Category: Uncategorized

This past week I discovered The Script and boy was I grateful for it. There is nothing that can make a crappy week better than a bunch of cute and talented Irish boys. However though they are aesthetically appealing, The Script produce some of the most heartfelt and lyrically intriguing music that I have heard in a while. One of my favorite songs by The Script has to be “Live Like We’re Dying.” Most of you have probably heard the Kris Allen version, but let me tell you, The Script’s version is so much better! The song is truly pop rock at it’s finest and has a great message to go along with it (think “Seasons of Love” from Rent). After listening to this song a half a dozen times, I began to think about my approach to each and every day. Maybe it was the lyrical repetition of the number of seconds within the day (86, 400 to be exact), but I felt as if I wasn’t living each and every day to it’s fullest. Thus, I began to make a list- a bucket list.

So here it is folks, a list of the five things I would like to do before I pass on out of this life (in no particular order):

1. Hail and ride a cab in New York City
2. Visit Egypt, sneak into one of the pyramids, and find the “Book of the Dead” a la “The Mummy.”
3. Go skydiving (I know it’s cliché, but it’s still pretty kickass)
4. Spend an evening karaoke-ing (I’m not quite sure if that’s a word) in a bar (a la 500 days of summer).
5. Go to the Superbowl (hopefully when the Patriots are playing-woot go PATS!)

I realize that there this endeavor is a bit morbid, but it’s still a great way to spend a study break/ a few minutes of free time. I definitely think it’s important for everyone to reevaluate and reflect every once in a while. Let me know what you think in the comments below and have a great week 🙂

Many powerful things are said without the use of words, just simple images. Every year, the National Science Foundations (NSF) hosts a contest titled the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge to celebrate the connection art creates between scientists and the general population to generate an understanding of scientific ideas.

There are five categories: photography, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media, and non-interactive media. Winners were selected based on the art’s visual impact, it’s communication of science, and the freshness of the entry.

Jellyfish Burger, pictured above was created by David Beck from Clarkson University and Jennifer Jacquet from the University of British Columbia,  tied for honorable mention in illustration.  It depicts future effects of over fishing –“as the numbers of larger fish dwindle and ocean temperatures rise, the sea becomes more and more ideal for the floating creatures,” Jacquet said.

If you want to see the other winners of this years contest, click here. There are some spectacular works of art,  including a 3.5 meter tall model of a lung.  Made out of zip ties.  I wonder how long that took.

Your friendly neighborhood anti-jellyfish burger blogger,

Jenny

Whoa… so this is not a painting.  It is a photograph of a model covered in body paint, posing against a painted set to make herself seem like she is part of a painting.  Isn’t this crazy?  I wonder if this type of thing was possible in the past.  The concept of trompe-l’oeil has existed for quite awhile, but have people previously thought to cover themselves in body paint in the goal of mimicking perfectly a painting?  Do mimes kind of count?

It makes me wonder, though– how much of what we see can actually be the truth?  How much of it is actually the truth and how much of it is the truth covered by layers of paint so that it is barely discernible?  Art, in a lot of ways, has that tendency– to portray truth in ways that make it seem so false and so empty.  From the prostitutes depicted in Picasso’s Mademoiselle d’Avignon to the photographs seen in National Geographic– this is all art depicting the “truth”, yet in such contrived ways that the truth becomes distorted, decontextualized, until we ourselves must struggle with grasping this notion of truth that the artist wants to convey.

Photography may seem like a strange example due to its explicit nature– it is what it is, no?  Photography, right after its inception, became a means of documentation; thus, of course it is truthful.  Yet, there are so many ways a photograph can be manipulated, especially in this day with all this technology, to reflect things that are not actually there, to eliminate elements that are unwanted.  And if this is true– if all the messages and information we deem to be “true” becomes so unrecognizable under all the layers of paint and manipulation, what do we do to make it more noticeable?  How do we train our eyes to catch all the falsities, to scrape away the various colors and forms to display it for what it truly is?  How do we get at the truth lying beneath all of the words and the art?

*shrugs*  Maybe we just have to be more meticulous, more searching.  We can’t just glance at a photograph, a painting, or an article and take it as it is.  It’s like with this photograph.  It looks like a shot of a painting.  But in fact it’s a photograph of an event that occurred in which a real person painted and placed herself into a set in order to give the illusion that the entire performance is a painting.  And because this photograph becomes decontextualized in the mere essence of it being a photograph, we the viewer see it to be a painting.  It’s only when we look more closely, when we read the caption that we realize it for what it is.  And it’s only then that we see the truth.

—–

Gabby Park is a triple concentrator in Communications, French, and History of Art.

These are my shoes. Today, perhaps after the fact of writing a Shakespeare paper into the dawn of the early morning, to the point that the chemical balance in my brain had fallen out of equilibrium, I got eerily close to deciding to wash my sneakers. Keds commandments tell me no, my Mom tells me yes, and my mind is ambivalent. Cleanliness isn’t my concern; I recall feeling irrationally yet utterly self conscious the first month — having them blaringly untarnished and the whites of them leering at me. Once immaculately and uniformly black, replete with a sense of emptiness, their eclectic earthly smears are now landing it somewhere between dinge and dank. It’d be washing away everything. The shoes have lifted and carried me everywhere in the past eleven months; the past eleven months when life has been jolted with a resemblance of a life well lived.

I never even meant to buy them; the kind sir I contacted about the job let me know I had been hired and I was to report to work the following morning. I needed black shoes. It was ten o’clock in the evening. I went to the virtually non-existent clothing department in the 24-hour grocery store.

My Keds were laced up pretty tightly the first weeks; it saw ten-hour shifts of a dozen happy unions – wedding cake being the first foreign contaminant it was acquainted with. The precariously tipped over wine glass in the bride’s hand as she danced with her betrothed dribbled champagne into the litter of petals on the wood floor and on to my shoes. These sneakers greeted my first room-mate, saw me through late nights of academic pursuits, escorted me to the nearest coffee vendor, ushered me to house parties, and waded me through streams of cheap beer leaked from kegs. They sat beneath me against the dewy grass during sunrise and while I read string theory on the hill; they forgave me when, during a lapse of poor judgment, I had opted for trying a new short-cut and had sunk them in an alarmingly viscous and inconspicuous pool of mud. They’ve run through rain puddles dashing water in cinematic glory; the only emission of sound save for the rainfall was the splashing of these sneakers against the concrete, each decibel cutting into the late-night as thunderous as each vein of lightning that shredded the sky. We stood at very front of the concerts we’d go to and they’d support the tips of my toes while deafening music pulsed through its fibers, sweat waxed to the floor. They’ve ran with me through the subway system in New York City, hopping over incompliant gates in disgusting weather. They kept their modest dignity when met with the loafers of urban bourgeois. We strode around cities. We spun the sky. On summer days, they flirted with the pavement but settled on the grass; even in times of mundanity, they’d comply with my desultory, absentminded ankle-flexing under tables. There’s something satisfying seeing their soles worn thin, knowing it’s partly due to getting lost in the most enriched and fascinating realms of ideas and potential enlightenment — glorious libraries and science museums. They’ve walked my head into a place I didn’t mind being and they’ve helped me wander my mind to living on my own in Ann Arbor.

We’ve stomped out potential forest fires and we’ve discovered glorious fields through muddy passageways. Each splatter of mud means something; every moment is a spot of dirt, collectively creating an idiosyncratic batch of eccentricities. I remember how they maneuvered me around the puddles and I remember emerging from a narrow path to the field and letting them rest on the table, to get off the ground for a bit.

We’ll be together, sockless and laces loose, to sit through exams next week. And we’ll be together finding our way back to couches inlaid in forests. We’ll be together until we can’t be together anymore.

The shoes seem mistakenly too emphasized for a single size eight Keds, but they’re hauntingly not. I ended up hand washing them tonight, and with each layer removed, I made room for another one.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Is graffiti an art or a nuance?

For this discourse, I’d like to focus on the illegal aspect of graffiti on public property.  Commissioned work is equally as beautiful, but I’m interested in opinions towards individual expressionism.

Graffiti entails a personal freedom separate from other artwork, due to its illegal rush.  Not speaking from personal experience, but being a participant in illegal activities such as jay-walking, riding your bike on the wrong side of the road, or driving barefoot (clearly my motor skills are limited by the law), I can empathize with the rush one gets from participation in illegal activities.

So what is the general consensus towards graffiti?

Is it a public indecency or a contribution to society?

Frankly, I’d side with the criminals out there, and say that the majority of their markings are beautiful.  Walking around the Ann Arbor area, you can see a wide array of graffiti on walls, signs, and electrical boxes.  Graffiti liberates the individual and the city.  Plain concrete was meant to be painted.  They scream for the attention.  It only seems natural to paint the world and make it as colorful as possible.

Have a great weekend!!

Sara majors in Art History and enjoys long walks.

There are many, vastly different opinions of what a person should be. How a respectable student should behave. What a responsible man must do. This recent writing exercise seemed fitting in lieu of my recent, emergency appendectomy, as well as, for fellow Lost fans, John Locke’s “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

Don’t be A Tomboy 

Or do anything daring at all—you’ll just get hurt. After all, you’re prone to it, to getting hurt. What with your condition and all. No, nothing even remotely daring. So before you do anything, and I mean anything: picture me. Would I approve? If you have even the slightest doubt, don’t do it. Don’t think twice. The answer is firm. The answer is “No.” No climbing of trees. No climbing of mountains. No shoes without proper arches (and they must always be clean). Take better care of your shoes. I don’t even know why I buy them for you. They’re always ruined. Don’t walk in the rain, stop walking in the rain. Your shoes will ruin and you’re really better off staying indoors, anyway. If you walk in the rain you’re likely to catch a cold. Or pneumonia. And don’t think you’re going dancing in those shoes, either. I don’t want you out dancing and drinking. You’ll get too tired; you’ll stay up too late. Your friends will forget about you and leave you behind. And worst of all—your shoes, they’ll scuff. A proper lady keeps her shoes clean. Don’t listen to music loudly. Eat your food slowly. Order a salad. At home, clear the table. Don’t tell your boyfriend, “I love you.” I know you don’t. When you break up, wait a while before finding another boyfriend. Not long enough and you’re trash. Too long, you’re a lesbian. Don’t tell me you’re a lesbian. Your reputation is only as clean as your shoes. You have too many male friends, which makes me suspect you’re a lesbian. You spend too much time with them. You sweat with them. You’re going to get hurt if you carry on like this, with your hiking, your camping. You can’t live out of a backpack. You can’t just gallivant about the wilderness. You can’t fight the elements. Listen: You’re going to get very hurt, or maybe you’re going to die. The mosquitoes are terrible out there. I’ll bet you contract West Nile. Your asthma’s getting worse, too. And for God’s sake: remember your blood condition. I know you’re not drinking enough water. I know you’re picking your scabs. That’s why you have so many scars—don’t you listen to your dermatologist at all? If you weren’t gallivanting about the wilderness all summer, wearing your hair short in that bandana like the lesbian you’re becoming, you wouldn’t have these hideous scars. Or this sunburn. Don’t you wear sunscreen? And how many times do I have to tell you to reapply it? You reapply sunscreen every hour. That’s every single hour, reapplying your sunscreen. That’s the appropriate amount. But you, you’re red. Don’t you know that this family has a history of skin cancer? And would you please just stop and think a minute, about your condition? Jesus Christ, your condition! Well, once you’ve gotten another boyfriend I’ll continue questioning your sexuality on a semi regular basis, but you better not be having sexual intercourse. Slow down. Don’t blow all of your money on train fare. And especially not on airfare. There’s a lot of risk involved with air travel. Don’t go where I can’t follow. Don’t walk so fast in those shoes. They’ll scuff.

Peace,
Molly

Molly Ann Blakowski majors in English and jumps in puddles.