Stories from Summer Vacation: Natalie Zelt's Refreshing Break

Here's a note from Natalie Zelt about spending her summer enjoying Austin's pools and some time away from the city, too:After surviving the first year of graduate school, I have spent my summer away from campus in a state of rebellious delight. Beginning in May, I devoted hours looking at images of and about food while curating an exhibition for the Houston Center for Photography titled See Food: Contemporary Photography and the Ways We Eat which opens this November. Over the past few months, I’ve worked with an array of photographers, including one who spends the summer months salmon fishing, another who runs a farm featured in Portlandia.I also swam as often as I could, making the most of Austin’s free public pools.  Swimming early in the morning was a great way to get to know some real characters in Austin. The rhythm of swimming laps proved soothing and revitalizing, as I compared the tiled bottom of my beloved Dottie Jordan pool to the shockingly large fish and underwater plants in Barton Springs.  This may not come as a much of a surprise to anyone else, but it turns out that swimming is an unbelievable way to decompress and stay cool in Austin.Another way to beat the heat is to get out of town. I just got back from a whirlwind research trip to Chicago.  If you are interested in learning more about the history of radical initiatives that link art and community, Chicago turns out to be an incredible town to check out. While there, I visited the Jane Addams Hull House where the staff literally opened their desks to share their working files on the settlement house’s art lending library and the Butler Art Gallery.

I also explored the history of the Chicago Society for Art in Public Schools and the Art Resources in Teaching programs at the University of Illinois Chicago. In the Ryerson Archives at the Art Institute, I learned about some pretty formidable efforts to bring art to the farming communities around Chicago in the 1920s. And I also heard about a number of current programs, such as CSA’s (or Community Supported Art), that connect contemporary artists and the community.  Prior to my trip to Chicago, I ventured up to Boston where I managed to coerce my younger brother into crashing a bridal shower dressed in full Colonial-era garb and to read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Much to my unabashed glee, the bride was mortified and the crowd loved it!The rest of the summer was spent with my puppy Scout as she recovered from two leg surgeries.

Aside from becoming acquainted with puppy orthopedics and the wonders of Austin, this summer allowed me to explore a many of the interests born out of first-year seminars at my own pace. My work on See Food and my research in Chicago were both great ways to allow my first-year of graduate study to grow and have gotten me pretty pumped about the fall.

Stories from Summer Vacation: The David Byrne Experience, by Carrie Andersen

Our next story comes from Carrie Andersen, who writes about an unexpected collision between her orals exam reading and David Byrne:This summer finds me in the midst of reading for my oral exams, which will take place next spring, come hell or high water. But I have been fortunate to take a few breaks from the books and from Texas. Of note was a trip with my family and a friend, my perpetual travel companion, to Italy. We explored the Tuscan countryside from our home base in a tiny village, Pian di’ Sco, before travelling southward to Rome, which was not so much a tiny village but a nonetheless welcome break from the books.Another trip—a decidedly shorter jaunt to my hometown of Chicago—unexpectedly stirred up a host of questions relating to my reading (people have been telling me you can never get completely away from the books; I’m beginning to  think that’s true). The event responsible for the whirring of orals brain? A David Byrne concert.Or, more accurately, a David Byrne – St. Vincent concert. The former Talking Heads frontman (and one of the most creative and fundamentally weird men in the public eye today) has been on tour for a few months in support of his recent collaboration with St. Vincent called Love This Giant. The show was one of the most hilarious and fascinating performances I’ve seen in recent memory. Byrne maintained his jerky, stunted choreography made famous during the Talking Heads years—at one point, he shadow-boxed a theremin—but he was so earnest that his yoga-like motions moved quickly past awkward, past endearing, and straight into perfection.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_5yJZUyr_cM]

(note: he still dances like this)

Although much of the show focused on Byrne and St. Vincent’s newer material, we did enjoy four Talking Heads covers, one of which was (of course!) “Burning Down the House.” The joy of the crowd singing along with Byrne belied the macabre tinge of the song’s lyrics (you know, houses burning, calls to jump off of this worthless structure while lacking any visible means of physical or metaphorical support, the usual...).Fear and paranoia have long been of lyrical concern for Byrne, according to Jonathan Lethem, whose Talking Heads’ Fear of Music attests to various sources of Byrnian unease from apocalyptic war to writer's block to air. (Note: for a clear example of this apocalyptic spirit, see the above  performance of “Life During Wartime” - this ain't no party, this ain't no disco—this is the end).These hang-ups are still floating around his oddball mind. One of his newest songs, “I Should Watch TV,” expresses ambivalence towards a technology that claims to offer a window unto the people but actually creates a demented version of identity and selfhood. What's fascinating here is that Byrne is not alone in fixating upon everyday sources of anxiety that are often dwarfed by massive looming pseudothreats like terrorist attacks or nuclear warfare. Those fears are, so I'm reading, usually inflated by a government that benefits materially from the misconception of what is truly dangerous about modern life in America. These books tend to offer the same despairing refrain: forget terrorists. Focus on economic insecurity. (Or systemic racism. Or an existential crisis. Or air.) But even given his lyrical emphasis on dread, Byrne performed with unironic joy, smiling through songs about devastation and prompting the audience to laugh with him. Lesson learned: when everything is going down the tubes, dance your heart out.