Eine Amerikanerin in München

Oberlin grad, Fulbright ETA, figuring it out (not in Munich)

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Oberlin typography

Over my three years at Oberlin, I took so many pictures of the various signs in town and on campus. Now that I’ve graduated, I figured it was time to put some of those pictures together in a post. These photos are all from my fourth year, but I could easily make a part two out of some earlier photos.

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I’d like to dedicate this post to a pair of sneakers, namely the ratty and ripped pair of Converse high tops that have been my shoe of choice for the past year and a half. (Hence the nice high top tan line.)

I bought them, if I remember correctly, the day after my family ended their stay in Munich and flew back to the US - my parents thought my current pair of Converse had gotten too gross and insisted on giving me money for a new pair. The very night I bought them I went on a trip. Admittedly it was a quick one, just a short train ride to Augsburg and back to see a friend of a friend give a concert in a hostel. But it was still a trip.

They came on JYM trips to Leipzig and Berlin. Later they went to Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Eger. Then to Berlin (alone this time), Hamburg, Copenhagen, Humlebæk, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. Then to Poland, for a weekend in Kraków and Oświęcim. And of course, they brought me all over Munich, and back to the US again, to Niskayuna, Cape Cod, Oberlin, Chicago, Detroit, Rochester, and a many other places in between. I attach a lot of memories to these shoes.

It’s normal and natural to associate objects with the times and places you spent with them, or at least I hope it is. The trouble with that is I can sometimes trick myself into thinking that I’ll forget those things if I get rid of the objects or decide to throw them away. So it was with these shoes. The sole of the right sneakers was coming apart from the heal, letting water in and soaking my sock whenever I went out in the rain. Not to mention that the canvas was getting worn and the laces were stained gray. It was time for them to go, and I had to remind myself that the memories didn’t have to go with them. They can stay in my photos and journals and, of course, in my brain, at least for a while. But that doesn’t mean that a part of me will miss these shoes and all the pieces of earth they touched.

So goodbye, shoes. May my memories last longer than your stitching. 

[oberlinadmissions]

I thought I would be sad during these last weeks in Oberlin, but mostly I’ve felt happy, happier than I’ve felt all year in fact. Maybe happy isn’t the right word, mostly I’ve just felt content or right, like this is exactly how my last month and a half here should be. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with affection for this place and these people. I’ll sit in silence for a few minutes to drink it all in or need to gush to a friend about the lovely light or a particularly beautiful color combination in the landscape, the sort of thing I’d usually just take a picture of and leave unremarked upon.

Emily ‘15 reflects on her final weeks at Oberlin (via oberlinadmissions)

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Chicago Signage

Over Thanksgiving break I visited my aunt, uncle, and cousins in Chicago. I wasn't planning on doing a signage post during my trip, but once I saw the famous Chicago sign, I couldn't help but find more signs I wanted to capture. Plus, how could I resist posting that beautiful pretzel from the Chicago Christkindlmarkt?

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I wrote an article for The Grape

If you open up this week’s edition of The Grape, Oberlin’s Alternative Student Newspaper, and flip to page 32, you’ll find an article by me about a cappella culture and the patriarchy, explored through a description and analysis of a joint concert my all-female a cappella group, Nothing But Treble, put on with an all-male a cappella group, the Obertones. I am pretty proud of this article, it’s the product of a lot of thinking about the intersections of gender, performance, and collegiate a cappella culture, but that’s not why I’ve decided to post about it here. Rather I’ve decided to do that because it seems to have ignited a bit of a controversy on some anonymous Oberlin spaces.

I’ve decided not to add much additional commentary here, although I might do that in the future. Instead I’ll post the following in order: an image of the article in print, screenshots of the complete Yik Yak and Oberlin Confessional exchanges as of 3:15 PM on Thursday, November 20, and finally the text of the article below a cut.

The article in print

(Arrows used to indicate posts I made, because transparency is good.) Apologies for the huge number of photos it takes to show this conversation, but I couldn’t think of a better way to do it and I feel like this exchange illustrates how people understood - and misunderstood - my article pretty well. The only other point people seem to think I’ve ignored on my article based on things I’ve heard from people is that the Obertones are an older, more established presence on Oberlin’s campus. This is patently false. The two groups were founded less than three years apart - the Obertones in 1984 and Nothing But Treble in 1987. Frankly I think the perception of the Obertones being more established in spite of their being only slightly older than the Trebs is evidence of the patriarchy at work.

The original Oberlin Confessions post, which a friend informed me of because as you might’ve noticed, the person didn’t feel the need to call me out by name.

The responses (full disclosure, Conor and Ella are my friends and Ella is also in Nothing But Treble).

Below is the article, please (respectfully) let me know what you think of it. 

On Friday, November 7 Nothing But Treble and the Obertones, Oberlin’s oldest single-gender a cappella groups, held a joint concert in Finney Chapel. I’ve been singing with Trebs since my first semester at Oberlin, and I think I can speak for everyone in the group when I say that leading up to Friday, I was pumped for the concert. Our set featured almost everyone on a solo and had music from a variety of different traditions, something we prioritize as the most diverse a cappella group on campus. Additionally we rarely perform in front of the type of crowd we were expecting for this concert and were excited to sing in front of such a large audience. 

At a normal Nothing But Treble concert, audience members often respond to our songs with appreciative whoops, claps, and yells of “YES.” The energy is overwhelmingly positive, which makes our performances more dynamic and exciting. But on Friday night this energy was nowhere to be found. From the moment we stepped onstage and began our set, we could feel that something was off. Our starting gag, proclaiming that we were the Obertones while clearly mimicking their standard concert dress, fell pretty much flat, and as the set went on, our attempts to engage with the audience never seemed to get anywhere. As I looked out into the audience, I saw more than one parent looking confused by or unimpressed with our performance. One woman in particular, presumably the mother of an Oberlin student, wore an expression I can only describe as “stank” for our entire set and seemed downright disturbed by our Beyoncé medley, during which she seemed to glare at one of our soloists.

When we sat down in the audience to watch the ’Tones perform we immediately felt the atmosphere in the room change. People responded well to their music and to their stage presence, which relied on moves typical of all-male collegiate a cappella: speaking in exaggeratedly loud, animated voices between songs, a skit in the middle of the set, dancing, and generally jumping around the stage. As usual, the ’Tones did all of these things well and I respect the level of energy they always put into their shows. However, I doubt that it would’ve had the same effect if we used the same strategies that they did to excite the audience.

After all, men are expected to be funny and to command a room, but as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in the section of her TED talk quoted in the song “Flawless,” “we teach women to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. Otherwise they will threaten the man.” A group of men dancing is funny. A group of women dancing, especially when many of them are women of color, is nearly always perceived as sexual and therefore vulgar, no matter the intent. And of course, it’s tough to jump around a stage in heels. No wonder that all-female a cappella groups are often considered boring – how are they to be interesting if so many conventions of the genre are totally closed to them?

As I performed our set, I wondered if it might’ve just been “too sexual for parents weekend,” but as I listened to the Obertones set, I realized that it included three songs about sexual desire or sex acts. By comparison, only a few short sections of the Beyoncé medley are explicitly sexual. While these brief expressions of female sexuality left the audience cold, they clearly could not have been more comfortable with the Obertones’ crooning and gyrating. In fact, the very same woman who sneered through “Blow” and “Rocket” seemed positively beatific when the Tones sang Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” a hypocrisy that was not as much surprising as it was disappointing.

Every member of Nothing But Treble knows that we live in a world controlled by the patriarchy, full of rules for how women should and should not behave. We know that these rules are present in every aspect of our lives, and that includes how people perceive us as a group of strong women making music together. In our safe corner, we can occasionally forget this problem and bask in the light of our friends’ appreciation for what we do, but the moment that we step back into the wider world, the reminder of the patriarchy’s perception of our music and ourselves is as swift as it is disheartening. While I don’t know how to solve these problems, I do know one thing: Nothing But Treble and all-female singing groups in general will continue to take up space on this campus and in the wider world. Even if you don’t want to hear us, we will continue to make our voices heard, and we will sound damn good doing it.

[wilkergirl]

Slow Train and the Sublime

This morning I had an experience that I've been mentally referring to as "approaching the sublime." I could just as easily, and somewhat less pretentiously, refer to it as cinematic, or maybe just as aesthetically cohesive. (I may be borrowing this idea of aesthetic cohesion from Tavi Gevinson,) This is what happened, starting with the general setting and moving towards the specific, sublime moment:

It's October 1st. Although leaves have been dropping on and off for a while now and there have been cloudy days that require a sweater and a scarf and nights that smell like dead leaves, today was the first day to unite these things, the first day that makes me think fall is here to stay, at least for a while. I left my apartment building and biked to Slow Train, where I got a coffee and a scone and settled in to read the last 30 pages of Housekeeping. The baristas had mostly been playing interesting jazz arrangements with a bit of a bluegrass element, a version of "Round Mignight" with a banjo, that sort of thing, but as I was nearing the last pages, a sort of mournful song with only a piano started to play. Housekeeping's last paragraph is really quite beautiful. My professor described it in class as, "one of the great closing paragraphs of American literature, and I don't like to say that sort of thing," and I know what he means. The last sentence is as follows, 

No one watching this woman smear her initials on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her bag for the sea gulls, could know her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie. (219)

And as I read that sentence, the song came to its final cadence and the piano line floated upward from chords into single notes and finally into nothing. Then I closed the book and another song began to play. I picked my sweater and scarf up from off of the floor, put them on, biked to class, and that was it. 

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Schenectady Signage

I've done a few of these posts now dedicated to the typography of various European cities. Now it's my city's turn. What I love about this particular group of signs is that you really get a sense of Schenectady's history. Maybe that's because I was drawn to particular signs that correspond to what I associate with the city, or because I know the city so well. Who can say?

I wonder if a native of Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin or Kraków would see the same thing when they looked at those signs.

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The Last Day in Munich

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She Will Fly -  Goodbye July

In which I say goodbye to July with a shaky cover of "April Come She Will" and some leftover footage from the last month.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 15

In which I reflect on meeting Hillary Clinton.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 14

In which I'm in my childhood bedroom.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 13

In which I attempt to find balance.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 12

In which I get my voice back and am happy to have friends.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 11

In which I am on vocal rest and have to get a bit creative.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 10

In which Kate visits and I am voice-less.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 9

In which I go swimming.

My Letters to July playlist

The original

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Letters to July - 8

In which I am done with my semester. Recorded on Tuesday, edited Wednesday. I should be doing same-day uploads from here on out.

My Letters to July playlist

The original