What characterizes us as Angelenos?

/ yunhokim94 / 7 Comments

I was searching for an academic article on Giovanni’s Room to incorporate in my second essay and found an author who said, “David internalizes his native country’s homophobia, and this homophobia in turn characterizes him as a white American man.” This got me thinking what my hometown’s distinct way of thinking/looking that gives me preconceived ideas. What are some ways of thinking/looking that characterize us as Angelenos (or any other places)?

-Yun Ho

Songs Related to Place and Space

/ karennishiyama / 9 Comments

I don’t think we ever got around to discussing the songs that we looked up during class, so I thought it would be a good idea to bring up the topic in the blog post.

I was actually just listening to my playlist while I was walking around campus after Professor Cassarino told us to look up songs that we feel are related to place and space. The song that made me think of place and space was Weezer’s “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here.” It’s a somewhat depressing song from their Blue Album. Assuming that songs use the same terminology as poems, the speaker in the song equates losing his significant other to being left behind by the “world.” I think the speaker meant that their significant other played such a pivotal role in his life that losing her was equivalent to losing everything.

But, relating to place and space, the lyrics that stood out to me was the bridge and the chorus:

“You remain turned away
Turning further every day

The world has turned and left me here
Just where I was before you appeared
And in your place an empty space
Has filled the void behind my face”

It made me think of the first reading, where we discussed the difference between “place” and “space.” Here, the speaker distinguishes the two. The “place” his world/girlfriend occupied, had substance. But, now that she is moving on, turning away from him and leaving him behind, he is left with only an empty space, a void.

I really enjoy the way taking this class has made me think more deeply about the meaning of one of my favorite songs. It made me appreciate the amount of thought lyricists put into choosing words for their songs. I would really love to hear what my peers think about the relationship between place and space for songs that they listen to.

–Karen

Do the Right Thing

/ garrettdurbin5 / 11 Comments

After watching City of God, I thought about how unnerving it was to watch the war and chaos unfold as I lied safely in bed. It is an unusual and moving experience to see such devastation from the comfort of one’s own space, completely aware of how foreign in nature it is. However, when I watched similar violence and unrest occur inside American walls in Do the Right Thing, my discomfort was magnified. I thought about how quick I was to dismiss the collapsed society of City of God as foreign, and whether or not I was right.

I wasn’t. Racism such as that depicted in the Do the Right Thing is as much of a problem in our country today as it was when Spike Lee made the film, and we’ve all read about or seen the myriad cases of police brutality and overreaction that have happened recently. However, there is something about seeing the racial divide manifested through the characters of this film, each with stories, hopes, and dreams, that drives home the realization that there is so much that still has to change right here at home. Watching Do the Right Thing, we still may feel insulated from these issues on a diverse and tolerant university campus, but all of sudden we’re looking at New York, not Brazil. And it’s not just Bed-Stuy, either. As much as you or I may not want hate, chaos, and murder to be part of our place, we must acknowledge the fact that our collective space, as citizens of the United States, is wrought with it. This film was as much of a reminder as ever that that must change.

–Garrett

City of God

/ garrettdurbin5 / 12 Comments

This film was filled with so many interesting dynamics: the idea we first examined in We the Animals of childhood without rules; characters’ youthful dreams giving way to disillusionment over time; the metamorphosis of the City of God itself from a housing project troubled by petty crime to a chaotic, drug-fueled war zone. Most of the main characters of the film begin their lives with total freedom, only to feel the oppression and constraint of a battlefield they can’t escape by the end of the film.

I think that films like these are so alluring to us because they are depictions of places with which we are unfamiliar; we’ve often discussed our desires to shape and mold the world around us, but we also often forget how fortunate we are to have that opportunity. When we are shown this extreme poverty and the chaos and corruption that stems from it, even from a safe distance, we are made uncomfortable because we are taken out of place. We are put in a unique position because we begin to feel compassion for morally ambiguous characters due to the circumstances in which they find themselves, whereas morals in our place are more cut-and-dried. For me, City of God was an incredibly interesting look into a place so foreign to me that I had to apply an entirely different lens to examine and analyze it. The place in this film was as important of a character as any other. That’s an incredible directorial feat, a poignant plot point and, to me, the most interesting aspect of the film.

–Garrett

Entrapment

/ jujmcc / 7 Comments

After reading We the Animals and Giovanni’s Room, I started thinking about the theme of entrapment, and the feeling of being trapped in a place/space that was once considered a home. These ideas are present throughout both of the novels, but each novel offers a different perspective on how this feeling of entrapment is created and later potentially conquered. In We the Animals, entrapment is largely the result of circumstance and inequality. In Giovanni’s Room, entrapment seems to be a more self-constructed thing, in which David continually finds himself trapped by him own inability – inability to be true to himself, inability to commit to being happy with Giovanni, inability to be decisive in his actions. At the end of We the Animals, I was left believing that one could escape a space of entrapment, whereas I felt the reverse at the end of Giovanni’s Room. This got me thinking about a quote from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, in which Kerouac writes, “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” For me, this Kerouac quote was sort of how I visualized the ending of We the Animals, in which there are clear tones of sadness and pain in saying goodbye to a space once considered to be a home and watching it disappear, but a beam of hope is also present. This same hope doesn’t seem to be present at the end of in Giovanni’s Room, when we as the readers seem to be the ones driving away from David, able to escape, as he stands outside with shreds of paper floating back at him. What is your take on the theme of entrapment in the novels? What conclusion did you come to at the end of the two separate novels about a person’s ability to escape a place that was trapping them?

Julia

Have you felt you were in the middle of two spaces?

/ Cindy Martinez / 13 Comments

Recently, my friend explained the meaning of the Nahuatl word, “nepantla”. She defined it as a space that doesn’t exist, literally meaning being in the middle of two spaces. Upon reading more about the word, I felt it describe David from Giovanni’s Room as he struggled with his sexuality, deciding between Giovanni and Hella. We ascribe the term homosexual to him, even though he doesn’t want to be associated with it. He is still figuring out his identity, so he is in a space of in-betweenness. I feel a lot of people also struggle with labeling their identity into one specific category, whether it be their sexuality, culture, even choosing a major(north vs south campus). I guess my question is: have you ever felt you were in the middle of two spaces?

–Cindy

Do people or loved ones trigger a sense of place?

/ jaecan03 / 10 Comments

The other day I was cleaning my room and came across a picture of my aunt who passed away when I was about 10 years old. Although it has been such a long time since she passed as soon as I saw her picture it took me to a place where I could remember each interaction we created. I could remember the things she said to me, the places we went together and the laughs we shared. Being in this place it triggered a emotional side to me and it made me wonder if this happens to anyone else.

-Jordin