Day 1. Year 2.

On repeat:

Sipping: a black & white mocha from the Beanery

First day classes: French 211, Film Noir

Wearing:

Mode of transportation: Bus

Writing: a chapter of my thesis and a proposal for a conference on pop culture

Reading: Double Indemnity (school), Watership Down (pleasure)

Last film I watched: Casablanca

Last tv episode I watched: Gilmore Girls 6x13

Highlight of my day: a friend in French class unexpectedly

Hoping for: a good year

Nerdy fun fact:

Ok, Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura is, of course, amazing! 

[Saldana and Nichols]

For a long time, there wasn't a consensus on her first name.  Eventually, it was canonized as Nyoto (which is Swahili for "star").  But!  Originally one of the names considered (and used in some sources) was... Samara!!  This made my nerd heart so happy :)

This.

This is glorious.

This is outrageous.

They talk about an embarrassment of riches?

We are living it.

I have often thought about how they couldn't even record sound until 138 years ago, 

and yet we walk around with thousands of songs in our pocket.

But this is even more wastefully incredible.

For how many Millenia have humans wondered

what the "dark side of the moon" looks like?

And for us? It's a GIF.

One Wild Life: Soul

Ahead of it's release, Relevant is streaming Gungor's latest album, One Wild Life: Soul. It actually marks the beginning of a trilogy--Soul, Spirit, and Body.  Gungor actually took inspiration from the format of Ryan O'neil's (aka Sleeping at Last) creative style - that of minimal touring or promotion, and spending nearly all of their energy and resources on artistic creation while also restraining themselves to a thematic project.  So, inspired by Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day" and the question it raises, Gungor aims to offer an answer spanning this trilogy of upcoming albums.

Stylistically here, Gungor has opted more for contemporary synths and beats and less for their previous acoustic sound.  Having emerged slowly over their last few albums as a lead vocalist, Lisa Gungor effectively takes the role even more often.  She leads the album's eponymous track and the song leaves breathing space for her soft quotation of Mary Oliver: "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"  Among others, she leads on the ethereal "Moon Song" and "At Sea" as well as duetting harmonically with Michael on "Light" and "Vapor."  Her maternal presence comes through clearly in "Moon Song" and even more so on "Light," a song dedicated their daughter Lucie (meaning light) who has downs syndrome.  She explains their journey beautifully here and the song reflects the delight with which they parent.  In fact, their recently released music video for the track is comprised entirely of home videos.

The social activist facet of Gungor is overt here in a number of ways.  On first listening to "We are Stronger," I'll admit I found the first half trite.  Even now, I find the peppy "We are better together" rather childish sounding--and yet, the second half of the song is so honestly gripping that I can't skip the track.  Here, they use the bridge to whisper-sing over a choral arrangement:

Every black life matters
Every woman matters
Every soldier matters
All the unborn matter
Every gay life matters
Fundamentalists matter
Here's to life and all it's branches

They finesse these ideals further on the later track "Us For Them." Both a beautiful treatise on breaking down divisions as well as a response to last year's backlash against Gungor because (gasp!) they shared they weren't convinced by Young Earth Creationism.  Reminiscent of U2's "there is no them, there's only us" ("Invisible"), this unifying, anthemic piece affirms:

We will not fight their wars,
We will not fall in line
'Cause when it's us or them,
It's us for them
We reject the either/or
They can't define us anymore
'Cause when it's us or them,
It's us for them...

These types of moments are certainly not new for Gungor (see "God is not a White Man"), but as they've become both more artistically nuanced and more lyrically frank, they appear to echo the frustrations many younger adults have with the current state of the Evangelical Church, but they move past defiance into much broader questions.

Their eerily beautiful "Am I"--an apparent inversion of YHWH's name, to which it finally resolves--haunts with both philosophically and personally familiar questions.  It echoes many of the statement's of "I am Mountain" in obverse as questions (e.g. "am I the stars?").  He seems to constrain a scream asking "am I a dream? am I memory?" before turning falsetto to ask "am I awake? am I okay?" The song is one that could appear simple but is, in actuality, fundamental.

Although often wrestling with millenial frustrations or metaphysical questions, they also reach for the soul's true home.  Many songs touch on the mythic or mystic - as the "here's to life and all it's branches" recalls Axis Mundi.  In "Land of the Living," a cover of Matthew Perryman Jones' 2012 single from an album of the same name, they draw in all sort's of imagery of the Promised Land.

The album's finale, "Vapor," matches the sacred finishing touches to their previous two studio albums--"Every Breath" on 2011's Ghosts upon the Earth (which happens to be one of my iTunes Library's 25 most played) and "Upside Down" from 2013's I am Mountain.  Like most of the album, this song circles the holiness of the Divine and erstwhile thinness of life this side of the veil--"the vapor of it all... the beauty of it all..."--to conclude in the marriage of Creator and creation:

Come like dawn
like grace
like sunlight
Bring this world to life
Come like rain
like breath
like springtime
Bring this world to life...

One Wild Life: Soul will be available on August 7th.  

You can read some of my thoughts on Ghosts upon the Earth here or I am Mountain here and here.

"Pride and Prejudice joins Twitter"

I've had a second paper accepted to a conference!  This November I'll get to present on the "Comparative Media" panel for the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association in Portland.  This is an exciting move for me as the audience will be made up of both grad students and professors from around the western region.  Here's the proposal:

Pride and Prejudice joins Twitter: Transmedia Adaptation on a Narrative Continuum

This paper explores The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a transmedia retelling of Pride and Prejudice set as a vlog in modern day California.  Across platforms including YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, this Emmy-award winning web series spent a year reworking the 200-year-old novel in “real-time.”  While the creators simply update certain aspects for the 21^st century—Mr. Bingley is now Bing Lee—other concerns are completely reinterpreted—the Bennet’s entailed estate is now a faulty mortgage; Collins “proposal” is for a job, not a marriage.  Enabling and encouraging audience members to interact with the story through multiple modalities, this transmedia adaptation provokes questions about its relationship to the source material.  While it can be read vertically as palimpsest, a retelling layered on top of the original, might we also consider the transmedia web series as part of storytelling’s historical continuum?  Do the novel and web series share more than a familiar narrative arc and a handful of characters? 

 In the historical moment of their emergence, both of the novel and the transmedia adaptation have been discounted for reasons such as the demographics of those participating, its reproducibility, their creators being perceived as amateurs, etc.  In her landmark Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon discusses the constructed strata of high and low culture revealing the economic arguments attached when she says, “we tend to reserve our negatively judgmental rhetoric for popular culture, as if it is more tainted with capitalism than high art” (31).  As an example, she notes academia’s tendency to deride the commercial-driven choices of a blockbuster, often ignoring that Shakespeare made similarly calculated artistic moves based on economic principals.  In a similar vein, some scholars may overlook a web series adaptation because it seems “tainted” by the enthusiasm of teenage girls, the advertising that funds it, the commonality of its chosen platforms, or a myriad of other “low culture” tags.    

However, my paper suggests that exploring these social conditions highlights The Lizzie Bennet Diaries as not only an adaptation of plot, character, and setting, but of the historical emergence of a narrative form.   Just as Austen’s novel was not only arguing for proto-feminism and against classism but also for the very form of the novel, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is not merely making claims about female friendships or stereotyping but that adaptation through transmedia is a valid form, participating in what John Fiske refers to as “culture making” and Robert Stam calls an “ongoing dialogical process.”  By placing the interactive web series on a continuum, we recover the emerging status the novel held in the past and are also able to look forward at part of the burgeoning future of narrative form thanks to new media.

I'm in the throes of research and have had some setbacks, but I am really excited to tackle the LBD from the angles of high/low-culture arguments, adaptation of form, and the question of interpreting it vertically/horizontally...  I don't have many conclusions yet, but a lot of intriguing questions!  

And now... back to the work in front of me. :)

Happy Birthday, Benedict!

It has been an amazing year to be a fan of Benedict Cumberbatch (see Oscar Nomination), but for me this year has been especially amazing because my Birthday Wishes for him from the last several years have come true.  Benedict's 38th has all been about:

And then his biggest wish came true:

"Benedict Cumberbatch and Sophie Hunter are delighted to announce the arrival of their beautiful son."

Congrats to Benedict, Sophie, and Baby Batch :) on a banner year!

Cheers to 39!

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Annnd this year, a wish of mine is actually coming true.

Recently, one of my closest friends won a pair of tickets to see Lyndsey Turner's Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch!!!

She graciously invited me to come with her, I couldn't say no, we've booked a flat near Hampstead Heath for 4 nights, and, as of yesterday, I have a ticket to London.

Sooo... in just about 6 weeks, I'll be at the Barbican seeing him perform live. 

And I can. not. freaking. believe. it!

Can you say "trip of a lifetime"?

More anticipation and news forthcoming, but for today:

Happy Birthday, Benedict! And see you later :) 

Dreams to Dream

"Dreams to dream... in the dark of the night

When the world goes wrong

I can still make it right

I can see so far in my dreams,

I'll follow my dreams

Until they come true."



Like many, I was saddened to hear about the passing of James Horner last month.  Many have noted his Titanic and Braveheart scores, but the song that's playing over and over in my mind lately has been his "Dreams to Dream," the Oscar nominated song which Horner created with Will Jennings for Fievel goes West.  This scene made a lasting impression on me as a child.  And, lately, I've found myself humming it often.

 

 



Is it just me, or is this song overdue for a modern cover?  One can dream.

 

Happy Friday!

Centennial Celebrations!

This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot publishing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"!  This poem is my absolute favorite (ok, tied with the thematically similar "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats).  I've mentioned Prufrock on the blog before and even wrote a really fun, final paper on it this Winter.  It's so bizarre and beautiful and tragic and a perfect statement on the time.  

Here, from 0:00-0:24, Tom Hiddleston recites the haunting introduction [I seriously need his recitation of the whole poem!].  And here are just a few of my other favorite lines:

Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea...

Do I dare
Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...

[I have this Obvious State print up in my kitchen]

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The childlike cadence used to convey the heavy, mythic philosophical themes is just marvelously profound to me!!  "Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."  If you want to (re-)revel in some mystery, I'd suggest reading through T. S. Eliot's first poetic masterpiece. 

Snippets

"The first [romantic fantasy] can hit me anywhere, though it's most often when I'm watching television or I'm looking out the window of a train or subway, and it's that there is a head resting on my shoulder that must have been there the whole time that I haven't noticed until now. And in the fantasy, or because of the fantasy--it's hard to tell the difference--I suddenly feel this surge of something like the combination of safety and elation, knowing that every sight I see, no matter how small, is now important because it's shared. I don't need to look at the head on my shoulder & I never do. Because what's so important to me is not what the person looks like, but that we are seeing the same thing.

"The second fantasy is that a small child, about 4 years old, is crying because she's drawn all over the wall with her crayons & has just realized that what she has done is going to subject her to some unknown form of justice. I put on a serious face & explain to the child that her mother & I are going to discuss what her punishment should be. Then I close the door to another room and, with relief, I drop the serious face and laugh and kiss the young artist's mother and ask her what in the world we should do about this creature we made who wanted to put colors on the walls and is scared what we're going to say about it."

- BJ Novak, "Sophia," One More Thing

Suffragette

Aside from Star Wars, this is the film I'm most looking forward to in 2015.  And the trailer is finally here:

I find this tragic, mainly for two reasons.  First off, what does it say about our society and about the industry that it's taken this long for a studio-backed retelling of the suffragette movement?  Universal suffrage (for women and people of color) is one of the most significant issues of human rights and yet we're only beginning to tell their stories with films like Selma and now Suffragette.  They faced atrocious horrors in striving toward these rights--and I do say striving not achieving as we still have work to do.  But that leads to the second reason this is so tragic: because we're still struggling over the same basic questions.  As Dorothy Sayers so bluntly put it Are Women Human?  And, though it's 2015, Suffragette reinforces, "I'm worth no more, no less than you."

But I also find it so very beautiful.  For the United States, August 18, 2017 will mark 100 years that women will have had the right to vote--making 2016 only the 25th presidential election women had any say in.  Long and not long at the same time, the right to vote can never be appreciated enough and the sacrifices it took to earn should never be forgotten. 

"Sometimes the night was beautiful 
Sometimes the sky was so far away 
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close 
You could touch it but your heart would break..." 

- Rich Mullins

Been watching lately...

So if we've talked recently, Gilmore Girls has probably come up - I've fallen completely in love with it!!

When I was in high school, my penchant for reading combined with my attendance at a private school earned me many comparisons to Rory Gilmore.  As I got older, people even noted us looking alike.  One time while working retail I walked up to a customer and asked if I could help her, she turned around and then slightly gasped, saying, "Oh my gosh! I thought you were Alexis Bledel!!" Because she would work at an office supply store?  Haha... anyway, the comparisons were enough to make me want to check out the show at some point.

Well now, thanks to the series coming to Netflix, I have been able to!  I'm nearly half-way through the show and it's so good - funny but dramatic, witty and emotional.  They feel like close friends and I'm pretty much ready to move to Stars Hollow :)

Here are just a few favorite moments:

And finally... the perfect way to deal with someone you're mad at:

Classic.

[via]

It's not the end of the world and I know it will be okay... 

Going Wilde

Ok, so it's not exact but, for our Dead Author Reading, this was my inspiration:

And this, my execution:

Best decisions for this particular costume have to be the [faux, of course,] fur, parting my hair in the middle, and constructing my own cane with a wrapping paper tube & the lid to my hairspray :)

Oh, and my chosen selection was Wilde's preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

Set
     backs


Dear Spring,
For a season of new life, why so many set
backs?  Why the confusion and self-doubt? 
To be honest, why all the tears?

Mentally, I know these are not life-ending, but
they are life-altering--
so many decisions; so many do-I-dares1.
My composure is wearing thin,
my strength is waning, in their place
only well-worn seams struggling with the tension
of holding this self together.

Primavera.  "Springtime."
Prima vera.  "First real."
I think broken apart, like myself, 
those words offer a better answer
to my initial question.  
Why all the set
backs?  
Because of all the realities.
Ones I'm experiencing for the first time. 
Realities I thought would skip me.  Set
backs I had hoped to avoid. 

Yet a wise philosopher2 conjectures, "Pain is 
what you experience when you bump into reality."
For some aspects of life, this is the "first
real" of a Spring where to become whole,
one must be broken; to move forward, one must be set
back.


1 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
2 Definitions by Dallas Willard

The peony gods had mercy. 

I called around and was able to find a place nearby that at least had peonies incorporated in their bouquets. Hopefully this will invigorate my soul for the upcoming weeks - they're big ones & I've been feeling like a lazy bum. Cheers to peonies!

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost 

I've reached the point of the year in which I need peonies.  Like, two weeks ago.

Preferably I'd be watching the shoots grow, the buds swell and burst with countless petals.  Then I could bring a few of those extravagant blooms into the house and inhale of that delicately sweet aroma.  And... oh.  I really need peonies!!

[via]

"And I'm learning, so I'm leaving

And even though I'm grieving,

I'm still trying to find the meaning.

Let loss reveal it..."

- Florence + the Machine

St. Jude

see you in seaside

last weekend i went on an early birthday get away 
with my two closest friends to seaside.

cruising down Highway 101 with taylor swift
dresses, sunnies, and i'm wearing cami's hat
also, i drew on a beauty mark because why not?

raspberry pie at sweet basil in canon beach
there was a live band and they sang me happy birthday :)

the sea!
it was surprisingly lovely for seaside in april
we came here last memorial day and we lucked out both times
and #sorrynotsorry for my compounding navy polk-a-dot patterns (thank you, target)

just for a comparison shot, here we are last year
#whydoesntanyonewannadancewithus
i love seeing how our hairs have changed...
but some things haven't.

so grateful for these friends
we are each really different and yet we get each other
it is unbelievably wonderful to be accepted entirely as you are - no judging!

isn't cami just too adorable back in her hat?    ^
v    and beks smile in the upper left

i love that we can be classy... and silly
the bottom right is us and our emperor palpatine hoods

and she bought us best friend t-shirts that are so accurate!
sorry if i don't look as enthusiastic as i felt...
we kinda partied-hardied the night before and zzzzz...

thank you, ladies, for such a wonderful weekend away!
i just feel so lucky to have you. lovoo!

Also.....

I'M SO

FREAKING

EXCITED!!!!

I feel like a lot of my favorite web series have wrapped up or are on hiatus... But! I have at least one mainstay to see me through right now and that is:  From Mansfield with Love.  I mentioned it briefly here, but now I can do one better.  The creators just released their own trailer:

I hope this hooks you and that, if it does, you'll share your thoughts below :)

Holy Saturday

I hope you are having a mindful and grace-filled Holy Week...

I wanted to share just a few things I've been meditating on--especially during the dark in-between-ness of Christ Crucified and Christ Resurrected.

I love what Micah J. Murray has written here on Good Friday.  In this prose-poem, "God is Dead," he explores the decimating reality of when God was dead.  The women and the Beloved Disciple at the cross must have held hope till the very last that He who could heal and He who could command the seas could and would rescue himself.  But no.  "It is finished" was the crushing blow to such hopes.  Murray writes:

Of course the earth shook when the breath that had formed mankind slipped from the lungs of the very One who first spoke it all into existence. I wonder that mountains and oceans and planets and stars didn’t all plummet together into an infinite void of darkness, when the hands that had molded them fell limp and lifeless, pierced and broken. 

“God is dead...”

And on this day, we don't get to rush ahead to the happy ending.  On this day we identify with the finality of hope lost.  And in this moment, I understand the words that my soul so often pushes against when TS Eliot said:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

- East Coker  

In so doing, we empathize with those who have lost hope in their own lives.  At the beginning of Lent, I read this beautiful reflection by Josh Ross who pointed out that, this year, Holy Saturday falls on the same day as the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.  As he so wonderfully puts it:

I think—as for now—April 4th belongs on the Saturday after Good Friday and before Easter Sunday. It is the day that adequately describes where we are in race relations today throughout our world...
Saturday is where we often live. It is the day of questioning, doubt, anxiety, and confusion. There is an awkwardness about Saturday; an uncertainty of how exactly this story is going to pan out.
Race in America is not where it was. Yet, it also isn’t where it needs to be. We can’t go back to the days of utter darkness, despair, oppression, and striping certain groups of dignity, yet we also can’t pretend as if we have arrived at somewhere we have not.

Holy Saturday reminds us that far too many areas of our world have yet to experience Resurrection.

And yet, today I have been reading Lady Julian of Norwich and exploring the notion of felix culpa--literally "happy fall." St. Augustine said of this notion: "Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere quam mala nulla esse permittere."  Or, in English, "For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist."

Holy Saturday means Christ is in the tomb and hope seems vain, "but all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well..."