Category: ITF Posts

Video Playlist: Choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009)

[videogallery id=”playlist_pina”]

Video Playlist: Choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009)

Useful Links

Prof. Natov: “Memory makes the best artist.”

During our last class, Prof. Natov asked the class to freewrite in response to a quote and/or her prompt, a time when you were disturbed at work. After people shared their work, she asked “what details from other people’s stories do you remember?” The details that people remembered ranged from descriptions (cold metal contraption) to colors (red/yellow) and even direct quotes – all from quickly-written stories told to the class. Prof. Natov’s statement from that afternoon, “Memory makes the best artist,” draws attention to the impact made by including specific details. To your audience, these specific details allow them to “see” what you saw or “hear” what someone said to you a long time ago – some details add texture, literally (fuzzy, soft, hard, sharp) and metaphorically in that the story takes on new layers as the audience shifts from their own perspective to yours.

(Similarly, the Brooklyn-based comedian John Hodgeman says “Specificity is the soul of narrative” in pretty much every episode of his podcast “Judge John Hodgman.” His podcast consists of two people presenting their side of a mutual conflict – about everyday things like furniture choices, whether or not to buy riding lawn mowers, etc. – to John Hodgman and he issues a ruling about what they can do to solve their conflict. As the guests tell their side of the story, they are very vague and he always interrupts to say fondly but sternly “SPECIFICITY IS THE SOUL OF NARRATIVE” so he can better understand them. It is VERY FUNNY so click here to listen: Judge John Hodgman)

Because we’ll be writing a lot this semester about ourselves and our responses to works of art viewed this semester, I thought that I’d share two activities from the book Writing Analytically by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen (5th edition, 2009), which are called Notice and Focus and 10 on 1. The activities are easy to do (and remember) and hopefully they will help you with your work in the class.

Read the rest of this post for some brief descriptions of the activities as well as an embedded PDF of the relevant pages in Writing Analytically.

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Link round-up: scientific knowledge & the general public

Some links to articles that relate to the topics covered in the first day of class:

Slate in particular has several pieces related to scientific literacy and the problems facing both the general public and scientists:

 

Images Used for the Site & Scientific Literacy

Below are some excerpts from the descriptions of the original pictures that, depending on the eportfolio theme, show up as the site header and logo. I picked these images for their relatively simple compositions that wouldn’t compete with any text. For example, each work has a repeating single geometric shape (square, circle) and limited color palette, which creates the appearance of negative space when text is placed on it and therefore won’t be too busy for most screens.

When looking for pictures to use, I checked two places, Bing Homepage Gallery and NASA. Every day, each site showcases a high-res photograph of nature, science and tech, or architecture, and often makes the work available for download. I also like the descriptions used for the images – each site or space is very specific location, graphic, or with the case of NASA, taken with unusual equipment – meaning that most of the photos require some kind of explanation.

While these might simply be understood as a caption or description of what the pictures depict, it might be useful to think about these descriptions as an example of science journalism. What kind of scientific literacy is required for someone to understand these descriptions? Are these good examples of writing for a general audience? What could be improved? Read on to see the full-sized images and their descriptions!

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Paris is Burning, Social Explorer, and tracking changes to the neighborhood: 1990 vs. 2014

My previous post mentioned the documentary Paris is Burning, which filmed drag balls taking place at the Elk’s Lodge at 160 W. 129th Street. Here is a description of the Elk’s Lodge from NY Mag’s 2009 Summer Guide:

Imperial Lodge of Elks (160 W. 129th St.)
Home to the drag balls that evolved into the competing drag “houses” portrayed in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which was mostly filmed here. Balls were held late at night because the rent was cheaper and drag queens were safer than on Harlem streets, where black-nationalist militancy had cramped the quasi tolerance of gay culture common in the neighborhood in prior decades.

To track changes in the neighborhood, I used the address of Elk’s Lodge and created five maps using Social Explorer to track demographic changes in the neighborhood using census data. I specifically picked the categories of race, education, and housing valued at $100,000 because a) the population represented in Paris is Burning was largely minority and b) a working thesis that the neighborhood may have gentrified – specifically, an increase in the neighborhood population’s education levels and housing values. These maps are by no means comprehensive nor have I checked my methods. These maps are for demonstration purposes only! 

Anyways, here are my maps: the 1990 map is left and colored green and the 2014 map is on the right colored blue – move the slider to see the changes:

To learn how to use Social Explorer, check out this great Youtube tutorial made by fellow ITF, Andrew Lucchesi with his then-colleague Darren Kwong: Exploring Social Explorer: Interactive Maps and Data Visualization for the Classroom. You can use the Pro version of Social Explorer by accessing it through the Brooklyn College Library Website > Databases > Social Explorer > create account with your .edu email address. 

Thinking about the future of New York: Queer and minority culture

Above is the trailer for the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning (released August 1991) that introduced the world to New York’s drag ball culture taking place at the intersection of Black, Latino, gay, and trans cultures and against the backdrop of growing panic and awareness about the HIV/AIDS crisis. The film has since been criticized by a number of people in and outside of academia, and I’ve embedded two examples below: the seminal critique by bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, and the article “Paris is Burning: How Society’s Stratification Systems Make Drag Queens of Us All.”

How does Paris is Burning relate to the topic of inequality and its role in shaping the future of New York? In his book There Goes the Gayborhood, Amin Ghaziani analyzes changes in populations in seminal “gayborhoods” like the West Village in New York. While the Brooklyn College Library doesn’t have a copy of Ghaziani’s book, it is available to borrow from a number of other CUNY libraries. An excerpt from a review in The New Yorker:

Ghaziani argues that the rise of post-gay culture has introduced a new turmoil in gay neighborhoods: more gay men and women are leaving for suburbs and smaller cities, and more straight people are moving in. According to the “index of dissimilarity,” which demographers use to measure the spatial segregation of minority groups, census data show that both male and female same-sex households became “less segregated and less spatially isolated across the United States from 2000 to 2010,” Ghaziani writes. Same-sex couples reported living in ninety-three per cent of all counties in the United States in 2010, prompting Ghaziani to conclude that, “gays, in other words, really are everywhere.” Ghaziani doesn’t think that this has wiped gayborhoods off the map—hence the question mark in his book’s title. But he documents a transformation that mimics that of earlier immigrant enclaves, triggered largely, he says, by the acceptance of gay men and women in the mainstream.

As the review notes, Ghaziani’s book uses Chicago as his case study rather than San Francisco or New York. Perhaps your research could explore the topic of inequality in New York by looking at the data of queer populations in New York – looking at the historic “gayborhoods” – and looking for changes in income, queer populations, and/or minority populations using the online tool Social Explorer. What kind of impact does Ghaziani’s argument have on populations like the people documented in Paris is Burning? What kind of information does the census data reveal and what kinds of trends might the data predict? Have demographic and neighborhood changes mean that Paris is Burning couldn’t be filmed in New York’s future?

https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5381/2016/06/16101213/hooks_paris-is-burning.pdf

https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5381/2016/06/16101213/Schacht_Paris-is-Burning_2000.pdf