Classes, money, and realizations

First, a class update. I am no longer in the technology class, so no more EduBlogging. I am, however, in a multicultural education class, whose assignments keep telling me to post something as my status update on Facebook or on Twitter or to text my friends. Creative...but my classes don't usually invade my Facebook life.

Well, but I have added professors as friends. Weird.

Anyway. The week has included several monumental moments for me.

First: the US Mint makes fake money.

Have you seen the newer one dollar coins? I don't know if it was just a PR failure, but I had no idea about this program when it started--the Presidential $1 Coin Program. Though I sure did hear a lot about the state quarter thing when it was starting, and when the dollar coin was introduced, and even about the revamping of dollar bills, I never heard anything about this. The first time I got a hold of one of the presidential $1 coins (I think as change for pizza at high school, if I remember correctly) I thought some dumb kid had given the lunch lady fake money that she had bought into, and now was giving me fake money back as change.

The design--especially the Statue of Liberty back--it looks fake and cheap. I bought a snack out of a vending machine this week and got gold $1 coins as change, and initially had the same reaction. Wait, this isn't real money!

And other coins, too--after completing the state quarter thing (last year, right?), the Mint is now starting an "America The Beautiful" quarter series--again, going through all the states and territories (kudos to them for including American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and US Virgin Islands--places I didn't even know about until 10th grade, but that's a whole other issue), depicting nature scenes. There's currently in circulation a penny with a shield on the reverse and also four different pennies with scenes from four stages of Lincon's life: birth and early childhood in Kentucky, formative years in Indiana, professional life in Illinois, and presidency in Washington, DC. "Westward Journey" nickle series with five different nickles with a buffalo, the Pacific coast, Louisiana Purchase/Peace Medal, a keelboat, and the traditional Monticello. Oh, and there are currently three designs for the reverse of the Sacagawea gold dollar.

I have to admit, I was a fan of the original 50 state series--I have all of them in a book at home (except about five) that I've been collecting for the last ten years. But I think part of my attraction to the program was how it was so new. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I didn't realize it was just the start of the future of American money. When did our currency come out of novelty shops, anyway? There are so many variations that you can't even tell what's real.

Second: Not everyone likes Minerva Tiechert's paintings

I love Minerva Tiechert's paintings. I'm signed up for a class about appreciating art and museums this term. We meet at the BYU Museum of Art. For our first assignment, we had to go write a response to a work in the museum. I chose The Rug Dealers by Minerva Tiechert, a huge--maybe five feet by ten feet--painting showing two Native Americans holding up woven rugs to sell. There are some cowboys--two Latino, one Anglo--standing on sides of the scene looking. Behind the sellers, a woman is standing and weaving a rug, a child at her side. It's Minerva Tiechert's style--more impressionistic, softer colors, movement--and looks so American, with the Native American designs in the rugs, lots of different cultures and people, an American scene in the American West.

I wrote the paper about it, and the next day at class, we all walked around the museum together, lead by our teacher. She asked us to present the work of art we had written about. We were close to mine, so I said I'd go. I stood up and described the things I just described, and then the teacher started asking the class questions, leading a discussion. She brought up Arnold Friberg, who painted the picture of George Washington kneeling and praying by his horse--and the series of pictures that appear in front of copies of the Book of Mormon. LDS audiences usually like more realistic depictions, she said, and when Friberg's and Tiechert's Book of Mormon paintings were both submitted, Frieberg's were chosen.

This lead into some discussion--several people saying, yes, I like the more realistic Friberg pictures. I don't like the chalky colors and painting style Tiechert uses. Her pictures are vague.... I guess this all just surprised me. I really like Tiechert's paintings. I guess it had honestly never even occurred to me that people might not like them.

Which leads me to realization number three.

Third: Some people think The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is cheesy

Another thing I love: the 1060's movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It's French, entirely sung, and sad. I watched it for the first time with my dad, and liked it so much that I bought the soundtrack and, when I was in France, went to Cherbourg and tried to buy an umbrella.

I've moved back into the French House at BYU, where I speak French with my roommates and five days a week all the French House people have dinner together. The other night we were talking about French movies. We had talked about Les Diaboliques and Amélie and I said, do you know The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? Clémence, who's from France, laughed. Christina rolled her eyes. "It's so cheesy," said Clémence.

I still love it. And listen to the music.

The Middle East, Rap Music, and Movies

A few weeks ago, I was reading about J. K. Rowling in Time magazine. Speaking on how global Harry Potter has become, the author reported that a teacher in Pakistan asked their students to look at the books politically. The students called Pervez Musharraf Voldemort, and labeled Benazir Bhutto as Bellatrix Lestrange. Bellatrix Lestrange is evil, which didn't fit with what the press was saying about Bhutto after her death (the photo is from the Academy of Achievement).

William Dalrymple was the exception--and solved the Lestrange-martyr mystery. In Time (Jan. 14, 2008), he writes things like: "Amnesty International accused [Bhutto's] gouvernment of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, abductions, killings, and torture."

I went to a Sundance film yesterday. Slingshot Hip Hop. It was a documentary about Palestinian rappers in occupied Israel. And after the showing--woah, five of the rappers were there. They were sitting right behind us, and went up and fielded questions and did a little free-style.

It was an interesting way to look at the conflict--how rappers from the different groups can't all get together for a concert because visas to leave the occupied territory are so hard to come by--and because the issue and honoring of visas is so arbitrary. Where some of them live, it takes eight hours to travel fourteen miles, because of all the checkpoints set up.

That surprised me. They can't move around. They don't have mail and electricity gets cut off. They aren't free. The rappers more than once in the film called rap their reason to live.

I think, though, an equally sympathetic story could have been told from the Israeli side. During the Q&A, someone asked what they could do to help the occupied Palestinian cause, and one of the rappers essentially said, "don't support Israel." Both sides of the conflict are unyielding--it is all black and white, so no one can win.

I saw Juno this weekend. It was the best movie I've seen in a long time. I liked it even better than the fancy Sundance flick. Fox Searchlight owns the image.

Airports and Musicals

I spent the weekend in San Diego. My sister and her husband and baby just moved out there. We spent Saturday morning on the beach, and I took some California sun home with me.

Traveling was awful. Coming back from France was the same thing. As I went through Paris Charles de Gaulle, and London Heathrow, and New York JFK, I kept thinking “this airport is awful.” But then it wasn’t just one airport, it was the next one, too. At de Gaulle, I spent longer waiting in the line for my passport to be checked than the length of the flight: the distance between the airport doors and the passport people was farther than the distance between Paris and London.

But of course, no one really needs to hear more complaining about the airline industry.

While I was in France, I never figured out how to say “airline”--and I ended up talking about them (or trying to) a fair amount. I think what I said most of the time was “airplane companies.” Close, but not quite....

I saw the movie Hairspray tonight. As it got started, I was reminded of another blast-from-the-past high school musical, Grease. Well, actually, first I was reminded of the Sponge Bob Square Pants movie, and then I was reminded of Grease. I think Hairspray should get higher marks. Rather than singing about cars and conformity, they sang about things like racial integration and accepting yourself.

Harry Potter Et L'Ordre Du Phénix

This is a photo of the Fnac (like Barnes and Noble) in Paris. The sign announces, rather nonchalantly, that Emma Watson and Rupert Grint will visit to chat at 6:30 on 4 July. It surprised me, I guess. I don't ever see things like that in Salt Lake.

I saw the fifth Harry Potter movie tonight. I liked it--except, towards the end the dramatic epic-battle-between-good-and-evil made me feel like my life was really rather uneventful.

I understood the movie, which was amazing. I had also seen the latest editions of "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Shrek" while I've been here, and most of the story--delivered in French--just went over my head in those cases. A month or so down the road, though, and I understood practically all the dialogue in this movie--except for Snape, who mumbles. Or something.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and a Note on Shoes

Last Saturday, Jennifer and I did some serious tourism. The original plan was to go to Bayeux and Cherbourg via Caen, but on the first train—to Caen—we realized not every train ran every day. So we ended up doing three cities in one day. The itinerary:

Train from Rouen to Caen
Once in Caen: An old church and the Abbaye-aux-hommes
Train from Caen to Cherbourg
Once in Cherbourg: A basilica, the quay, a lovely garden and a natural history museum that would have made Darwin feel quite at home. Umbrella shopping.
Train from Cherbourg to Bayeux
Once in Bayeux: The Tapestry, the cathedral, a WWII museum that was closed when we got there
Train from Bayeux to Caen
Once on the train: talking to a pair of American college students in France for a rocket science seminar.
Train from Caen to Rouen

I was excited to actually get to Cherbourg. I have a thing for the movie “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg”—the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It was made in the sixties, I think. It’s a musical without a single spoken word, bright colors and a tearjerker plot. It reminded me of West Side Story, except that it’s in French and nobody dies except someone’s old aunt. The title of the movie comes from the store the main character’s mother owns, and ever since I saw the movie for the first time, I wanted to buy an umbrella in Cherbourg. This was my motivation for going.

I was planning on just stumbling on a shop called something like “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg,” which didn’t actually happen. After Jennifer and I had been wandering around for maybe forty minutes, the closest we had gotten was a “Cherbourg!” postcard with an umbrella boarder—which made me begin to ask myself: where are the umbrellas of Cherbourg?

But we found them. We didn’t actually buy umbrellas, though, because these ones were priced in the 40 euro neighborhood. I was satisfied just to have found them.


Last week, I bought another pair of shoes. I say “another” because this is the second pair of shoes I have during my stay in Europe, which puzzles me, since I’ve never considered myself a shoe person. The new ones are a pair of knock-off Puma- or Adidas-style tennis shoes. I was so enthusiastic about them that I wore them on the big adventure Saturday—and my feet hurt before the Rouen to Caen train was underway. After a pharmacy experience, I was on my way again.