Sometimes a bad tattoo is harder to forget than a beautiful tattoo is to remember. Tattoos are risky, not necessarily because of the intense physical pain they can produce, but because of their permanence. We are constantly bombarded with examples of horrendously butchered tattoos, both in person and online. Since neither our minds nor the internet will allow us to forget the mistakes that have been left on people’s skin, we often forget that a tattooist is a genuine artist.
I’m not usually one to voice controversial ideas. I find that when I suggest things that force people to consider their own fundamental beliefs and perhaps, even for a moment, call them into question, guilt creeps like fear into distant territories of my mind. I sometimes feel like I am responsible for maintaining the happiness of others and, because of that, pacify others and modify the outward manifestations of my internal notions. However, after operating in this way for some time now, I have begun to feel trapped.
The 89th Academy Awards will go down in history for one very obvious reason, the massive blunder that was the final and most important award announcement of the night. For those that live under a rock, here’s a quick recap: While announcing the “Best Picture” winner, Warren Beatty took a pause when reading the card. However, his hesitance seemed like a cheesy effort to build suspense, causing his “Bonnie and Clyde” co-star, Faye Dunaway, to take the card and name “La La Land” as the winner.
This is not the column I had planned on writing this week. I had a couple hundred words written about awards shows and their place in American culture, inspired by the wacky Oscars broadcast this past Sunday. Then, early yesterday morning, we all received an email alerting us to the fact that transphobic vandalism had been written on the mirror of a gender-inclusive bathroom in Frost Library. Receiving this email dismayed and horrified me, as I’m sure it did for many fellow students. So, when I sat down to finish my silly awards show article, I realized that I could not.
Before we imagined what community looked like, we simply wanted it. Students and the institution both often rely too heavily on aesthetics. We try to create a community that looks and behaves a certain way, but we don’t always listen to the underlying emotional drive for social connection. Relational drive becomes sidelined for the sake of the relational product, and we lose sight of why we were trying to connect with others in the first place.
Sophie Chung is an English major with a concentration in film theory. Her thesis examines Asian-American voices on YouTube and how they affect the Asian-American community at large. Her adviser is Mellon-Keiter Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of English Yu-ting Huang.
Amherst alumna and MacArthur Fellow Dr. Kellie Jones ’81 spoke about her career and upcoming book “South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s” in a talk titled “EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art” on Thursday, Feb. 23. In her talk, Jones outlined her efforts to bring the work of black and other marginalized artists to the spotlight and reveal the “hidden history of black people everywhere.”
