Book Cover

' The orginial photograph is credited to Eolo Perfido
where here I just simply used and edited them to
make the book cover.'

GROTESQUE
NATSUO KIRINO
Publisher: HARVILL
Category: CRIME FICT

Article. Assignment 2

ADS TURN TV INTO AN 'EWW'TUBE

March 17, 2008 -- IT'S enough to make me take up smoking again.
You see the ads every morning on NY1, airing as regularly as a cigarette addict needs a fix.
The anti-tobacco ads put out by the city Health Department are as grotesque as open-heart surgery performed without anesthesia.
There's video of a beating, diseased heart. It's followed by an image of discolored lungs. There's a mouth eaten away by disease. And a throat with a purplish tumor growing from it.
I get it. Smoking is bad.
But this is sick.
For the last few months, Health Commissioner and chief nanny Dr. Thomas Frieden has ratcheted up an anti-smoking blitz to the point of nausea.
One morning, as one of the commercials came on, my gaze fell on the 9-year-old with whom I share my world. She tried to hide under the sofa.
I can explain to my kid why people simply should not smoke. But this campaign goes too far.
A check of parents assures me I'm not alone.
Anne Townsend, a Brooklyn mother, clicked on the tube to catch up on Spitzer.
As she watched, horrified, her girls, 3 and 7, mutely stared at the set, terrified.
"I had to explain to them that I think smoking is terrible," said Townsend. "And yet I don't want them to think that their friends are going to have these horrible things happen to them."
Beth, mother of kids, 4 and 8 years old, said, "I think it's horrifying!
"No one thinks everyone should go out and smoke, but the message is lost.
"To a child, it's the picture of a monster."
Sarah Perl, assistant commissioner of tobacco control, told me that since Feb. 25 the ads have logged just seven complaints, while hot-line calls from smokers who aim to quit have jumped 400 percent.
These ads are set to run through the end of the month.
A news broadcast would not post pictures of medical atrocities without warning. But these X-rated ads run without a rating.
The Health Department needs to toss them out with the Marlboro Man.

URL :
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03172008/news/columnists/ads_turn_tv_into_an_ewwtube_102351.htm

I think it's really bizzare that what the world has come to nowadays. Back in the day people know that smoking is bad because of what the parents told us about the dangerous of smoking but now we are living in different generation (generation Y) where everything is more complicated and more harder. Now most children and most people are not aware of how dangerous smoking do to the body, so it comes to the point where people need to be warned to the extreme by those advertisement of how smoke can do to our body.

Task 2. Representation and Character

Person's key qualities

-Julia
Former work mate and friend.

Julia is a person that is very difficult to be around with but at the same time she value her friendship. She’s a perfectionist to an extremely tiny detail, very hardheaded girl and strict towards everything in her life, she’s always making her life difficult where there’s actually an easy way. She’s moody and she’s a pessimist as well. She can be said to have a perfect melancholy personality.


Describe a scene or situation involving this person

Another day at work at the café, I prepare myself for a shift of critique and peeve. I know that she’ll already be there, turning up 30 minutes early checking things that haven’t been done properly by the night shift people so she can have something to complain about later. As I step my foot in the café’s door I can see her standing by the fridge with a tired, angry and unhappy face. Somehow I know that it won’t be long before she says all her thoughts and complaints to me.
She then comes up to me telling me off that we’re not yet ready to open as I make the first coffee for that first customer of the day. I’m thinking what’s not ready? Everything seems in place and ready so why not just start take customers in? She quickly explains to that there’s still another 2 more minutes till we open. I can feel she’s now watching me like a hawk. Small wrong steps and I think she’s going to eat me.
All things has to be done her way, nothing gets done any other way unless I want to hear her nagging me the whole day. Everything needs to be in place, she won’t be happy and satisfied unless everything is according to her standard and rule. No one can take it working with her except for me because she’s still my friend but she can really makes people go crazy or think she’s crazy.

Lists

Weather - Cloudy and stormy
An animal - Beaver
A household object - Rocking chair
A machine - Robots
A place - Dark alleyway
Music - Soft and sad, something sound very depressed
A colour -Grey
A fictional ‘archetype’ - Martha Stewart

Image

Yuriy Norshteyn

Yuriy Borisovich Norshteyn is widely regarded as one of the most innovative animators of all time and are best known for his animation Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales. During his work and the state animation studio, he discovered the films and writings of Sergei Eisenstein, which had a profound influence on him and inspired his own directorial ambitions towards his work. His also inspired by the early twentieth century avant-garde painting. "The painters of that period (1910-1920) enabled me to see the immense artistic potential of animation", he explains. That influenced all his subsequent work.

Norshteyn gained the status of a classic master of animated cartoons upon the release of Hedgehog in the Fog in 1975. In 1984 the international jury in Los Angeles called his Tale of Tales (1979) ‘the greatest animated film ever’. And in 2003 Hedgehog in the Fog received the same sort of accolade in Japan. He has created a special type of poetic animated cartoons, of pure lyricism and developed through a sequence of visual images. Unexpected associations, sensations, reminiscences, fears and dreams are more meaningful than the real plot in his original works.

Besides his brilliant and touching cartoon characters and amazing delicate scripts, one is clearly impressed by astonishing effect of a ‘living’ screen, which is due to a special technology that Norshteyn has elaborated himself. This is the most complicated method of multi-level transposition in the lessons of filming, the images are made as scaly combinations of tiny elements, with each of them are able to move separately for example each of the eyes, lips or fingers. As a result the character, though not looking like a realistic personage at all, but rather bizarre, amusing and irregular seems to be really living and breathing. Norshteyn intentionally insists on imperfect, non-ironed drawing.