Artsy-Fartsy II

Hey Guise.

Hm, I'm not sure what I'm doing on here. The next 48 hours for me are pretty...busy. Notice the pause, a pause more poignant than any expletive the English language has yet contrived. But here are the thoughts I'm putting down before anything of the Biot-Ampere-Laplace nature seizes hold of my brain-bark.

Admittedly, in between study times I've been down in the music room figuring out riffs to catchy songs. I could spend an entire day practicing and composing a piano piece, tweaking bits and pieces in order to tailor certain riffs to my fingering approaches. One song, “Winter Night,” originally set to a dawdling tempo of 85, sets an eerie ambiance, as if one were sitting atop the chilly Danish castle battlements waiting for King Hamlet’s ghost to appear. But play the piece an octave higher with added caprice, and you have yourself a fanciful scene decorated with dainty white snow gently settling atop sleepy pines. Indeed, music can easily place the participant in whatever setting it wishes to, so long as it is different from the present.

And what of the visual arts? Sculptures and sketches, all of which present some “perfect” form of man and society. As a child of the ‘90s blessed with cable television, I would spend countless afternoons absorbing fantastic, animated adventures. People could recover from a 2-ton weight struck in the head. Good and evil were effortlessly distinguishable. The coyote that ran off the edge of a cliff would not fall until it noticed its mistake. The realities here were amusing and ideal, yet nevertheless fictitious.

However, out of all the arts, I am most in love with dance. I immerse myself in the art of breakdancing, preferably known as "b-boying" by fellow enthusiasts loyal to its original Hip-hop nomenclature. It is raw. It is physical. It is emotional. Whether I dance to express what bottled up feelings I have or dance as a fresh medium of school spirit, I can share these sentiments on the hardwood floor, engaging others in the essence of being one with the earth. The musicality, kicks, spins and pivots take me away from the drudgery of daily existence. All that matters is hitting every 4th snare beat with soul and class.

Sonatas. Ceramics. Sambas. If life weren’t so fast, I would revel in the arts forever, in all their imaginative depictions of truth. Still, there came a time when I had to “grow up,” where I had to reevaluate these former “truths” with the current realities of modern life. Reality, though beautiful in the aggregate of its experiences, has its moments every so often riddled with monotony, injury, and complexity. At one point I concluded that those old cartoons and those Christmas songs, with their desirably simplistic albeit misleading ideals, have no place today in all pragmatic respects. Allotting much of my time to transcribing sheet music, taking sketch portraits of friends, or developing dynamic styles for upcoming b-boy battles, I began questioning how I could get anything "productive" done.

Now, I have since learned that art is not meaningless or powerless. Quite the contrary. Both art and reality have their ups and downs. Art is very much influential, to a point where I struggle to separate artistic concepts I have been fed since childhood from the blatant realities of the tangible universe. As it turns out, smoking is bad for you! The Earth's “North Magnetic Pole” is actually the South Pole! Napoleon was actually 5-foot 7, taller than I am! Surprise! If only the phenomenological realities of art could find application in reality, PHYS151 would be a little less demanding. But perhaps these distinctions are what save us as a species from the occasionally disappointing thing known as “reality.”