Reflection Post

This class was definitely one of my favorites this semester. It was great working with so many people who were on the same course I am. One of my favorite aspects of this class is the creative freedom we had to use what we have learned as English majors and future educators. We were allowed to take a broad topic/ project and present it in a way that we felt would best inform and engage our classmates ( and sometimes our students). the class was always encouraged to think differently and allow our creativity to help us connect with the material and assignments.

 The learning process during this course was very hands on. When we learned about poetry, we were assigned readings then we were asked to create poetry. When learning about how technology could be added to the classroom, we read a book and then had to create a project that incorporated technology into a lecture. This course was very informative and benefial to me as a graduating senior and a future educator. I would definitely recommend this course and this professor to students and CSUN.

Beijing Bicycle

Bristol, Lauren

English 495

Professor Wexler

12 May 2014

Beijing Bicycle Analysis

Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle is a story of a young man named Guei trying to make his way to make a living in the big city while living in the country. He is hired as a bike messenger for a well known company and is given a brand new mountain bike to carry out his duties. When his bike gets stolen after a hard day at work, Guei gets laid off and sent back to the countryside. His boss offers him a chance to regain his position if he can find his bike. The remainder of the movie is Guei’s relentless quest to find his bike as he faces numerous obstacles that he is determined to overcome. Sounds like a great drama, right? Though the plot seems simple enough, this film has many scenes and struggle that are related and representative of Western capitalism and globalization.

 Guei really needed his job and was willing to do anything to keep it. His boss gave him another option to get his job back: If he would be able to get the bike back, he could keep his job. Though it may have seemed like his boss was doing him a solid, it caused Guei to put his life in danger, kept him from moving on to another job, led him to become reliant on his boss/ job, and drove him to desperation. This is similar to the loan process that was outlined in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. The American people are desperate and don’t have enough money to survive, so the bank gives them a chance to restore their lives and financial situation by taking out loans. There is a heightened interest rate in this money taken out which requires Americans to struggle even more to pay back a sum larger than they borrowed:

…. Of course hidden in the dozens or hundreds of pages of fine print are tricky clauses that allow the bank to raise your interest rate to a number you didn't know about. Perhaps so high you can't repay your loan. But that's OK, because if you can't repay it, we'll just take your house. (Moore)

 This cycle also leaves Americans slaves to the banks they have borrowed from and drives them to desperation. In Randy Martin’s article “Where Did the Future Go?”, Martin elaborates on how people are made to feel backed into a corner financially:

… but less focus has been given to the implications of finance’s rule for the experience of daily life. One shift lies in how finance asks people to see their future or more specifically to see the future as already at hand. Given how much capitalism had once staked on the future, the political implications of that change merit careful attention, especially if we are to see finance more than novel means of domination… (Martin)

 Large political powers have made its people feel as though they must be financially stable now and making they feel as though they are lacking in financial security. This shift in mentality leads people to taking out these loans that they don’t need also describes the way in which Capitalism has seeped into our democratic system and has crippled us via loans and fluxuating interest rates.    

There is another scene in Beijing Bicycle when Guei is talking with his friend, Mathis, after he gets a job as a bike messenger and they have a simple meal consisting of rice and a scarce amount of meat. Mathis shows him a woman that he has been watching in a nearby window. She is young, beautiful and lives in a well furnished apartment. He proceeds to explain that she has everything that she could want, but she always looks so sad and dissatisfied. The audience then sees a series of frames in which the young woman has changed into a few different outfits in the same day. There is definitely class difference between Guei and his friend and the young woman in the window. The angle at which they are looking up at this woman is also significant: She is high above them and they have to look up at her from their slum of a home. 

 In a society run by capitalism, the rich political powers are on the top of the hierarchy pyramid and the poor common citizens are at the bottom, struggling to survive. It is almost impossible for the lower class to make it to the top of this pyramid, therefore the gap between them grows. In Capitalism: A Love Story, Randy Hacker and his family are evicted from their farm that has been in the family for decades. Frustrated with the ruthless injustice of the government, he makes a profound comment about this social gap, saying, “There’s gotta be some kind of rebellion between the people that’s got nothing and the people who have it all. I don’t understand. There’s no in between anymore. There’s the people who got it all and there’s the people who got nothing.”

Guei first gets his bike as a part of his job as a bike messenger and when he loses his bike, he loses his job. He scours the town, day after day searching for his bike in the hopes of bringing to his previous employer and getting his job back. Jian purchases the stole back at a shop with the financial help of his friends. Jian’s father can no longer afford to buy him the bike he promised him because he will be using said money to pay for Jian’s younger sister’s school tuition. He steals money that his father has saved for his younger sister’s tuition to buy the bike he wanted. When Guei gets his bike back and starts working at his old job, Jian and his friends hunt him down to reacquire the bike. Guei needs that bike so that he can have a living but the boys continuously try to take it from him because they want it.

This struggle can be representative of the struggle between working class and the political powers in America. In Capitalism: A Love Story, we are introduced to Randy Hacker’s wife, Donna, who equally as distraught as her husband about the foreclosure of their house and ultimately their lives. She is sitting on the porch of her family farm for the last time and cries about the circumstances under which her house is being wrongly taken from her, saying “ Why do you do this to the hard-working people?... We’re just middle class, hard-working people just trying to make a living. Just trying to survive.”  The Hackers need their house to live. It is not a desire or an accessory, but a necessity. The bank has overlooked their basic need for survival and repossessed it in the hopes of selling it to someone else and making a bigger profit off of this family’s misfortune.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Beijing Bicycle. Dir. Wang Xiaoshuai and Xiongping Jiao. Perf. Lin Cui. Arc Light Films, 2001.

Capitalism: A Love Story. [Traverse City, MI] Beverly Hills, CA: Front Street Productions, LLC;             Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2010.

Martin, Randy. "Where Did The Future Go?" (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Apr.-May 2014.

Capitalism paper rough draft

The boy really needed his job and was willing to do anything to keep it. His boss gave him another option to get his job back: If they boy would be able to get the bike back ,he could keep his job. Though it may have seemed like his boy was doing him a solid, it caused the boy to put his life in danger, kept him from moving on to another job, led him to become reliant on his boss/ job, and drove him to desperation. This is similar to the loan process that was outlined in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. The American people are desperate and don’t have enough money to survive, so the bank gives them a chance to restore their lives and financial situation by taking out loans. There is a heightened interest rate in this money taken out which requires Americans to struggle even more to pay back a sum larger than they borrowed. This cycle also leaves Americans slaves to the banks they have borrowed from and drives them to desperation. Martin’s article also describes the way in which Capitalism has seeped into our democratic system and has crippled us via loans and fluxuating interest rates

There is another scene in Beijing  Bicyle when Guo  is talking with his father after he gets a job as a bike messenger and they have a simple meal consisting of rice and a scarce amount of meat. Guo’s father shows him a woman that he has been watching in a nearby window. She is young, beautiful and lives in a well furnished apartment. He proceeds to explain that she has everything that she could want, but she always looks so sad and dissatisfied. The audience then sees a series of frames in which the young woman has changed into a few different outfits in the same day. There is definitely  class difference between Guo and his father and the young woman in the window. The angle at which they are looking up at this woman is also significant: She is high above them and they have to look up at her from their slum of a home.  In a society run by capitalism, the rich political powers are on the top of the hierarchy pyramid and the poor common citizens are at the bottom, struggling to survive. It is almost impossible for the lower class to make it to the top of this pyramid, therefore the gap between them grows. In Capitalism: A Love Story, the farmer makes a profound comment, stating that there is no middle class really, only the really rich and the really poor.

March 3- March 9

This week was very interesting. Watching the presentations for the myth assignments were very enlightening. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend class on Monday, but the presentations that I saw on Wednesday were quite impressive. My group's presetation on the male divine was good, I think the way that we planned the presentation to look wasn't how it actually... looked. We had a really beautiful Prezi presentation prepared and the morning off, it wouldn't work when we tried it in class. This took up a lot of our preparation time and shook me up a bit. I was really disappointed in my portion of the presentation because I forgot to explain almost half of my research. I thought that we were going to be running short on time so I ran through my cue cards very briefly and forgot to explain the significance of the different representations of the male divine. :(. But my group gave a lot of solid information to the class and the skit portion was hilarious.

The other groups, I think, really utilized different forms of media in their presentations. They used PowerPoint, online graphics, video clips, etc. They did a great job getting the class involved in their presentations in a way that was equally entertaining and educational. I am feeling a little insecure about our final grade but I know that we did our best

February 24-March 2

This week, we focused on our Myth Presentation projects. After finishing reading the book, my group decided that we would present on the male divine archetype that is present in mythology. The research for this project was really fun and my group has a lot of creativity, which I lack. My portion of the research consists of explaining the different representations of the make divine in mythology. A few examples consist of the father/son relationship, the trickster, the shaman, and the sacrificial son. What I've found from the text has peaked my interest in the topic and I'm looking forward to analyzing these personas. My group has expressed their desire to have a skit in our presentation which sounds like a fun idea. I don't know if I will be involved in that part of the presentation, but I'm definitely on board to have that be a class participation portion of our assignment.

February 17- February 23

Last weeks class session was extremely refreshing. To enjoy everyone's poetry was such an eye-opening experience. I had no idea there were so many artists in one classroom! I was able to experience the poems come alive because of the use of the different poetic techniques and elements. I completely underestimated the power of alliteration until I chose to use them to bring my poems  "She Was There" and " Your'e the One That I Want" to life. In "She Was There", I used alliteration to replicate the sound of breathing in the line "... be here, hovering over her", which became a particularly powerful element to a poem that is describing the experience of feeling death linger (I didn't realize how much it added until after I finished it). Even the assonance in that line totally brings more air to the words and adds to a pattern of inconsistent breath that one would encounter when inching closer and closer to death. In "Your're the One That I Want", I used alliteration as a tool that further illustrated a sense of the speaker being mentally stuck in the same cognitive place in her mind. The line that states "hyperventilating in disbelief and disappointment and disdain and disembodied" has a lot of repetition in sound that represents her thoughts being in this continual loop that she can't move past. The stressed and unstressed syllables in the words with the "d" sound also resembles the sound of a person hyperventilating of read in one breath. I definitely learned a lot about they way different techniques can appeal to more of the senses and better allow the audience to connect and feel the work

She Was There

"She's not the same; It's not... her."

I nodded in understanding, 

He patted my shoulder and trudged into the kitchen

I looked into the open doorway for a moment, 

Needing to burn this moment into my memory.

I walked steady into the room
It was dark to the right.
To the left is where she laid, that's where the light was.
There she was.
It was almost laughable except for the fact
That it altogether was not.
She was on her back
Chin sunk into her chest, hands beautifully at her side.
The skin on her face had the full effect of gravity
Or the full effect of pain.
Phillip was at the foot of her bed.
Told me to sit, like we did this all the time.

He was talking but all I could hear was her body.
This wasn't her. Someone was wearing her skin as a costume
And it was too big for them, She was too big for them.
This was too big for me.

Life was happening but the clock was tapping.

Loudly, like a dripping faucet in a porcelain room.

An hour glass, emptying

Grain, by

Grain by

grain. 

And that’s all I could hear

That clock tick-tocking.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick .

Tock.

It was almost as if death was tapping his toe, saying

I

Am

Wai-

Ting.

If you’re going to be here, hovering over her every breath,

Don’t be a tool about it.

Let her invite you in, offer you some orange juice, bring you a brownie. 

Like she did me, like she did all of us. 

She was still there, 

a paralyzed shell.

She was still in there, banging on the brim of her brain

"I'm Still here! I am in here!"

But I stared, 

And he stared. 

And she was vacant.

Tick. 

Tock. 

Tick. 

Tock.