Been working on this for a while and super-excited it’s nearly complete. I’m putting it up on the WFU servers sometime this week. Check out the facebook page to request they play something silly and/or ridiculous.
9 months ago
August 31, 2011
September 27, 2010
Eastern North Carolina: My. God.
1 year ago
June 11, 2010
Two years ago when Meredith and I were hobbling home on the last leg of our cross-country road trip with Bill and Jessie, we had a long discussion about what kinds of things she wanted to do in Winston-Salem once we got home. A central topic of discussion was the lack of collaboration—even communication—between students at Wake Forest, UNC School of the Arts, Salem College, Winston-Salem State University, and Forsyth Tech. Students had engaged with each other in the past—an earlier example of such collaboration took place during the 1960s, when white Wake Forest students took seats alongside their black peers from Winston Salem Teachers College (now Winston-Salem State) at the Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Winston-Salem to protest discrimination and segregation. ”When did such interaction fade from the student populations in this city, and how can we revive it to foster a more vibrant and synergistic diversity in Winston-Salem?” she asked.
Perhaps even more troubling than the lack of interaction between students across the city was and is the substantial lack of engagement between students at Wake Forest and the people of Winston-Salem. This absence creates an unsettling, elitist seclusion, and, personally-speaking, led to my four-year battle against fellow WF students who hurled “townie” derogatorily at anyone who called the 336 their home. The Wake Forest Institute for Public Engagement—a forward-thinking initiative led by the Provost and one of my mentors—has been working to bridge that gap between the University and the City. Last night, Meredith helped to do the same with a project called “Transforming Race.”
The project—funded by an Accord Grant by the Kenan Institute for the Arts—paired Wake Forest arts students (picked and supported by David Finn) with high school seniors from Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools to create a piece of art that addressed race.
Here is a complete description:
Transforming Race encouraged youth to use visual art media to communicate the problems and joys of living in a multiracial society for Winston‐Salem’s Millenium generation. The project teamed five Winston‐Salem/Forsyth County high school students with Wake Forest University Art students. Transforming Race provided racial identity and diversity training and a venue for interaction between these students and young adult artists. The program encouraged them to work in an open‐ended format, using their strengths and artistic talents to communicate for their generation and collaborate on these visual representations of their examination of racial identity.
The exhibit opened last night at the Liberty Arts Center, formerly DADA. The crowd most certainly represented the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the City, and the pieces really impressed. The exhibit will be travelling around to the different high schools throughout the city before stopping at the Wake Forest Student Art Gallery (START).
May 13, 2010
Meredith sent me this link to Palo Samko, a man doing some pretty remarkable woodworking in Brooklyn.
We are currently debating whether to go straight to graduate school next fall or take one more year off to pursue various interests. Learning this sort of wood-based artistry is at the absolute top of my list.
2 years ago
February 18, 2010
Just game across Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Some Rusted Root sound without the late 90s jam/pop bandishness and with some deep south soul mixed with CA grooviness. Yes, and a little hipster—or maybe just alternative (maybe those are synonymous right now; maybe not?). If they are hipster, they are old school hipster…as in hippie.
UPDATE: LA Time coins “hippie-ster” to describe them. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/19/entertainment/et-edwardsharpe19. I like that.
They’re playing at Bonaroo in the summer. Any Tennesseans out there up for a trip back to your home state?
2 years ago
February 2, 2010
January 21, 2010
"A Bad Day for American Democracy"
Commentators weighing in on the Supreme Court’s decisions today:
Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2242209/
and
http://www.slate.com/id/2242208/
NPR also provides a useful timeline for campaign finance reform:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121293380
2 years ago
January 13, 2010
Pictures of the moon over Mt. Pacaya in Guatamela. Then the lava (people were roasting marshmellows and one guy burnt his shoes) and then our guide. One of the three volcanoes behind him erupted a little (I didn’t really know that was possible) about 15 minutes later. Meaning to post for a while.
2 years ago“In “The Trouble with Poetry,” Billy Collins asks if the time will ever come when poets will have “compared everything in the world / to everything else in the world,” leaving them with nothing to do but sit at their desks with folded hands. He knows that won’t happen, and so do we. For those infected with the need to discover the past, there will always be mysteries pulling us through digital or archival darkness. That is why people with tenure as well as those without continue to write. Collins admits that though poetry fills him with joy and with sorrow, “mostly poetry fills me / with the urge to write poetry, / to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame / to appear at the tip of my pencil.” If you have discovered that flame, you will write history.”
—Ulrich from the AHA’s Perspectives
2 years ago
July 24, 2009
Daytrotter has some great recrodings. I like the version of “Creature Fear” by Bon Iver, in particular. Fleet Foxes, Langhorne Slim, Ingrid Michaelson, and The Felice Brothers have also done good stuff on there. I like their posters, too.
2 years ago
June 25, 2009
This blog tracks community art goings-on in Winston-Salem and the Triad area. Meredith is the administrator, and the posts are, in my objective opinion, awesome. Check it out.
June 17, 2009
To begin
How do authors begin their work? How does one chose a single word, sentence, paragraph, or page to properly introduce the amalgamation of thousands of words to come? The words below come from three works and represent three decisions of how to begin.
“My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother. Father used to dub me Shapka , for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month. He ceased dubbing me that because I ordered him to cease dubbing me that. It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative.”
-Jonathon Safron Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“By the grace of God, my kinfolks and I are Carolinians. Our Grandmother Bower always told us we had the honor to be born in Carolina. She said we and all of our kissing kin were Carolinians, and that after we were Carolinians we were Southerners, and after we were Southerners, we were citizens of the United States. We were older than the Union in Carolina, and our grandmother told us never to forget that fact. Our kinfolks had given their personal consent to the forming of the Union, we had voted for it at the polls, and what we had voted to form we had had the right to vote to unform . We knew of course what our grandmother was talking about, for our grandmother was an old Confederate lady—she was reconstructed but she was reconstructed in her own way, so whenever she got to talking about us and the grace of God, we said “Yes, ma’am” to our grandmother.”
-Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….”
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
May 15, 2009
Day-Lewis.
D-Day tearin’ up the streets of Italia. The trailor for Nine, his newest flick, is here. I am not big on musicals…but it is D-day…but then again I am not big on musicals at all…
3 years ago
March 4, 2009
January 20, 2009
