Category: Uncategorized

The City of Angels has wings. It’s bright and clear rays create new marks on my skin; my face scratched by the salt of the sea.  As the sun wakes the earth and unveils cliffs and valleys naturally spotted with magenta, lime, and lemon, a new world is revealed.  Yes, changes by man are inconspicuous, and neighborhoods exhibit the expected heeled, bleached, glamorous reality of television.  But those who inhabit it show a way of life unbeknown to the deciduous breed that I’ve only known. Striving artists of multiple types show rigor and passion for their craft in bountiful numbers, only to hopefully become the cream.  Tension is slowly erased from my mind and instead is filled with sunlight. Strides turn to strolls and stress to smiles.  The Hills rise up and up and above your head and are polka dotted with residents burrowed in between them.  The lights at night shine like stars in a clear sky, creating constellations new even to the Greeks.

The City of Angels has wings, yes, but New Amsterdam breeds an unmatched animal. Its hills are paved with concrete and glass, its parks artificial, and its people never stationary.  The once pure waves that still exist in The City of Angels are littered here with bottles, over population, and sweat. Buildings block sunlight and fill the air with intensity.  With few areas of solace and escape, intensity reigns this world. It will thicken your skin, and make you feel overwhelmed and alone all at the same time. But it’s the destruction that makes you stronger.  Passion is in never lacking in a place that has transformed from The Gangs to The City.   Constantly pushed out of comfort and into the wild, you know it’s for the better.  Strife and stride keep you going, donned in black and ready for anything.

It’s Angels versus Amsterdam, the eternal battle.  There are no winners, just wanderers and explorers, trying to find their way home.  To which do you belong?

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

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.