Building off of the four key emotions portrayed in Inside Out, a quartet of reflections on Pixar’s latest. Joy It’s a fun Pixar film that gives you Pixar feels. Yay. (Also, the fleeting nod to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” was a nice gesture.) Anger As much as I wanted to love this movie, […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the video above. It’s not Owen Pallett’s best performance – a little rushed and rough around the edges (perhaps for obvious reasons as you watch it). However, the joy in performing and exploring and sharing his work – in recklessly racing past a threshold of safety in doing so […]
Last week, I listened to the recent This American Life episode, “Three Miles.” The project at the heart of the episode–having students from the poorest congressional district in the U.S. visit with students of a wealthy, $43,000 a year private school. (The title refers to the fact that the schools are only three miles apart.) […]
I Last night Ally and I made the trek to Boulder to see the Brad Mehldau trio perform. I’d seen Mehldau a couple of times back in LA (he’s even released an album titled after my favorite venue). I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that the show was Mehldau performing as part of a […]
I was sitting on the deck of a pirate ship in a non-descript office building in San Francisco celebrating the nuptials of my close friends from earlier in the day when a voice next to me said, “I heard you like Kanye West.” I knew it was bait. And I took it. An hour later […]
True Revolutionaries (At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous…)
Last week, I talked about where I was wobbling in my teaching practice. This week I want to describe a new pose I am trying out. This week month I’m trying out a pose of sustained writing and “hustle.” This month is National Novel Writing Month–colloquially NaNoWriMo, which challenges participants to write a 50,000+ word novel […]
Over the weekend I watch the extended music-video-quasi-art-thing Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film. I would argue it’s one of those three nouns: a performance. And while I think Jay Z has been making strong efforts at pushing himself and the hip-hop genre into loftier domains, I think Picasso Baby is representative of what’s wrong […]
Sometimes when listening to the echoes of history, breezes from the past are fully felt in the present. (Kirkland, 2013, p. 26) It was difficult waking up this morning, sipping on coffee, and diving back into David E. Kirkland’s book, A search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men. I’d ranted earlier in the […]
I think it’s getting worse. I used to hold my tongue and nod along with everyone else. The problem is I’m tired of not seeing folks of color in films. I’m tired of picking “good” YA texts for the classes I’m teaching and seeing white privilege reinforced on every page. I’m tired of not seeing […]