I am bringing in some cookies tomorrow for everyone! They’re sugar cookies with a trace of cinnamon. Despite my bowl, you can obviously tell it is not pasta.
Ingredients:
Flour, Sugar, salt, butter, baking powder, cinnamon, and eggs. They do not contain nuts so if you’re not allergic I hope you enjoy.
Daniel Kelly – making music…
Here is some information about our guest – musician: www.danielkellymusic.com
Here is the musical portrait of Flushing created by Daniel Kelly together with members of the community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aELUVzfIF8k
And information about more of his Rakonto projects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Jis8IzTaU
Enjoy!
On Tuesday, Joshua, Kevin, and I went to Joyce Theater to see a dance because we had enjoyed watching Fall for Dance. Thus, we were looking forward to watching this dance performance.
The building was similar to BAM Harvey Theater because the walls were old and made of bricks. It was around for a while, so the outer walls remained unchanged, but inside everything was renewed/replaced.
Outside it was cold and everyone had a lot of clothes on, while during the performers in the theater had very little clothing. In the first dance, the men were basically only wearing matching underwear and the women wore one piece bathing suits. The dancers performed ballet usually in pairs and sometimes in larger groups with about 20 performers on stage at the same time. They were all synchronized and switched partners often. In their groups, the dancers moved together and came really close to one another (something I would not do if people had barely any clothes on). They relied on one another for support and balance. Something common was a woman raping herself loosely around a man, while he spun around at the proper speed to make sure she did not fall.
Part of the music was recorded and some of it was live. I noticed that the two violin players that performed live at the ballet made the sounds of their violins compliment one another. If I did not watch both of the people playing the instruments, I would not have known that there were two violin players. Just like the dancers, they made their music (instead of dance) combine to make a single, proper functioning system. The recorded music played at the ballet would normally make me want to dance slowly, but the dancers were dancing really quickly to the retarded rhythm.
One thing that I remember well from the performance was that a dancer fell when he was running on the stage to his position. He had gotten back up in the blink of an eye and continued performing. This blunder demonstrates that people always make mistakes, which cannot be avoided even in a synchronized, well-performed ballet. Moreover, I was never expecting anyone to slip in a professional performance, so I guess that anything can happen.
Reading about the Hotel Chelsea in “Just Kids” is just so overwhelming. On almost every page there is a new major person referenced and being someone born to parents that were once part of 60s culture almost all of the musicians sound very familiar. Although I cannot put names to songs I know I enjoyed a lot of the songs of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin in particular. Seeing these names repeated, I could not help but listen to their music in the background as I continued to read. Although I am just about free of these past musicians, as I am now enthralled with modern pop music and alternative rock, seeing these names and listening to their songs and brought back memories of long road trips as my parents listened to the Vinyl Classics station on Sirius XM.
I remember one class in which I said I am happy I chose not to be an artist because of the harsh life they live and now reading throughout this chapter I have to slightly recant my haste conclusion. Although I still cannot imagine having to live with such a lack of financial security, I think it would be amazing to be able to surround myself with these very notable and famous artists and musicians. It is a very diverse group of people and I remember Smith saying how it is as if the entire hotel held many universes as in each room there was just a whole different type of person. As a developing artist she also says how many of these people had influenced her and in living in such a place, I guess you would not be able to help but be influenced by every artist around you. I can’t imagine how interesting it would be to be surrounded by all of these artists everyday.
Like I said my parents were alive during this time and they were very into this type of music that was being made but they had never told me about the Hotel Chelsea and so it had been very interesting to learn about it by reading it from a artist’s perspective. If you had not been able to influence this type of music I really recommend these songs:
I became nostalgic thinking of some of the weirdest poems that I loved back in those days….
Ode to an Artichoke (Pablo Neruda)
The artichoke
of delicate heart
erect
in its battle-dress, builds
its minimal cupola;
keeps
stark
in its scallop of
scales.
Around it,
demoniac vegetables
bristle their thicknesses,
devise
tendrils and belfries,
the bulb’s agitations;
while under the subsoil
the carrot
sleeps sound in its
rusty mustaches.
Runner and filaments
bleach in the vineyards,
whereon rise the vines.
The sedulous cabbage
arranges its petticoats;
oregano
sweetens a world;
and the artichoke
dulcetly there in a gardenplot,
armed for a skirmish,
goes proud
in its pomegranate
burnishes.
Till, on a day,
each by the other,
the artichoke moves
to its dream
of a market place
in the big willow
hoppers:
a battle formation.
Most warlike
of defilades-
with men
in the market stalls,
white shirts
in the soup-greens,
artichoke field marshals,
close-order conclaves,
commands, detonations,
and voices,
a crashing of crate staves.
And
Maria
come
down
with her hamper
to
make trial
of an artichoke:
she reflects, she examines,
she candles them up to the light like an egg,
never flinching;
she bargains,
she tumbles her prize
in a market bag
among shoes and a
cabbage head,
a bottle
of vinegar; is back
in her kitchen.
The artichoke drowns in a pot.
So you have it:
a vegetable, armed,
a profession
(call it an artichoke)
whose end
is millennial.
We taste of that
sweetness,
dismembering scale after scale.
We eat of a halcyon paste:
it is green at the artichoke heart
———————————————————
This ties in with my previous snapshot of NY; sometimes we are just like an artichoke, thinking greater of us than we are, until the moment it strikes us to realize that Maria is coming to boil us down. Perhaps, that is the very reason why movies featuring the destruction of the city due to natural disasters tend to be stimulating (not in a positive sense)…
If there is glory in something fleeting, when will New York become glorious?
SO, I read through some of the comments left on the other post about the final project and as I can tell everyone is interested in combining poetry and art. I have an idea that might perhaps interest some of you.
A few years ago (I don’t remember the story behind this) many walls around the world emerged with the words “Before I die….” Everyone would sign these walls with the things that they desire to do before death, this activity brought communities together.
This is how the wall looked.
I was thinking that perhaps we can do something like this but instead write “Art in NYC is…” and everyone would sign what they believe it is. This could be in poster or collage form. It would turn into our own, personal poem in a way. If some of us did not know what to write, we could also add pictures. Basically, we could put all of our creativity into this by making it colorful and unique.
What do you guys think? It doesn’t seem like too much work, yet it’s very representative of what we did all semester.
-Angelika
Without a doubt, the acronym “MTA” has a negative connotation do it.
Nonetheless, we all use it. In the recent years MTA has implemented a program called “Arts for Transit”, which displays any form of arts in the stations, in the trains, basically anywhere in the transit system.
I remember we read a poem in the beginning of the year called “Construction Site, Windy Night” (Pg 201 in Poems of New York). The thing that I most remembered from it was some sort of scaffolds, plastic sheets that was flying from the building. Today, as I was on the D train going back to the dorms, I notice a poem titled “Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). The poem went something like this:
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seems to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
This beginning of the poem is pretty straight forward. The first two stanzas pretty much depicts a mason’s job when they begin to build. However, the poem starts to change in the third stanza, when the speaker seems to be sad that the scaffolds are falling. This however exposes the beauty of the building when its done.
The fourth stanza is the highlight of the poem. The speaker speaks to someone he cares, someone he loves, most likely a mate, and it reveals that the relationship between the two may be “falling apart”. But he ends up with the fifth stanza, saying that whats behind that scaffold is something stronger, something more beautiful.
So next time you take a ride on the MTA, check out the arts and all the stuff you see just may very much surprise you! See if you can spot this poem as well! 🙂
~Christopher Chong
First, here’s a bit of history on the theater.
Joyce Theater was originally a movie theater, built in 1941 and at that time called Elgin Theater. The theater was a popular venue for moviegoers until 1978—by that time it had begun to show less-than-savory movies and was forced to close by the community.
There was a renovation period between ’78 and ’82 when the theater’s interior was gutted and redesigned as a space for dance.
Once this period was over, the theater reopened as Joyce Theater.
The dance program consisted of three dances and excerpts of two more:
I don’t presume to have much experience on the language of ballet, and perhaps I would have benefited from choosing another performance. However, I have learned much about the language through this experience.
In these dances, the performers wore leotards ranging from ample coverage to a very scant amount of material.
Head Space exhibited a confused man in a crowd of couples who were all intimately dancing together. This man took a while to find his way to a woman of similar sentiment. Much of the dance focused on confusion and hesitation, the man unsure of whom he could be intimate with in the midst of so many already-established couples. After he found his partner, the dance focused on their closeness, ignoring all of the other coupes.
Igual: I didn’t understand this one.
Testament was quite weird as it was performed to a seriously curtailed version of “Amazing Grace”, changing the hymn’s meaning by omitting many of the words. It emphasizes how the woman saved the confused man or vice versa. It was an interesting piece.
The text quoted below is the whole hymn as written by John Newton; highlighted in yellow is what was sung during the dance.
Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believ’d!
Thro’ many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
The Lord has promis’d good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.
Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
Will be forever mine.
John Newton, Olney Hymns, 1779
What Come, Thereafter: I didn’t understand this one.
The Groove is a view of the House music scene in Chicago of the 1980s. The dancers were more scantily clad here than in any other dance. One line of one of the songs caught my attention and stuck: “If only fools are satisfied, take my sanity away.” That conditional statement heavily underscores the human desire (and perhaps need) to be satisfied.
Group Joshua, Adrian, and Kevin
Sorry to post another poem that may not be a great fit for class, but this is one I felt really fit well with most of us as college students:
“If I don’t drive around the park,
I’m pretty sure to make my mark.
If I’m in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I’ll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.”
I feel like this is something a lot of us have to go through now that we are in college. We received all those lessons on time management early in the year and this poem shows that for a lot of us, we know what we should do with our time, but we just do not care enough to do those things. Instead, we would rather stay up late (not me, I actually go to bed at 10) and have a good time. This certainly is not a bad thing, as whatever we have done has gotten us this far.
I found this poem on page 68 of our poetry book. I am not entirely sure this is a great poem for us to go over in class, as it does not take any special talent to decipher what it is about. It is rather short, spanning just 16 words. Nevertheless, this is a very powerful poem that I figured was worth sharing, since not everyone would see it. Because it is short and I doubt many of us read these posts with our poetry book open, I will copy the poem here:
“Mingled
breath and smell
so close
mingled
black and white
so near
no room for fear.”
I think those last four lines are especially meaningful, as it speaks to the diversity of New York, but more importantly, to the fact that you cannot fear others when you are always around them. Hughes explains that there is no way to hide from people of a different race and, unless you plan to always be fearful, you cannot be afraid of these people. You have to recognize that a person’s skin color is not related to the kind of person they are. This poem also goes beyond race and beyond the subway. New York is so diverse with many people of different religious beliefs and sexual orientations and they are all over the city, not just in the subway.
I love my monster, but I guess it’s time for me to change…
How do I change my monster????
When I started reading up on Robert Mapplethorpe, all sources pointed to the fact that this was one of the most controversial artists of the 20th century. It was when I started looking up his artwork that realized why: his highly stylized black and white photography bordered on graphic depictions of the human nude form. His portfolio ( selections of which are available at http://www.mapplethorpe.org/portfolios/ ) consisted of other types of photography, however. My personal favorite was his series on statues. One of them, I’m posting here! I highly encourage you guys to read up on Mapplethorpe, not because of his immense artistic impact, but simply because he’s such an interesting fellow.
Mapplethorpe, Skull and Crossbones, 1983
Mapplethorpe, Italian Devil, 1988
Hey guys! So the semester is approaching a close and we have to come up with and actually create a final project. I believe that it should be something that encompasses the three main themes expressed in the title of this course: “The Arts, The City, and Me.” Thus, I think we should create something that artistically depicts us and the city. It should be something that portrays both the physical and human beauty that makes NYC a city like no other.
To be more specific we should make a collage. I think that if we create a collage of pictures that form the shape of the island of Manhattan, we can satisfy all the criteria. These pictures should be, however, a picture of you in your favorite place in the city (and by city I do mean Manhattan). Including these pictures will perfectly combine that human and physical aspects that define NYC culture. Along with these, we can also include any necessary pictures form the Media section from this website. We can also include any newspaper articles and magazines pictures that are fitting (e.g. a New York Times headline, a New York magazine with flashy words such as “Broadway” or “Central Park”). We can even include cutouts from the dreaded subway map! Anything that has some aesthetic appeal can definitely be incorporated.
Finally, this has the potential to be a time consuming task, but I do think as Macaulay students we can avoid that. All we need to do is pick a day, where everybody comes prepared with their pictures and cutouts, to actually create the collage. Since it appears that last of our class days are busy, we may need to do this on our personal time.
Thanks for your consideration. I do hope we can accomplish this!
For the four years before I had come here to CCNY, I was involved in my high school’s SING production. SING is a completely student run play in which the school is divided into two teams and these teams must come up with a whole play that means the script, lyrics (as songs in modern culture are used and made into parodies), written music (notes for instruments), and sets are all made by students. We were the musicians, the stage crewmen, the directors, the producers, the directors, the liaisons. I myself had always played in the band, with my trumpet I followed my conductors from freshmen to senior year. On Friday night on November 14th I had gone back to my old school to watch their performance and although no longer being part of the overall cast I could not help but get nostalgic. It was a great 3 hours of singing, dancing, and memories. On Saturday night the winner was announced and although I was not able to go to that performance I was able to catch some of my old band members after the show and join them for a dinner. Are these plays nearly as well made as the great works of Pirandello or Shakespeare? Of course not, but they having something more to them. There was never just one writer, but a team working together. It was great to be involved and it was great to be able to go back and see that everything is still going on as it always had.
How many of you were involved in a similar type of performance at your schools or even had the same program at your school?
The first exhibit my group had gone to had been Zero Tolerance at MoMa PS1. Coming in with mixed expectations I had left quite pleased. Due to the nature of the exhibit I was shocked that it had carried the same message that I am finding very prevalent today: governments imposing laws and doctrines that oppress their people. Much of the exhibit were different documentaries showing major protests and public gatherings. Even in America where we are promised freedom and complete autonomy over our own lives, we are met with unscrupulous businesses that collect and sell our information and a government that spies on its own people. The exhibit had made me reflect on the novel “1984” by George Orwell in which the masses of people do not realize fully what the government is imposing upon them. In summary of the exhibit (picture provided), it is stated that these governments mask draconian laws in the guise of some form of public service or help.
The exhibit displays heavily the public outcry against these governments. There was one room, with T.V.s situated all around the walls with different public gatherings and if you stand in the center of the room, you can hear bits and pieces of everything, all of it creating an overall chaotic atmosphere. Then the room after, focused heavily on Russia and the nation under a ex-KGB president. There had been one song made by “Pussy Riot” that went against Putin’s declaration against secularism. If you want to check out the song and music video just follow this link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPDkJbTQRCY . One of the strangest and most interesting things within the exhibit had been the work of Voina in “Operation: Kiss Garbage.” It had been a video depicting their work to demean and humiliate people of power. In it, women would go up to policewomen and kiss them on the lips with absolutely no notice. The public art, not only challenges the power of government but also goes against Putin’s views on homosexuality.
The exhibit overall had been great, and if you want to see more pictures of the exhibit just look below!
Jerry Saltz asks us to think about the role art plays in the world when we put it within in rules and boundaries.
NYMag article graphic
It takes a certain amount of courage to follow your dreams, whatever they may be. Becoming an artist, while a dream for many, is one of the most difficult dreams to follow, as it does not offer much financial security, and unless you make it big, you really don’t make it at all. I remember Kevin saying this book made him not want to be an artist, and while I certainly agree that this would be a very difficult lifestyle for anyone, this book also shows the positive of such a lifestyle. The first 55 pages of this book, while brief, showed the many pros and cons of being an artist. Those positives included an incredible level of freedom that many of will not enjoy in our lifetime, as Patti and Robert had an incredible amount of free time to themselves. They are also able to do what they enjoy for a living. I think in a way that is the ideal way to live, and that is why so many people try to follow such dreams even if they do not offer much in the way of financial security. Nevertheless, it takes a special amount of courage to pursue something more than the money.
Disch’s poem speaks to the fact that some of the best moments in life involve little things. These events are often brief, yet they can still have a significant effect on your day. One of the most important points of this poem is that these beautiful moments must be brief and fleeting, otherwise, there will be no reason to long for the event to repeat itself. Not to make this about sports, but what, an example that comes to mind is the way that the media treated Derek Jeter this season, as it was his final season. Many outlets, including Gatorade, made exceptions to policies in order to honor Jeter. If these companies did this every time a player retired, it would not be special or significant. However, it was a very meaningful gesture because it does not happen very often. This is certainly not the best example for everyone, but it was something that came to mind for me. I’m sure we each have experiences like this that are brief, but still have a impact on us.
I believe it was Chloe that raised the question of what the significance of the cat and owl was. The main point of this poem is certainly related to religion and how God is a mystery. However, as Professor Drabik pointed out recently, poets do everything deliberately, so the choice for a cat and an owl was no accident. The differences between a cat and an owl are pretty clear, as a cat is domesticated and often bound by rules imposed by its owner and an owl is free, only bound by the laws of nature. In the poem, we see the cat trying to defy the laws of the projects and then fall to its death, whereas, the owl survives and thrives, as it seemingly conjures up a bold of lightning. The owl seems similar to God because he is not bound by the laws of others, and has a mysterious power that others do not. Whereas, the cat is similar to humans, as it is bound by the rules of others and eventually dies, often trying to overcome these limitations.
[catlist id = 344559]
[catlist id = 344543]
[catlist id = 280382]
[catlist id = 83902]
