Arts

Since I lack artistic appreciation…

During campaign week, there was an urban dance show and there was a Battle of the Bands.  Last year’s student government executive and some of their friends had their own band.  The music was a little bit too screaming-hard-rock for my taste, but ah well.

The next weekend was Aida.  The play itself was cheesy, but the acting was good.

The second weekend in May was a trip to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art.  It was a SLE trip because our second paper was comparing a painting to a literary work.  The trip was moderately interesting even though I’m not an artsy person.  The lecture at the start gave some interesting historical tidbits. 

I wasn’t very interested in the static works (paintings), but there were some video exhibitions that I liked.  There was an entire floor on one video person.  He paints stuff, but he also does videos of himself painting, and the videos are very good.  He does some cool stuff with turning the film backwards (in time).  In one, he has a painting that, when he filmed it, he had finished and was ripping up and tearing down from the wall.  With the backwardsness, though, he was building up the painting from pieces.  There was another one where he painted something using various household objects (rag, tea kettle, something that splatters…) with black ink.  Doing it backwards gave the effect of him taking the black ink off with a rag (and the ink going up into the tea kettle…).  Seeing a rag move backwards in time to pick up paint was definitely worth seeing.

The next day was Bent, a play about the Nazi treatment of LGBTQ people during the holocaust.  It was intense.

There was also an end of year comedy show that one of my friends helped organize.  It was for a sketch comedy class that he was taking.  It turned out very well.  One of the highlights was a ghetto spelling bee.  One of the contestants was “La-ka,” pronounced “la dash ka.”  It took me embarrassingly long to get that joke.  The words were funny too.  One was a word pronounced like “omelette.”  The word was “Immalet” as in “Immalet (I am going to let) you go.”