music

Winning Humility at Awards Shows

Macklemore accepting his award at the Grammys

Image Credit: Huffington Post/Getty Images

The Grammys provided plenty of viz bait: Beyoncé twerking with Jay-Z, unlikely performing duos like Robin Thicke and the band Chicago, Pharrell’s be-memed hat, and Taylor Swift’s GIF-able dancing. However, what I want to discuss is something that occurred after the Grammys: Macklemore, who won awards for Best New Artist, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album, acknowledged another victor after the fact.

#IWillAlwaysLoveYou: Whitney Houston and Rhetorics of Tribute

Whitney Houston in her video for "I Will Always Love You"

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

By this point most people—at least the ones reading blogs or The New York Times—have heard about Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday. As it so happened, Houston passed away the night before the Grammys, turning that celebration into a kairoitic moment of mourning. Singer LL Cool J opened the Grammys with a prayer for Whitney and Jennifer Hudson performed her most famous hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Since then, LeAnn Rimes and the television show Glee have offered performances of this song in tribute to Whitney. Likewise, her family is allowing her funeral to be streamed on the Internet. I’d like here to consider further the function of these institutionalized tributes. How can (or should) we remember the dead?

Let’s Stay Together, America: Obama’s Viral Campaigns

Obama sings 'Let's Stay Together'

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

While ostensibly Tuesday’s State of the Union address was President Obama’s most important speech of the week, his performance at an Apollo Theater fundraiser last Thursday stole the spotlight.  The reason for this, of course, was because he sang a few bars from Al Green’s classic song “Let’s Stay Together.”

Journey to the Center of a Triangle

I don't often get terribly excited about geometry. But in the case of the above video I just can't help myself. My first impulse, after viewing the entire clip was to blame my sense of wonder on the soundtrack. By layering music from Inception Robert Mikhayelyan and Alex Gill are hitching their wagon onto an incredibly carefully manicured experience. Inception was sold as, and sold itself as, this evocative, mind-blowing experience. And whether or not the film actually accomplished that for any given viewer hardly matters in the face of a sale we could so easily read. Inception, both in and out of the film, sold its sense of wonder so blatantly that it's the sales pitch that sticks--slightly Pavlovian, we hear the music we prepare for befuddled amazement. 

"Cinematic Sound" and "Acoustic Portraits": DJ Spooky's Art

Penguin

Image Credit:  DJ Spooky, "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica," 2008

Via Robert Miller Gallery  H/T Sean McCarthy

Last year, at about this time, I was writing my very first viz. blog post.  In 2009, the series of photographs that had caught my attention were about ice fishing in the northern United States.  The ice of the northern lakes, it seemed, had begun to diminish. New York-based photographer Maureen Drennan had been featured in the Times DotEarth Blog for the work of photos she called Thin Ice. I loved Maureen's shots of the fishing shacks and the people there, because they seemed potentially transformative, depicting the intimate textures of human life affected by climate change.  My first post this year again returns to imagery of ice.   Over dinner this weekend, one of my friends described DJ Spooky's latest performances on Antarctica, replete, he said, with stunning images. (The penguins above do have a point, after all.  See after the break).

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