Things I Learned This Week

Sinners, Nauman, Didion, Gang of Four, and the Dammed

Today is my final day of class as an undergrad. The last few weeks have been exhausting, but we are reaching the end. I'm going to see Gang of Four tonight, so I will probably have some wine and Curry Boys to celebrate. Only finals to go. Here are the things that stuck with me.

Speaking of Gang of Four, props to the British post-punk band’s album Entertainment! released in 1979. The show's first set tonight will be that album in full. The anthem "Natural's Not in It" is in my top ten songs of all-time list. Such a jam!

My mother dragged my sisters and me to a million museums as a young person. We liked them, but we usually stayed way too long and saw way too much of things I wasn’t particularly interested in. In art history class, I was reminded of the first museum show I saw as a grownup on my own, which struck a chord with me. It was Bruce Nauman’s show at MOMA in 1995. I’m sure it had something to do with the fact that most of his work incorporates the printed word in one way or another. Words used sparingly but speak volumes. He has a lot of beautiful words created in neon, but it was the above that spoke to me as a young person and still does today. Second to love, paying attention is the most important thing.

I know I mentioned Joan Didion the other day, but I still can’t get over Goodbye to All That. That essay is sticking with me. It conjured ghosts of what it meant for me to be 20-something and in New York. I could have written it myself if I was as good a writer as her. Every word.

All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.

For my photography final, I did a project on the Olmos Dam. Originally constructed in 1925-1927 as part of San Antonio's early efforts in flood control after a devastating storm wrecked downtown and killed people on the city’s impoverished West Side. The dam does control flooding in the more wealthy neighborhoods and downtown, but it does little to protect the city’s most vulnerable populations. I am incorporating the dam into my Decolonial Shakespeares final as a location for a performance of a Native American play. In the research for that, I learned that during excavations, 16 Indigenous bodies were pulled from the earth and stuck in a box somewhere in the anthropology department at UTSA. The college has almost 300 remains still to be repatriated. But they are working on it. Probably not fast enough.

Lastly, I saw Sinners. Twice. My husband is not into vampires or horror movies, and he loved it. Worth the trip to the theater to see it on the big screen. The music is fab, and oh my god, Miles Caton as blues man Sammie Moore is drop-dead. Where did they find this young man? A revelation.

Quote of the week?

“I've never missed a gig yet. Music makes people happy, and that's why I go on doing it—I like to see everybody smile.” — Buddy Guy

‘Til Tuesday kids.

Burgin