was an opportunity for them to practice things they already knew. If that helped them at all, then great. If not, sorry I wasted your time.
Even though teaching was a pretty disappointing experience, I’m still glad I did it. I came to China before in 2006 to teach for a summer camp, but I didn’t stay long enough to feel satisfied. This time, even though I still didn’t stay that long, I feel like I’ve seen and experienced plenty of China. The only remaining question, then, is would I do it again? That depends on what you’re asking. If you’re asking if I’d teach again then the answer is without question; no, I’ll never teach English again. When I do live abroad again, it will have to be for some reason other than teaching English. I may have had a select few good teaching experiences, but the bad far outweighs the good. If you’re asking if I’ll come back to China, then the answer isn’t so clear cut. I’m not opposed to coming back to China. I would enjoy coming back to China, it’s just not very high in my list of priorities. There are so many other places I’d much rather go before I come back to China. It’s hard to answer my students when they ask me when I’ll come back. I quickly found they didn’t like the answer “probably never” so instead I just shrug.
This last weekend I had the opportunity to attend a Chinese wedding. My reaction to some of the traditions range from full approval to uh… not like. Let’s get the bad out of the way right now. Most banquets have an annoying MC that jokes, sings, and narrates through the entire event. Weddings are no different. The moment things got rolling to the second the wedding was over, the MC was hollering into a microphone. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if we weren’t sitting right next to the speaker, but as it stands I spent the majority of the wedding with toilet paper crammed in my ear canals and my hands over my ears. I don’t see why this guy is necessary; can’t people just enjoy each other’s company during the wedding instead of being overpowered by some obnoxious stranger? Worse than the MC, though, is the tradition to smoke throughout the entire event. Every table was given a huge stack of cigarettes that the guests made sure were used. Which meant I also spent the entirety of the wedding adorned with a face mask. It seems like a really odd tradition. It’s like saying “to celebrate our new life, you can smoke away yours!”
One of the more peculiar traditions is that the bride changes three times throughout the course of the day. She starts out in her wedding dress, then changes to a dinner dress, and finally changes into a departing dress. Where it seems like in the US we try to get as much mileage out of our wedding clothes as possible, they were eager to parade around in new get-ups.
The tradition that really stood out to me is that everyone gives the bride and groom the same gift; money. How awesome is that? Every gift is simply some cash presented in a red envelope. I can totally get behind that tradition. It’s way better than getting ten toasters and uh… whatever else you get at a wedding.
Attending a Chinese wedding was certainly an interesting experience, albeit a smokey and noisy one. At the very least they had some nice wine.
