John Grebetz
Professor Yudit Naáge
Art 247
11 November 2009
Death By Tomato: Love Songs
Is it fair that we must be placed into a situation in which we are forced to cope with? Is it not fair that we can make the decisions in which govern the direction we perceive our scenarios are to be heading towards? I care to believe that fairness is a fallacy if perceived natural because, artificially, we imply biased specificity to our situations as a logical reasoning to a hopefully better outcome. My theory of fairness binds inversely with love because love is just as much as a want to something physical as fairness is to an outcome. To perceive love as a divine bridge held together with a physical or psychological attraction, this is a mistake at thought because again we must agree that fairness and love are artificial: they are ideas in which we affiliate to the physical nature of our reactions. What we focus on are the ideas that we can understand rather than the greater entirety that we do not know, and doing so over and over again artificially makes those ideas real. What we have to know is that we do not know, and to what we do not know, we can have the potential to knowing in partiality. Therefore, there must be more to the idea of love that we still need to discover in order to better understand our reasons of seeking that feeling of goodness.
I know within myself there is the passion of love and the understanding of fairness, however, I do not feel content. The reasoning to this interference is that I have always felt the
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need to work diligently, one step at a time, to reach checkpoints to meet a final goal that I do not have yet. It is mine to have, but I don‘t have it at this moment. I have the love of my life, but not here with me physically. This disruption of my understanding of fairness is obvious, however the amount of pain and suffering I have to endure day in and day out is not so obvious. The obvious is as clear as black and white, hence the colors that I included in my project; but the shrewdness and the feeling of statically chronic pain is not so clear, thus is my reasoning for the repeatedly embossed gradients all around the album. This feeling is endorsed by the compassion that is shared within the idea of love, and thus love is sought as a virtue one has but does not have at the same time. This perception conforms this understanding of having now two different types of feeling of love: love that feels good and love that hurts. To correlate this idea for relevance sake, the lyrics that are dormant within the songs, to which I have created in the past few years, were inspired through these forms of love; these feelings that became personified verbally as though they themselves were translations of another source for communications. They were generally improvised and later written down after their recordings; to pull words through countless thoughts of interpretation only changes the uniqueness of what that first thought truly was.
I felt that since I am doing this with my music, why not do the same with the artwork that goes to the few selected songs that I created? To this reasoning, there is no clear and conscientious understanding as to what exactly I did to get the results that I received with the creation of this album, but instead I feel that it is necessary for me to explain the concepts in my mind along with the tools that I used as I thought about those ideas:
Death By Tomato. This is the title that was inspired by my girlfriend when I told her a personal story about my past. When I was in my final full month of high school, I was in
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Calculus class and we were to create a video that would teach younger students how to do particular math problems or to explain why things happen and how they happen in a mathematical approach. My group came up with an interesting plot to our film, where I’d have a tomato thrown at me to explain at what velocity would cause that tomato to explode. Unfortunately those tomatoes were not at room temperature, rather they were put in the back of the fridge and were like rocks; so of course the tomatoes did not explode unless thrown really hard. Haha, eventually the film ended with me rolling down a hill to my death after a battle scene. Right after I told this story to my girlfriend, she thought it would be a great idea to name our band, Death By Tomato.
Keep in mind, this conversation that I had with my girlfriend was done over the phone. She laid in her bed in Athens, Alabama, while I laid in my bed in Oceanside, California. Realistically, the idea of forming a band together seemed as farfetched as they come. But, after over two years and counting of being with her, these thoughts of idealistic fantasies are becoming more realistic by the minute. This perception of reconciliation is coming together more rapidly than my mind would have never before realized. I remember feeling this feeling back when I was in South America when I leaned over a rail-less ravine that overlooked the Essequibo River, I believe which is the widest river in that continent. That sublime state of realization took me by surprise, and forever will I remember what that day looked like.
Memories are keen to knowing what fairness and love is. I
keep these thoughts in my mind as I doodle and draw, Photoshop, compose music, and even paint. I take those memories and I use them as tools to my creativity. That’s how I came up with the concept art on my front cover to this album. As stated before, the background for the art is comprised of black and white
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gradients that have been embossed numerous times to satisfy the means. I also included a rainbow gradient because I figured something had to look beautiful. I used the “Wind” filter to the concept art that I created so that the image matched with the background, and reduced the opacities until everything went together fairly well.
The reason why I decided to use the type of gradient where there are widening streaks coming from a focal point is because I suppose my mind felt it was necessary to describe a broadening outlook to what we can regularly overlook. Similar to the idea of stopping to smell the roses, but in the sense of looking to see the reasons to every action we find ourselves doing something.
When it came down to formatting the album art to look realistic, this was real simple text inclusion and figuring out what would be the best location to put each text. This was simple because I could look at the albums that I have bought and see how they do it. My favorite part of doing this portion of the project was making the bar code. Looking at every little detail that goes into designing a professional, consumer product really simplifies what was never really thought about before because this was something I needed to do. Running a business, these are things that you have to do, and the more user friendly it is, the more likely to reach a broader scope of consumers. I never knew before that you had to have a bar code number on almost every part of the album just so that it is accounted for altogether. I also never knew that recording studios must include an address, where some even include phone numbers and fax machine numbers, so that if there are any comments or complaints, you know who to contact. If I were completely nuts, which I am close to being, I would probably write a letter to the studios that published one of my favorite band’s album and tell them that in their song, “Sane No More”, there is a little “duuoop”
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sound. I know that sound comes from the mixing portion of the recording, and for a clean, perfect recording, that sound should not be there. I don’t think they would really give a care what I say or not, but I hear it every time I play the song. I’m sure plenty of other people will not even hear it, however I hear it and I think sometimes it’s unjust.
Anyways, it goes to show you how much a single piece to a puzzle can really turn a design upside down. You don’t have the same puzzle when you put it together and you realize that you are missing a single piece, or if that last piece sitting there belongs to a different puzzle. But who is to say that this unlatching piece to the puzzle is the wrong piece to place? There is some other piece that has been lost, or quite possibly replaced by this one, and so what if that was what was meant to be? And does that make life more or less fair? I don’t think I myself could ever fully understand, but to conclude this telling of my love story, there is an “other puzzle” where I chose to put my last piece, inspired by love that I have made physically fit. As insanity prolongs, my madness for fairness to love will forever be told within the stories kept within the compilation of the fairly new band known as Death By Tomato, God bless.
