What is the person in The Scream screaming about?

The Scream

by Edvard Munch

(in Norwegian, it's Skrik)

created 1893-1910

I know wikipedia is much decried for inaccuracies, but I used it for information and the article is here.

This painting has always given me a creepy feeling if I study it long enough. I think the screaming figure is especially weird because he's bald. No one in real life looks like this, so it's otherworldly. He looks afraid. There are two people coming toward him, but he's looking off to the right and something there is scaring him. The transliteration of the Norwegian word is "shriek," and that seems even more appropriate for the picture. A scream of surprise.

I often have dreams about the end of the world. I am trying to deal with people chasing me, dangerous terrain, aliens, natural catastrophes. My family is in danger and I'm trying to help get us all to safety. I guess watching shows like Falling Skies on TNT doesn't help me at night!

The scenery in The Scream is the kind of imaginary world I might see in my dreams of the end of the world. One of the theories about the red sky is that there was a volcano eruption that spewed a lot of ash into the sky and gave Edvard a red sky at sunset which inspired him to paint this painting. The sky seems almost to be moving around like the stream going under the bridge, or even as the body seems to be moving. I feel like the screamer is about to slip down to the ground, melting down with fright.

But the question today is, "What is he screaming about?" I think something is just off the other side of the bridge. Something is coming out of the water. Something so scary and threatening that it scared the hair off him! It's a man with a knife and a heavy brow, storming his way up the bank of the river, coming right at the screamer. The two people coming up behind him are going to catch him if he tries to run the other way. There is no escape . . .

To be or not to be

J and I started watching Hamlet on the Ovation channel Thursday night, and I was excited to see it was back on this evening. I had to miss the last 30 minutes! So now I'm finishing it up.

It has been 17 years or so since I've studied Shakespeare, but I still love it. I don't understand all of it, but I like it! I took two semesters of Shakespeare---one at Texas A&M and one at UNT---and I still have my BIG Complete Works of Shakespeare (somewhere). It's best watched, not read.

I'm glad J was interested in watching Shakespeare with me. He's an actor, so maybe he'll get to perform it one day. At Christmastime, he will try to get in a school production of "A Christmas Carol." He is not getting to take drama this year after all---he has to take a technology class instead because of the program he's in. Jamie wants to see "Twelfth Night" tomorrow, so we're setting the VCR.

This version I'm watching now was made in 2000, and is set in NYCity. Ethan Hawke is Hamlet. I'm enjoying it!

Here are a couple of pictures from the last few weeks.

When I top this hill, and start down this long stretch, I know I'm almost there. (Do you know where?)

I did a beginning of year activity in my classroom using this book. Each child brough a rock, as did I, and we will keep them here as long as we're in the class.

This is me on the first day of school. One of my students took it for me.

Here are all the new shoes! and legs, and knees, and khaki shorts.

Hooray!

I'm watching Survivor!! :-) It's in Africa. J is rooting for BOB and I'm in these early stages rooting for the pre-school teacher (and 4x100 relay 2004 Olympic gold medalist), Crystal.

Sesame Street's influence

One blog leads to another . . . and once I am YouTube, I just can't help searching for similar things!

I saw this first video on another blog this afternoon, and I love it.

Stevie Wonder


Culture is out there if you know where to look!

I am teaching kids who are that target audience for shows such as this, and although they may not see the significance of the highly successful artists that sometimes go on S.S., the quality music is still seeping into their little minds. That was a video from my childhood, but the next one is from my son's childhood.

R.E.M.


Some may think I'm bad for this, but I just never got much into "children's music." I can't really stand too much of it! I let my kids listen to my music form the start. J was choosing Tom Petty form our stack of CDs instead of a bunch of kiddie music.

Now this is not to say that none of it's good. I love witty music, like Joe McDermott
but my kids are too old for all this now.

Here's a cool video form the 80s. "New" technology at that time. Probably quite a few kids have little electronic pianos that will do similar things to change voices nowadays!
Herbie Hancock


And all that lead me to this video of one of our favorite Star Trek stars . . .

Patrick Stewart


And this one . . .


But here is my most memorable S.S. segment . I still sing this in my head sometimeswhen I'm counting!

I am a member of the TV generation.

High School Musical 2

I have to mention some things about High School Musical 2. We've been watching Disney and Nick all summer, and couldn't miss the continuous hype about HSM2. The Disney Channel has no commercials for products, but they have commercials for all their shows all day long. Over and over. All the time.

Anyway, we were sufficiently hyped up about HSM2, which came on last Friday night. J hasn't really gotten into it, but B is at the young end of the target audience, I guess. I 3rd grader interested in a show about High School? It seems a little wrong, maybe. ?? But I'll get to that later.

She was all set to be home at 7 to watch this show, and it was a little bit of work to get home on time. But B and I were there (without the guys home) and we ate pizza and French onion dip and enjoyed the music and dancing. The storyline was okay, the colors in the show really appealing, the music peppy and fun or dramatically sad. It seemed more like a musical than the last one. It wasn't just singing a song in the story, it was singing a song to carry along the story, singing the lines at times. The dancing was really good, too---very difficult, I thought.

I ended up watching it twice---J succumbed to the hype and watched it the next night. He thought it was pretty okay. He objects to them hyping up an okay movie until it is an obsession. I'm teaching him to be wise about marketing. ;-)

I heard of lots of parties around this movie, and even a friend's daughter's birthday bash with 3rd grade girls walking down a red carpet. heehee!

I caught a few of the TV interviews with the cast I thought were interesting. They said the dancing was harder---more partner dancing. They had to do a lot of filming at night since so many scenes were at night, which was kind of hard. (But they're young!)

I have heard this HSM phenomenon being compared to this generation's Grease. Maybe. Today's culture with DVDs is so different than it was back in 1978 when Grease came out and I was 7 years old. I didn't go see it at the movies, and it wasn't played 3 times in one weekend on my TV. Really, that's a good thing! Grease makes me cringe when I watch it with the kids, especially because J understands so much more now. What's that movie rated? It's not appropriate for third graders at all, really, but the music is so good and it's such a part of American culture.

What's good about HSM 1 and 2 is that the language is clean, the costumes seem appropriate, and the storyline is okay. No one is getting a pregnancy scare in HSM! Ahem! There is a heavy emphasis on "getting the guy" or "getting the girl" but it's not too sexual. The cast is really diverse (someone for all to identify with except maybe Asian-Americans), and they're all so clean-cut and really beautiful to look at! I do wonder what the population of a typical Albuquerque high school---a few more Hispanic-looking kids, maybe?

I have heard that #3 will be at the theaters instead (cha-ching!$!), and that #4 is already in the works as well. So what ever happened to the guy who claimed he wrote a "High School Musical" and Disney stole his idea? I found this article about it after searching for 15 minutes. It's all about the money! I hope he got a quiet payoff for his ideas, if they were stolen! In Disney's defense, this article talks about how the songs were not the same, and part of the Disney movie appeal was the peppy music. That was the top selling CD of all of 2006! Wow! But if anyone is capable of taking someone's idea, changing it enough to not be "the same show," and making a hit out of it using marketing and beautiful actors and catchy tween-appealing music, you know it's Disney. They have the money to get it done.

Hey!! I think that's really some of my money!