MOVE - Issue 14

And here's our last issue for the semester, including a personality-specific holiday gift guide, tips on how to throw the best end-of-the-world party and good-bye articles from our fall columnists! I'm so excited with the way that content turned out -- I'd say it's our best issue yet!

Issuu link here to view magazine online, and letter from the editor here!

"Just Kids" Review

The  Tale of Two Artists: A Review of Just Kids

Today’s scarf-swathed hipsters, jammed in cigarette jeans and laden with vinyl records, vintage cameras and obscure references aren’t going to simply appreciate Patti Smith’s ­Just Kids. They’ll eat it up, lick their lips and just get lost in the 1970s bohemian world of poet/performer Smith and her sometimes-lover, sometimes-muse, but always-companion, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. With one nostalgically romanticized anecdote after another, Smith recreates a time when the two first started out as starving artists, barely able to afford entering art museums together.

The story begins with Smith tracing her own growth from her childhood in Chicago and Pennsylvania as a perpetually curious but naïve girl smitten with poetry, imagination and Arthur Rimbaud. After Smith becomes pregnant at age 19 and gives the baby away for adoption, she loses her job at a textbook factory and decides to strike out for New York City alone the following year. When she arrives in New York, Smith is friendless at first and resorts to sleeping on strange doorsteps in her long gray raincoat. Through several chance encounters, she comes to know Robert Mapplethorpe, a “sweet and mischievous, shy and protective” young artist who shares her love for Dada and Surrealism.

The two become inseparable and cobble together a life in cramped apartments, soon-to-be-legendary quarters at the Hotel Chelsea and cliquey social circles. They steal art supplies. They cheat on each other. They grapple with Mapplethorpe’s sexuality crisis. But throughout their relationship, Smith and Mapplethorpe never stop relying upon each other to create art. Though the story foreshadows Mapplethorpe’s succumbing to AIDS decades later, the true tale ends with the two each on the cusp of fame, no longer romantically involved but still well-versed in their own “brother-sister” language.

The retelling of these two undeniably artistic existences is made even dreamier through Smith’s storytelling craft, which colors over gritty issues like sexual identity, drugs and S&M in soft, rose-colored hues. Smith unflinchingly recounts story after story of questionable moral judgment: she fumbles through co-workers’ pockets for change to buy food. She keeps quiet about Mapplethorpe’s ventures into the occult. She supports him when he finds a preserved human embryo to use in his artwork. And she offers no comment on Mapplethorpe’s heavy drug use or sexual promiscuity, which makes us wonder if Smith regrets anything at all or if she was actually “happy just being free.”

It seems as if Smith remains unaware of her sins even when writing ­Just Kids years after the fact. Or perhaps, the absence of remorse in the pages is Smith’s way of accepting a risky lifestyle during one of the seediest—but most heralded—scenes in American history, a time when she said “committing to great art is its own reward.”

True to her poetic nature, Smith uses a range of powerful literary techniques to tell her and Mapplethorpe’s story. For one thing—probably in typical artist’s nature—Smith takes great delight in juxtaposing the ugly and the beautiful together. When talking about their earliest days as artists, she says she and Mapplethorpe, who would become two of the most artistic souls in modern American history, would draw like “wild, feral children into the night.”  She portrays one musician friend who “transfixed the crowd with his misaligned eyes and playfully demonic style,” and describes a band with having “disjointed orgasmic music.” Oxymoronic phrases like “tarnished stars” and “rays of filthy light” dot the pages of Just Kids, leaving us starry-eyed and desperate to see a similar kind of beauty in the dreariest corners of our own lives.

Throughout the book, Smith often recalls Mapplethorpe talking about how no one sees the world as they did. But by using heavy imagery and figurative language side by side, Smith does her best to help readers try. She talks about “negotiating the thick psychedelic atmosphere” of New York when she first arrived and how she “clawed through” a “web of the culture’s consciousness”  to show how she’d dizzyingly underestimated her lone foray into the world.

 To Smith, Mapplethorpe never just takes off an ordinary shirt – when he peels them off, they’re “soaked in light and damp, sloughing away the prison of skins” (21). Add in bold personifications like ones about amphetamine, which “robbed some of their innate powers, drained their confidence, and ravaged their beauty,” or music that was “in danger of spiritual starvation,” and the effect is intoxicating: you can’t help but think that life as an artist must be very picturesque indeed.

There are times when Smith’s romantic ramblings are hard to connect with. To be honest, I found it hard to keep up with some of her descriptions of her and Mapplethorpe’s dealings with the art social scene. When Smith describes her encounter with Jimi Hendrix at a bar before Woodstock, of course, it’s easy to admire away. But in many instances, she rattles off names of lesser-known friends and acquaintances like a sort of hipster role call, and I felt rather proud of myself for recognizing maybe one or two names at the end of it all.

To get the full experience of Smith’s story, you would have to be incredibly knowledgeable about the 60s and 70s alternative culture scene, and it’s an assumption Smith makes that makes the story lose a bit of intimacy with readers. But it’s not like Smith is trying to give a history lesson or flaunt the circumference of her social circles. Considering Just Kids’ anecdotal format, it would be reasonable to chalk a lot of the name-dropping up to nostalgia and Smith’s own way of remembering the era.

I identified the presence of two theses in Smith’s book—the first being that despite everything, Smith and Mapplethorpe had a constructive relationship. It was no doubt an unconventional one, whether the two were lying to Mapplethorpe’s Catholic parents about their “marriage” or befriending the others’ paramours to discuss art together. Originally drawn together by chance and art, the two are driven to stay together by their need to survive. It was Mapplethorpe who first rescued Smith out of her homeless wandering in New York. In turn, Smith nurses Mapplethorpe back to health from trench mouth, fever, malnourishment and gonorrhea many years later, remembering, “We promised that we’d never leave one another again, until we both knew we were ready to stand on our own.”

It’s not a story of mutual dependency, though. Mapplethorpe and Smith do build each other up in the sense of the word “constructive,” but there are times when it seems like Smith is about to admit that their relationship wasn’t all that equal, like when she summarizes, “For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me.”

 At many points in time, Smith is the only one of the two to hold a steady job so that Mapplethorpe can focus on his art. She talks about having to “keep in step” with his creativity and social skills, as if she would be left behind if her own drawings or banter weren’t up to par. Smith seems to feel inferior to Mapplethorpe throughout most of their relationship, comparing herself to an oar that must be steered by a skilled hand and rationalizing, “We were both dreamers, but Robert was the one who got things done. I made the money but he had drive and focus.”

But in the end, it’s Smith who tastes mainstream success first with her Springsteen collaboration, and Mapplethorpe eventually admits, “Patti, you got famous before me.” Smith says that at the time, Mapplethorpe had nothing but “admiration without envy” for her, and if we assume that’s true, then it proves that their relationship was a constructive one after all.

Once you flip through some of the earlier pages of their near street-urchin lifestyles, it’s clear that it is Mapplethorpe who always encourages – sometimes even pesters – Smith to make art no matter if she was travelling with her band or touring France alone. He is the one who drags her to the cool kids’ hotspot, Max’s, every night and in doing so, convinces her to start making connections with fellow artists and influential scene giants. Conversely, Smith’s support and connections help Mapplethorpe realize his own potential as a photographer.

Ultimately, Smith and Mapplethorpe’s romantic relationship doesn’t last, but the two kindred souls stay resolutely in the other’s lives, continuously creating on their own terms. Before Mapplethorpe’s death, he tells Smith regretfully, “We never had any children,” to which Smith affirms the purpose of their relationship in one clear statement, “Our work was our children.”

Their universal connection is echoed in Smith’s second, larger thesis: that artists—and great people and figures—are all part of a common thread. Throughout her story, Smith talks about identifying emotionally and somewhat spiritually with figures like Wendy of Neverland, as when she guides fellow “Lost Boys” artists; or Joan of Arc , as when Smith dons her “fragile armor” of a white dress; or even one of the Sons of Liberty when Smith’s generation finally takes hold of the art scene. Her physical encounters with greats like Grace Slick and Hendrix are eclipsed by her more internal associations, like when she feels Bob Dylan’s presence while playing with her band and when she thinks of Andy Warhol when the white snow matches Warhol’s hair.

As a result, Smith shows that she doesn’t see her role (or Mapplethorpe’s) in the art world as any lone, shining beacon of innovation. It’s the harmony she finds in the constantly shifting cultural matrix as she weaves her artistic path alongside Mapplethorpe and countless others, all holding and pulling each other up like small children trying to scale a wall together. It’s the same harmony you and I have felt when taking a step back at an art museum and seeing the bolder, wider scene created by the combination of each individual piece on display and realizing how that vision extends in our everyday life’s aesthetics. That sense of harmony is what underlies Smith’s story and ultimately provides a faintly mystical backbone for a beautiful tale about subsistence and creation.  

Final multimedia project: "A New Direction" news story

A New Direction for Mizzou Dance Marathon

This student-led philanthropy is moving faster than ever, and here’s why.



A walk through MU’s campus earlier in November might have led you to encounter students dancing in striped spandex suits on the way to class or handing out free hot chocolate in Speakers Circle. On Facebook, classmates and friends replaced profile pictures with Mizzou Dance Marathon logos, added a “DM” prefix in front of their names and warned of secret flash dance mobs.

Such activities on and off campus made up just a fraction of Dance Marathon’s Recruitment Week. From Nov. 5 – 9, members of the student-led philanthropy donned bright blue DM T-shirts and then, shimmying and shaking to pop music from the quad to the Student Center, encouraged people to sign up for this year’s 13.1-hour main dance event to be held on March 9.

At the end of the week, more than 500 registered dancers had registered, which was a sizeable indicator of success for the philanthropy this year, considering that last year’s final dance involved approximately 550 dancers.

But participation isn’t the only thing that will likely be an time high for Dance Marathon’s 2013 season – fundraising is also headed in a record-breaking direction.

Event dancers are expected to raise $100 each, so registration will make up at least $50,000 of 2013 fundraising. Then consider this year’s corporate sponsorships listed on the Mizzou Dance Marathon Web site, which equals $3,250 so far. Add in the money raised by fall fundraisers (more than $7,215 so far), and it looks like Mizzou Dance Marathon – without accounting for additional funds dancers may raise this spring – can anticipate more than $60,000 of the philanthropy’s pledged $75,000 for 2013.

And there are still four months to go before the big dance.

Considering that Mizzou Dance Marathon began only four years ago in 2008 with a total of $13,500 raised, the fast-moving group is also becoming the university’s fastest-growing philanthropic organizations in terms of participation and fundraising. And the secret to being bigger than ever before? It lies within re-focusing, reorganizing and recreating an inclusive atmosphere.

What is Mizzou Dance Marathon?

Originally founded at Indiana University in 1991 in memory of a student who passed away from HIV, Dance Marathon is a nationwide movement that works with the Children’s Miracle Network to raise funds for community children’s hospitals. MU is one of more than 150 colleges and high schools that take part in the movement.

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However, when it first began in Columbia, the philanthropy originally attracted mostly fraternity and sorority members and had themes such as “Party with a purpose,” as reported in The Maneater. MU’s student newspaper also reported that during those early years, when DM was held at venues such as The Blue Note and Tonic, it consistently raised around $25,000 and attracted approximately 100-200 participants.

Executive Director Annie Bastida said 2008 was the year Mizzou Dance Marathon began anew. After the philanthropy was moved under the Center for Leadership Development, a campus resource that supports leadership development in student organizations, it shed its “Party with a purpose” style. Mizzou Dance Marathon has since raised more than a quarter of a million dollars in four years, according to its Web site.

“The overall positive impact has increased tremendously,” DM advisor Bryan Goers said of the organization’s re-focusing efforts. He said the shift away from the old atmosphere made the community more receptive to Dance Marathon’s efforts.

Leading the Way

In reference to this year’s explosive growth, Goers credited new leadership with this year’s growth.

“They created a road map before starting,” Goers said of the six current executive board members, who had met immediately at The Heidelberg after last spring’s main event with a new vision for 2013. They incorporated plans for three structural changes: the reinstatement of an executive director, a split in the public relations/recruitment committee and a redefinition of leadership roles.

Bastida said the decision to reinstate a single director system over last year’s experimental tri-directorship only made sense to her after serving on Dance Marathon’s Steering Committee for four years. She said she observed communication challenges among the tri-directors and noted how details would fall through the cracks that resulted. For example, she said no media passes were given for the 2012 main event.

“It’s consensus, but at the same time, there’s that one person you can look to to make decisions,” Goers said.

New roles and new ideas

Bastida was also responsible for the redefined role of the “morale captain,” a steering committee position that had been vaguely outlined. When Bastida had worked as “moraler” herself, she said she remembered only being in charge of decorating spirit sticks and dancing at the main event. Under her leadership, morale captains now serve as liaisons between the DM leadership and dancers. Morale captains recruit dancers from other MU organizations, help dancers fundraise and help them understand the Dance Marathon’s purpose.

Last year’s PR/recruitment tri-director Carly Love, who is no longer working with the philanthropy, said that dividing her old position seemed to be working.

“I think it was a great decision to break up PR and recruitment so more could come from the two separate directors," she said.

As a result, Recruitment Week promotions and activities were successful due to the separate efforts of Public Relations Director Kate McIntyre and Recruitment Director Jesse Day. Besides traditional get-the-word out tactics like setting up a table at the Student Center, handing out fliers and planning flash raves, McIntyre and Day planned additional community events like a midnight pancake dinner and a free outdoor Zumba dance session.

McIntyre said the use of social media was a good way to reach potential dancers, their parents and donors. She also used guerilla tactics, such as the Dance Marathon crew setting up a giant chalkboard in the center of campus and encouraging students to write about what inspired them to dance.

One of the new fundraising ideas Day credited to a previous Steering Committee member was the FT5K race held downtown in October, which he said was this year’s most successful single fundraiser. Named after Dance Marathon’s “For the Kids” motto, it wasn’t just an ordinary 5K race.

“We were able to give it the DM treatment to give it a fun vibe,” Day said. There were numerous “dance points” along the route to give the 370 registered runners a break. “We had certain people that actually danced the entire 3.1 miles.”

Day said the race raised $7,215, but Dance Marathon isn’t measuring its achievements just by numbers.

“I’m really really proud of where we are financially, but maybe what I'm more proud of is the culture of Dance Marathon we are fostering,” Bastida said. She described the organization as one big family -- a “DMamily” -- where members not only work together but hang out together. As a result, Bastida said everyone holds each other accountable as both co-workers and friends.

One Big DMamily

The DMamily extends beyond campus to the “Miracle families.” These are the mothers, fathers and siblings of the 16 children at the MU Children’s Hospital who will directly benefit from Dance Marathon’s fundraising.

Bastida said that over the next five years, Mizzou Dance Marathon’s anticipated pledge of $375,000 will help fund a music therapy program, a cancer and blood disorders unit, a part-time teaching position to keep hospitalized kids caught up on schoolwork and a TeleHealth Love and Care program that lets working mothers and military fathers use video chat technology to see and read to their infants.

“You see student orgs rise and fall over the years, but it’s great to see the impact as it rises, especially when the impact is such a tangible thing,” Goers said. “You can go to the hospital and literally see the impact Dance Marathon’s having.”

The funds might go to the hospital, but the effects of Dance Marathon reach even further. Seven-year-old twins Beau and Bryce Edwards have been Miracle Kids for four years. Their mother, Julie Edwards, said working with the student-led philanthropy is nothing short of miraculous.

“They’re proof of what can happen with the money [Dance Marathon] raises,” she said. Dance Marathon students seek to engage her sons on a greater level by going to their flag football games. ‘The kids are really getting to know them, and they’re getting to know the kids.”

  A few weeks ago, Julie Edwards brought her sons to Dance Marathon’s final Recruitment Week event, a tie-dye night where the steering committee introduced dancers to the Miracle families they would be representing. She had to work hard to keep an eye on her boys, who have been in and out of the hospital since birth but were currently busy running amok with the Dance Marathon students.

“My kids love the people from DM. I mean, look at them,” she said, pointing at the twins grooving with the smiling college students. “They’re dancing with them!”

Check out multimedia components like photo, video and audio done with this story as part of a multimedia journalism class project here: 

Final semester project: Stepping it Up

Here is the link to the final project my group and I have been working on for our multimedia journalism class! We were in charge of covering some kind of local issue (we chose Dance Marathon, one of the coolest philanthropies I've ever heard of on campus!) and featuring it through video, text, photo and audio elements. Then, we had to package it all on a website (whereupon I learned how to wrangle Wix at midnight on Thanksgiving...)

http://steppingitupmizzou.wix.com/multimedia

Photo by Carleigh Cavender

Design Bureau - "Dark Interiors"

Nov/Dec 2012
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This was a photo essay research project I worked on at my internship with DB. You'd think it would be easy to Google "apocalyptic interiors" and be done with it. Boy, was my search engine-dependent self in for a surprise. 

In the end, I researched and contacted photographers/locations for each of these locations featured. If I could, I'd list "begging for photographic permission" on my resume...

Design Bureau - "Mountain Contemporary"

Nov/Dec 2012

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Design Bureau - "Storybook Style"

Nov/Dec 2012

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How badly do you want to live in this house???????

Design Bureau - "Cool Design, Warm Hues"

Nov/Dec 2012

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Design Bureau - "Lofted Living"

Nov/Dec 2012
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Design Bureau - "Designing for News Anchors"

Nov/Dec 2012
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This interview was my favorite from the whole summer interning with DB!

Design Bureau - "Room in a Box" and "Have a Hearth"

Nov/Dec 2012
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Design Bureau - "Cartoon Constructions"

Nov/Dec 2012
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Design Bureau - "The New Coffee Shop Culture"

Nov/Dec 2012
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Design Bureau - "Gin Bars Around The World"

Nov/Dec 2012

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(We won't discuss that awkward moment when I had to tell my editor I didn't know what a gin bar was...)

Design Bureau - "Southampton Style Guide"

Nov/Dec 2012
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Design Bureau - Nov/Dec. issue

Summertime seems an era and a half ago, but a few weeks ago, I received Design Bureau's November/December issue in the mail. Cue a lot of squealing and jumping up and down. This is the first issue that I worked on at my internship with them over the summer, so it was very neat to flip through the pages and recognize most of them from helping copy edit and even write!

Here's the cover  -- I'll be posting PDF images in subsequent posts for clips! Open each image in a new tab to see up close.

MOVE - Issue 13

Here's our second-to-last issue for the fall semester, and it includes:
-Q&A with Old Crow Medicine Show
-A end-of-the-semester bucket list to do
-feature on an MU freshman who's quitting school to make a documentary
-Hot yoga diary
-And tons more!

Check it out on Issuu!

MOVE - Issue 12

Done before midnight. Happy, happy day.

Issuu link: http://issuu.com/themaneater/docs/move_issue_12

MOVE - Issue 11

Local music issue! There can't be anything better than putting out a magazine and tying up loose ends before heading to the Ozarks this weekend!

Issuu link here:

In the Studio, Part 2

Took a look at our TV-style video projects in class, and I added a few edits today!