Old World Swine

Art Rulz

In the elementary school art room in which I currently teach, there are some art room rules posted. These include items like "Be respectful" and "Raise your hand", but also include a pair of rules - posted right next to each other - that are worthy of some very deep philosophical discussion on the nature of the arts.

The first is "Follow instructions", the other, "Be creative".

Well, that's the whole ball of sculptor's wax, isnt it? Balancing the two is like walking a minefield.

Alice in Disneyland

Saw the latest Alice in Wonderland movie last night.

I love movies, and I always want to enjoy myself at the movies. I tried hard to enjoy Alice. I went in with an open mind, honest.

I'm not qualified to give a really robust review of the film, to place it in cinematic context or anything. I'm just a popcorn-crunching lout. For the full treatment, read Steven Graydanus' write-up at Decent Films.

I can only say that the experience, like Disney's Prince Caspian, left me - for all the unrelenting noise and spectacle - completely unmoved throughout. Stunning visual effects are very commonplace and expected, now, but the whole thing was simply dreary, dull and hollow.

Even the pleasure of Lewis Carroll's famous nonsense is denied us. The fun of the Bandersnatch and the Jabberwock is the sound of their names and the fact that Carroll never descibes them in his poem, but leaves the full extent of their obviously horrific form to the reader's imagination.

Every detail of this latest film adaptation is mapped out in dogged realism, and the Jabberwock turns out to be... a dragon from Central Casting. *yawn*...

The heroine Alice is pretty, but strangely aloof and detached the entire time. One doesn't care much what happens to her. Johnny Depp makes a game effort as the Mad Hatter and is very much himself, for good or ill. Helena Bonham Carter makes a fitting Red Queen, but from start to finish the film takes itself far to seriously. It's supposed to be Alice Through the Looking Glass, but symphonic music swells ominously throughout, dark clouds roll and we are dragged through scene after scene of ham-fisted pathos.

Trying to elicit new and deeper insights on the human condition from Alice in Wonderland is like trying to write a serious philosophical treatise on The Benny Hill Show. It misses the point from the get-go. Benny Hill would fart on your self-important treatise. His show was an escape from all such things, a break in the Sturm und Drang. Alice is supposed to be fun.

By all rights this new Alice should be fun... but it isn't, at all. It is a joyless slog through a brilliant computer-generated fantasy world. Not one genuine laugh througout. I would ten times rather have the entire 3-D world of the movie on a disc and go exploring through the little details the designers have concocted. They are the only real creative talents involved in the project (Tim Burton, et al...). The story and the dialogue are as flat as last night's beer.

Strike a Blow for Families

How? By calling one's congress-person? Waving a placard? Casting a ballot?

Not today. The idea is to cut against the grain of modern culture by cooking a meal at home, giving thanks and eating together. What a concept!

I only bring it up because we just enjoyed the most amazing, if simple, family supper (thanks, Honey!). We have been cooking more than we used to, for reasons both economic and philosophical (and 'cuz it's fun), but there is something about home-cooked corned beef and cabbage, potatoes and beer that seems to call for special acknowledgment. It's something like sitting down to a table in your very own inn.

Owing to illness, St. Patrick's Day passed around here with nary a whimper. We sort of made up for it tonight. A perfect end to a day of cleaning the garage in the warm spring weather (that's how we celebrate Spring Break).

Now for some inexplicable reason, I have a strong desire to smoke my pipe,  play some darts, and learn the guitar tabs for "Rocky Road to Dublin" (okay... I know that corned beef and cabbage is a dish more properly associated with Boston than Dublin, but what's a few thousand miles between friends?).

Happy Spring!

Spring is here, Spring is here,

Life is skittles and life is beer,

I think the lovliest time of the year is the Spring,

I do... don't  you? 'Course you do!

- Tom Lehrer

Happy St. Patrick's!

Sweet Wifey and Darling Daughter put together a very fitting St. Pat's meal of beef stew and potatoes (the wee one doesn't like corned beef), and I'm feeling tolerable enough, I may even manage a beer before bed.

Pass the Tissues

I have had a head cold - or more correcly, an Upper Respiratory Infection - that has helped rank me (if they ranked these things) among the top users of Kleenex products over the past several days. They've killed and pulped on my behalf at least a whole Douglas Fir.

This is one area, by the way, where I'm very glad for the modern innovation. Yes, we do use and waste WAY too many paper products, but I give thanks that I haven't had to rely on an old fashioned handkerchief for the job at hand. Eew.

Just eew.

Continued light blogging whilst I recover. My brain is running on fumes, and I am good for nothing much more than staring blankly. This post is itself a little miracle.

I'm offering it up. Lord knows it doesn't amount to much, but it is suffering, and I came by it honest enough. Lurching off to bed, now...

Teaching is Not for Wussies

There's probably no avoiding that I'll be writing a lot about kids and teaching and that kind of thing for a while. It's an all-consuming sort of occupation. I can't help but notice that it is physically exhausting (especially teaching art, where there is so much materials preparation and cleanup, moving about and hovering).

I've worked with real men before, tough ones... in construction jobs, at a farm equipment dealership where I reconditioned the trade-ins that the farmers dragged onto the lot (50 year old farm implements that had rusted into one, solid hunk), and I am fully aware that these guys would laugh until their sides ached at my talk of being exhausted by gradeshool art projects... but supervising, in turn, the activities of 150 elementary school kids does make one feel, at the end of every day, something like a Veteran of the Psychic Wars.

Then again, I got some cool drawings from a few fans, one a portrait of me, which I was gratified to see did not make me appear too scary. No "Big, Fat Meanie" drawings, as yet.

Forces may be conspiring to neuter me completely; I find myself inadvertently listening to NPR during my morning commute, and today I got my first forwarded message containing advice from Oprah in the school e-mail. I need to go and do something manly, and quick. Maybe this weekend, only not Friday evening... I'm scheduled to do face painting at the school carnival (hangs head and slinks away...).

GKC Quote for the Weekend

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

from Chesterton's Robert Browning (1903)

This little paragraph captures so much so well. This sensation is, I suppose, what I hope to put across in my art, which means translating the mystery and subtlety of everyday experience into paint, which is really hard.

Tough Room

Okay, I've asked for prayers before, but I need them now more than ever. I've recently been hired as the temporary long-term replacement for a local art teacher.

At a gradeschool.

Kindergarten through 4th grade!... the Omaha Beach of teaching assignments.

I put on a kind of mini-workshop last week for a local artists' group, an oil painting demonstration. As challenging as that sort of thing can be, I truly find the instruction of gradeshoolers to be a more profound and delicate business, by some orders of magnitude. It is kind of awe-inspiring to enter the sanctuary of childhood, to perhaps be granted a small space in their memory. Adults remember all kinds of trivial stuff, while children are more ruthlessly and more sensibly selective.

Their current teacher, who is bringing me up to speed, introduced me to the classes through the day (six in all). One girl raised her hand and asked the only question really worth asking;

"Is he nice?"

She decided I was.