Author: lizzz

Caption 1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flisspix/15849911/

Originally posted by: mygothlaundry

“ ‘ Chris was always an entrepreneur,’ Billie says with a laugh. ‘Always.’ As an eight-year-old, he grew vegetables behind the house in Annandale and then sold them door-to-door around the neighborhood.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 115).

This is a picture of a little vegetable garden in someone’s backyard. The caption from McCandless’ mother paints a picture of how driven McCandless was even when he was a small child. He was very intelligent and driven, but didn’t necessarily have a lot of common sense, as we the readers find out through out the book.  I choose this picture to go with the caption because I see an eight-year-old working diligently on this small piece of land, planting seeds and checking everyday to see if anything is growing. I can also see the eight-year-old mind working to make a profit, reminiscent of Calvin from Jim Watterson’s comic strip. This picture could be anyone’s backyard, with anyone’s small child tending to it.  The caption is sentimental, and makes the reader feel remorse towards McCandless’ death. You can see the cute little face with the basket of vegetables, instead of the gruesome, emaciated, furry man found at the beginning of Krakauer’s book.  Many people would prefer to see the picture of the little boy as opposed to the dead young man.

 

Caption 2

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sillykitty/23465997/

Originally posted by: sillykitty

“..and I could tell by the language he used he was a real sharp fella. He wasn’t what you’d call a typical hitchhiker.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 159)

This is a picture of Marvin the Martian, holding a handwritten sign. I picked this particular quote because it summed up much of Chris McCandless/ Alexander Supertramp’s transportation. After he left his Datsun in the desert, McCandless either walked, canoed, rode a bicycle, or hitchhiked to get to the next place in his journey. I picked this picture because it had a hitchhiker holding a sign. The language used on the sign is English and very simple, the opposite of the complexity and style of  how McCandless talked. The figurine is not based on a real person, but a character from a cartoon. This is similar to how McCandless based his idea of an Alaskan adventure on fiction books. The caption I choose to go with this picture is ironic because it has a little plastic man holding a sign that says happy birthday. The figurine is standing in front of a keyboard and a computer monitor, and no where near the road. The Martian is recognizing other people, and is connected to those people through the internet. His cartoon character travels through space, where McCandless traveled on the Earth. Marvin the Martian is not what you would call a typical hitchhiker.

 

Caption 3

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94799348@N00/127315133/

Originally posted by: slylitteminds

“For most of it’s short length, Davis Gulch exists as a deep, twisted gas in the slickrock, narrow enough in places to spit across, lined by overhanging sandstone walls that bar access to the canyon floor.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 88).

This picture is a picture of Fremont Gulch, in Colorado. I choose this picture because it is a picture of a gulch. It is what the gulch that is mentioned in the book looks like in my head. This picture has all the different elements described in the passage I choose. The picture and the caption go together because you can see the gulch, and might describe it the same way that Krakauer does. The landscape is beautiful and  haunting because there is no human life portrayed, just endless sky and sandy crevaces.  I choose the caption because it is about the place where Everett Ruess disappeared. The desert that Ruess choose is very similar to the Alaskan wildness that McCandless choose because they are both desolate, fairly uninhabited places. Krakauer compares Ruess and McCandless, marking their solo journeys, their disappearance from the social world, and their deaths. The two men were very similar, and had similar experiences while tramping through the desert.

 Caption 4

http://www.flickr.com/photos/burlapjacket/22081306/

Originally posted by: burlap jacket

“Over the next three years the Park Service used the Datsun to make undercover drug buys that led to numerous arrests in the crime-plagued national recreation area, including the bust of a high-volume methamphetamine dealer operating out of a trailer park near Bullhead city.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p.27)

This is a picture of an Astin Martin on a corner in New York City, in the SoHo district. I chose this quote because I really like that McCandless’ Datsun got a lot of good use by the park service. I chose an Astin Martin to compare with the quote because it is a car of all cars; James Bond drives them in the movies. They are really expensive, top of the line machines. This particular car isn’t abandoned, and is being shown off around town. This car is the opposite of what McCandless would have chosen to drive and own.  The car is not going to be used for drug busts, or for the greater good of society. It’s a car to have fun in, and let other people see you in. The picture is ironic because the Astin Martin represents the opposite of Chris McCandless’ ideals. McCandless wanted to find the real meaning in life, and I think he would have seen the Astin Martin as a huge affront to finding that meaning, because it represents a lot of wealth and money. McCandless made a lot of effort to get rid of money in the last two years of his life, only getting the bare essentials of what he needed.

Synthesis

Photographs influence the meaning and meanings of their pictures because they give the viewer something solid and defined to compare the words to. The word happy under a picture of someone frowning is ironic, whereas the same word under a picture of someone smiling can be redundant. The caption can also get rid of potential meaning the viewer may see. The caption has the capability of limiting or expanding meaning. Chris’s Datsun was able to help better the world by getting rid of drug users, while the people who drive the Astin Martin might be involved with the white collar version of drug use. To use the very cliché phrase, a picture is a thousand words. Using a caption under a picture reduces those thousand words into a paragraph or even a single word. The viewer is almost forced to see the picture the way the caption, or the person who decided on that caption, skews it. When Into the Wild is taken out of context, anything can happen. Seeing the picture of the vegetable garden, paired with the caption I choose, the reader may think that Into the Wild is the biography of Chris McCandless. The picture of the Astin Martin would change the book into a story about how an abandoned car helped to reduce drug problems, almost eliminating McCandless from the story. Into the Wild would not be about young men with ideals that led to their demise, or in Krakauer’s case- his almost demise, but about going into the wilds of drug circles and the men and women that try to eliminate their existence. Pictures invite the viewer to see what they want to see, and take away what is important to them, where captions make those same readers take away what the photographer intended.

I can’t help but notice the similarities between Into the Wild and “Grizzly Man”. We find out a lot of information about the characters from the work that they have left behind, and the people that knew them, but nothing from the two men themselves. The book and the films are very similar in that respect.  Both men wanted to be away from people, but yet they both seem to crave some sort of contact, a “look what I did/am doing” mentality. Alex Supertramp wrote in journals and took rolls and rolls of film. He wanted some type of documentation of what he had done. If he didn’t want some sort of contact, he wouldn’t have felt the need to do so. Timothy took hours of film, shooting the footage of himself as well as the bears. He shot the footage like he was making a television show to put on national television. His quest for aloneness with the bears was ruined by his filming more of himself than of the bears doing bear things. I think that these men had an unrealistic view of nature, which ultimately led to their deaths.

I really enjoyed Professor Scarlata’s presentation last night on point of view in film. The part that I most enjoyed was the clip from Christopher Columbus. I think a film like that shows not only a single person’s ability to shape an  event the way they want, but that other people expect to see the event played out the way that it is presented. The movie was made in the 1940’s, and I think the characters were presented that way to make the viewers comfortable with what they were watching. The reason a movie is called controversial is because it makes the viewers uncomfortable with either the subject, or the way they think about the subject. At the time, the comfortable movie may be hailed as a master piece, but it is only the later generation that will look at the same film and take it down from it’s pedestal. The controversial film will be banned, mother’s will cover their children’s eyes, and a later generation will see the movie as groundbreaking and a true testament to the times. I think it is the comfortable movies that tell a true testament to the time in which it is made, because it shows how the populace in general thinks and feels. The controversial movies are made by the “weirdo’s” and the people who don’t quite fit in. It is neat to see how literature does a similar thing. Works like The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelo, made the people at the time uncomfortable about what was going on around them; they were happy about seeing what they wanted to see.

“Sonny’s Blues” is not about Sonny Bono like I thought it was going to be. However, music is really important in this story. The main character hears a man whistling when he reads about his brother’s arrest; his brother is a musician. Sonny, the man who was arrested and the brother of the narrator, plays the piano. He spends hours and hours at the piano, playing his own music and learning and adding on to others. The music in this story represents the growth Sonny goes through. He starts by copying someone else’s work which can be equated to the lessons and behaviors that he learned from his parents and the people around him. Then he adds on to pre-recorded pieces, using the music as a base to jump off of; here Sonny is applying things he has learned on his own from life and seeing how they fit into what he already knows. Finally, after years of drug use and going to jail, Sonny plays in a club downtown. When he plays, Sonny plays his own music. He has learned many things, and plays his own life song.

The genre of music emphasized in the story is blues, a type of music stemming off from jazz. The people singing these songs have lived hard lives, and reach a type of catharsis through singing these songs and telling others the hard times. The music captures an age of difficulty with people struggling to make it through life. I think the choice of music suits Sonny, because he lived in a poor neighborhood, was a drug addict, and went to jail. He may have brought the suffering on himself, but he suffered none the less. If the music had been classical or rock, the mood would not have been the same, and would have taken away from the story.

I have read other works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and understood what point the author was trying to make, but I was really confused by A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. The old wise woman says that the man blown in by the storm has to be an Angel, because he has wings. A priest is mentioned, indicating this is a Catholic community, so the Angel assumption is not surprising. What is surprising is that the people are not afraid of him, but rather treat him as a freak and with very little respect. Whenever an angel appears in the Bible, the Angel always announces “Be not afraid”, making the reader wonder if the Angel is scary looking, and not as the cherubs or Fabio’s as we all thought?

Another really interesting point made is that the Angel does not really perform miracles the way the inflicted want them too. Instead of curing a man’s blindness, he grows extra teeth. The leper, who is unclean and dying, has sunflowers grow out of his sores. Sunflowers are living things, and the flowers growing out of the lepers sores is ironic because they are the living healthy thing the man wanted to happen to him. The miracles happening are miraculous, but seem to be made by an Angel who does not care, or is starting to get feeble and unable to do what he really meant to do.

The people in the Bible always treats the Angels with reverence, and they always do the Lord’s work or something amazing, so is Marques trying to imply that the reverence for religion and staples of religion is fading?