Week Four: Magazines

NAME: Bay Scene

CONCEPT: The scene in the Bay Area is slowly dying out. As time passes, more venues and bands close down and relocate to the Sacramento/Stockton area, which isn’t a drive that is easily made on a regular basis. This magazine aims to bring the scene back to the Bay by recruiting promoters, spreading local music, and letting the bay area know of the need for more REAL venues, not just teen centers and churches.

READERS- This magazine is aimed at hardcore music lovers between the ages of 16 – 24.

COMPETITION- AMP magazine, AP; both magazines are a staple in the lives of hardcore music lovers everywhere; key word being “everywhere”. This magazine will focus on the bay area only, which has seemed to be forgotten by many touring bands.

Five Advertisers- Shine Drums, Live Nation, Pandora, Local Music Stores, Channel 92.3 radio station

Five Articles-
- 10 Best Bands You’ve Never Heard of
- The Pros and Cons of “No In and Outs”
- Upcoming Shows for the Month
- Venue Breakdown
- What Every Promoter Needs to Know

COVER- The cover will have BAY SCENE in bold, shiny print and all caps. A big picture of one of the bands featured in the “10 best bands…” article (a live performance shot) will be on the front.

BOOKS

Invisible Monsters
If beauty is all a person has, what happens when it’s taken from her? Chuck Palahniuk’s brilliant critique on modern day societal values centers on the shallow nature of today’s culture, and the great means one will go through to achieve beauty. Being a typical girl who struggles with self-image on a daily basis, reading a story about one girl who loses her beauty and soon after watches her whole world crumble absolutely fascinated me. After being in a car accident where she loses her jaw, she’s left with nothing. She loses her fiancée. She loses her best friend. She loses the admiration of the public, now being treated as this “invisible” monster. The moral is that beauty is superficial in every respect. If beauty consumes a person, her relationships will be superficial, and so will her happiness.

The Bell Jar
I felt like I was Esther Greenwood incarnate the moment I read the inside flap of the book. It wasn’t until page four when she realizes straight vodka is her alcohol of choice that I was absolutely sure of it. As would be expected of Sylvia Plath (a woman who committed suicide by shoving her head in an oven as her children were fast asleep, creating a domino effect since her son soon followed mommy’s influence), this tale is about a talented woman’s downward spiral.

The Last Lecture
Robert Pausch was given a death sentence. The Columbia Professor diagnosed with cancer was told he had a mere six months to live. Instead of spending as much time with his wife and children as possible, he set out to write one last lecture about his life’s achievements and the lessons he learned. This inspiring tale of a brilliant man’s accomplishments is most notable for the advice he gives readers/listeners. (My favorite is “If there is an elephant in the room, introduce it.”) This book taught me to never regret, and always live life to the fullest, ‘cause towards the end of life, myspace surveys and facebook drama won’t matter; what will matter is the friends you made, the things you accomplished, and whether or not you made a sufficient enough mark on society.

Week Two: Media Impact

Researching: Images of women in the media set an unrealistic standard that young girls try desperately hard to achieve.

Methodology: Survey teenage girls about the effects of socialization on their self-image.

Test Hypothesis: Ask the subjects to provide height and weight, what they consider themselves (fat, skinny, average etc.), what they could change about themselves if they could, the magazines they like best, which woman celebrity they would like to look like most.

Prediction: Teenage girls will compare themselves to women who either had their bodies surgically altered to attain society’s unrealistic perceptions of perfection, spent thousands of dollars and many hours with the best personal trainers and dieticians, or had their portraits unbelievably photo-shopped [for example, the above cover of Demi Moore, a picture that has been highly publicized lately by those opposed to photo-shop being used on magazine pictures (in this picture, her left hip seems to have vanished)]. Majority of girls surveyed will show signs of low self-image, and think that having a BMI of 22 is the new BMI of 30.

Week One: Different Forms of Media

Movies: When it comes to movies for me, the more indie they are, the better. I probably watch on average about five movies a week.

Book: I started reading at a young age and always have a book i'm reading leisurely.

Newspapers: I never really liked the paper when I was younger. I used to just go straight to the comic section and discard the rest, like most other Americans unfortunately. It wasn’t until I made the front page of my local newspaper for something insignificant I did on what must have been a slow news day when I was seven that I gained interest. Now, I’ll read the paper whenever I have free time.

Magazines: Music magazines have always interested me the most (as you can tell the moment you step into my room and see my walls heavily adorned with cut-outs and clippings). I won’t lie, I used to buy them solely for the pictures, but now I’d like to think I’ve matured a little, reading about my favorite bands and their accomplishments and goals because I’m genuinely interested and not just ‘cause I think the drummer is cute.

Recordings: My iPod and Comcast On Demand: two things I can always turn to when I’m nearly paralyzed with boredom.

Radio: Most avid music lovers are either disinterested or disgusted with the radio, or, so I’ve noticed. Disc jockeys can take one good song and overplay it to the point of physical deterrence. A prime example would be Boulevard of Broken Dreams, the bitter ballad by Green Day, a band whose past hits about masturbation didn’t have their chance to shine until their satiric album American Idiot caught the public’s attention in 2006. Even though my distaste for the radio is great, I’m still guilty of being a talk show listener as I drive to school in the morning whenever my iPod runs out of a charge.

Television: Television is something I’ll always turn to in desperation. Seldom do I ever watch it by choice.

Internet: The Internet – the melting pot of mass media. I’ve been caught up in this information age just like most of my peers. I used to feel devastated and cut off from the rest of the world for not having my phone with me. Now I feel that same way when my macbook can’t get a solid connection to the Internet.