Tuesday, 9 December 2014
Bang Bang (my baby shot me down) - Dance and Death
I'm a not-so-closet fan of So You Think You Can Dance because of dances like the one posted here.
Yes, Nigel Lythgoe is a creepy sexist asshole, yes the screams and cries from teens at the tapings are annoying and of course, yes, the whole premise of the competition often leads to aggravating popularity politics determining who gets to continue to dance and who leaves. But I don't really care in the end, because sometimes you'll get to see people like Eliana Girard and Alex Wong completely embody a song in beautiful movement. Dancing to Nancy Sinatra cold, slow rendition of a ballad about love lost and the violence that is felt through rejection, Girard and Wong (as per their choreographer - Stacey Tookey's- intructions) create bent, gnarled shapes with their bodies through and alongside beautiful, dynamic movement to tell a story of lust and death. Sometimes dance tells such stories better than any other medium. As one movement leads into the next, as lust guides us toward death and death kickstarts lust, you can understand and really feel how the two impulses are connected.
Monday, 8 December 2014
Sunday, 7 December 2014
Robin D. G. Kelley- A great academic
In response to the question of how he incorporates his text Race Rebels into his teaching, he humbly responds:
"I may have taught Race Rebels twice in my career. Still, there are some themes that come up in my teaching that relate directly back to Race Rebels, as well as to all of my books during that period. My objective has long been to unearth movements that had been driven underground or erased from popular historical narratives, and to recover their ideas. Race Rebels, more than my other books, is about unearthing what is sedimented below the surface. In the classroom, I’m not necessarily trying to construct a new master narrative but encourage students to figure out what people thought, felt, and how their ideas and visions of what is possible changed over time—irrespective of how big or influential the movement. I resist dividing Black movements into categories like “integrationist/separatist; resistance/accommodation; nationalist/socialist, etc., but instead try to get beyond the public performance of consent and push students to understand that motives for human behavior are not reducible to material conditions or ideology. I hope that students come away from my History classes recognizing that evidence for these kinds of movements is always fugitive, ephemeral, flashes rather than full-blown illumination. It’s like writing history by strobe light."
* rest of article
Wayne's World 2 - nostalgia
K- so Drew can't hold an accent here, but I love this clip dearly; mostly because I did the same school project on some country in grade 6 and also the Dick Van Dyke show reference. Sometimes, Myers was super spot on.
Saturday, 6 December 2014
Image Study
Every Saturday, from here on in- hopefully- I'm going to post five images from the MET online database that has recently made it's resources more available to the public. I don't plan on following a theme necessarily, though I may in future posts.
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| Landscape, Gulf Coast, Louisiana Walker Evans- 1935 Photo- Gelatin silver print |
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| Femme aux Cartes Florence Henri- 1930 Photo- Gelatin silver print |
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| Campden Hill, London Bill Brandt- April, 1949 Photo- Gelatin silver print |
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| Verduta d'alla Villa Medici od Academia di Francia Giacoma Caneva- 1852 Photo- Salted paper print from paper negative |
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| Melencolia I Albrecht Durer- 1514 Engraving |
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