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Some things are best viewed exactly as we see them, if only altered or in different contexts. Some things are presented to their advantage when viewed from very close up, revealing details invisible to the human eye. Other things are perfectly visible at an ordinary scale, but do not reveal comprehensive shapes and forms until they are looked upon from afar. As such, aerial photography is an excellent means with which to discover things hidden in plain sight. A portion of archaeological surveying, for instance, is done this way. Pull back far enough, and entire patterns begin to emerge. Lines and curves and networks, etched onto the landscape. It’s urban as well as rural, too: How are cities planned? How were the roads placed?

It does a funny thing, perspective. On one hand, the great distance between the viewer and the viewed pushes very thoroughly three-dimensional things flat, simplifying them into shapes and textures where not even shadows offer any hint of their height. On the other hand, there is an added dimension in the form of mountains and crevices and significant elevation differences, marked by light and shadow. The cloudscape, perhaps more significantly, overlays land and water below, thoroughly three-dimensional, projecting shadows of their own. And these things, reflectivity, luminosity, color— these depend on the nature of the material below, be it water or snow, forest or manmade sprawl, grassland or bare sand.

This photographer’s set of aerials demonstrates a familiarity with the subject in that his photographs are not just the bony spines of a mountain range in an otherwise flat brown desert, not just a strip of river cutting through a greenish patchwork of agricultural fields. River systems fan their delicate latticework over indeterminate washes of soccer bets of the day color, spines of textured cloud emerge from a hazy floor, and the earth itself is aged, weathered, puckered and scarred. Elephant-hide. If minerals stain the soil in only a particular swath, how would you know, but to view it from above? If the tops of mountains emerge from a smooth blanket of cloud, cut off from their bases, who would see?

This one is a particular favorite of mine. The patchwork squares of development stretch away into the background, hazy bluish squares of green and yellow and rust, but they come to an abrupt halt at a ragged border partway down the frame, dark and irregular before it falls away to nondescript brown desert. The juxtaposition is stark and arresting, the scale of the geography expansive.

I, for one, am always delighted when I’m able to secure a window seat (on any sort of public transportation, but mainly on flights).  If you have a choice of seating, consider:

1. the flight route, the direction you’re travelling, and how you’ll be approaching interesting landforms or cities
2. the time of day- where’s the sun? (how strong is the light? will there be strong glare?)

Even a drab sea of uniform clouds can be transformed with the correct application of light. Turn off the film for a moment, lay off the solitaire, and opt for the window instead.

Let’s talk a little about the death of classical music. Because nothing pushes my buttons more than to suggest that classical music is dead. It’s my humble opinion that “classical” music has just adapted a new name, place, and time. It’s just as relevant as Adele, and just as emotionally potent.

Now I use air quotes around the word “classical” because it’s such a misnomer. True Classical Music, with a capital C, refers to the music produced exclusively in the time period from about 1750-1820. It’s when people like Mozart and Haydn were active. Now, I love me a little Mozart as much as the next guy, but that music is old. It’s great, but it’s very, very old. We live in a modern day society, right? And there are still some orchestras around playing this “classical” music? So where are our Mozarts and Haydns? Where are the people producing music that speaks to us as a modern generation? And the answer…well it requires a little history lesson.

Near the beginning of the Twentieth Century, composers started to get a little ambitious. They were fed up with the old style and how music followed exact patterns, so they started to push the boundaries of music more and more. This meant a lot of things (levels of complexity in the music started to pick up, composers started doing some weird things) but suffice to say, listeners’ reactions were all across the charts. Some people cheered on this new music, others rioted at the premieres (See: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring). Music really started to push some buttons, go farther and father out, and the audience started to deplete a bit.

All the while, this crazy thing called “jazz” started popping up.

And by the 1950s, we’ve got jazz and folk music and r&b and full on rock and roll. All of these genres outside of classical music. We have the creation of what is now referred to as “”pop music.” Because of a lot of factors, audiences grew to like this music in much greater numbers than the “classical” composers of the time. This created a bit of tension between these two groups. And you can still feel that tension now. Fans of “classical” music are quick to point out that their music is much more intelligent and high-class. Fans of pop music criticize classical music as being lofty, boring, and much too stuck up.

Anyway, this is a huge oversimplification that sets the scene for where classical music went to. A bunch of young kids were raised on pop music AND classical music. They grew up loving the Beatles just as much as Beethoven. And they eventually went to school for music, but wanted to breech this barrier that separated the music they loved. A whole group of composers wanted to create music that wasn’t just “classical,” but was rather true to all the music that they enjoyed.

The answer to this in the 60s and 70s was a movement called minimalism. This music favored repetitive structures, a unifying process to create a piece, and mixed instrumentation (that is, whoever the composers could find to play their music). The sound owed a lot to rock music, african music, and eastern thought. The idea was that you could experience music in a very different time structure―something that hinted at a much more primal and basic human level. Repetition was a natural human sensation that could be exploited through music. A great example of this aesthetic is Steve Reich:

Or Phillip Glass:

Personally, I find a lot of beauty in this music. It’s incredibly simple, but really quite striking.

But how about people that are even younger than that? Members of the new generation? Well, let’s start with one of the most well-known groups, the Bang-on-a-Can All Stars. This is a New-York based group that pioneered the idea of a classical “band.” They have a set instrumentation and tour with new music being produced by composers and artists that want to collaborate. Here is a piece by a Bang-on-a-Can composer and professor of composition at The Yale School of Music, David Lang-

Notice the beat-based structure that sounds a lot closer to prog rock than it does Beethoven. And yet, David Lang is a classically trained composer, one that has studied all the greats. He is trying to write music that he wants to hear, regardless of what kind of genre it falls under.

Todd Reynolds is another name I’ll throw out as well. Reynolds is a composer and a violinist also out of New York. He writes in a way very similar to David Lang, which is to say he ignores boundaries of genre and just writes what he wants to hear.

It’s also worth noting the artists that aren’t considered to be composers in the classical tradition. This means people and groups like Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Bjork, and the Dirty Projectors. These folks all owe a lot to this weird classical tradition, and, I would argue, are some of the great composers of our time. Songs like The Age of Adz, by Sufjan Stevens are just great demonstrators of this.

Besides the obvious instrumentation that owes itself to the classical realm, Stevens’ whole aesthetic is informed by the shifting timbres, experimentation, and the violent energy that modern classical music has.

To mention these artists and not mention their backup groups would quite a travesty. These artists, like Sufjan, often enlist help from musicians who are also active in the classical community. See Colin Stetson or yMusic as great examples. Stetson has toured and recorded with Arcade Fire, Tom Waits, TV on the Radio, Yeasayer, and a whole host of other “non-classical” groups. But he also operates his own solo efforts, which are incredibly well thought out and simply amazing to listen to. They are certainly within an experimental classical tradition:

He uses his instrument (bass saxophone) to its full potential, exploiting it to generate all sorts of sounds that you wouldn’t think could come from a bass sax. This is a huge scores aspect of the modern classical aesthetic―experimentation with generating new and interesting sounds from instruments that simply weren’t made to do such things.

Along the same lines, yMusic is a group of musicians who have toured and recorded with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, The National, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, Bjork, and lots of other awesome acts as well. Here they are performing with Shara Worden (yet another one of these genre bending artists who are just CRAZY GOOD)

yMusic was founded with the idea of overlapping the pop and classical worlds, an endeavor sometimes referred to as “indie-classical” or “post-classical.” I just see it as great music played by great musicians.

So. Classical music. Dead? Not at all. The musicians and composers trained to be “classical” have just created a new world in music where genre doesn’t exist. You can find these academically trained composers writing just about anything these days, from indie rock to orchestral concert music. Good music is good music, regardless of what people call it. Classical music never died. It just became more relevant.

Melissa Hyde’s challenge to “cherchez la femme” defines 18^th Century views on femininity within the context of a hostile masculine world; even the colloquial implication of the phrase indicates the accusatory and suspicious dismissal of female influence that confined women artists like Vallayer-Coster, Labille-Guiard, and Vigée-Le Brun.  Hyde’s thesis makes the case that the problem with the modern lack of visibility of 18^th Century female artists does not rest in any shortage of women painters, but rather the limitations put in place by institutions like the Académie and the Salon that obstructed any significant advancement in the profession.  The combination of this intrinsic “culpability” of the female and the hindrances to professional acceptance are weighed on opposite sides of Elizabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun’s Madame Rousseau et sa fille, from the side of the painter and of the sitter.  Paradoxically, Vigée-Le Brun does the work of capturing the confines of a woman’s space while still being a successful, albeit scandalous, artist.

Gill Perry’s introduction to gender and art history charges the reader with not only assessing the constructs of femininity that can be gleaned from visual representations of women, but also contemporary definitions of masculinity.  An unintentional glimpse into this duality can be gained through the Louvre’s current mistranslation of Vigée-Le Brun’s work, which lists Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille as “Madame Rousseau and His Daughter.”  The emphasis on an external masculine possession is fitting, particularly if Perry’s aspect of the “role of gender in the physical or social environment” is considered.  Madame Rousseau inhabits the role of mother and, consequentially, dutiful wife.  Her daughter appears as more of a prop to support Madame Rousseau’s apparent fecundity; the little girl is

held up by the mother but is still forced toward the back of the painting, is mostly covered by shadow, and does not look toward the viewer.  Despite motherhood being more or less Madame Rousseau’s ‘profession,’ it is still a private space.  Vigée-Le Brun’s own self-portraits even supersede her actual career in place of motherhood; similar to Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille, her role as a mother is what defines her.

Presumably, Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille would have been commissioned by Madame Rousseau’s husband, the architect of the Palais de le Légion d’Honneur, Pierre Rousseau.  This normative representation of femininity twists the typical definition of the male “gaze” into a purely dominating form, sans overt sexuality.  Monsieur Rousseau’s commission would have given him a work that placed his wife in a respectable context and reminded the viewer of her position within the confines of the Rousseau family.  This subtle confining of the woman is reflective of the diverting of male concern over the power of female sexuality with references to maternity that Geraldine A. Johnson writes about in her essay on Marie de’ Medici.  Like Marie de’ Medici’s allusions to fertility and the Virgin Mary, Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille extirpates any “culpability” of the female sex with the placement of the daughter in what is essentially a portrait of Madame Rousseau.

Vigée-Le Brun’s position as the painter of this work, however, does not necessarily lend her to accusations of being complacent to this misogyny.  Her status as the chosen portraitist of Marie Antoinette would have gained her no ground with the revolutionaries or the conservatives who wished to ground women within the home.  Vigée-Le Brun may have been painting a portrait of a woman within the private sphere, but ultimately the fact remains that a female was the one being commissioned.

Now that the sun has decided to show its face in Ann Arbor again, State Street has been reanimated.  Everyone is back– all of the people eating ice cream on the sidewalk, the guy playing guitar on the corner, and my personal favorite, the man who sells books outside of Amer’s.  This man and I have a very complicated relationship.  I love his prices and the books he has on display (sometimes with the sign “Good Books $5, Bad Books $10), but I also hate him, because I cannot walk by that table without buying a book.  And just like that, another bit of my non-disposable income has been spent on A Prayer for Owen Meany.

The sidewalk bookseller makes me undeniably happy not just because he has great prices and reminds me of the best parts of Ann Arbor but also because he is like my local bookseller.  Yes, I go to and adore Dawn Treader, but the sidewalk bookseller is directly on my way to and from home, and he becomes a part of my day just as much as a trip to the grocery store or CVS.  That’s how reading should be.  Digesting good literature should be just as important as digesting a turkey sandwich.

I love local bookstores.  I do miss Borders, in all its corporate accessibility, but there is something so personal and beautiful about searching for and eventually finding the exact book you’re looking for.  There’s a history in a dog-eared paperback that you don’t get with a clean, crisp first edition.  I think there is a place on my bookshelf for both shiny books with their binding in tact as well as well-worn, well-read books that have passed from person to person.  And without that search for the book you want, you might never accidentally stumble upon another treasure.  You might find something you never knew you were looking for.

One thing I’ve noticed about the sidewalk bookseller, the cashier at Dawn Treader, and the workers at nearly every other local bookstore I’ve visited, is that they love books.  And they love to talk about books too.  That is what we lose by ordering from Amazon or going into Barnes and Noble.  Sure, you can go online and engage in discussion in some forum or on a fansite, but you won’t get that same spontaneous gut reaction that you get when the person ringing you up notices that you bought their favorite book and they can’t help but gush about it.

Locally-owned bookstores can be a vital part of a community.  I am obsessed with the website McSweeney’s, and they are often advertising readings and tours that take place exclusively in small, local bookstores.  By integrating a bookstore into the community, it becomes uniquely specific to that community’s needs and feel.  A bookstore you find in Ann Arbor won’t look the same as a bookstore you find in rural Pennsylvania won’t look the same as a bookstore you find in Southern California.  That’sjust the nature of book buying and selling.  The store’s tone and focus depends on the seller, the buyer, and their relationship with one another.

I understand why Amazon is taking over the world.  I do.  It’s convenient, it’s cheap, and you have pretty much anything you could ever want right at your fingertips.  But Amazon can never replace the physical bookstore.  At least not spiritually,emotionally, whatever you want to call it.  I know this is an argument that has been beaten to death a million times over.  If you search “Amazon vs bookstores” you get six million results.  But I think it is an important thing to think about.

When you go shopping for clothes, you want to try the clothes on, right?  That’s how I feel about shopping for books.  I want the one that feels right.  You probably have a certain brand of electronics you trust.  The same holds for books for me.  There are certain booksellers who I know I can turn to to find what I need, at a price that fits my needs, and I will enjoy my entireexperience when purchasing said book.  Bookstores are about books.  That is obvious.  But that’s not all.  Bookstores are about the experience.  I am convinced that having local bookstores inspires lifetime readers.  I know that I am a more avid reader because of the experiences I had picking out books at the local stores growing up.  When a child sees the passion that a group of people have for reading, they want to understand what that is about and hopefully become a part of it.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, thank you sidewalk bookseller, thank you Dawn Treader, thank you Olympia Books in Dowagiac, Michigan, for reminding me why I fell in love with books in the first place.