WE ARE UCI: New Podcast!

Co-hosting a brand new podcast at UCI!

The Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning (OVPTL) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is launching a new podcast to feature the struggles and triumphs of UCI’s diverse student body to redefine student success. Hosted by Hai Truong, UCI alum and marketing strategist for the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, and Jonathan Alexander, associate dean in the Division of Undergraduate Education and Chancellor's Professor of English and Informatics, the “WE ARE UCI: Student Success Podcast” will be launching later this Fall.

“We will provide a platform where the students can share their stories of strength and resilience,” says Associate Dean Alexander. “By amplifying their voices, we hope to inspire the entire Anteater community and encourage other UCI students to seek out opportunities. We also want to redefine what success as a student means in these changing times.”
Upcoming episodes will feature candid conversations with students about the personal, social and educational experiences that have shaped their pursuit of success at UCI.

“WE ARE UCI: Student Success Podcast” will be available to stream and download at iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and wherever else you listen to your podcasts. http://weareuci.uci.edu/podcast/

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Nayland Blake Retrospective

The art of Nayland Blake offers one of the most pressing meditations on — and invitations to interrogate — the circulation of pain in contemporary American life. A retrospective of their work at the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, one of the largest recent exhibits for the artist on this coast, foregrounds such an invitation by showcasing Blake’s frequent use of bondage equipment, chains, images, and video of discomfort and pain, and periodic gruesome glimpses of self- and other-inflicted suffering.

Check out the full review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/getting-hard-with-nayland-blake-on-the-artists-recent-retrospective-in-los-angeles/

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Getting Hard with Nayland Blake

Getting Nerdy

A podcast episode of THE IMAGINATION DESK, in which I talk with Joey Eschrich of the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination.  We take a closer look at popular modern Science Fiction TV shows and their cultural and political uses, along with a look at writing stories in the digital age.

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EASTSIDERS and Kit Williamson

My interview with Kit Williamson, creator of the hit series EASTSIDERS, in which Kit talks about representation as politics and the importance of being unapologetically queer …

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unapologetically-queer-kit-williamson-on-eastsiders-and-revolutionary-representation/

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I also think there’s something to be said for queer stories written from and for a queer point of view. And that’s something I hope to continue doing in my career.

Another article on Nico!

In a new book, published this year by Crown, Space Between: Explorations of Love, Sex, and Fluidity, Tortorella traverses some of the same terrain as The Love Bomb in a largely memoir-ish account of their life that also reads at times like a manifesto — and one that understands their generation, millennials, at the heart of the new gender fluidity. Read more at LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-millennial-fluidity-or-a-second-open-love-letter-to-nico-tortorella/

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On Millenniall

Fluidity

or, a Second Open Love Letter to Nico Tortorella

STONEWALL @ 50

THIS PAST JUNE we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, those moments in a queer bar in New York on June 28–29, 1969, when a group of faggots, trannies, and drag queens decided that they had had enough, that they didn’t want to be harassed anymore by police making periodic raids on queer establishments.  Read more at LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/problem-reparative-shadow-stonewall/

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The Problem of the Reparative

in the Shadow of Stonewall

BURNING TIME -- Two videos and some news coverage!

So please that UCI made a great video explaining the BURNIGN TIME exhibit, and that local news covered the opening of the exhibit at UCI.

The UCI-produced video offers some additional background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=FCEL8CQYlRI 

And this news report, which aired Friday, May 10, provides some lovely commentary about BURNING TIME: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/orange-county/news/2019/05/10/art-exhibit-commemorates-50th-anniversary-of-stonewall-riots 

BURNING TIME -- May 7-23 @ UCI

Burning Time is a graphic book collaboration between Professors Jonathan Alexander (English Department)) and Antoinette LaFarge (Art Department) that explores the intimacies of imagined memory and sexuality. The book consists of a cycle of 8 poems and associated panoramic paintings to tell the story of a young gay man arriving in New Orleans in the late 1950s to start a new life. The project began with a trove of photographs that Jonathan Alexander was unexpectedly given at a family retreat, forgotten images that gave him a poignant glimpse into the life of a long-dead gay uncle. He began to imagine what his uncle's life must have been like, arriving in New Orleans from rural Louisiana as a very young man in the middle of the 20th century. In conjuring his imagined version of this man's life, Jonathan soon realized that his words needed equally evocative images to create an emotional correlative of the uncle's experiences, and he invited Antoinette LaFarge into the project. Text and image interweave to evoke a particular time and place while also summoning the timelessness of self-exploration and desire— experience reimagined as mythic adventure. 

Image: Burning Time: Letters (detail), 2018

Friday, May 10, 4 p.m. - Opening Reception

Viewpoint Gallery, UCI Student Center

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