Author: Rachel

When I was in the 7th grade I knew a girl who loved to knit. She would knit all through recess and even through class when the teacher would allow it. One day, she taught me how to knit. Before long, the class was divided between the nifty knitters and those who frowned upon our seemingly geriatric skill. I was always a terrible knitter, probably because I never had the patience to finish a scarf or learn how to pearl (an alternative stitch). However, I watched this girl’s hobby blossom into an astonishing talent. Soon, she had made almost everyone in our class a custom hat of their choosing. At the time, I really loved cows so a white hat with black patches and soft pink ears was swiftly delivered to me upon my request. But this was basic for her, she continued on to make hats of more and more detail, creating three hats that almost identically matched the faces of three Invader Zim characters.

This creativity I will always admire and no matter how much downsizing I have to do I will never part with my cow hat because to me it stands for something much larger than a cow. It stands for the idea of perseverance and a type of talent that isn’t instinctive, but rather a result of practice and a love for your craft. My cow hat is a reminder to me that some day I could make a hat like that, too, or really anything I want if I put in the time and effort. Hobbies are far from useless. They are ways of showing yourself how much you are really capable of.

Despite my disloyalty to my inner crafty self by purchasing premade knitwear from the store, I love looking at the woven stitches and knowing that there are people in the world who can do so much better than that, people who put their whole heart and soul into making their own scarves, hats, clothes, music, you name it. One day I will stop making excuses and sit down with my knitting needles or my guitar or my sewing machine (the remnants of hobbies past) and make my vision a reality. It may not be soon, but the products of creativity that I see around me every day are proof enough that (brace yourself for a cliche) anything truly is possible. Until then, I’ll keep on with my favorite hobby of them all: writing.

Creation and production of art can lead to some pretty amazing results, but as I stared out the window of my discussion section this morning I realized that nature is one of the best artists around. There is something simultaneously intricate and simple about a tree . For a time, they are lush green giants that contrast the rich blues and whites of the sky. After a few months the monochromatic green develops into multicolored warmth, the branches strewn with bright oranges, reds, and yellows. As these graceful shapes drift gently to the ground, they reveal the elaborate skeleton they had been covering. A naked tree is really a beautiful thing. Stripped of its leaves, the branches jut and contort in ways that would seem impossible to keep it upright. No tree’s set of branches is like another. The wind gives motion to their existence. If the leaves are actors changing their costumes with the seasons, the branches are an interlude of dancers in the Winter season.

There is nothing like a tree. Tress to hug, trees to tell your secrets, trees to shelter you from the rain, trees to dance with you in the rain. A tree stands for strength, perseverance, and unity. They stand their ground through rain, sleet, snow, and heat until they are forcefully removed or slowly decayed by nature into a lying log. This is not their end, however. This is a new life. As they lie a whole new beauty appears, one that had been formerly overlooked. The trunk. A sculpture all its own. Rough outer, smooth within. Rings keeping track of all its years. The trunk is a storyteller. The trunk is generous, providing for the comfort of animals and humans alike. I love trees with all my heart. They are undeniably a work of art.

I love meat. It tastes great, fills me up fast, and supplies a lot of ways to get creative with cooking. However, I’ve recently been giving a lot of thought to returning to my high school vegetarian ways. There are three main reasons for this contemplation, 1) Depending on what you replace your usual meat meals with, it can be a very healthy lifestyle choice; 2) I love me a good challenge and could really use some more creative cooking ideas; and 3) I’m an environmentalist who cares about the treatment of animals by large corporations. The industry for meat hasn’t been the kindest or the cleanest, which makes it hard to stomach (literally) knowing the cruelty behind the deliciousness. Furthermore, according to a Ted Talk given by founder of TreeHugger.com, Graham Hill, “environmentally, meat amazingly causes more emissions than all of transportation combined.” Hill presents a new way of looking at the veg or not veg choice, which is both manageable and practical. The talk is very short and well worth a watch. By eating meat when trying to be a vegetarian, I felt that I was “cheating,” but maybe there’s an alternative to the either/or scenario.

Even though this Ted Talk answered most of my qualms with returning to a vegetarian lifestyle, I still have an apprehension about finding creative ways to maintain a well rounded diet without meat. I worry I’ll fall into the trap of replacing meat dishes with solely pasta and breads in order to get as full as I would from eating meat. So, in attempt to make the task less daunting, I turn to my good pal Pinterest for some inspiration…

Honestly, all of that stuff looks way better than the I think fatty value chicken I’ve been buying from Kroger. I think with the right pace we can all stop feeling the pressure of whether to meat or not to meat and still help ourselves and the world. There are also an abundance of internet forums on maintaining a hearty, well rounded vegetarian lifestyle that include recipes and moral support. All this combined, I’m with Graham on this one.

Going in to see The Wolf of Wall Street on Christmas day was something I had been looking forward to since I had first seen the trailer (any movie trailer that thumps along to a Kanye song usually gets me pretty pumped). Unfortunately, my beloved Matin Scorsese let me down on this one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means a prude. I love Breaking Bad, Tarantino, and even zesty dramas like good old Cruel Intentions, but The Wolf of Wall Street lacked a substance that even fluffy Cruel Inentions pulls off. I understand that the point is to depict the ultimate self-destruction of an individual so consumed by his own greed that he completely deteriorates, but this story has been done before in films like Wall Street and its inevitable sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. So, to make it stand out, the writers chocked this tale full of graphic sex, drugs, and party scenes to the point where even I was uncomfortable.

The climactic demise of the protagonist culminated in an almost too casual domestic rape scene. This moment is extremely underplayed compared to the excessive explicit imagery appearing throughout the film. To me, this was the worst thing this criminal had done the entire movie and it was left completely ambiguous and uncontroversial. This may have been an intentional choice by the production team in attempt to make this final horrific act stand out against the earlier glorified and glamorized depictions of misbehavior. However, if that is truly the case, they were unsuccessful because most viewers were left unsure whether it was a rape at all, myself included. Instead of standing out, this deeply important scene fell by the wayside.

As a filmmaker,  if you’re going to make a three hour movie, you better be adding moments that are really worthwhile. Scorsese just lost me at so many points in the film and I walked out of the theater feeling like I had made no connections with any of the characters. The writing was shallow, the characters were not relatable, the soundtrack didn’t make sense with the scenes. Overall it was really disappointing compared to Scorsese’s usual quality of production shown in some of my favorite films like Goodfellas and The Departed. These movies included excess sex and violence, but this was balanced out by the quality of the story.

Despite my overall disappointment with the film, I will say that the acting and cinema were very well done. Unfortunately, the writing failed to deliver the quality promised by the trailer and thus the shining acting went mostly unnoticed in my eyes. I’d be really interested in reading the autobiography of the real Jordan Belfort, which served as the inspiration for the film, to see if it contains any redeemable elements of good storytelling that are missing from the film.

After my final lecture in Art History for the semester, I decided to take on the brave and daunting task of art interpretation without my dear professor’s brilliance. Instead of writing my multiple papers, I’ve been staring at Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for the past hour or two, rummaging through article after article to see if I can come to terms with this painting’s representation of women. Many of Google’s finest declared the painting an empowering portrayal of the sexual freedom of women, but I still needed some convincing. The more I stared at it, the more determined I became to see this painting as an empowering portrayal of women and, despite Picasso’s intentions, whatever they may be, I feel prepared to defend my opinion on this painting as a breath of fresh air from the all too common highly sexualized or idealized representation of the female body.

True, this is a brothel painting of young nude women, so it inherently associates women with sex and the body. However, through his experimentation with form and space and use of African mask influence for the faces of the women, he in a way frees them from the pressure to be physically perfect. They become objectified as shapes and lines instead of objects of desire. The human body is just that, geometry, and by breaking apart and piecing together their bodies in unconventional ways, he almost releases their true identity from their physical forms and frees them to be just what they are – people. Drawing on what I learned in class this year, I can see connections with the works of Manet and Courbet who actively work to undo the fiction of the idealized classical female nude. Courbet’s representation of women with imperfect bodies and explicit representation of what painters of the classical nude were trying to make sexy (see Courbet’s The Origin of the World, hint: it’s a vagina) is almost liberating from the pressure of these idealized representations. So, as a recent graduate of my first art history class of my life, I declare this painting a liberating release from the female body standard prevalent in most modern art (especially the modern media). Good luck on finals to one and all!

While even at a young age the feminist in me spurned America’s Next Top Model for its blatant perpetuation of social beauty standards and stereotypes of female behavior, the prevailing artsy side of me left me planted in front of the TV for hours on end as the Fashion Network replayed entire cycles back to back. Sure, the fights were entertaining and the judging scenes were always oozing with dramatic tension, but my favorite part was always the photo shoots. With at least a dozen episodes in every season and now 20 total seasons, how could they possibly come up with so many drastically different brilliant ideas for these shoots? For some reason the models get all the credit for “working it” (or not) when really the part that I’m stunned by is the product of an incredible makeup team, photographer, and the person who comes up with all of the themes. The art of storytelling is such a crucial part to each photograph that I could never change the channel, knowing I had to find out what they would do next. Some of my favorite shoots include ones where the models were entirely submerged under water, had paint splattered across their faces, and of course the crazy range of modeling with animals from crocodiles to elephants. Despite my initial hesitation toward the values the show  promotes, within a few seasons they began accepting one to two “plus size” models. It truly was so kind of them to let one or two girls into the competition that, like the majority of the female population, are bigger than a size 2. However, this doesn’t stop the judges from their ruthless comments about women looking “too old” “too commercial” “too sexy” or just too flawed to win the competition. All in all, I say it’s the behind the scenes crew that should win every season. So, without further ado (or ranting), I present some of my top favorite photo shoots from America’s Next Top Model:

Okay, I had to throw that one in there. She doesn’t look very plus sized to me. But, I believe the other photos have illustrated my point on the artistic brilliance of very creative minds that create this beauty, and because of this, I’ll continue to bite my tongue and throw away hours on this show that is so artistically stimulating.