The Fallen Angel

Carsey-Wolf Center @ UCSB, Film Studies, Humanities, UC Santa Barbara, ,

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Since its first (initially anonymous) publication in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein has intrigued successive generations of readers and critics while inspiring dozens of cinematic adaptations and re-imaginings. In honor of the novel’s 200th anniversary the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara presented Frankenstein: Afterlives, a series of screenings and interviews that explored the lasting impact of Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece on popular culture.

The inaugural program in the series uses the 2017 biographical film Mary Shelley as a springboard for discussion about the author’s relationship to her most famous work, and the various interpretations of Frankenstein arising from scholarly examination of her life. UC Santa Barbara’s Professor Julie Carlson frames Shelley’s story, both personal and fictional, as a series of oppositions – radicalism vs. conformity, class distinctions vs. egalitarianism, intellect vs. imagination, pragmatism vs. idealism, art vs. commerce – while noting that it is only fairly recently that scholars and commentators have begun to fully grasp the complexities of Shelley’s life and work. Frankenstein is key to any such discussion, not merely because of its iconic status but because it was one of the first popular texts to foreground the post-Enlightenment confluence of art and science. The story’s resulting conflict between pure scientific inquiry and philosophical concerns constitutes an early treatise on bioethics, a topic of increasing urgency today.

Frankenstein has also been championed by modern scholars and critics as an early feminist text, but Carlson cautions that this interpretation is dependent upon a consensus definition of “feminism” and is therefore debatable. According to Carlson it may be argued with equal validity that the novel was autobiographically-inspired, an allegorical reaction to Shelley’s own upbringing as, in Carlson’s words, “an experiment of radical parents.” Shelley was doubtless keenly aware of the oppositions mentioned above and incorporated them into her work, but she doesn’t resolve them neatly for the reader; rather than a destination, her interest was in the exploration. The many other possible interpretations of Frankenstein – as cautionary fable, post-revolutionary tract, political allegory, critique of English Romanticism, etc. – are a tribute to the novel’s many facets and confirmation of its status as a vaunting work of imagination.

Watch Frankenstein: Afterlives – Mary Shelley

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When Should You Seek Medical Care?

Aging and Senior Health, Cancer and Oncology, Cardiology, Dermatology, Health and Medicine, Men’s Health, Mini Medical School for the Public, Sleep Disorders, UC San Francisco, , , , , , , , , ,

Knowing when to seek medical care can save your life but how can you tell if your complaint is best ignored or worth a trip to the doctor? Googling your symptoms can amplify concerns rather than ameliorate them but often common complaints are not a cause for worry.

This series features leaders in their field who address six common medical complaints, including blood pressure, palpitations, snoring, trouble urinating, skin lesions, and neck lumps.

Learn the signs that should raise concern and when it’s ok to relax, kick back, and focus on everyone else’s problems!

Browse more programs in Common Medical Complaints: When Should I Worry?

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Seven Steps to Building a Best-Selling Brand

Business, Entrepreneurship / Start-ups, Rady School of Management, The Career Channel, UC San Diego, , ,

Building a brand is about more than spending money on marketing. It’s about how you think about your brand conceptually, and the strategies you employ at every level of your business. That was the message from brand architect and strategist Larry Gulko when he spoke at the Rady School of Business at UC San Diego recently.

Gulko laid out his recipe for success in seven simple steps. His first piece of advice: specialists win, generalist lose. He points to several examples of companies that lost sight of their core business and ended up failing. Gulko told the crowd, “be the Q-tip.” He says it’s a brand unmatched in specialization and name recognition. His next six steps touched on everything from connecting with your customer, to inspiring your employees to be brand ambassadors.

After his talk, Gulko sat down with two UC San Diego alumni-turned-entrepreneurs to learn their brand secrets. Pierre Sleiman is the CEO of Go Green Agriculture, and Suman Kanuganti co-founded Aira, a high-tech company improving the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired. Gulko, Sleiman, and Kanuganti have a lot of expertise to share about branding, including why you don’t remember your second kiss, and what that has to do with being a best-selling brand.

Watch Building and Growing Brands with Larry Gulko: Global Business Leadership Forum

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Memories, Found and Lost

Arts and Music, Classical/Symphonic Music, Concerts, La Jolla Symphony & Chorus, New Music and Contemporary Composers, Performances, UC San Diego, , , ,

In his Conductor’s Note for La Jolla Symphony & Chorus’s Celebrating Tradition concert, Music Director Steven Schick observes that “memory flows down two related streams,” the personal and the communal. In this concert’s program communal memory is strongly evoked by Handel’s Messiah, Part 1, drawing as it does upon a story heard around the world for over two millennia. Since its Dublin premiere in 1742 Messiah has become such an integral and cherished part of Christmas tradition that virtually everyone who hears it anew may reflexively summon recollections of prior performances; those recollections are in turn echoes of past cultures that experienced Handel’s music.

Qingqing Wang’s new piece, Between Clouds and Streams (a world premiere), explores the sources and formation of memories in its evocation of the natural world set against the most modern of musical techniques. At times Wang’s observations are arranged as in a musical garden, serene and contemplative, while at other points in the composition she conveys the sense of memory struggling to the surface, as half-remembered and sometimes fragmentary images intrude on the composer’s (and listener’s) thoughts. The overall effect is one of connections drawn and new pathways forged from the old.

Memory can also be a fragile, capricious thing, as evidenced by the inexplicable and undeserved obscurity of Florence Price. Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, performed in 1932 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Chicago World’s Fair, was the first work by an African-American woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. The Chicago Symphony continued to champion Price’s music through the Forties and Fifties, and singer Marian Anderson recorded several of her songs. All together Price composed over 300 works in a variety of forms and was performed widely in America and Europe, yet shortly after her death in 1953 her work fell into obscurity, possibly as a result of changing musical tastes that were not hospitable towards her conservative style. It was only by accident that her vibrant Violin Concerto No. 2 was discovered in an abandoned house, and the La Jolla Symphony’s performance of this nearly-forgotten work serves as an excellent introduction to a remarkable and unjustly neglected composer.

Watch Celebrating Tradition – La Jolla Symphony & Chorus

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Drug Wars: A New Hope

Neuroscience, Saturday Science at Scripps Research, Science, UC San Diego, , , ,

Why do some people develop addictions and others don’t? Does that provide insight in how to mediate addictive responses and behaviors? Join The Scripps Research Institutes’ Olivier George as he talks about his research and shares insights into how the brain responds to a variety of drugs, both illicit and prescription – as well as alcohol and nicotine – and new directions in developing novel therapies to reduce compulsive drug use and abuse.

Watch Drug Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope – Finding New Therapies to Fight Drug Addiction with Olivier George – Saturday Science at Scripps Research

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