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There is a quote by Harry Chapin that I wanted to share. He tells a story about his grandfather, who differentiates between good tired and bad tired. The point is that in order to be good tired, you do not necessarily need to be successful. You may fail, but if you fail at something you care about, something for which you have a passion, you can go to sleep that night happy. I think this is so powerful because we all spend an incredible amount of time on things we do not particularly care about- not because we want to, but because we think we have to. I hear so many of my fellow students profess their disinterest in their classes- about how little they connect to the subject matter or substance. In Harry Chapin’s mind, they are bad tired. Even if they get an A+ in the class, they go to sleep bad tired. Obviously we cannot all drop our required courses for interesting electives, but hopefully this quote can inspire an effort to increase the amount of time we spend on pursuing our own interests, and defying the idea that widespread definition of “success” is the only way to ensure thay when we do finally rest our heads at night, we are good tired.

“My grandfather was a painter. He died at age 88. He illustrated Robert Frost’s first two books of poetry. And he was looking at me and he said, “Harry, there’s two kinds of tired. There’s good tiredand there’s bad tired.”

He said, “Ironically enough, bad tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people’s battles, you lived other people’s days, other people’s agendas, other people’s dreams, and when it’s all over there was very little you in there. And when you hit the hay at night, somehow you toss and turn, you don’t settle easy.”

He said, “Good tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost. But you won’t even have to tell yourself, because you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days. And when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy, you sleep the sleep of the just, and you can say, “Take me away.”

He said, “Harry, all my life I’ve wanted to be a painter and I’ve painted. God, I would have loved to have been more successful, but I’ve painted, and I’ve painted, and I am good tired, and they can take me away.”

Now if there is a process in your and my lives in the insecurity that we have about a prior life or an afterlife, and God (I hope there is a god – if he does exist, he’s got a rather weird sense of humour however)…

But if there is a process that will allow us to live our days, that will allow us that degree of equanimity towards the end, looking at that black implacable wall of death to allow us that degree of peace, that degree of non-fear, I want in.”

—Harry Chapin

Good Tired

If you spend a godless amount of time on YouTube, you know the concept of tags. You make a video about something and tag other users at the end and those users make a similar video and tag others and so on. The most recent tag is the “Draw Your Life” tag where YouTubers are doing exactly that, drawing their life stories and making videos of it. Here’s the legendary Jenna Marbles with her video:

This is such a cool tag to me. It’s people who don’t generally use stereotypical art as their preferred medium of expression using stereotypical art as a medium of expression.

Explore. And possibly make your own?

The animated .gif, or simply GIF, has come a long way from its flashy pixelated beginnings of the early internet. Now used to illustrate concepts, used to register any and every manner of sentiment, lifted from every second of video as soon it hits the internet, it has proliferated, its use commonplace, normalized. Recently, a variation dubbed the cinemagraph has tentatively appeared. The movement in the image is usually very isolated and very small, leaving the remainder of the image still while the subject flutters or flickers or flows in part of it. The movement, moreover, is smoothly looped in a way that the movement seems seamless and continuous. Most of easily found cinemagraphs on the internet are the work of several photographers who developed the format and coined the subsequent term, but others are out there too.

One such is artist David Barreto, who recently created a series of photomanipulations entitled Woodhouses. Parts of houses— windows, doors— have been grafted into the bases and trunks of trees as if they belong there. What should look so very artificial instead looks natural, integrated, organic. The trees themselves are unremarkable, one of many in a wood, standing often in the half-light of predawn or dusk. At first glance, that is all there is to it. But then the windows’ fluorescent lights flicker, dim, and flicker again, casting cold rectangles out onto the still snow.

There is something about the scene that is very much reminiscent of the streetlight at night and the flashing neon sign of the corner shop, the 3am car alarm and the sudden quiet after it is shut off. A man’s muffled curse and the distant sound of a door slamming shut, and then the silence resumes, a thick blanketing silence that the darkness corroborates. The harsh light, greenish, or orangish, perhaps, cuts into it oddslot, revealing, intrusive, but nonetheless silent, wordless. And that is what Woodhouses embodies, it seems. The nature of the medium demands silence; it is an image, not a video. We are intruders looking into lit windows at night, and the abrupt light is an intruder upon the darkening winter landscape outside.

The isolated animation is crucial to the effect. Because the environment is static, its details remain important. They will not pass out of frame as they might in video. And yet some part of it slips the moment, the singular moment in which an ordinary photograph might be captured, and it moves. It catches us by surprise. We cannot be too complacent, too unobservant, because something happens. Time cannot travel too far, however, because then the motion circles back on itself, and we are again suspended in the moment, preserved.

On Friday, March 29 2013 while strolling down State Street, full of grilled cheese and veggies from Mark’s Carts, the commotion and bustle of the Work Gallery captured me. Low and behold, the perfect post-dinner snack for the mind’s eye lay before me in the form of the Xylem Release party.  Select writers were chosen to perform their pieces during this release, personal works that I only dare to scribe.

The most striking piece was a poem written by Seth B. Wolin. I do not know Seth B. Wolin. And yet, his piece spoke volumes to me. He spoke of the simultaneous individuality and anonymity of the masses, as well as the simultaneous cultural preservation and gentrification balance that most cannot seem to hit correctly. He spoke without excess drama and perfect smoothness.

Wolin explains his poem to be about a man he encountered in New York City, one that he would never meet again.  I truly respect the lack of narcissism in this piece, the ode to observation, and the understanding of the cultural struggle that is so prominent and often escapes those who are not overtly foreign.  He perfectly taps into the thought process I constantly experience on the subway in NYC, running into

strangers and wondering what their story is, and how they ended up here. The poem reads:

Figure on the Five Train
5’9” fresh-faced

transplant from Ukraine.
Where is your father?

Here, there is no province.
Only concrete asphalt red win
sky – starless, bounded monolith of

sky.

Not like home. And yet, neither
are you.

Short, precise, and powerful. Just the way I like em.
“Xylem Literary Magazine is an independent, student-run literary magazine at the University of Michigan that annually publishes original undergraduate student writing and art, including poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, artwork and photography. The journal exclusively features the creative work of University of Michigan undergraduates, and all aspects of the journal’s publicity, production, and publication are student-run.”