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A lot of my memories, especially early ones, are associated with wisps of senses—the warmth of the eggs we had incubated in my 3rd grade class, the enormity of the first Fourth of July fireworks I watched, the smell of cinnamon buns cooking in the oven on an unexpected snow day. A lot of the American road-trip memories that I keep with me are feelings of vastness, of simultaneous emptiness and freedom; somehow, I remember the Southwest roads the best. The slightly dusty, clear-skied landscape seemed to stretch on forever, not paying the slightest attention to our little Mitsubishi Galant crawling on its surface.

And if a crazy-looking hitchhiker with a Polaroid camera turned up on the side of such a road, we definitely would not have let him into the car. But of course, since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a horror film, the characters had to give him a lift. And of course, this leads them into a chain (ha!) of unexpected events.

I’d never seen the movie before the October 19th midnight showing, though it’s such an iconic film that I’d heard of it and the horror stories surrounding its filming process. Apparently Entertainment Weekly even ranked as the second scariest movie of all time, just after The Exorcist; and given my history with scary movies, it’s a mystery as to why I decided to go at all.

Then again, if EW had been at the midnight showing last Saturday, they would have retracted that ranking pretty quickly. The midnight showing was a testament to how the viewing experience could change the reading of a film drastically, for better or for worse. In a nearly filled room at the State Theater at midnight, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre read more like an unintentionally funny movie rather than a legitimately scary horror film. For me, it allowed me to distance myself from the film and make it less scary to digest, which I liked better. But I also know that some people were less than thrilled to watch it in such an environment. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great movie with genius pacing; the whole film details less than 24 hours and many scenes of just Sally running away screaming, yet somehow it still holds together. The creepy dinner scene at the end especially- the 27 consecutive hours of filming certainly paid off.

Maybe it was the time, maybe it was the audience, or maybe it was just that the ‘scary’ codes in the movie didn’t quite match up to 21st century standards—so many factors make up the viewing experience. There was a unique sense of community as well; the fact that all of us came out at midnight to see a classic horror film certainly added to this aspect. Personally, it didn’t detract from my appreciation of the film but made it more special. I’m looking forward to doing it again (Rock Horror Picture Show in a week- the Midnight Theater Experience, vol. 2!)

Greetings, arts ink world, it’s a real pleasure to be back here. My goal of blogging about music I currently enjoy is going to be made blissfully easy by a strong resurgence of excellently produced, intricately thought out and creative music in the past six months. Specifically, I will focus the next few blog posts on the burgeoning rise of the Chicago Hip Hop scene that, astonishingly, is spearheaded by a few 20-something year olds and exemplifies some of the most positive aspects of Hip Hop culture. I left off last academic year with a post about Milo & Otis, a soulful, hip-hop inspired duo, who mark the beginning of this new movement. To be clear, Chicago is no stranger to rising Hip Hop artists: Kanye, Common, Lupe, No I.D., Twista and Rhymefest all hail from the windy city. This recent surge marks a deviation from their impressive legacy because these artists form a collective– they are young, talented, and run in similar social circles. Milo & Otis released their stunning EP in 2011 (if this is unfamiliar to you google milo and otis the joy), and featured a collaboration with an emcee called Chance The Rapper. When Chance wrote and premiered on the track “Lift Up,” he was only eighteen years old.

I begin my exploration of the Chicago Hip Hop scene with Chance The Rapper because, although he is certainly not the pioneer of the group, he is presently at the forefront, arguably across the entire country, of Hip Hop. Chance began working with artists like Milo & Otis in high school, where he mostly learned and played soul and jazz music. He belonged to the same group of friends and musicians Kids These Days, a seven-member band (including rapper Vic Mensa, more on him to come) that blended rock, jazz and Hip Hop into their self-titled “Traphouse Rock” style. As Kids These Days was gaining popularity, Chance was turning his musical interests towards Hip Hop, influenced (as everyone is quick to mention) by Kanye West’s first album College Dropout. After being suspended from high school for ten days, Chance wrote and produced his first cohesive work: a mixtape called 10 Days. The mixtape put him on the radar of bigger names like Childish Gambino and Joey Bada$$, but it is Chance’s most recent effort that has every music blog and magazine gushing over the twenty year-old artist.

On April 30, 2013, Chance The Rapper dropped his second mixtape, Acid Rap; 13-tracks strong, it is unequivocally the most aesthetically pleasing, imaginative, expressive, relevant and original collection of tracks Hip Hop has seen in the past several months. (It is so phenomenal that, instead of overwhelming you with all my praise, I am going to touch on a few songs at the end of my next several blog posts, so that I extend my review throughout the weeks.) Hip Hop fanatics and skeptics alike should give Acid Rap a listen; Chance is a unique rapper in that he can be playful and silly– using his sharp and skillful wordplay to make jokes and spin out of control– and also solemnly reflective, sometimes on the very same track. His lyrics are not only substantive, they are also witty, include a wide variety of idioms, figurative language and impressive diction, and just sound good. I am so infatuated with Chance’s music because, among other reasons, it is such pretty rap; he translates his message without difficulty, but he does it in a way that channels his background in jazz and soul, setting him apart from the heavy-hitting Trap music rappers, known for their abrasive beats and overwhelming bases. Chance is markedly different, and the whole music scene is responding to him. He is so young to be so talented, and it is clear we can expect tremendous things in his future. I sometimes have to remind myself that he has yet to even produce a studio album, much less sign to a big record label. He’s still with the Save Money Militia, and he’s still gonna watch his bros.

If you haven’t gotten your hands on Acid Rap yet, go over to chanceraps.com to download it for free and peruse all things Chance.

Ever since I was little, I’ve been illogically frightened by the idea of space. I remember fixating on the spinning Universal Studios logo that preceded some of my childhood movies and feeling a terrified thrill at seeing what was possibly my first image of earth in space. The incredible smallness of human existence might have been at the core of my dread, but I mostly remember a kind of visual vertigo when I looked at the corners of the screen that the earth graphic didn’t fill. The background was black and studded with stars like the night sky, but unlike the night sky it was possible, deep and dangerous.

Since then I’ve only felt the same kind of visual vertigo when I’ve stood at the foot of great mountains, or looked down from great heights. I believe that the sensation has to do with how certain physical phenomena confrontationally and thoroughly confound perspective. When I first stood in the Court of the Patriarchs in Zion National Park and looked up at the mountains, I saw unachievable altitudes filled with rock, altitudes that in my Michigan hometown were nothing but unpunctuated flat sky above flat ground. When I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite, I saw from impossible altitudes the impossible depths of Yosemite Valley, depths that in my hometown were complacently filled with rock and sediment. Outer space is in many ways the ultimate mountain or valley, the ultimate confounding perspective, that sight that exists so far from any hometown, so lost to any scale.

When a movie takes place in space, often the entity of space itself is ignored in favor of character and action, and space functions as a black backdrop for the same kinds of explosions and fight scenes that might take place on earth. Even when the laws of space are obeyed (air locks, space suits, shuttles), space is a set of rules and not a visual, physical presence. I can’t help but see space movies as a kind of noir genre just because of the loneliness, the coldness and the infinity that space implies, a desolation that often penetrates the story (Moon, Alien, Prometheus, 2001: A Space Odyssey). But although movies have used space to evoke effective moods, no visual conception of space has ever confounded or stunned me quite like that first view of the Universal logo when I was five or six years old – until this October’s release of Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

When I saw the trailer for Gravity, now Cuarón’s first world-wide box office hit, I was drawn in by how directly it played to my fears and fascinations with space. Instead of a hodge-podge of scenes set to tense music, for a minute and thirty seconds the trailer showcases a clip of the most climactic scene in the movie – an astronaut, Sandra Bullock, is attached to the large protruding arm of a shuttle, 372 miles above the earth according to text on the screen. Suddenly, the shuttle is hit by debris (from a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite), and is sent spinning with devastating speed, rotating wildly with the cartoonish physics of a carnival ride. As the shuttle sheds pieces, the arm itself is knocked off of the shuttle and spins end over end, carrying Bullock away from the structure and into space. Amid her rhythmic gasping we hear a voice in her headset urging her to ‘detach’ – she fumbles, then releases herself and goes tumbling away into darkness, the camera perspective inside her helmet confirming both her terror and the truth of her report: ‘I see nothing.’ The trailer ended and I realized that somewhere between Bullock’s amplified gasps, I had stopped breathing.

The scene from the trailer is just as breath-taking in the actual movie, especially as the careful integration of 3-D technology works to place the viewer directly inside of Cuarón’s realization of space. Here, the earth is no pale blue dot. Our blue and white orb is vast but unreliable, as it alternately takes up the entire shot (the two astronauts float in the dizzying grey area of ‘in front of’ and ‘above’) half of the shot, (George Clooney’s Matt Kowalski remarks on the sunrise), and none of the shot (structures disintegrate against blackness, the astronauts struggle towards a distant space station). Cuarón captures the feeling of space using innovative motion-capture techniques, filming the actors in what I’ve only heard described as a giant mechanical cage. However claustrophobic filming must have been for Bullock and Clooney, the results are utterly breath-taking. Cuarón thoroughly transforms the flatly star-studded night sky into exactly that which astounded me conceptually before visual technology could really show it to me– a space with depth, motion, and possibility.

Nervous first time mission specialist Ryan Stone (Bullock) and cocky veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (Clooney), the sole survivors of the first barrage of debris, battle space by separating themselves from it with space suits, oxygen tanks, and damaged shuttles. Explosions are often the cheap currency of action movies, generally used as the cheerful and expected accompaniment to an ass-kicking hero (or heroes, see: the damage to New York City in The Avengers), with no follow up on the devastating damages they might incur. In Gravity this action movie rule is reversed. Every explosion, every destroyed piece of equipment, takes away more life-saving structure and brings the enemy, in the form of nothingness and death, a little closer. Debris hits our heroes at stunningly high speeds and from nauseating depths, once functional machinery disintegrates dizzyingly around the camera, and space itself is ever-moving, deep and dark.

Gravity is worth seeing for its stunning cinematography, but isn’t flawless. Although the actors inject their much-needed movie star charm, the characters are as flat as Cuarón’s space is deep. Kowalski is wisecracking and confident to a weary fault, smooth, simple, and without a personal detail or flaw. In contrast, Stone’s one personal detail, coaxed out by Kowalski, feels trite and almost unnecessary – her young daughter died, and ever since, it’s implied, her life has been in a state of suspension. This plot point is supposed to connect us to Stone’s humanity, to make us understand that she perhaps has been emotionally ‘floating in space’ for a long time, and to lend motivation to her otherwise primitive struggle for survival. But it feels tired, both because the past personal tragedy is a cheap device to introduce depth to a character, and because the script does a weak job connecting the tragedy to Stone’s struggle. As long as we’ve abstracted this far, why can’t fighting to survive be enough? Furthermore, the dialogue is surprisingly bad, especially considering Cuarón’s history of excellent scripts, and the score distracting as it tries to make up for the lack of sound (explosions don’t make noise in space) with pointed, directive swells. But Gravity only seems to fail when it tries to elaborate beyond truly excellent visual storytelling. As much as it has been criticized, its failings are small because what it does well – conceptualizing the movement, perspective and terror of outer space – is a good 85% of the movie.

See it. It’s no Life of Pi, where Ang Lee’s storytelling and visual effects were so beautifully integrated as to be poetic, but neither is it Avatar, where impressive visual effects were discounted heavily by a stale plot and script. It’s innovative, visually stunning, and, regardless of its flaws, unlike anything I’ve seen before.

For about five years of my life, before coming to college, I was training to become a professional ballet dancer. I would take technique classes and rehearse for hours on end. I would take pride in my bloody toes and sore muscles, because that meant I was dedicated. Teachers told me that I had “such great potential” and “the perfect ballet body.” A fellow dancer once said she loved the flexibility of my feet so much, that she wanted to “chop them off.” I’m still not sure if that was a joke.

Today, I consider myself a retired dancer, and until a conversation I had this past summer, I had been avoiding coming to terms with why I left that world. My seventeen-year-old coworker was explaining to me his plan to “make it” on Broadway. He asked me why I had “given up” my dream of dancing for a ballet company. I was completely taken aback. No one had explicitly asked me this before. It was a question that had been gnawing at the back of my mind for the past two years, though — one that I had repressed from the fear that I might deeply regret the decision I made to give up my “great potential.” But I answered with the truth: I hated the ballet world with its constant pressure to be perfect and its uncertainty and its dancers that would give you condescending glances if you were eating anything but a fruit or a vegetable. His response: “Yeah, you have to be tough to make it.”

Of course I didn’t kill his huge dreams, because they were important to him, and they were to me at his age. In fact, I probably spewed the same line which alluded to the notion that I was a special breed of invincible. But as I’ve grown older, and (hopefully) wiser, I have revised my interpretation of “tough” in that you need to be tough to understand that you can no longer deal with a community you have grown up in. You need to be tough to get the hell out of it.

Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely love ballet as an art form. The feeling I would get when I flew through the air in a grand jeté was incredible. Successfully balancing an arabesque until the music faded made me believe I could easily balance my life like that as well. It was the ballet world with which I quickly became frustrated. The competition that it bred was sickening to me both physically and mentally. When I moved from dancing with a small, local studio to training with a professional company, I immediately discerned that I was not welcome by many of my peers there. They would mock how I looked and danced in class and would send death glares my way whenever I completed multiple pirouettes. After four years there, I recognized that I felt like a stranger to myself and that I just didn’t want to feel miserable anymore.

I was reluctant to stop dancing, because I had the potential to succeed and a love of leaping. However, a daunting feeling developed within me during my senior year of high school, a feeling that I couldn’t return to that environment and the doubts that came with it. Looking back, I am able to see that along with this elegant ballerina dream and hidden within a teenage invincibility-complex, was the fear that I may not achieve my goals. I had dedicated my life to ballet; I thought that I had nothing else, that I would be no one if I didn’t “make it.” I had to leave, if not for the constant pain and eating disorders and mentally paralyzing envy of others, to learn that I was someone without my pointe shoes.

After this conversation I had with a seventeen-year-old who would have given John Lennon a run for his money in the dreamer department, I was able to analyze my own life and come to the understanding that I had not given up on my aspirations. I realized that artistic dreams do not have to be grandiose or full of hairspray, glittering eye makeup, and spotlights. They do not have to be absolute and unwavering — they can evolve and grow with you, never dying, but helping to shape the person you become. I do not regret my decision to enter the ballet world; it instilled a strong sense of discipline within me that I continue to apply to my everyday life. However, I also do not regret my decision to leave it, because I am so much happier now than I was five years ago.

My toes are happier too.

People have a lot to say about tattoos. They’re ugly, they’re trashy, they’re awesome, they’re addictive, and so on. Regardless of the critiques, tattoo art has rapidly become one of the most consumed and mass displayed art forms of the 21^st century.  Is body art considered art at all? If so it is certainly thought of on the lowbrow spectrum. However, things are changing. Where before you’d be lucky to get a job with a tattoo, it is now much more socially acceptable, and honestly, thank goodness. I’ve seen some of the most artistic amazing tattoos at concerts, coffee shops, and just surfing the web. Tattoos are an amazing form of self-expression and individuality. It’s also a great employment opportunity for so many talented artists. Art has become so easy to access; I can buy a Van Gough Starry Night exact replica poster online for $20. Artists are passionate and talented, but there’s not a whole lot of ways for them to make steady income in society these days. I personally have yet to get a tattoo, but I’m excited to make a choice about how I want to look and represent myself with color and art. Here are some incredible tattoos that I’ve found in my exploration.

The day I saw this one was the day I was sure I wanted to get a tattoo. The detail of the scene is just unbelievable, it looks like a place I’d want to go and it’s all just ink. Even skeptics really can’t deny how artistic this is.

What’s even better than tattoo art? Tattooed art. It’s incredible that someone could totally replicate Picasso’s Guernica in this way on something as small and round as an arm. An arm is nothing like a flat canvas, but the amazing attention to detail takes what could have been a disaster into something incredible.

This one is surprisingly one of my favorites. I used to think there was nothing worse than a tattoo of a girl, or any person for that matter. I just couldn’t see why anyone would want to get someone else’s face permanently tattooed on their body. That was how I felt until I saw this. I think it’s the combination of the fact that it’s on a girl’s arm instead of a guy’s and that it’s so extravagant that I fell in love with this tattoo.

As with any art, you like what you like and you don’t what you don’t, but an open mind about tattoos in this modern world can be really eye opening into a unique branch of art, culture, and creativity. I give major credit to all of the artists who created these and many other brilliant works of tattoo art.