Childish Gambino a.k.a. Donald Glover is truly the jack of all trades. Comedian, actor and lyricist, he’s not only a modern renaissance man, but a bonafide superstar in every aspect. In his most recent album “Awaken my Love,” the singer/rapper/whatever category you want to put him, showcases his awareness of music culture. Combining punk, gospel, RnB and other genres, Childish Gambino has evolved as an artist, creating a work of art that is breathtaking for all music listeners.

A successful album usually begins with a big bang. In this case, it is the Gospel chorus in “Me and your Mama.” This intense play of musical composition is as overwhelming as it is beautiful. With Gambino’s vocals in the background, it melts sounds and emotions into eachother, bringing the listener closer to the music.

“Have Some Love” is a soulful track that stands out because of the synchronized drumming. It is quite an unexpected twist to his album, considering that he has never incorporated this genre before. But this track is emotional and so raw for listeners to hear, that it will seem as though he is a seasoned professional.

Throughout the album, you will frequently be unsure if this is an album of Gambino singing or this is all a sample of his various musical talents. In “Zombies,” he sings this ballad in high notes, showing off his incredible vocal range. This simple production is deep and emotional as he laments for his long lost love.

One of the most memorable songs off the album and at the top of the charts is “Redbone.” This funky song will be a kickstarter for anyone studying for exams right now. The deep undertones of the bass and the intricate violin background is a surprise motivator for anyone who needs to get things done.

If this album is a showcase of his music abilities rather than hip-hop influences, that’s okay because I am still a fan. Instrumental solos are majority of the pieces composed on this album, and the variety of sounds and beats throughout the track is truly emotional and engaging. You will rarely hear Gambino’s vocals or raps on the album unless he is providing background vocals. But, still, this album one of a kind and Gambino does not disappoint.

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The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) invites submissions across disciplines and fields that engage with the idea of “MOSAIC” in culture and theory. Mosaics are images produced by the arrangement of glass, stone, tile, and other non-precious materials into a pattern. While mosaic most immediately invokes an artistic aesthetic, the term also encompasses notions of perspective, legibility, materiality, representation, collectivity, and place.

Mosaic is a way of considering the relationships between the one and the multiple, troubling the artificial divisions cracking and crackling within our social compositions. As Jason W. Moore contends, we must recognize society and nature as entwined in a world-ecology. World-ecology interrelates capitalism, nature, power, and history as "the fundamental co-production of earth-moving, idea-making, and power-creating across the geographical layers of human experience." Society and nature are often categorically separated, but they must be recognized as always and necessarily co-constituted. Margaret Rhee's art, as both a praxis and poetics of social equality, enacts this kind of social consciousness in storytelling that interrelates being with desire. To recognize a mosaic is to engage in aesthetic attention to the world. This kind of perspective is also being taken up by studies in fields such as (but not limited to) eco-criticism, new materialism, ethnic and indigenous studies, media studies, Marxism.

This conference seeks to further complicate how the moments of world-ecology and social poetics fit together to attend to the permutations and arrangements of parts that make up various social, political, personal, and ecological wholes. What images can we abstract from the uneven fragments and "cheap natures" of our inherited world ecology? How can patterns help us attend to a long history of industrial grids, racial fractals, gendered webs, and class pyramids?  What materials are necessary to form a more sustainable political and empathetic economy? How do we become through our loves?

This two-day conference welcomes and encourages research across disciplines to collectively consider, question, and critique “mosaic” in theory, art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, ecology, medicine, anthropology, art history, sociology, media, psychology, mathematics, history, biology, etc. MIGC will also showcase an evening of artistic performances, readings, and art installations. Please see the call for creative submissions.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Mosaic and its history in art and cultures
• World-Ecology as mosaic, mosaic in the Anthropocene
• Form and its relation to content
• Assemblages, nature-cultures, and other ways of thinking about nonhuman arrangements
• Mosaic and architecture, urban planning, and public art
• Gender and sexuality as mosaic
• Embodiment as mosaic
• Theories of political organizing and activism
• Literature and film that considers the singular vs. the collective
• Pattern, arrangement, organization in digital media and coding
• Theories of cut-ups, mixed-media, collage in art and cultural texts
• Comics as mosaic
• Games

Questions can be directed to themigc@gmail.com. Please use the form below to submit all submissions by December 1, 2016. All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by a committee of UWM graduate student organizers.

The 12th annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is supported by the Center for 21st Century Studies, the College of Letters and Sciences, the Graduate School, the Office of Student Affairs, and the Department of English, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

Last week, the Retriever had the opportunity to speak with one of the campus’s most highly acclaimed and student-praised staff members: Michael Fallon. This week, we sat down with the English Department’s Artist in Residence: Lia Purpura. She has taught poetry, nonfiction writing and other English courses at UMBC for four years. Purpura is the author of three collections of essays, four collections of poems as well as a collection of translations. Her most recent (2015) collection of poems, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful, was widely praised. Stephen Burt, nationally recognized literary critic and alumni of Harvard and Yale, said of the collection: “Compact, profound, bright, occasionally dangerous, Purpura’s sentences shine like amethyst pendants, snap shut like bear traps, and open up underneath like trap doors.”

***

TR (The Retriever): What is an Artist in Residence?

LP (Lia Purpura): I get to teach from the perspective of a practicing artist and show my students how to develop the habits of a practicing artist. I give readings and workshops and talks around the country, publish poems and essays and articles and generally behave like a writer in the world from my home base at UMBC.

TR: Tell me about how you became interested in writing.

LP: Oh, I’ve always been writing, I just didn’t think about the act in any kind of formal way until I got to high school, when became more conscious of making poems as something I set aside time to do. I think most poets or writers are intense readers first, and then at some point they feel the urge to talk with or talk back to their favorite authors, or they feel the pull to test themselves against certain forms or subjects or specific poems. Or they operate out of the best kind of envy: the drive that sort of says “hey I can do that, too.”

TR: What do you consider to be some of your greatest achievements in your writing career?

TR: Do you think that UMBC is a community and an environment that cultivates poetry, poetic ideas, or poetic moments?

LP: Absolutely! Cultivating art in any form happens in an environment of curiosity and exploration, tolerance, acceptance, and interest in difference – and when people are given the freedom to try and fail. These qualities and elements are abundantly present at UMBC. I’d encourage everyone to “jump tracks” and enlarge their repertoire of “identities” during their time here. In other words, some of the finest young writers I’ve worked with at UMBC are STEM folks who bring vital and lively perspectives to the page and class, and who often discover the full range of their creativity when stepping into a complementary creative realm, like writing.

TR: Do you believe that UMBC is a good environment for writers?

LP: “Environment” is exactly the word to use here. A campus is an ecology. Think in terms of literary ecology and how the parts interact and what’s available for all. So, the annual poetry slam, open opportunities for editing and publishing in Bartleby and in the newspaper, classes in all genres of writing from poetry to journalism, an English department full of well-known, publishing writers, the extraordinary Manil Suri in the Department of Mathematics who is an internationally known fiction writer, opportunities to learn from peer tutors… the literary ecology is diverse and offers so many interconnected ways to behave like a writer. I’d encourage students in any field to try out classes in the English department – and go to readings. The next reader in the Department’s Literary Reading Series is Tim Seibles, new poet laureate of Virginia, who’s totally dynamic and a fantastic reader.

TR: What inspires you to write?

LP: The macro answer: the very act of being alive. The micro: the drive to hold and assert fragile states of being and perceptions that are in danger of being overrun by speed, efficiency, negligence – those ways of perceiving, those wee moments of being that make us feel most human. As E. M Forster said, “how do I know what I think until I see what I say?” That surprising and trusted interaction between self and page, between gathering and reflecting, observing and acting, is at the heart of my practice. I try to teach my students how to engage with forms of curiosity and how to practice listening so they might slow the onslaught of information coming at them and find ways to make things of beauty and ethical weight out of chaos and overwhelm.

TR: Do you have any personal thoughts, advice, or challenges for our readers?

LP: It’s challenging, in times of chaos and uncertainty, to remember that art matters. Why does writing matter? At a recent reading in NY, a high school teacher asked me this question. I told his students, who very much resembled the student body at UMBC, that now more than ever, clear, coherent, untrammeled language is desperately important – and this sort of language in any form is a kind of art. [That is] because language can be used to counter facts, betray humane values, and manipulate (to paraphrase Toni Morrison), and to maintain power, to obscure intentions and so on. A commitment to honesty and clarity and to the work it takes to attain those values is really critical. Art challenges, speaks back to, shapes the incoherent, shakes up the complacent with necessary chaos, offers new ways of being and thinking, makes beauty of strangeness – oh, so much more. Creative acts are, at core, acts of attention and alertness – both qualities we need in abundance today.

I told my poetry class the other day that they restored my faith in humanity – because of the way they talked and listened to each other, heard each other out, and though they often differed in opinions, respectfully countered. [I told them] that in no way should they ever discount the weight of these accomplishments and that this behavior in and of itself was one of the elements that they can bring to bear on the moment we’re living through as a country – the knowledge and practice that humane and open discourse is possible, that it takes practice and discipline and in no way precludes expressing strong feelings.

[I also told them that] they’re the agents and keepers of this behavior and that’s a form of power if acknowledged as such. Such modes of discourse are not to be taken for granted but to be acknowledged, because civility and openness to others, and the values of tolerance are not necessarily, as we’re seeing, stable norms. [They] can be broken into and robbed if we’re not attentive to what we’re upholding here in an open and free academic community. Students need to know that they can be the creators and keepers of this kind of behavior – and if they want it to thrive they need to be ferocious in asserting and demanding this out in the world.

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Following the much anticipated reboot of “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” on Nov. 25, Netflix still has a long list of “TBA” premiere dates for new seasons of Netflix original series. Without studying and homework getting in the way (for the most part) this Winter Break, Netflix subscribers will have more time to catch up on fan-favorites, although we might have to wait until Summer for some to return.

Besides the great series that are on Netflix, a list of classic childhood movies will also be added starting in December. A few of these include Disney favorites, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” (1989), “D2: The Mighty Ducks” (1994) and “The Little Rascals” (1994).

Here are a few series that are confirmed to premiere in the upcoming months:

Fuller House
Season 2, Friday, Dec. 9
Following in the footsteps of the original series, Full House, the new season of Fuller House continues to follow the lives of DJ and Stephanie Tanner and Kimmy Gibbler, as they learn valuable life lessons raising their own children. Just in time for Winter Break and the holiday season, this season of the show will also follow a holiday theme with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve all included according to Candace Cameron Bure.

One Day at a Time
Friday, Jan. 6
The new Netflix original series is based on the 1975 sitcom, with a modern twist and multi-camera view. The story will follow a Cuban-American family as the newly separated, military mother takes care of her two kids with the help of her own Cuban mother. The original 1975 series ran for nine seasons and the Netflix remake will start off with 13 episodes.

A Series of Unfortunate Events
Friday, Jan. 13
The popular children’s mystery series by Lemony Snicket will be coming to life once again in January as it did back in 2004 in theaters. The story similarly follows the Baudelaire children, Violet, Sunny and Klaus as their lives repeatedly take turns for the worst. The villain of the series, Count Olaf, who was originally played by Jim Carrey will now be personified by “How I Met Your Mother” star, Neil Patrick Harris.

Marvel’s Iron Fist
Friday, March 17
The new addition to the Marvel industry follows Danny Rand (Scott Buck) as he learns to accept his powers and returns to New York after years of hiding. As he tries to reconnect to this past and family legacy, he also comes back with an expertise of mystical martial arts. This is the fourth Marvel series on Netflix, and viewers — Marvel experts or not — can see the action and success already being foreshadowed.

Stranger Things
Season 2, Rumored as Summer 2017
If any show could be named the epitome of the Netflix industry, Stranger Things is the one. The first season took the network by storm, following a group of kids who have to fight against a monster and evil scientists to save their friends. The face of the show, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), has the ability to not only flip cars with her mind, but transport herself mentally into another dimension dubbed the “Upside Down.” The first season finale left viewers with many unanswered questions, but one thing they should be sure of is that the next season will be just as nail-biting and addictive, if not more.

Premiere dates are not yet determined, but there is already anticipation for the return of other hit shows like Orange is the New Black (Season 5), House of Cards (Season 5), Making A Murderer (Season 2), Narcos (Season 3) and Aziz Ansaris’s Master of None (Season 2).

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