Category: Uncategorized

Sinaboro? For those of you who have never heard of this student organization before, Sinaboro is a Korean Traditional Drumming Group on campus. Founded in 1998, the group has grown bigger and bigger over the years and perform samulnori, a type of music originally performed outdoors by farmers to celebrate good harvests, in many campus events. Now the next question you may wonder about is the meaning of this word in Korean. Well, I personally searched it online first, but did not find any satisfactory explanations until I opened the group’s official website. Okay…so it means “little by little, gradually without notice” and “the word itself is no longer in use…”–Haha…traditional enough to name this group. So, this past Saturday night, Sinaboro presented its annual concert at Mendelssohn Theater, and after watching it, I was so amazed and impressed and added the Sinaboro annual concert to my list of must-go-event next year.

The concert contained various forms of performance. I was late and missed the opening drumming show, but was lucky enough to enjoy the performance of a lovely singing group. At first it was the solo of a guy singing the theme song of the Korean drama Secret Garden, called That Women. Then a girl joined him and they performed a beautiful duet. At the end of the song, a singing ensemble came on the stage. The melancholy melody was soon replaced by a lively tone of the group. They went on to sing another cheerful Korean song and then Seasons of Love from Rent. The singing section was followed by a drumming piece. The stage was dark with a midnight blue wash, leaving the silhouettes of the drummers. I could see their body movements, and couldn’t help moving my body with the beats. And then there was this really cool dance–I apologize for not knowing the name of it–in which the dancers produced rhythmic sounds by flapping and stepping, somewhat similar to step dance.

However, what I love the most about the concert is that it incorporated every performance into a larger narrative, the parody of the 2010 Korean drama, Secret Garden. I watched that during my senior year in high school and trust me, I was obsessed with that show, and the leading actor, Hyun Bin, has been my favorite Korean man for almost ten years. The show tells the story of two young persons whose bodies got switched by accident, and in the process of getting used to their new bodies and pretending to be each other in front of other people, they fell in love with each other. The concert showed five short movie clips of this story played and filmed by the creative kids from this group. They changed the context of the story to Ann Arbor and recreated the famous scenes in a humorous way. For example, the milk foam kiss scene, the original version being that the Hyun Bin wiped off the milk foam of cappuccino on the girl’s lips by kissing her. Here, when the boy was trying to copy that romantic moment, he got slapped on the face instead and was left muttering “Wait, I thought girls liked this in dramas.” The part when the girl (now in the body of the guy) taught the guy (under the girl’s body) how to wear bras after they just switched their bodies was also hilarious.

Although I kept telling myself that I had this 3000 word paper due in three hours (yep, on a Saturday night), I totally loved this concert and was reluctant to leave early. The only thing I wanna say is: Bravo!

The videos of the concert by parts could be found under the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMYk1kN_bxqcpQ5tDSReEZw

Also, the film clips:

Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0vMx6vCJMw

Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSUqUtdau0A

Part III: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z8BpOmQQrg

Intermission: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Iqeg1SPXI

Part IV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCOuvYDCS0

Part V: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI4fMDDNJ6o

Ancient Arts

Morocco is a dry, sandy dessert-y place where some trees grow, but millions of fossils reside. Maybe the most ideal place for retirement, but for some million year-old species, it is!

If you get a chance to visit Morocco, you’ll probably see fossils on every street corner, but like many other things sold there, you have be sure that what you’re paying for is authentic. Luckily, I was able to visit a dig site where I watched the rough stuff get smoothed, polished and primed for resale.

The fossils in Morocco range from small, shrimp and beetle-looking creatures to giant nautilus shells, bigger than dinner plates. If you have the money and the personal taste, then it’s possible to not only buy a granite countertop or sink from Morocco, but also to buy a granite or marble table with fossils in it.

I found this fossil art to be interesting simply because you start with a living, organic specimen that once walked or em, scuttled the earth. While the sedimentary arrangement of fossils is luck of the draw, the polishing, cutting, and framing of all the fossils together requires intense focus, visioning skills, and attention to detail.

For poor college students like me, there are smaller pieces that have been fashioned into wonderful keepsakes and tabletop accessories.

 

I ended up snagging a 200 million year-old nautilus shell, aka ‘ammonite’. There were several versions of ammonite, some of which looked like a mini-nautilus countertop, since they were so polished. But I preferred an ammonite specimen that retained its rough organic texture, but still had some human touches to even out the rough edges.

At the dig site store there seemed to be something for everyone. Since Morocco is so full of fossils, this is probably true.

So it’s that time of year again. Better prep your Facebook newsfeed and inboxes for a flood of poetically inspired cascades of consonance and artfully articulated alliteration. That’s right, 30/30 has come again and the poet folk raise their collective heads to force out a manifestation of madness for the thirty days of April.

As any poet will tell you, it’s a grueling process (I’m already three days/poems behind). Still, there’s something very rewarding and uplifting to see the community of poets step into the light of spring just as the cold of winter is being shaken off. Perhaps the illuminating warmth of poetry is enough to counteract the eternal winter brought about by so many people singing Frozen’s “Let It Go” (we all know that’s the reason this winter has gone on so long, don’t even lie).

Of course, there have always been a lot of questions about “what is poetry anyways?” I’m somehow certain that there have been more answers given to that question than times that the question has actually been asked. It’s not our fault, really, poets love poetry! I remember when I met Pulitzer Prize Winning poet Galway Kinnell, and he described a poem as “a soft and loving thing.” Of course, I’ve written many poems that I would never in a million years describe as being soft or loving, but I think that perhaps he meant that poems have an ability to curl up inside of people–even angry poems–and touch them. Poetry can be a gentle light cuddling up inside your heart, even if it’s topic is intense or full of rage and despair. I think that this is because poems allow for a connection of thoughts from writer to poem to reader in a stream of consciousness way that prose doesn’t always necessarily convey.

Kinnell went on to give his own definition of poetry: “touching a part of your consciousness that was previously untouched; going farther into yourself.” Poetry as a sort of self-focus and self-reflective examination of the writer’s consciousness is fascinating. The poem, in this sense, is not for the reader but for the poet. However, what I’ve often found is that when it comes to writing poetry, the more specificity that the writer puts in from their own life and experience, the more relatable the poem becomes to readers. Readers can tap into that intimacy between writer and poem, which exists more strongly if the writer has experience and passion towards the topic.

Honestly,  I never really thought that I’d ever accept something as constraining as a definition for poetry–or art in general really! Something I’ve come to cherish as a writer is that writers set out to break rules. In fact, what seems to make poetry distinct from prose is that poetry breaks the normal rules of syntax and grammar in order to transform a page into a canvas for word art. Poetry operates on a visual level, a content level, and an auditory level! With so much going on, how could you possibly constrain it to a definition? But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way we see the world as defined and separated by the idea of internal versus external. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve begun to see that there is no binary there, as there is no external reality. Everything is internal (and not necessarily just in that everything is based on perception which is internal but that perhaps we are far bigger than we give ourselves credit and to say that everything is inside of me implies that “Me” is something large enough to incorporate all things). In this way, the separation between ourselves and all the people and things around us is revealed as an illusion. However, since the world we live in seems to depend on that illusion it can be hard to break out of that perception. Hence poetry and art in general.

Poetry (in my tentative, tenuous, fluid, and ever-changing definition) is the utilization of the perception of separateness in order to promote the perception and simultaneously make manifest the unity that exists amongst all things.

It has come to my attention that in this world appearance is absolutely everything. If you don’t dress a certain way, wear your hair in an appropriate style, or exude an outer appearance of someone made for this world, then you essentially are not worthy. You aren’t worthy of any time, nor worthy of any conversation, debate, or attention. Am I wrong or am I right? I sincerely would love to know, please leave a comment below. Is it not true that when you go to a restaurant, you don’t want to get a plate of pasta that has sauce splattered all over and sliced tomatoes that are in a pile on the side? You want a plate that is beautifully designed, with sauce filling the center and tomato slices delicately placed on top. Once again, appearance seems to be everything. Now, what about with art?

Do we art appreciators enjoy and buy art because it is pretty, therefore making it worthy? I’d like to think that is not the case. In the creative world, from fashion to film to portraiture and paintings, there are quite a few images or fashions that are applauded simply because of its lack of traditional constructs of beauty. It can be the way a dress has an outlandish shape or a funny interpretation of  a seemingly normal landscape, and somehow it draws us to it, loving it, appreciating it, and purchasing it. Take the image below for example, it’s not something I would normally picture in my head when someone says I’m going to make an image that works with color! Nor does it have the normative constructs of beauty that we are so inclined, in other aspects of life, to deem worthy. But this is a great image, the way in the colors and the lines overlap, covering the person’s face and leaving their hands criss-crossed and exposed, entices me in a way that makes me appreciate this work.

Brian Vu – True False series

My question is, why is it that this socially constructed idea of beauty favored in some aspects of life making it worthy to others, yet when it comes to the creative field, unique interpretations are favored, yet sometimes misunderstood?

My friend Fiona has historically been the facilitator of most of my impromptu-concert-going. Once during my freshman year I was studying in the East Quad basement when Fiona called me offering a ticket to see Girl Talk at the Blind Pig if I could make it to a street corner across town “on Packard next to the brick house” within ten minutes. More excited by the adventure than I was mildly psyched to see Girl Talk, I ditched my backpack with a friend and jogged to Packard and hill to join her concert-going caravan. But I got out of class this past Thursday, charged my phone and found a text from Fiona inviting me to see Mac Demarco at the Magic Stick, I was excited both to have some much-needed spontaneous fun and to see one of my favorite new musicians. I’ve been a fan of Mac since about the time that everyone became a fan of Mac, when he found commercial success with the release of his laid-back but straightforward album ‘2,’ a series of carefree odes to cigarettes, apologies to his mother, and tender love songs. A word-cloud of reviews and write-ups on Demarco would probably come up with bolded key-words like ‘stoner’ (though he doesn’t touch the stuff), 90s-alt, and ‘hat (he fields a lot of questions about his omnipresent baseball cap),’ but I like better comparisons to solo John Lennon and My Bloody Valentine. Demarco himself does nothing to combat more casual descriptions of his music, calling his style ‘jizz-jazz,’ but his refusal to take publicly take his own music seriously seems to just reflect a kind of ambivalence towards his sudden success. Demarco’s newest album ‘Salad Days,’ released April 2^th, is now being heralded as a finessed elaboration on ‘2,’ with the same laid-back rock’n’roll feel applied to more serious, reflective lyrical subject matter.

The Magic Stick sold out at a capacity of 275, and the venue was already filling up by the time we arrived. “ It’s when I come to shows like this that I remember – there actually aren’t that many hipsters in Ann Arbor,” Fiona laughed as she surveyed the crowd, where pastel colored hair, dreads, PBR, beards and plaid abounded in a pretty comprehensive exhibit of the new crusty edge of hipsterdom.

As soon as Mac and three person backing band wandered out onstage to do their own sound check, I immediately realized that I wasn’t going to be able to see anything and jumped at the chance to sit on the edge of a table above the crowd. The seat turned out to be a godsend for a short kid, especially when as the first song started the crowd unexpectedly began moshing in an odd but endearing show of enthusiasm for the laid-back rock’n’roller. The performance itself was full of infectious, genuine enthusiasm. Tour reviews often cite the musician’s odd proclivity to strip completely naked and/or get obscene with drumsticks, but the set was mostly gimmick-free, besides the dutiful singing of a happy-birthday song to a brave 16 year old mosher. My vantage point gave me a great view of Mac’s onstage dynamic – laid back but engaged, grinning through his gap-tooth and joking with his band members. Although Demarco actually records every instrumental part on his albums himself, he tours with three of his old friends on guitar, bass and drums, forming a crew of musician-friends that clearly enjoy playing together.  When Demarco occasionally put his guitar aside to play keyboard and sing with the mic in his hand, he closed his eyes as though earnestly soliloquizing – but beyond the occasional tender moment, Mac gave a generally buoyant and upbeat performance. By the time he gleefully took off his omnipresent baseball cap and crowd-surfed back and forth, the crowd greeted him like an old buddy.

We waited to meet him afterwards in a queue that was less like a line and more like an anxious vortex of iphones swirling around the tired musician. He seemed exhausted, dutifully throwing up peace signs for instagram pics, signing girls’ jean jackets in lipstick, and gracefully accepting a demo tape someone slipped into his jacket pocket, but sometimes staring off into space between groups of people. I almost felt bad for him by the time Fiona and I made it to the front of the needy vortex, and we both made it a point to look him in the eye and thank him for the great show. “Sure,” he said, “thank you.” As we shuffled off, he quietly accepted a fan’s offer to trade hats, and a skinny kid walked away grinning wildly, wearing what looked like a very well-loved, very dirty white baseball cap.