Jack Moore Blog Posts
12/3/2019
Distance Between Actor and Role: The Test Run
Theatre is the only form of art that I have any real talent in, and so it's one of particular interest. But for this blog, I wanted to examine the concept of role selection. When casting a character, it is considered a job well done by the director for finding the closest match between character and actor, but a tremendous acting performance is usually defined by the difficulty the actor goes to to change themselves into that character. For example, Deadpool is a perfectly cast character. Ryan Reynolds outside of the role is so similar to the character that it's almost impossible to distinguish the act from the actor. But at the same time, he will never win an oscar because of this closeness, there's an idea that it's barely even acting for him, therefore it can't be the best performance. I personally find this to be a pretentious viewpoint. An actor should be judged on the quality of the character created, not the lengths they went to do so. Perfect casting does not mean less talent has to go into the performance. If it comes naturally to someone, they are fundamentally a tremendous artist.
8/26/2019
Individual Beauty Assignments
This class is going to be a struggle for me, I can already tell. Coming up with three examples of times I've experienced beauty shouldn't be all that difficult, but it's something so unlike anything else I've done. I came up with two, and I couldn't in good conscience come up with another without pulling something out of my butt. My first had to do with a beautiful morning after a horrible all-nighter, and the second had to do with making someone smile for the first time with me. I was never going to share when the opportunity arose in class, but I felt it was important to at least consider what these mean for me. What I could distinguish is that what gave those moments a beautiful quality was the contrast from darkness to light, an all-nighter to a sunrise and a frown to a smile. Moments cannot stand out as truly beautiful unless they are distinctly contrasted before or after.
9/9/2019
Heidegger, good god Heidegger
Being and Time has had me in a spiral for a few days. It seems like nothing actually matters, only what you individually find important in moments of Anxiety. This is the only thing that keeps life meaningful to Dasein. But this leads to the concept that art is entirely subjective, which is not in line with Heidegger's thought on Art as a whole. Anxiety also hit me as uniquely phenomenological in comparison to everything else I've been learning in my other classes. It should be interesting to see how the phenomenological approach differs between my 451 class and this one!
9/12/2019
OK, I'm not a fan of Nothingness
"What is Metaphysics?" by Heidegger has created inconsistencies for me again. On a podcast I listened to on Heidegger, it said that Great Art has the capability to reveal truth and Being according to Heidegger. But in this last reading, I learned that the nothing nihilates as Dasein consider Being, and pushes Dasein back towards society, which would include art. But society is considered inauthentic, so would Art not also be inauthentic? The consumption of art in media make me think that the podcast didn't fully elaborate on what Heidegger means by Great Art and what separates it from standard art that we see everyday.
9/18/2019
Ritual
The video about different forms of ritual including the Whirling Dervish and the Chinese theatre was particularly interesting to me because I've studied and seen Chinese theatre in China. The differences between eastern and western theatre are incredible. Western Theatre focuses on dialogue and complex storylines to entertain and challenge its audience. Eastern theatre can oftentimes have no dialogue, and the story lines are meant to be rather simple to follow. The play I saw in Chengdu had an enormous 300 person cast, and none of them had speaking roles. A narrator spoke over the top explaining everything and it's context historically as well as it's meaning. I just thought the way the ritual appeared made a lot more sense with that context of their theatre as a whole than just as an individualized ritual. When few to no characters have lines, silence is not quite as jarring.
11/25/19
Cave Paintings
The documentary on cave paintings in class was my second Herzog documentary of the day, so a little bit dry round two, but it had one really impactful moment for me. It was the idea of editing art in the Aboriginal tribes. The way it was phrased as an out of body experience was so interesting to me. The idea that the art they create isn't actually theirs, they are just guided by the ancestors. I thought that was super interesting when contrasted to the cult of the artist that our modern society encourages.
11/26/19
The Andy Warhol Movie From Class
I wanted to discuss the way in which the artist was corrupted by outside forces attempting to monetize him. When the young artist is discovered by the art industry, they devour his art, forcing him to create more and more, no longer for himself, but for them, and for money. His relationships begin to fall apart, first with his best friend, and then with his girlfriend. We watch as he gets the fame and attention he wanted for his art, but his life gets no better, and at the point that his overdose nearly kills him, it's clear it may have gotten worse. I thought it was an interesting perspective to watch beauty for itself be superior to beauty for a purpose. In a way, it almost made purpose-driven beauty ugly. I'm all about anti-capitalism, so this was a fun movie to watch and breakdown along these lines.
11/26/19
The Train
I'm currently traveling to NYC to spend Thanksgiving with a friend, and this train ride has been a perfect opportunity for brainstorming. I was considering again Heidegger's Great Art. Now that I've studied it, it seems to me that any number of activities, if viewed from the right perspective and with the idea of letting the work be. The paper I'm writing for your class is gradually shifting to the argument that war and art are not necessarily different in the right context. I know that there is inherent strife in art for Heidegger between The Earth and The World, so I think that war is a really good example of a non-artistic activity that has beauty, which could be considered art. The Art of War may be very literal.
11/27/19
The Puppy
I've been in New York for a day, and the family I'm staying with has a dog that doesn't like me. I don't know what it is, but at certain times of the day he won't come near me, but when I changed into pajamas, he loved me all of a sudden. It felt fantastic because I love dogs with my entire heart, so getting to play with him was fantastic, but it reminded me of my earliest blog post where I spoke about the contrast making things beautiful, and I'm still very on board with that. I think that this moment would not have mattered anywhere near as much if Copper had liked me from day one.
11/28/19
I need an excuse for peace and quiet
I've run out of patience for people in general. I needed a quiet moment to gather myself and just think quietly. The house I'm staying at is beautiful, the family, is wonderfully nice, but I just needed a moment. The more I think about it, I believe it has to do with the idea that I cannot authentically express myself around them. As lovely as they are, it's still not a place where I can be emotionally open. There is a certain version of ourselves that we share with others, and it can get frustrating to live inauthentically for too long without an opportunity to breathe.
12/1/19
The Train Back
Not a great opportunity for brainstorming. This train ride has been painful. We got on at 1:36 am, so I knew it wasn't going to be a blast and a half. As I was trying to sleep however, a baby started crying, and now I'm thinking about context. A baby's cry when they are born is a moment for happiness and joy at a successful delivery. It's the moment when the baby has taken its first breath. There is real beauty in that moment. A baby crying on a train at 3 am is not beautiful, and it is not the right context. Do not take infants on overnight train rides seems like a typically accepted rule of thumb. Context is important for everything, especially babies.
12/4/19
The Library at Night
There is a certain time of night when the library becomes a beautiful place in preparation for finals. I'm in the reading room with my friends doing work, and we just took a study break and started messing around the massive, empty room. We sprinted in between desks, tried to do one-handed pushups, and just started making jokes and laughing. MOMENTS before this started, everyone of us looked dead inside and out, working for hours will do that to you. But after minutes of relaxation, we all felt incredible. It makes me think that humans are so innately tuned to finding and appreciating beautiful moments that they refresh us far faster than our internal battery can be drained.
12/6/19
My First Theatre Performance in 2 Years
I took a bit of a break from theatre, and after tonight I won't be doing that again. The feeling of being onstage, even for a minor one act, makes me feel amazing. It's a rush of panic, fear, confidence, and love for the work you've put in. It's been months of rehearsals to get every part of this play into top shape. My character gives me so many opportunities to put humor into simple moments, and that's the beauty of theatre. You can't act only at the major moments, the audience won't be engaged or care enough by then. You have to draw them in with little body movements, facial expressions that wrap them up in the performance. My director gave me so much liberty to do exactly that, and it's made this whole experience tremendously rewarding.
Distance Between Actor and Role: The Test Run
Theatre is the only form of art that I have any real talent in, and so it's one of particular interest. But for this blog, I wanted to examine the concept of role selection. When casting a character, it is considered a job well done by the director for finding the closest match between character and actor, but a tremendous acting performance is usually defined by the difficulty the actor goes to to change themselves into that character. For example, Deadpool is a perfectly cast character. Ryan Reynolds outside of the role is so similar to the character that it's almost impossible to distinguish the act from the actor. But at the same time, he will never win an oscar because of this closeness, there's an idea that it's barely even acting for him, therefore it can't be the best performance. I personally find this to be a pretentious viewpoint. An actor should be judged on the quality of the character created, not the lengths they went to do so. Perfect casting does not mean less talent has to go into the performance. If it comes naturally to someone, they are fundamentally a tremendous artist.
8/26/2019
Individual Beauty Assignments
This class is going to be a struggle for me, I can already tell. Coming up with three examples of times I've experienced beauty shouldn't be all that difficult, but it's something so unlike anything else I've done. I came up with two, and I couldn't in good conscience come up with another without pulling something out of my butt. My first had to do with a beautiful morning after a horrible all-nighter, and the second had to do with making someone smile for the first time with me. I was never going to share when the opportunity arose in class, but I felt it was important to at least consider what these mean for me. What I could distinguish is that what gave those moments a beautiful quality was the contrast from darkness to light, an all-nighter to a sunrise and a frown to a smile. Moments cannot stand out as truly beautiful unless they are distinctly contrasted before or after.
9/9/2019
Heidegger, good god Heidegger
Being and Time has had me in a spiral for a few days. It seems like nothing actually matters, only what you individually find important in moments of Anxiety. This is the only thing that keeps life meaningful to Dasein. But this leads to the concept that art is entirely subjective, which is not in line with Heidegger's thought on Art as a whole. Anxiety also hit me as uniquely phenomenological in comparison to everything else I've been learning in my other classes. It should be interesting to see how the phenomenological approach differs between my 451 class and this one!
9/12/2019
OK, I'm not a fan of Nothingness
"What is Metaphysics?" by Heidegger has created inconsistencies for me again. On a podcast I listened to on Heidegger, it said that Great Art has the capability to reveal truth and Being according to Heidegger. But in this last reading, I learned that the nothing nihilates as Dasein consider Being, and pushes Dasein back towards society, which would include art. But society is considered inauthentic, so would Art not also be inauthentic? The consumption of art in media make me think that the podcast didn't fully elaborate on what Heidegger means by Great Art and what separates it from standard art that we see everyday.
9/18/2019
Ritual
The video about different forms of ritual including the Whirling Dervish and the Chinese theatre was particularly interesting to me because I've studied and seen Chinese theatre in China. The differences between eastern and western theatre are incredible. Western Theatre focuses on dialogue and complex storylines to entertain and challenge its audience. Eastern theatre can oftentimes have no dialogue, and the story lines are meant to be rather simple to follow. The play I saw in Chengdu had an enormous 300 person cast, and none of them had speaking roles. A narrator spoke over the top explaining everything and it's context historically as well as it's meaning. I just thought the way the ritual appeared made a lot more sense with that context of their theatre as a whole than just as an individualized ritual. When few to no characters have lines, silence is not quite as jarring.
11/25/19
Cave Paintings
The documentary on cave paintings in class was my second Herzog documentary of the day, so a little bit dry round two, but it had one really impactful moment for me. It was the idea of editing art in the Aboriginal tribes. The way it was phrased as an out of body experience was so interesting to me. The idea that the art they create isn't actually theirs, they are just guided by the ancestors. I thought that was super interesting when contrasted to the cult of the artist that our modern society encourages.
11/26/19
The Andy Warhol Movie From Class
I wanted to discuss the way in which the artist was corrupted by outside forces attempting to monetize him. When the young artist is discovered by the art industry, they devour his art, forcing him to create more and more, no longer for himself, but for them, and for money. His relationships begin to fall apart, first with his best friend, and then with his girlfriend. We watch as he gets the fame and attention he wanted for his art, but his life gets no better, and at the point that his overdose nearly kills him, it's clear it may have gotten worse. I thought it was an interesting perspective to watch beauty for itself be superior to beauty for a purpose. In a way, it almost made purpose-driven beauty ugly. I'm all about anti-capitalism, so this was a fun movie to watch and breakdown along these lines.
11/26/19
The Train
I'm currently traveling to NYC to spend Thanksgiving with a friend, and this train ride has been a perfect opportunity for brainstorming. I was considering again Heidegger's Great Art. Now that I've studied it, it seems to me that any number of activities, if viewed from the right perspective and with the idea of letting the work be. The paper I'm writing for your class is gradually shifting to the argument that war and art are not necessarily different in the right context. I know that there is inherent strife in art for Heidegger between The Earth and The World, so I think that war is a really good example of a non-artistic activity that has beauty, which could be considered art. The Art of War may be very literal.
11/27/19
The Puppy
I've been in New York for a day, and the family I'm staying with has a dog that doesn't like me. I don't know what it is, but at certain times of the day he won't come near me, but when I changed into pajamas, he loved me all of a sudden. It felt fantastic because I love dogs with my entire heart, so getting to play with him was fantastic, but it reminded me of my earliest blog post where I spoke about the contrast making things beautiful, and I'm still very on board with that. I think that this moment would not have mattered anywhere near as much if Copper had liked me from day one.
11/28/19
I need an excuse for peace and quiet
I've run out of patience for people in general. I needed a quiet moment to gather myself and just think quietly. The house I'm staying at is beautiful, the family, is wonderfully nice, but I just needed a moment. The more I think about it, I believe it has to do with the idea that I cannot authentically express myself around them. As lovely as they are, it's still not a place where I can be emotionally open. There is a certain version of ourselves that we share with others, and it can get frustrating to live inauthentically for too long without an opportunity to breathe.
12/1/19
The Train Back
Not a great opportunity for brainstorming. This train ride has been painful. We got on at 1:36 am, so I knew it wasn't going to be a blast and a half. As I was trying to sleep however, a baby started crying, and now I'm thinking about context. A baby's cry when they are born is a moment for happiness and joy at a successful delivery. It's the moment when the baby has taken its first breath. There is real beauty in that moment. A baby crying on a train at 3 am is not beautiful, and it is not the right context. Do not take infants on overnight train rides seems like a typically accepted rule of thumb. Context is important for everything, especially babies.
12/4/19
The Library at Night
There is a certain time of night when the library becomes a beautiful place in preparation for finals. I'm in the reading room with my friends doing work, and we just took a study break and started messing around the massive, empty room. We sprinted in between desks, tried to do one-handed pushups, and just started making jokes and laughing. MOMENTS before this started, everyone of us looked dead inside and out, working for hours will do that to you. But after minutes of relaxation, we all felt incredible. It makes me think that humans are so innately tuned to finding and appreciating beautiful moments that they refresh us far faster than our internal battery can be drained.
12/6/19
My First Theatre Performance in 2 Years
I took a bit of a break from theatre, and after tonight I won't be doing that again. The feeling of being onstage, even for a minor one act, makes me feel amazing. It's a rush of panic, fear, confidence, and love for the work you've put in. It's been months of rehearsals to get every part of this play into top shape. My character gives me so many opportunities to put humor into simple moments, and that's the beauty of theatre. You can't act only at the major moments, the audience won't be engaged or care enough by then. You have to draw them in with little body movements, facial expressions that wrap them up in the performance. My director gave me so much liberty to do exactly that, and it's made this whole experience tremendously rewarding.
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