Category — Site Authors

Link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQlvn-upmfk

How does music make you feel?

It’s hardly an easy–if even possible–question to answer. Still, we all listen to music. We each have different tastes for different voices, genres, styles—but have you ever noticed the way that individual music affects the individual? How that one split second in a song that you haven’t heard in years can bring you back to an event, an emotion? Many are deeply affected by the power of music, and in countless ways.

This revelation can’t be missed, even on these very streets. Performers that I have seen in the subways, in the parks, all attracted—or didn’t attract—an audience. The main audiences that I noticed were, surprisingly, children. More often than not, I noticed that many adults felt uncomfortable openly watching street performers—but children were an entirely different story. More often than not, I saw children staring in wonder at performers, as their parents looked the other way. One such example was the picture from the Delancey Street Station near the dorms. However, every once in a while, I lucked out and saw adults looking along with their kids—such as the picture of the mother and child at Union Square. Street performers aren’t the only avenue through which music calls out, though. Another example is the magic of the concert.

I myself have attended at least a dozen concerts in past years, but one of the first times that I really noticed the effect of music on the people around me was at my third Anberlin concert, this past October. Here, I noticed that even hours before the concert was to begin, there was an electrified feeling to the air–I was not the only one fidgeting frantically, awaiting a night of high energy and amazing music. Once in the concert hall, though, one was able to see the direst human response to music: all around me, people were moving as one, waving hands, pumping fists—no matter what it was, people were recognizing their own emotion, and reacting in turn as those around them did (and, amazingly, in response to only a few instruments and a singer).

One definition of music is “an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.” It’s truly astounding how just a simple organization of sound in time can evoke such a powerful response. There seems to be nothing else that brings people together to the extent that music does—or as universally.

Be it adults jumping in unison in crowded halls, or children leaning out of strollers and laps for a better glimpse of guitars and kazoos, the power of music is quite irrefutable. It is even supported by science: MRIs and other scans have proven that the brain not only becomes more active while listening to music, but its most emotion-related parts, such as the cingulated cortex, are incredibly active?

What does this tell us? Undeniably, whether we recognize it or not, we are all affected, by individuals and as a people, by the power of music.

What has music done for you?

Coming from a middle school of mainly Hispanic students, I was shocked by the heavy Asian culture at my new high school. There were names and foods and languages I had never really been exposed to before. One drink in particular, called “bubble tea,” was mentioned frequently among my classmates. I assumed it was some kind of carbonated tea beverage. The explanation they eventually gave me for this drink, “sweet tea with these gooey tapioca ball things,” did not appeal to me. One day, a few weeks into school, I ran into a girl in my environmental club on the bus. She invited me to get bubble tea with her and her sister and I accepted, just for the sake of meeting new people. When we got to the bubble tea shop, my friend ordered a plain milk bubble tea for me and I watched anxiously as the gooey tapioca was poured into my cup. I had always been a picky child and bubble tea was completely foreign to me. When I was handed my tea, my friend inserted a fat pink straw into my cup and I cautiously took a tiny sip. The tea tasted like sweet, milky Lipton, rather than the exotic flavor I had been expecting. However my next sip shot a slimy chunk of tapioca down my throat, causing me to choke. My friend giggled next to me, warning me not to drink so fast. When I finally got the tapioca in my mouth I almost gagged at the strange texture and lack of flavor. Though I lied to my friend that I enjoyed the bubble tea, I had absolutely no intention of ever trying it again. Now, years later, I am a big fan of bubble tea. I tried it again my sophomore year of high school and that time I loved it. However, the only place I will drink bubble tea is at a shop called TenRen’s, so I am still quite limited in my drinking of bubble tea.

The other day as I was on facebook–probably wasting time when I should have been doing homework– I noticed a picture my friend posted on her page. It was a picture of “arroz con dulce” and as the caption she wrote, “starting thanksgiving early =)”. She is Puerto Rican and I knew she ate Spanish food a lot, but I was unaware this was her traditional Thanksgiving dinner. When I think of an ideal Thanksgiving supper, I think of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberries, and apple pie. That is just the way I grew up and how I got to know Thanksgiving. Out of curiosity, I asked her if this was really what she had on Thanksgiving because I was simply unaware. She responded by saying yes and that this is a traditional Thanksgiving meal for many Spanish families. I don’t know if you would say I was ignorant for not knowing that there were different Thanksgiving meals for different cultures, but I was definitely surprised when I found that out. I know every culture has their own cultural foods, but I sort of thought that Thanksgiving was a national meal in which everyone ate turkey.

I was pretty amused by the whole idea of eating another Thanksgiving dinner. I tried picturing me and my family having that type of meal for Thanksgiving and it made me laugh…not because of the food itself, simply just because it is a completely different culture than the one I’m used to so anything else would feel weird and artificial to me. I actually love this cultural variety that we have in New York though. From house to house, there is uniqueness that we don’t get to see anywhere else, and being able to see these cultures and learn about them is rewarding in many ways.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/galleries/christmas/images/6.jpg

I love the holiday season.  My friends joke that it’s my namesake (deck the halls…), but from Thanksgiving to Christmas, everything’s just more cheerful.  Perhaps its because of all the family gatherings—and the huge feasts that come with them.

Starting with Thanksgiving, is when the family comes to my house, and the food is prepared by lunch and we eat endlessly until the night, play games (mahjong and cards), watch television, and just catch up.  There’s always the turkey that starts defrosting since the night before, garlic clam pasta, garlic bread, some sort of fish, Stouffer’s stuffing, baked potatoes and yams, and a little bowl of gravy.  Then there’s the stuff I make: the mashed potatoes and baked goods (brownies, pumpkin pie, pecan pie).  And the cranberry sauce from the can that I used to like when it retained the can-shape.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_m1jOFzcB9IU/SwLBGtqWkjI/AAAAAAAACIo/_88Y2f1k6IE/s1600/Cranberry+Sauce.jpg

But the greatest event is Christmas because it’s when everyone comes to New York City.  Thanksgiving is usually my grandma, relatives from Jersey, my second cousin’s family, and whoever happens to be in town.  Instead of Forest Hills (where my house is), we used to gather at my aunt’s loft at Greene Street.  This aunt used to fly in from Sweden with her husband and son, then there’s the uncle from New Jersey with his wife and three children, and the family from Australia.  Being the closest in proximity (a subway ride away), my family would always come early to help set up.  There would be vacuum packed fish from Sweden, along with loganberry jam made from scratch, nougat from Australia, and other foreign goodies.  The Jersey aunt would always make chocolate covered fruit and bring everyone gifts.  Meals would start off with appetizers and they alone made one full and usually included fried salt and pepper shrimp, shark fin soup, and other delicacies.  Then there’s always a break to relax before eating one’s own weight in food.  And there’s the drink that’s one of my favorite parts about the holidays: glögg, a sort of mulled wine with cloves and nutmeg.  Along with food is the endless number of family members I seem to have and meet, cousins, extended cousins, and then there’s the random professors that are lifelong friends of my grandmother.

Can be heated up and drunk as is or heated up with alcohol.

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That loft is now regrettably gone (it was a rent-controlled studio bought out by a new landlord), as are some of the most loving family members.  There’s the new apartment at which to celebrate, and all the old gatherings are some of my fondest memories.  And the holidays don’t really end there: there’s New Year’s and Chinese New Year’s and then birthdays and more.  So in a way, its always the holiday season, and there’s always something to be grateful for.

Over the years the issue of race has become one that has been best tiptoed around and when needed, swept under the rug. It’s a topic whose history is as unpleasant as any other possible conversation piece, with perhaps the exception of some heinous crime. It’s amazing then to consider that the newly opened Scottsboro Boys on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre attempts to tackle two birds with one stone as it recounts the alleged rapes and subsequent convictions of nine black teenage males on a train ride down to Memphis in search of work.

The fictional account would, as one might guess work best as a blockbuster Hollywood drama, a medium in which the emotions of all involved could be best captured; it is surprising however to consider that the harrowing tale was most recently adapted by writer David Thompson (‘Chicago’) as a musical in the form of a minstrel show, a traditionally offensive form of early American entertainment. Utilizing twelve main male actors, several of whom played multiple parts, the Susan Stroman (‘The Producers’) directed play relied entirely on the belief of the audience that the performance taking place onstage was in fact one that was taking place in the early half of the 20^th century. Employing utilitarian procedures as one might expect from a ‘minstrel show,’ perhaps the greatest achievement of the night was the display of the set, which consisted of seemingly little more than ten or eleven metal chairs. Once paired with sounds from the crew, and arranged by the show’s cast, the chairs transformed from a train, to a jail cell, to a courtroom and any other setting needed for the plot in between. As simple as it may seem, it could not have been easy for Beowulf Boritt to put together conceptually let alone concretely as displayed on stage. The barebones set also allowed for no intermissions, and a full focus on the events unraveling onstage.

The production itself left little to be desired as far as acting and singing were concerned. Each and every actor played their particular parts to the extent at which the script could allow them. In a show in which there were twelve main characters on stage nearly the entire time, it would seem a difficult task to have to choose those whose performance exceeded the rest. It wasn’t. Joshua Henry’s portrayal of Haywood Patterson, the rising ‘leader’ of the nine, was by and large much more in tune with his character than any other actor playing one of the ‘Boys.’ Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that Henry was featured several times in multiple songs; regardless, his portrayal of the angst and anguish that his character faced should have been the consistent emotion throughout the entire play, certainly not the exception. It is unfortunate then to consider Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon, the two actors that played Mr. Bones, and Mr. Tambo respectively.  Both played their parts superbly and were my two favorite actors in the play. Yet, it is their two roles, both essential to the minstrel theme that prevented the play from making any advances in emotional progress. They were both extremely comical, which in it of itself isn’t a bad thing, but when the seriousness of the storyline reserves little room for such humor, it’s easy to question the intended direction of the play.

If the play’s humor left any mixed feelings on the production, the nature of it being a musical only added to the confusion. The songs, while well performed seemed to come at points in the play in which the dialogue could no longer sustain its importance; considering the material that the collaborators had to work with, one would have hoped that it would have been the other way around: with the dialogue the focus, not the music.

Ultimately though, it comes back to the initial problem that the play’s genre presented. It certainly had its share of comedic moments, and well-done vocals, but what seemed to be lacking was the awareness of the gravity of the story that was being told. The writers though seemed to hit on one issue, if only circuitously, and that was poor treatment of the blacks both in and out of the minstrel shows, as evidenced by the repeated calls from the interlocutor to give “just one more cakewalk,” (a racially-charged dance) a request persistently denied. All in all, the show itself was enjoyable, but by the end, I could not help but notice an uncomfortable feeling in the pit in my stomach.

LINK–> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cm2Ny04h_Q

For my collage theme, I decided to do it on the city that doesn’t sleep, New York City. Personally, I am ALWAYS tired and that’s pretty much the reason I decided to do this topic. Most days going to school in the morning, I sleep on the train. Most days going home, I sleep on the train. Some days when I get home, I take a nap. I love sleep. You can almost say that my hobby is sleeping and I know I’m not the only one. I always see other people sleeping on trains, on buses, even on the street. You can walk through Madison Square Park right outside of school and see people laying in the grass sleeping or on benches sleeping. Everyone sleeps, obviously, but I want to capture the moments that don’t just happen between the hours 11pm-8am in our own cozy beds. I wanted to be able to capture the moments where people just happen to fall asleep, whether it be on the floor of a living room, or a bench in a park. I want to point out all the naps and rests that the city that “doesn’t sleep” has to offer. In New York City, people make “beds” out of whatever is available to them when they are tired.

In my collage, you will see various places where people sleep. You’ll see people laying in bed, sitting on a couch, sitting on a park bench, laying on the grass, sitting in a train, standing in a train, DRIVING, and then some people just snoozing on the floor. There isn’t a place where people don’t sleep. For example, my dad’s favorite place to sleep is on the toilet bowl…but I didn’t find it appropriate to include a picture of that for obvious reasons. And I know the reason that New York City is labeled as the city that never sleeps. There is always something going on in the city regardless of what time it is. I just thought it would be fun to take pictures of people who aren’t always part of that “middle of the night”, lively atmosphere…and I was right. It was both fun and funny. As creepy as it sounds, I really enjoyed taking picture of people sleeping. Sure, I would get an occasional weird look from people, but for the most part people didn’t even notice. It was funny being able to be right in front of someone’s face without them knowing and the humor in it helped me get it done.

I wasn’t sure the style in which I was going to do my collage at first. I knew I couldn’t do a video because a video of people sleeping would put everyone watching to sleep! But I also didn’t want to do the old fashioned cut and paste on to paper. I didn’t find any excitement in that…especially with what the topic of my project was. I ended up figuring out how to work iPhoto and used that to help me make my collage with music and all. I had control of everything and I am pleased with the way it came out.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF5E_JDwpos

The theme I chose for my collage is subway art. I meant to juxtapose the feeling one gets from seeing art that is placed there by the MTA in specific subway stations with a vision behind it, to the colder feeling one gets at the sight of the vandalization that is now considered a form of art. When I started going out with the intention to work on this project, I found that my original ideas were wrong. My ideas of “intentional” and “unintentional” art mixed together and I began to appreciate the two equally. I decided that I should switch my focus to try to show the viewer how these two forms of art are quite similar. This would be a little harder to pull off then my first goal: many of my graffiti pictures were taken by sticking my camera out of the window of a train cart in the tunnels and blindly taking pictures to review later and find the art there. These all naturally give a darker feeling than the usually cheery art the MTA provides. How could I  show that these two were the same when the look of my photos was inherently different?

I thought that a way to connect the two and get rid of this disjointed feeling could be to fade in and out of color. By this I mean that the organization of my video is as follows: first my series of MTA art photos which start in full color and fade into black and white, then my pedestrian art begins which starts in black and white and slowly comes back into color for the ending. I think that my choice of playing with the coloring narrows the distinction between the two forms.

The song I chose to put in the background is called She Moves She by Four Tet. I knew I would want something instrumental because words would likely grab the viewers attention away from the photos I wanted to show. But I still had a lot of trouble choosing the right song: I originally wanted to insert a Steve Reich piece which starts with a clarinet and adds 12 more pre-recorded clarinets that gradually build up because it sounded like something I would hear in a train station, but when I showed it to friends they found the piece annoying. I decided to go with something less repetitive and more disjointed and random- this “folktronica” piece I think captures more of the essence of what I wanted to play in the background, which is an exotic but simple piece that you’d think you’d never hear anywhere else.

I think my decision to make this collage a video was a successful one. I thought it would be another challenge to put the video together, since I am technologically challenged and still not used to Mac products. I edited and cropped the photos as I could first and then started to put the video together. Surprisingly, iMovie was easy to use and pretty self explanatory, I got the hang of it right away and there wasn’t much else to do once I placed in the photos I wanted and controlled the panning and time that each picture would take up because I thought the collage would have more power in simplicity.

New York City streets are decorated with countless cigarette butts, scraps of litter, and smoke spewing out of trucks and cars’ mufflers. I always contemplated how the world used to appear before cigarettes, paper, automobiles, and other human inventions were made. The world used to be bountiful in green landscapes, vibrantly colored flowers, and full of all kinds of animals. I chose this topic to display aspects of nature alone, untouched by humans, and transition to today’s world when humans leave behind traces of their existence. Many passersby in the city streets ignore the trash that is carelessly thrown onto the ground, as if the trash will disintegrate and will not be existent in the days that follow.

I decided to capture the beauty of nature as well as its counterparts, the humans’ traces left behind in nature, by taking photographs and recording videos to put into the collage. I used the audio from the videos to demonstrate the difference between the peaceful sounds of nature versus the raucous sounds that are human-made. By using photography, I was able to use my eyes to see what I found suitable to use as examples of untouched nature and of humans’ traces. If I were to cut out images from magazines or other forms of paper media, I would have very limited options to display what I thought would be a good comparison of the before and after of humans in nature. Creating an 8×11 inch page collage is extremely restrictive because I can only put a number of items and pictures on the page before running out of space. Using a video to display various pictures and using audio makes the project more realistic because you can both view and hear nature as well as the effects of humans on nature.

As great as creating a video for my collage is, a video is also limiting in the sense that you can only see and hear what it has to offer. Looking back on my project now, I can see that if I had created a paper collage instead, I could have incorporated pieces of nature as well as scraps of litter found on the streets; for the nature portion, I could have picked up leaves and pasted them on the page, as well as flowers or feathers found on the floor, and for the humans’ effects portion of the page I could have picked up cigarette butts and paper litter and cans to put on the page. Using actual objects found on the streets and parks of New York City emphasize the fact that we New Yorkers are the cause of all the trash laying around in the city, while using a video can be viewed almost anywhere and not personalize the fact that humans polluting the environment is an issue in our particular city. Adding in the audio presented many challenges for me since I had to extract them from the videos I recorded and insert them where I found suitable; I also had to make them transition well so they would not sound choppy and out of place.

Starting digitally presented me with a wide array of options on how and where to capture my images to use in the video collage. I was able to choose which particular flower or scenery I wished to include, and I was able to carry my camera around and snap a picture whenever I saw it was necessary. Using the VadoCam, I walked around in the city and was able to capture sounds of birds chirping and trucks’ noises to incorporate into my collage. Using my camera, the VadoCam, and my laptop really broadened my creativity because I could edit my video however I wanted and incorporate sounds where I wanted them to be.

LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5AMMVlTxM

(Photographs by Brian Yee)

(A larger image may be seen at http://oi52.tinypic.com/2jafc4p.jpg)

Initially, I had wild plans for my collage. In my mind, I imagined music, video clips, and pictures all incorporated into one piece that exposed the rich variety of hip-hop dancing. However, I was later inspired by a topic that was much closer to my heart. After a visit with my former high school track team, I decided to take my collage in a completely different direction.

At that point, I knew that I wanted to create a more traditional photograph collage. While I had no prior experience with image editing programs, I thought I might dive into a new challenge. In the beginning, I felt overwhelmed with all the possible effects that were available and the use of different image layers. In a way, the many options that technology offered made me feel trapped. I saw that I could take the collage in many different directions, and I simply had no idea how to get started. At first, I considered avoiding this obstacle by switching to the old paper and scissors method. After some thought, however, I realized that printing out the photographs, and cutting and pasting them might be a waste of my time and materials.

The original photos I used to create the top center image in my collage.

Once I gathered the photographs that I wanted to use, I realized that I was not sure how I wanted to blend them into one image. When I began playing around with Paint.NET’s various effects, I tried one out called “ink sketch.” This effect allowed me to customize the ink outlines of the photographs, as well as the amount of coloring in each of them. Essentially, it turned photographs into images that appeared illustrated. When I continued to work with “ink sketch,” I saw that it allowed me to combine photographs into a more unified picture. This is seen at the top left of my collage, in which I used three different photographs to make one longer image. I tried to make it appear as though the different groups of competitors were running one behind the other, which was easier to accomplish with this particular effect. I also used this technique for the top middle image, in which I placed two candid photographs side by side to create a single picture.

I also had the option of merging together all the separate images through fading effects and by altering their transparencies. In the end, however, I created a more comic book-like feel to my collage by keeping the photographs defined in clearly boxed shapes. At the same time, I noticed that I could have cut and pasted the photographs by hand and still accomplished the same basic formatting of my collage. Nevertheless, I feel that working with the photographs digitally was more time efficient and less tiresome. Instead of carefully cutting each photograph in a clean straight line, I was quickly able to “cut and paste” each image with a just a few clicks. Although in the end, using technology to create my collage was very useful and efficient, I must admit that I was only able to utilize it by keeping my plans simple. There were certainly more effects and techniques that I could have used, but I decided to take baby steps when it came to manipulating and working with digital images.

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Are horrifying circumstances less horrifying when told to the tune of flighty banjos and predictable bass lines? It seems that in the musical The Scottsboro Boys, music and lyric writers John Kander and Fred Ebb were trying to find out just how much contradiction and unsettling revelation an audience can take willingly—and it seems that they’ve hit it right on the mark.

The show’s controversial subject matter may have been enough for some. Starting with the utilization of the minstrel show form (one of the most racist forms of theatre in American history), The Scottsboro Boys begins a true tale of brutal injustice with a thoroughly sardonic glimpse into the continual presence of racism, even as the events that the minstrel group portrays are portrayed in past-tense. The group of men creating this show-within-a-show—not incidentally consisting of all African-Americans, only led by a stereotypical “Southern Gentleman” who continually interrupts their heartfelt connection with the story—brings a relevance that makes the audience wonder just how removed the characters—as well as they themselves–are from the injustice that this story narrates.

Despite the condescending yells for interruptive dance routines and joyous distraction, the men continue on to weave a tale in which the audience finds it harder and harder to separate delight from disgust—a thoroughly unsettling concept, if it weren’t for the efforts of the composers to throw in “happy” chords and joyous percussion at every turn. Pieces such as “Electric Chair” are prime examples of this: in this piece, a fright-stricken boy is carried through the terrors of the chair that he will likely meet, as the tempo increases and the musicians frantically play their assigned major-mode parts. The juxtaposition of fear and joy doesn’t end here, though, as the once comically White jail-guards—played by other members of the Black minstrel group, of course—prance around in a bizarre display of joy over the imminent demise of the guilty-until-proven-innocent inmates, surrounded by dead bodies who re-animate just in time to re-enact their moment of truth under the strobe lights.

And as if this fantastic display of fear and exultation just wasn’t enough, we are often reminded that this story is not just a story: although assuredly less musical, this happened. Seventy-some-odd years ago, these nine boys underwent the abhorrent events of this garishly spectacular musical—a revelation that is not easy to dismiss, especially as the musical reaches its finale. Here, the audience is subjected to possibly the most unsettling part of the writers’ insight: here, all African-American members of the cast are portrayed using blackface makeup, a thoroughly grotesque representation that makes clear that even at the time that their show-within-a-show was being done, these actors were far from escaping the oppression that they so detested. Still, as the lights flash and the music continues to crescendo, the audience finds itself witnessing a total about-face in the show’s direction, and assignment of power—a tool that allows the musical to become more than just a revelation for an audience to undergo: The Scottsboro Boys, with all its glamour and terror, pizzazz and disgust, becomes an example with which the audience feels obliged to do more than just reflect upon…

No small feat for some banjos, building-block chairs, and a small group of men wiping some paint off of their faces.