Author Archives: Shawn Tucker
DON’T READ THIS
Have you ever seen anything written in strikeout? Strikeout is where you have the line through the sentence. It is supposed to say that this has been deleted. And, like parents saying “don’t listen to that music” or “do as I say, not as I’m doing,” strikeout seems to only draw more attention to something. Swift uses something like strikeout … Continue Reading
The Satire Everyone Knows
It seems to me that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is the satire everyone knows. And the reason why everyone knows it is not just because everyone studies it in school, but because it is awesome! Hopefully, as you have read it again, you have found new reasons to love it. The first thing I noticed this time is how … Continue Reading
Master of Her Wheel
Okay, so let’s just be clear: this is about the weirdest music you will ever listen to! The Roman de Fauvel includes the “coolest” music of its time, which, to our ears, sounds very strange. The first piece has a spoken portion and then a song. The last “song” is the musical accompaniment for the wild wedding-night party. The second piece, … Continue Reading
Changing Stripes
In Horaces’s Seventh Satire, he mentions Priscus, a man who would “every hour change his stripes.” In Horace’s poem, this means not only changing his clothes, but changing them as a way to fit it and to move into different social situations. This might seem like a useful social feature, but for Horace it means a lack of integrity. Priscus … Continue Reading
Satire, or “10 to 20 million killed, tops, depending on the breaks”
Satire brings together elements of this class brilliantly. The vehicle for satire is, or can be, works of art. Those works of art ridicule or make fun of something by exaggerating the flaws, follies, or vices. We can see this in a clip from Dr. Strangelove. General Turgidson gives an only slightly exaggerated speech about taking advantage of the situation … Continue Reading
Postmodern Architecture: Spruce Up that Old Building
To make sense of postmodern architecture, we have to go back to the trenches in World War One. When World War One started, people were very optimistic. Europe had been in a politically tense state for a long time. When fighting broke out, the tension was released, and nations could go at each other! And even citizen were happy, hopefully … Continue Reading
Still life: The More You Know the Funnier (?) It Is
There’s a lot of background that you need for today’s work. I’m guessing that you’ve all seen a still life painting at some point. You might’ve seen one in a museum or gallery, and you may have even painted or drawn one in our class. Still life’s a great because they’re cheap, the weather doesn’t change, you don’t have to … Continue Reading
Still life: Wit in a Parisian Café
So you’re sitting around in a café in Paris in the early 20th century. You are a painter or a poet or a model or an art dealer or a musician or a political activist. You made friends with some of the other creative and intellectual types that hang around in the same café. You read the same newspapers and … Continue Reading
Music: Taking One’s self very, very seriously
You really need to watch the Usher video in order to really see how seriously he takes himself and that song. And then this whole idea that it’s second group of confessions that need to be made. And the deep regret and remorse that he tries to express at this terrible thing that he’s done. All of this just becomes … Continue Reading
Music: Turkey in the Straw
I thoroughly enjoy PDQ Bach. I find his music to be very clever and interesting. The work that we studied for today, Eine Kleine Nichtmusik 1st Movement, is a great example of what I like about his work. YouTube also helps me enjoy his work. Watching the video that has the subtitles for the PDQ piece was very helpful, and … Continue Reading