Released this month by Temple University Press (304 pp., $22.95 paperback), the book looks at rock as a mass art, drawing people together in communities of listeners who respond viscerally to its sound and intellectually to its message. From the Sex Pistols and Eminem to Bonnie Raitt and the Rolling Stones, he says, rock music contributes to our cultural capital.

In a nutshell, he argues:  What you listen to is who you are, but the context in which you listen alters the meaning of what you listen to.

This is Gracyk’s second book that takes a philosophical look at rock music. His first, “Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock,” which reasoned that rock music is an art form in its own right, was released in 1996 by Duke University Press.

Gracyk started writing “I Wanna Be Me” in response to some of the criticism of his first book. “But I got sidetracked by how we establish our political, personal, gender and racial identities through music.”

The book takes its title from a Sex Pistols song of the same name. It was on the flip side of “Anarchy in the UK,” a 1976 anthem of the emerging punk movement.

“The lyrics of that song, ‘I Wanna Be Me,’ which was never really a best-seller, illustrate how the Sex Pistols’ struggled to hold on to their own political identity at a time when the mass media was branding them as bad boys and thugs. It gets to the heart of what the book is about.”

Gracyk notes that music played by radio stations following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon tended to either reinforce American patriotism or helped us deal with grief. “National identity in times of crisis can be more important than our personal identities,” he said “We often express it in the music we listen to.”

Some of the questions he tries to answer in the book: How can a feminist be a Rolling Stones fan when so many of their songs, like “Under My Thumb,” denigrate women? Can a straight man enjoy the Indigo Girls? Does Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and Eminem’s rap exploit the music of Black Americans?

Gracyk doesn’t pretend “I Wanna Be Me” isn’t an academic book. “It has a few fairly technical chapters,” he said. “But it’s written at a level that’s accessible and, hopefully, interesting for a general audience or rock music fans.”

Why is Gracyk, a specialist in 18th-century philosophy and the philosophy of art, writing about rock music? “Simple,“ he said. “I was a teenager before I became an academic. Rock music helped me mold my own personal and political identity.”

The book cover is a photograph by MSUM alum Kermit Graber taken at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.
 

Steel was stationed in the Philippines during World War II, and on April 9, 1942, Brigadier General Edward King, commanding officer at Bataan Pennisula on the island of Luzan, surrendered to the Japanese. Steele was one of 10,000 Americans and 65,000 Filipinos who were captured and forced to march 100 kilometers in blazing heat from Mariveles to San Fernando, a walk subsequently named the Bataan Death March. It is estimated that half of the marchers died from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition or execution. Steele survived.

He worked as a slave laborer until he became too ill to work. He was sent to Bilibid Prison, where he first began to draw.

“I used to sit there day after day. I thought I’d lose my damn mind. I wanted something to do, so I started drawing with anything I could find to draw with,” Steele explained. “I'd draw on walls. People around me said, ‘why don’t you draw the guys? You know, there are no photographs taken of this stuff.’ So I started drawing stuff around the camp and sketches of people and portraits as close as I could. I wasn’t very skillful.”
Unschooled in drawing, Steele used charcoal from open fires to draw on the backside of Japanese custom papers, producing a series of 70 drawings. Most of the original drawings were destroyed.

The MSUM exhibit features three phases of Steele’s drawings, including two original drawings he completed after being transferred to Japan. A second phase includes re-created drawings that were made during post-war rehabilitation, which are similar in execution and spirit as the originals. The final phase of drawings were made in 1952, after Steele graduated from Cleveland Institute of Art.

MSUM gallery hours are Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, 1-5 p.m.

MSUM PAINTED TURTLE STUDY
FORESHADOWS CHINA’S APPETITE

China’s appetite for turtles is voracious.

The nation of 1.2 billion people has nearly decimated their turtle population by eating them and grinding them up for folk medicines.

That’s one reason about half the 270 turtle species around the world are in deep trouble. And why a recent international conference on the “turtle crisis” concluded that China’s pursuit for turtles beyond its borders may bring several species to edge of extinction

Donna Bruns Stockrahm, a biology professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead, and senior biology students Deanna Thompson and Candice Zemlicka, are marking and radio-tracking painted turtles near Rollag, Minn., a study the Minnesota DNR is interested in partly because of the interational turtle market’s potential.

“We just don’t know how this pressure on the world turtle populations will eventually affect the ecosystem here,” Bruns Stockrahm said.

Already more than seven million turtles are exported from the United States every year for food, folk medicine or pets.

But Bruns Stockrahm also wants to know if the decline in wetlands, the increase in pollution, and the infringement of human activity on sandy shores—where turtles often prefer to lay their eggs—may also have an impact on turtle populations.

“Not many people in Minnesota are studying turtles,” she said.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources agrees.

“The painted turtle isn’t a listed species yet,” said Carrol Henderson, supervisor of the non-game wildlife program with the Minnesota DNR. “But in the last few years there has been pressure from commercial turtle trappers to increase their take so they can be sold on commercial markets.”

He said many are being exported to the Orient as food because turtle populations there have already been depleted, extirpated or endangered by the demand for turtle meat.

Painted turtles, the most widespread turtles in Minnesota and North Dakota, are found across the northern half of the United States and southern Canada. They’re often seen basking in the sun on logs, rocks or stumps in lakes and ponds—sometimes by the dozen.

Basking, Bruns Stockrahm said, allows them to maintain their body temperature and synthesize essential vitamins, while the sun's ultraviolet rays help eliminate skin parasites.

Their name comes from the brightly colored yellow, red, and green markings on their bodies and their orange, yellow and black patterned undersides (or plastrons).

They prefer soft-bottomed ponds, lakes, swamps, ditches and slow-moving streams with lots of aquatic vegetation.

“Which makes them perfect for undergraduate research,” Bruns Stockrahm said. “The other turtle we could have studied here is the snapper. But it’s just too dangerous to handle.”

Zemlicka, a senior from Highmore, S.D., began live-trapping turtles this summer at two sloughs by Bruns Stockrahm’s farmstead in Rollag as part of a wildlife research project funded in part by the MSUM Alumni Foundation. She invented her own trap: a floating net with an attached see-saw plank. When a turtle climbs up the plank to bask in the sun, its weight tilts the board downward, dumping the turtle into the trap.

Zemlicka paddles her makeshift canoe out to her traps daily to check the catch. Then she marks each turtle by notching the shell using a numerical system. After weighing and measuring them, then determining their sex and recording the data, she releases them back into the slough.

So far Zemlicka has marked more than 250 turtles. She’s also equipped three with radio transmitters.

“All together we have 10 transmitters,” Bruns Stockrahm said, “We intend to put them all on females, to try to find out where they lay their eggs and where they hibernate.”

Their goal is to learn more about turtle habitat, populations, reproduction and survival.

“We’re being pressured by some turtle trappers to further liberalize the regulations,” said the DNR’s Henderson. “But we do not have adequate information on turtle populations, on the ecology of unexploited turtle populations or on lakes where turtles are being trapped and removed. We have just begun the process of doing studies that will help us answer those questions.”

Henderson said that Wisconsin has banned all commercial trade in turtles. But Minnesota’s turtle harvest laws are still very general and not very restrictive.

Turtles first emerged on the evolutionary spectrum more than 200 million years ago, sharing the stage with the first mammals, dinosaurs and frogs.

Today, China’s rich eat them as delicacies, their poor eat them for subsistence, and their hopeful believe consuming turtle parts can assure long life, cure cancer and boost athletic performance.

“While it doesn’t seem likely now” Henderson said, ”who knows if this appetite will some day extend to Minnesota.”

Gudmundson, a mass communications professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead, will attend an afternoon reception at the White House with Pres. and Mrs. George W. Bush on Saturday, Sept. 13, followed by a dinner at the Library of Congress hosted by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Gudmundson photographs were among 245 works by 152 artists selected by FAPE’s millennium committee to show off American culture at the more than 160 United States Embassies around the world.

Among the other visual artists represented in the Embassies collection are Robert Motherwell, Cristo, Jasper Johns, Lee Friedlander and Robert Adams.

Gudmundson selected the embassy in Iceland because he’s been working on a collection of ancestral landscapes in that country which, coupled with his own writings about those places, he plans to develop into a book.

It’s given annually to a campus ministry staff person who has shown commitment and support for Lutheran Campus Ministry, a pan-Lutheran student organization.

The award, presented at the National Staff Conference for Campus Ministry at Augsburg College, is named in memory of two students who were killed in a 1985 car accident on their way to a national gathering.

Hertler, the MSUM campus pastor for six years, is originally from Chillicothe, Ohio. She’s a graduate Wittenberg (Springfield, Ohio) University and the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C.

Hertler’s, whose office is located the Lutheran Campus Ministry house at the corner of 7th Ave. and 10th St. S., was nominated for the award by the students of the Tri-Ota region of LSM, which encompasses Minnesota and North and South Dakota.

Lin has traveled extensively in China and led a study tour there two years ago. Scheduled stops include the Great Wall, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Yungang Grottoes, Stone Forest and the Tera Cotta Museum. Lin, a native speaker of Chinese, has taught Chinese language and culture at MSUM since 1985.

 The tour is open to students, faculty, staff and the general public on a space available basis.  Credit is available for Chinese 390 during spring semester. Students can apply for financial aid.

 Approximate tour cost is $3,995, which includes an international programs fee, round-trip airfare from Fargo, all airfare and ground transportation in China, entrance fees, local tour guides, accommodations in four-star hotels, and meals.

 For more information, contact Jenny Lin, 218-236-2913, linjj@mnstate.edu, MacLean Hall 271L; or Jill Holsen, 218-236-2956, holsenj@mnstate.edu, Flora Frick Hall 151.

The 15th century German craftsman didn’t invent printing or moveable type. The Chinese invented moveable type four centuries earlier and used block printing at least since the fifth century.

“But you won’t find that highlighted in many encyclopedias or textbooks,” says Shelton Gunaratne, a professor of mass communications at Minnesota State University Moorhead. “It’s an aspect of European colonialism that still survives.”

Gunaratne, a Sri Lankan native who’s been teaching at MSUM for nearly 15 years, insists he’s not a revisionist trying to re-write history from an ideological viewpoint.

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s a well documented fact that the Chinese were way ahead of the West in printing technology.”

He says he’s just trying to be objective about a topic that’s central to the history of mass communications. “Scholars must re-write that history to reflect what happened globally, not just in Europe.”

Gunaratne’s article on this subject, “Paper, Printing, and the Printing Press,” will be presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research conference next month in Budapest.

Gutenberg, according to legend and a wide variety of sources, invented moveable type around 1450 and by 1456 he’d mass-produced the famous 42-line (number of lines printed per page) Bible, also called the Gutenberg Bible. Printed on both paper and vellum (a parchment made of animal skin), it is still considered the earliest book printed from movable type. Only 47 of the original 200 copies survive.

Gutenberg’s  “invention,” Gunaratne said, is credited with spreading literacy, culture and information to the European masses while fueling the Renaissance and eventually the democratic revolutions of the 18th century.

Gutenberg was a major candidate, in many turn-of-the-millennium polls, for the title “Man of the Millennium.”

Just 50 years after Gutenberg’s Bible came off the press, there were 1,000 printers in 200 locations throughout Europe who already produced at least 15 million printed books.

While more than 130 titles in the library of Congress database bear Gutenberg’s name, Gunaratne said, the fact remains that the Chinese were the real pioneers in printing.

“It’s just an extension of concept of European exceptionalism that surfaced after the West emerged from the Dark Ages,” Gunaratne said. “This separatist history is still entrenched in modern culture. That’s part of the reason why so few people know that Chinese inventions included gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, kites, whiskey and, yes, printing and moveable type”.

Gunaratne backs his research with dozens of historical and archival references buttressed by two groundbreaking histories, “Science and Civilization in China” by the late biochemist and historian Joseph Needham, and “The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention” published in 1988 by science writer Robert Temple.

For the record:
* The Chinese invented paper of matted rag fibers in the second or third century B.C., 1,400 years before it slowly migrated to Europe via the Silk Road, a major trade and travel route between Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
* The Chinese began the first printed newspaper, “Jing Bao,” in 713 and continued publishing it until the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911.
* The world’s first known book, “Diamond Sutra,” a work of Buddha’s teachings and a fundamental Zen text, was printed in China in 868. It’s a seven-page scroll printed with wood blocks on paper.
* The printing of the 11 Confucian classics??filling 130 volumes?? by Prime Minister Feng Dao between 932 and 953 ushered in the era of large-scale block printing, the world’s first official printed publication.
* Bi Sheng, an alchemist, invented moveable type between 1041 and 1049 when he experimented with type made of clay, which later evolved into wood and metal moveable type as it migrated to Korea and Japan. Scientist Shen Gua recorded this invention in his “Dream Pool Essays” of 1086.

One of the ironies of Chinese history, Gunaratne said, is that although it had all the ingredients for modern science long before the Industrial Revolution, China failed to build on many of its innovations.

“In printing,” he said, “the Chinese never intended to produce books for mass circulation. Their language, which relied on up to 80,000 intricately shaped characters, made movable type labor-intensive and impractical.”

Gutenberg, like Henry Ford, did take printing to the next level by introducing mass production, Gunaratne said. Modeled on the presses farmers used to make wine and olive oil, his printing press used a heavy screw to force a printing block against paper to make a readable impression.

But Gutenberg’s most significant contribution may have been refining the molding and casting of movable metal type that originated in the Orient, he said.

Gutenberg, a trained goldsmith, created metal molds for letters, which were then filled with a molten lead alloy. The cast letters were uniform in size so that they could be aligned easily on a frame, and once assembled in proper order, the frame holding the letters was then pressed against parchment or vellum. The result was a repeatable, error-free piece of writing.

Before moveable type hit Europe, only a few thousand manuscripts were in circulation, most of them hand-written by scribes. By the early 16th century, Gunaratne said, books were no longer rare and expensive objects of art and religion or the secret treasure of a guild, church, or government. Scribes were becoming obsolete.

“Scholars refer to three communications revolutions in human history,” Gunaratne said. “The emergence of writing was the first. The invention of printing was the second. The convergence of telecommunications, computers and digitization is widely hailed as the third.”

Writing, he said, undermined the power monopoly of the elders who preserved in oral form the accumulated knowledge of preliterate people. “Likewise, printing ended the information monopoly of the church, the clergy and the mandarins, depending on the social context.”

The invention of digitization, he said, may change the society power structure in ways yet to be seen—including, he hopes, the eradication of Eurocentric history.

Ironically, Gunaratne said, it was China, not Europe that ruled the world economy throughout the Renaissance and into the 18th century.

“By 1750,” he said, “about 80 percent of the world’s gross product of $155 billion (measured in 1960 U.S. dollars) was in Asia, which then claimed 66 percent of the world population.”

That changed with the Industrial Revolution. “The West, facing a shortage of cheap labor, took advantage of the era’s scientific advancements,” Gunaratne said. “China, however, had plenty of cheap labor and wasn’t pushed in that direction by circumstances.”

While China’s role as the world’s economic leader faded quickly during the 18th century, European fortunes expanded.

“History clearly shows that the Far East, not Europe, was the main instigator of the second communication revolution,” Gunaratne said. “To document the truth about human achievement, we must get the history right.”

Five productions are scheduled, all starting at 7:30 p.m. in the Roland Dille Center for the Arts Hasen Theatre (except for a 2 p.m. Guthrie matinee in April).. For season or single show ticket reservations, contact the MSUM box office at (218) 236-2271.

(Season tickets range from $99 for a   single seat  and $185 for a dual seating in best house locations for all five shows. There’s also a $70.40 package for four shows and $56.10 for three shows. Single show tickets range from $12 to $22. Tickets are $12 for students 17 and under; $9 for Tri-College students; and $6 for MSUM students)

Featured in this season’s tribute to The Rhythm of the American Performing Arts Heritage:
* Tuesday, Oct. 2: “The Turtle Mountain String Quartet”??fusing classical string quartet esthetics with 20th century American pop styles. The ensemble redefines traditional chamber instruments (violins, viola and cello) by adapting them to jazz, bluegrass, rock and blues into their repertoire.
* Thursday, Oct. 25: “Caution: Men at Work;Tap”??a combination of techno music, musical theatre and tap dancing. Seven dancers and a live band illustrate the progression of tap dance and its rhythm from the streets of Harlem to the lights of Broadway featuring state-of-the-art lighting and special effects.
* Tuesday, Feb. 26 “Monte/Brown Dance”??winners of the International Dance Festival of Paris. The troupe, founded in 1982 by Elisa Monte and David Brown, is culturally diverse, physically explosive and inherently American in style.
* Thursday, March 7: “Rhythm and Brass”?? an eclectic sextet performing everything from 16th century motets to Pink Floyd and John Coltraine. It’s music unbound by time, geography or culture.
*Friday and Saturday, April 5 and 6: The Guthrie Theatre presents Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness.” The play is set in a small Connecticut town on July 4, 1906, a time before America’s coming of age when “family life was the only life.” This is the landscape O’Neill paints his classic story on. (The Saturday show is a 2 p.m. matinee.)

Schlossman Ludwing, enrolled in MSUM’s master of liberal arts program, did her undergraduate work in literature at Northwestern University and began her painting career 28 years ago while living in the San Francisco Bay area. That’s where she studied under former Stanford University faculty member Richard Bowman, a well-known proponent of abstract expressionism.

The abstract expressionists were influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung, especially his notion of the collective unconscious, which holds that beneath the personal memories of the individual is a collection of feelings and symbolic associations common to all human beings.

Schlossman Ludwig is also an accomplished violinist and was recently the driving force behind the creation of a non-denominational chapel in downtown Fargo, a space she helped design.

For gallery hours to the exhibit, called “Marjorie Ludwig: A Painter’s Perspective,” call the MSUM art department at 236-2152.