#williams record

[andallofthemwitches]

Ombudsman column: The Pentagon is trying to silence me

Outgoing Stars and Stripes ombudsman Jacqueline Smith has spent months speaking about her growing concern over attempted control of the news

[andallofthemwitches]

Inciting Art and Perseverence: Deborah Rothschild Highlights

Spring Lee

Deborah Rothschild retires this week after hunting for rocks, getting chased by farm animals, helping incite student dissent, as well as holding out for just the right Picasso for the sake of her job as the Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the WCMA. She told me over coffee that her two passions are working with living artists and researching, "digging like those boars that root for truffles until I find the gems I'm looking for. I love that. I love making the connections that you make when you research thoroughly enough to make them surface. And I got to do them both."

Highlights of working with said living artists, circa 1994, The Rock Fan: "David Hammons – he did the Rock Fan, which people who take Art History 10 still study. He worked improvisationally, and so he came up here and the galleries were empty—there were nothing in them. Which for me, who plans, I [kept saying], 'Well, what are you going to put in them, what are you going to put in them?' And he kept saying, 'Well, we'll see.' I was a nervous wreck, and I said, "What if it doesn't work? What if it's not good?" And he said, "That's okay. Not everything has to be a home run'—which," she breaks into laughter, "which was a really new concept for me. I'm type A, and you know, want to make everything perfect. It was eye-opening.

He did this piece: he placed this huge boulder—and we went together into a field in Adams on a farm for just the right boulder and we were chased by bulls…. I mean, not exactly part of the job description! But we finally got the boulder here and he screwed in about thirty rotary fans and put it right in front of Chapin Hall. And this caused a riot on campus. The students were protesting, it was on the radio, they gathered around complaining that their tuition money was being spent on this—and of course, it wasn't; it was funded by a grant by the Lannan Foundation. I think there was also a little racism involved: he was a black artist. And the piece was this craggy, irregular thing with all these funny fans on it; it looked ugly at first. It got covered in post-it notes: Ban the Fan, I don't want my tuition money going into this, that kind of stuff. And his attitude towards this was just wonderful. 'Poor little guy, he's just been born. It's a new thing on the planet, and anything new at first looks ugly. You guys are gonna have to get used to it.' His idea has to do with flight, it has to do with escape, and ultimately, it's tied into slavery. And his thought was, "Well, when the wind blows, the fans will turn, and the rock will rise up." [Laughter.] Which, of course, was impossible. I mean, this thing was like a ten ton rock, but the concept was beautiful. But he eventually won students over. Working with him was a peak experience.

Tell me about your process setting up an exhibit: First and foremost, it's an art museum, so you need to get the art. The last exhibit [Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy] was very labor-intensive because the cast of characters is so large. It wasn't just Gerald and Sara Murphy, there are all the illustrious friends they had: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Johnathan Parker and Cole Porter and Stravinsky…on and on an on.

Gerald was an artist who produced a very limited body of work, and only seven paintings survive, and it was critical to get all seven—and it was difficult to get all seven. Then we needed a major Picasso, which I call a Sarah-type, which looks like Sarah was an inspiration for it. Not any Picasso would do—I needed just the right one.

Lenders are recalcitrant, and you have to keep going back and not hear 'no.' If I'd had to do this show when I was 20 years younger, it never would have happened. I would have thought it impolite, and I wouldn't have had the perseverence, which I learned.

It was so gratifying because I felt like I'd really come to know [Gerald and Sara, and their group of friends] and see their value in a way I couldn't have done if I hadn't done everything—read the letters, gone through the archives.

You must be on to bigger and better things: what are you up to next after that laundry list of impossible tasks?

I'm resting for a little while!

[andallofthemwitches]

[williamsmhc]

How the Oscars Contribute to the Stigmatization of Mental Illness

Year after year, the Oscars is the biggest night inentertainment. Its ubiquity from November to February dictates moviegoers'discussions of independent films and limit them to, primarily, acting and cinematography (two categories that most people feel qualified to speak about). But our fascination with the glitz and glamour of the Oscars is dangerous. The power we grant this awards ceremony to determine our opinions of important, groundbreaking films has the potential to keep us from discussing what the contents of these films mean to us as a community.

 This year's Oscar favorite for Best Actor and winner for Best Picture, along with its many other awards and nominations, “Birdman,” is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The movie follows a former Hollywood star, Riggan Thompson (played by Michael Keaton), famous for his action movies and popular with middle-aged women, as he attempts to take back control of his acting career by directing and acting in his Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver's “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Throughout the journey, Thompson suffers from hallucinations, hearing the voice of his former character, Birdman. The hallucinations damage his relationships with everyone he is in contact with; other actors, his ex-wife, his daughter, and his best friend and producer. Moreover, they take a serious toll on Thompson himself. In the end, he attempts suicide onstage (and gets a standing ovation from the audience). When he wakes up in the hospital and learns that he failed to kill himself, he jumps out of his hospital window and finishes the job.

 The conversations Thompson has with his family and friends throughout the movie should raise serious red flags for us, as an audience. The people closest to him fail to acknowledge or discuss his obvious mental health struggle, even after he destroys his dressing room in a wild tantrum, even after he shoots the nose off his face in his on-stage attempted suicide (as do the health professionals supervising his hospital care). The absence of substantive conversations about mental health from the movie should not go unnoticed – these absences present an opportunity for us to think about what role mental illness plays in our society, and make every effort we can to combat the stigma that kept Thompson's family, friends, and coworkers from speaking up.

 The greatest irony for me in viewing “Birdman” was the post-movie discussion I heard as I exited the theater. After Thompson attempts suicide onstage, he gets a standing ovation for what the audience perceived as an extraordinary performance by a gifted actor. Unfortunately, the movie's audience reacts the same way to Keaton's performance in “Birdman.” The irony is lost on the moviegoing crowd, as they leave the theater focusing on Keaton's brilliant acting and the film's one-take cinematography and failing to realize that they are the exact audience that “Birdman” seems to be mocking in that scene. When I watched “Birdman,” a powerful, critical message presents itself: stigma is a tragedy, and suicide is not a spectacle. But when we combine “Birdman” with our Oscar-worshipping culture, we do not get the message; we at once fail to recognize the mental health stigma that the movie wants to combat, and reproduce that stigma by otherizing mental illness.

 The Oscar award for acting has serious otherizing potential. The award in itself suggests that the actor has accomplished some great feat by making the character relevant and relatable to the masses. When we look at the winners for Best Supporting Actor in the last five years, we see Christian Bale winning for portraying a drug addict, Christopher Plummer winning for playing an elderly man coming out as gay, and Jared Leto winning for playing a trans woman. For Best Supporting Actress, Octavia Spencer won in 2011 for her role as a black maid in the 1960s American South. For Best Actor, Matthew McConaughey won last year for his role as an HIV-positive man. For Best Actress, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Lawrence, and Natalie Portman have won for their portrayals of women struggling with mental illness. It is clear that the actors that win this award for their supposed transcendence of human limits, are actually being recognized for their ability to portray “the other” in a relatable way.

 These awards, in themselves, may not be so offensive. They may even have potential to bring awareness of several important issues to our celebrity-worshipping culture. It is significant that films with characters representing marginalized groups in society are being made and recognized; we could easily look at this as a huge step forward. And the actors and actresses who win have some agency in promoting the cause of their character, if they so choose. But our narrow focus on the celebrities and their acting, let alone their dates and outfits to the actual awards ceremony, does serious harm to any potential for these films to make a powerful, critical statement about our society, and reproduces our all-too-eager tendency to otherize cultures unlike ours and people unlike us.

 Some may argue that the Oscars are meant to recognize and award movies specifically for their artistic value and have no responsibility for social justice. This is a fair point, but the way that the Oscars recognize supposed “artistry” is by breaking up film into categories that together fail to encapsulate the film's content and communicative power. When decide it is appropriate to recognize films in bits and pieces, it is as if we are choosing to award each brush stroke of a Monet painting without stepping back to see the actual scene he was painting. Even though the Oscars arguably do not have social responsibility, that doesn't mean that the films themselves are devoid of a social context or an activist undertone. It simply means that the awards ceremony both fails to recognize these types of messages and willfully obscures them by focusing on the parts rather than the whole, and that is truly a shame.

 Once our favorite actor wins Best Actor and our favorite film wins Best Picture, we forget about it. As long as we focus on artistry rather than content, as long as we fail to consider these films in relation to ourselves and our society, as long as we prioritize celebrity over criticism, we are not moving forward. We at Williams need to examine our (invisible) roles in these films. We should recognize and work to change the cultural issues that we see in movies. We should watch every movie, and every Oscars, with a critical eye.

-Sarah Austin

[huffakingit]

The two of us are not dating, but that did not stop us from e-mailing Lisa Champagne, assistant manager of Dining Services, to tell her that we were engaged and would like a prime table at ’82 Gril...

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