Despair

Part of what attracts me to Webber’s version of The Phantom of the Opera are the lyrics so creatively penned by Charles Hart. I find many of them quite poignant, haunting, revealing, and extremely moving upon my own heart (no pun intended there). The three lines above are no exception.

I am back to Erik’s humanity, as I write this post, for a few simple lyrical lines are about to reveal once again his tortured existence as a human being – black despair brought on by rejection, isolation, and loneliness. The Phantom of the Opera has become for me, at times, a psychological playground. Perhaps I missed my calling in life and should have been a psychologist, instead of pouring over contract language all day long…boring. As I have mentioned before, emotions in our lives that drive our behavior fascinate me to no end. Despair is no exception, and as we examine Erik’s character in depth, it is not hard to understand despair was a huge motivational factor in his life.

You already know the story, bound by an existence of loneliness for years hidden under the Opera Populaire. Then Christine arrives into his life, giving him at least the incentive to expose the essence of who he is to another human being. What great risk Erik took! Bound in loneliness, despair, and isolation yearning for a normal life, he takes the greatest risk to escape his darkness in hell. He reveals himself, his genius, and his love to the one woman who he believes can “save” him from his solitude. He may not have taken his outward mask off, but he certainly stripped himself of his inner one to find freedom and love.

Yet the cruelty of the story exists. He is betrayed and rejected again and returns once more to his dungeon of black despair, the prison of his mind that keeps him bound in the thoughts of his own unworthiness and the path that leads him only to hell. I believe this one act is another indication of why this story hits home to so many; it touches those who have sunk to the pain of depression at one time or another. The lines are a poetic description of the hell experienced by humans whose depression is born out of isolation and loneliness.

If you have never been there, count your lucky stars! I am not sure how many I speak to in this post, only to say that this existence is a real battle for those who live a life of isolation and loneliness. It takes GREAT courage to rise above it and risk the taking off your mask once again to another human in order to find the love and acceptance you yearn for. It also carries with it great fear that once you do, the rejection will return, and you will be once more dragged down to the dungeon of your black despair. Just another provoking thought…

Your Obedient Servant,
The Phantom’s Student

Order Lessons From the Phantom of the Opera Here

smARThistory wrinkle

Dear smARThistory community,
as you know, we started our blog here at blogspot and eventually moved to smARThistory.org. The following is a rather long update on recent events. Until we are up and running again at smARThistory.org, please visit us at our temporary site, smARThistory.us and thanks for your good humor and patience.

Part 1: the .Org/.Us Fiasco!

There has been a flurry of activity behind the scenes at smARThistory over the past few months and Beth Harris and I can finally bring you up-to-date. As many of you know, we created the domain smARThistory.org a little over three years ago and grew our blog and web-book content to the point where we were visited well over 100,000 times from over 100 countries. Little did we know that our modest success made our domain, smARThistory.org, a target of nefarious web domain pirates. When our domain registration lapsed for a few days last spring due to an email mix up, the .org site was bought at auction by a man in Armenia for a sizable amount of money, based, we later learned, on the traffic we had generated. We immediately requested return of the domain and investigated the rules set forth by ICANN and other agencies. But in the end, the auction was legitimate and the mistake was ours so we had little recourse.

To make matters worse, the new owner of the domain kept our content up on his site despite our repeated demands that he respect our work and copyrights. He also began to post unrelated commercial advertisements, something we have never done. We were able to get Google Adsense to remove their ads but the site links began to break almost immediately and we feared our viewers would assume we were responsible for this neglect. In response, we immediately opened smARThistory.us and hoped our viewers would somehow find us there. We also continued to negotiate for the return of the .org domain even as it changed hands again. As of this week, we have it (and now have it locked in for the next ten years) and we are both breathing easier. We hope to have smARThistory.org up and running again within a few weeks (.us will then be redirected to the .org site). We are only thankful that it is summer and hope that most of our readers are not in session and were not inconvenienced. For those who were, we offer our sincerest regrets and hope you will return. We think you will be very excited by what you find here this fall.

Update Part 2: A Samuel H. Kress Foundation Grant Means No Tan This Summer But A Great Website Redesign!

Thanks to the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, smARThistory was awarded a $25,000 grant. This has allowed us to work with Lotte Meijer, our brilliant information architect and Mickey Mayo, our unbelievably insightful and creative web designer (and their respective teams). Below are excepts from the proposal:

Background
smARThistory.us is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook. We began smARThistory three years ago by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.

We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using the read-write web’s interactivity and capacity for authoring and remixing. Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content, eliminating Web 2.0 possibilities for the open collaboration and open communities that our students now use and expect.

In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them.

We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies. Following this project, we will begin a conversation with other art historians to discuss different models for our own discipline-specific collaboration.

Aim of Grant
We have delivered and organized the content of smARThistory using the free, open source application, Wordpress. Out-of-the-box, it has been a very useful tool in the initial stages of our project. Because Wordpress is open-source, the look, feel, and structure of the site is entirely customizable. Unfortunately, our expertise as art historians does not include the requisite programming skills. This grant will allow us to use the summer of 2008 to engage an accomplished web designer, an information architect who focuses on museum education, and a programmer to work with us in order to improve the site’s design and usability by:

1. Reorganization of the content along Art Historical pointers (Chronology, Style, Media etc)
2. Redesigning the information architecture of the entire site for consistency and ease of use
3. Visual Redesign of the entire site for better ‘at-a-glance’ navigation and access
a. Redesign the Homepage template to improve clarity and visual attractiveness
b. Added tagging/search functionality
c. Establish a modular structure to the site that can support future expansion
4. Creating a more rational back-end structure that will readily accommodate future content growth and added functionality.

In the fall and winter, when these objective have been met, we will publicize smARThistory in a coordinated roll-out to increase use and engage additional collaborators. We plan to attend the 2008-2009 annual conferences of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, the Visual Resource Association in Toronto, and Educause in Orlando where we intend to present papers on this project. Further, we will continue to work with ARTstor and the New Media Consortium to promote smARThistory among art historians and related organizations.

Update: As it turns out, on the recommendation of dragan, our Swiss developer, we are likely going to use MODx instead of wordpress for the web-book because of its greater flexibility.

Passion

I have pretty much dissected most of the characters in the Phantom of the Opera, so I thought I would start prodding your brains to think about emotions.

Do any of you remember Mr. Spock on Star Trek -- the alien without emotions? Pretty sad having to live your life with only logic, never experiencing love, hate, jealousy, passion, lust, obsession, despair, joy, unhappiness, and fear. Emotions are powerful feelings that drive our thought processes and influence our behavior. Let’s face it, being a Mr. Spock in life would be pretty boring. What’s the fun in that? Probably the only advantage would be you’d never have to experience the pain of a broken heart.

I must confess when I was born, I was overly wired with emotion. Definitely an extremist. When I feel emotion -- I feel emotion. I laugh hard. I cry hard. Maybe that’s why I get so wrapped up in stories like the Phantom of the Opera. I fall hard for things that deeply touch my emotions. I’m also fascinated by emotions and how it drives us as human beings.

Passion in the Phantom of the Opera, especially in the play and movie, is powerfully portrayed throughout the story, exhibited undeniably in our three main characters - the Phantom, Christine, and Raoul. It’s more powerfully emphasized between the Phantom and Christine. Just watch the Point of No Return and you’ll need a fan to cool you down.

Passion is defined as a powerful or compelling emotion of love or hate. Taking the love side of passion, the emotion is filled with strong love, mixed with sexual desire for another person. We can probably debate whether the Phantom’s passionate love for Christine was mixed with a little obsession, but there’s no doubt he had passion for her. It was an emotion that must have been a pretty compelling and driving force for him, having never been with a woman. He’s more than willing to experience passion, as he sings to her the questions about the passion that awaits them. It’s quite obvious that Christine is drawn to the Phantom in a passionate way, more so than to Raoul. Probably a little bit of that “bad-boy” attraction going on along with it.

A few weeks ago we had one of those water cooler moments at work with a few of the girls talking about the Phantom of the Opera and passion. Some of the women were married, some single, some divorced. I found it interesting that the majority of them had never experienced the emotion in their own relationships. They’ve never known what it is to have or feel passion with another man in that sense that we see in the Phantom of the Opera. Wondering about me, are you? Yes, I’ll admit, I’ve been one of the lucky ones. I’ve been consumed by the emotion myself. Unfortunately, he’s long gone and with another, but the memories are as hot as ever.

Why is it that we don’t find more passion in our relationships? Seems like the only place a woman can find it today is inside the cover a romance novel, written by another woman, who either knows the emotion first hand or dreams about it like the rest of us. It’s an emotion we all seem to want to feel and have consume us, but few ever experience it first hand. Of course, I’m speaking from a woman’s view here. If there are any men who read this blog, please chime in and give me the man’s take on this!

Passion - We can experience it, dream about it, and lose it. It's an emotion that I think is a bit elusive -- hard to find - hard to keep. I wonder why.

Passionately yours,
The Phantom's Student

Order Lessons From the Phantom of the Opera Here