Graduation
The ceremony this past Sunday was bittersweet, as it was in 2008. My dad was in the hospital this weekend, as he was in 2008. He’ll be in the nursing home by the end of the week. This time I decided to walk across the stage.
The last time I saw Dad he wrote his full name, and then his high school grade point average of 2.60. Then he wrote my full name, and followed it with PhD. Yeah right, I told him. He shrugged and smiled at me. When he could talk he loved to brag, and I loved to make him proud.
Last night I turned on Cuban salsa loud in the living room and my flip flops stuck to the floor. It was a good night for a mojito. I like that this is what he taught me to do, to dance and to drink in the kitchen. I was sad and happy all at the same time. This is how life is now.
I don’t know what it means to be your father’s daughter when you don’t know where your father is anymore, in every sense of the word. I’m working on this identity, working through it, creating something new.
At home in a piece of history: Beth Howard stumbled onto the Iowa farmhouse depicted in Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic” on a road trip after her husband died three years ago. She pays $250-a-month rent, and a clause in her lease requires her to be nice to the thousands of people a year who come to pose for photos in her front yard.
Photo credit: Alana Semuels / Los Angeles Times
An outtake from 2008. It’s so hard to be stoic.
I’ll be presenting this tomorrow at IUPUI Research Day and touching it up for the Center for Civic Engagement Showcase next week and the capstone Museum Studies Portfolio Night in the first week of May. If you’re interested, you can check out the project’s Flickr, WordPress, and Wikipedia pages.
And then I graduate, find a new job, move somewhere else in the country, and get out of this funky student diet of beans, rice, peanut butter, and beer. What a year.
I don’t care if football is not your thing. This costume is incredible.
(via Erika D. Smith)
New York Public Library’s Stereogranimator Lets You Make GIFs Out Of 19th Century Stereographs:
“With the Stereogranimator, the NYPL is letting users transform 19th century stereographs into GIFs, which lets people experience these historical images the way someone in the 1800s might have. Drawing on a collection of over 40,000 stereographs, the Stereogranimator is a project of the NYPL Labs, an experimental unit at the library using digital means to develop new tools for research.
“If you look through enough of them, you start to notice that many from before 1900 come in seemingly-identical pairs. What you may not realize is that these pairs were meant to be viewed together, each side lending the other a sense of depth that a photograph alone cannot possess,” Joshua Heineman, who began a version of the Stereogranimator as a personal project on his blog, wrote on the Huffington Post. “Using stereoscopes, the entertainment-seeking public of the 19th century immersed themselves in these 3D photographs (called stereographs) in a manner akin to how we now view movies, video games or cellphone screens.”Wow this is an amazing idea coming out of a GLAM I admire :). What a great way to make a historical hobby extremely fun and relevant for today? Love love love.
Sharp web design, too.
Come for the Super Bowl and then stay for the IMA: XLVI Reasons to Visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
My favorite museum in Indy.
I have to tip my hat to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. A couple of nights of the year, with heavy sponsorship from Stella Artois and local restaurants, the organization hosts a happy hour geared toward young professionals. For $25 per ticket ($13 for students), you’re treated to free cocktails, appetizers, desserts, and general admission seating to the evening’s performance. Navigating the packed venue is difficult — everybody fiending for some White Castle! — but nothing a little crowd control can’t fix.
Here’s the interesting part, from a sustainable nonprofit perspective:
From the food to the performance, the evening attracts new audiences by challenging preconceptions of a stuffy, uptight venue. (Museums, are you listening?) At happy hour, the artists-in-residence look like they’re going out to a club afterward, not a formal banquet. The mood is light-hearted and a little swanky. The conductor tells jokes, the audience whistles.
The symphony switches it up, but stays true to who they are.
The featured artists-in-residence, Time for Three, blend pop music with classical compositions. But the ISO still mixes in some traditional pieces. The key is that you’re probably going to recognize that Mozart movement, even as a casual listener. The double bass player filled us in with some history about an American composer named Samuel Barber, a name unfamiliar to me until I realized I had heard his “Adagio for Strings” featured in countless film and television soundtracks.
Then, it starts to get fun. Bon Iver teams up with J.S. Bach. Justin Timberlake joins A.M. Storch by a vintage lamp and Persian rug. The ISO isn’t reinventing the wheel with these arrangements — Vitamin String Quartet comes to mind — but it works because the musicians sell it completely. The music is familiar enough that it bridges a gap for the uninitiated into a new genre (my head is twirling with education theory, but I’ll spare you). The performance made me want to learn more about classical music, to listen again, and that is the point. It’s likely that the ISO, like most nonprofits right now, is struggling financially. But this is how you build your membership.
Thursday night featured Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, and damn, that was a beautiful sound. The strings swelled behind her voice. She capped off the night with a Nina Simone cover, the stage bathed in a deep red glow.
So if you’re in Indy, go. Go have fun. Go support live music at happy hour or regular programming. In March the whole show is dedicated to Bon Iver and Aaron Copland. I’ll meet you at the White Castle stand.
(Hilbert Circle Theatre photo credit: Flickr user leahcrane)
26
Sweet homemade card from my 82-year-old Grandma B.
Gay Block, Mother, Before and After Stroke, 1987-1989; printed 1999
