What legitimizes a group of people who feel they have been done an injustice on the part of another person or group of people? This question has been circulating around in my mind all week considering the recent events that have taken place on campus and the way that they have been handled or addressed by some of the faculty here. Do people reserve the right to decide when someone else has hurt them? We talk a lot about consent in this class and what the standards of consent are, but I am beginning to realize that people struggle with understanding the nature of consent and how, in my opinion, it should be applied to society. Continue reading “Once Again We Must Address Consent…”
Meaning & Measure
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.– Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Lecture Continue reading “Meaning & Measure”
Folk Digest
I enjoy folk music, but my enjoyment wasn’t fully contextualized until I took Music and Ideas: Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger with Jim Kimball last fall. The class gave roots to Folk’s heritage in Sorrow/Freedom Songs as well as its place in labor and social movements. I’d been aware of the movement songs in the Civil Rights movement and in labor movements and this class really connected disciplines of organizing and music. Continue reading “Folk Digest”
Sex Work is not a Crutch: How Big Machine Falls Short
The first time I thought about writing this blog post was after the reading of “The Resistance: An Adele Henry Adventure.” I held myself back though, because I knew that my immediate response would likely be too passionate and uncontained. I also wanted to give Big Machine and LaValle a chance at redemption. I was unfortunately disappointed. Continue reading “Sex Work is not a Crutch: How Big Machine Falls Short”
Institutions
While looking through my classmates’ blog posts, one that really stood out to me was Maria Papas’s blog post “How Do Institutions Fail You?”. I liked her post because in class, a topic of discussion I found very interesting was the topic of institutions and whether or not any institution can be trusted. In her post she provided examples of quotes from different peers about what it means when an institution has failed them and it was very interesting to see different peoples’ perspectives. Continue reading “Institutions”
The Art of Teaching Art
As I was reading through the blog, I was reading Brian’s blog post titled Power In The Internet; An Artist’s Dilemma. I really enjoyed reading it. He says, “The option to teach is a gift which enables musicians to support themselves financially as they try and pursue the creation of music or visual art, as well as the continuation of the music tradition—of course, there also exist those who want to teach the future generations the tradition of art”.
Artists tend to have financial struggles throughout their career because as Prince stated in his first visit to Geneseo, “artists work on come and go paychecks, sometimes you have lots of money and then you go without receiving pay for months”. This leads to a lot of artists to pursue a career in teaching art. Continue reading “The Art of Teaching Art”
Keep the Drafts!
Over the course of the semester, I have grown to really like the concept of blogging. It has allowed me to get thoughts out and into print. I’ve thought through things that I otherwise would not have, gaining better clarity in my mind about challenging concepts. I’m thinking back to my past English courses and the approach of a few large papers worked on for the whole semester that reflects a large amount of your grade, with a focus on tiny details for points. I’ve had other courses with daily write ups, but none like this. There is something about the public nature of a blog, and the compositional tools at my disposal that allow me to be a bit more raw than those daily write ups for class I mentioned. I think that the practice of blogging can be rooted in our course concepts: making a quilt.
As this is my “last” blog post for a grade, I’m thinking about continuing the practice of writing my thoughts out at least once a week. If you all haven’t noticed, I certainly enjoy my pens and stationary, so I’ve thought about journaling in the past, which could be an outlet for me as well. Blogging, though, is public. I find the idea of putting content out there for others to read and think about to be exciting, that I could spur a discussion that otherwise would not take place. The approximate length of a blog post is excellent for me to explore a thought of this level, as I have now done eight times before on my own and once collaboratively. These past few posts have been about a similar theme in different contexts which is purposeful, not just me squeezing a similar idea into more posts so I can meet the deadline. It may be a both/and, but I’m really thinkING about the course concepts in preparation for the self reflective paper, which I have been preparing for during the entire semester. Continue reading “Keep the Drafts!”
Life is us Constantly Improvising
We are always and constantly improvising; improvisation is one of the ways we experience, grow, and how we survive and how the people of our history have survived—to improvise is to create from almost nothing, read your environment, and ride the process.
Improvisation is an especially important part of expression in art and music, as many witnessed Steve Prince whom emphasized the process and showed us his improvisatory sketch of our classmate Amina—there was even an excellent display of improvisation between Steve Prince and Herb Smith and his Freedom Trio at the end of the Urban Garden project in the SUNY Geneseo Kinetic Gallery. Steve Prince understands the power of art and improvisation, this is especially the case since he is from New Orleans, a city of jazz and improvisation and a storyteller, aware of the difficulties people have struggled with in the United States. One particular moment I would bring up is the story Steve Prince told during the Kitchen Talk, of his grandmother hiding his mother under her dress—this was the inspiration for the six-legged woman in his piece Sow. Continue reading “Life is us Constantly Improvising”
Soul-Eating Cats
Anyone who knows me knows my immense adoration for cats. I know that Dr. McCoy can attest for this as she watched me pet dozens of stray cats in Dakar, Senegal. I have grown up with a black cat that I’ve had since I was eight years old. This started my love for cats, as I feel like they are extremely intelligent animals with senses humans may not have. Therefore, I was originally pretty excited when the placement of the stray cats came into Big Machine. When I started reading the scene in Murder’s basement, I originally predicted that the cats would act as an angelic figure that came to Ricky in his time of need to help him. Ricky describes his interaction with the cat stating, “Then I bent my left arm, and the tips of my fingers brushed the bottom of the bobtail, but the cat didn’t flutter, so I left my fingers there. Touching. It felt wonderful” (319). I thought that the cat would be a savior or at least sit with Ricky until he gathered strength to move. When Ricky began to see another cat that was an exact duplicate of the first one, I thought this was going to be a good omen that would help give him strength. Boy was I wrong! Continue reading “Soul-Eating Cats”
Recursive Memory
After thinking about my previous blog posts, I realized that I unintentionally kept returning to art history. I alluded to Hopper’s and Motley’s paintings and the concept of the anchor (it’s also worth noting that art history came up in group conversation when I thought about tenebrism in Victor LaValle’s Big Machine art allusions). Looking back on this, my blog posts’ content itself aligns with a course concept: recursion. But in my thinking about this recursive process, I began to realize that this was no mere coincidence, rather, it highlights how interconnected recursion and memory actually are. Continue reading “Recursive Memory”