Much like its title and cover art, the opening songs of Queen Mary are a little hard to parse at first. But as it grows on you, what started as discord gradually opens up into a very unique and unforgettable sound. Those familiar with Isaac Brock—the lead singer/songwriter of Modest Mouse—will instantly recognize his influence on Wolf Parade’s sound from the producer’s seat. Think “The Lonesome Crowded West,” but with less country twang and with the howling fury turned up to 11. It’s clearly a very emotional album, but one that owes its stylistic debts more to 19th Century Romanticism than teen angst. In a way, it’s almost fitting that the band fashioned their debut as an apology for breaking the ballroom doors of an ocean liner (the titular Queen Mary) in a violent séance. Now if that’s not rock and roll, I don’t know what is!

Wolf Parade use their guitars to produce a sort of percussion that is at once loud, driving, and elegant in its simplicity. The synths on “I’ll Believe in Anything” sound like a Commodore 64 as interpreted by Crystal Castles: fun, cheeky, and cool at the same time. This sound creates the perfect complement for Boeckner and Krug’s wonderfully disjointed falsetto. To call it “singing” almost misses the point, as Wolf Parade succeed at conveying raw sound and emotion as much as poetic meaning. While the words are at times a little hard to make out, there’s lyrical complexity buried within Queen Mary that rewards repeated listening. It’s a great record for both the start and end of a good night in that regard. No easy trick, but it makes Queen Mary something to definitely fist-bump along to either with friends or in private.  While their songwriting can get bit tedious and intense at times, Wolf Parade earns their right to self-indulgence by channeling their manic energy into an album that rocks out consistently from beginning to end.

The Highlights:

-”Shine a Light”

-The dueling aristocarast in the music video for “I’ll Believe in Anything”

- Great for sloppy sing-alongs

Charlie Kessner '12 and Sofia Tedesco '14 co-teach Monday night's capoeira class in the Bucksbaum dance studio. Photograph by Emma Sinai-Yunker

Capoeira emerged as a product of Afro-Brazilian slavery circa 1500 AD. At its inception, it is believed to have been a martial art disguised as a dance, a cunning tactic employed by Brazilian slaves to seize their freedom from their unsuspecting masters.

“Once it was established as a focal thing of the slaves in Brazil, Capoeira became a lynch pin for a whole movement of cultural expression … as a new Brazilian identity,” Charlie Kessner ’12, co-president of Grinnell College’s Capoeira group said.

Under the Portuguese, Capoeira faced a long ban. During this period, the reputation of Capoeira was conflicted, as the Capoeiristas who used their lethal ability to free themselves tended to turn to crime. However, over the course of its own history and that of Brazil, Capoeira has found a new place in society.

“At the turn of the twentieth century, there was kind of a spark of a new direction for it,” Kessner said, “where there were a few masters who wanted to practice it more recreationally and then bring about another movement in cultural identity for Brazilians.”

With globalization, Capoeira has spread in popularity beyond Brazil. In the United States, Capoeira began to intrigue American martial artists in the 70s. Today, at Grinnell and around the world, Capoeira is better thought of as a game.

“It’s probably the most friendship-based martial art. This is definitely the most cohesive martial art, also because we don’t have set kata like other martial arts do,” said Sofia Tedesco, ’14, Capoeira co-president, in comparison to other martial arts in which she has been involved.

Capoeira has adapted to its large and multicultural following by implementing features more familiar to “Eastern” martial arts. Capoeiristas, after entering the larger community by initiation at an annual “bautizado” (baptism), gain a belt to which they attach shorter cords as they progress. Also, capoeiristas are more recently organized into schools. Participants in a uniquely communal and giving art, capoeiristas who have attained the maximum cord level begin to teach others, as a “professor,” “mestre,” or, most adept of all, “contra mestre.”

Grinnell’s group is also involved in the grand tradition of Capoeira, sharing an affiliation with a celebrated contra mestre Ninja and Cornell College’s large capoeira group. Members are privy to what Charlie Kessner calls, “a large support network,” the inviting and caring community that surrounds Capoeira and its practice. A certain playfulness abounds among capoeiristas, as demonstrated by the monikers among those nicknamed, like those of contra mestres, “Ninja” and “Tanque” (Tank). The movements of Capoeira itself still today seem to be disguised behind a light-stepped dance, peppered with dodges and kicks and punctuated by cartwheels and handstands.

Perhaps the most ingratiating aspect of all is Capoeira’s versatile appeal to peoples of a broad array of interests. Tedesco recounts how she began Capoeira in her first year at Grinnell, drawn by a previous interest and participation in martial arts. For Tedesco, Capoeira’s innate camaraderie and fluidness provided a new avenue for her life at Grinnell.

“It became an expression, and, honestly, really good homework relief,” she said.

Kessner, on the other hand, began to practice Capoeira in middle school. Now, he enjoys its strong musical component most of all, his experience informed by his interest in musical ethnology and his majors in Music and Anthropology.

Inviting others to share in this dynamic art form, Tadesco said of the group, “Practices are Mondays from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., no experience necessary, Bucksbaum dance studio.”

“It’s good fun, it’s a good aerobic exercise. Don’t be intimidated by it; it’s really a beautiful thing that more people should do,” Kessner said.

Dancers, martial artists, those interested in Capoeira, or anyone who “just wants to know how to move” is welcome to join this remarkably friendly group at their own pace and bring whatever passion they want in their encounter with Capoeira.

Returning to Bridesmaids, the film (starring Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Annie Mumolo) more than delivers on its promise of Apatowian revelry, happily laying thick layers of sexual humor, bodily fluids, and painfully awkward social misfortune over what boils down to a fairly sweet, though not particularly original, rom-com storyline about love, friendship, and rediscovering one’s confidence.

The film focuses on the story of Annie Walker (Wiig), a 30-something Milwaukee resident going through a personal crisis. The small bakery she owned and operated recently went out of business, and her boyfriend (and former business partner) promptly dumped her, leaving her in a dismal state, both financially and existentially. She lives with a British brother and sister (who seem intent on fulfilling the criteria for world’s worst possible roommates) and works at a jewelry store—a job she only got because her mother is the owner’s AA sponsor.

To complicate things further, Annie’s lifelong best friend Lillian (played by SNL alum Maya Rudolph) becomes engaged and asks Annie to be the Maid of Honor, a role she is initially more than happy to fulfill, but which ends up placing her in a volatile situation, as she competes for Lillian’s friendship with the rich and beautiful bridesmaid, Helen Harris (the inexplicably familiar Rose Byrne).

What follows is the humorous chronicling of Annie’s downward trajectory to her own personal “bottom” and subsequent attempt to re-invent herself, win back her best friend, and get the proverbial guy (a Milwaukee cop played by the characteristically likeable Irishman Chris O’Dowd).

Not a lot of surprises here, both in terms of structure and ultimate resolution, but a solid script and a talented cast serve to keep the story moving when it inevitably lags or the jokes miss their mark.

Both Wiig and Rudolph (easier to appreciate the more years separate her from her rather unfortunate days on SNL) do a fine job of balancing the serious and comedic elements of the plot. But the real laughs come from the characters that surround them, most notably Melissa McCarthy’s bawdy bridesmaid, Megan (a role which just earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress—no easy feat in comedy), and Jon Hamm’s caddish playboy, Ted.

These two, along with the rest of the cast (with the exception of the half-heartedly vilified bourgeois Barbie doll, Byrne, whose main problem is unfortunately just not being particularly funny) make this a solid comedic effort. Though probably not deserving that buzz that surrounded it last spring and far from on-par with the stuff of Apatow’s early years, Bridesmaids provides a heartfelt message, a love story anyone could get behind, and enough laughs to keep you interested.

After countless attempts at forming bands, Alex Karaba and Dan Dellandunl came to the conclusion that they are at their best when playing together. They complement each other in a way that listeners feel any addition to the band would be unneeded, and even detrimental to the quality and type of music produced.

Slow Animal has been compared to bands such as Wavves and Bummer Sanders. Their mix of punk, pop, garage, lo-fi and fuzz combine into a mixture of sounds that will please the ear of anyone looking to go wild. With their upbeat tempos and fuzzy lyrics, a dance party is sure to follow them wherever they go.

Their frantic instrumentation sounds like its riding on the waves of youth. Feelings of rebellion and defiance take control as the listener losses themselves in the music. Their garage-band style paints a picture of a late summer night party on the beach with a group of rebellious teenagers dancing around a roaring fire. Head banging and a mosh pit will be a guarantee.

Cymbals crash at an ever-increasing rate as the mindset of everyone is slowly turned into a mentality of letting go. It is easy to imagine the performers lose control of reality and get sucked into the infectious melodies of their music themselves. Their interactions with the crowd enriches the experience to one where you are not only a listener, you are a part of the music. Classes, teachers, and the week will leave your mind as you become not only one with the music, but one with the experience.

Once the listener is hooked into the music, Slow Animal even further hypnotizes them with a unique mix of what can only be described as vocal humming.  Between choruses, they resemble bands like the Beach Boys and The Beatles and use a mixture of noises and rhythms to create a bridge connecting the different parts of the song. Your head starts swaying back and forth as you peacefully await the next chorus to take you away once again.

As they continue to play, this band will only continue to gain popularity.

Andy Lange '13's Smith Gallery exhibit highlights the subtle importance of life's various Tight Spaces. Photograph by Kathlyn Cabrera

He states “What I am investigating with the show is what can all be done with a very small palette, this is the main thing that I’ve done throughout the show. I think the title really ties into the theme of tight spaces in that I find that in making a work of art if I don’t give myself some sort of parameters it gets very daunting and the message often gets muddled. I think if you give yourself very few possibilities you are able to do very interesting things with those very few pieces and that’s what I’ve tried to do throughout the show.”

Lange explains that his interest in very limited parameters began in his introductory Art class with Professor Kluber.

“I started doing work in a similar style in Introduction to the Studio, during our unit with Adobe Illustrator. I was really fascinated with doing parametric design, where you set really strict units or rules for yourself before you begin a piece,” Lange said. “The cube form which is on the card advertising the show is what I used to make all the two dimensional pieces there.”

Architecture has been a long-time passion for Lange and he is now working on translating different forms throughout different art mediums.

“I am really interested in architecture—that’s what I plan to do after college—so space is something I’m really interested in exploring through my work. I took sculpture this past semester, so I really worked to try to translate so of those two dimensional concepts into three dimensional pieces, which I think the paper on the floor really does the best. It is literally one form that is repeated over and over again to make a very organic shape” said Lange.

Lange attended a six week art program this past summer that solidified his interest in architecture as a career. “I saw a flyer in the studio for an architecture program, so I applied and got to do the program. It’s called Career Discovery, it is a six week architecture program that is designed to replicate a master’s program to help participants figure out if that is something they want to do later on,” Lange said. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done; I practically lived in the studio for the whole summer. It did however definitely make me develop a passion for architecture and working in the studio, doing lots of hands on work.”

Lange’s show calls much needed attention to the small and “tight spaces,” that get overlooked due to their simplicity. “I’m really trying to show what you can do with simple things and the beauty in simple spaces. I think often times when people think of something they think the more complicated it is the better it is. I think an example is that you could think a dish with one hundred ingredients is the better than a recipe with only five, but that isn’t true and that is something I’m trying to convey. I want to highlight the significance of the little unit that can be overlooked.” Lange said.

Lange’s show will be on display until Friday, Feb. 3, 2012.

Jamison-Lucy's exhibition "Gravitas", depicted various self-portraits drawn from film-stills. Photograph by Emma Sinai-Yunker.

Jamieson-Lucy began working on the self-portraits last semester, though most of the pieces in “Gravitas” were completed over the past month.

“It’s sort of an exploration of self and self-image through self-portrait,” Jamieson-Lucy said. “I think that self-portraits are really interesting, in that I am always available to be a subject. I have to find a mirror or a camera or a webcam and I can make art.”
The exhibit arose from a Mentorship Advanced Project in drawing Jamieson-Lucy, who is an Art/Biochemistry double major, completed this semester. “Gravitas” addresses themes of body image and self-representation.

“It was a big hurdle to get over drawing myself naked, and then accepting that I was going to put it up for the whole school to see,” Jamieson-Lucy said. “One of the things that I wanted to work through in my art was to look at body image and how by drawing you can get over stuff that you couldn’t get over just by trying to get over it another way.”

The portraits provide large-scale perspectives of Jamieson-Lucy and make use of innovative subject positioning and light and dark additive and subtractive marks. Jamieson-Lucy drew the portraits from video stills, created by recording PhotoBooth videos of herself.
Jamieson-Lucy attributed her positioning ingenuity to time spent in Figure-Drawing Club and inspiration from artist Jenny Saville.

“Drawing is a really great way to take charge of yourself and your self image. It’s surprisingly healing,” Jamieson-Lucy said. “It’s really hard to be mad about how you look when you’ve just spent eight hours drawing yourself and you put all that effort and care and attention into something that’s you.”

“Gravitas” will be on display in Smith Gallery until Friday.

“tRADitions + enCOUNTers,” directed by Celeste Miller, Theater and Dance, and performed by the Dance Ensemble and several guest performers and groups, opened on Friday, Dec. 2. With a focus on how the habits of daily life and learned movement practices come together, the piece included—and put in conversation— a massive spectrum of movement forms and traditions. Broadly, the show progressed through a kind of conversational rhythm wherein distinctly modern and collaborative pieces, performed and developed by the ensemble, alternated with guest performances by groups such as indepenDANCE (hip-hop), Aja Naachle (Bollywood) and Legacia Latino (Contemporary Salsa).

The project originated in a specific kind of openness and flexibility, which profoundly impacted the final production.

“Well we started with the title, “Traditions and Encounters”, which actually Shawn Womack, the previous director, had come up with in the spring semester of last year,” Moreland said. “We all kind of started together because Celeste was new. So we had this new group, this new title and we began to just explore the idea of tradition. We started with Javanese dance.”

The Ensemble’s movement-based reflection on traditional Javanese dance focused on the quotidian actions of dressing in traditional costume before moving into the dance itself. Enter Val Vetter, College Dean and Javanese Dance instructor, to the sounds of live Gamalan directed by Professor Roger Vetter, Music. In her collaborative role with the Ensemble, Vetter brought a wealth of knowledge about Javanese dance as well as a playfulness, which, in the performance, resulted in a deliberate troubling of gender roles. Adelle Yin ’12 and Moreland performed two variations of “strong-male” Javanese dance, featuring impressive balances, extensions and the iconic bend of the wrist.

Further engaging with and troubling dance traditions, this time by blurring the line between ‘intentional’ choreographed movement and more improvisational movement, the Ensemble requested audience participation in the form of notes tossed into a ‘growling bowl.’ At various points throughout the show, and with sound effects from off-stage, the Ensemble brought forth the growling bowl and read aloud the various contributions from which they improvised movement.

“I think especially with the theme of tradition it makes sense to include a wide variety of people,” Moreland said.

Even in the choreographed work, collaboration was key.

“I invited the dancers to be investigators with me in terms of dance outside of our circle,” Miller said.

From these investigation arose not just the participates of groups like indepenDANCE, but also a variety of spoken word pieces which narrated the dancer’s choreographed work.

“The dancers interviewed family and friends,” Miller said, “and the spoken word was drawn from excerpts of these interviews. I thought that was beautiful because we got to see different family and cultural traditions.”

Indeed, several of the most expressive and intimate moments in the performance relayed stories from the dancers’ own lives. Moreland spoke of the winter tradition of Santa Lucia in her family, Yin of the blending of traditions that all relationships require.

Other poignant moments were almost silent. In the later half of the performance, the members of the dance ensemble rode into the black box theater on a few remaining campus bikes. They made a slow circle accompanied by the soft ringing of bike bells, the clicking of gears, and were gone. It was at moments like these that the show was most successful—insightful as a result of its openness and possessed of something deeply relevant to say.
In a piece that ranged from an exuberant shout to near whisper, it was the inclusion of so many distinct and honed voices that lent such cohesion to this encounter.

The Grinnell College Dance Ensemble is open to all artists with a commitment to expression through intentional movement. Next semester’s projects include “Now You See Me”, an exploration of dance and activism. The first workshop will be held on Jan. 25 at 4:30 p.m. in the Bucksbaum Dance Studio.

Photograph by Joanna Silverman.

The space itself is filled with vibrant and energetic wallpaper patterns of dynamic blues, yellows, purples and magentas, all vying for attention at once and still somehow complementing one another. The pattern is interrupted occasionally by another pattern, an organic, chaotic mishmash of colors and lines.

On top of the wallpaper, flanking the collages, Espinosa layered white vinyl pieces drawn freehand on a tablet, which provide areas of visual calm among the turbulent wallpaper.
In front of this animated backdrop are mounted digital collages of appropriated and compiled imagery. Espinosa often uses images of cities and of women drawn from idealized pop culture images and from the glorified paintings the history of art.

In his artist statement, Espinosa explains, “My collages are configurations of disparate elements that I appropriate from search engines and image databases that come together to form aesthetically pleasing compositions. I use imagery that expresses my feelings of frustration about relationships.”

Amidst the lively images are strewn words and phrases, lifted from Espinosa’s sketchbooks. According to Espinosa, “The fragmented phrases and sentences that litter the collages … communicate the futility of my attempts to translate my emotions into words.”
In fact, the collages become a pop culture mash-up of conflicting images and emotions, sentences and stock images that, together, build a complicated and intriguing narrative that draws the viewer in.

The title for the show is a reference both to the new Drake album, which Espinosa listened to while creating the show, and to the feelings he ended up experiencing after putting the show together.

“‘Take Care’ is pretty fitting for what I’m trying to say,” Espinosa said, “because it’s just a catharsis, not a bashing.”

In his artist statement, Espinosa continued this thought: “With this show, I find emotional release. I hope to be able to purge these unwanted emotions through this act of catharsis.”
Overall, Espinosa said “Take Care” allowed him to work in a new way toward producing a purposeful installation that expressed the meaning he wanted it to.

“I got so much out of it,” he said. “My work is usually more process driven, and more divergent, and not convergent.  This was more convergent, where I actually had a goal in mind, because I was fueled by the emotions I was feeling at that particular point. It’s a very refreshing change of pace.”

Created during the past semester, Espinosa chose to install “Take Care” in the Chrystal Center Gallery after talking to Director of the Faulconer Gallery Lesley Wright.

“I was looking through available galleries and exhibition places, and Lesley Wright gave me a list and recommended me to this,” Espinosa said. “I showed her most of my work and she said, ‘The Chrystal Center Gallery might be the best place for your work because there are a lot of pristine walls and it just has the right amount of room for it.”

In the end, the exhibition succeeded in that it is as meaningful as it is beautiful. Despite the cold weather and distance of the gallery, it should not be missed.

This distinction becomes clearer and more meaningful when juxtaposed with an activist artistic practice. Here the very process of producing the work consists of political engagement. Activist and curator Lucy Lippard perhaps puts it best when she characterizes political art as “politically concerned” while activist art is “politically involved.” This involvement, like more traditional activism, often consists of interactive and participatory processes on the level of community. Such work might involve a community in the authorship and production of a work of art; the very process of production becomes a politicized act, highlighting specific issues relevant to the participant authors or imagining and creating an alternative space for that community.The success of such work often rests largely on the success of this process, the emphasis resting on this process rather than the material product that emerges from it.

What conclusions can we draw from this comparison? While many of the nuances contained within politically and socially engaging artwork escape the broad strokes used here, I’ll attempt to reach some general conclusions. Political art objects being exhibited in more traditional venues, whether a museum, gallery or a similar institution, occupy a very different space than the processes of activist art. For some critics this presents a line of attack, they argue such work is limited by the scope viewership of these spaces, that these institutions force artists to present work in line with rigid institutional sensibilities. From this perspective activist art removes itself from such restrictions, engaging its audience on equal footing and in public spaces. There is of course no demand on exclusivity to either of these models. What perhaps becomes most interesting is a synthesis of the two, a form that navigates and disrupts traditional boundaries through imaginative and engaging artistic processes.

Cuban performance artist and activist Tania Bruguera provides a model for precisely this kind of balance. With work ranging from more traditional installation and performance to radical community based actions, she repeatedly reinvents herself. Her current project, Movimiento Inmigrante Internacional, mobilizes individuals and organizations in communities around the world to address political issues facing immigrants. The project embraces a multiplicity of tactics to stimulate awareness and dialogue on a local and international level. A map of actions taking place as a part of this project on International Migrants Day, Dec. 18, is visible at http://immigrant-movement.us/december18/.

Work like Bruguera’s and recent events highlight both exciting new ways that communities share spaces and the increasing necessity for this type of engagement.

Accompanied by a beautiful catalog, more fully explaining various interpretations of each work and how they fit together as a cohesive whole, “Bare Bones” utilizes the rather dreary and awkward space of the Burling Gallery to enliven the library and provide relief for anyone happening through the basement while studying.

Lewandowski chose the 17 works of art for various reasons—both to exhibit recent acquisitions like the Diane Victor piece “The Rape of Africa” from 2009, and to display works that don’t usually get much sunlight.  For example, Enrique Chagoya’s piece “Illegal Alien’s Guide to Existentialism or My Private Border Patrol”, which features prominently on the cover of her catalog, has not been exhibited once since it was acquired in 2007.
In other cases, Lewandowski chose works by artists who get a lot of attention for other pieces, but whose particular pieces are not usually displayed. The Kara Walker and Goya both fall into this category.

“Bare Bones” is the culmination of a Faulconer Gallery internship Lewandowski participated in to create an independent exhibition, with the help of Tilly Woodward, Curator of Academic and Public Outreach. Lewandowski has also worked in the Print and Drawing Study Room for three years and in that time has come to know the collection at Grinnell very well.

“I’ve organized the works somewhat thematically to encourage viewers to find their own connections between works,” Lewandowski said. “I’m a firm believer that it’s very important to first look at art without external interpretation.”

And by bringing the works out of the collection for everyone to see them, Lewandowski provides a very special opportunity. Although many of the works are digitized online, seeing them in person is an entirely different experience. The Chagoya, for example, has a distinct materiality to it and reflects light in a way that is totally lost digitally.
At her gallery talk and reception on Thursday, Lewandowski spoke briefly about “Bare Bones”: “I’ve become pretty familiar with the collection and the stronger pieces (in my opinion) in the collection, the artists that have a good representation in the collection. From the top of my head, I could give you five artists who I associate most with the Grinnell collection.”

These artists—Francisco Goya, William Kentridge, Kara Walker, Jiri Anderle and Enrique Chagoya—are therefore represented in her exhibition, making “Bare Bones” a unique, Grinnellian exhibition.

Albert Liu ’13 began the recital with a solo piece by J.S. Bach for violin, and was followed by Georgia Bock ’13 and Qimeng Gao’13, who played Jules Massenet and Jean-Baptiste Accolay respectively. Sami Rebein ’14 then dedicated her piece, Szymanowski’s “Chant de Roxanne”, to her mother of the same name, who was in the audience. Finally, Leah Meyer ’15 concluded the recital with a piece by Austro-Hungarian composer Erich Korngold. Lecturer Melinda Westphalen, Music, accompanied the last four performances on piano.
The five performers take lessons in advanced violin under Nancy Gaub, who studied at both Juilliard and Chicago College of Performing Arts.

“I love teaching violin at Grinnell because the students are enthusiastic and very smart,” Gaub said. “At the conservatories I studied at, there are students who are terrific players, but have little curiosity about anything else. I always find my students here very stimulating.”

Students study violin with Gaub for various reasons, whether they are continuing to pursue an instrument they have played since they were three or four years old, or whether they have never played before in their life and just find the instrument appealing.
Gaub’s students receive guidance in “the basics of tone production, intonation, dynamics, as well as musicianship,” she said. She tries to push her advanced students to the extremes of expression and technique.

“Since I have students at so many different levels, they each play different pieces,” Gaub said.

She emphasizes that all of her students are worth hearing.

“So many of [my students] comment that they love hearing our semester-end recitals,” Gaub said, “The beginners all the way to the most advanced, as they hear different repertoire they might like to play themselves, and hear things to which they can aspire.”

It all starts with David Byrne putting on a tape; one guy alone on the stage with a stool, a guitar, and an oversized suit. The first time my parents sat me down to watch Stop Making Sense, they gave me just about the same level of explanation. So this is the greatest rock film of all time? I wasn’t totally sold in 8th grade, but I think that now I’d have to say yes. It’s not as much a show as performance art—simple and flawless in its presentation.

David Byrne and co. would probably be blushing awkwardly. For a gang of Rhode Island art students, the Talking Heads are anything BUT pretentious. Listening to the album, you get the sense that they are even a little awed by their own performance; in between sets, the lead singer barely manages to blurt out a stunned “thanks!”
No, really—thank you! Recorded live over the course of three different shows, this album is as much a labor of love from the Talking Heads to their fans as anything else. There’s something for everyone here—shameless 80s synth, soulful choruses, goofy banter, and rousing sing-along classics (like “Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down the House”). The whole thing is almost too much fun to stop listening to (no mean feat at an hour-forty).  I have no idea what “making flippy-floppy” means, but I’m sure that I want to do whatever David Byrne is doing. I just can’t help but smile at his straight-faced protestations that “This ain’t no party; this ain’t no disco; this ain’t no foolin’ around!”

And yet, it totally is. This record is the ultimate concert-in-a-box: a soundtrack for whatever cheeky, retro shenanigans it may inspire. It may be no “party or disco”, but I know that it routinely leads to some of the best dance parties at Grinnell every time it gets screened at Gardner. But in all honesty, I still just love watching the concert video. It’s almost fitting that after all these years, this album still holds up as an unmatched feat of art, showmanship, and style despite all its efforts to Stop Making Sense.

The Highlights:
•The songs all complement each other perfectly
•“Once in a Lifetime,” “Thank you for sending me an Angel,” “What a day it was”
•David Byrne’s Big Suit
•Live songs that are better than their studio versions

Smith Gallery. Photograph by Marfa Prokhova.

“Our work had a lot of qualities that overlapped or just invaded the experience of other works,” Amy Tsui ’12 said. Tsui’s two pieces, “Tracing” and “Sectioning”, explored the human form with topographical lines or cuts.

“The work that I did was pretty rigorous,” Tsui said. “Lots of doing the same motion and thinking intensely about form. I was intrigued with being able to pull out a form that I thought of in 3D and place it on a 2D surface.”

Kitty corner from Tsui’s work was an installation by Jo Murray ’12, called “Natural Selection,” which presented various decorative boxes each containing bees, moths and even a praying mantis. Viewers were encouraged to explore the boxes and the velvet lined pillows showed the true beauty of creatures who are often considered disturbing.

Equally lovely and disturbing, Susanna Moller’s ’12’s series of watercolors titled “Don’t Stare” isolated different parts of the human body including a hand, foot and forearm as well as views of teeth and gums, contrasting beauty with decay.

The exhibition was well curated with a subtle east-west transition from color pieces into black and whites.
“I think they did a really good job of organizing the space, laying it out and not having it feel really cluttered,” Jeremy Chen, Art, said.

Engaging the space left clear by the two-dimensional works, Carly Riley ’13’s large wooden sculpture, “Stairs,” twisted the form of a spiral staircase into a bold organic shape.

“This semester I’ve been doing an architecture-as-art theme. I’ve been taking architectural objects and warping them into more abstract shapes,” Riley said.

Dani Radoshevich ’12 also explored architectural themes in her diptych “Window Refractions.”

“My pieces come from a bigger project that is meant to be a kind of visual deconstruction of perspectival space and depth,” Radoshevich said.

The strong geometry evident in Riley and Radoshevich’s pieces contrast the flowing lines of Christopher Squire’s ’13 fabric, liquid starch and pen installation which covers much of the west wall. His piece offered a smooth transition between the colored and black and white pieces and drew the viewer’s eyes around the entirety of the exhibition. Squier is a Graphics Editor for the S&B.

Also on the west wall was a PB speaker and vintage cassette player projecting “Outgoing Message”, an audio feedback loop by Clint Williamson ’13. His piece created a surreal atmosphere throughout the exhibit that highlighted the strange connections between the pieces.

“It’s interesting because it’s a cassette loop originally designed for answering machines,” Williamson said. “It’s rare to find an analogue form that will actually loop. It’s a pretty cheap, lo-fi way of recording an ambient landscape.”

Williamson’s audio piece meshed with the soundtrack from “Final Call/A Wake”, a video installation by Nic Wilson ’12.

“When both pieces are playing sound its a great auditory experience,” Williamson said.

Wilson’s piece also contrasts the participation inherent in “Natural Selection” by purposely alienating the viewer and exploring themes of inactivity.

“‘Final Call/A Wake’ is a pessimistic meditation on insularity, stagnation,” Wilson said. “The mundane activity recorded reinforces the overall thematic pointlessness contained within the piece while simultaneously highlighting the general failure of art to participate in life itself.”

Wilson’s installation is comprised of two televisions facing each other on the floor. Each recorded two hours of time which Wilson spent surfing the web but one video showed the images on his computer and the other recorded Wilson’s face as he gazed into the screen.

The overall show’s reception was very positive.

“Its amazing! I think that we have a class of incredibly talented artists,” Phyllis Frimpong ’12 said.
“Definitely an interesting range and mix of things and a very open theme,” Paul Dampier ’12 said.

“A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi” is an aptly titled show and successfully draws out connections between seemingly disparate works. Make sure to check it out next time you pass through the JRC.

MacCauley’s voice has a distinct twang that amplifies the group’s indie-folk sound. On the new album, O’Neil and Ryan also take lead vocals on several tracks to create greater variation while maintaining the folksy sound that brought them to where they are today.  The band has made two appearances on “The Late Show with David Letterman” in the past year and a half and is now touring the country to promote “Divine Providence”.
This concert comes as a departure from the average show at Gardner because of its country feel.
“A lot of people have been talking about the lack of diversity in shows, and I think that this is pretty diverse,” said Pooj Padmaraj ’13, SGA Concerts Chair.

Unlike most Gardner concerts, this show will be ticketed. Admission is free and tickets were available to students outside of the dining hall every day this week from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 11 and the show will begin at 9 p.m.

Lecturer John Kizilarmut, Music, met McComas-Reichl professionally, which introduced him to the group and ultimately brought The Zodiac Trio to campus for Sunday night’s concert. Kizilarmut sees the group as actively challenging the rules and conventions of the jazz genre.

“They really push the boundaries of conventional music-making,” Kizilarmut said. “It’s an extremely challenging way to play music.”

This description was certainly appropriate on Sunday, as the group gave a remarkable performance, pushing the limits of harmony seemingly to a breaking point, only to reign themselves in at the last possible moment.

The group’s performance was anchored by McComas-Reichl and Stranahan, who worked with remarkable cohesion, the former pounding out the wandering bass lines that provide a backbone for the group’s sound, while the latter matched him beat-for-beat, his sticks roaming swiftly around his drum set, delivering frenetic, irregular strokes of accompaniment. Over this foundation, Zaleski competently laid sweeping sequences of piano notes, creating an array of musical moods ranging from melancholic to hysterical.

The entire group displayed a sense of comfort and synchrony that could only be the result of rigorous rehearsal, yet managed to infuse their music with an exciting quality of improvisation. Kizilarmut sees this natural, improvised style as the defining characteristic of the group’s sound.

“[They play] in a way that, even though there are all sorts of complicated things going on, the end product is extremely organic,” Kizilarmut said.

The trio that played on Sunday is in fact only the rhythm section of a larger group, The Zodiac Ensemble, formed just last year by McComas-Reichl, with fellow Stevens Point, Wisc. natives Aaron Kruziki and Mike Bjella.

According to Kizilarmut, the ensemble has recently finished recording for its debut album, which now only needs to be mastered before it can be released. Those who enjoyed Sunday night’s concert should keep their eye out for this project.

News and music are available on the ensemble’s website, www.zodiacensemble.com.

What motivated you to start writing about Rachel?
It was an accident. I was writing fiction and my agent suggested that I do it. At that point, memoir was not a genre as it is today. I just, at some point, started thinking that I had something to say and that I would try to work from life rather than inventing things. It was a stretch for me. I had not really written non-fiction. I wasn’t really interested in it. So it was a stretch for me to train myself to write how a fiction writer would write, except that it would be on real events. Once I’d trained myself to do it, it opened something in me and I became really interested in the idea of using myself and my life as a way of writing about something that was larger than myself or my life.

One of the summaries I found for Rachel in the World began with the question: What happens when love is no longer enough? Do you think love can be enough?
No. It never is.
Really?
Yeah. It’s one of the sad lessons of life. You need food. You need housing. And that’s at a basic level. Let’s go a little bit further. I’m not even talking about disabled versus nondisabled. But you need … meaningful activity. You need friends. You need a community.

But can’t those things be characterized by love?
No. If you … totally fall in love with somebody and you want to spend the rest of your life with that person, and neither of you have employment or means of money coming in … how will you do that? And then if you have no community or friends.

But couldn’t friends and community be a product of love?
Yeah, but here’s an example: Did your parents push you to do well in school?

Yeah, I would say so.
See, well that’s the difference. You probably didn’t feel it as love, but think about the parents who say “I love my kids. I let them do whatever they want,” and a parent who says, “I love my kids, but I have to make sure they can have a life when they’re not living with me.” So I have to do things that [Rachel] doesn’t necessarily like, I have to push her, I have to do this and this and this. You can say that love is underneath it. But just saying, “I love my child,” is never enough under any circumstances. And with a child with disabilities, there’s so much that’s necessary to help your son or daughter have a meaningful life that just the fact that you love your kid is not currency that’s valuable. You have to know how to work the system, find appropriate education. I mean, it’s the same thing as raising any kid. It’s work. So you can say that your parents do these things because they love you and want the best for you, but it’s more than that. It’s more than that. It’s the sense of responsibility, and the sense of looking at your kids as having potential.

How does Rachel make you rethink people?
Oh, that’s a fabulous question. That’s probably the biggest and most positive change for me. That my sense of what it is to have a meaningful life, to be on this earth, is so different from what it had been. I think before Rachel, I had this equation of productivity equals life. It was a very narrow view of what it means to be alive. But now, after being in her world, … I just think there’s a lot of ways of being on this earth. Those of us who can have a responsibility to help others who don’t have the means to make their own lives, to make their own happiness, necessarily, to help them find it. I think Rachel’s life is just as valuable as mine.

Three members of the original group and two long-term friendsRosa Marta Zárate Macias, Laura Garcia, Maria Elena Ramirez, Hilda Rodriguez and Felicitas Nuñez, came to Grinnell to share their history, theater, and vision. The women of Teatro Chicana met as first generation students at California State San Diego and were from relatively traditional Mexican families. Once on their own, they banded together through Guerilla/street Theater in support of feminism, workers rights, ecological awareness and peace.

“We’re not professional but we have a big heart,” Nuñez said.

Teatro Chicana was brought to Grinnell through the Spanish department and SOL.
“The beauty of their work lies in its simplicity and its impact. In very short one-act plays, the women drive home messages that transcend generations,” Professor Nasser said. “Street theater gives voice to the people and creates avenues of expression that would otherwise not exist.”

This past Tuesday, Teatro Chicana performed skits and songs from their theater. On Wednesday, they constructed an altar to honor the dead in accordance with Dia De Los Muertos, and on Thusday they read excerpts from and signed copies of their book Teatro Chicana: A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays.

Teatro Chicana’s performance Tuesday evening coincided with All Saint’s Day, which also marks the beginning of the Mexcian celebration of Dia De Los Muertos.

As part of Tuesday’s performance, the visiting members of Teatro Chicana performed their own version of “The View,” in which Nuñez explained that The Day of the Dead is about celebrating death as opposed to fearing it.

“We invite the dead to come back and join us,” Nuñez said.

Inspired by this, the women began their performance by honoring Jean Seberg, an activist and the star of the movie “Breathless,” who was born in Marshalltown, IA. Seberg supported the NAACP and American Indian tribes such as the Sac and Fox living in the Tama settlement near Marshalltown.

Teatro Chicana encouraged students to attend The Wild Rose Independent Film Festival, between November 3rd and 10th  in Des Moines, and which will celebrate Jean Seberg’s life and work.
In addition to honoring their dead, Nuñez and Ramirez performed an excerpt from “Salt of the Earth.” The skit discussed a New Mexican strike for better working conditions in which women played a pivotal role to organize and help the men. Nuñez, playing the wife, expressed her excitement to be involved with politics despite her husband’s (played by Ramirez) desire to return things back to the way they were when he did not have to help with the cooking, cleaning or child rearing.

“Can you only have dignity if I have none?” Nuñez asked as the wife.

In between skits, Zárate Macias played beautiful songs on her guitar singing lyrics in Spanish.

“I am the Senora de la Canción,” Zárate Macias, said. Or, I am the woman of song. Zárate Maciassang “Woman is Standing on the Front Line,” a feminist revolutionary ballad of her own composition. At the end of every verse, Zárate Macias knocked percussively against her guitar’s body and shook her fist in the air. Her reverberating, lamentful and expressive voice captivated the attention of the audience.

The performance continued with “ET” in which Rodriguez played an impoverished Mexican woman, driven to immigrate ‘illegally’ with the help of an exploitative agent, or ‘cayote,’ to the United States in order to support her sick mother. Teatro Chicana asserts that no person is undocumented and no person is illegal.

“We are all members of the human race and should live as brothers and sisters,” Ramirez said after the skit.

Teatro Chicana also aims to tell history from the side of the marginalized, taking on the role of people that seem to have run out of options and showing how they can survive and flourish.
“We make her-story, not history,” Garcia said.

Maria Elena Ramirez, did just this— she explained the last 500 hundred years of history from the perspective of the Aztecs and Mayans in the Chicana’s own style of rap. She impressed upon the audience that we are about to embark on a new and more egalitarian cycle, according to the Mayan calendar.

“The prophecy of the Rainbow Warriors will come to pass,” Ramirez said, “when all the sacred colors of the human race: black, red, brown, yellow, and white, will coexist at one time.”
Ramirez stressed that an ecological balance must be found.

“The way that the earth is treated is the way that women have been treated,” Ramirez said, “as something you take up, use, and discard.”  In the future, Garcia hopes our generation will learn to respect the Earth as opposed to seeing it as a commodity.

The final act of Teatro Chicana was “The View a la Chicana” in which, in honor of Día de Muertos, the ladies conducted an upbeat interview with Death.

“In the West, the fear of death is right up there with public speaking,” Garcia said.
“La Muerta is the only thing which does not discriminate,” Ramirez said.

Teatro Chicana ended their performance by advocating that the natural balance between life and death is not something to fear, but instead something to respect.

These grey-haired revolutionaries put on a captivating performance. Although much of their work was created thirty years ago, the issues they discussed still ring true today. Teatro Chicana spoke honestly and engagingly from the perspective of the subaltern; the migrant worker, the silenced woman, and those marginalized by race, when the ‘writers’ of history would not. They imagine a world with permeable borders in which the environment is respected and diversity is cherished. They leave it up to us to make that happen.

Freesound

Improvements include new equipment, such as an MPC and two turntables, which open up great possibilities for potential hip-hop groups.

“I’d love to have more hip-hop groups participate in Freesound,” Kenvarg said.
Also there have been numerous renovations to the space. Besides installing acoustic panels to sound-proof the room, Bush and Kenvarg arranged to provide P-Card access to the space.
“[Previously] there has been some theft/damage of the equipment because we had to leave the door unlocked all day for people to get in,” Kenvarg said. Now students who join Freesound gain access to the room with their P-Card.

Freesound invites any new members to join.

“To get involved, just email [freesound] and arrange a time to get sound-trained, which entails getting a tour of the room, learning how to use the equipment properly, and understanding the policies of the organization,” Kenvarg said.

The space is open from 4pm to 9pm on weekdays and noon to 9pm on weekends. Also anyone interested in participating in Freesound should check out the weekly meeting Wednesdays at 10pm.
“We have a democratic organization where everyone gets a say on when shows happen, what new equipment we buy, and what direction Freesound should go in,” Kenvarg said.
Currently there are numerous groups which bring in vastly different styles of music to Freesound.

“I come from a background of jazz, playing jazz trombone, but Freesound has been great for me learning other styles and other instruments,” Arthur Richardson ’14 said. “I can even pound away on drums. That would not be the case if the Freesound room didn’t exist”.

Come to Freesound to practice or learn.

“Some of the best music created by Freesound is from ‘non-musicians.’ It’s really cool to have a space and community that fosters that type of experimentation,” said Eric Jarvis ‘12, of Freesound band The Apple and The Oak. “It gives musicians a home outside the music department”.
Many Freesound bands have used the opportunity to open for concerts, such as Gluestick who recently opened for Bass Drum of Death, or Katie In ’13 and Kenvarg’s band which opened for Jukebox the Ghost.

“It’s a great jumping off point for bands at this school,” Kenvarg said.

Freesound will also be providing recording opportunities for student groups later this semester.
“We just got a SPARC budget to pay for recording both at John Edward’s home studio,” Kenvarg said. “It’s a very low key recording process, and depending on the quality the artist desires and the person recording them, it can take as little as a few hours to finish”.
Also watch out for Showvember with three different nights of music. Starting with an acoustic showcase in Bob’s Thursday November 3rd, continuing with dance/rock in Loose lounge Saturday November 12th, and ending with Freesound’s specialty, a punk rock extravaganza Saturday the 19th.

“This semester Freesound has been better than ever before,” Richardson said. “With a p-card reader, new equipment, and a functioning system for reserving the room, the user friendliness of Freesound is awesome.”

Check out Freesound to hone your skills, get a band together, or just mess around with a range of equipment. It’s a low-key environment where any sound is possible.

I guess first I’d like to know a little bit about what projects you’ve been up to since graduating. You’ve been in New York, Manila – what all have you been working on?In terms of personal projects, I’ve finished two photo projects and one short video since graduating.  China Trace (2010) was a series of black and white images observing the effects of gentrification on Chinatown in New York City.  That series was selected for one of Asia’s largest photography festivals, Chobi Mela VI: International Festival of Photography and allowed me to attend a Canon-sponsored workshop through VII Photos.
The second series, Thanks to the Bearer, is actually an ongoing project revisiting the architectural spaces and monuments created by the New Society, which was a cultural movement spearheaded by the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda during the 1980’s. It’s “ongoing” in that I need to re-shoot a good portion of the series during my upcoming trip to Manila.
Finally, my short film, Culiat, is a black and white assemblage of clips that I took of an impoverished Muslim migrant community in Metro Manila.  The film was selected for the Sinehan sa Summer: Shorts, a Filipino film festival that took place at the Philippine Consulate here in Manhattan.
As for other noteworthy experiences, I had time to work as a photo assistant this summer for my mentor, David Alan Harvey, who is a member of Magnum Photos, and a long time contributor to National Geographic.

Are these projects separate or do you see certain things tying them together formally or thematically?
I view what I’ve done artistically to be thematically tied together, but I don’t think that is apparent to anyone besides myself or maybe my loved ones.  Despite their roots in the category of the documentary, all three of those series end up pushing a narrative by means of impressionistic techniques and compositions. The use of black and white is a visual abstraction that is also shared in all three works.
Speaking quite generally, all three projects were invested in a particular perspective regarding the passage of time as traumatic and history as an alienating presence.

What venues have you then been sharing this work? Magazines? Gallery spaces?
Since returning to the United States in May, I honestly haven’t pushed this work towards any particular venue. At the end of the day, I look back and just see weak, indecipherable work. In the past year, I have sent my work out to maybe two or three web magazines. I had something published via The New Yorker, but that was just a single that I submitted.
Thanks to the Bearer is possibly going to be included in the 2012 Philippine Arts Festival, which is a touring national exhibition.

What projects do you have on deck, what do you hope to accomplish in 2012?
My last trip abroad was quite intense and I learned so much about myself and the Philippines as a nation, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into making great pictures. With that said, I’m returning to the Philippines this winter with a definite focus and resolve.
The most ambitious project will follow the journeys of Filipino migrants from the conflict ridden island of Mindanao, to the Muslim quarter of Manila, and finally to the Middle East.
We’ll see where that goes, but I’m thinking that body of work will be the culmination of 4 years of experimentation as well a project that will be worth showcasing.
In regards to my “career,” my close friend and I recently started our own video production company, which has already done promotional work for several A-list chefs and a Michelin star-rated restaurant.  We plan on incorporating and I’ll probably have my hands full with that after I return to the States.
Finally, I’m probably going to apply for the 2012-2013 one year certification course at the International Center for Photography in New York City.

Do you have any advice to someone at Grinnell who is interested in pursuing an independent creative career similar to yours?
You can only profit from “pre-production.” Coming from someone who is impulsive and disorganized, I grudgingly admit that having a storyboard will make any creative endeavor so much easier.     - compiled by Nic Wilson

What do you write about?
Well, I’m writing two books. One, I’ve been writing for a very long time. It’s the one called “The Invisible World is in Decline,” which is a multi-book poem in prose that’s pretty philosophical. And the second book that’s called “Tablature”. Tablature is an old word that refers to a certain type of musical scoring, particularly in Jacobean and Elizabethan music. Which didn’t so much use musical notes, as language. So, I think of poetry as scoring of language. This book is poems in traditional lines. They’re focused on the present world around me, and they’re also kind of focused on the relationship between music and language.

What advice would you give to aspiring young writers?
I guess I’d say a couple of things. Definitely read, read, read. I think a lot of poets think that you don’t need to be that familiar with poetry in order to be a poet—that somehow it’s sort of this form of self-expression. I think that’s misguided. I think you really do need to train your ear by reading a lot of other poetry. And to … kind of have a storehouse in your brain of what’s been done before, before you actually commit yourself to actually making additions to it. So, I think reading is really important. And then, working hard at it in the sense that … I think every poet has a different practice as far as revision and rewriting and that sort of thing goes. But I think really writing something, putting it away, bringing it back out, rethinking it, and making sure everything is working out the way you want it to is good, rather than just letting it go as soon as the inspiration of the moment comes off.

Right. I imagine that’s hard.
It is. I mean, everybody’s different in this respect. And I’m, sort of for the first time in my life now, on a schedule … which I never thought was really meant to be for a poet. Which is to say, I have three hours a day, every day, when I’m supposed to be writing. It’s like scheduling a muse to visit when you want her to come. I used to think that you can’t do that. You just have to sort of be ready whenever the muse comes, and then you go and write. But actually, it’s working. And it’s working because of a certain kind of determination. And it’s not planning. There’s nothing for me that’s planned. I don’t sit down with an idea of what I’m going to do. I just sit down and wait for whatever it is to come. Sometimes three hours come and go and there’s no mark on the page. Sometimes there is. You have to sort of be ready for that, too. In my case, the music and the sound of the language is very important. I have some musical training, which I think helps. I mean, not all poets have to have musical training, but I think you have to be able to listen and really work on developing your ear. And that comes a lot of the time from reading other people’s work. Reading it out loud, I think is always good, rather than silent reading.

Do you think poetry is meant to be read out loud?
I think on a whole, it is. There’s probably some poetry that isn’t, but mostly, yeah. I mean, silent reading is a relatively recent practice in the world. I mean “recent” as in early modern 17th-18th century. I don’t mean last week. People always used to read out loud to each other, or they would have people read to them. And, I think that really helped with developing readers’ ears as well as writers’ ears. Even though that practice has kind of gone away on the whole, I think it’s good for poetry to be read out loud because it’s not like prose. It’s very dependent on its effect as the music of language. You hear that better when you hear it in the air, rather than in your mind.

Do you ever get so frustrated with writing sometimes that you just want to go back to being a librarian?
No. I—yes and no. Yes, I get frustrated with writing sometimes. It doesn’t usually lead me to think that I want to go back to being a librarian. The frustration is that every time you sit in front of the writing desk, it’s like you’re doing it for the first time. It’s scary in that sense. You don’t really know what’s going to happen. Every time I finish a poem, I think: what if this is the last one? What if no more occur? It’s a feeling which you would expect would go away after … well, it’s been many years. And it hasn’t, really. It’s always kind of difficult and slightly frightening to think that, well, that poem is drafted, or finished, or whatever, but what if no more come?

Vocalist Grace Slick, the face of Jefferson Airplane for many fans, had not yet been in the band for a week.  Their first female singer, Signe Anderson, gave her final performance with the group on Oct. 15 and Grace joined and made her debut the following day. After a handful of concerts in San Francisco, the band packed their bags for Iowa, their first gig east of the Rockies. Accompanying them was Tony Martin of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, who was renowned for his liquid light shows in which he projected colored oils in constant motion behind the performing band.

An S&B article from Oct. 14, 1966, boasted that “movies, slides, and moving color abstracts will cover large screens measuring 80 feet by 17 feet placed along the walls of the gym, to create an exciting mood in tune with the music.” Interviewed in the same article, social coordinator Bob Johnston ‘67 said, “We are attempting to create an excitement of the mind”. Unfortunately, there is no known recording of the performance and very few photographs, but by all accounts, it must have rivaled even the best of Gardner raves for a sheer multi-sensory experience.

In the Oct. 14  the S&B’s Bob Johnston described the upcoming performance as “totally unlike anything that’s ever been here before,” which seems like an understatement. Parents’ Weekend coincided with the concert, so the bleachers must have been lined with mothers, fathers and siblings wondering what on earth they were witnessing. But with each set, the students got more loosened up and more parents trickled out of the gym, so that by the end the Grinnellians had taken off their jackets and heels and given themselves up to the lights and music.

The group’s manager Bill Thompson has said that it was at Grinnell that he first saw Jefferson Airplane had the power to transform their listeners. Certainly by the next year, fueled to a great extent by the countercultural and anti-Vietnam War movements, many students at Grinnell took up the causes of social and political reform and exercised their rights to demonstrate, culminating in the temporary closure of the College and cancellation of graduation in May 1970. Jefferson Airplane would go on play at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and record many more albums. The group still performs, in one form or another, and has an international fan base.  The 1966 homecoming concert then represents a period of transition both in the band’s career and in the history of Grinnell College.

Image of concert poster by an anonymous artist published in the Oct. 11, 1966, issue of the S&B courtesy of Chris Jones of the Grinnell College Archives and Special Collections.

Making his directorial debut, Dougherty (best known for his work on the screenplays of the tepidly-received “Superman Returns” and the not-too-shabby X-Men sequel, “X2”) delivers an originally structured story, continuously jumping back and forth between characters and temporal points. The result comes across as something closer to a collection of vignettes than a conventional feature film narrative. The movie focuses on four intertwined tales, all set on Halloween night in the generally sleepy town of Warren Valley, Ohio: a young married couple is harassed by a holiday demon, a murderous educator is on the prowl for innocent victims, a Goonies-esque band of youngsters investigates a dark local legend and a beautiful young woman (the film’s only semblance of a star in Anna Paquin—Rogue in “X2”, and that sultry undergrad Jeff Daniels tries to get with in “The Squid and the Whale”) comes to town with three friends, seemingly looking for nothing more than a good time, but perhaps with a slightly more menacing agenda.

What follows is fairly typical of the theatrical excess that has come to characterize the genre: severed heads, bared breasts, protracted projectile vomiting, a disembodied hand wriggling its way across the floor towards its victim (à la “Evil Dead II”), and some pretty awful werewolf puppets—general mayhem, really.

The effect on the viewer is likely to be more often comic than frightening, at least when examined from any kind of critical distance, but in no way does this detract from the film’s ability to entertain.

To his credit, Dougherty does do some fairly interesting things with chronology, allowing glimpses of later sub-plots to work their way into early scenes. The film is most compelling, and certainly most frightening, when forcing the viewer to wait for a shock he or she has in part already seen.

You might not be scared silly by “Trick ‘r Treat” and you certainly won’t be blown away by its content. But if you simply embrace it for what it is—a truly bad horror film—you are sure to be entertained.

“Trick ‘r Treat” will be screening this Saturday, 10/29, in Harris Cinema at 6:30 and 9:00 p.m. Critically-acclaimed Norwegian monster flick “The Troll Hunter” will be showing on Friday, 10/28, at 6:30 and 9:00 p.m.

Ume, (pronounced ooo-may) combines Lauren Larson’s shredding guitar and edgy vocals with bassist Eric Larson and drummer Rachael Fuhrer. The band formed in Houston in 2006 and is bringing an unrestrained post-punk racket to a traditional indie-rock structure.

“I love to make music that is brutal and beautiful,” Larson said, “but I hate putting it into words.” And in fact she doesn’t have to.

Critics have acclaimed Ume’s work. Tom Tom magazine says, “It sounds dangerous and sexy like French kissing over an electric fence.” Relix says, “The group, led by powerhouse singer/guitarist Lauren Larson, has merged the sounds of heavy rock and ethereal indiepop with deft precision, finding new ground somewhere in between Warpaint, Metric and Mogwai”.

Their most recent release, “Phantoms,” was produced by Modern Outsider Records and debuted last August. Tim Plumley, the bands press manager says, “[‘Phantoms’] recalls a time when the band and kids in the crowd weren’t afraid to sweat, the album marries the heavier and more distorted side of indie rock with visceral passion and pop hooks”.

Indeed, Larson’s energetic shredding and wildly swinging blonde hair, combined with booming drums and bass which could level the foundations of a house, are sure to please Grinnell’s dance-friendly audience.

“We like to shatter expectations and try to hold nothing back on stage” says Larson, “whatever results on stage is visceral, honest and fun.”

Recently the band enjoyed performing with the likes of TV on the Radio, Cat Power, and the Flaming Lips at Kanrocksas and LouFest this summer. “Also playing for 10 people once in NYC and seeing [rock star] Joan Jett rocking out in the audience was amazing,” Larson said.

“Phantoms” develops Ume’s sounds. “It is more lyrically intimate than our other material and incorporates vocal harmonies and orchestral textures that are new to our sound,” Larson said. Ume is rough, raucous and rambunctious while keeping a tight sound, chockablock of reverb and driving drums.

Ume will be beautifully complemented by North America, comprised of Josh and Jesse Hasko. North America describes their music in a series of tags, “l.s.d. New York desert kitchen jams newage pastry makin’ music post-dance rock rofttop rock Albuquerque”.

North America will start the night with a lo-fi groove that will immerse the audience in a crazy sea of floating guitar riffs, kelp forest bass, and popping bubbles of drums.

Be sure to catch this weekend’s concert with Ume and North America for an out of this world music experience and crazy dance mash.

Voters will be left with a tough decision. The eclectic collection includes dozens of outstanding works, stretching from the floor to the ceiling in the fashion of the famous French Salon in Paris.

“There’s never been a salon show in Smith Gallery, at least not in my time,” said Professor Andrew Kaufman, who teaches the student artists in seminar. “They’re very interested in seeing if this works. They’re challenging convention by letting the work completely take over the space.”

“It’s hard coming in with everyone having different pieces of work and having no idea where to begin.  We didn’t initially know it would be salon style. It just evolved that way,” Phoebe Currier ’12 said.

Although the students stress that there is no unifying theme to the pieces, Refuse still flows well, partially because the artists avoided framing their drawings, paintings and photographs, in typical salon style.

“We left a little space between each work, so that the white space on the wall becomes the frame for the pieces,” Vadim Fainberg ’13 said.

Not all of the pieces can be framed, anyways. Besides paintings, drawings and photographs, Refuse also includes graphic art, large quilts, enchanting embroidery and intriguing digital pieces, such as videos and illuminated works of art. The paintings range from portraiture to grotesque caricature.

“There’s a shift from the normal mode of curating working to an accumulation so that it deemphasizes any one piece,” Kaufman said. “This show is about a collection, a visual onslaught for the viewer that hasn’t been done yet.”

However, the implementation of the artists’ full vision is impaired by a simple, but unavoidable problem.

“There is no way to do the lightening properly,” Fainberg said.

Some of the more intricate pieces, such as a work of white vellum embroidery, struggle to stand out in the limited light, which hides their craftsmanship and detail. The inclusion of digital and illuminated works also slightly detracts from more traditional paintings and drawings because of the close proximity.

Overall, the artists did a fine job of exhibiting in difficult conditions. The show displays a breadth of talent that appears stunning in such a small, cramped space.  Really, no piece in Refuse deserves to be voted into a metaphorical or literal trash can.

Photograph by Travis Law.

“Body Toxic” is subtitled an environmental memoir and I find it interesting, and also very appropriate that you would make so much space for your surroundings in your memoir— why did this feel necessary?

The way that book really began to form was in layers it really accreted. It started about a straight memoir of my family in Barbados. I had put out old notes about my family there. Then I pulled out my notes about when I went down there and met them, that is where I started. Then it turned into a story about my contemporary family, my extended family and then it just kept striking me how we were all struggling with the same health issues.
Clearly memoir has been excessively physiological and it has kind of turned out that we live in this much larger context, in which we are informed by the places we grew up in and the challenges. It was really just a matter of accreting all that. My cousins and I were dealing with the same type of problems—fertility problems—and at one point it occurred to me, at what point is your life non-physiological, but determined by all these other factors.

What drove you to intermingle personal experiences, specific events, and reflections in “A Mind Apart?”

I’m always interested in writing that looks at the bigger picture. It can be frustrating to read writing that is so small that it doesn’t seem to want to take up any space and at the end of the day you are just figuring out that someone likes toast or some type of furniture. I just think if I were that type of writer, I don’t think I would have the fortitude to sit down every day and write. For me there has to be something at stake, or I think: why bother? Maybe that’s a sign of laziness.

In “A Mind Apart” one of the main things I was trying to draw out was the whole process of evolution. We are in the position right now where we can map the human genome. We have sold it—it’s in private hands and you can start eliminating many types of people. Then we begin to ask ourselves what human culture is all about, why we’ve gone in the directions we’ve gone and maybe the big mistakes we’re on the verge of making.

Can you talk about your upcoming book, Inventing Family, and anything you are working on now?
It’s about the history of adoption going back to Hammurabi’s code and how different civilizations dealt with it around the world. For example, in Oceania—all the pacific islands—adoption is simply normal. It’s almost not normal if you stay with you biological parents your whole life. They move family around very freely.

I have an adopted child, who is a boy of color, and there is this feeling in the education community that male children of color are going to have behavior problems and it’s this thing I cope with all the time. I find myself having to go to teachers with research books telling them it’s not true.
I’m also working on a newer book, that’s very complicated, that has to do with the way the eugenic movement enabled the Holocaust to happen. They began by gassing mental patients and Hitler kind of looked at it as a template to follow. Right now it’s very overwhelming to see how much of this is going on way before Hitler. It’s a story that needs to be told.

“New Embroideries” is simply composed of only three materials—thread, plastic bags and wire, but with a stunning result, partially because Flynn took the initiative to paint the walls of Smith Gallery vivid blue and red.

“I think the show is brilliant,” Joe Hiller ’12 said. “The vivid colors interact well with all the bags. Its great to see the plastic bags reset in a formal art space, they take on all these possibilities of interpretation.”

The show is comprised of seven individual bags standing alone and manipulated into organic forms and one impressive quilt-like installation of multiple plastic bags, patch-worked together, along the back wall.

“The quilt is the newest piece in the show and I see it giving rise to a transition to larger embroidered forms,” Flynn said.

This unconventional medium also raises questions about sustainability. Flynn invites interpretations about the social and political implications of re-situating the bags.

“For me, working with the bags as textiles is a way of reconciling myself to their existence and a small response to the problem of what to do with them,” Flynn said.

The embroidered thread weaves wandering lines into the plastic. Flynn played with the transparency of the bags revealing different aspects of the lines and also experiments with different ways of seaming them.

“I love working with plastic bags,” Flynn said. “It’s so seductive, because you can’t go back, once you make a hole its there.”

Indeed, Flynn was aimed to “map inner sensations” by working with the plastic and found that each bag held the memories of its manipulation.

Many of the embroidery threads are left long and fall in vertical lines offering a stark contrast to the abstract and voluminous bags.

“Its like the threads are drips of paint running down the wall,” Emily Stanfield ’12 said.
Flynn found inspiration in sashiko stitching, a japanese style of embroidery, as well as a project she worked on last semester which treated plastics bags as a medium for drawing as opposed to her current, more sculptural, work.

With “New Embroideries,” Flynn hopes to blur the line between craft and fine art by incorporating her background in knitting, crochet, embroidery and spinning, as well as the work she’s done in drawing and painting.

“Its great!” Ethan Kenvarg ’12 said. “It’s like you see a plastic bag and you think, ‘That is something ugly,’ and then you look more closely and you see something beautiful”.
Next time you’re in the JRC be sure to stop by “New Embroideries” to check out Flynn’s whimsical sculptures in an unconventional material.

Dr. Cheney takes a dapper moment before beginning his Wednesday lecture on the intersection of Homer and Milton. Photograph by Sophie Fajardo.

What is, as you said in your presentation, the value of seeing old texts with new eyes?

I would propose that the poems, plays and prose works that I study form a comprehensive reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, ideas and representations of what is important to the human. The writers that I teach and work on—Homer to Milton, people like Shakespeare, Spenser, Virgil, Dante—these are the premier authors of the Western canon. They are deep reservoirs for thinking, for ideas on identity. And I really do think that literature forms a kind of command center for modern identity. By studying a writer like Shakespeare, you get ideas about how to lead your life, about how to interact with people, about how to live in society.

What books or authors would you define as essential reading for everyone?

If I were stuck on a desert island, I’d want two books with me—the Hebrew and Christian Bible on one hand, or the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” on the other. I think that those two sets of work are the foundation of the Western literary tradition. Other essential authors for me in classical culture are obviously Virgil and Ovid. In Medieval culture, Dante and Chaucer would certainly make my shortlist. And in the Renaissance, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton are certainly major authors that I think that students should read as their foundation for their education, at least in English literature.

You’ve been a part of writing 17 books in as many years. How do you do so much writing? Do you have any advice for students?

More interesting about that statistic is that it is confined to the last 17 years—I’ve actually been working in the profession for 32 years. I spent the early years of my career working very hard to learn my craft and my trade, my profession. I still work seven [days a week], I don’t necessarily put in the 12-hour days anymore, but what is important is that I’ve worked very consistently for a long time. If you get in the habit of writing, as I did as a young person, writing becomes what you do, it becomes who you are. I love to write, it excites me the most, it gives me the biggest thrill. So there’s a couple of things: one is the discipline you establish as a young writer, but also, you have to enjoy doing this. That combination of discipline and care has allowed me to continue to enjoy doing in my early sixties what I enjoyed doing in my early twenties. A third element is consistency—I think you’d be surprised at what can emerge over a 30-year period.

The 55 minute-long play will boast an eclectic collection of puppetry, singing, monologue and other movement based sections.

“That’s more like life. Life doesn’t have a simple narrative. [Reality] is not that clear, it’s not that easy,” Quintero said.

In order to incorporate the uncertainty of life into the play, and to experiment with a different genre altogether, Quintero, who had worked with Pei-yu in Taiwan before, decided to bring her to Grinnell and provide the students with the opportunity to experiment with another form of theatre.

“[We are] trying to experiment with the way we construct theatre. It’s trying to encourage a dialogue between different forms of theatrical expression,” Quintero said.

Pei-yu said, with Quintero as a translator, that it was an exciting opportunity to work for five weeks with the students and provide them with the experience.

“To start from pieces of wood and Styrofoam to a puppet and to be part of the experiment, not just as performers but as builders, was a great opportunity to experience,” Pei-yu said.

Lexi Leuszler ’12, a theatre major and one of the cast members, said she is very excited about the prospect of working with Quintero and puppets, her area of interest.

“I really wanted to work with Craig. He is an interesting director and he demands a lot of his actors and I wanted that kind of intensity and immersion,” Leuszler said.

Although Leuszler has been involved in a number of theatre performances at Grinnell, such as The Neverland Players and The Bread & Puppet Show, she said that this was different.

“This was a new breed where we really from the bones built the skeleton, then the flesh and the costume of the puppets,” Leuszler said. “We’ve been living and breathing with the puppets.”

Leuszler, who was very keen on working with an international performer, said Quintero is fun to work with as he welcomes suggestions and collaboration.

“And [then] it’s really how you work it into your puppet. It breathes life into the puppet. And that’s the beautiful part of it,” she said.

Quintero said that this is a big experiment and he is excited to see how the different forms come together.

“With this production of having a mash up of different forms that normally don’t speak to or with each other,” he said. “We’re trying to rethink a way of expression which is more contemporary.”

The performance will take place throughout the weekend, from Thursday until Sunday. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, it will be at 7:30 p.m. and on Sunday at 2:00 p.m. All of the performances will take place in the Flangan Theatre, where an excited cast of seven and an intriguing setup await a curious audience.

“This space was empty five weeks ago,” Quintero said, regarding the setup, “but now we have this beautiful world here which was created with artistic designers [and] students. We strongly encourage students across campus to come and work with us. This is our creation.”