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I can never really convince myself that I am an intrinsic reader. This is partly due to my history with literature. I don’t really have one. In fact, the earliest record of my interaction with literature or rather, picture books to be more precise, is of me when I was a very small boy, about 3 years old, flipping through books, illiterate, thus making up stories of my own.
I didn’t really read that much later on either. I never got swept into the whole obsession with easily consumable series books. In fact I remember disliking the first Harry Potter book, one that I didn’t even read upon its release but rather quite later. Even in high school I didn’t read that often.
It wasn’t until the summer after graduating from high school that I suddenly gained an interest in literature AND I STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHY.
This got me thinking, or rather, looking for an explanation. Which brought me to the realization, that the one form of narrative that was constantly a part of my life, was, and still is, film, the marvel of cinema.
It was through film that I learned how to speak English after moving to America from Korea. More importantly however, the medium influenced my style of writing to some degree or at least that what other people have suggested. It is hard to really say what my writing style is like, what it resembles, unless I am specifically and consciously trying to replicate a particular style that I found that I love. I could be trying to write something like the dialogue of Quentin Tarantino or trying to write a description of the beautiful shots of a P.T. Anderson or Stanley Kubrick film. Maybe I am thinking about the striking visuals of “Baraka” and trying to capture it in words.
Maybe I can tell I have a visual background because that is what I think about, visuals, images, etc. I think about the waterfall I slept next to when I went camping, the stars that dotted the night island sky.
Ephemeral images.
Often, such things influence me. Little images, patterns, or a phrase, never full ideas or concepts, inspire me.
But like I said, now that I am interested in literature (honestly for the first time in my entire life), my views have altered, and without a doubt, my writing style has changed. All thanks to the novels in recent memory, novels such as, “A Clockwork Orange”, “The Trial”, “The Master and Margarita”, “Gravity’s Rainbow”, “Pastoralia”, “Cat’s Cradle”, and etc. All of these novels I recommend (well “Pastoralia” is a collection of short stories, one of the short stories being called Pastoralia). There is a joy and excitement of exploring the medium that I will most likely continue to study. It is exciting and my film adoring background is certainly casting a different light on everything.
This whole piece is incredibly muddled and awful. Although all my past posts have been for me as well, I will explicitly say that this post was definitely for me.
I just needed to sort this through.

Last week’s visitor at the Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series was an artist named Fred Tomaselli. His work includes installations with fans and paper cups in grids, lines and designs made from rows of pills, compositions of leaves and pictures of birds cut out of field guides, all exploding in vast splaying patterns and colors, encased in resin, painted over, more resin – this year having published a book of gouache and collage paintings over scanned printouts of the front pages of the New York Times, aptly and simply titled The Times, which will be conveniently available for viewing at the University of Michigan Museum of art through January 25 - the visual disruptions responding to headlines, reflecting the news and happenings of Today.

What I really enjoyed about Tomaselli’s presentation of his work and ideas was the tone he went about explaining it all, chronologically, walking us through the development of form, content, and concept, all with the same casual lightheartedness that comes from (what I see as) a deep and profound sense of purpose, being completely at peace with his existence as a craftsman, a maker of images, an alchemist of visual data – the work existing as both a personal, compulsive, ritualistic act of synthesis, as well as a relevant collection of powerful imagery that wanders amidst topics of political and environmental and spiritual significance – stuff like the use and legality of pharmaceuticals and psychedelics, arranging these materials into lattices referencing folk art and the Eastern approach making images – he also likes birds, watching them and identifying them, and fly fishing, happily referring to himself as an “angler”, a cutter of lines through the air with rod, a reader of the particular river and ecosystem in which he casts his thoughts. His tedious process stems from experiences working at blue collar jobs, determined not to let the hours and days of working laborious jobs be a “complete waste of time”.

The rest I’d like to leave up to the work itself:

Need I say anything? The first trailer for P.T. Anderson’s new film “Inherent Vice” has finally been released. It will be starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, and many more…

Reasons to be exited? Well first of all, it is a P.T. Anderson film (a director known for such works as…”Boogie Nights”, “There Will Be Blood”, “Magnolia”, and “The Master”). Second, it is adopted from a Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name. Third, Pynchon, an author considered to be a recluse of sorts (to which he replied cleverly by saying, “My belief is that ‘recluse’ is a code word generated by journalists… meaning, doesn’t like to talk to reporters…”), gave his blessing on the script.

Thomas Pynchon was an author most widely known for books such as “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Crying of Lot 49”. His most recent book being “Bleeding Edge”. This is the first time a Pynchon novel has been adapted and the trailer only furthers my belief that this will be a great movie.

Here is a little introduction to the novel for those who are too lazy to google…

“It’s been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that ‘love’ is another one of those words going around at the moment, like ‘trip’ or ‘groovy,’ except that this one usually leads to trouble.”

“Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon – private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era.”

(All found on the back cover of the book)

The weekend before last I attended the play reading series presented by Thus Spoke Ann Arbor, the Chinese Drama Club. The performance featured John Logan’s The Red, a two-character bio-drama about the postwar American painter, Mark Rothko. The two actors sat at the two ends of the table and read from scripts, with a girl facing us with her back reading the narrator’s lines. The costumes were simple and there were only a few props—a canvas displayed on an easel, a paint bucket, three lamps, and that’s all.

The two men engaged in intense discussion about the aesthetic of Rothko’s works, the works of his contemporary artists, the relationship between philosophy and art, the purpose of art making, and their past memories. It is interesting to observe how the relationship of the two changes subtly as the plot develops. In the first half of the play, Ken, Rothko’s (fictional) assistant, appears as a modest and deferential figure, who hardly dares to express any oppositions to Rothko’s arrogant harangues. However, in later acts, he becomes stronger and more mature and starts challenging Rothko’s aesthetic of art. In the final act, to repute Rothko’s disapproval and harsh comments on several pop artists, he criticized Rothko’s hypocrisy and self-approbation, and points out that Rothko’s art has become obsolescent.

I was shocked to hear someone describing Rothko’s art as outdated. As an art history student who is always stuck in the past, more often than not I look at medieval, even ancient stuff, or, at least pre-modern. Nineteen century is already called “modern,” when it is about 150 years ago. Thus, having never got the chance to take the modern and contemporary art class with professor Potts before, I always have the impression that artworks created after the 19^th century are just too “new” for me. I mean, of course I like them, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein—he is definitely my favorite—not to mention the main reason I was attracted to this play was Rothko. However, I tend to group them together, even though I am aware that Warhol and Lichtenstein came after the former ones. It is hard for me to imagine the scenario when a pop artist raises his eyebrows when talking about Rothko and refers to him as “some old guy who plays with his color blocks.”

This reminds me of the concept of period eye in my Renaissance class. Baxandall developed this term to invite a viewer to consider the original cultural context when looking at an artwork—how the work was viewed and understood by its contemporaries. Imagine how striking would it be when linear perspective was experimented by artists like Brunelleschi, those Renaissance artists who we now call the “old masters.” Aren’t they the ones who pioneered new art forms in their times, forms that we deem as classical canons today? I should be more careful with calling something “the old stuff,” because they may be the most innovative inventions in their times.

It surely takes me long enough to finally realize the fascinating dynamism in the history of art.

To be more precise, the papers I needed to ink in order to transfer into the Interarts Performance program, a joint degree program offered by the Stamps School of Art & Design with the School of Music, Theater and Dance. I had been an unofficial part of the group since last semester, trying out a couple of classes and seeing whether it would be a good fit. And today, after an 8-month probationary period of sorts, I made it official.

Interarts is a relatively small program at such a large school like the University of Michigan, with an average of 4~6 students per year. Everyone’s interests are different, lying somewhere in the realm of performance and visual art. Everyone’s reasons for joining the program are different—some applied directly to the Interarts program, while others (like me) transferred into the program from different areas of study.

I joined Interarts because I felt limited within the art school—I came in last year without a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. I had never taken formal art classes, I just knew that visual expression was what I wanted to study because I enjoyed doing it. But going through foundation year, I realized that this rigid curriculum was something I had little interest in pursuing. I also felt like I was wasting so many resources at the University—a big part of the reason I chose Michigan over art schools was the fact that it was part of something bigger. I wanted the chance to explore other new fields of study and to continue pursuing my academic interests as well. But foundation year offered me little breathing room, and by the end of the year, I wasn’t very invested in becoming a solely visual artist.

Granted, every individual’s experience with foundation year is different. And to a certain extent, it is also necessary; with students coming from a variety of different skill sets and interests, foundation year provides us with the necessary aid to hone in on our basic skills that could be applied to multiple fields. And it’s also being improved from year to year, with both positive and negative feedback from students, so maybe in the coming years it will encourage more exploration.

Now that my official transfer has been processed, I’m prepared to make the most out of this semester (which a third of is already gone), shuttling between theater classes and art classes with a dash of engineering classes thrown in for fun (but not really). It’s an incredibly hectic semester so far, but I finally feel like I’m in the right place. After all, fitting into a single label was never my thing, and I don’t intend for it to ever be.