Category: Uncategorized

If you haven’t heard Moroccan music, but like American music, then I suggest you don’t plunge yourself into a bingefest of Moroccan beats, but rather try the gateway drug of Hindi Zahra.

At first listen, she doesn’t sound like someone who comes from a place full of sand, scarab beetles, and countless Kasbahs. She sounds more like someone from a place with Monet paintings, men in tight pants, and women with multiple bellyrings.

I recommend Hindi Zahra not only because of her smooth, Billie Holliday-esque vocals, but also because she represents the Euro-African culture that Morocco is known for. Also, for non polyglots, most of her songs are in English, with a few flavorful Berber lyrics thrown into songs like Imik Si Mik.

Born in Morocco, Zahra moved to Paris at age 15 where worked at the Louvre/wrote music. Not a bad coming of age period, if you ask me. Her style has been described as ‘jazz-blues-gypsy’, which is pretty accurate. Her swinging guitar riffs give just enough structure for her voice to glide through and reach her listener’s ears.

Her songs are great cafe fare.

If you enjoy Zahra, another wonderful product of Moroccan and Parisian culture is Malika Zarra, whose influences are more Bobby McFerrin than Billie Holliday, but the results are just as soothing and smooth.

Both women are chilled out introductions to Moroccan music and incorporate similar Berber strings in their bass lines.

Every Thursday I go see the Penny Stamps lecture series at the Michigan Theatre – partially because attendance is mandatory for all Art & Design students, but also because it’s really great and the only lecture of its kind in all the land, and these terrestrial creatives come talk to all us college asteroids floating aimlessly aspiring to their level of planetary gravity, and they say grand inspirational moving things and remind us that BFAs aren’t useless after all. It’s a shame that most of the people there would rather be somewhere else, hence all the little glowing rectangles that can be seen glittering in the sea of chairs, mostly the back seats, where thumbs are twiddled and absent minds discuss social media in undertones and the rebels huff and scoff and always find imaginary or otherwise flaws in the person on stage even if they radiate with the intensity of a hundred suns. It’s a shame that the only reason people don’t want to go is because they’re forced to go, but what can ya do.

This particular Thursday’s speaker was Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy who founded the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India, which among other things teaches illiterate grandmothers in Africa to be solar engineers and pass on this knowledge to their villages and show everyone how to be sustainable and generate light from the sun and not just wood and gas – grandmothers because they say males have a tendency to head out to big cities and leave families once they’ve got diplomas – grandmothers, however, are dedicated to the childrens, neighbors, friends, farmers, tradesmen all of whom could really use more better light. The college only accepts students who don’t have a degree or diploma of any kind, favoring instead the hands-on knowledge of experience, competence, and confidence. The reasoning for this is to protect and enhance traditions and practices that have been used for generations, resulting in specialized skill sets that can now be shared across cultures and spaces. When the grandmothers return from their crash course, which lasts about six months, they become the teachers and soon enough every hut has it’s own little glowing piece of sun and they don’t have to burn so much and life generally becomes at least a little easier.

I think this idea of teaching only with the hands and no books or exams or theories is one with great potential, one that makes me think of guilds back in the day, of passing on a different kind of knowledge than academic proficiency, tacit knowledge, skill trades, how to do things and change life and not just talk about it like stuff’s gonna happen on its own. Of course, in an ideal world everyone can read and write, but this kind of education has the ability to transcend the invisible barriers of language and culture that conceptual education has constructed. The ability to make things with one’s own hands seems to be overlooked these days, what with so much of the open space for innovation existing in the digital universe. I vision a future where these kinds of experience-based institutions could work together with the academic centers based on theory over practice, every university consisting of two halves, one for books and one for hands. I see a time when we can admit that we all have something to teach each other, always something new to learn, things that can’t be taught in a book or on the computer. After all, there are hundreds of grandmothers all over Africa that can now build solar lamps, which is something I can’t say I could do with four fifths of an undergraduate degree under my belt. Could you?

Barefoot College: Solar Training Workshop

Given the great sunny weather we’ve been having this St. Paddy’s day weekend, I expect that all of you have been out and about jigging to your heart’s content (or at least to the content of the leprechaun who lives inside each of our hearts ((mine’s name is Steven))). This has got me to thinking about dancing, which I want to dedicate this article to because even though I don’t really have any sort of professional training or experience with discussing dancing on a technical level–when has that ever stopped me?

In a stand-up show, Jim Carrey said something to the effect of anything that makes a human being want to do this…

is okay with him.

So many people seem to bow out of the dance floor with the excuse, “I don’t know how to dance.” Well, neither do I and it doesn’t really look like Jim Carrey does either, but damn does he (and I, for that matter) look good doing it! And even if you (or I, for that matter, cause it does happen) end up looking like a dork, at least you’ll look like a dork having a grand time!

I think of dancing in much the same way that I think of T’ai Chi in that you’re aligning your body with your mind, emotions, and spirit and in that way expressing something perhaps even greater than all four. Once at a restaurant that was focused on being fancy to the point of being invasive (nobody needs to be laying napkins on my lap, it’s just not right), my family was celebrating my father’s birthday. At some point during the meal, he decided to ask us all a question that would reveal one of the three lessons he had decided upon becoming a father that he would pass on to his children. “What is the symbol of universal harmony?” We, of course, said all kinds of things: love, the infinity symbol, Ghostbusters 2, etc…but none of these would do. No, the symbol of universal harmony, he said, is dancing. Because everything is dancing all the time, from the smallest protons and electrons buzzing around to the planets and stars whirling around each other in a galactic tango.

So why would anyone be afraid of connecting themselves to that?

There’s an intriguing distinction I read attributed to Paul Tuitean that “the difference between a soldier and a warrior was that soldiers march, warriors dance.” What do the warriors of today look like? That drive and passion still exists in many people, but in today’s world there isn’t as much opportunity to go over and pillage the neighboring town. We find all sorts of ways to funnel that sort of frantic kinetic energy that propels the burning hearts of warriors: sports, mixed martial arts, and obviously dancing. But the war waged on the dance floor now is generally more dedicated to peoples’ drive for sex, which is okay because isn’t sex just another type of dancing? Dancing is a way of connecting, with self and others (since others seem to exist simultaneously in, out, and with the self). When you’re a soldier, you’re in the army, but when you’re a warrior–you are the army. So I hope you have a great weekend, I hope you move, I hope you dance.

Yesterday our campus saw the 5th annual TEDxUofM conference– a showcase of ideas, energy, innovation and new ways of learning. The full-day long event drew in over 1,000 people and featured over a dozen different speakers and performers, talking about everything from curing diseases to puppet-theater workshops in public high schools. Each year, several seniors in the school of Art & Design create a poster that relates to the conference’s theme, to be shown on the day of. This year’s theme was “Against The Grain,” and the following artists contributed posters: Cori Lewis, Dave Eppig, Ellen Wolbert, Leah Backo, Leah Whiteman, Madalyn Hochendoner, Margaret Hitch, Mary Clare Harrington, Meggie Ramm, Sarah Brennan, Tarah Douglas, and Taylor Ross. See all of their amazing work below!