Irish Band Tedea Comes to Annenberg
On St. Patrick’s Day, an Irish performance featuring champion step–dancer Samantha Harvey, 2013’s Traditional Singer of the Year Séamus Begley, and Irish band Téada will come to Annenberg.
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On St. Patrick’s Day, an Irish performance featuring champion step–dancer Samantha Harvey, 2013’s Traditional Singer of the Year Séamus Begley, and Irish band Téada will come to Annenberg.
Barbie dolls are so much more than plastic toys—they always have been. For decades, they were one of the many standards that society used to define what a physically beautiful woman should look like. With blonde hair, blue eyes, and an impossibly small waist, the dolls have exacerbated problems of body image, self–esteem, and self–worth . While Mattel, the company responsible for making the Barbie dolls, has started to make dolls representing women of different backgrounds and ethnicities, the toy representations of women are still far from accurate.
Watching Call Me By Your Name, I was captivated, not by its lurid, nostalgic romance, but by that feeling of déjà vu that I could not shake off. Maybe it’s because queer cinema and literature has risen in mainstream prominence and acceptance (about time!), with Moonlight winning Best Picture in the 89th Academy Awards and CMBYN, Best Adapted Screenplay in the 90th Academy Awards. In these narratives are shared themes and connections—of sexuality, of fruit, and of foreignness, hence the déjà vu.
Think: When was the last time you read a book for fun? Was there ever even a last time? In the midst of spring break, the threat of midterms and problem sets is (hopefully) gone, so what better chance to catch up (or pick up for the first time) on your reading than now by the beach in Cancun? Here are Street’s best picks for Spring Break.
Of the many clubs on campus, few serve simply as an outlet for us, let alone a creative outlet. There are of course the typical consulting and finance clubs that seem to have insurmountable barriers of entry. On the other end of the spectrum there are the performing arts groups who spend days and nights together to work on shows. In between are the vast array of other clubs, many of which emanate preprofessional vibes regardless of whether or not they are preprofessional in nature.
For anyone familiar with Penn Housing, it’s easy to say that the housing facilities aren’t exactly prime. Rooms are small, buildings are infested with vermin and their offspring, and when nothing is leaking, there’s an elevator broken somewhere. Regardless, what makes up for the somewhat lackluster interior is its facade. I’m referring to, of course, the Quad.
To read the written word is one thing: it allows one to understand the self, to connect with others, and even to fantasize in an imagined world. But to hear the written the word—that’s a completely separate thing. That’s exactly what “LIVE at the Writers House” does. Occuring six times a year, LIVE at the Writers House airs a “one–hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken–word art, along with one musical guest from the Writers House onto the airwaves at WXPN.”
Telling my friends to read more poetry is always an uphill battle. Thanks to murky metaphysical poems like Donne’s “The Flea” and convoluted comparisons of symbolism, poetry has been pushed aside as too difficult to understand. I get it. Sometimes, it does require a lot more patience and effort that goes against everything the efficiency–oriented mind of a Penn student knows. But that’s exactly what I love about it.
When you visit Hadeel Saab’s (C ‘20) Facebook profile, her featured photos aren’t of that one night out with a group of friends or that really good solo shot. No, it’s a close–up of a bouquet of roses. It’s an aerial view of the skyline, the blue sky pinched by a fluttering rainbow parachute. It’s a canal by a street spotted by buildings that clearly have a story behind them. The choice of these photos is telling of the kind of artist Hadeel is, a kind of artist who finds the beauty in the everyday through multiple lenses, even if that means the most banal of things.
Louis I. Kahn: Penn alum, Penn professor, and, as so many often considered, “America’s foremost living architect.” But unlike the many Penn alum in the arts, whose legacies on campus are the mere facts that they attended the university, Kahn left a tangible, indelible mark in the form of his architectural designs for buildings on and off campus. Today, many of these plans can be found right here in metal drawers of the architectural archive at Fisher Fine Arts Library, depicting the inner workings of perhaps one of the most influential architects of the 20th century.
When I hear the words “American art,” I see a mental image of Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow; when I hear “European arts,” I see da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks; when I hear “Japanese art,” I see Hokusai’s The Great Wave. Clearly, where art derives from determines its character. In the same way, where Penn students go abroad for art shapes their individual creative processes.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) can be considered a landmark in this city. It’s the home of the Rocky Steps. It’s the place where the Eagles ended their victory parade. It’s the place where we (or at least most of us) dressed up for the gala that one night during NSO. But for me, the PMA was my reprieve. When I received a yearlong membership to the museum as a gift, I made it a goal to go twice a month and like most, I was first drawn to the museum’s extensive collection of impressionist artists, which soon expanded to the modern, the American, and the early religious arts. There was, of course, undeniably more than enough heavyweights from the late nineteenth to mid–twentieth centuries. Picasso, Dalí, Monet, Van Gogh, and Renoir adorn the walls of over half of the first–floor galleries.
August’s mother is dead at the end. We find this out in the opening line of Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn. “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.” There it is, the tragic plot twist, given away by the candid retrospective voice of the narrator. But this novel isn’t another one about death or grief or any of the common themes typically associated with tragedy. It’s about youth, friendship, healing, learning. Above all, it’s about memory.
Carmen Maria Machado is just like us. She binge watches Law and Order: SVU, she plays video games, and she didn’t get the job as a Starbucks barista. But unlike us, she received the Bard Fiction Prize, won the John Leonard Award for best first book, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize: all for her first collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties.
Walking into the launch party for the latest edition of The F–Word, it seems impossible that Penn’s only feminist arts and literary magazine was relaunched just three years ago. The gathering was held on Feb. 22 to celebrate the release of the inaugural fall mini–issue. The event featured an array of snacks and beverages as well as attendees who were eager to have important conversations about gender and equality.
Whether you want to spend time with a bookstore cat, go to poetry readings with friends, or see the places famous authors lived, you can do it all and make it back to Van Pelt to finish the readings you were actually assigned.
Jay Kirk has taught courses in experimental and creative nonfiction at Penn for 13 years and was recently awarded a $40,000 grant from the Whiting Foundation to conduct research and write his next book.
Allison Winn Scotch (C ’95) doesn’t outline.
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