Pentathlon: Fall Semester

#Film #ArtsScholars
Disney+
Saturday, February 20, 2021

Last week I had the opportunity to watch High School Musical with some of my peers from Arts Scholars. With the online learning environment, it was nice to have people gather (albeit virtually) for some community bonding. It was also an interesting experience to revisit a piece of my childhood that I have not interacted with since becoming a young adult. In connection to my career path as an English teacher, this experience was important in compelling me to consider how one can view the same media differently over a period of time. The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, reads much differently to a student amid their adolescent development than it would to a middle-aged adult. Indeed, now that I have grown up past the age of the film’s target audience (and have actually been through high school) I now see that some of the plot points are both unrealistic and childish. Moreover, many of these scenes play to stereotypical tropes found in both teen films (e.g., handsome but rude jocks; shy student excelling in math and science, etc.) and Disney films (e.g., “we’re all in this together,” and “be yourself”). These were not as obvious and did not seem as formulaic when I was a child.

Nevertheless, I immensely enjoyed re-watching the film (in fact, I went on to watch the other two on my own time). And, in watching with other students my age, I came to understand the creativity of those who worked on High School Musical, for it has affected the collective memory of my generation; we identify with it even after we have grown up. Though the plot was cheesy and contrived at times, I was nonetheless struck by the infectious melodies, heartened by the endearing story, and even empowered by the characters’ courage to manifest their own identities.  

Billy Collins' TED Talk "Everyday Moments, Caught in Time"

#Presentation
TED.com
Monday, March 15, 2021

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https://www.ted.com/talks/billy_collins_everyday_moments_caught_in_time

This past week, I watched an incredibly intriguing TED Talk by the former poet laureate, Billy Collins. I have always admired Collins’ work because his poems are incredibly funny yet deceptively simple. Though his poems are usually quite easy to understand, Collins leaves a great deal of room for discussion and interpretation. In the talk, he presented five clips which animated the words of his poems. The images in these clips do more than simply illustrate the words, however; they enhance them by expanding upon the original work. In the clip of “The Country,” for instance, the animators expanded upon the mouse who runs with a match being “a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer in a forgotten ritual” by animating a crowd of little brown mice bowing before the match. This was not mentioned in the original poem but served to augment it by giving the audience a broader understanding of that specific line (they also laughed wildly when those images flashed upon the screen). In “Some Days,” the animators illustrated the characters of a doll house with such detail that audiences could see the light reflecting off of the porcelain pieces. Again, this was not mentioned in the original poem, but allowed the readers to interact with it on a visual level.

The multi-media endeavor of illustrating poems would be an interesting assignment for an arts or English class. Indeed, for these clips to be successful, the animators must engage in a careful balancing act of looking deeply into a poem to extract the most meaningful images while also preserving the poem’s ambiguity which welcomes different interpretations. Those who illustrated Collins’ poems did this wonderfully. They did not seek to summarize his poems with images, but rather to reimagine them through images and sounds which were not present in the original work.

Easter Services at Fallston United Methodist Church

#Music

Fallston United Methodist Church

Fallston, Maryland

Sunday, April 4, 2021

I had the privilege of playing piano at a local church this Easter holiday. As this Easter marks a little over a year since the world was forced to adapt to keep people safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the perfect time to reflect about how my life has changed within the past year. This particular Easter was interesting because I played at both virtual and in-person services. The virtual services were pre-recorded which allowed us musicians to stop recording if we made a mistake and edit the audio to balance the sound. This stands in sharp contrast to the in-person services where we must play through the mistakes and run sound checks well in advance because we cannot stop mid-service to fiddle with the soundboard. The juxtapositions between these performances compelled me to consider how the pandemic is changing how artists work and how live performances, showings, galas, etc. differ from virtual sessions. I now have a deeper understanding of how interactive art is—it is fundamentally a conversation between the art and the artist. This understanding is essential as a future English teacher; if students think of themselves as being in conversation with an author rather than an observer of their work, they will more readily immerse themselves in the discourse surrounding the texts. It was also an interesting experience playing piano outside in the cold! People still showed up for the service though, helping me realize that audiences enjoy art that brings people together.

Sense and Sensibility (1995) Film Screening

#Literature
Amazon Prime
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

“In seasons of cheerfulness, no temper could be more cheerful than hers, or possess,

in a greater degree, that sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself”

For my final pentathlon credit of the year, I chose to watch Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility. The story is quite simple but most captivating: two young women seek husbands who can provide them with a degree of financial security after the death of their father leaves them destitute. Like most works of classic literature, the plot welcomed conversations surrounding gender roles, sexism, and power and compelled me to consider how times have changed. In this way, it was particularly interesting to notice Thompson’s modifications of the source material. The original story centered around the importance of marriage and highlighted the courting processes between the Dashwood sisters and their suitors. The focus of Thompson’s adaptation however, is not placed on marriage (i.e., the men) but rather on the bond between the sisters. Consequently, Thompson shifts the narrative from helpless girls simply “waiting around” for a man to save them, to a tale of strong women who find their strength and their purpose from one another. Additionally, Thompson made the men much more likable and modern by diluting the sexism and patriarchalism which categorized these suitors in the book.

After watching the film, I thought about how art can change throughout time. The cultural reality in which Sense and Sensibility was first published is certainly different from our contemporary culture (indeed, the book was originally published anonymously to encourage male readership). Yet, Thompson was able to adapt the story to make it more palatable in the modern world while still maintaining the integrity of the original story. After watching this film, I learned how we can approach controversial art which endorses antiquated or prejudiced ideals. Rather than dismiss for being bigoted, these works are wonderful ways to welcome potentially difficult conversations about the nature of social progress and ways we can continue to move forward in the contemporary age.