{"id":2631,"date":"2012-10-30T11:28:10","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T15:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arts.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=2631"},"modified":"2012-10-30T11:28:10","modified_gmt":"2012-10-30T15:28:10","slug":"its-raining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2012\/10\/30\/its-raining\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s raining and cold outside (or: Brownie Brownie B-B-B-B-Brownie)"},"content":{"rendered":"
So a hurricane approached the east coast last night and I really have no concept of what that<\/a> means. I don’t know how I feel about that.\u00c2\u00a0I’ve been in Michigan my whole life and occasionally I’ve known how it feels to fear weather. I’ve known how it feels to be in a basement with a flashlight and a radio and I’ve known how to listen like my life is in danger. But it never was\u00c2\u00a0actually<\/em> in danger. Really, I’ve only rehearsed the idea. And so I don’t know what to think.<\/div>\n
I’ve seen the pictures from last night and they frighten me\u00c2\u00a0but they fascinate me. Seeing a place like New York, an infallible, imaginary\u00c2\u00a0city to me, fall victim to something as universal and equalizing as the weather, it’s scary. And it’s engrossing. And it’s confusing. But I feel scared for everyone out there and I feel like Michigan is a pretty great and safe place to be and it’s weird to know that just a bit farther east the world is different and that cold rain falling\u00c2\u00a0on their face in the morning is the least of their concerns. But I suppose that is always true, hurricane or not.<\/div>\n
All of this hurricane talk reminds me of Hurricane Katrina, for some reason. I distinctly remember standing in the remnants of the hurricane in\u00c2\u00a0front of my house in a small town in southeast Michigan and thinking how strange it is that this same storm was just destroying a part of the country and now it is politely raining and helping my flowers grow. It was a weird feeling, like being numb and knowing that something hurts, but not actually being able to feel that hurt.<\/div>\n
But Hurricane Katrina reminds me of songs. And specifically it reminds me of a composer who’s name is Ted Hearne and wrote a song cycle about the hurricane called Katrina Ballads<\/a> (You can stream the whole thing here<\/a>). He used a text entirely comprised\u00c2\u00a0of primary sources from the reaction around the event (Including George Bush’s famous, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” and Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”).<\/div>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n
It’s an incredible piece of music and theatre and it is a fantastic look into raw human reaction. Sometimes all we can do to make sense of things is just to say what’s on our mind. And hope it makes something clear.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So a hurricane approached the east coast last night and I really have no concept of what that means. I don’t know how I feel about that.\u00c2\u00a0I’ve been in Michigan my whole life and occasionally I’ve known how it feels to fear weather. I’ve known how it feels to be in a basement with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2631"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2641,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631\/revisions\/2641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}