Mike and Me

Throughout my Michelangelo seminar this past semester, I noticed even art historians like a good game of “Whodunit?” With a 500 year chasm between the modern world and Michelangelo’s Renaissance, most everything has already been observed, written, and shouted from the rooftops.

Does David have long-lost siblings?

Chances are, if you have an interesting thought about this iconic artist, it’s been said before, and published in some swanky art journal to boot. With images of Michelangelo’s masterpieces reprinted and mass-produced across the globe, can anything new and innovative possibly be observed?

Well, many folks have credited themselves with “discovering” authentic Michelangelo pieces, which have never before been beheld by our 21^st century retinas. Some are more serious than others.

One goofball was pretty sure he’d found a hammer of Michelangelo’s. His evidence? The tool had an “M” inscribed in it! A more intriguing claim is one of a Columbia professor who suspects the “Laocoon”—that famous classical sculpture currently housed at the Vatican—is actually of Michelangelo’s magical hand. She posits that Michelangelo secretly buried the piece and then helped dig it up. Kind of a flashy archeological dig, don’t ya’ think?

The Italian authorities have received a lot of notoriety lately for heralding the detection of a somewhat dinky 16 centimeter wooden sculpture of Christ, now housed behind glass and fortified by non-smirking Italian guards (Everyone knows those well-dressed sentries who police the Sistine Chapel could be a bit more jolly). In fact, newfound “Mikes” have been, on average, discovered every two or three years for the past century.

My favorite discovery is “The Lost Pieta”—a painting that was found sleeping behind a family couch in Buffalo, New York. Apparently the work was passed through this American family for years and years but was relegated behind the sofa when the kids got a little too raucous with an indoor tennis game.

Finding Mike crouched behind the family furniture brings a whole new world to the game of hide-and-seek. I wish Michelangelo was my childhood playmate! I checked in the corners of my own Connecticut closets when I got home, just to be sure some long-lost craft project we had stored away wasn’t robbing us of a few hundred million or anything…

Home on the Range

Now that winter break is in full-swing I, like so many college students, am finding it evocative to see my family getting ready for bed at, well, normal hours. It’s kind of nostalgic to witness people whose sleep-patterns still correspond with the sun.

Howlin' with the Night Owl.

 

At 9 pm, my mom tells me I need to stop clamoring quite so enthusiastically. This translates loosely into what I imagine is something like, “Danielle, the whole neighborhood does not care about your views concerning the Estate Tax; please settle down.”

By 10 pm, now clad in his flannel pajamas, my dad questions why I am brewing coffee. By this I assume he means, “Danielle, I am rather concerned your proclivity for caffeine is undermining the sincerity of your biological clock.”

At 11 pm, my younger sister, with her lights out, asks me to please turn down the volume on my laptop. I take this to indicate a sentence akin to, “Danielle, your preoccupation with West-Wing episodes is all well and good, so long as you and your fictitious politicians are not reverberating throughout our entire home.”

Once the Westminster chimes officially stop singing at midnight, the only sound I hear is Joni Mitchell’s voice from my headphones. To this, my cat twitches his little triangular ears. Mickey is not quite fluent in English, but what he’s insinuating is, “Danielle, I enjoy drawn-out and dramatic guitar solos from the 1970’s as much as the next feline, but right now, it’s really time to go to bed.

Gosh, life back in Connecticut is challenging. Good thing Swarthmore’s helping me buff up my linguistic skills to crack open all this innuendo! Good night.

Postmodern Puppies

It’s the finals finale here at Swarthmore. Swatties are coping in their usual ways: reading excessive amounts of Foucault, viewing nonsensical YouTube videos, pretending coffee is water, and memorizing Bio bonds. Even so, the faculty nurtures us with spoonfuls of down-right adorableness. Seriously, I think the qualifications for teaching at Swarthmore are earning a Ph.D. in something extraordinary, writing a zillion publications, and being awarded the Nobel Prize in Cuteness. Yes, these folks are cute to the N^th degree.

Sadly, my pooch does not recite Paradise Lost.

For instance, I’m really looking forward to the “Pet Parlor Party.” Essentially, professors and deans bring their dogs to campus for the afternoon so students can cuddle up with a collie and forget chemistry exists.

At first, I imagined my black lab at home would love an opportunity to have a multiplicity of student hands petting her and whispering sweet-nothings in her floppy ears. She’s social and sweet and has always wanted to meet Dr. Doolittle, but I don’t know if she’d fit in with these professor pups. After all, she didn’t grow up eavesdropping on as much Proust as these pals probably did. While my lab was chewing bones, I bet these guys were gnawing on old copies of Kierkegaard.  While she was curled up in her PetCo bed, the humanities huskies were snoozing on oriental rugs. As far as I know, she believes in doggie heaven. A philosopher’s poodle probably has more of postmodern perspective…

Swarthmore Hazards–Who’s gonna phone OSHA?

Some environments come with hazards. Old buildings sometimes have a lurking asbestos. Vintage shops are known to have trouble quenching a mothball muskiness.

Are over-sized Adirondack chairs a hazard to humanity?

Urban construction sites require workers to master their fear of on-the-job cherry pickers. I’m come to see that matriculating at Swarthmore comes with its own hodgepodge of hazards. Here are a few:

1. Swarthmore excites students on a daily basis. In fact, if I spent less time clamoring on about how excited Swat makes me and greater time studying, I might be clocking more REM hours these days. Then again, sacrificing rapid eye movement sleep in the name of Swattie-styled conversation is well worth it.

2. Sometimes, you will be late to meetings. For instance, I was fashionably delayed at my weekly Sunday lit-mag dinner because I spent an unforeseen hour in my dorm basement voluntarily chatting about tax policy. Awkwardly shuffling in late is mildly embarrassing, but, heck, how else am I supposed to prepare for meeting Alan Greenspan in the afterlife?

3. It may, upon reintegration with the “real world” be difficult for you to partake in the beef-consuming grandeur of a 4^th of July party. This is because, vegetarian or not, you have adjusted to the prolific availability of veggie burgers at Swarthmore.

I remember trying to envision what I considered a utopian universe back in middle school when I was first introduced to the concept of a perfect society. In my mind, Swat gets as close to an ideal tropical island as possible without having to deal with all that kumbaya singing, or conversely, crazy totalitarians. Come to think of it, my closest exposure to totalitarianism here has been getting shuffled along in the Sharples Dining Hall pasta bar line. That, I can deal with.