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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.

This weekend I attended Dlectricity – a sprawling festival exhibition of Art and Light installed within Midtown Detroit, along Woodward Ave. starting at Kirby and stretching down past the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (affectionately known as MOCAD), the purpose being an interaction between old spaces and new media of expression, developing a sense of community, literally allowing the crowds of wide-eyed onlookers to see these public structures in a new light. Some things I saw:

Beginning at Detroit Artist’s Market where Endi Poskovic (Internationally acclaimed and prolific artist/teacher at A&D) has curated a show called Landscape and Abstraction, bringing together six Michigan printmakers whose work wanders between fields of relief, collage, reduction woodcut, hanging installation, and even prints with city lights punched out of the paper, leaving it full of holes and shadows – here also is projection on screen by another A&D teacher Heidi Kumao, shadows and video shot onto stack of books, small silhouette climbing spines like ladder rungs, well done –

on to MOCAD where two projections outside talked across from each other: a girl slowly beatboxing really barely making any noise and opposite her a dancer man in a sweat suit pop locking and turning to her occasional rat-tats and fwooms – farther behind in shack-like side building more projection on garage door, through door are shadows interacting with footage of guests donning paper and rubber masks and walking through this hall of shining mysteries, us watching from outside, adjacent to this real time journeying are shots of disco retro dancer couples, strange contrast, ritualistic but jiving, the dancers all smiles, us moving on –

big steel MOCAD doors, wander inside, pass gift shop, ponder art – I saw paintings of lacquer and varnish, garish portraits with worms of paint squirted from tube over bodies, farther in was a room of rooms, pairs of artists filling small spaces, like IP studios, I saw videos, tables of books with hanging headphones that don’t work, moldmaker casting things he likes, wants to try, saw buddhas and large quarters and rock mobiles, collections of plants, a room of hayfloor and wooden puppet at table of horrors, a room of college essays and notebook sketches and writing stapled behind plexiglass all four walls and floor – in the next room a performance, two girls on stage, purposely caked makeup, dumb wigs, blacked-out teeth, cartoons, sing karaoke ballad about freedom of self, hop around stage, having fun up there, us deciding it was about performance culture and our expectations of performers and the realities we don’t see and don’t want to – onward, pop-up shop of forgery containers in corner gallery, soup cans and boxes of crayons and spam, cigarette cartons, candy packaging, all plastic and empty with little lamps inside, free, on necklace or fishing pole stick dangle, bouncing light –

there was a bike parade in the street, wheels and wheels spinning by all a-glow, whistles and hoots and hollers from riders, music blares, mingles, moving, us following flow of bikes up Woodward  – stopping next at a big open field on Warren, perspective box confusing, supposed to distort scale, make small and tall people look same size, can’t see while inside walking through, unsure, design tent of wares, projection on wall on back of porto-potties (a woman in a blindfold sitting on a whoopee cushion over and over again, on three screens, somehow each clip a little different, done multiple times) – onward again, a glowing inflated set of four fingers gyrating in the sky, reminding of rocketship alien arms, scheming above bystanders, lighting up and spreading, buzzing, down the street hugeing projecting on façade of DIA, madness, landscapes and faces with trees and scales growing, a cube with cameras, projecting immediate audience onto various backgrounds (traffic, fields of color, crowds of people), a cathedral with echoey glowing windows, ineffective from up close, craning neck to see nothing faint glimmer of orange light above – us reaching Woodward and Kirby, turning, walking block to see Osman Khan (yet another A&D Prof) installation, a house shape in LED tubes, fluorescent, a diagonal bulb in middle occasionally blinking while house frame dims –

in addition to all this ART I saw faces, all the faces gaping and looking around, searching for meaning in awe of illuminations, seas of crowds flowing over street corners, intersections, tides of feet and eyes, heads turning in Look – and the space really was transformed, not even so much by the light itself but what the light causes which is community, everybody here for the same thing, all the souls searching for one thing or another, the real deal being something there worth searching for, this the effect of light, to make us see what we hadn’t before – and you can be sure I’ll be back next year.