STATEMENT

Gridlock

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key

DANIELLE CANAN Statement Correspondent

To write music in any capacity is an act of turning yourself inside out. (If you’re not a musician of any kind, bear with me.) It’s synthesization, alchemy, a wringing of the brain. I write music sometimes, and it often feels like a blind swipe toward anything to bring intangible ideas into a physical form. Coming up with ideas is often the easy part. I can picture orchestral hits and trumpet lines all day long. I can hear them in my mind’s ear, but the problem lies in pulling these ideas out of the brain and throwing them on paper.

Let’s say you want to compose a string quartet about the sadness of losing a friend. How do you begin? Some basic first decisions are that of finding a good tempo and a good key. A tempo is a choice of number, a speed for the beats to march at and for the rhythms to operate within. A key signature is a choice of one of a finite set of sharps or flats, designating which notes can be bumped down a half step and which you’ll bump up a half step.

Minor keys tend to be associated with sad songs, so maybe you choose something like B minor and pair it with a slow 52 beats per minute. We can give the lower registers of the cello and viola’s long, droning notes. Give cello the B, and give the viola D and an occasional C♯. If the second violin plays an F♯, that would round off the full B minor chord, and the first violin could cry a softly lilting melody above. Make the chord stretch like taffy, make the melody dance slowly through the scale, and simple as that, you have a sad song.

But do you really?

What if I told you that slow songs in a minor key don’t always have to be connected with feelings of sadness? Or that you don’t even need to choose a tempo for a song if you don’t want to? Or that notes that lie in spaces between two piano keys can be used? There are widely accepted and used conventions for music, almost like figures of speech that can be utilized to easily convey different messages. But music is so much more than its western conventions, the formulas European white men declared most pleasing to the ear.

The best musicians are those who oscillate between the rules and the rebellion with ease, using conventions when they suit the music but remaining unfettered by going off-grid. Jacob Collier is an artist and musician who often writes unconventionalsounding music, to say the least. I once heard him say his favorite polyrhythm is two against three against four against five against six, demonstrating it by tapping his fingers on a table. There’s no doubt that he’s a music theory genius, but part of music theory is studying the rules and patterns that music tends to follow.

The brilliance of Jacob Collier in particular is the way he knows the theory like the back of his hand and then challenges it. When I started to learn some theory, the prevailing idea when it came to writing was “you learn the rules to break the rules.” Theory is a tool, but what would a toolbox be if there was only one hammer in it?

Let’s examine a small musical rebellion in action through one of Jacob Collier’s songs. Collier makes his music in the digital audio workstation (DAW) Logic Pro, which is a program for music making designed for Mac computers. For many of his songs, he’s organized livestreams during which he picks apart every individual vocal and instrumental layer and explains the thought processes and methods behind them. In a “Logic Session Breakdown” of his single “Time Alone with You” with Daniel Caesar, he takes a moment to explain what the quantizing tool is and how it affects his music.

The song’s groove is quite swingy and doesn’t exactly align with the beats of the tempo he chose. The quantize button in Logic Pro, when pressed, snaps every hit of the drums to the nearest linear beat. As he clicks the button on and off, playing the rhythm both ways, he highlights the difference of feeling between the two versions. He wouldn’t “get jiggy” to the quantized version, but the space an uncommon snare landing creates can open up new groove possibilities. “Time Alone with You” wouldn’t exist in its current dynamic form if the groove weren’t actively railing against the traditional beat.

On a larger scale, jazz music as we know it today might not exist if musicians didn’t start playing with the idea of swinging rhythms. Breaking conventions makes music progress to new heights, to places we didn’t know we could go.

Disregarding the rules of 18th-century counterpoint is not a new idea by any means. But, Jacob Collier completely changed the way I thought about theory rulebreaking and life in general with one of the metaphors he’s used to criticize music software such as Logic Pro. In the same Logic Session Breakdown video, Collier says:

“Grids are not the same as humans. Humans are some of the least grid based creatures in the world, in the universe … I think it’s about time for music software to stop being grid based. It’s one of my, like, real passions, is to get the grid out of people’s psychologies, because the moment we start thinking in grids, then everything becomes grids.”

A grid, in the simplest of forms, is a pattern of evenly spaced and perfectly perpendicular lines spanning a two dimensional plane, much like graph paper. A mathematician might use grids to create graphs with utmost accuracy, using the carefully blocked out dividers as a tool for eliminating mistakes.

An artist can use the “grid method” as a technique to draw a visual reference as precisely as possible. Instead of taking in the whole image at once, you mentally focus on replicating one square at a time, and the result comes out looking more real than if it was eyeballed from the start.

The grid of musicians is the series of musical staves that make up sheet music. Or in Jacob Collier’s case, the digital audio workstation.

These examples are what I’d call the “kneejerk visualization” of a grid. They’re literal manifestations of the dictionary definition for “grid,” lines that “are parallel to or cross each other.” However, the definition can be expanded in a way that wraps around infinitely more ideas.

The main goal of a grid is to divide. The way it achieves division is through repeating patterns. So, I like to think of a grid as being any pattern or structure that uses its various categories and groupings in service of division. A clock. Political parties. An ordered recipe. Assembly lines. Country borders. Multiplication tables. The five paragraph essay. A nine-to-five job. The scientific method. Instagram. Systems of government. Systems of education. Gender roles. Gender labels. And graph paper.

But, just like a clock can only divide time into equal hours if there is first a conscious feeling of ever-unfolding existence, so can a grid only be a grid if there’s something to divide. Because of this, I would claim it’s not possible for everything to be classified as a grid. Not everything in this world can or should be divisible.

If a grid’s job is to be a pattern for division, then a non-grid is a dynamic, transforming whole that can allow for infinite potential and fluidity. The non-grids of the world are my favorite. In a dimly lit jazz club filled with the electricity of the current moment and nothing else, a singer with a pixie cut and a lavish red velvet jumpsuit improvises a solo that makes everyone in the room believe in magic for at least one night.

Entropy, the constant and reliable motion toward chaos. A fallen tree eventually caking apart and rejoining the earth it once sprang from. Empathy, the great comfort of knowing someone else sees and understands and feels your joy, your pain, your disappointment, your frustration. Giving knowledge to someone who needs it. A glance becoming a smile becoming a conversation becoming a friendship becoming love. A tightly constricted and vibrantly violet wavelength of light bobbing, weaving, sailing, relaxing, until it meanders through blue and green, takes another breath as it descends to sour lime and buttery yellow, relaxes into orange and finally settles into a sluggishly raging red.

I see these nebulous non-grids as dynamic spectrums, or expanses. Grief, love, emotion, personality, volcanoes, communication, wandering, spectrums of sexuality, spectrums of neurodivergency, irrational numbers, opinions, neural pathways, language and time. These transform and bend in ways that can’t ever be truly static or patterned or divided in two.

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SARAH STOLAR Statement Correspondent

Memes: The sixth love language

Almost all of us have heard some version of it: technology ruins the sanctity of relationships, friendships formed over the internet are not real, digital communication and social media have spoiled what it means to interact with other human beings. Millennials and members of Gen Z are constantly criticized for their inability to put their phones down and connect with people through in-person interactions.

There is some truth in the idea that people our age spend an exorbitant amount of time looking at screens. Studies show that Gen Zers may spend almost nine hours a day interacting with technology. But in an increasingly digitized and globally connected world, it’s almost impossible to escape spending time online, whether it’s for academic, occupational or social reasons. Need I remind you that my generation just celebrated our two-year anniversary of attending ‘Zoom University.’

As a result, young people have created spaces on the internet for interactive freedom. Digital selfexpression has become the new, sixth love language of intimate connection — and memes are at the forefront of this modern form of communication.

A variety of definitions for the word ‘meme’ circulate around the web, but it’s generally defined as an internet image that reflects some sort of social or cultural commentary. Memes can communicate niche jokes just as much as they can reflect the attitudes of a people, speak to our personal values and allow us to approach current events from a more accessible angle. There are many types of memes that tap into different facets of viewers’ humor: the use of irony in memes, such as the popular “the feminine urge to” posts that allow women to make fun of behavior traits associated with gender constructs, can appeal to those who find humor in the absurdity of social norms. Additionally, post-ironic memes go beyond the use of irony and give consumers a more straightforward remark on the state of the world. With many different approaches to humor as well as visual layouts, memes explore different facets of our culture in a way that taps into any individual’s idea of what’s funny or relatable.

But what isn’t conveyed through most definitions of the term is the bridge that these simple, at times stupid, pictures create between people who share similar brands of humor.

My Instagram direct messages consist of three different conversations: one with my roommate, one with a best friend from home and another with one of my closest friends at college. Images and reels fill each exchange, from dry-humored, existential clips from The Onion to relatable posts from college-focused accounts. Rarely any words are sent, the exception being reactions to a video taken from TikTok or new variations of scenes from Euphoria season two. Each post they send speaks to a different side of my unique sense of humor, brought out by the people closest to me in real life.

Despite my DMs, I actually limit myself fairly strictly within the world of social media. I only use Instagram regularly, and mainly use Snapchat just to look at private stories. I don’t have TikTok or Twitter, so my exposure to current trends and digital content is limited to what I find scrolling through the Explore page on Instagram. I’m extremely careful about the social media I do use and its purpose in my life, why I would allot my time to exploring certain platforms. I choose to engage with Instagram because it provides me with content that captivates my sense of humor while strengthening the bonds of my relationships, including between me and my roommate whom I interact with every day.

My roommate is one of my best friends on the planet. After sharing a room together for almost two years, we are completely attuned to each other’s attitudes and idiosyncrasies. On the Michigan Marriage Pact, we got a striking 99.8% friendship match, each of us putting humor as a highly important factor in a relationship. We DM each other Instagram content almost constantly, each of us knowing exactly what will make the other smile. We’re laughing, conversing, poking fun at one another without even needing to be on the same phone call, let alone the same room.

Instagram is also the primary form of contact between me and my friend from high school; though we rarely text, the posts we share about cute animals and “alpha women” keep us in touch and spark the most interesting conversations over text or the next time we meet face to face.

Each time I get a DM from these individuals, I feel even more deeply connected with them, especially when they tap aspects of my thoughts or identities in ways I had never known were possible: through singular, static images made by a stranger online. I hardly ever thought that memes would become diverse enough to match my humor exactly when they first appeared on the internet, or that they would be employed to uphold my connections with those I love. That my loved ones select posts out of the endless technological abyss of social media and choose to send them to me in the hopes that I’ll enjoy them makes me feel appreciated and understood.

I still talk to all of these friends frequently in person when we are together.

Parking lot sunsets and other suburban phenomena

Design by Erin Shi // Page Design by Sarah Chung

OSCAR NOLLETTE-PATULSKI Statement Columnist

Several weekends ago, when the temperatures were below twenty and snow was still a little exciting, my housemates and I found ourselves inside the Micheal’s craft store on Washtenaw Avenue. We had come for small projects that would fill in our overestimations of free time: sewing needles, watercolors, new writing pens.

We checked out and paid for our items, and upon exiting through the automatic doors, we looked up to see a transformed sky. During the thirty minutes spent inside the windowless store, the colors above us turned from an agreeable blue to determined shades of orange, rose and purple, and the clouds took turns reflecting these colors into vivacious paint strokes. We marveled at the way the bird spikes atop the corporate logos glistened in the low sun’s rays, and used our feet to move ourselves in small circles, in an attempt for our eyes to capture the enormity of it all.

We wondered: Why do sunrises and sunsets look so much better in parking lots?

This phenomenon is not completely new to me. In high school, one could open up Snapchat at 7:30 a.m. on any given weekday to see half a dozen or more stories featuring the same sun. It played its role as the red orb hovering below the traffic lights, the rays piercing above generic shrubs or the glow over single-story buildings, as seen through your mom’s minivan window. Among the harsh horizontality of the city’s outskirts was the possibility of beauty, the beige walls cast in a shimmer of gold. ***

The neighborhood I grew up in, Riverside Gardens, can be interpreted as an inspired garden suburb. These types of locales are characterized by their integration of nature into the residential street fabric, where tall sycamore trees line the streets in front of the one and two-story single family homes. Unlike their relative, the garden city, the garden suburb does not weave industry or workplace into its quilt of foliage. Instead, it poses itself as a place to sleep — nothing else.

Growing up in a garden suburb, I was often frustrated by the lack of activities surrounding my home. The great distance to cultural centers like art museums and performance halls was defeating to a teenager who didn’t know how to drive. What is there to do in the quiet privacy of my aging residential neighborhood?

Enter the neighborhood Facebook page. A relatively common fixture of the suburban subdivision, these groups seek to break down the boundaries between the brick walls and front doors, and to replicate the serendipity encounters that are rare in neighborhoods like ours. Like in real life, there are characters and stereotypes that occupy the virtual posting wall, all existing within the morally ‘iffy’ space that is watching people interact for your own entertainment.

In our own “Riverside Gardens Neighborhood 49505” group, there is the event planner who creates polls on which food truck to bring to her front lawn in hopes of a springtime social. Then there’s the young man who posts videos of himself running 13 miles while carrying a full size American flag. And, of course, the older woman who shares photos of her bruised knee in a graphic tale of the dangers of ice. What might be strange to share on one’s personal social platform is fair game here, and these oddities add colorful virtual chatter to streets that are almost silent when one steps outside the front door.

For my father, however, what is most interesting about the neighborhood page is something notably less human. A group of turkeys, numbering about half a dozen, wander through our backyard. My dad takes a few photos, conjures a caption of their number and location and, some taps later, uploads them to be viewed by all of our neighbors. Several other users might comment, and in a few days the process will repeat itself with a new neighbor. A conspiracy theory may emerge, hoping to describe the fluctuation in numbers that circulate under the photos.

Scrolling through the virtual depths of Riverside Gardens, the turkeys seem to be a popular subject for socialization over the years. Photo shoots include the flightless birds atop of a decorative fountain, in a standoff with a car, occupying the drive-through of a Burger King, or chasing after a mail carrier.

This is where the magic of the Suburban Facebook Group shines: the mundane is made spectacle with the addition of the unpredictable. In our case, it is the whims of twenty pound creatures as they navigate the built environment. Are the turkeys special because of the suburban boredom they cure, or are the events like these what draw people to the suburbs in the first place? ***

Back in Ann Arbor, my boredom is often cured by following digital rabbit holes on Google Maps. I ignore Canvas notifications and open a new tab on my web browser to decide where I want to travel or live. Sometimes it’s along the rugged coast of New Zealand, other times its unrealistic apartment hunting in New York City. Before spring break, in a frivolous form of preparation for my trip to the Southwestern United States, I dragged my little yellow street view guide from the bottom right corner, and let it go somewhere outside Phoenix, Arizona, in a

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The Lesbian Master Doc: Not just for lesbians

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Palmer Commons, Forum Hall 4:00 pm

2022 Thomas Spencer Jerome Lecture Series

A FUTURE IN

Ethics of Archaeology and Heritage

Monday, March 28 Wednesday, March 30 Friday, April 1 Monday, April 4

Engineering Internationalism: Colonialism, the Cold War and UNESCO’s Victory in Nubia Imperialism, Internationalism and Archaeology in the Un/Making of the Middle East Saving the World? Reflections on UNESCO’s Mid Century Mission in Conflict

Developing Petra: UNESCO, the World Bank, and America in the Desert

RILEY HODDER Statement Correspondant

My life changed when I read the “Am I a Lesbian? Masterdoc.”

The “Lesbian Masterdoc” is a document that asks you to consider the nuances behind one simple question: Are you a lesbian? Written like a blog post, the document whisks you through bullet points to help you decipher the difference between heterosexuality and compulsory heterosexuality.

American essayist and queer theorist Adrienne Rich first introduced the idea of “compulsory heterosexuality” in the 1980s when she published her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” But what exactly is compulsory heterosexuality? It’s the idea that heterosexuality is assumed and forced upon women, and therefore women feel forced into being attracted to men, even when they might not be.

This is where the lesbian master doc comes in. Angeli Luz, the author of the master doc, originally posted the document in 2018, anonymously, with the intention of helping women reflect upon the influences of compulsory heterosexuality in their lives. She surely achieved her purpose when it came to me. Though I’ve still got a while to go to dismantle compulsory heterosexuality in my life, the document opened my eyes. I began to understand that the idea of men I had in my head didn’t necessarily correlate with reality.

I appreciated the document so much that I started to share it — if my friends were questioning their sexuality, I suggested they read it and really absorb what it says. Their reaction was often the same: “Oh no, I’m not a lesbian. I know that.”

But guess what — you don’t have to be a lesbian to enjoy the intellectual fruits of Luz’s document.

According to Rich, compulsory heterosexuality affects all women, because all women are expected to like men. This includes lesbians, bisexual, asexual, pansexual, queer, trans, straight women and all other women.

That could include you. The master doc can help you understand where you lie on the infinite, confusing, ever-flexible spectrum of sexuality and attraction.

What is real attraction?

The meat of the master doc is directed toward trying to help you differentiate between genuine attraction to men and compulsory heterosexuality. Luz does this simply — she asks the readers if they’ve ever encountered a certain feeling or exhibited a certain behavior. Then, she explains what that behavior means.

As a queer woman who is still figuring out her sexuality, this exploration was pivotal to me. I went into reading the doc entirely sure that I was attracted to men — I came out the other side pretty sure that what I had been told my entire life about attraction was complete crap.

The best example of a flawed concept of attraction was the idea of “butterflies” — a nervous feeling in your stomach. I had often thought I liked a man because I was nervous around him. Luz claims that we think this because that’s how the media portrays attraction — the blushing, the butterflies. Ginny is so nervous around Harry that she can barely speak to him until the fourth book. Bella feels uncomfortable around Edward. And yet, they’re portrayed as though they’re in love.

But according to Luz, butterflies don’t mean you’re attracted to someone. The doc says: “... you might feel like you must be attracted to a man if you feel nervous around him, just because you’re experiencing the physical bodily response you’ve been told to expect, not because you actually want to date him.”

This blew my mind. Now that I knew this, I could move forward with the knowledge that my butterflies did not necessarily signify attraction, and I could reflect on my past to figure out how this played out in romantic situations I had with men.

This revelation reminded me of an interaction I had once — I was sure that I liked this guy because he made me so nervous. Whenever I was near him, my palms grew clammy, my stomach turned and I tripped over my words. I realized far too late that I only felt this way because he was someone I didn’t feel safe around, and that there was no genuine attraction there.

The idea that nervousness didn’t equate to attraction was the original point that got me thinking — is this document really just for lesbians? The master doc examines nervousness, but it also examines attraction to fictional men, or liking the idea of men but not the reality; none of these notions are exclusive to lesbians. I spoke with my friend about the document, and she came up with her own conclusions — she said that the master doc’s analysis didn’t help her realize she wasn’t attracted to men, but helped her understand what attraction even was.

By examining the symptoms of compulsory heterosexuality, women can begin to dismantle the socialized idea of attraction in their mind and discover what attraction really is to them. Any reader of Luz’s work may be able to more thoughtfully explore their sexuality, leading them to such revelations as they aren’t attracted to women, they’re more attracted to women than they previously thought or even strengthen their confidence in their heterosexuality.

Attraction to women

Obviously, a document called the “lesbian master doc” is going