Expressionism

Based on what I've observed, it seems that Expressionism is the display of human emotions so heavy and raw, it becomes surreal. Somehow, expressionism has a way of physically forcing emotions out of you, unlike most forms of art which only entertain and make you reflect.

One thing I noticed is that a lot of the imagery in the videos we saw contained characters with deformed bodies. It was common for people to have white painted faces and dark black eyes. In particular, one of the versions of Wozzeck had people with hunched over bodies.

These characteristics are intense enough to seem out of place, but still subtle enough to seem almost human. I believe that's what induces the most fear into people: distorted reality.

A lot of the expressionist work deals with distorted, grotesque reality. Mary Wigman's dances played around with this concept. All through the Witch dance, she was twisting her body in all sorts of awkward positions.

The Witch Dance (this is not Mary Wigman)

The way that this person's arms are twisted back and their fingers are fully extended, they seem like another creature. Just looking at them makes you feel unsettled.

It was interesting to see how expressionism was used in music and writing, where you don't create a physical image. 

Listening to the atonality of Wozzeck instantly made me think of Sweeney Todd (which I'm guessing is definitely expressionistic). The music in Sweeney Todd has a tendency to change keys randomly, and change time signature randomly. Stephen Sondheim definitely knew his stuff when he was composing. Even though there's no clear melodic path, the songs in Sweeney Todd are still quite memorable. And scary.

One thing I find interesting about modern art/movements: It's funny how after hundreds of years of cultural evolution, we've decided to throw out all of the rules and standards that have been created for art in favor of our own set of rules. It's like we've all started from scratch once again, from the beginning, when art was first developed by the human race. Perhaps this is a common cycle that is necessary for new things to be created. I just find it intriguing.

Ethics

Talking about ethics is difficult. Although everyone treats it like black and white, there's shades of gray, and it's always hard to know what's right or what's wrong. It's one of those things that isn't clear cut, so it's hard to describe, hard to judge, and sometimes even hard to punish, or to feel guilty about.

This has recently come to my mind after having my dad yell at me for "unfairly downloading music". 

It used to be clearer back in the day who owned what. When a person owned a CD or a record, they owned it, and no one else. Nowadays, it's so much more complicated.

Of course, one option that people have is illegally downloading music through websites which is definitely not the right thing to do. Perhaps people can give reasons like

• No one will notice
• The musicians have enough money anyway
• The recording industry is very corrupt anyway
• Music is not worth a price, especially when I can listen to it free on youtube

In the end though, it is illegal activity, and someone ought to get in trouble for it, or at least feel very guilty. That's clear. But it gets more complicated than that. 

Let's say that you're in a musical, and the teacher is giving out music from the soundtrack of the musical for anyone to download. Is it unfair to copy the music, even though you're using for educational purpose? Even if you have no other choice BUT to download the music?

Perhaps yes. You did not pay for it, so it is not really yours. But you still OWN it, it's a file on your computer. It exists, and it doesn't un-exist unless you delete it.

At that point, are you supposed to pay for the music itself, even if you already have it? According to my dad, yes.

If your friend has a CD and you copy the files from the CD onto your computer, is that stealing?

Probably yes, but it doesn't feel like it. Does it make you a bad person if you do so?

If you listen to music on a free service like Spotify, should you buy some of the music you listen to anyway? Sure, the record companies are paid to a certain extent, but if you're listening to the same album over and over, should you buy it, for the sake of giving to the musician and simple morality?

Stopping yourself from unethical downloads is like staying abstinent. People think you're weird and won't want to put up with it, and you get rushed into a bad decision because you really want to get something however you can.

Along this line of thinking, I also think about some of the Anti-Bullying laws I've heard about. I understand that bullying is a bad thing, but I think that a lot of these laws are impractical and almost impossible to use.

There isn't a fine line between teasing and bullying, and there are many reasons for this. Kid A could be joking around with Kid B, but Kid B takes offense to it. Kid A could be teasing Kid B and Kid A just has no clue he's hurting Kid B's feelings.  In addition, many people can argue that bullying builds character, and trying to prevent bullying is just sheltering kids off from the real world.

Now, what I'm talking about is bullying, which is teasing that can hurt another's feelings. There's a different between bullying and harassment, in which a person basically takes another person's life and makes it a living hell. Examples: A woman poses as a fake boy on facebook and pretends to like a teenage girl and get her to admit all of her secrets; a person mocks someone and gets so many people to join in, the kid can no longer defend himself.

But even though these two things are different, they tend to blend into each other at a certain point. And when that happens, what do you do? It's not black and white.

Hopefully we all have a percentage of good inside ourselves that outweighs the bad, but there will always be bad.