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I love to talk, and I love to write. I’ve been talking, talking, talking for about 19 years now, and I’ve been writing for a little more than half of that. According to my parents, I started to talk early, because apparently my toddler self had a lot on which to pass judgement.
I am not the most adept at poetry. I often shirk away from poetry readings, which deny me the comfort of meditating over lines and stanzas, rotating them in my mind until they yield some sense. I need time to read poetry, so when I decided to attend the reading for Iris Tillman-Hill’s newly released, “All This Happened Long Ago – It Happens Now,” I did so with a touch of apprehension. What was there to expect? Would it be too academic for me to handle?
I didn’t grow up with cowboys. I believed they were already long dead. I haven’t seen “Gunsmoke,” “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” or “The Virginian,” films that come out of an era so time-worn that the smoke has long cleared. Cowboys were not a fixture of my childhood afternoons, when imagination and historical mythicality coalesce into something both trivial and all-consuming. I gave them no thought, at least until last week when I saw Jeremiah Ariaz’s exhibit “Louisiana Trail Riders” at the Center for Documentary Studies. My childhood history was more recent, more tangible, and the cowboy/Indian duality was too wrought with flattened racism even for my 9-year-old brain.
I was 14 when I first watched Janelle Monae’s unabashed, unflinching “Q.U.E.E.N.” Although the music video doesn’t make any explicit references to LGBTQ+ identity, its unapologetic flourishing of abnormal selfdom earned it the honor of being deemed “queer,” at least in my eyes. Certainly, it was the dose of queerness that my gay teenage self needed at the time. At last, here was a blackqueer proclamation of freakishness that disavowed efforts to silence with an equal degree of fun and funk. There was nothing like spiting the quiet – and its somewhat less stifling brother, solemnity – with a well-timed declaration that “the booty don’t lie.” I loved it. It was as though Monae was finally giving me the license to be me without any capitulation or accommodation, all the while making sure that I was having fun while I was at it. The line “even if it makes others uncomfortable, I will love who I am” was a defiant assertion that I played back over and over in my head, a rhythm that I kept under my tongue. I didn’t really know who I was, but I now knew that it didn’t really matter. “Would your God accept me in my black and white?” sang Monae, “Would he approve the way I’m made? Or should I reprogram the program and get down?”
“For whom do I write?”
Watching Mike Wiley’s one-man play “Breach of Peace” was a bit of an otherworldly, other-era experience. The hour-long play, performed April 12 at Goodson Chapel, chronicles the history of the Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights activists who rode interstate buses in the 1960s South to call to national attention the non-enforcement of two Supreme Court rulings that mandated the desegregation of public bus systems.
When first observing Evan Nicole Bell’s photographic exhibit “Faith in Color,” which explores the deep roots of religious influence in black communities, I was initially met with a sense of cognitive dissonance. From afar, the photographs that Bell pairs together in a series of diptychs appear to have been taken in the same setting. However, upon closer inspection, one notices that they find their bearings in diverse contexts.
What is “normal”? How do socially-constructed conceptions of normalcy limit the types of narratives that are constructed and propagated? By challenging normalcy, how do we both innovate art as well as successfully incorporate and acknowledge marginalized identities?
“One Day at a Time,” Netflix’s first original family sitcom, premiered on the streaming platform last year with little to no fanfare. Nevertheless, the show quickly attained critical acclaim and modest popularity, garnering an Emmy nomination and being listed as one of the top 10 shows of 2017.
The first time I attended a poetry reading was last Thursday at Brody Theater on East Campus. As part of the English Department’s Blackburn Poetry Series, poets Alberto Mobilio and Elizabeth Willis came to campus to present their poetry and discuss the process of creative writing with students. Mobilio read pieces from his recent collection, “Touch Wood,” as well as more recent, unpublished works. Willis selected poems spanning her career as a poet, including selections from “Meteoric Flowers,” “Address” and “Alive.”
Where is the line between entertainment and art? This was the question that came up in my conversations with Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, two experimental filmmakers and professors at UNC-Chapel Hill who are organizing the Cosmic Rays Film Festival. The event will be held Thursday and Friday at the Varsity Theatre in downtown Chapel Hill.
At the finale of the film “Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai,” set in the Nigerien city of Agadez, musician and protagonist Mdou Moctar takes up his guitar and deftly immerses the viewer in his world: The “desert blues” style characteristic of the Sahel, a semi-arid region stretching from Senegal to Eritrea, transforms the guitar from a melodic to a percussion instrument such that one is snared in its yearning, palpable rhythm.
What defines our college experience is a fundamental search for identity. As the acclaimed developmental psychologist Erik Erikson asserted, “In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.” Duke’s Arts of the Moving Image program — which offers courses in the theory and technology of motion picture — held the AMI Student Film Festival Nov. 14 in the Griffith Film Theater, showcasing the 12 best short films made by students over the last year. Through the AMI program, students are encouraged to foment a second sense of self: that of the artist and the filmmaker. They are forced to grapple with a fundamental question: for whom do I make my art, the audience or myself?
Van Gogh is remembered as much for his tortured past as for his artistic masterpieces, so much so that the romantic ideal of the “tortured artist” finds its roots in his troubled life. Historically, tortured artists have been characterized by their strong sense of alienation; they are self-destructive and struggle with mental health issues, often ridiculed for “thinking too much.”
