Category: The Rabbit Hole

By Aine Nakamura (MA ’20)

By Vivian Xing (Gallatin BA ’22)

#Mood is a continuation of my exploration of storytelling still life photography. As I have always been interested in how different colors are associated with a specific type of mood, I incorporate the theme of color in this series of images to showcase different emotions/states that I go through. The process of making this series allows me to slow down my everyday life and refocus on my inner self. These images are an honest analysis of my mental states throughout the project. By presenting this project, I encourage viewers also to take some time, pay attention to their inner feelings, and embrace them.

Vivian Xing is a sophomore at Gallatin, originally from China. Before transferring to Gallatin, she studied photography and sociology. Now she is exploring the intersection of art, business, and sociology, which mainly focuses on how to use visual art and design as conversation starters for social problems. With a keen awareness and genuine care of the environmental, economic, and social problems brought by capitalism, Vivian is always questioning what changes we could make collectively and how visual strategies could encourage changes in consciousness around those issues.

By Kwami Coleman (Gallatin Professor)

Two tracks from the 2017 album Local Music, where the music revolves around field recordings from my home neighborhood, Harlem. One is a more straightforward trio piece called “Vestiges,” which is based on melodic motifs that are fashioned after those in older styles popular in Harlem, like boogaloo and R&B, and  “Youth” which features a field recording of young men playing basketball very competitively and having a spirited talk on the block afterwards. 

Vestiges from Local Music by Kwami Coleman Trio

By KC Trommer  (Assistant Director of Communications)

          When the train picks up speed, it sounds like a woman screaming,
one woman all over the city, releasing her heat in a high, steady wail,

          smearing her red mouth along the tunnel walls. I make and unmake myself.
When the doors open, anyone can come in, anyone does. I circle back

          downtown, leave the book open on my lap, look over the map
that lays out the routes. The city is a muscle; we feed it. The woman across

          from me shrivels up her face, sticks a finger in each ear to kill the sound of
the train rounding into Queensboro Plaza. My hands are warm

          on my lap: they are for making and unmaking. I thumb the seam
of the sketchbook open while the city sits and waits, indifferent and unblinking

          like all gods. My mouth is a siren, my body mine to make.
Wherever I go, I am this woman. Whoever needs erasing, I erase.

KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poem “Fear Not, Mary” was selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2015 Fugue Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Blackbird, LitHub, Prairie Schooner, The Sycamore Review, VIDA, and in the anthologies Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) and Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press, 2018). She is the Assistant Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.

by Karen Siff Exkorn (Gallatin MA ’96)

I’m over it. I know we are all feeling that way about what’s going on right now. But I’m also over another thing. Reading all of those pieces of advice. You know the ones. Overcome Your Stress! Overcome Your Anxiety! Honestly, they all make me feel more stressed and anxious…Read the Whole Article Published by Thrive Global Here

Karen Siff Exkorn, Best-Selling Author/Playwright/Public Speaking and Media Trainer/Executive Coach- Internationally acclaimed speaker and best-selling author Karen Siff Exkorn has been featured on Good Morning America, Today Show, The View, CNN, PBS, Nightline, CNN, CBS, NBC Nightly News and in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. As founder/CEO of KAS Consulting Inc. and Speak On, Karen leads corporate training programs and works one-on-one with Fortune 500 executives, authors, producers, film/music executives, and celebrities. Clients include top fashion industry leaders Armani, Ann Taylor, Bloomingdales, Louis Vuitton, Macy’s, Saks, and Tommy Hilfiger, in addition to GE Capital, Sony, and more. She has lectured and delivered keynote speeches at Brown University, Columbia University, UMASS Medical School, NYU and the United Nations. Karen is the author of the best-selling book, The Autism Sourcebook—Everything You Need to Know About Diagnosis, Treatment, Coping and Healing—From a Mother Whose Child Recovered (HarperCollins 2005) and the parody Fifty Two Shades of Blue-ish (Orange Press 2012). She is a contributing writer to Huffington Post and Today.com. Her play, Do This, is in production for an off-Broadway run. With a B.A. in Psychology from Brown University and an M.A. in Performance Studies from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, Karen is also a certified master practitioner of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and a Mindfulness coach.

by Roy Nathanson (Gallatin professor)

Don’t Touch Your Face!

And by all means, keep your hands away
from your eyes – they hear things!
Mysteries that amaze and frighten us.
For instance, they hear
when you sip tea with a spoon.
They advise the spoon
to have its own cup of tea.
“In these dark days, you deserve a cup,”
your eyes tell the spoon.
These days, they speak to me too!
“Let small be small,” my eyes say.
“Introduce yourself to your germs.
Give them a spoon and their own 2 eyes.
Let them have their own cup of tea.
I’m sure they are as frightened as you are!
Let them make themselves at home. Who knows?
Maybe you’ll end up living side by side!
After all, far smaller things vibrate this world
and manage to negotiate proper living quarters.”
Then my eyes go so quiet, even they think it’s night.

Don’t Touch My Face!

I know it’s not the advisory du jour
but I want my hands to have clarity—
to know the do’s and don’ts.
Certainly my arms, fingers,
slumping shoulders, lips, skinny ass
or the desperate neurons in between
have neither the motive or opportunity
to touch anyone’s face. So none
of these actors have been weaponized.
It’s my hands that must know the rules.
So I wrote the directive quite legibly:
Don’t Touch My Face!
But what of my heart, or yours for that matter?
We all know how hearts tend to be desperados
even in the best of times, and these days?
Mine says it can barely see out there!
Yesterday night my heart was so beat.
“C’mon Roy, it pleaded. “We hearts are wily.
We need clear messages. We need to know
where/what/when it’s safe to touch.
We see—but through our own kind of cloud.
And unfortunately, we never learned to read.”