Author: Rachel

Today “artsy” is synonymous with Instagram photos and DIY crafts from Pinterest. Everyone is a photographer, an editor, a creator. For many people, our lives on Instagram and our lives in the real world don’t quite match up. Thanks to the world of filters and editing tools, it doesn’t take much work to enhance, so to speak, your life. This is amazing in so many ways, but it also teaches people to devalue the grit or even dullness of their own lives. Sitting on the couch watching a movie or spending quality time with your family suddenly becomes less valuable if it is not captured in photo form and social media worthy. Though your ratty sweatpants may be the most pleasing outfit, they’ll never make it onto your Instagram page. In this way, the virtual idealization of reality, once found only in television, movies, and video games, are now merging with your actual life. Instead of creating a Sims character, you are creating a self character, constantly trying to chisel a glamorized public self on the pretense of giving a glimpse into your private world. Beacause of this it’s a lot more difficult to find spaces where you can let your guard down, leave the makeup off when going over to your friend’s, for fear of the inevitable snapshots that will be taken. Posed artsy “candids” shower the pages of Instagram though the subject presumably asked someone to take them.

This changing idea of self representation is messy. In many ways, it reflects the history of art, especially photography, where the piece can appear to be a happenstance capturing of a moment in time, when really it is the product of much staging and editing (like the Jeff Wall photograph above). On the other hand, it interferes with our sense of ourselves by shaping it around public reception. Only 10 likes on Instagram seems to tell you that that particular event isn’t worthy of public sharing, and thus is it really worthy of anything? Similarly, travel seems to be bogged down by excessive photography, as if we are so fearful of losing the moment or that it will not be recognized as worthy unless it ends up on Facebook, that we end up experiencing the entire thing through the lens of the camera. Art is supposed to influence and shape the self, but the individual is not meant to shape his or herself into a work of art. Imperfection is beauty and many of the beauties of life are those outside of the frame.

I love How I Met Your Mother, I really do. The fact that it’s one of the few shows that can actually make me laugh out loud, the characters are all fantastic, and its constant ability to totally cross the line in a way that produces just the right effect are all qualities I really admire. However, I have one huge issue with the show: it’s basically all white people. I’m actually extremely disappointed in myself for not noticing this sooner, but as I continued to watch I noticed a major absence of color in the show. I still haven’t finished the series, but being most of the way through season 7 (out of nine total seasons), it’s really disappointing that this season was the first to have more than a couple sporadic appearances by people of color. I think maybe the writers realized this lack somewhere in season 7 because Robin and Barney both begin dating non-white characters, but it’s really unfortunate that it took until the show was 2/3 of the way over to change this. The only people of color in the previous six seasons were Barney’s brother, who only appeared a handful of times, the gang’s favorite cab driver Ranjit, Lily’s black best friend, Robin’s old singing partner, and some women who appeared in the montages of Barney and Ted’s ex flings. Other than this, no person of color received a sustained regular role on the show until season 7.

For being such a progressive and intelligent show, I really expected more diversity. As a long running show, HIMYM has sustained many subplots and brought in many new long term characters, almost all of which have been white. In other words, there were plenty of minor longer-term characters that could have been played by non-white actors, but this was never the case until season 7. Unfortunately, this has put a bitter taste in my mouth toward the show. Popular television is still largely dominated by white actors and actresses and in a show with constant additions of new characters in the extremely diverse landscape of NYC, the show had the opportunity to break the mold. Every day life is not a white-washed experience, every member of this society is vital and what we see on TV needs to reflect this. As viewers, it’s our job to demand to see more diversity on our favorite shows. As shows like Scandal and Orange is the New Black have proved, this can only enhance the quality and honesty of the show. If people want to argue that we are living in a post-discriminatory world, it’s high time to prove it. I’m glad HIMYM finally decided to diversify the cast of characters, but I can’t shake the disappointment that it took them 7 seasons to get there.

People consume media like water. With the constant streaming of shows, movies, and music, it’s important that what people are seeing matches the progressive thinking we are trying to possess as a nation. Each show has a social responsibility because people of all ages are watching and learning from what they see. Not another day should go by where individuals find they can’t identify with any characters from their favorite shows. So, this is my demand to television, especially predominantly white sitcom culture: step up your game.

The English language is full of idiosyncrasies. Why the there, their, and they’re? Why do c and s sometime have the same sound and sometimes not? How do poop, shit, and feces all mean the same thing, but have three entirely different connotations? The answer may never be entirely clear, but in a way that’s the beauty of English. I’ve always loved language and its power. The power it has to move, to shock, to express, to relay, to convey, to make change. How cursive, print, and American Sign Language can all have the same alphabet, but look entirely different. English is an art. My Spanish professor once told our class that he loves English because it is one of the most creative languages he has ever encountered. I thought he was crazy at the time, knowing how ridiculous and unclear the rules of the English language can be, but looking back on my career in English, I think he may be right.

As a lot of kids do, I used to dumb myself down in school to interact with the other kids. It’s apparently cool not to care. Senior year, however, something changed in me and I decided to start using the pile of vocabulary that had been gathering dust in the back corner of my mind. I began incorporating scholarly vocabulary into my every day life and you know what? It felt good. I finally understood what my father had been getting at when he encouraged me to use “50 cent words,” which turned into a little game where he would score my integration of more uncommon and intellectual words into every day sentences. I now use 50 cent words as often as I get the chance.

I think the most powerful thing about language, the reason I dedicated my college career to studying the English language, is its profound ability to impart some of the most breathtaking beauty. Language has an amazing ability to engage all of the human senses with a mere syntactical feat or an elliptical that can say all at once, “this sentence is over, but this is not all.” Phrases can induce tears, words can build characters and worlds that we can explore from nothing just by putting words on a page. Words are an endless realm of possibilities and I want to continue to explore them, learn them, play with them, exhaust them, exasperate them until they can do nothing else for me (though I doubt this will ever be the case). This is why I am an English major, this is my art, this is all of our arts. This is Harry Potter and The Great Gatsby and Othello. This is all of the poems I wrote in middle school and the complete works of William Wordsworth. This is nature and culture, history and the future, reality and fiction. Wherever my future holds, I’m ready because I know the power of language.

The sad truth is that people in my generation are growing increasingly apathetic to hard work. Obviously this is no news flash, but sometimes going through a lot of effort for one small thing can seem pointless. This has come through in my experience with cooking. Why would I want to spend an hour or more preparing something I’m just going to devour anyway only to be left with a stack of dishes the size of Mount Everest, a floor covered in crumbs, and ingredients strewn across the kitchen? With all of that to anticipate wouldn’t it just be easier to order a pizza? Well, not too long ago I met someone who made me rethink my apathy toward the cooking process. This friend argued that cooking is an amazing art, that he loves the hands on engagement of crushing garlic and chopping onions, and that nothing beats the feeling of a successful cooking experience. It took me a little while, to say the least, to get on board with this mentality. After burning my jambalaya, setting the stove on fire trying to make bacon, and even regressing in my ability to make pancakes, I was ready to go back to frozen dinners for life. It wasn’t until I really started to acknowledge that all art takes both hard work and a lot of practice that I was able to start enjoying cooking. It’s the same with music, painting, drawing, and even writing. Understanding this has refreshed me in my approach to all of my artistic interests – writing, photography, music, and now cooking. The more I push aside all of the reasons not to do something, the better I get at it. Now I’m making acorn squash and eggplant parm like nobody’s business. Once you can pull down the creative process from this idealized space, you can take the first (and hardest) steps and get practicing. Then, the dishes, the time, and the mess will all be worth it and you can finally throw away the stacks of takeout menus in your drawer.

I hate the word smart. It comes steeped in so many connotations that I’m always skeptical when someone uses this word to describe me. A on a paper – smart; correct someone’s spelling – smart, maybe a know it all, but smart; remember the name of the man whose assassination was the catalyst for WWI (archduke Franz Ferdinand) – smart. Smart can mean dorky, smart can mean pretentious, smart can mean you’re expected to have all the answers. Frankly, I don’t want to be smart. Cue gasps (sorry mom and dad).

What I do want to be is educated, intellectual, motivated, maybe even talented. To be labeled as smart comes with too much baggage and the wrong kind of assumptions. Take me and my step-brother, for example. We both went to the same high school and college, we both got about the same grades, thus both of us have been called “smart.” But we’re completely different. He can look at a textbook and memorize it’s contents, I need to take thorough notes and study. He’s an excellent test taker, I’m average. Where he excels in the ability to retain information, I excel in hard work. We got the same grades because where I was struggling to understand concepts he was struggling to put forth the effort. I work harder, he knows more facts. So who is “smarter?”

Take jeopardy, the game where your smartness means nothing if you can’t hit the buzzer at exactly the right time, and if you are able to do both, well, that’s just talent. A baseball player or coach’s ability to analyze the game, know the physics, strategy, and history of the sport, is that talent or smarts? Every time someone refers to someone else as “smart” I start thinking about how different that person’s brand of smarts is from mine. No he just works hard; no he just knows facts; no she’s just talented; no he’s all talk; no she just has a big vocabulary. Not smart. None of these qualifications for smart seem to add up to anything cohesive. Street smart, book smart, hard working, photographic memory – these are all contradictions, yet they all fall under the category of smart. With this, the whole ideology behind smart begins to unravel itself.

The concept of smart is a flawed one; it is a generalization that seeks to rank individual worth, but as I’ve hopefully shown, we all express completely different types of smarts. I think it’s time to develop a new go-to vocabulary to acknowledge people’s strengths, then we can step back and see how interdependent we are on one another instead of trying to make a hierarchy out of the rigid smart/dumb binary we are so wrapped up in. If it weren’t for the science minds out there, I wouldn’t have a computer or an iPhone, and if it weren’t for people like me, those people wouldn’t have art and literature or this blog for that matter. I’m throwing smart out in exchange for creative, articulate, and educated, what about you?

When my friends tell me how much they love and idolize Demi, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and the like I try to jump in with my one and only pop obsession: Marina and the Diamonds. The usual response I get is, “who?” Followed by a return of discussion to the more easily recognized pop heroines of the day. These friends gush to me about how Demi is saving the world, Tay is giving voice to our broken hearts, and Bey is just queen of everything. And while I completely respect these pop heroines for using their voices to reach people like my wonderful friends, there is something missing from their vein of pop for me, something that no one provides better than Marina and the Diamonds.

Marina began playing the piano and putting her poetry to music when she was 20 years old, which is a pretty late start for someone in the pop world. The first video I ever saw of Marina’s was “How to be a Heartbreaker” from her 2012 album Electra Heart. My first reaction was that this was yet another fluffy pop song jumping aboard the modern trend of gender role reversal in music videos. I thought it was cute, but didn’t connect with any substantive message in it at first. However, something kept me coming back to it and I watched it three more times that day.

Fast forward to a couple weeks later. After making it through the entire Electra Heart music video series (yes, she did this before Bey), I was totally swept by her unique voice and poetic lyrics. The way that she uses the pop medium to expose a variety of multifaceted issues on gender and culture results in songs that are both extremely catchy as well as layered in symbolism and deep thought.

The song that broke my ambivalence toward Marina is called Primadonna. Like many of her songs, this song is full of wit, irony, humor, and depth – not a very easy thing to pull off. She artfully balances mocking the “prima donna” female trope with an explicit acknowledgement of the fact that we all have a little prima donna in us. This theme is reflected in her song Homewrecker, but this is just one side of her work. She is entirely unafraid to expose a much more raw and emotionally charged side of herself in songs like Teen Idle and Lies.

I could list, analyze, and gush about the Marina songs I love (aka all of them) all day, but beside her artistry in writing and crafting her songs and videos, she has amazing talent that is not to be overlooked. I love Rihanna, she’s so bold and eccentric, but when she gets on stage to sing, she exposes how artificial and produced her tracks are. Marina, on the other hand, has amazing control of her voice. She moves seamlessly from beautiful high notes to a smooth (or sometimes raspy, if she so chooses) deep low notes.

I see how long this post is getting, but I genuinely feel that even this does not do her justice. In her music, she advocates for women’s rights, a deeper thinking culture, and a more intellectual breed of pop in a wonderfully poetic way. The best part is, she really does have the world talking. Instead of the usual heap of trolling and superficial commentary, her videos receive comments discussing and opening up the songs to the many possibilities of meaning, almost in the same way one would for a piece of literary criticism. Her work is sparking an highly intellectual and interpretive discussion about culture and art.

I highly respect this artist and encourage you to check out her other songs, especially the acoustic versions she has released. Stay tuned for her upcoming album FROOT; she released the first track from the album earlier this month.