Category: Uncategorized

Perhaps you’re like me: you find or are told to listen to a new song. You like the song and listen to more of the album. After a couple listens (which you don’t like so much because you find it hard to differentiate between tracks and remember which of your favorite bits and pieces belong in which songs) you decide conclusively that you are a fan. The next several listens are bliss; they last for a few weeks, stay in your mind through class and bus rides and long runs, and guide your thoughts and emotions. This music is the only thing you want to hear and it feels good and new each time you listen. Until, inevitably, you’ve outplayed your welcome. The songs no longer carry such enormous power and your grow tired, wanting, within the first thirty seconds of each song, even the best song, to change towards something new. A few days later, the album is finished. No more chills, no more appreciation, no more obsession.
Well, if you’re like me, there seems no other option than to continue searching for more albums, more new music, more chills. Here are a couple that served me extremely well this summer, and so far into fall.

The Head and the Heart’s “The Head and the Heart”

Chances are you’ve listened to this album before. Not sure how I missed its release in 2010, but I couldn’t be more thankful that I found it four years later. This is the ultimate sunny day music, full of pleasant harmonies and multiple voices and the feel-good kind of folksy rock you see in really good music trailers. (for more on good music from movie trailers, see here). My favorite aspect of The Head and the Heart is the various singers they have in the band, and the way they blend melodies and create different choruses.

Favorite Tracks: Down in the Valley, Rivers and Roads, Winter Song, Lost in my Mind

Mick Jenkins’ “The Water[s]

“Started from the bottom of the map, roll tide at the end of the wave.”

Words from Mick Jenkins, the 23 year old rapper from Chicago, on his recent mixtape The Water[s]. Jenkins was born in Alabama, and the “Roll Tide” reference reminds us that the city’s next great voice is not a native. Don’t be fooled, though. Jenkins’ project surfaces at the top of an incredibly long line of burgeoning music from Chicago. In my opinion it’s the best collection of tracks since Acid Rap, despite the two artist’s dissimilar styles. Jenkins plants an extended metaphor, comparing water to truth, in each song on the mixtape, working the theme until it becomes so visceral and real that I was shocked my laptop didn’t turn into a faucet and spray H20 in all directions. His lyricism is creative, bursting with social commentary and full of complex comparisons. He shares none of Chance’s pretty aesthetic, and instead relies on softer, powerful beats to lay the groundwork for his piercing voice and words. The production is incredible (some tracks from big names like Statik Selectah, Ongaud and Cam from JUSTICE League) and the overall effect of the mixtape is one of awe, deep thought and genuine admiration.

Favorite Tracks: Vibe, Jazz, Comfortable, Martyrs

Happy listening!

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: