I had the pleasure of meeting Jacqueline Smith over my winter break. My parents took us to see the Lorraine Motel, which is where MLK was assassinated. I had already felt strange taking pictures in front of the place someone was murdered at, so I waited in the car. Across the street from the motel, I saw Smith sitting in the rain, and I learned about her work. She had been forcibly removed from the motel in 1988. Since then (almost 33 years later), she has been boycotting the museum and protesting the massive investment that converted the motel into a museum for MLK. She is homeless, and her protest site relies entirely upon the support of others. She receives no welfare or financial assistance. She sits across from the museum every day through terrible weather in a part of town, which is considered unsafe and dangerous.
After months quarantined inside my house, venturing outdoors felt much like a trip to an amusement park. Eagerly awaiting my arrival at the beach for my first immersion in the natural world in nearly a quarter of a year, something felt different. For so long, I had taken for granted the wonders of the environment, thinking of patches of grass under a shady tree at the park as a place to have a picnic with friends or a stretch of sand by the salty seawater as the perfect spot for an afternoon of tanning. Instead of recognizing the innate beauty of the world around me, I had always looked for opportunities to further my own contentment, never appreciating nature for being simply that: nature.
What is it with spring
and wasps? More than daffodils’ thrusting yellow buds or the French’s mustard-colored crocuses they are the ones who know when Spring arrives. Take this one. Dear Alex,
How are you in Chicago? In the news today I only see New York, New York, and New York, where exhausted nurses and exhausted doctors and failing systems can’t cope with much more as everyone catches the coronavirus and I can’t imagine Chicago is that far behind because it’s also a big city, the Big Apple of the Midwest so maybe it’s more like the Big Corn or something or maybe I’ll just go with Carl Sandburg and the Hog Butcher for the World but I digress. Hi folks. I was unsure what I wanted to write, so I’ll tell you a (true!) story instead. We’ve ended up somewhere strange.
Well, not too strange. Really, just strange enough. Or just one really strange guy, as it might be. Almost any rhythm can be decomposed into heart beats. Not always human, not always regular, sometimes hummingbird stuttering, sometimes zero gravity’s infinite pulsations. This project set out to explore the idea of direct translation. What would happen if musical rhythm was translated into the written notation of syllabic speech? Etiology is a rhythmic record of the first three minutes of Camille Saint-Saens’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. I recorded all short (sixteenth, thirty-secondth, sixty-fourth) notes as stressed syllables, denoted with a (/), and all long (eighth, quarter, half, whole) notes as unstressed, denoted with a (-). This created a rhythmic map, which I matched with language that met these specific accent constraints. In this way, Etiology seeks to mimic the musical rhythm of the Rondo Capriccioso. Rather than an attempt to lyric the piece, Etiology is a rhythmic sibling, two pieces which share ventricle and breath in the form of our own, inherent, human tempo.
All my life has been lived on the figurative “right side of the tracks”. Nice neighbors, green lawns, and a dog or two to lay around with. More literally, I’ve always lived on the dry side of the tracks- that is to say, the side of the tracks that is not a beach.
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About MeHi! I'm Andrea. I really like words. Categories
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