Fish Out of Water: Coachella Music Festival

Coachella Music & Arts Festival is the kick start to summer music festivals each year.

Taking place in the desert heat of Indio, California, people travel from far and near to hear their favorite bands and discover new artists worth listening to.

Because of the success and popularity of this festival in the past, the company who puts it together (Goldenvoice) decided to have identical festivals for two consecutive weekends.

Coachella's first weekend this year held record low temperatures compared to years past.

The second weekend was full of record high temperatures, reaching over 103 degrees the entire three day weekend.

Having never been to Coachella before, I had a group of friends that invited me to tag along, and I accepted the gesture.

I am a lover of all things music and love going to shows but had never been to a festival of this scale.

I had only heard good things about Coachella and, in doing so, set standards as to what I should expect.

The group of people that I went with were not my best of friends but they too loved music so I assumed we would be in the same boat all weekend. I was sadly mistaken.

At this specific festival, concert-goers may camp directly outside the venue on their site for the weekend if they choose to.

Aside from the sweltering heat (which prevented my friends from being even slightly motivated to go into the venue until dusk each evening), they guys seemed to be more concerned with getting drunk than getting their full money's worth of music.

I however, did not spend money and time to sit in a campsite in the middle of a polo field to drink all day and wander in to watch a show that I wouldn't remember.

So, to make a long story short, I was truly a fish out of water and participated in the festival alone, for the most part.

At first, it seemed like a strange experience; I felt like a tourist in a world that I thought I knew well.

After the first couple sets that I watched, things got a lot easier and the feeling of comfort from having someone with me no longer seemed like a necessity.

By the end of the weekend, I calculated that I watched a total of five bands' sets with the friends I travelled down with.

In total I saw over 25 performances.

Never would I have thought that I would experience something like that alone but I'm glad that I did.

I ended up meeting some really interesting and likeminded people who were there for the same reason that I was.

The people that I did meet did not even stop to question why I was alone or what I was doing.

Veterans to the festival were excited that there was someone else who was there for the love of the music and there less for the hype of the party scene.

In a culture with many different subcultures, I felt like I fit right in.

Everyone I came across was either welcoming, suffering from the heat, exploring new things, or were off in their own little world.

I concluded that I would never again go with the same people because we were on such different pages but at the same time, from a different perspective, I had a fantastic weekend.

From a first-time outsider to this festival culture, it seemed pretty apparent to me that any kind of person could find things they liked about the world you're immersed in once you enter the festival gates.

Japanese Internment Memorial Essay

The everyday passerby could easily overlook the Japanese Internment Memorial.

Located at 2^nd and San Carlos, across from Camera 3 and Psycho Donuts, artwork blends in with nearly everything around it, aside from the blue sky on a warm spring day.

Having grandparents who lived in these camps used to just sound like the same old story every time.

It wasn’t until much later when I realized that they were informing me of history that they had lived through on the first account.

The memorial was a lot different than I had expected.

I don’t know what it is I was expecting to see but it wasn’t a giant mural made of bronze.

Right off the bat, I realized there were a lot of interesting details to the wall.

The front side was prewar life while the opposite side portrayed life for Japanese Americans during the war.

On the front side, many different vignettes stood out but one I chose to focus on was after families found out they were being relocated.

There was a little scene on the wall of lines of families waiting to get onto buses.

From everything I’ve heard from my grandparents, it seemed like one of the most accurate scenes in the artwork.

My grandma used to tell me that they were only allowed to take what they could carry; the rest was either sold or left behind.

In the picture you could see families lining up around these buses with stores in the background with signs that said things like, “Sale, One Day Only” or “Must Vacate”.

One of the other vignettes that stood out the most to me was on the opposite side.

The whole scene of families loading onto the trains surrounded by soldiers with guns contained the most detail of the whole memorial.

If you look closely you can see the emotion on a lot of the people’s faces.

Families are crying, saying goodbye to each other; many of them unaware of when they will see each other again.

A man near the front car is smoking a cigarette but something about his older face showed sorrow even though he does not appear to be crying.

The kids around the scene are wearing a look like they are confused.

I’m sure it was hard for the younger kids to fully grasp and understand what was going on.

Families down the entire line of train cars are reaching up through the windows and doors, desperately trying to say goodbye one last time to the people they love.

Lastly, there was a small scene of camp life showing prisoners playing baseball to pass the time.

This has more personal value to me than anything.

When my grandpa was in the camps, baseball was one of the only things he was passionate about; it was one of the only things he could be passionate about because he wasn’t able to live freely.

My grandfather developed a love for baseball that lasts on until this day.

I didn’t realize that baseball or sports in general were such an influence on everyday life in the internment camps.

However, it makes complete sense to want to do something to pass the time.

As I looked at the scene, batter up to the plate, I wonder if the catcher was my grandpa.

I don’t think the United States would make the same mistake again about making something so discriminatory public.

However, I think that things like this are still occurring, just in different ways.

The number of Muslims in prisons has been on the rise since 9/11, and blacks still have the highest prison percentage as well as return rate.

This isn’t solely because these groups of individuals deface the law most often. This is because we fear these individuals like we did the Japanese during the war.

It’s not fair but it’s also not public because in this day and age too many people would stand against it.

Classmate Profile: Brea Watts

When asked to describe herself in one word, Brea Watts responds quick and confidently, replying, “paradox”.

“I’m the total opposite of what people think”, Watts says.

Not your normal nine to five; this 21-year-old juggles responsibilities from 9am to 11pm almost every day of the week.

Being a student at San Jose State University who majors in public relations already gives her a lack of spare time.

However, family has a major impact and is a big part of her life, and she has two of them.

On a normal weekday, Watts either attends classes or works as a mentor in SJSU’s Career Center from 9am to 5pm.

After that, she is basically on call for those in her secondary family; her sorority.

From the hours of 5pm to 11pm, she gets calls regarding anything from upcoming Greek life events to a fellow sister’s apartment water leak emergency.

Being a member of Delta Sigma Theta with responsibilities of planning events, she spends much of her free time putting together things like socials, Black Greek Week, and community service projects.

But there’s a lot more to this social butterfly than there seems.

She has a love for words that many of America’s youth lacks today.

Brea reads everyday and loves using poetry to express herself.

The starting point of this love for words, as she recalls, started when she was seven when she wrote her first poem, centered on Black History month.

That point was also the beginning of her passion for equality.

Coming from Oakland, she talks about the city’s poor media portrayal and how it is somewhat deserving. Even though they’re older, her brother and herself always check in and tell each other to be safe.

Within the year of 2010, four of Watt’s friends passed away.

As she looks me in the eye and tells me how hard it was to go through those bad things but how she was able to learn from those experiences, it is clear that she is undoubtedly genuine.

Where she comes from and where she is now, combined with her life’s experiences have made it easier for her to take on such a big load of responsibilities.

She says that after she graduates from San Jose State, “There’s so much that I want to do that I don’t even know…”

Ideas of graduate school flutter from her mouth.

She showed a lot of interest in SJSU’s new New Media program, which will be starting in the fall.

But all in all, she wants to learn more about public relations with hopes of working for businesses like hair salons, clothing lines, or up and coming music industries; all of which she already has connections in, and dreams of starting her own online magazine.

Descriptive Feature: Tommie Smith & John Carlos statue

Amidst the center of vibrant green grasses in between San Jose State's Clark and Dwight Bentel halls, sits a monumental statue made of colored cement and tiles of red, white, and blue.

At higher than twenty feet, a reenactment of the 1968 human rights salute between Tommie Smith and John Carlos graces the alma maters' university campus.

The podium has three tiers, each of which signifies the different medals awarded.

There is a description of the statue where the silver medal athlete once stood. 

Bronze medal winner, John Carlos, stands on the third tier.

His right hand rests behind his back with his thumb up, pointed towards the number 259 that painted his back.

His jacket relaxes, unzipped and open upon his chest; a symbolic gesture made towards all U.S. blue-collar citizens.

A beaded red, yellow, and green tiled necklace is draped around Carlos’s neck as an ode to all those who had been hung and tarred, lynched, or killed.

In the center stands gold medal recipient, Tommie Smith.

Dressed like Carlos in the blue track suit with red and white stripes racing up the sides of their legs and hugging their wrists and waists, Tommie Smith stands strong both in posture and in faith.

His left hand clenches a wooden box near his side with an image of an olive branch painted on the ceramic tiles that cover the inside.

He stands wearing his number 307 proudly, as someone who just won an Olympic gold medal should.

Looking at their shoeless feet, both athletes are standing in black socks, a representation for black power.

After seeing this, the age of this statue becomes clearer from the teal colored rust that the bottom of their feet have gathered over time.

Following the eye’s gaze upward, you see a patch placed over the hearts of both the athletes advertising the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Both men have their heads bowed down, looking toward the ground with a look of determination, focus, and pride in their eyes.

As the eye moves even further up the statue, both of the men are wearing one black glove (Smith’s on his right hand, Carlos’s on his left), fists clenched and thrust into the air.

It was clear that they were standing, but now it is clear that they are standing for something.

As the statue sits peacefully on the lawn, few tiles are chipped, cracked or missing.

Water stains decorate the hundreds of tiles that make up the bodies of these historical athletes.

Time has treated well the statue and what these two brave athletes stood for. 

Word of the week #8

Word: appropriation

Source info: article, "Senate panel's budget spares higher education cuts", The Columbia Daily Tribune

Sentence: State colleges and universities will be spared budget cuts in the coming year, the Senate Appropriations Committee decided this morning.

Definition: droves-noun; the act of appropriating, an act of a legislature authorizing money to be paid from the treasury for a specified use.

Example: After much debate, the appropriation for solar panels on all house roofs was approved.

NPR Radio Interview Analysis: A Breath of Fresh Air

Sitting down for an interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross seems a lot like getting together for a cup of catch-up coffee with an old friend.

She gathered a lot of information about her interviewees prior to the interview process. This was made apparent in the questions she asked and the way that she prefaced them.

She researched many different areas like their acting histories, current news and affairs, and personal more intimate details from other publication interviews.

She was really good with the wording of her questions in a way that made the interview feel more like a casual conversation between familiar colleagues than a stiff awkward encounter with an A-list celebrity.

She talked first, to actors Brad Pitt and Aaron Paul from the AMC series Breaking Bad, about their work- something that journalists seem to use as secondary information or leave out completely from their media coverage today.

She didn’t only ask questions about current work. Instead, she used previous work history to tie together current projects and each actor’s style as a whole.

By using what she’d researched about their personal lives, she was able to ask the two men personal questions that were unique from the typical prompts they’ve answered elsewhere time and time again.

Gross used what she learned to each actor to built up to a question that didn’t leave space for a simple answer.

Instead, she created space for explanation and for the most part, Pitt and Paul did just that.

She asked Aaron Paul about using acting as therapy after talking about growing up as a minister’s child and the restrictions he had as a developing adolescent.

The way that she built up to the questions she asked made for a much better and insightful answer.

She had follow up questions but instead of using predetermined questions, she seemed to go with the flow.

If she asked a question and got an interesting answer, she seemed to go from there.

It not only made the interview flow better, it made it more interesting.

When Terry asked Brad Pitt about Angelina Jolie and marriage, he didn’t really give her an answer but instead of pushing the topic onto him, she turned the conversation in a different direction.

It was a smart move on her part because instead of pushing him towards a corner, she guided him in a different direction (talking about New Orleans and their charity work) where he was more willing to talk.

Terry Gross has a strong interview strategy and it works well for both her, the interviewee, and the listeners.

Word of the Week #7

Word: notoriety

Source info: article, "French shootings: Race to find cold, brutal killer", BBC News

Sentence: Toulouse has a serial killer revelling in his notoriety - and showing every indication he will kill again.

Definition: droves
-noun; the state, quality, or character of being notorious or widely known

Example: Seeking notoriety, the vengeful murderer used the most bizarre tactics to kill his victims.