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Last weekend, I had the privilege to attend a Martha Graham performance, with dinner and a lecture beforehand all for $15.  I was more than willing to scrape fifteen dollars together to see a dance performance by a company founded by the Andy Warhol of dance, Martha Graham.  A household name that I have known for years and years, without really knowing about her contributions to her art.

This was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Having never been to a modern dance performance, and having little knowledge about modern dance in general, I wasn’t sure what to expect (although I had heard something about a large, gray sock…).

But the lecture prior to the performance shed a lot of light on one of the few artistic facets of modernism that piques my interest.

A few key things that I kept tucked away in my mind about Martha Graham was that she did not add male dancers to her company until several years after its inception.  This female-centricity was extremely foreign to me, compared to the historically male-dominated world of theater.

This was because many of her pieces are centered around female psychology and the female gaze (e.g. ‘Night Journey’ which I saw later that night).

Aesthetically, Martha Graham’s dancers place a heavy emphasis on gravity.

They do not always point their toes or convey a sense of lightness when they are in the air.  Instead, their limbs are contorted and broken to convey the weight of gravity and the human body.

“Huh,” I was thinking, “That doesn’t bother me.  Or does it?”  I’m not a pointed toe nazi.  But I wondered how this heaviness would effect me later on.

Musically, something I found very interested and was a little afraid to experience, was the fact that Martha Graham’s dancers always dance a little bit ahead of the music. Later on, I found that this out-of-sync movement did exactly what Martha Graham wanted it to do, it made me focus on the movement of the dancers.  It made me view them as moving entities unto themselves as opposed to visual expressions of beautifully composed music.

All throughout the dance professor’s lecture, she had everyone in attendance change their body position.  She told us to stand up, sit down, lie down.  Basically do anything we felt comfortable doing.  Some people did lie down on the floor and when the professor was done with her lectured and everyone had changed positions multiple times, she asked us about the experience.  I was amazed at how aware I became of my body and how it influenced the way my mind paid attention.  Some of the attendees who laid on the floor commented on how much easier it was to pay attention to the speaker when they were allowed to be comfortable.

Once the lecture was over, we watched a short clip of Martha Graham getting ready in her dressing room, circa 1959 for her role as Jacosta in ‘Night Journey’.

Martha Graham Getting Ready

When it came time for the actual performance, I was scared and excited.  I didn’t know what to expect, besides contorted bodies, non-synchronized movement, and simple costuming, from what I had seen in publicity photos.

What proceeded was an amazing tour de force that made me marvel at everything the human body is capable of.

What surprised me most was how beautiful the dancing was.   Given that the Martha Graham company is a modern dance company, I was expecting something wretched or confusing.To be honest, I was sure how excited I was to see people contort their bodies out of time to music.   And there were times when I was confused, but it made me more engaged in the process of creation.

In the past, when I have been to ballet performances, I have loved the frilly, glittery costumes….

I have loved being taken to a fantasy land….

And I have loved being swept away by the beauty of Tchaikovsky’s music and Marius Petipa’s choreography.

Martha Graham was not Marius Petipa.

And I didn’t spend the entire performance reveling in candy drop ecstasy.  In fact, most of the time I was uncomfortable and constantly asking questions.  I asked myself questions like, “Why don’t I move like this more in my every day life?  Why don’t I express myself with my whole body instead of just my facial muscles?”

There were some scenes that expressed such raw emotion, I wondered why no one had ever tapped into this emotion before.

The company performed several pieces by other choreographers (one of which, was my favorite of the night) but my favorite Martha Graham composition was definitely ‘Night Journey’ which is a psychological examination into the emotions of Jacosta after she realizes that she has slept with her son Oedipus.  On an average day, incest does not sound like a great premise of a story to me.

But when danced by the Martha Graham company, this story became something that illuminated my emotional interior.  Although I did not relate to the characters’ incestuous relationship, I found that I did relate to the emotions of Jacosta.  Who hasn’t regretted something they’ve done and wanted to kill every object related to that horrible memory?  And it was a journey.  At the start, Jacosta is enthralled with Oedipus…

But after finding out that she has just spent the night with her own son, Jacosta is dumbstruck and horrified.  She runs across the stage, staggering to catch herself from falling deeper into madness.  It gets pretty intense.

After the emotional and psychological confrontation of ‘Night Journey’, my other favorite component of the performance was three variations on Graham’s original ‘Lamentation’ piece (arguably her most famous piece).

The first variation was comprised of three male dancers and one female, all in nude skin-tight costumes that showcased their bodies and movement in ways that glittery tutus never would.

The second variation was a solo.  A woman in a black dress spent most of her time alternating between avoiding and reaching towards a banner of light from the side of the stage.  The attention was almost exclusively on her torso; on the way she arched her back away from the light and then strenuously crouched forward as if her soul couldn’t bear the weight of her shoulders any more.

Last in the ‘Lamentation Variations’ was a piece that used the entire company performed, dressed in street clothes.  Slowly the whole company crumbled to the floor until only one couple was standing and grasping on for dear life.

As a whole, I was very engrossed throughout the performance.  It was very awkward at times.  There were points where I didn’t know what to feel.

But it has left me thinking for days.  Why wasn’t I able to reciprocate the dancer’s visceral performance with a more intuitive response?  Is it because I have become so out of tune to instincts, so bent into shape by society’s emotional postures, and so sterilized by logic, that there are depths beneath my surface, that even I am unfamiliar with?

Lastly, I loved learning some biographical information about Martha Graham (including her romance with Erick Hawkins) and look forward to any future Martha Graham performances that I get the chance to see.

This Monday I will be starting a Hip Hop Workshop with 10^th graders at Ben Carson high school in Detroit. We will be focusing our first session on the song, “Diamonds From Sierra Leone Remix” by Kanye West and Jay-Z. This is an adapted version of the original, “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” on Kanye’s sophomore album Late Registration. As a bonus track, the remix features Kanye’s career mentor, partner and closest friend Jay-Z, and serves as a testament to the continued success of their joint label, Roc-a-fella records. The song’s instrumental appears a third time on a mixtape by fellow Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, who adds his own perspective to the theme of Diamonds. All three versions are equally impressive (the joint Kanye/Jay-Z one may reign supreme), but are drastically different in tone and message.

Kanye’s original version revolves solely around his feud with Vibe, a magazine that rated his first album worse than Kanye felt was deserved. He uses the theme of Diamonds to relate to the famous hand sign of Roc-a-fella records, and uses this track practically as an autobiography. This song epitomizes why Kanye West is always the subject of much debate; his unrestrained ego is evident in every single line, but the diction is so well crafted, the flow so well delivered and the word play so intricate that it is impossible not to be a fan of this song. Yes, he’s a self-centered ass, but maybe it’s warranted.

On the remix, however, Kanye takes a much more laudable approach to the premise of the sample. He uses the first verse to explain his inner conflict between perpetuating a loved and enjoyable passion for buying expensive jewelry, and his knowledge that these jewels may conflict diamonds. These conflict, or blood diamonds, are being mined in many West African countries (including Sierra Leone) by men, women and children in war zones. Kanye’s insecurity about this issue candidly shines through his lyrics; it is an extremely critical and horrendous problem, and Kanye is struck with the knowledge he may be funding it. Interestingly, Jay-Z’s verse could not be more different. He adopts the same themes prevalent in Kanye’s original version, rapping about the continued vitality of his record label and his own career. This verse is famous for the lines, “I’m not a businessman/I’m a business, man!/Let me handle my business, damn.” With utter confidence, brilliance and swag, Jay-Z establishes himself as the forerunner of Hip Hop.

Finally, Lupe Fiasco chimes in on this beat, and continues Kanye’s insight into the subject of blood diamonds. He dedicates the entire track to the history and contemporary relevance to the diamond trade, and like Kanye, struggles with his role in the system. He too feels conflicted by the pressure of his culture and profession to flaunt expensive jewelry, even though he is cognizant of the ramifications of the trade. All three accounts merit a listen; while they vary in content they are similar in flow, lyricism and skill.

If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s when people dress up as characters, especially characters from video games. This may seem harmless. Until this happens.

Yeah.

Let’s face it. Video games are sexist. This may be because they cater to a group of adolescent boys who have not yet ventured completely into the world of the opposite sex and have based their knowledge of romance and women on what they learn from the media. And cosplay, at least in this form, only reinforces the sexism.

I have read many defenses of cosplay. It’s for fun. It means nothing. It’s an art form. Well, yes. Everything, in a way, is art, right? That, in no way, excuses and justifies blatant misogyny.

And don’t give me bullshit about these women are simply embracing themselves and their bodies and their sexy sides or some moronic excuse like that. If the woman in the above picture was obese, would she have received the overwhelming popularity that she has? Would she be celebrated as a woman simply celebrating her body? Women who feel the need to dress like this are adopting the sexist construct of beauty in order to feel valued.

The woman in that picture is Jessica Nigri, in case you were wondering/you wanted to Google more pics of her. She makes her own costumes and does this on her own time. But that doesn’t meant that the art form she is participating in deserves merit. Art has connotations of purity and an almost untouchable nobility but I beg to differ. This is art but at the same time, it’s disgusting.

And NO, I’m not slut-shaming. I’m not commenting on what she’s wearing and telling her not to wear it. I’m just begging people not to adhere to a fucked up notion of beauty.

-End rant-

Google Maps is a universal resource for finding restaurants and friends’ houses, for ensuring we can drive from Illinois to Colorado without somehow ending up in Connecticut. How many countries does Zimbabwe border? Where in the world is Hvolsvöllur? And, naturally, street view is the patron saint of identifying shady areas in unfamiliar cities. But outside of pure practical functionality, Google Maps also carries with it a great potential for other uses.

The thing about the street and satellite views is that they are, plain and simple, massive, nearly inexhaustible visual resources. Ninety-eight percent of the time, you will see nothing out of the ordinary. But every here and there are gems. While puttering around in street view, one comes upon single frames with colorful digital aberrations, misaligned shots. Outside a police station, the view is suddenly blocked by seagulls and one bird, right up in front of the lens, is carrying a giant log of food. I’ve begun curating screenshots of interesting things. It’s found art, of a sort.

Spotting low-flying airplanes from an aerial perspective provides another pastime— one was a plane so close I’d mistaken it for an airport icon; another could only be found by the shadow it cast on the ground. Planes and the like aren’t anything out of the oddslot tips ordinary, but unlike much of the everyday activity one expects to see captured, some things are strangely absent.

Street view, in fact, gave rise to MapCrunch, which drops users in street view in random global locations (which was subsequently crashed by an influx of traffic last year from a mostly fruitless game involving finding one’s way to airports from random, unmarked locations). It generates locations at which one would never think to look, and while the majority of images are perfectly mundane, the randomization allows people to turn up rows of dilapidated stonework houses, slopes of silvering foliage, cattle standing in the road.

These tools can provide hours of recreational exploration, transporting you to far-flung locales and hidden side streets, remote mountain roads and surprises smack dab in the middle of the busiest intersection. We’ve grown so used to using maps as utilitarian resources, practical and straightforward, that sometimes we forget that there is much more to be seen.

Update: Aaron Hobson has a haunting collection here.