The man who lived Into the Wild

Today I'm going to write about a movie that I like. It is called Into the Wild, and it was directed by Sean Penn. The movie was based on a book (with the same name), which was based on a true story. The film’s premiere was on 2007. The soundtrack was composed by Eddie Vedder. It tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a young American man, who started travelling around the USA after he graduated from the university. Christopher rejected the conventional-material life and wanted to stay away from his parents.

He thought that society was sick, and that man in the city only has access to a false idea of himself. He broke his identification cards and donated his savings to Oxfam. Then he started travelling without telling it to his family.

In the film, Christopher meets many people and work in many places looking for a new life and wanting to go to Alaska, where he thinks he could live “on the wild”. Christopher wanted to start again and to know himself renouncing to the conventional values, which of them he considerate as values of hating and ambition. For that, he creates a new name for himself: Alexander Supertramp.

While Christopher was tripping, he changed and learned so much.

Music whenever you want

Today I’m going to write about my favorite piece of technology. It’s the MP3 player. The MP3 player is a tool that reproduces and allows you to hear the music that you have in your computer everywhere, but it also can keep any file that you have in your PC. It has a memory, which determines how many files you can save on it. This piece needs to keep charged, and that’s why you need to get a charger in some cases and in other cases you need to get batteries.

I got it the last year, in August. It operated fine until December, and that’s because it was very cheap. After that, the phones started to stop reproducing music (actually none of them sound). That’s why I used to fix it and adjust it, listening only with the good phone.

I use it when I’m at the subway, when I want to walk, when I’m not in classes or studying and when I’m not at home. In general, use it when I feel bored or tired and also when I go out with my bike.

I think that it’s very easy to transport it and I like it because it lets me listen to my favorite bands when I’m not at home.

I think that it’s not an essential thing and actually I’m not using it, but it helps you to amuse yourself, because it’s great to listen to your favorite music wherever you are.

CORRESPONDENCES

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
sometimes give voice to confused words;
man passes there through forest of symbols
which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
in a deep and tenebrous unity,
-vast as the dark of night and as the light of the day-
perfumes, sounds and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
sweet as oboes, green as meadows
-And others are corrput, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
that sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.


Charles Baudelaire

The life of Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)

Today I’m going to talk about a poet that I really admire. His name is Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire was a poet, critic of arts and translator of the 19th century who is considered as a classic author in French poetry.He’s known because of his book called “The flowers of evil”. His art was important for the poetry in his country. In fact, Baudelaire have been considered as a father for the Decadent movement, which looked up to shock to the bourgeoisie with his art. Also, his influence extended to other movements as the symbolist one, which most important exponent was the poet Arthur Rimbaud, and whose objectives were to create a new art, using artistic language as a medium of human for knowing himself, putting emphasis in the dreams, the unconsciousness and using metaphors and symbols. This movement was created in opposition to the realist movement and the descriptive art. After that, he was considered as a father of the Surrealist movement.

Many of Baudelaire's philosophical proclamations were considered scandalous and intentionally provocative in his time. His familiar life was hard because of his way to be, his addiction to drugs and his bohemian life. In fact, the youth of Baudelaire was very intense because he turned into a negligent person.

At the end of his life, he died of syphilis. He wasn’t appreciated because of his poetry while he was alive, but after his death, the Baudelaire work have been considered as an important legacy of brilliant art, as a result of rebelliousness against society and originality.

Clifford Geertz (1926 - 2006)

Today I’m not going to talk about an expert in my field exactly (He’s an anthropologist and I’m studying sociology now), but he’s an expert in the social sciences field in general. He is called Clifford Geertz. Well, sincerely I don’t know him very well, because I just have read some texts that he wrote last week.
Clifford James Geertz was born in San Francisco, in 1926. When he was young, he made services in the Us Navy in the Second World War. After that, he studied first in Antioch College where he graduated from studying Philosophy and then he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University. After that he became professor in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he turned into emeritus professor. He worked there until he died.
His theories were based on a symbolic idea of culture. He defined culture as a “system of concepts expressed in symbolic forms, through which people communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge on their attitude to life”.
He thought that we can’t apply or develop any kind of law or rule without having the experience of the relationship with the people we want to investigate. We must interpret the behavior of people attending to their ideas of what life is. In his theory, he denies an idea of “human nature”, opposing to it the concept of culture. The theory must adapt to the people we are investigating, and it has no sense if it doesn’t express the sense of social action gived by the actors. He compares the anthropological investigation with the interpretation of a book.
I like him because I think that a fundamental matter on social investigation is that we can understand the sense of the social actions, and I think that if we comprehend the reasons that people put on his actions, we can achieve that.