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DECEMBER 2, 2009
The Broken Healer Teaching Ways to Move Towards a Better Life
BY STEPHANIE DANIS Arts Editor ’11
“I’m trying to heal myself so I don’t kill myself,” are the first lines of Harvey Moore’s The Broken Healer, a oneman hip-hop show he performed at Saint Peter’s College on November 10, 2009. The one-man show, which lasted a little bit over an hour and a half, spoke out about issues of suicide using a mish mash of spoken word, rhymed verse, freestyle, and monologues about Harvey’s struggle through a bout of depression where he contemplated suicide. The entire play is written in real time, as Harvey was experiencing the action he wrote it down and created the verse that he transformed into a one-man show. Over a three-hour interview savoring tea we drank out of soup bowls, Harvey explained that The Broken Healer is not just a simple story, but it is a work of art that he created as part of a Movement aimed at creating a methodology that can be
applied to reduce chaos in our personal lives. He explained to me that entropy is the definition of chaos in a system. His goal, through his work, is to help people find their OIM: Organizational Internalized Methodology in order to learn systems that they can apply to reducing the entropy in their lives. The Broken Healer is one way in which Harvey hopes to broadcast his vision of the future, he has a second installment to his Broken Healer series called, Hip Hop, Autism, and the Movement in the works. His performance at Saint Peter’s College was the first of this tour. Moore, a graduate of Yale’s drama school performed for about 50 people in an intimate semi circle in McIntyre lounge. For the duration of the show the lights were turned off except for a lamp that was part of his set. Harvey shifted from rapping along with a beat to free styling for the audience. Along with his own words, he incorporated verse from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The show was powerful and compelling,
ARTS SPOKEN WORD
as Harvey tackled the issue of suicide reaction to the show. For students who missed this he addressed issues of love, loss, and I would highly redemption. The story is about his performance, struggle with himself and his desire to recommend seeing it at Saint Peter’s or lower the chaos, his entropy, in his life. another local college on his tour. This He succeeded in creating an outlet for work is not just a suicide prevention himself, and he hopes he can do the skit; it is a deep and intelligently written foray into our psyches that clues us in same for students. As he continues on his college on our ability to control our actions. tour, Harvey plans on incorporating a team of people who have their Master’s in Social Work. His goal is to create an outlet for students who have just seen his performance in hopes that they PHOTO BY KOTARO OHASHI will interact Pauw Wow editor Stephanie Danis interviews and flesh out Harvey Moore their feelings in
Came for the Food, Stayed for the Mood BY ANDREW DAWES
Contributing writer ’11 A silkscreen painting by Andy Warhol sold for 43.7 million dollars two weeks ago at Sotheby’s, more than quadrupling the high estimate. On Thursday, November 19, at the Student Art Show in Rankin Hall, the reserve for a slice of marble cheesecake was set at $2.50. Both were outside my budget. Slim pockets, however, did not prevent me from enjoying the plethora of original works presented by students of photography, fine art, and graphic design while being simultaneously serenaded by the sounds of St. Peter’s student Molly Rotondo’s original choral composition entitled “This is Why.” She conducted the seven vocalists herself, accompanied by Professor James Adler on piano. The event also boasted live performances of classical music by peer
pianists Vuk Fio, Marissa Buccianti and Jonathan Herrmann, as well as percussionist Kenny Medina. I spent the majority of my stay in the second floor hallway, just outside what I will dub the ‘concert hall.’ Here a free smorgasbord of epicurean meats and cheeses was readily available. Milling about behind the glass displays, I jotted down odd irrelevant notes and attempted to appear deep in analytical thought while gnashing on an overloaded Italian sub, as all good art critics must. For a while I was zealously determined to expose the cowardly tyrant responsible for the grossly disproportionate amount of diet-to-regular sodas available, but decided to curb my extracurricular enthusiasm and focus on my first PauwWow assignment. I corralled the artist responsible for an interesting piece of what I
perceived as pop art, but turned out to be more like sound commercial design. Commercial artists create pieces to be replicated, not sold as originals. With the right innovative idea, this practice is extremely lucrative. I originally thought Patricia Verano’s representation of a rectangular, cardboard fruit snack packaging was a way to make us view a piece of everyday life from a different perspective. The small red box adorned with Japanese characters and images of smiley-faced strawberries stands in front of a two dimensional representation of what it would look like laid flat, before the paper gets folded into its final shape. The measurements of each flap are marked precisely, forcing the viewer to think more pragmatically about the actual process that goes into creating objects like boxes of fruit snacks or cereal; normally taken for granted.
ART SHOW
Someone literally sat down and drew the prototypical design on a piece of paper first, visualizing how it would fit together and where pictures or text would appear. It turns out Patricia did not just take something already in existence and dissect it to nourish our curiosity, as I’d suspected. She designed the box herself, inspired by a love of Asian culture and frequent shopping trips to her local Mitsua marketplace. She went there so much that in high school, she says, her friends dubbed her “Patsie-Chan,” a nickname she now uses to identify her fictitious brand of gelatinous chews. And it’s too bad they weren’t real. Neither were the cookies in Adham Emera’s “Chocolate Chip Swirly’s” box. Alas, there was never any soup in Warhol’s Campbell’s cans, and they’ve done just fine over the years.