One more post from this weeks media assignment:

James Thurber's "The Little Girl and the Wolf":

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

(Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.)

The poem for this week is Frank O'Hara's "Why I am not a Painter":

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. 

Frank O'Hara

Let me also use this post as an opportunity to remind everyone to submit their media reaction papers.  Technically, they were due last Sunday, but due to Artweek, you have a week extension.  I am still waiting on four people in the class- you have until midnight.

Submitted: Monday, January 13, 2003

The week 4 media assignment, "Your Chocolate is in My Peanut Butter" is just about to go out- I am just waiting on Dropbox to finish the sync-ing. 

As I was washing dishes this afternoon, I caught a little of Studio 360 on the radio, the whole episode is interesting and relevant for the class but this story about design and joy, seemed especially pertinent.

That said, you might want to check out the interview and performance with Kate Pierson- her live performance is a little shaky but i am just thrilled that she is still making music.  (Remind me to include "Your Own Private Idaho" on the Sabotage playlist.)

Also the discussion about Citizen (a book of poems) and the interview about Whiplash (a movie about jazz drumming and the way aesthetic sabotage and mentorship can intertwine) are worth the time.

One specific thing I hope you noticed about the Stephen Hawking video (in the week 1, The Big Bang, playlist) is the necessity of imperfection.  The point of the demonstration with the ball bearings on the floor of the dining hall, is that if the creation of matter in the big bang had been perfect (so that all of matter had been perfectly and evenly distributed throughout the whole universe, then everything that we know of matter and existence would not exist.  No stars, no planets, no rocks, no trees, no puppies. 

I think this is a great point for beginning art students to ponder, because perfection is the enemy of creation for working artist as well as newly formed universes.

It is often the desire to make something perfect, that begins the self-sabotage that many artists know too well; the beating yourself up because your work does not live up to the ideal.  This of course leads to low production which leads to even more self disappointment.

Consequently, one of the best things to learn as a young artist is the ability to make large amounts of work where much of the work is probably not very good.  Accepting imperfection in your process and in at least some percentage of your production can be a great first step to learning to make successful bodies of work.

The Week 3 Media Assignment will be going out this afternoon.

  

I thought it might be nice to post some short works from each of the readings.  This poem is from Week 2: In the Place That You Are:

KEEPING THINGS WHOLE

Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.