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As we near Martin Luther King Jr Day and the yearly symposium that the university plans in his honor, I believe it would be beneficial to look back at last year’s and at one particular event. I attended this event and it was perhaps one of the hardest things for me to sit through, and not in a good way. This event was Erik Wahl’s Embracing the Art of Change.

When I first read the seminar planned for the 2015 symposium, I was excited to possibly attend many of them. In particular, I was most interested in an event discussing queerness in our prison system and Erik Wahl’s event where I hoped they would be discussing the intersectionality of art and Black culture. While the prison system one appealed to me slightly more, I decided to attend the Erik Wahl event as a few friends were planning to go as well and I believed I should be spending MLK Day learning about race and racism, which I thought would be discussed more at this event.

The day started off great as I also attended the keynote presented by Marc Lamont Hill. This was an extremely powerful speech as he unashamedly discussed the hard topics that we should focus on during MLK Day and throughout our lives. I was lead to believe that the university’s annual MLK Day Symposium was an effective force of positive change and that the university was actively trying to educate it students on the intrinsic racial disparities in our society. My opinion changed after the Erik Wahl event.

Let me first start off by saying that I cannot put too much blame on Erik Wahl. Yes, he was very clumsy and ineffective in altering his standard motivational speech to try and include social justice, but we should place more blame on the event planners who believed (for some ungodly reason) that a white “grafitti artist” who spent most of his time working in corporate America was a good fit for the MLK Day Symposium. Perhaps it’s my fault for believing I would see something poignant and intelligent about the criminilization and debasement of Black art without looking into who the actual speaker was.

Now luckily this event was packaged with it’s own perfect metaphor to explain the inappropriateness of this event for this symposium. Throughout the event, Erik Wahl would take time out of his speech to paint his “graffiti”. The last one was the icing on the cake as he flashily painted Martin Luther King Jr. in white on a piece of black canvas. He literally whitewashed one of the most important social activists in American history in front of hundreds of people. Looking back on it, it’s pretty humorous.

But we should focus on the particulars as to why this event was such a dark cloud over MLK Day. First, let’s discuss how absolutely trite the motivational speech was. This was clearly one of Erik Wahl’s most popular speech and the one that he always has in his back pocket in case he needs to give one. This would be fine if it was original, but it wasn’t. Everything he said was just a rewording of phrases that I have heard from hundreds of other motivational speeches, only this time he peppered in a few social justice buzz words. It was one of those substandard “get out of the box, get creative” speeches that have been drilled into all of our heads by now.

In addition to this, the multiple paintings that he did, while fitting the theme of diversity, were unfortunately misutilized. I don’t remember specifics, but I remember he painted two famous athletes and finally MLK Jr. in white. While these could have been great points of access into discussions as to why these people are idolized and the barriers they had to break in order to become successful, he instead used them as talking points into how they affected his privileged childhood. He preferred to discuss why they were some of his heroes, but shied away from the racism they overcame in his shallow anecdotes.

All of these aspects came together to present me with a pandering, purposeless event that had me writhing in my seat from frustration. It was clear that Wahl didn’t feel comfortable actually discussing race and instead preferred to discuss his famous sports stars, his pretentious music, and his hollow philosophy. The part that continually plays in my head when I think about this event is the Q&A portion. A homeless woman came to mic and wished to talk about the affect of homelessness on the Black community. Instead of taking this opportunity to actually learn something, Wahl instead decided to climb off stage and hug the woman in a perfect display of this event’s pandering nature.

It’s clear that the Business & Finance Convocation simply used “graffiti” as a connection to Black culture, when all they really wanted was a another white guy to discuss business practices with. This could have a been a great event with an actual Black artists who could discuss the nuances and depth of Black art and Black culture, but instead we got Erik Wahl and his whitewashed Martin Luther King Jr.

Before I was accepted to University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance I spent six months on the waitlist. I auditioned in January (unaware that U of M was not simply good for music, rather, that it was and is one of the top music schools in the country), placed on the waitlist in March, and told in May that there absolutely was no room for me – there simply were too many sopranos. However, my name was kept on the waitlist for the summer in the unlikely event that some soprano got cold feet and gave up their spot. Two weeks before my freshman year I received a call and suddenly I was a music major.

I began freshman year knowing that I was the worst one in my class and to some extent I have carried that shadow of doubt with me throughout my entire time here at the University of Michigan. Yet this doubt has fueled my desire to prove myself to the faculty who saw potential, if not promise, in the performance of a 17 year old that could not sing below G4. It motivated me to audition for every show possible and resulted in me performing in over 25 operas, musicals and plays in 4 years. It convinced me not to change my degree to a Bachelor of Musical Arts from Bachelor of Music even though a BMA is more dual degree friendly and it hung it the back of my mind reminding me that I needed to work harder than everyone else to earn the opportunity which I had been given.

On December 21st, the voice that has hung in the back of my mind finally disappeared because on that day I sang in the preliminary competition of the University of Michigan’s Concerto Competition and won. After years of doubt and determination, the same professors that placed me on the waitlist decided that was fit to represent the voice department at the Concerto Competition Finals where I would compete with 6 instrumentalists and another vocalist for the opportunity to perform my piece with symphony orchestra.

While I did not win the Concerto Competition Finals, the opportunity to sing at Hill Auditorium with a real audience was the culmination of everything that I have been working for these past four years. Granted, 17 of the audience members were faculty members sitting with pen and paper (some even following along with the music) actively judging the quality of my instrument and preparation, however, in the twenty minutes where I stood center stage at Hill Auditorium I felt the deepest sense of accomplishment. Here I was a twenty-two year old soprano singing on the same stage that Rachmaninoff, Joan Sutherland, Elton John, Leonard Bernstein, Audra McDonald, Yo-Yo Ma and so many others have rehearsed and performed on. It was a bit overwhelming! In those twenty minutes that I sang Previn’s Honey and Rue, the chip on my shoulder vanished. Part of me will always be the little girl from waitlist worrying that she is not doing enough and that she is falling behind her peers, but the little voice constantly casting a shadow of doubt has vanished, all because I refused to listen in the first place.

Over the break I found myself at a comic book shop called the Forbidden Planet in New York City. It is right next to The Strand, a bookstore located just south of Union Square Park along Broadway. Unlike the famed bookstore, the comic shop doesn’t have an eye catching bright red sign, or banners hanging from the upper floors, flowing downwards along the façade facing Broadway. Instead, along with the simple sign hanging above the front door, the nerdy merchandise lining the large front window tells you exactly what kind of store it is, without the use of words. Now that I think about it, how very appropriate for a place that sells comic books.

I haven’t been to many comic book shops (there was The Comic Shop in Vancouver, the Forbidden Planet, and, of course, the Vault of Midnight, right here in Ann Arbor) so I cannot really say much about the establishments themselves. However, while I was there, I picked up a book called Emitown as a Christmas present for myself. It’s a collected volume of the homonymous web comic written by Emi Lenox, an artist I talked about last year on my article about Plutona. I think it is obvious that I’m a fan.

The comic features daily entries, or almost daily, that cover an array of topics, from her getting angry at a new scanner, wanting to eat, romance, paying the bill, seeing friends, and etc. A great bulk of the pages is filled with extraordinarily mundane things. Yet, it’s still interesting.

The comic is acclaimed to be a unique way in the memoir comic genre, or rather, diary comics, something that I’m not all qualified to weight in on. But I do feel it to be captivating for reasons I can’t explain. Is it the use of just inks and a pastel blue as the singular use of color? Is it the honesty of her words and opinions? Is it the way she draws expressions with a cartoonish aplomb and infectious spirit? Is it how relatable a lot of her entries are? Or perhaps it is all the dogs and cats (or the occasional llama?) that sometimes interject into her loose panels. I’m sure I don’t know.

 
During a break where I just wanted to huddle up and do nothing, this was the perfect comic to get into. I didn’t want to be transported to a new world, filled with fantastical creatures, or in the middle of nebulous space, or in some different time. I wanted to read about other people who are into comics; I wanted to read about a comic creator I admired.

It’s nice to slow down once in a while, and read something that is not “serious” but still artistically and narratively interesting. I hesitate to use that word though, “serious”. Honestly, it’s a word that doesn’t mean anything to me anymore when applied to works of art. It doesn’t serve any real purpose that benefits anybody. Just a label – an empty label.

I’m having a hard time bringing this together. But I would like to conclude this with a thank you to the Vault of Midnight. While I was at the other two comic book shops I mentioned, I noticed that they shelved their single issues without any protection, ie, without a bag and board. It kind of bothered me, not because I collect comics with the intent of keeping them in pristine condition only to sell them in the future. But because after experiencing the luxury of already bagged and boarded comics at the Vault, I really did miss it. Who doesn’t like their comics to be packaged nicely when they buy them? Seriously though…who?