Author: Dino Dinco
Few of you know me, as I’m a returning student, tying up some loose ends after an extended period of absence. I’m also an artist and arts curator. In my former stint at Oxy, I was hired by the ASOC to book bands, musicians, performers and DJs to perform on campus.
On a cold February night in 1999, Grammy-award winning Beck performed for 50+ students at what was then called the “Sidetrack Café,” the outdoor shack next to Johnson Hall. Beck emerged from the underground Los Angeles art & music scene, playing in coffee houses and alternative arts spaces. His hit “Loser” became an anthem for the youth of the time. One month after I booked him to play Oxy, “Mellow Gold,” his major label debut album hit stores and quickly went platinum.
My point? Artists like Beck live and work (and are often born and raised) in Los Angeles. There are thousands of great bands, singers and musicians who also live here, work here and love to play colleges. You should be enjoying them on campus on a regular basis as part of your Oxy experience.
Los Angeles is one of the rare cities where “local” music can often mean some of the biggest names in entertainment. We routinely had touring, emerging and “local” acts playing lunchtime and evening shows, in the Quad, in dorms, on ball fields. Where are the “arts” – especially the live arts – in Oxy’s liberal arts experience? Where are the young, edgy bands, dance presentations, readings, young rappers, performance art, taiko drummers, and hybrid arts experiments? I’ve seen nothing in the Quad at lunch except a dorm room poster sale, club day sign-ups and what looked like a giant, angry toaster whose bucking aimed to simulate an earthquake. Aside from fantastic academics and sports programs, don’t you feel short-changed in the fun stuff that should be happening all around you, especially those of you who come from outside of Los Angeles?
About a month into this semester, I became aware of how deathly quiet Oxy’s campus is, save for evening crickets and an unreliable bell. I wondered when the music was going to start. I also thought of how fortunate I am to have a multitude of achingly talented, creative friends in Los Angeles, artists who live to provoke and entertain. Reacting to what I saw as a serious dearth of art and cultural events, I approached ten artists and performers, all friends of mine, and asked them to come to Oxy for a night we named “O+LIVE: BRAVE ARTS FROM LOS ANGELES.”
The multi-cultural, poly-gender-identifying line up would have been this:•Modern dance from choreographer and costume designer, Ryan Heffington, and his dance troupe, many who have danced with and for: Peaches, Fischerspooner, Tiga, Britney Spears, Margaret Cho, Cher, Madonna and others;•Anecdotal readings from respected Mexico City-born playwright and essayist, Ricardo A. Bracho, accompanied by his gifted niece, Bianca O’Blivion, a staple DJ at LMU’s KXLU;•An interactive video performance from Argentinean artist, Lucas Michael;•The bathed-in-blacklights-hyphy-crunk-ghetto-tech musical duo, Icy Lytes (www.myspace.com/icylytes); •Community-based activist performance theater from the trio Butchlalis De Panochtitlan do Femmelalis En Panochutopia (aka Mari Garcia, Raquel Gutierrez and Claudia Rodriguez); (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQG6cTvNPfo) (brown, queer, proud, brilliant); •And a set from Dorian Wood, an Eagle Rock resident and unfairly talented, cabaret-style musical artist, who always dazzles. When I asked Dorian to perform, he told me, “You know I will. I’ve performed at Oxy twice and I absolutely love playing there.” (www.myspace.com/dorianwood)The tech requirements would have been fairly basic. Oxy students would have been incorporated into some of the pieces and the artists were more than ready. I had a preliminary meeting with the Office of Student Life (OSL) to discuss dates and a location. Of four weekend dates, Nov. 14 was offered to me and it was the one that could accommodate the artists. I e-mailed various club heads and the OSL on Oct. 18. A week later, I heard – from a few – a cautionary “Oh, but that’s Homecoming weekend.”
The OSL person with whom I initially met was leaving Oxy for good, so I asked to be assigned someone else to follow through with the event. We scheduled a meeting for Oct. 21.
My new OSL contact – I’ll call her X – was unapologetically 20 minutes late for our meeting. I sat in her office for just under a minute, where we talked about an e-mail that I had copied for her regarding the event. Her office phone rang and she took the call. Occasionally, X would whisper, “I didn’t get your e-mail” in between planning another event with the person on the phone. Fifteen minutes later, with X still on the phone, I got up and said, “Shall I schedule another time with the admin assistant?” She waved and nodded. Her next available time slot was the following week. I was ten minutes late to class and nothing was accomplished at this meeting.
I sent X the e-mail again after my class ended. She replied that she thought the e-mail had been “a solicitation” and had deleted it. She added that our event was “coming up way too soon” and that I should re-schedule it. I replied that I wasn’t asking the OSL to plan the event for me, but was merely scheduling a date. While asking nothing about the event, she automatically categorized it as “a big event” which means there is a six-week minimum to get approval, as per the Student Handbook.
The day before our meeting the following week, X cancelled the appointment. I scheduled yet another meeting with her.A professor of mine had also advised me to meet with a Dean to request a special type of funding and discuss some of the clubs involved. I scheduled a meeting with the Dean. Three hours later, her office cancelled the meeting. I asked, “When can she meet with me?” I was told, “She won’t meet with you. She spoke with X of the OSL and you need to discuss it with her.” I asked if I could meet with anyone besides X, as X was proving unable to follow through with her scheduled appointments. I was told no.
To abide with the six-week minimum, I found that the artists were available on Dec. 5. An Oxy department had expressed its cooperation and support for the event, but told me that Dec. 5 was out, as events after the last day of classes were forbidden.
At my third attempt to meet with X in the OSL, I intended to discuss doing the event on Dec. 1 – historically, World AIDS Day and formerly, A Day Without Art, when artists who had died from AIDS were remembered and celebrated. December 1st would have been within the last possible days permitted AND outside their six-week minimum. However, X cancelled our re-scheduled appointment.
See how this works?
A professor who had encouraged me to put this show together also warned me of the in-house bureaucracy I might face. She winced as she told me this. And she was dead on.
I had heard nothing but excitement when telling various students, mostly in the ECLS and theater departments, of what we were putting together. More recently, many have asked me when the show will be. I share with them my experiences with OSL in trying to plan it – and my decision to abandon the idea. They’ve all registered disappointment. Many also 1) offered their dissatisfaction with the lack of on-campus events and 2) voiced frustration from their own experiences in trying to produce events. In my time alone on campus, I eavesdrop quite a bit and I hear similar frustrations.
Los Angeles is a world culture capital. It can be challenging to navigate – both logistically and geographically – which is why some of the artistic, cultural and entertainment wealth that exists here should and must be imported to campus. Being under 21 and perhaps without a car while studying in Eagle Rock puts a lot of this off-campus entertainment out of reach. I just read about Oxy getting listed as the “most liberal” campus in the U.S. and I’m trying to figure out what this means. If anything, the campus feels conservat
ive and underutilized. The professors I’ve discussed this with agree. I ask: Are we spending too much time online to care about anything not virtual? If this is true, isn’t this, well . . . sad? Has Oxy’s campus merely become a botanical garden we use to move from class to class, computer to computer? We all love pampered rose gardens and disciplined topiary, but when people ask you about your college experience, do you want them to envy Oxy’s flora and fauna?
You should have control in creating and shaping Oxy’s cultural and social climate. If you’re unsatisfied with the lack of events, the type of events, and the ease with which to plan events, you’re only cheating yourself to not demand the things you want to see, hear and do on campus. If your voices are being ignored, have mom or dad give the Glass House a call. If I lived on campus, I’d be pissed off. I would want a lot more from my Oxy experience than an earthquake simulator and a poster sale.
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