Malevich

This past Monday, I had to do a presentation for my Russian Studies class. On the same day, I had to submit an Abstract Statement for my final essay and a fieldtrip report. So, three assignments in one day. I didn't really think it through when choosing a presentation date.

The presentation was the most stressful of the three, as it was worth the most marks, and if I failed, I would fail in front of the class.

I did not meet my presentation partner in person until the day of. A list hard circulated around class, I'd written my name down in one of the slots, and someone wrote their's down next to mine. They contacted me over email and we sent emails back and forth as our method of communication.

Our topic was Abstract Art in Russia, with a focus on Kandinsky and Malevich. My partner had taken the initiative in starting the Powerpoint, and had begun the section on Kandinsky. So, I offered to cover Malevich as a way of dividing the workload.

This was Kandinksy's key contribution:

This was Malevich's:

Titled: "Black Square". Let's check how much a reproduction of this image might cost...

...$590 to $1950 depending on what size you want.

I felt like I'd gotten the more difficult pitch for the audience.

And my instructor was a big fan of Malevich. When she showed us part of "Victory Over the Sun", an opera that was a collaborative work between Russian artists, she indicated that the backdrop was Malevich's "famous painting". It was Black Square, and I don't think most of the people in the class even perceived it as a painting.

She showed another one of Malevich's paintings, "Yellow and Black", which is a series of overlapping yellow and black geometric shapes. She showed it from three different angles, saying that when you observe it in person, it takes a long time to analyze, because it looks correct no matter which way you view it.

I was lost. But I knew that if she felt strongly about it, I had to sell it.

I was ranting to someone about how I'd have to fill ten minutes (it was a twenty minute presentation, so assuming I took half). She said, "You've already been talking about this for over ten minutes" and suggested I just speak as I had been.

"It's just a black square! A BLACK SQUAAAAARE!"

No, that wouldn't do.

Even though me and my partner never met in person, they claimed to know who I was, as we had been grouped together in our first class. Because this person's name was something traditionally male in Canadian culture, I envisioned a guy in that group that never again returned to class. There are some people who just don't go to class, read the online notes and submit assignments online. A few weeks previous we had a presentation by someone that nobody recognized. I assumed it was a similar situation, especially because I said that we'd meet in class and they said it was impossible because they had a class directly after.

Day of, we're supposed to meet in the library. I can't find the guy, but I notice the shy girl from the back of the class. "Uh... Gryphon?"

Yup, my partner. I'd felt bad because I hadn't been too responsive with my emails (a frustration I'm sure many of my readers associate with me), but it turns out she was in every class and had not approached me. Whatever.

We get into class. Our instructor is sick and says she's "just trying to stay conscious". Not good. You don't want the person in charge of your grade to be in a negative headspace, even if it has nothing to do with you. She says that we have a "Very interesting topic". Again, not good. She's invested in this presentation, so if we step wrong, she's going to know. Each presentation before us has been at the end of the class, and she's cut into their time, but she offers us the opportunity to open the class, so that she doesn't cut into our time. So we'll have to do the full 20 minutes, and she's clearly invested in a topic I have no confidence in.

At first, we can't get the projector to work. It's just showing a blue screen despite the Powerpoint showing up on the computer. She has to call for tech support. Nobody gets why it won't work. I have to choke back jokes about this being Malevich's famous work, "Blue Square".

Eventually it clicks on for no reason and we can present. I start off with a definition of abstract art and it's influence on Russia, then hand it over to my partner to cover Kandinsky. She's short, and so I have to cover the bulk of the time with Malevich.

We start in with his early works:

At this time he used bold strokes and usually conveyed one or two people.

Then we went into his inspiration from cubism and futurism:

That's the Knife Grinder. We then go into his collaborative work, the opera, "Victory Over the Sun"

And the style he developed with his colleagues, "Alogism".

The "log" in "Alogism" stands for "logic", and the "A", is similar to "Asymmetrical" which means "Not symetrical". So "Alogism" means "Not logical".

The point of Alogism was to contradict all conventional aspects of art so that it challenged viewers to understand how their own minds work.

However, Malevich felt that by simply rebelling against artistic trends, was still allowing for artists to be defined by those trends.

He felt that God had given humanity talent to create, and that immitating God's creations was theft.

So he rejected form, including his own human form. He strove to reduce everything to zero, which would reveal a void. But he wasn't satisfied with the void, he wanted to arrive on the other side, and create the first truly original human creation.

And thus he created Black Square, which was bringing "Zero to one"

He began his own art movement, "Suprematism", which meant "Supremacy over form". He said that Black Square was the face of Suprematism, and it was his "Royal infant" that would grow into the rest of Suprematism.

Having to call a black square a royal infant in front of a crowd of colleagues has to be one of my most humiliating moments.

After this I showed another one of his works:

That's "White on White", two slightly differently off-coloured white squares set atop one another. I explained this as the tilted white square representing motion. I said that when I first looked at this image, I thought that if I wanted to represent motion, I might draw a bird or a train, but then I realized that with those images came all the perceptions and biases associated with them With a neutral image such as White on White, we can observe the concept of motion in its purest form, without any attached biases.

Then we looked at Yellow and Black

This was the class example where our instructor said it took a long time to analyze because it looked correct no matter which angle you observed it from.

I said that because it looked correct no matter the orientation, this gave the impression of a lack of gravity, and a sense of motion, where you could easily imagine it "tripping through space" which emphasized Malevich's "Cosmic reality" which opposed and earthly one.

At the end of the presentation she thanked us for a very interesting presentation. At the end of class, she repeated that she would like to thank today's presenters. Felt that was a good sign

Got our grade back today. Unfortunately, it was the worst grade that I have received in this class to date.

That means we only got 97%! So far my grades are:

Test 1: 100%

Test 2: 100%

Abstract: 100%

Presentation: 97%

I should just move to Russia.

Court Again

Went to court today. I've mentioned it, but my landlord had been increasing my rent by an illegal amount and refusing to show me my lease. When I opted to pay him only what he could legally claim based on increases from my initial rent, he decided to put in a court order.

I told him that if my initial rent was $939.00 on January 2016, then it could only have been increased to $953.09 at a 1.5% increase in 2017, and then to $970.25 at a 1.8% increase in 2018. But he was saying I owed him $972.54 for 2017 and $990.05 for 2018.

He told me that my initial rent was discounted, and the discount became inactive after my first year, "as we had discussed". This is the man who told me that I had to pay him an extra half month of rent because even if I had moved in January 1st, he had accepted me December 15th. This is the guy who, for the first four months that I had lived in the unit, told me my cheque bounced and that I would have to write him another, and I would have to show him a bank statement showing he was wrong. Giving a discount would be very out of character for him.

I told him that we had not discussed the discount, asked him what the discount was for, and told him I would need to see the lease to verify. He refused to answer all these questions. I also told him that he had reported me as having paid less than I had for June and October 2017 and I had bank statements to prove it. He refused to comment.

Happened in a text conversation, so I had him on record for denying me my lease and not answering questions. Told him I would be reporting this information if he chose to take this to court, that I would be pushing to have him pay the court application fee, and that I would be looking into paying the Landlord and Tenant Board directly from hereon out.

So, knowing what information I had, I was surprised that he decided to issue me a court notice.

This is the second time I've been to court with him this year. First time, when I explained the situation, his lawyer cussed him out, "F*** my life. He's trying to charge for fifty f***ing dollars. I don't give a sh**, I really don't give a sh**, he's trying to evict on pennies". Then when I told him my take on the rent situation he said "I'll take your word for it". When he told the judge the situation, she laughed at my landlord, and he wound up having to pay some minor charges.

 After that exchange, I was surprised my landlord wanted to go round two.

I saw the judge again this time, but there were two hearings being held, and she was overseeing the other one. Saw the lawyer, but he was representing a different case. Neither of them recognized me.

I had prepared thoroughly once more. I had bank statements for every month since moving into the unit as well as images of each of the cheques, I had copies for each rental notice and records of him denying me the lease, and three copies of all relevant information.

As soon as I told his lawyer that he had been denying me the lease, she was just like "I'll make a copy for you. I'm doing that right now."

So now I have a copy of my lease. I'm the first person that I know of in my complex to have one.

Aggravatingly enough, it turns out his numbers mostly check out. I had a 2% "prompt payment discount" in 2016, meaning that I got 2% off if I paid on the first of the month. The discount wore off at the end of the year, meaning that it was a 1.5% increase from $957.78, not $939.

I have no idea why he would refuse me access to the lease if his numbers checked out, or why he would refuse to answer what the discount was for if there was a valid answer.

We had never discussed this. We had in fact never met before I moved in, I had only communicated with the then-Superintendant. It's also a little weird that the base rent is not stated on the lease, only the discounted rent, and that it states in the fine print that the base rent is 2% more than the stated amount.

But still, it says the lease was active January 1st, 2016, so I'm glad I didn't pay for December 15, 2015 like he was requesting. And he still misreported me for June and October 2017.

Whatever. I have a small expense to pay, but after two years and two months I finally managed to obtain my lease.

Sickness, Exercise, Board Game

I've been sick the past few days. Started with stomach cramps, turned into digestive issues. Cramps subsided, still had difficulty digesting. Low fever developed. Was blinking in and out of consciousness for almost three days. Day and night didn't mean much to me. Had to cancel two work shifts and skip a lecture. One of the people I work with was unavailable, so you can look at it as either me being fortunate in not having to cancel on another person, or me missing out on a day off.

It's Kind of like what I had at Christmas, but at least the most painful symptoms came one after the other instead of all at once, for some reason. Kind of annoyed that the same thing happened to me twice in under three months,

My roommate got it too, right after I got better. If everyone's going to get it, it's better to rotate the illness than to have it all at once, since it leaves at least one able-bodied person to go out and fetch supplies.

Fever dreams are always quite entertaining. This time, I had a dream that one of the pet cats in Guelph passed away, but she came back to life as a bag of shredded carrot. In my dream, my mother described seeing her attempting to possess the bag of shredded carrot, and encouraging her by calling "Come here little one! It's okay honey!" So this bag of shredded carrot actually came to life and would meow, purr and curl up on your lap. I vividly remember that this specific bag of shredded carrot was inspired by one that is currently in my fridge. In my dream, I remember saying that I was grateful that she came back to us, but wasn't it strange that she could live without a brain and make sounds without vocal chords.

There was a certain time when I was sick, when the cramps and the fever were gone and I had regained my energy, but I still had the digestive issues and needed to be near a bathroom at all times. That issue did not seem to be subsiding at all, and it made me wonder if this was just something I'd have to live with from here on out. I got better in one fell swoop the next day, though.

Today I managed to leave the house for the first time since the illness set in. Tomorrow, I will go back to work. I don't know if I'm back 100% though. All I had appetite for today were some crispers, and I keep sweating, even in the cold. I feel great though.

My roommate is a former body builder and is the type that exercises for enjoyment. The type that feels stress and needs to "work it out". I can't empathize. When I feel stressed, I want to eat and sleep. Exercise feels boring, repetitive, painful, and time consuming. But I'm trying to turn my mind around. He dug out a track through the snow in our backyard through the community area to the fence that separates us from the creek. At first I didn't think it would be very strenuous, because the track isn't very long, but it poses a unique challenge. When running on a track or on a treadmill, you usually start strong and then run until you meet your stride. With this thing, you sprint to the fence, skid to a stop, sprint back to the yard, skid to a stop and sprint back. Plus half of it is downhill, so every time you hit the fence, you sprint back uphill.

I've used it three times.  First time I did so covertly under the dead of night, because I wanted to find out how out of shape I was privately. I overdid it, wound up hacking and coughing so bad it lasted better part of a day and I pretended I was sick to everyone else so I didn't have to explain that I was still gasping for breath 12 hours after having done the run.

My roommate does that run while punching the air, holding weights, wearing a weighted vest, and wearing a gas mask that prevents part of his oxygen flow to simulate being on a mountain. And he does it for fun.

My brother was in a Sailor Moon board game commercial. He's Sailor Mercury, and he got 2nd place in the tournament.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIfB0L3r26k&feature=youtu.be

Super Blue Blood Moon

Tonight we have a Super Blue Blood Moon to cap off January 2018. It's Super because it is at it's closest proximity to Earth, and thus appears larger. It is Blue because of a popular saying that refers to the phenomenon of having two full moons in one month, and it is Blood because of a lunar eclipse, which causes the sun's light to reflect through the moon and give it a reddish colour. Pretty freaky.

I don't know how I missed out on the symbolism of having the first of the year occur on the night of the full moon, which is what allowed today to be a blue moon. I'd like to say that  it started on a blue moon, but I don't really think you can call the first of the "set" of full moons a blue moon, even if it's just as necessary for the phenomenon.

Yesterday I took a Social Psychology test that I don't have much confidence in, although I also recently took a Russian Studies test which I got 100% in. I've got an Art and Society project due next week where I have to find some piece of music and argue why it's a folk song.

 I finally filled the spice jars my grandparents gave me. As a reminder, when I broke a spice bottle on my fancy spice rack, my grandparents attempted to replace the bottle. When they couldn't, they gave me their cool spice bottle set. The bottles didn't have default labels like my other set, so I got to choose what to fill them with. I went with ginger, cinnamon, cumin, garlic powder and onion powder. With the remaining bottles from my old set, I also have oregano, rosemary, thyme, sage, basil, and chili. I think I still have coriander in Guelph, too. I thought I broke coriander and tarragon, but I guess it was only tarragon, because my mom showed me a fully intact coriander bottle from my old set last I was there.

I need salt and pepper shakers, of all things...

Last time I was home, I got to make stirfry for my mother and brother. I don't usually get to take command in my mother's kitchen, so this was exciting.

My stirfry is probably the best thing I consistently make. I know I've said it before, but I reverse-engineered the technique by observing the Conestoga cafeteria chefs and the people at Mongolian Grill. Not very complicated technique. You pour boiling water over some rice noodles, you put some meat in a pan, fry it, add vegetables, add rice noodles, add sauce. For a long time I just had been using frozen vegetables but recently upgraded to fresh. I prefer to use vermicelli as my choice of noodles, then cauliflower, snap peas, carrot, mushrooms, bell pepper and onion for vegetables. I used ground turkey for the meat, and teriyaki and sriracha for the sauce.

Went over well. They spoke highly of it, but what else are you going to do when someone makes something for you? But I was encouraged the next day when they ate the leftovers, and encouraged again when my mother wanted to make a stirfry utilizing some of my techniques.

Flattering that she felt she could improve her recipe with some of my innovative techniques, but she wound up upstaging me. She used a homemade sauce, used sliced chicken breast instead of ground meat, and she used ginger.

I tried using ginger in a stirfry recently and completely overspiced it. Now I don't know if I should just throw it out or if I should force myself to eat it. I'll probably leave it in the fridge and pretend that I'll eat it because I don't want to waste the food, but put it off long enough that it goes bad and I have to throw it out.

Safe Management, Water Shut Off, and Family Traditions

This past Monday and Wednesday I co-facilitated some Safe Management sessions. Because of new policies regarding training requirements, we had to swap up the slideshow from one that was more Extend-a-Family specific to a more standard Safe Management one, albeit with a few EaF touches. I wasn't really informed ahead of time, so I kind of stumbled through the slides, but my co-facilitator was at a similar disadvantage, so we had to be a little candid in our presentation style. We got through it.

Just took my first online Russian Studies test. For the test, we needed to have read Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev. 201 pages. Test was on Wednesday, finishing an hour before I had to teach Safe Management. I'd been reading the novel on the bus casually, but when I checked how much I still needed to read, I realized that I was on page 80, and so had 121 pages to go.

Did it all in one shot. Pulled an all-nighter, although I took a nap in the morning, did my test, then taught a 6 hour Safe Management session.

I was kind of off-base with my Art and Society project. Apparently I was supposed to create links with social influences rather than historical ones. Sucks to take a loss after I put so much more effort than I thought I would, but whatever. Take your licks.

After I came back from class today, I found that none of the taps in the house worked, or the toilet. Turns out, a water pipe burst, and while the city worked to fix it, they needed to shut off our water.

So I bought eight litres of drinking water and used the bathroom at our local Tim Horton's, which was in high usage due to no one having an operational toilet.

It was estimated that it would take two days to solve the issue, but they managed to get our water flowing again by 8:00 PM tonight. Mad props to those construction workers, working late during the winter and listening to all the resident's complaints when they were the ones fixing the issue, not the ones creating it.

Last Thursday, my grandparents from Toronto visited. They took us out for both lunch and dinner. Since Ive been away from Guelph as long as I have, my family get-togethers have been kind of divided between myself-brother-mother in Guelph or myself-cousin-grandparents-aunt-and-uncle in Kitchener. Me, my brother, mkoher, and grandparents used to frequently visit in Guelph, but because of my complicated schedule in Kitchener, it has been hard to bring myself into the old formula.

Had to skip Social Psychology in fact. But it was worth it. My mother, brother and Grandparent's have developed traditions since I've been gone, and so I got to finally dine at their places of preference.

We first went to Buon Gusto for lunch, where I got the chicken panini and mushroom soup, and then we went to a place called Einstein's, where I got the red pepper quasadillas. It was all good stuff.

Bad Teacher Mostly

So seriously, if this blog post is a little dry, please skim to the segment covering my brother, as it is far more interesting.
 
Last week I finished that Art and Society project, where I needed to link two pieces of seemingly unrelated art between 200 years, with six historical point connecting them. My instructor said it took him fifteen minutes, so I thought it might take me thirty, but it actually took six hours. Just didn't know how to approach it. First I attempted to look up indirect influences between ancient and modern art, and found out that Pablo Picasso was deeply inspired by African masks, and this developed into him spearheading the Cubist art revolution, one of the largest shifts in artistic history.

So I thought this was amazing, as Picasso's inspiration gave me a starting point of 7000 BCE, well surpassing the 200 year requirement between only my first and second examples. Besides, I was greatly intrigued to learn that arguably history's greatest artist shared with me a fixation on African art.

From the man himself, in reference to his first experience with African art: "And then I understood what painting really meant. It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path."

I feel you man.

His first cubist example,  Les Demoiselles d'Avignon even featured three women donning African masks:

But from here I didn't know how to take things, so I researched cubist architecture, cubist literature, cubist photography, as well as an extensive list of cubist artists, just looking for a lead.

Eventually I got smart and just looked up current African artists and attempted to find someone with a style similar to cubism.

Wound up with Ibrahim el Salahi, who spearhead African Modernism, which evolved through Cubism-Dadaism-Surrealism, and he even shares an inspiration with Picsso.

Some examples of his work:

So hopefully that takes.

My brother had an interesting class recently.

He was attending an Anthropology lecture of about 600 students. The instructor (Edward Hedican) was a substitute, as the regular professor couldn't make it.

This instructor spent the first segment of class advertising his books on Amazon after absentmindedly leaving a student's personal email address on the projector behind him. As the class continued, he stated that he would not be able to cover all the course material, as he did not have enough time despite having spent the first half hour of class advertising his own work.

When he eventually progressed to the course material, a student raised his hand to ask a question. The professor replied that he did not appreciate this students "competitiveness".

Apparently this student sneezed partway though lecture and Mr. Hedican took it upon himself to pause his lesson and glare at this individual.

As class moved on, Hedican called out this same individual for chewing/playing with gum. At this time, the student explained that he suffered from anxiety and used chewing gum as a way of coping (probably for dealing with being accused of competing with the instructor, being glared at after sneezing, and being called out for an insignificant action in front of 600 students). Hedican then questioned if this student was even enrolled in the program. When the student began exhibiting signs of anxiety, his Educational Assistant stepped in to help him, and at this point Hedican addressed the EA as his "handler" and made a request to "control him".

At this point, the student and EA exited the room, as well I hear, another student who began crying.

In response to this, another student rose to exit the room. Hedican said, directing to her "I didn't realize class was over".

She said "It is to me" and continued to call him out on all his abusive behaviour toward his own students.

Supposedly her video was taken down. Here's an intact one I found:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njaVTCyG76c

The video starts with some applause implying that she had already made the first segment of her speech. She continues to make two more, each receiving a round of applause. After this, approximately 550 out of 600 students left class.

Hedican has been placed on suspension while the situation is being investigated.

But it's a big deal. Hear are some major news outlets speaking on it

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/guelph-professor-edward-hedican-anxiety-student-anthropology-1.4492976

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/professor-suspended-after-allegedly-mocking-student-with-anxiety-1.3763119

http://www.lfpress.com/2018/01/17/university-of-guelph-suspends-professor-for-allegedly-insulting-student-with-severe-anxiety

Art and Society

I took my first Art and Society session. Honestly, I don't really remember signing up for it. I was going to drop it before seeing that it was an SDS course and remembering that I had space for an SDS elective. I guess it fit my class schedule, met my breadth requirement, and was a 200-level course as well as fitting into my new artistic phase.  It's art and how it reflects and develops society, kind of like my Media Arts class, which I took in high school and enjoyed.

No final exam, so I will have no exams during Finals week this semester. Whoo.

Grading is divided between an Observation Journal, 5 assignments, a review essay, and two tests. So again, more content but less intensity per assignment. We already got our first assignment, which is to take two pieces of art at least 200 years apart from one another with no obvious connection and connect them. Instructor says it took him 15 minutes on Google to come up with his sample assignment, but I don't know. Sounds kind of challenging.

Our Art and Society instructor says that his other class is teaching poetry to engineers. Probably a breadth requirement hosted in their main building. That sounds amazing. I'm almost jealous I can't be in the engineering poetry course. He did a thing where he asked us what art is and we listed off something like "Creativity, expression, subjective" etc. Then he pulled up two examples of definitions, one developed by his social work students, and one by his engineering students. The typical social work students reflected us fairly accurately, while the engineers listed "Paintings, theatre, music, poetry" and other more technical answers.

It's kind of interesting to see how this semester's courses connect with last semester's. In East Asia, there was some overlap with Russia, and now I'm studying Russia. Social Psychology is right on the edge between Psychology and Sociology and I took Sociology last semester. And then Art and Society is about the philosophy and history of art, and I studied the application of art last semester.

I went to get a calendar this year and found out that Calendar Club has shut down at my local mall. I had long speculated that a shop specializing in calendars could not survive, as its relevance was limited to only a month or two per year. They had other stuff, like board games, but I felt they needed to rebrand. But weirdly, Calendar Club chose calendar month to call it quits. So I was reduced to purchasing a Lang-brand calandar at some place called Bonkers. It's.... okay. I got something called Beyond the Woods, which is art depicting weather and wildlife in its respective state for each month of the year.

I've been getting calendars that have art depictions of the natural state of each month over the past few years. Last year I got Raffi's Toronto, which was monthly depictions of Toronto by some cool artist named Raffi. Before that, it was a seasonal conglomeration of the Group of Seven.

But this year, I have to settle for Lang's  mediocre collection. There was another seasonal-focused calendar, but July depicted some guy in a speedo jumping into a lake and I'm not going to look at that for a full month. They did have one called Proud Rooster, that I was tempted by. It was just some rooster, and each month he's strutting with some seasonal colours and patterns in the background. It seemed a bit simplistic and I almost felt like I was missing out on an in-joke, so I didn't get it, but I kind of wish I did. Probably more memorable than this super basic seasonal wildlife calendar I got.

Over the past while, we have been caught in something called a Polar Vortex. Simply put, it means that we are getting incredibly cold weather even by Canadian standards during the coldest time of the year. It's not normal Canadian weather, it's like a cold-storm. Weirdly, we also got hit by some  warm air crawl from the states, so we went from having record-breaking cold weather one day, to nearly summer weather the next, melting everything away, and then back to record-breaking cold. I watched the rain turn back to snow as the warm crawl left and the polar vortex overtook again. People around here are in near-disbelief over the strange weather.

They turned the basketball court near where I lived into a skating rink. Pretty innovative, I feel.