in cold bloodsausage

My roommates and I recently started a book-club. A booze & brownie-soaked affair/excuse to get together and sound off smartly on books we not-so-smartly ditched out on reading for some reason, some way along the literary line.

Our first selection is In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. A true tale of a heinous crime committed (get this) in cold blood.

It's a serious story, and seriously frightening. It's the first book in a while that raised hair on the back of my neck even though I thought I had it pegged, handled, etc. And the first book in a while that's kept me up till 4 in the morning, wide-eyed and sick-stomached, thankful for the little glimmers of goodness that shoot through the bloody, brutal fabric of the story.

We do keep asking each other how the "muuuuuuuurrrrrder mystery" is going. Making ghostly howls in jest. Waggling our fingers like so mancy mincing ghosts out to fix you a cocktail.

But at the end of the night, curled up in our beds with this undeniable proof that people are cold and warm at once or else supremely cold, the goofy can't hold candles to the true.

we live in science fiction.

I sometimes get this wave of intense feeling when I'm on Facebook, liking someone's link or photo or gathering that someone else likes mine or has something to say about such or someone else's. You can break it both ways: anxious or insightful, plain and simple. Forget latest fads, this is the current state of communication. Pony express, parlor cards, even phone calls bow down to the infinitely intricate interactions played out on a binary chessboard with borders that stretch past the edge of forever. We sink so much into this, and being so self-aware snicker at ourselves for it, maybe never realizing that no matter how much we mock the state of affairs, they're still the state of affairs. It's modal, it's systemic, and it's becoming organic. Shit's not going to be unlearned any time soon.

And all the good and bad that holds (because I do believe there's both), I wonder what the future archaeologists and anthropologists of the world will think of us. Given they themselves aren't human/iphone app hybrids, will they find much left of us beside some cryptic references scrawled in the odd paper journal to a Status Change, a Deletion, a blog posting?

All that's everything we want anyone to know is hidden in plain sight, on sites. It's awesome, and mostly fun. But sometimes I think about how communication might be cheapened by it, because it's so damn easy, inconsequential, and easy to write off. Laugh at.

the hard part

WIRE.


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.

modern art camp makes me want to rock out.

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.

What is already awesome: the size of the art room. 80 kids a day will see the inside of this room, 20 at a shot. They’ll be making puppets, drawing themselves as Rococo vampires, and making oversize sculptures of tiny objects in it. They’ll make friends, get crushes, and learn to love or hate tempera paint. I’m still trying to come up with something really campy and tacky for them to make, a cabin flag of sorts for a city camp with nary a cabin or totem pole in sight. Maybe they’ll just claim The Bean for their own, with craft glue and glitter. We can popsicle-stick over Grant Park.

I love that all these boxes of something will one day be something really cool and full of glue. It’s such a cliché that teaching is inspiring, but really the entire profession and act IS. Your job is to either inform or remind people that it is possible to do such things, spin gold from straw and puppets from newsprint. All anything great takes is some wild enthusiasm, steady hands, and raw materials.

They don't call that shit construction paper for nothing.

French Lovemaking Robots From Outer Space

Outline I wrote for a film when I was 16:

-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.



I watched a lot of Moulin Rouge in high school.

glee.

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.

Watch glee:

fail whale of a tale.

"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: