Category: Uncategorized

Over the summer I got really into this band out of Minneapolis called Bad Bad Hats. They’ve got a really fun acoustic sound that’s perfect for blasting while on a road trip with the sun beating down on you and a film reel playing in your head. Essentially, pretty ideal for anyone who imagines their life as a movie. I recently made a pretty cool discovery when I stumbled upon their lead singer’s bandcamp page from before the band started working on their first EP, It Hurts, and since then I have been playing her early music and the EP’s original demos on loop.

What I love about Kerry Roy’s music is that she writes really soft and sweet love songs, complete with visually vivid lyrics and fluttering harmonies, but captured in each easygoing piece is a complex story about the struggles of relationships missing from a lot of contemporary love songs. For instance, her piece 9AM tells the story of a person who leads someone on because she knows she “doesn’t feel a thing” but is too attached to let go. This apology piece is complicated by lines like “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I’m not sorry” and “don’t tell me I can’t stay but know I’m gonna treat you badly.” I Know I Am But What Are You is a song about wasting your time on someone who doesn’t seem to want to be with you, but settling for the fact that you are the one they choose to be with at the end of the night. Not only is this a possible foil to the person in 9AM, but it touches on relationships that  go undefined by the parties involved and the difficulties of navigating them.

One of my favorites is a song called The Things We Never Say, which tells the tale of two people in a complicated relationship who do a lot of things “wrong” by conventional standards. They make each other jealous, are never around when needed, and don’t know how to say ‘I love you,’ but their feelings for each other go without saying. It’s a beautiful song about resigning yourself to another’s flaws and realizing that you love them regardless.

I would definitely suggest giving her demos a listen if you are looking for a new sound for the summer, as well as grabbing a free download of their EP, which has a higher quality sound. You can find her demos on her bandcamp here.

It is a little obscene how much I love performing. The thrill of the applause, the fear of missing an entrance and the chance to share a little bit of truth hidden behind a plot of twists and turns that demands a dutiful suspension of disbelief is addicting. Something about it consistently causes me to agree to one too many things just so I can have 1 more minute under those hot stage lights.

Two weekends ago I gave my senior recital. Wednesday I performed in the Chamber Choir Concert. Thursday I performed in the Green Opera Performances and tonight I will perform in those Green Operas again (8 pm Stamps Auditorium in the Walgreen Drama Center if anyone is interested). While being in all of these shows is amazing and I have never regretted taking all of this on, it gets tiring. Beyond the physical exhaustion of all the rehearsals and performances augmented by late nights to finish homework, the act of performing is emotionally and mentally exhausting.

After the run of a show ends I typically send out apologies to everyone who came to it. Not for my performance or the way that the set looked or for any other reason you are probably thinking of, but because after a show when I walk out of the green room to talk to my friends and family I am out of it. After having spent 2 hours being someone else, I am not able to so quickly transition back into Alexandria – which always feels awkward. Here are people congratulating me, supporting me, and often paying money to see me perform, and all I want to do is go to bed!

Yet, this exhaustion is part of the experience of performing. I know that if I am not mentally, emotionally and physically drained by the end of the performance I was not “in it”. If I am perky and immediately transition back to Alexandria after the final curtain I know it was Alexandria up on stage – not Brooke, not Phyllis, not Grace, certainly not anyone that the audience had paid to come and see. This exhaustion is cathartic and means that on stage I was not thinking but that I was living life through the eyes of another. This is the beauty of performing, because once it stops being a “performance” it is not longer contrived but a theatrical presentation of truth.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying re-watching one of my favorite shows, the first generation of Skins. Unlike many of the other shows I watch, the draw of this show isn’t the drama or the storyline, but rather the kids themselves. I say kids instead of characters because the show blurs the two together as we follow each on on his or her journey. What I mean by this is that not only are the characters very real, raw, and gritty, but the actors themselves also embody these qualities and this is represented in the show. Unlike many shows today where a 16 year old is played by a 25 year old or a high schooler is portrayed wearing seamless makeup and 4 inch heels, the kids of Skins all actually look, act, and dress their age. Many of the female characters are shown without makeup, sometimes in ill-fitting or awkward clothing, and close-ups don’t try to hide the blemishes, braces, or flaws of these real life teens or their characters.

In addition to the physical blur between actor and character, the characters written for these actors also have a way of bringing out the real feelings and fears of anyone who has ever been through high school. In each character, Skins takes something that almost every young person has dealt with and hyperbolizes it. Take, for example, Cassie. Cassie is known by all her friends as an anorexic mental case, but the show allows us to see behind closed doors into her life where she is utterly ignored by everyone around her. Though not all viewers have experienced eating disorders, almost everyone has known what it’s like to feel completely alone and unnoticed. Each character personifies a challenge of youth in such an honest and complex way that by the end of the series the whole cast has become both a projection of your inner feelings and your best friends.

I’m not writing this solely to suggest you go watch Skins (though if you haven’t, you really should), but rather to demonstrate that having honest, flawed, non-glamorous, and real characters can be so much more powerful than those impossibly beautiful and glamorous creations of Disney and ABC Family. These characters fall into a dramatized plot rather than grappling with their own problems and insecurities over the course of the show as is the case with the characters of Skins. I’m not saying that there are no honest characters on TV, but I have yet to see anyone bring the realness that Skins delivered in 2007.

Glitch refers to an electronic feedback, sonic or visual, created when a reciever misinterprets a signal. This can happen at three stages – compression of data into message, the reading of data, or a fault in the equipment receiving the data.

A glitch is more than an unwanted digital transmission, it’s a physical artifact of a less-than-perfect system of electronic communication, reminding us that our hardware and software architectures have not transcended the scope of error. Although glitches are generally unwanted or unplanned and therefore precipitous of negativity, movements within contemporary media practices have rallied around the aesthetic of the electronic accidental. What is so compelling about the glitch?

Electronic feedback is a rude awakening for an otherwise hypnotically smooth functioning system of information. Moreover, glitches expose how the machinery we take for granted thinks, and even more interestingly, by defying our expectations, force us to encounter the implicit paradigm of representation we impose upon technological artifice.

This might be considered an artistic impulse with traces of a modernist sensibility, questioning and problematizing the very medium upon which the artist practices. Furthermore, glitch artists question the model of transmitter, message, and receiver by rupturing the flow of communication with ambivalence.

Although seemingly unproductive, this rupture of information can be enlightening. What we consider a productive flow of information is a fetter on our imagination and conception of socioeconomic relationships. Reducing the possibility of electronic communication to a syntactic exchange of orderly commands not only limits the possible implementations of technology, but also possibilities for how humans can interact with each other and think about society.

The glitch smashes the code in order to blaze a trail for something new – meaning, symbolic, and otherwise.