Kids love it, and grownups love to give it to them to make stuff.
We're making 3D sculpture/puppets in camp, and entering what I call The Hard Part: frame-making. After withstanding roughly half a million dubious stares after telling the class to simplify their puppet's skeletons, I am pleased to say things paid off big when we got to said Hard Part.
3 times today I sat amidst a sea of smaller-than-mes, warning them that wire is awesome, but fairly frustrating and sharp. Ten minutes after the warning they were banging out asymmetrical circles with the best of them, light dancing in their mad-scientist eyes. I wanted to take those moments and throw them up like a smoke signal to the world. Shit is hard, then it is a cool hand puppet version of a trash can with felt garbage popping out of it. Or a talking cupcake. Or a sock puppet that isn't made out of a sock but looks like it's made out of a sock.
Pretty amped on kids right now. And pretty amped on skeletons.
I'm teaching at art camp this summer, starting Monday. This week I've been training, which has so far consisted of unpacking a lot of art supplies, asking people what their majors were/are, and giving myself what I think is a bonespur on the heel of my hand from CPR practice on hardbodied plastic models.
I have always loved and hated the beginnings of things, and camp is no different beast. I love that the people and kids who are strangers now won't be in two weeks' time, but hate having to wait for the time when the sea changes from awkward to awesome.
-Smoke ring circles frame. We see a bird's-eye view of Love: a guy. A player, womanizer, whatever. Seductive. Ultraseductive. He has a string of women around him. Not real, meaningless relationships. He meets a man named Courtier who is also seductive, but this man attracts beautiful, intelligent, meaningful women. The first man wants to know the secret. The cool man says it is pointless to divulge. Because he is one of the...
TITLE CARD: FRENCH LOVEMAKING ROBOTS FROM OUTER SPACE
-French Lovemaking Robots take over the world: University of Chicago campus for beach scenes. -Robots walk out of water and onto beach. -Robots wear all black? Silver? Purple??? -How do they take over the world? Putting something in the water? Seducing world leaders? Through informational pamphlets? -Fred Astaire, Gene Kelley, Buster Keaton: Robot Triumverate? Not French... -Look up who Sartre is.
No one makes TV shows about blue-collar teenagers who do arty stuff. People make TV shows about blue-collar teenagers who do football, basketball, somesuch town-pride-saving sport. TV Shows about Arty Teens are reserved for the upper-crusty, and maybe the retarded. But normal folk trying a hand at singing, dancing, a heartening combo of the two? Get a fucking grip. Also: off primetime.
Being a once-upon-a-time blue-collar teenager who did arty stuff, my heart goes out to "glee." It's a dramedy from the peep behind "Nip/Tuck," and its got guts stout with dorkiness and feelings. Read: MY BAG. Even though the kids who star in it are scrubbed to within an inch of pure Hollywood perfection, the words they're saying and feelings they're swimming in seem to sound true, lower-middle-classian depths.
I go crazy for mass media that deigns to plumb the world beyond Real Housewives and High School Musicals made in Hills Heaven. Mostly because it's a world most of us live in. It's not rough & tumble. It's not carefree and provided for, either. It's a socioeconomic bracket where people have cell phones and insurmountable, petty debt. People live paycheck-to-paycheck. People "aspire" to low-end mall department store heights. And while people are not what money they make or products they buy, we live in a culture that wants us to be. And no one wants to be cut-rate. We try to be bigger, better, but we're realistic. We limit our aspirations to the most practical and easily achievable. We don't do Art. It's for Snobs: the only thing worse than being low-class. That caste of people who get everything they want and more without ever trying. Who waste time on celebrating themselves and "exploring" the unneccessary. Who rub their luxury to do so in in everyone else's face.
One of Jane Lynch's lines from the pilot is "You can have your little glee club, but make sure those kids don't think they're something they're not."
Hats off to a show, and its tandem group of makers, who are throwing out a signal that says doing what you love doesn't just amount to killing time. That you are whatever the fuck you think you are. That's the kind of sentiment that can make a town proud. Don't stop believin.
"People who believe intelligence is fixed are less resilient. If you don't believe you can learn anything from your mistakes, you won't welcome failure with open arms. But students who are taught that the brain is plastic and that they can become smarter and more competent—that the brain grows, like a muscle, when you work it hard—show a spike in grades and enjoy school more. Because they're less afraid to fail, they succeed more."
Read this: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=20090429-000002&page=1 Then this: http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination And for good measure, this:
If you took the base of someone's spine mid-electrocution and hotwired it with a really fussy game of OPERATION!, then drenched the mess in Diet Dr Pepper, that is how jumpy I am right now.
Mostly because I have been hitting the DDP sauce pretty hard today.
And also because I'm lucky enough to be in a moment in life where I'm "getting it", pretty hard. Not that way. This way: being really happy, making a go at the things I really want to be making a go at, mostly succeeding, and learning a lot from when I don't. Also: about to move into an apartment with two of my favorite people on the planet. People I know are doing well. Feeling good. Getting theirs. Also, also: the weather's getting nicer, and I'm feeling downright saucy.
All this stuff makes up one giant good feeling, sheathing a bunch of smaller good feelings. Knives of possibility poised to be thrown at moving targets: bright patches of color dancing in the dark, just asking for connection.
It's enough to make your nerves shake if you pause to think about it.
I first came into contact with this poem about a year ago. I was lucky enough to be at a Neil Gaiman event at New York Comic Con, and he read it to the audience- directly after Bill Hader introduced him, and before he read the best chapter from the Graveyard Book.
The end of it really caught me the first time I heard it. It is strange to think a 40some British man who has mostly known success in his life also knows exactly how it feels to wait for a phone call you don't have much business hoping will come. Strange, and comforting.
The poem is called The Day the Saucers Came, and it's just great.
* * * * * That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden, Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes, And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended, Waiting, dry-mouthed, to find out what waited inside for us And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow But you didn’t notice because
That day, the day the saucers came, by some some coincidence, Was the day that the graves gave up their dead And the zombies pushed up through soft earth or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable, Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran, But you did not notice this because
On the saucer day, which was zombie day, it was Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us A ship built of dead-men’s nails, a serpent, a wolf, All bigger than the mind could hold, and the cameraman could Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out But you did not see them coming because
On the saucer-zombie-battling-gods day the floodgates broke And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities And charm and cleverness and true brave hearts and pots of gold While giants feefofummed across the land and killer bees, But you had no idea of any of this because
That day, the saucer day, the zombie day The Ragnarok and fairies day, the day the great winds came And snows and the cities turned to crystal, the day All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the Computers turned, the screens telling us we would obey, the day Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars, And all the bells of London were sounded, the day Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day, The fluttering capes and arrival of the Time Machine day, You didn’t notice any of this because you were sitting in your room, not doing anything not even reading, not really, just looking at your telephone, wondering if I was going to call.
