Author: bravo0925

Although I cannot ever fully understand what it’s like to be in your shoes, your post really hit home. Coming from a mixed background, I do sometimes struggle with my identity. I father is Italian and my mother is Ecuadorian and Spanish. Despite this fact, I grew up pretty ‘”ethnically neutral”. I grew up only speaking English even though with my grandparents begging me to learn the languages and growing up in a predominantly mixed area (Queens, New York). My family has a running joke that the only thing Italian about me is my first name and the only Spanish thing about me is my last night. After living almost two decades, my biggest regret and my biggest struggle were never embracing where I come from. Like you, I do embrace who I am through God. Although I don’t know much about what it means to be Spanish or Italian, I know what it means to believe in God (this is something that I feel I learned through my culture.) Catholicism has always and will always play a pinnacle role in life, and I always turn to it when I feel lost. Sometimes I feel like the only thing I know about myself is that I am Catholic. I also learn through cooking. Food is huge in both cultures (at least in my family). My father has recipe books from his grandmother and aunts from Naples, and my mom learned everything she knows about cooking from her mother.  Through this, I was able to build a bond, not like those my fluent speaking cousins could with my grandparents. I was also indirectly able to connect to my roots through cooking whether it be from making sauce and mozzarella, or to cooking pernil. These two things have been my passion and my doorway to who the stories of my past. Through these things, I know that I can find comfort and rest easy knowing who I am. Very well said, David.

In Bowie’s “Sounds and Vision”, there were different instruments to follow, but Beck’s took the cake in being an array of sounds.  The retelling of Bowie’s “Sounds and Vision” was greater in size, but I  wouldn’t call it the better version. Although I found Beck’s version to be visually stunning and beautiful, I got overwhelmed by the intensity of the sound. I was amazed by some elements in Beck’s performance of the piece. He combined different elements from different genres and connected and made all the pieces fit and created something that I would compare to a well-oiled machine. I saw gospel singers, guitarists, and a string orchestra play with what looked to be brass instruments and an acoustic guitar. I applaud Beck’s performance, but I prefer the original. The best cover for a David Bowie song is Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold the World”.

The nature of Jazz is improvisation that builds off one another in a group. From what I expected to be disjointed was very organized and congruent in the Latin Jazz Concert at Lehman. The individuals performing showed their skills in their solo pieces, and I think this stood out most in “Super Ray”. Although I found it difficult to follow individual instrumental groups in the band, the sounds did come together in harmony like jazz.

I.        Both the Judge’s monologue in Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and Man on Wire deal with crime. The crime Phillipe Petit committed and the crimes Judge Soderberg spoke about are not the same, however. Phillipe’s crime is one driven by passion and love for the art (of tightrope walking) while the crimes the judge speaks about are crimes driven by lust and greed. These crimes include rape, murder, and robbery.

II.        Judge Soderberg gets both Phillipe Petit as well as Jazlyn and Tillie on the same day. This judge is Claire’s husband, and this bridge in the characters is what ties them together. The judge almost has a predetermined outlook on the characters in which he thinks of Tillie and Jazzlyn as bottom feeder criminals and prostitutes and sees Corrigan as nothing more than their pimp. Doubling up on both of these cases show the different walks of life in which these people come from while still highlighting a connection they make with one another (a prominent judge, two prostitutes, and an Irish missionary).

III.       The prologue in Let the Great World Spin tells the story of the day Phillipe Petit crossed a wire connecting the World Trade Center Towers. It tells how all of New York hushed in amazement over the great feat that was being done over their heads. People halted their daily commutes to watch this man do what was thought to be impossible and perhaps foolish. As the two buildings were bridged that day by the tightrope cable, people from different walks of life crossed paths as well. It was on that very day on August 7, 1974, that said events would take place. We learn Tillie and Jazzlyn get arrested, Corrigan dies, Claire has the women from counseling over, and Judge Soderberg presides over both the tightrope walker as well as Jazzlyn and Tillie. Whether they knew it or not, these people would affect each other in one way or another.

The connection that surprised me the most was the one of Corrigan and Adelita. Knowing he was a Catholic monk and that he had to take a vow of celibacy, I was truly shocked when we first learned how intimate their relationship truly was. With talks of furthering their relationship, it was soon evident that Corrigan showed interest in leaving his duties as a monk and eventually his duties as a priest. I feel like this was solidified in having sex with Adelita. I think its also interesting in noting the fact that neither Corrigan nor Adelita were native to New York, or the United States for that manner. Adelita is from Guatemala while Corrigan’s original home was Ireland.

A connection that makes my heart skip a beat is that of Jaslyn and the tightrope walker. Jaslyn carries a photo of Phillipe Petit in her pocket in memory of her mother. When she looks at it, she wonders how something so beautiful can happen the same day just hours before of something so wicked taking form (the death of her mother).  This was significant to me because we should all be aware of fleeting time. The notion of significant events happening in concert with one another. This goes well with a book like this because it is a perfect example of the networks this book establishes among its characters.