To me one of the greatest perks of life on campus as a college student was the continuos lineup of speakers that would come to the various auditoriums and theaters near daily and deliver moving addresses on their lives and careers. All I had to do practically was show up and maybe mill about a little in a line outside before being let in to be treated to an hour or more unfettered wisdom and advice. Being a student I was accustomed to taking notes at a lecture and being an artist I was rarely without my sketchbook. So before I even knew what to call it, I began making graphic notes at these speaking events: drawing as I listened, jotting down key phrases and outstanding quotes, and often including a simple portrait of the speaker to accompany the words.
The first time I made this kind of recording was in January 2008 at a speech given by Dr. Cornel West in McAlister Auditorium on Tulane’s campus. It was a Martin Luther King Day event and even though I had never heard of Dr.West before that evening I was encouraged to check it out by a friend who went with me. (For what its worth, I was not alone in my ignorance of Mr. West as another peer of ours who sat next to us declared at some point before the lecture started that he was pretty sure Cornel was Kanye’s father “or maybe uncle.”)
True to form, the speech was a moving diatribe against leading an “unexamined life” and he implored us in the audience to muster the courage, like MLK Jr did, to face the challenges and hard truths that life inevitably will present us. In his own distinctive cadence, he encouraged us to find our voice in the same tradition as the New Orleans musicians who created jazz did. It was a rousing call to action that left me so inspired I eventually ended up editing and publishing what I’d taken down in my first ever zine along with the notes from 2 other speeches I attended afterwards: a stump speech by then presidential canidate Barack Obama and a truly far out lesson on hip hop metaphysics by the rapper and polymath KRS One.
When I look back on that time, I’m proud of the work I did and recognize how formative it was for me. Not only was it my first steps in making zines and self-publishing but it was also the first graphic notes I ever put down on paper. Little did I know that a dozen years later, those skills of listening, drawing, and transcribing other people’s words would develop into a new branch of my artistic career. So many thanks to Dr. Cornel West for making that stop at McAlister Auditorium that day and for encouraging all of us in attendance to find our own voices. I’ve been working on that ever since.
