Things I Learned This Week

Budde, Williams, Matta-Clarke, Césaire, and Italy

I’ve spent a lot of time refreshing pages and waiting for more word on graduate schools to roll in. I'm happy to be headed into February and closer to knowing what I’m going to be doing next. The good news is the school work and MFA distractions have pulled me away from reading too much news. That said, here’s the stuff that stuck this week.

As a lifelong Episcopalian, I was so proud to see Mariann Edgar Budde’s call for mercy during the inauguration and learn of her actions after the murder of Matthew Shepard all those years ago. That woman has balls of steel. So, I was psyched when my good friend Jules pointed me in the direction of her book How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. I am not exactly a person of religion, but I am one of faith, and when this woman writes that “heroic possibilities lie within each of us”, I tend to believe her.

Free time is scarce, so the only film of note I watched this week was one recommended by a young person in my photography class. The Phantom of the Paradise is an absolutely nutter Brian DePalma film starring and with music written by Paul Williams of The Rainbow Connection fame. It’s one of those films that is so bad it's good and co-stars the infamous electronic synthesizer dubbed TONTO. It is so campy and amazing and awful that trying to explain this musical exploration of the Phantom of the Opera, Faust, and 1970s rock-n-roll would make me seem bonkers. Let’s say you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a young Paul Williams nude in a bathtub, signing his soul away to the devil—peak film history.

Speaking of photography and the 1970s, in class we’ve been examining the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. There’s too much to tell in a short paragraph, but beyond his work in general, we looked at Conical Intersect, wherein for the Paris Biennale of 1975, he cut a giant cone-shaped hole through two 17th century townhouses that were soon to be knocked down to make way for the Pompidou. I dug deep into his life from privileged son of Surrealist painter Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren and godson of Marcel Duchamp to Cornell-trained architect to critic of gentrification through the near-performance based art of “making space without building it.” Beyond epic. You can view the video he created of the process here.

My husband is retiring shortly before I graduate, and we’ve been saving up for a trip to Europe in the summer. We had plane tickets and a planned trip shortly after September 11, but obviously, those plans got sacked, and we never went. 20-plus years later, my Art History course includes studying early and late Renaissance art, so I’ve started marking up a guidebook of must-sees. In addition, my husband’s mother was a war widow before she met my father-in-law. John Bodenmueller was a captain in the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion in WWII and was killed in action on February 12, 1944. He’s buried in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy, and part of the original reason for the trip was making a trip there on behalf of his late mother. Long time coming.

Lastly, I read the 1969 reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Une Tempête—by Aimé Césaire, a writer and activist from Martinique. In his version, he gives Caliban—an enslaved minor character—the lead role that challenges the position of Prospero, the play’s original colonizer. At first, I didn’t quite understand the purpose of reinventing Shakespeare through a more modern lens, but this one has me sold. Looking forward to what comes next.

Quote of the week?

“With a commitment to unity that incorporates diversity and transcends disagreement, and the solid foundations of dignity, honesty, and humility that such unity requires, we can do our part, in our time, to help realize the ideals and the dream of America.” — Mariann Edgar Budde

‘Til Tuesday kids.

Burgin

(I’m finishing college at 50+, follow along and read my story here.)