Category: Uncategorized

It’s a long way to Michigan and back.

Taylor Leave a comment

A guitar. A ukulele. A strap on harmonica. And a piano with sticky note reminders.

Sunday night couldn’t have been planned better with 50 people sitting around a stage, a stage all to ourselves to laugh and cry and joke and sing and make mistakes.

Humans are crazy. I critique and analyze them and their thoughts for my job. But the music let me step back and listen to someone for an hour and half with no judgment.

Antje Duvekot was the happiest person to be around. In jeans she made herself and a guitar she “exploded” her wallet over I was impressed with how much she loved what she does. Sure she has the company of a GPS and knows only crowds of strangers, but sometimes that’s all you need to make a moment special. Her voice was sweet and intentioned, every note seemed emotional and every broken note reminded me of how human she was. I forget that music is meant to be imperfection.

Imperfect because the world is terrible.

What better way to cope than to make beautiful, folky music? She whispered and belted about Kerouac, hippies, commies, peyote, and her friend–a.k.a. the dreams I have of my future as I find myself (because we all have to do it) out on the road. She sang about scenes she drove by, feelings she had about war, and her unwanted agnosticism.

I’ll be honest, at first I thought about writing this column about social identities and privilege and how they project on our view of the world. That would have been a crime. For all she did was to bear her soul and her memories for me. 15 dollars is worth learning about a human in a way that I doubt I know some of my friends.

And the crazy part was that it wasn’t just me learning about her. The old man, two rows beside, me was there too. There was even a child across the stage from me! Students. Adults. Teachers. Friends. Spouses. Couples. Friends. Granted I think we all hailed from very similar situations and our whiteness could’ve been compared to the Crayola crayon labeled “milk,” but it was so refreshing to be surrounded not just by 20-somethings.

The show ended and the encore came and went. I packed up my belongings and my friend and I headed the wrong way out the door. SHE WALKED BY US. Smiled and thanked us for being there, she walked to greet the rest of the crowd and waved goodbye as we left her life to return to our own.

The Ark is a great place to get some perspective. When I fret about an impossible midterm about boring English empiricist philosophy and over a paper on gender and distance and work and waking up early and going to bed late and running out of coffee and money and food and friends and breath and forgetting pesky commas and pondering on Toni Morrison I will know that last Sunday I got to feel again. “Oh, that’s what it’s like to be a human.”

And even if I’m pushed back on the Merry Go Round, I’ll have more balance now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dWTG6MkvUY

The Repository of Forgotten Things

Terrie Chen Leave a comment

In recent years, the function of the library has shifted from a repository of information to a designated workspace. Where once people conducted their research primarily by sitting down in a library and poring over books and microfilms, they now bring their work to libraries for the building and the environment and the quiet. We still utilize traditional resources from time to time, of course, but increasingly we value libraries for their updated café area or their cushy wood-paneled (and vault-ceilinged) rooms, or even just a nice table tucked away in a corner.

Part of the appeal of the library environment lies in its very identity. What makes us choose a library over the local coffee-shop, for instance? It still has a grave sort of dignity to it, however great or humble. When we say “resources” we don’t just mean the technology and the services it boasts, though those too are important. We mean the hundreds of thousands, the millions of files and tomes and volumes, organized, catalogued, searchable. Knowledge! Data! It’s not quite at one’s fingertips, but it’s all so very accessible, and, moreover, aggregated and collected. It’s an institution, an institution for the people.

Library stacks, though, are always something different. In a significantly large library, at a significantly late hour, you can be the only one in among the stacks. Shelves and shelves and row upon endless row of books, footsteps muffled and deadened by paper and oddslot fabric and webbed binding material. When was the last time someone touched this book? Opened it, read it? How old is it? Who wrote it, and were they well-received? Are they? What do they say? What are and were the lives of these books, their authors, their subjects? I don’t tend to enjoy studying in libraries, but sometimes I like to prowl Hatcher’s stacks, looking, brushing cracked spines, wondering if that one will fall open with a gentle puff of dust, like in films.

The space created by the presence of so many books exhales a sense of possibility. It’s a museum of art and history and science, but tangible, there for the purpose of letting you smell and handle and read it. It’s yours.

A Call for Virtuous Video Games

Justin & Ersun Leave a comment

I am not a fan of video games.

Mindlessly falling away into a realm of flashing lights and sounds of illusion is often a means to mental decay. Modern video games have become more concrete and closely parallel to society. People blast away at the avatars of others with artificial guns, peppering virtual bodies with imaginary bullets. The sights and sounds are brought to life before our eyes and the lack of abstraction takes us to a place we can perceive, without much thought, as reality. While this is often the basis for arguments against violent video games, I am not trying to debate against the content of these games, simply the premise and existence for them. At their core, they lack ingenuity. They are largely based off of war, sports, or racing, and while we typically may not  have access to the full extent of these activities in real life, the fact that these games are simply reflections of this reality does not aide in the mental development of players.

Video games need to be more intuitive, leaving more to the imagination and less to graphics. While technology becomes increasingly easier to use and manipulate, a higher creativity is required for furthering greater development. With fresh and innovative ideas, we can form technology as not only as a wondrous tool to eliminate grueling and grinding work (such as mindless data entry, etc) but a refreshing toy that teaches us how to think and learn.

We need technology to better our minds, not help them. VectorPark.com is a beautiful example of what improved technology can create. It breaks the mold for what video games have popularly become. It defines something new and strange, something that makes us think and learn, like children, developing a greater plasticity in which we can continue to learn and figure out the unknown. There is a small niche of these games in existence and they revolve around a philosophy of thought and intuition, rather than a dexterity of control. It challenges the mind by pushing the player into a flow state. If we, as a society, can learn to embrace the unique, the strange, and the challenging, we could develop a whole new line of video games and draw in a more intellectual audience that benefits society, rather than detract from it.

So start by playing Feed The Head, both for your intellectual and visual enjoyment. This game, like any form of art, holds the potential to inspire you.

Cool Development

NicoleNg Leave a comment

In light of a recent conversation of being “cool,” a good friend of mine and I defined a person possessing this ubiquitous adjective as one less related to the Regina George type, and more toward the well versed, off-beat, passionate end of the spectrum. A person unafraid to explore unknown territory in both themselves and in subject matter, and confident to show their knowledge, or lack thereof, with the world.

Alas, the mid-year resolution to become “cooler” incepted.

These are a few pictures I took a year and a half ago for my Ann Arbor street style blog, Wolverine Wear Daily. Here’s to giving the portfolio another go, pursuing underdeveloped passions, and being cooler.

Painting Spoiler Alert!!

Sarah Ogar Leave a comment

The other day in my art history class, we had just moved past the French Realist movement and were centering in on the beginnings of impressionism.

For the last fifteen minutes of class, we were examining this painting:

It looked pretty nice to me.  Like a post card or the book cover to a Victorian rags-to-riches story.  What it communicated to me was something along these lines, “Oh, look at these wonderful hats!  Fluff, fluff, fluff!  I wonder what’s on The Bachelor tonight.  I hope that slut from Reno goes home.  Ay me!”

However, after fifteen minutes of lecture, I was told that such was not the case.

Instead, what this painting is actually communicating, is a commodified young girl who is susceptible to the penetrating male gaze of capitalist France.

What do FEATHERS have to do with the male gaze??!
What do FEATHERS have to do with the male gaze??!

In literary criticism, examining a piece of literature without any historical context, author’s biographic information, or ideology is part of New Criticism.  New Critics focus on works of poetry and prose as self-contained entities with meaning in themselves.

All of this commodification talk got me thinking… does a painting have inherent meaning?   If we don’t know the painter’s original intent, how do assess what the meaning is in the first place?

While I was sitting there, trying to take notes, all I could think to myself was, “I still think the colors and textures are pretty.  And that this woman is probably nice and sends money to her mom every weekend.”

I was also thinking that I needed some chocolate or something to cheer me up, because Marxism (along with many other -isms) often sucks the positive emotions out of my life like an ideological dementor.

Nikky Finney: Living in the Folds of Poetry

Erika Bell Leave a comment

Sitting down for my first poetry reading, I was overcome with nerves. Shifting in my seat, switching my legs back and forth, I began to realize that I wasn’t completely sure of what kind of audience member I was supposed to be at a poetry reading. At basketball games, I’m the obnoxious, overtly analytic member, and at plays I become the characters, I’m lost in the story, I sincerely don’t know who I am. So going into my first live poetry reading at the UMMA of Nikky Finney’s work, I was a little apprehensive of how I was going to react. What if she would look out into the audience and see my face mixed with unexpected, unrecognizable emotion, and I could ruin everything for her!

Luckily, what occurs in my mind is an overdramatized, yet very entertaining conglomeration of thoughts. As Finney was given an introduction gratifying her creative, opinionated, and humbled personality, I began to warm up to the reading. This was a real person who just happened to have written some incredible award-winning works, no big deal. Nonetheless, Finney began her readings, conversationally opening up about her moments of intrigue, and feelings of repression and progression, that brought her to relinquish her thoughts into words.

Most of her writing was so experiential. An interaction with a woman looking her in the eye telling her that “she writes like she’s never been hit before”, an affectionate love for her Uncle Freddie’s astrological beliefs, the connection to the mother and baby penguins after a viewing of March of the Penguins at the cinema, all became experiences transformed into poems about two women understanding each other’s journeys, developing an appreciation for the sheer luck of life, being the nurture that feeds nutrients to someone you care for.

By this point I was floating from my chair, no longer was I flipping rigidly from side-to-side, I was hanging on to every word Finney was saying hoping to absorb who she is as a writer and a poet, so I could revitalize who I was in return.

The poems read by Nikky Finney were complex, historical in their own right, and thought-provoking. I recommend picking up one of her collections this upcoming break and really look to take in the feelings brought on by each one, you might even float away like I did.