A Public Display Of Affection

The color red is a point of conflict for me. As my favorite color I have very strong sentiments and motivations for how and why I prefer it above all else. I will now attempt to do the impossible: explain my love of the color red, in this,

A Public Display of Affection

Let me start off by saying that I was born right outside Cincinnati, OH, home of the Cincinnati Reds and that from a very young age she (yes she) has been my belovéd. My first cognitive memory of this resolution was in second grade when I brought my bfffl, Zach to church with me in West Chester, OH. The time and place are embedded in my brain. During Sunday school, Zach and my other friend Meredith were arguing about which is better: Yellow or red? Yellow being Meredith’s favorite color and red being Zach’s. After a few minutes of heated discussion between two 7-year-olds about the colors of the rainbow, they asked me to weigh in. Instinctively, I said “red” for two reasons. 1. Because Zach was my best-friend and I wanted to support my wingman since birth and 2. Because Meredith had cooties and girls are icky. But being forced to choose made me wonder.... “Have I ever chosen a ‘favorite color’?” In this instance I merely had to choose which I preferred in relation to the other.

A favorite though? Other people have favorite colors. Blue, green, pink, orange, and even black or white. But none of those suited me. Not enough woaoahh and too much blehhh. Could red be my favorite color? Idk my bff Zach.

Fast-forward over a decade and here I am looking back to that moment and I should have proposed then and saved myself time and money on a ring. Red is, has been, and always will be the ONLY color for me and I have finally come to a semi-communicable reason why.

There is no color like red. She has so many insinuations and connotations attached to her that one can’t help but be....attracted. Ooh-laa-laa. Red is controversial, passionate, sexual, ruthless, loving, violent, bloody, patriotic, revolutionary. Never in my life have I come across another color with such diversity in importance and symbolism behind the same value scale.

Take the Nazis for example. They utilized the power of red in what is generally considered to be the worst thing to ever happen in the history of everything ever. Not to mention all the people communists have sent to a permanent resting place over the years. Also in the name of red. Yet, the same color that has put millions, possibly billions to death worldwide is also part 1 of 3 in the “freest country in the world.

RED, WHITE, AND BLUE ALL THE WAY BABY!! **spoken in a deeply southern accent**

Fun fact: roughly 74% of all national flags IN THE WORLD contain some hue of red in them. Not even the magnificent white that takes an impressive-but-still-not-first-like-red 71% could beat her. Red is the mark of patriotism for one’s country as well as rebellion against another’s. French Revolution? World history and stuff? My 9th grade history teacher Mr. Molnar would be proud. The earliest pieces of artwork known to man are cave paintings created, in red paint, some 42,000 years ago in Málaga, Spain. Who coincidentally use red in their flag. Need I continue?

We could write a novel about all the brands that utilize the compromise and comfort of blue and green, but it takes it takes a special kind of passion for oneself and one's brand to use red. Here are a couple notables: LEGO, one of the top selling toys worldwide since the 1950s and voted by TIME Magazine as one of “The Greatest Toys Ever Made” uses red as their primary logo color and puts a 4-foot-tall, red LEGO 2x4 in every store they open. Why? Because it has presence. Coca freaking Cola the national drink of everywhere. Red. Ferrari [no description needed]. The Vodafone Group, owner of Verizon Wireless and many other telecommunication providers worldwide. Red. The BBC is the largest news broadcast in the world and they use red as well as CNN....the second largest news broadcast in the world. When one thinks of names such as these one does not envision an end point.

All I see is eternity.

A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were chatting about why we both prefer red to other colors. During our discussion I remember him saying something along the lines of, “I really love red and its vibrancy as a color. The only thing that bothers me about it is that I don’t own anything that goes with it.” Just a couple of dudes talking about colors and fashion. Nothing to see here....But for me, I have never had this problem.

I. JUST. BUY. RED.

In fact, sometimes I buy too much red. My car, appropriately named Scarlett, is Honda racing red. I painted half of my room red. Shower curtains? Yep. Hats (x3), karabiner/key covers, shoes I wear (x4)? All red. My laptop case even has a red lining like a pimp’s sport coat. My favorite jacket from H&M (another red company) is red. Shirts, towels, pants (yes, pants), notebooks, deodorant, drawing utensils; the list goes on. If everything in the world came in a shade of my sweet, sweet darling, my house would be the warmest place on earth.

But I have come to realize that we must treat red like a fine wine. A red wine.... Respected always and enjoyed only in moderation and on occasion. Wear too much and you look like an imbecile. But never at all? Sacrilege. She has the potential to make or break the outfit, the moment, the mystique. I think we can all agree that a white button up coupled with a grey suit and black shoes can be pretty darn classy. But top it off with a crisp, red tie and matching pocket square? GQ Magazine’s Top 50 Dressed Men of FOREVER. A woman in a slender black dress, with her hair pulled back, and a dazzling pearl necklace? B-e-a-utiful. But add a fresh coat of crimson lipstick and bright red shoes? I’m starting to lose my focus..........................wait.

What was I talking about?

WHOM?

As I grow older I realize that I am becoming more and more strange. Self-discovery. Not strange by other's standards, but strange by my own. I do not necessarily recognize this "Nate" I have become so "familiar" with over the past 19.5 years...With every late night I stay up thinking about what my life is like and what it has become, I realize:

I am not as simple as I thought.

Ever look in the mirror and wonder who's staring back? I do.....a lot.

Not wondering who physically is staring back as in, "A man with short, black hair, wearing a red t-shirt, etc."

But WHOM is staring back. What do other people think of the person you see? What do people like about them? What could people do without?  What do people say behind their back both good and bad, honest and dishonest? What are the person in the mirror's nervous ticks and mannerisms they preform when speaking in front of a large crowd or talking with an intimate friend? What are their favorite words to use and do they even sound intelligent when they speak in general?

Now let's get personal.

What is my look of surprise? What do I look like when something disgusts me and I'm trying to not show it but yet still showing it in a very palpable way? How do I look at my friends differently than my family? And why do I always write "friends" before "family" as an ordered pair every time? I love my family. What do I look like when I'm in love with somebody? What do I look like when I hate somebody? Do I truly have a "pokerface" or is it so easy for those closest to me to identify when I'm full of it that I needn't lie anymore because they already know what I am up to?

These are the things I wonder about.

Why do our voices sound different when we hear a recording of them as opposed to when we're actually using them? And why do we hate their sound so much? Better yet, which is our REAL voice: the sound we both hear and feel in our chest, lungs, and teeth or the voice others can measure only with their ears? Is the red, yellow, blue to me the same as red, yellow, blue to you or is it just an example or nature vs. nurture? And what if some eyes are so "colorblind" they only see in black and white but they see with such a heightened sense of luminous detail that they can still differentiate colors solely based on value alone, never mind hue, saturation, tint.

Why do some people only have 200 friends on Facebook and others have thousands? Does that correlate directly to real-life sociability or is it based on the time and effort you put in to social media? Why is it more lame to follow more accounts than be followed on Instagram, Twitter, etc.? What if everyone who has less followers than following are really just more interesting than us because they branch out into the unknown to find something...."strange".

Why do I find myself proofreading a status for Facebook, of all things to proofread, over and over again to make sure I won't "offend" anybody too, too much, but still get my point across while still sounding witty but without coming across as an egotistic asshole?

I try to notice things. See the details in that which others may not. And what is something observed exclusively for oneself but an idea people won't actually believe is yours. I guess I want to take credit for all the things I think of before others think of the same thing. Because if they think of the same thing as I have, they'll just use it on their friends like I do mine and their friends will use it further and further until it eventually makes it back to me and I say, "Hey! I thought of that!" like a disgruntled child whose friend has just STOLEN his one amazing idea in the world, only to hear a condescending, "Noooo.....I heard that awhile ago from someone you don't know." And they will Ancestry.com the idea back to who they heard it from and further and further down the line, the trail WILL lead back to me but before that can happen....

I will be labeled an immediate plagiarist.

Which I am not.

Mountain Dew Slushies

Why do I continuously do this?....I drink caffeine late at night with the intention of staying up a bit later than usual to either get a little work done or "catch up" on some television I've missed and the clock passes 2AM, 3AM, 4AM, and I'm still wide awake. Left alone with the inner workings of my brain, I am kept awake for much longer than I originally intended.

At a certain point a man wants to sleep and yet here I am....2:48AM and I could stay up all night if I wanted to. Writing, watching television, drawing, whatever the crap my mind thinks would be productive at this point. The average start time of my past 7 journal entries hovers around 1:45AM, the earliest being 12:30AM and the latest being 4:10AM.

My original plan for tonight was to have a little caffeine and catch up on the newest season of Mad Men then slowly wind down and fall asleep at a semi-reasonable time and wake up early-ish tomorrow and turn all the blank t-shirts I own into original "Nate Seaman works of art". Yeah....that's not gonna happen. I have watched 3 and a half hours total and still not a yawn or heavy eye to show for it which makes me wonder: How many other people stay up this late merely for the sake of staying up late? I wonder how many people on our cul-de-sac are awake right now and what they're thinking about.

If they look out their window and see my room lit and think the same thing I do. I tried to see if anyone is awake on Facebook but I've left chat off for so long now that I honestly don't even remember how to initiate a conversation or even contact my fellow night owls.

I remember hearing a comedian, Mike Birbiglia, talk about how he suffered from years of sleep apnea, irregular dreams, sleep walking, and a general lack of rest and I can't bare the thought of it. While I was at school was probably the least amount of sleep I've ever had. Not to mention all the nights I went to bed with such high blood pressure I'm surprised I woke up the next morning (shout-out to my ex-roommate's crazy bitch girlfriend what what!).

Luckily my girlfriend is not crazy though. She refers to people who stay up really late as "cool people" and insists that every time she stays up past 11PM, she is classified as a "cool person" too....yeah. I guess she's pretty cool \m/

-N8

Email to Housing and Residence Life at UNCC

Recently, since the cold weather has started to come through, my roommate Alec and I's room has started to become EXTREMELY FREAKING COLD because something is wrong with the heating in our room and neither of us is a fire-bender so we are officially SOL. So, naturally, I emailed HRL department about la problema (that's Spanish for "the problem") but they didn't really make many changes the first time I emailed so I emailed again......with more words......a lot more words. Unfortunately, I forgot to put any words in the "Subject" section of the email so this could very well go unread so I wanted to share it with the world because I think it's great and sometimes having a brain that stops working logically at 8pm works to your advantage. So here it is.......seriously.

"Dear HRL,

My roommate (Alec Newell the Great) and I (Nathan Bruce Seaman the First) live in Sanford Hall Rm. - - -. Before Thanksgiving Break whenst turkey would be consumed, we received a notice to contact you fellows about anything that was wrong with our rooms (cable, heating/cooling, rodent infestations, the usual). After reading said notice, I contacted you posthaste about the absence of heat that had/has been permeating through our vents when it is cold outside and everybody else's heat is working. We used to keep our door open with a fan facing inwards hoping that the warm air from the hall would trickle in like the chocolate river that swallowed Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, but, much to our chagrin, it made virtually no difference and the fan, as you may have guessed, made things even colder. As a result our room was/is always cold (after Thanksgiving Break) and we walked/walk around in pants, socks, shoes, and hoodies all the time and we both have to wear sweatshirts, sweatpants, our matching footy-pajamas, blankets, and socks to bed to keep the ever-advancing cold at bay. 

A few days after I electrically mailed (emailed) HRL, a kind-souled technician, whose name escapes me, came out and inspected the vent. He "fixed a belt" in the mysterious room where all pipes and gauges live to where air started coming out again and I thought, "Shazam!! Huzzah!! Our room shall FINALLY be warm again!!". But unbeknownst to my roommate and I....progress stopped there. After that, the local climate of Charlotte, North Carolina, USA started warming again as is customary for this "crazy Carolinian weather". I figured the heat wouldn't come on until it got cold again because before leaving, that is what the unnamed jack-of-all-trades told us (something about the computer that recognizes temperature outside). 

But now it's cold again and our room: still cold. Like.....REALLY cold. When I went to turn on my computer to send this very email it was freezing and wouldn't turn on until I warmed it up by shining a lamp on it and urging it, "DON'T MOVE TOWARDS THE LIGHT!!!" At this moment in time, it is unclear to me if we need a separate module of heating equipment such as a space heater or something of that sort to warm our room. But what IS clear to me is that it is still really cold and it seems like most everyone else's rooms around our periphery are normal, happy temperatures. 

Thank you for your attention to my EXTREMELY-long, quasi-novelic, electronic mail (email). I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it (at approximately 2:45am in the morning). We (Alec and I) hope a solution can be reached quickly before we both go into a cryogenic freeze like Han Solo in "The Empire Strikes Back", because although we (Alec and I) both have Princess Leias in our lives. I doubt either of them have the knowledge necessary to unfreeze someone suspended in a cryogenic state. :D 

THE END 

Written and Produced by: Nathan Bruce Seaman the First" 

After getting a response from HRL this is what they responded with......

"Nathan Seaman,

You and your story are awesome! I did enjoy reading it. If you don’t mind, I printed off a copy of it as the best maintenance request ever written. Thank you for giving us all in the Facilities Office a smile :)

P.S. Your request was referred to one of our mechanics."

Sounds like it was a success....

-N8

Power - Reflection - "Manos y Oídos"

When I think of power I think of the power we have over others. The power we have trapped inside our bodies that we can release through our own actions both physical and metaphorical. When you think about it, the five senses we have are the only way we can express ourselves in terms of showing others how we feel. 

I chose a hand and an ear as my subject matter because I thought they were both neutral senses with great power for good or bad. With your hands you can write someone a love note, embrace someone you haven't seen in a long time, high five a friend, play music, or make art. But there are also things you can do with your hands that aren't so loving. You can wield a knife against someone, punch, slap, shoot a gun at someone, sign an adoption form for your own child, or abort a baby. Likewise with your ears you can hear someone say, "I love you", hear your favorite song, a baby's first laugh, the leaves crunch beneath your feet during fall, a friend tell a story, or absolute, calming silence. But you can also hear somebody you love being hurt, tales of distress and agony, cursing, terrible news, doors slamming, screaming, or crying.

The eye would have played a key role in this project because of all the good and bad things you can see and or do with your eyes but I tried to stay away from cliché objects and for me, the eye is it. After hearing feedback from my classmates I realized that my works were more aesthetically pleasing to the eye rather than conceptually strong which did not come as much of a surprise to me. When Mrs. Rothrock said I could have put them in multiple gestures to get my point across I sort of understood as far as the hand went but that would have been literally impossible with the ear because.....ears don't move.

The hand, as I previously stated, was an older project that I felt fit into the prompt for this assignment. One of my toughest struggles during this project was trying to keep the style of the ear consistent with the precedent already set up by the hand. If possible I would have made them into actual prints like a woodblock or lithograph but I lack the resources and knowhow to do either of those so I went with an old-fashioned ink drawn print. I am pleased with the way these turned out and plan to continue this series in the future with my spare time.

In Class Reflection on "Power"

After seeing the works of art that hold "power" over people I understand exactly why they do. In the case of the pictures on naked children it is not a positive power that they hold but a negative one. Almost every person in the class was in complete cohesion when say that, that shouldn't be allowed to photograph children in that way. Some could understand why and how the pictures were probably taken but no one was flat-out, "Yes. This is okay as art and I have no problem with it."

A couple of the other pieces held different types of power. The Mexican people acting inside the glass boxes really interested me because I have spent extended time in Mexico. I thought it was interesting how people could go up and share their confessions about what they thought about Mexico and how it was almost always a media-based assumption.

The sexual figurines that were shown were definitely meant for shock value. I have come across Takshi Murakami's work in other art classes in the past and I found it interesting how he could make such happy, playful work of flowers and smiley faces with all kinds of vibrant colors and flora and then completely change directions and go to very adult, sexual versions of what look like children's toys. I personally would never make something for a shock value merely because I would rather stimulate thought on a piece where you study every part of it and what it means rather than seeing something and closing your eyes or turning away almost immediately like many of my classmates did.

In this project I am planning on taking some sorts of logos and changing them to become art themselves rather than symbols for, what I believe to be, destructive things.

-N8

Ecology - Reflection - "Luke Gnarles Seaman"

Ecology: the scientific study of the relationships organisms have with each other and with their natural environment. After hearing the definition of "ecology" in class I decided to go for something about the relationship of humans to different environments. I always get asked the question, "Mountains or beach?" and almost every time, North Carolinians prefer the beach and people who have recently moved here prefer the mountains. Point of view. I see it as all environments and how we relate to them is simply a point of view. I, for instance, prefer going to the mountains and climbing rocks, skiing down slopes, and longboarding down hills whereas other people I know prefer the ocean and sun rather than mountains and clouds. It was this thinking that brought me to the thought of doing a project on longboarding.

I spend hours every week longboarding like many people spend them going to the gym or studying for classes. It has become a part of me just as much as my love of music and art and because of that I have focused various different works of art towards it to pay respect to something I love doing. As a longboarder, I look at the world differently. Where most people would see a mere staircase, I almost instantly calculate in my mind, "How many stairs is that? Could I land the impact without getting hurt from that height? Could I jump far enough to clear the last stair?...." When I am driving in my car up/down a big hill most people would see a hill, occasionally you would get people thinking about sledding but that is normally exclusive to fall/winter time and a longboarder would do the same calculation, "How fast could I get going down this hill? Is my board hardware tailored to survive until the bottom without falling to pieces? Are there blind corners where traffic could be coming? If I fall how bad will the injury be?....." It is all merely a point of view.

For this reason I chose to do a picture of Luke (my younger brother) doing a trick called a "slide" where you break the wheels' rolling friction from the ground and slide (much like socks on a waxed floor) until your wheels begin to roll again. I chose a photograph because longboarding is such an action-adrenaline sport and no other medium could really capture what I was trying to express for this project. I chose a sequence of photos because I wanted to show the progression of the slide from the "wind-up" to the actual slide progressing towards the exit. Also because of the nature of longboarding, I wanter to show the speed and high-voltage nature of the sport. The filters and coloring I used are supposed to be a throwback to the 50's when skateboarding actually started and the smudges on the pieces are merely for aesthetic appeal.

If I were to go back and do this project again I would not change a thing. I went out for a boarding outing with some friends originally but when I took the pictures they just seemed too staged. I later went out with my brother and received the shots necessary in a single take which just reiterates how you can't stage something so natural. I don't even remember how I made the filters to look how they did with the reddish tint and I tried going back to recreate it because a friend asked me about my process and I couldn't do it. This whole project was a "fly by the seat of my pants" experience and I thoroughly enjoyed the subject matter and assignment as a whole.

-N8