Oral History Interview

For this week's blog post, reflect upon your experience interviewing your oral history subject. How did you feel about the experience? Do you think it went well - why or why not? What do you think you might do differently in future oral history interviews? What was interesting about your subject's story?

Last week my group and I interviewed Anna Maria Garza, she is an employee at Hatch, and she started Girls Rock Camp also known as GRC. She was part of a band a when she was younger, she is a awesome person, and I'm happy with what she does and who she helps. However, the interview did not go so well, my interviewer had a list of questions, she asked them but she did not ask any follow up questions. What I will do differently next time is run a practice interview among the group to see which person is the better interviewer. Other than that road bump, for the most part the project went pretty well.

Houston's Graffiti Culture

Modern graffiti has been around since the 1960's when gangs would spray paint names, messages, and pictures on surfaces, to show protest, violence, or leisure. Currently though, graffiti has become a more accepted way to create art. Graffiti can appear on clothing, advertisements, music covers, and more. Houston, however, did not start this "movement" Philadelphia and New York did, Houston had maintained a unique history that helped the graffiti art success. In 1979 Eddie Scott ad Scott Prescott formed a group called the Urban Animals. The group was known for their graffiti art, bar-hopping, crosstown skating, and other things. A quote from Angel Quesada, a visual artist and muralist "There's this whole back and forth about what is street art, what is graffiti, what's a mural..."

https://houstonhistorymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Graffiti-Culture.pdf

Final Blog - Is Persepolis a true story?

1. Summarize the story to which you listened and provide a link to that story. Then write three follow-up questions that you would like to be able to ask the person(s) telling the story.

 Marjane Satrapi, explained that her book/movie Persepolis is not 100% autobiographical, she says it's not a documentary about her life, and that not everything on the script is exact wording. Although the book/movie is still based on her life experiences, Marjane believes that even documentaries are fictionalized most of the time, so the story would be interesting. She explains that when she left Iran both times in 1984 and 1994, and how she would hear rumors about Iran. She would say "this is not like this or that is not like that" she would say something like, it does exist but it's not the only thing that happens in Iran. She wrote the book five years after she left Iran the second time, she just wanted to turn the book into a movie adaptation.
The follow up questions I would ask Marjane are the following: If you could change one thing about the movie what would it be? What made you produce the movie even though you did not approve of it? Why did you decide to make the movie black and white for most of the scenes?

Persepolios 4

For your final blog post on Persepolis, you may write about anything else that interested you about the novel that you have not yet had a chance to write about.

One thing about the book I found very interesting was the face that Marjane's journey to adulthood, I know that was kind of the point of the book, but I still liked how the book started when she was little. We get to see her grow up, we see her hardship during her time in Austria, we see her learn new things and get an education. We see her debating things in her head about drugs and alcohol, for example when her friends in Austria asked her to smoke and Marjane was debating whether or not to take the drugs and get high. So she turned around and pretended to inhale the drugs, she also poked her eyes so it would look like she was high with red eyes. She wanted to be accepted but didn't want to put her health at risk (for that one time). Once she got older, after the bronchitis she went to the doctor, he said "I forbid you to smoke" or something like that, Marjane was fine with that at first, but after a little while she didn't care about what the doctor said. She started smoking again, she's a risk taker, and that is shown throughout the entire graphic novel. That's why I liked this book and the fact that it starts when she's a little girl