Freshman year, as I walked back to my dorm, I pondered how my sense of humor had taken a shift over the course of the semester. My wit had sharpened, my sarcasm become more dry, and even my laugh had begun to sound like that of my roommate. She was rubbing off on me. Much earlier in my life, as I was struggling to figure out my adolescent identity, I asked my mom in a panic “is it bad to take bits and pieces of the things you like in other people and do those things too?” I was terrified of becoming an emotional version of Frankenstein’s monster, but she assured me that this was only natural. It’s really amazing to think about the people who have shaped me and inspired me to act better, think more critically, and embody their good qualities in myself. Learning the lesson that it’s okay to be a “copycat” when it comes to finding yourself also showed me that it’s okay to change. In early high school, everyone’s biggest fear was always that of change. Whenever a pair of friends would drift apart, the mutter of “she’s just so different now” was always cast as a sort of blame on the changed one. When I said that leggings weren’t pants and I’d never be caught dead in them, but a few months later found myself sporting them on a regular basis, I had changed. When I walked into my first course on women’s literature, I did not identify as a feminist; I have changed. The ides exchanged in that classroom and all of the things I loved about my professor changed my thoughts about myself and my own identity. This is not a bad thing. The fear of hypocrisy and the fear of becoming someone you weren’t a few months ago overwhelms our culture, but as someone who is learning all the time, I think I change every day. This change is just growth and I’m learning to embrace it.
Category: Uncategorized
Martha Sheil
Technically, Professor Martha Sheil is just my voice teacher. Technically, her job is simply to teach me how to turn notes on the page into music that one day (hopefully) will earn me a paycheck. Yet, over the past four years Martha has served as cheerleader, makeshift therapist, and second mom – all while teaching me how to sing and constantly reminding me why I do.
Last year, Martha announced that in May 2015 she would retire. For a studio with a cult like reverence for their teacher, this news was devastating.
Last semester I strategically avoided thinking about her impending retirement or that in a few short months I would have to begin the search for a new voice teacher but Saturday night the department, the studio and I had face that the end was near, and that her departure was a few voice lessons away.
Saturday night was her final recital as a professor, entitled Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Besides demonstrating her technical prowess, musicality and stage presence that immediately drew every eye to her, Martha touched every person in the audience. One student started crying the moment Martha began to sing because she knew how nervous Martha gets backstage. Another lost it when she sang their song – a piece which they learned at the same time and grew to love together. Others lost it during “surprise Tosca” when Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore (I live for art, I live for love) was performed although it did not appear on the program. Before the final piece I numbered among the few audience members who were not yet reaching for a tissue, but as she sang Final Monologue from Jake Heggie’s Maria Callas, all hope was lost and the entire auditorium was in tears.
I’ve know since that night that I wanted to talk about Professor Sheil in this week’s blog post yet every time I start to type I stop. Saturday reminded me that she was leaving but writing about it makes it real. More than that, how do I put into words someone who has changed my entire life? How do I convey that, other than my parents, she has been the one person who believed in me when the music school said I wasn’t good enough, who ordered me to ignore everyone that told me that double majoring was stupid, and who has dealt with a dejected, disappointed and defeated Alexandria more times than I care to admit?
For the past four years Martha has been a constant in my life. Every week she has returned me to sanity and every week I have grown as a musician and as a person. She has seen me through audition disappointment, performance success, break ups and musical breakthroughs. She has given herself to her students selflessly and has taught me more about music and about life than I had ever thought possible.
As I write this, I feel an immense desire to try and explain who she is and what she means to me but anything I can say will fall short. All I can say is thank you. Thank you for giving me more than I can ever repay and for believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Thank you for turning me into the musician and person that I am today. Thank you for every moment we have shared and for the ones which we will share in the future.
In May everything will change. While I do not graduate, the people I have grown up with and grown to love will scatter across the country. Martha will retire and I will focus on finishing my engineering degree leaving behind a world which has defined me my entire college career. Endings are always hard – even when you know it is all for the best – and I’m sure more tears will be shed before my final lesson. While I know I will no longer have my weekly sanity checks with Professor Sheil I will continue to learn and grow, knowing she is only a phone call away.
Postcards are Nice
When traveling for an extended period of time (or to a new place), sometimes we’ll send a postcard or two. We’ll find some iconic or ironic image, write a brief message on the back, and mail it to family and friends. It’s quick, easy, cheap, and mildly entertaining. But why does it exist anymore? With our various means of communication–phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, blog posts, Instagrams, Vines, Snapchats, pins, re-blogs, and so on and so forth–why bother to give business to the postal service? We can instantly send a few words to family or friends, and if we find an iconic image (or several), we can send them along too. And it’s free! Postcards are an inferior means of communication in almost every way, shape, and…
Well, I guess not form. They are physical, and their tactile form separates them from their digital cousins. There’s something special about receiving a random chunk of paper. They’re small and inconspicuous. Unobtrusive and benign.
The above image is the supposed “first printed postcard,” and appears to be sent from an army camp in 1870. They haven’t evolved much since. Postcards still serve as a variety of souvenir–a gentle reminder of a place where someone thought of you. Be it a beach or a mountain, a big city or an army camp, postcards are a subtle means of saying “Hey, I thought of you for a second.” That’s about it.
But there’s beauty in that. Sometimes the images aren’t the most flattering–or, rather, quite repulsive in aesthetics–but they deliver a good message. Their brevity is nice. They take only a second to read and a few moments to appreciate. They rarely warrant a response or demand a reply. They are the manifestation of noncommittal communication. Like a small wave or a quiet hello, they are a pleasantry that doesn’t expect reciprocation. This relaxed nature is refreshing amidst the slush of bills, emails, and advertisements pining for our attention. Postcards can decorate the doors of refrigerators or liven up the tawdry page of a scrapbook. Over time, they can form a nice collection that takes up little space. Stories and relationships are stored in each card. They can start conversations with guests and spark vicarious adventure. They’re a wonderful gift and pleasure to send. We should hope they don’t get lost in our clutter of modern communication. They may be small, but postcards are an embodiment of joy.
They’re just nice.
Why I Think Jimmy Fallon Revolutionized Late Night Television, Part 1
When I was little, I obviously had a concrete bedtime that my mom and dad used to enforce fairly strictly (mostly my mom on this one). But as I got older, they loosened up, because honestly, their bedtime habits aren’t the best, and it was hard to make me go to bed when they weren’t going to bed themselves. So around the time I was in middle school, I discovered late night TV and all the wonders it held.
And by wonders, I mean…not wonders. Sure, I thought it was cool to stay up so late that I get to see David Letterman, and maybe sometimes I’d get some of the jokes, but most of them flew straight over my head. However, I did enjoy the guests they brought on the show, especially when I started exploring music on my own terms rather than just based on what my mom played in the car. As I got older, I watched more late night TV, maybe not religiously but often enough that I decided who my favorites were. I wasn’t a big fan of Letterman, so I often fluctuated between Leno and Kimmel – Kimmel was crass (I got the jokes now) but funny, and Leno was mean but funny, so they evened each other out. There was even a period of time when me and my mom would curl up most nights and watch Craig Ferguson together, because we found him to be hilarious for some odd reason.
Late night TV, for me, was always a kind of frivolity. Like, if it’s on, sure, I’ll watch it, but I never went out of my way to see something. But then I realized that this was actually kind of a problem. As I learned more about general pop culture and became invested in it, I realized that my generation, the teens/young adults, we were the audience that was hard to crack. Not only are we apathetic about the world, we also had weird, unpredictable taste (Backstreet Boys? Really?). According to them, that is. According to me, late night was just boring.
But then something happened. My mom told me that there was a new guy on the Late Show, some comedian named Jimmy Fallon. She would call me into her room every so often, because Emma Stone was on or they were playing some wacky game.
I don’t think I need to say anymore about how Jimmy’s popularity skyrocketed. Also being a casual watcher of SNL, I learned that Jimmy had been on SNL years before, and for some reason I was surprised. Jimmy as a sketch comedian? Really? He was perfect for late night. But then it made sense. Jimmy isn’t perfect for late night…he’s just a funny guy. Period.
Over the past few days I’ve found myself pulling up videos of him and showing my friends his hilarious videos, whether it be his “show” “Ew!” or the lip sync battles, and then asking them why they like Jimmy Fallon so much. It’s no surprise that I talk to my friends and they all agree that he is hilarious and we all love him.
At first I thought it was just because he cracked the code somehow. Like he “gets us,” and he gets the age of technology. Leno had Headlines, from newspapers, Fallon has Hashtags from Twitter. But then I thought that wasn’t exactly right. I mean sure, his YouTube videos have tons of hits, but it’s gotta be more than relatability.
And I think what I’ve come up with is a pretty solid explanation. Jimmy’s show is clearly different from other late night TV. I mean, where else can you see a host and his guest get up spontaneously and sing “It Takes Two?” But more than his structure, it’s Jimmy himself. He makes fun of other stars, to be sure. But it’s not like Letterman, where there was a hint of poison in his barbs. Jimmy is like your best friend making fun of you. They can make fun of you because you know so clearly that they’re joking. You can’t help but to laugh along instead of being offended. And when he’s not doing a monologue, he’s having his guests do crazy things that are starting to revolutionize late night TV (okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I repeat: lip sync battles). He’s making late night TV fun instead of following the usual monologue-guest-guest 2-music format. And my age group is responding to it, if 28 million views on #Hashtag says anything.
Reality of the Virtual
Media devices of contemporary society constantly tread towards an ideal of transparency and immersion. We want the artifice of our tablet or phone devices to act as physical extensions of our own limbs and perceptual faculties –
just look at touch-screen, voice-command, and the visual interfaces which simulate tangible objects such as loose leaf paper or sticky notes.
In addition to practical tools, our entertainment media too progress towards an ever more immersive experience.
48 fps films such as the new Hobbit series,
3-dimensional cameras for films such as Avatar which attempt to transmute its audience to an alternate universe,
or videogames such as Call of Duty which simulate battlefield experiences with point-of-view perspective and high-definition graphics.
The above media exemplify a cultural push for virtual reality – the simulation, perhaps even the electronic accentuation of immediate physical experience with the environment.
Historically, prominent schools of intellectuals and social theorists have expressed anxiety towards virtual reality, arguing such technology obfuscates reality. Some of the founders of the field of Communications, picking up a line of discourse formulated by early 20th century sociologists, argue our very state of existence is so highly contrived by a phenomena of perpetual imagery
from billboards
to neon lights
to street-side advertising signs
that our psychological state has been fractured. The modern individual subject is interpolated by the ideological agendas imagery which populates physical artifacts around him or her to the point of a distantiation from material, or perhaps even spiritual reality.
I would like to complicate this common fear of virtuality. I agree that the transparency and immersive capacity of our surrounding media has grown exponentially. Rather than seeing this increased virtualization of the social landscape as a shift away from reality, however, I posit a bolder claim – that increasing virtuality offers deeper insight into the glimmering reality behind the virtual.
For one thing, let us consider Hollywood films such as The Matrix and Inception. Both are big-budget special effects movies which draw audiences with the promise of immersive spectacle, yet simultaneously function as convincing demystifications of immersion.
The Matrix is about an ideal society which is, in fact, simulated by an apparatus of robots conspiring to oppress the human civilization. The film suggests the possibility that social organization and modern luxury are false freedoms in exchange for mental agency. This is not just an entertaining story, but a self-reflexive depiction of the Hollywood image manufacturing process – which sells utopian visions in exchange for our time, money, and subservience to consumer ideals.
Inception tells a suspenseful story about invading an individual’s dreams and planting ideas that had yet not existed within their subconscious. As the film’s complex narrative web unfolds, the ambiguous layers of dream-consciousness seem to fold over one another, leaving the audience unsure of which dream each character currrently resides in, or whether there is any real in the first place, or whether each plane of existence the protagonists inhabit is in fact a dream. Inception too propagates a message of false consciousness – that aspects of material existence may be manufactured projections rather than self-evident material reality. Moreover, Inception articulates a theory of ideological interpolation – that the artifacts of simulation which surround us may be sowing the seeds of ideas in our minds.
At the point where seemingly neutral objects of social organization are always-already manipulating our psyches, perhaps the way to resist is through a recursive act of hypersimulation. In other words, rather than attempting to disengage from the contrived advertising culture which permeates every thread of the social fabric, a strategy of inflecting an entertainment culture of virtual reality with visceral encounters of authentic reality becomes possible.
For example, how might an immersive, psychological identification with a soldier in Call of Duty not only simulate a fictional war-time experience, but also demonstrate the real and horrible effects of war and militarization? Or how might the fantasy-land of Naavi in Avatar serve as a serious critique of technological overconsumption of natural resources.
Troubling Thoughts on Macklemore
During the aftermath of this year’s Grammy’s, several prominent hip-hop artists have voiced their criticisms of the award show. Through a post on Instagram, Snoop Dogg joined the list this morning with a startling image. The picture displays Macklemore–tuxedo’d out, hair flipped like a pancake–accepting a Grammy, while in the background sit head shots of legendary hip-hop artists who never gained as much popular support as Macklemore does now. And there are a lot of faces behind the thrift shopper’s polished smile. Snoop writes, “Macklemore has more Grammys than Tupac, The Notorious B.I.G., DMX, Busta Rhymes, KRS-One, Rick Ross, Snoop Dogg, Snoop Dogg, Mos Def, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Big Pun, Young Jeezy, Ja Rule and Kendrick Lamar combined.” Combined!
That list simply makes no sense. Except when I pause to think about which celebrities are most popular in this country, and why that is, and then this list makes complete sense. The major difference between Macklemore and each of these other artists is not hard to recognize, and as much as he may disagree, at least part of Macklemore’s enormous success and fame and record sales and sold out stadium shows is because of his race. Which, on the outset, would not be a problem. In any other music genre, it would not cross anyone’s mind. But Macklemore is not in any other music genre. He’s in hip-hop. A music and culture created by a specific group of people in a specific place to overcome a specific type of adversity. And while hip-hop has developed and evolved in enormous ways since then, there is still a matter of appropriation and exploitation when a white person becomes a hip-hop artist.
Macklemore’s most committed fans will argue with me here. They’ll say that he understands the precarious place he holds, and makes music in a self-aware and humble way. They’ll say he once wrote a song about this very topic, and is the first to admit there are problems with being a white rapper.
This is where I become frustrated. The song most people mention in defense of Macklemore is from one of his earlier mixtapes. It’s a track called “White Privilege” and at first glance seems like he really knows what he’s talking about.
Here’s the hook::
“Hip-hop started off on a block that I’ve never been to
To counteract a struggle that I’ve never even been through
If I think I understand just because I flow too
That means I’m not keeping it true, I’m not keeping it true.”
Which sounds great. And so does the rest of the song. He talks about gentrification and white privilege and cultural appropriation. It seems like he really genuinely understands the issues he himself perpetuates. And so my only question, one that I think would be quite obvious, is why in the hell is he still rapping? If he knows it’s wrong of him to do this, if he knows he is changing the culture of a genre of music he has no right to, then why is he knowingly continuing his career? What a hypocrite!
Macklemore doesn’t exactly address this problem in his song. He does a magnificent job outlining the multitude of problems related to this issue, but doesn’t hold himself accountable. His one response comes in a horribly vague phrase: “I’m gonna be me.”
So even though there are a million things wrong with doing what he’s doing, Macklemore’s going to continue because, well, that’s who he is.
No wonder Snoop is angry.
