Art & Authenticy

     Music has evolved over time into arguably the center of our culture today. You can’t go anywhere without hearing music in its most predominant form, a song, or a rare form, just someone tapping a rhythm with there feet. The seventies embody huge change in mainstream and underground music.

     This I knew before this exhibit and I must say I found it very interesting but not all too informative. I have a decent knowledge of music but I felt that there was no catch or spark here. It was nice picking out pictures of bands I knew and able to listen to older music, but none of this made this exhibit different.

    All in all it wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but it isn’t something I will remember forever also.  I just didn’t feel that it was anything special, or worth going to see for the sole purpose of seeing it.

     I have never been a poetry advocate so I must admit I did not have very high hopes for Joseph O’Connor. Especially after I heard his very heavy accent and my struggling to understand him. However as I adapted to listening to him I realized the importance of the poem being presented as it was.

     I came to realize that when the poet reads his own poem it is a very different experience. You can really feel the meaning behind it, and how original it truly is. What contributed to this was his accent, it made the poem seem different, even though it is the same no matter who the speaker. It seemed more alive, and more exotic. I must applaud Joseph O’Connor because he had the most daunting task to impress me that anyone at these events has had so far. He showed me that even though I have never enjoyed poetry before, that maybe I just wasn’t hearing it right.

I walked into the International Center of photography to many photos. However this is the first time I as presented with so many pictures yet I had to look one at a time. Every single one had its own authenticity, its own story, and its own aura.

     The Belt, Step 1 to 9 caught my attention the most. As I first looked at it I saw a rather heavy-set woman, however upon further research of the other pictures or steps, it is a woman hiding many layers of fabric. This was very powerful to me in a few ways, that people will get by sometimes by any means necessary; also because it shows that you can show the world whatever face you want but reality can be so drastically different. It’s amazing how extremely cosmetic things can look so very genuine. You choose how the world sees you.

Uncommon to the other events that I have attended so far I found FELA captivating. From the second I walked into the Eugene O’Neil Theater the air changed mostly because of the music. The mood could not have been set better if it was not longer a show but reality.

     The thing that caught my attention throughout this show was that the audience never lost interest, and that was in part because of the interest in the show, and also because of Sahr Ngaujah. From the beginning he got the audience involved and he never looked back, never lost them. I found this show to be both entertaining and informative.

     What impressed me the most however was that despite all the dread of yet another even, it would have been a great challenge to find a person who regretted attending. Even Brantley would agree, fantastic performance.

Danzy Senna took a giant step when she wrote Where Did You Sleep Last night. She put forth all of her family’s issues in a hope that others would relate. I assume she didn’t have to hope because unfortunately what she experienced in her life is not all that uncommon. I must say I have tremendous respect for her because it is never easy to speak of personal struggles, and in my opinion, especially ones you didn’t create but were handed.
I felt that Danzy had much to offer to a great variety of people depending on how you could relate to her writing. I almost felt, as fellow students questioned her, that by the demeanor of the person asking the question you could tell who has something in their life to relate to her writing. To me that portrays a very powerful subject that was written and presented very well, able to connect with the audience where you can almost feel there reactions.
What I enjoyed most about this reading was that there was a sense of resolution. Even though what happened in the past can never be altered for Danzy she has a sense of resolution no matter how late it came. This is what gives her story its flavor that something so powerful and sad can end up okay.

In the grand scheme of life, Feminism is a fairly new concept. My first impression as I walked into the museum was that this was going to be another “girls can do anything guys can do” theme. I was both right and wrong.” As always and need be for Feminism that does need to be the theme but the way that it was gone about was very abstract, at least some of them.
The movie of the woman doing physical labor with boxes gave me that, “well this isn’t anything new”, feeling. In all honesty its not that woman can’t do everything men can, but if you took a very heavy box, many more men would be able to pick it up than women, its just how were born. So I was quite unimpressed by my first impression.
However as I went on the movie of the girl dropping signs that read, “There are no happy ending.” At first I was thinking, well now that’s just untrue, sometimes there are, and sometimes there not. I didn’t get the meaning, and after reading the description I understood more that everything isn’t always about happy endings, and a lot of the time this applies to women. I found this to be a nice change in how Feminism was represented.

I must admit, I was dreading attending an opera, it has been something I have never aspired to do. In fact, it is something I have sort of avoided; it held no appeal to me. Unfortunately based on this experience I was not proved wrong. Count and Rosalina triumphed over all of Bartolos schemes, love at first sight, and the whole happily ever after theme was so very mundane and expected.
However the entire experience was not in vein, I did find much humor in the performance. I was also very impressed with the skill level, to sing and act as these talented performers did, is incredibly tantalizing. Also not to be cliché but it was just a nice experience, not everyone has an opportunity to go to an opera, and I was given one. Even though I may not have enjoyed it, it most certainly was not a waste. I can say that I went to see The Barber of Seville, and I can forever share my experience with others, whether it was a good or bad experience, as I am doing right now.

I huge fan of photography, I loved coming to the ICP to take a look at some pictures.
It was interesting for me to see the wide range of photography out there – from pictures bigger than me in size, taken from another room, to blurry shots, with a bit of a buzz to them, to collages put together to harmonize.

The picture that I enjoyed the most was the one with the “tears” (which were actually condoms). To this day I am not certain as to what I loved about the photo, but I couldn’t help but be drawn to it, and I actually walked back to stare at it a few times.

A favorite of many were the pictures of African women in the beginning of the exhibition. I disagree. I saw nothing good about the pictures, aside from maybe composition. The viewer’s eye was simply fooled by all the vibrant colors. The colors blinded everyone into thinking there was something special about the photo. There wasnt.

Another set of pictures that I really liked was the collection of Shanghai photos, put together to explain the life in the city. It was shoking to see the conditions that people live in. Some families have a kitched, living room, bedroom, and convenience store all in one box-like room. To see what life is really like for some people, in a country that is deemed to be prosperous was really eye-opening.

Overall, I must say that through this exhibit I understood that there arent just two types of photography – portrait and landscape. There is photography that extends into everything, and everything can become art (like the photos of women wearing animal organs showed). Presented in the exhibition were many ideas, concepts, beliefs. Photography was portrayed as a medium of expressing oneself in more than just a creative way.

Oh, and I do not agree that the central theme tying all pictures in was “fashion;” I think a better connection should have been culture, as seen through the eyes of each particular individual.

Looking at Danzy Senna, I would have never been able to tell that she is half-black.  And unless I read her story, I would have never believed anyone who told me so.  It was striking how beautiful she was.  But how nothing about her gave away the part of her that she considered her race to be.  After all, she did think of herself as African-American, rather than white.

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The extent to which this Broadway musical was pushed was one that I didnt think possible.

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