rfb&d | this is WAR!

My cousin Steve Siegel, aside from being a marketing/fundraising guru at Claremont McKenna College, volunteers for the nonprofit RFB&D ("Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic"). For years I only heard about this organization. On Memorial Day I finally attended the big annual fundraising silent auction, which auctions mostly art by Claremont watercolor artists.

When I arrived I saw the gentle giant Michael Woodcock, an old graduate school friend. Little did I know that Herr Doktor Professor (ret. Pitzer College) Woodcock would have one of his artworks on display and up for auction. Not just any one of his pieces, but rather one of my FAVORITE Michael Woodcock pieces of all time.

Well, who knew I could be such an aggressive bitch! I WANTED that piece. I NEEDED that piece. THIS WAS WAR!!!!!

I outbid Walter Ebrahimzadeh, a Claremont gallerist (who showed my work back in the '80s). I outbid my cousin's boss. I hovered. I glared. I bared my teeth.

I won!

Mwaaa ha ha haaaaaaaaa.

being Auntie Laurel

It was NOT pretty.

Don't get me wrong. I ADORE my nieces and nephew. But all my years of college teaching did NOT prepare me for babysitting four rampaging kids (three related, one sleepover friend). A demanding, pouty six-year-old. Two nine-year-olds (nine, going on sixteen). And the elder statesman at eleven. Three instigators. Four show-offs. Every conversation a negotiation. Every game a mosh pit.

WHOA Nelly!

Anyway, it is a good thing I love them to pieces. Otherwise I might have locked them all in the bathroom for the night.

how to love your life

How?
Set people up for a future of unbridled creativity and free expression. Show it. Suggest it. Support them.
And then?

And then get out of the way of the inevitable flood.

What I do in life is create, and create/empower creators. That is to say, to empower people to be their fullest, most powerful, most fulfilling expression. I just set my Art 56 students up for their final project. The die is cast.

Final Project
Create an edition (minimum three copies) of an "artist's book." The artist's book must have a strong concept or theme. The binding of the book must relate to that concept or theme. The "book" must include at least three images generated in Painter.

Questions:
What is a book? Why is a book the way it is? What does its actual, physical binding relate to?*

And, what can a book be when an artist starts to tear the form apart and demand that form reflect or contain concept?

I brought tubs of artists' books, some by known artists (Cheri Gaulke, Katherine Ng, Christian Mounger) and most by my former students. First I let my students paw through my personal collection—four tubs of artists' books. Then I pulled a few out for scrutiny and explanation:

Valentine for Newt
Christian Mounger creates a heart-shaped brown-paper-covered book, hanging from chain link, for Newt Gingrich, filled with images of 1950s gay porn. Yay Chris.

Letter to Grandpa
(a student writes a letter in Spanish to her long-dead grandfather expressing her guilt at leaving him to die in El Salvador, in a handmade envelope, overlaying her ten-year-old face on the flag of El Salvador on the front, and her eighteen-year-old face on the flag of the US on the back)

Breast Cancer Barbie
(a student publishes a poem she wrote while enduring her own chemotherapy, about how Barbie would handle chemo—the binding being "Barbie" packaging, complete with cool wigs!, a hospital gown!, large Vicodin!)

Consumer
(a student makes a list for an entire week of everything he has ingested (every single cigarette, all the alcohol, all the drugs, all the food, minute by minute—discovering and facing his level of addiction and lack of control—juxtapposed with images of how it felt to be him, day by day)

Fortunate Me ("Fortune Ate Me")
Katherine Ng's exquisite bakery box of cardboard letterpress "fortune cookies," revealing the artist's thoughts and memories of her father and her own emotional state, with the "fortune" inside each cookie being one of her father's aphorisms.


After two hours of discussion, examination, sharing and listening, my students were completely moved. So I talked to them about the purposes of art.

Some art sells.
Some art guides.
Some art educates.
Some art entertains.

And some art—my favorite art— moves, touches, and transforms people. It shares something about the realities of being human. It expresses, for no other motive than to express. My invitation is always for my students to engage in all of the possibilities, including the latter. I have given myself over mostly to the latter.

This is what I live for. This very conversation. I have been building to this. From wrestling with technological concerns to wrestling with art concerns. From talking about pure form, to talking about what form delivers and how it delivers it, to talking about generating concepts (sketching, analogies, brainstorming, etc. etc. etc.) and winnowing them down.

We made it. We have arrived.

Evidence?
The emails.
The tearful, hushed conversations in the hallway at the break.
The energy and intimacy that is suddenly present.
The red eyes ringing the room as artist's books pass, hand to hand to hand.
Sanctity. Beauty. Humor. Joy. Deliberate tastelessness. Necessary creativity, as necessary as rain.

Now it is easy. I tease out their ideas.
I visit their sketchbooks and challenge their assumptions.

Now I get out of the way.


* We ask and explore. Discuss. think... to discover that the binding of the book is mostly driven by marketplace issues (production, distribution, shelf space, etc.), which itself grew from the history of publishing and book design. The form of a book has nearly NOTHING to do with its ideas or concepts.

MacGathering

Friday and Saturday were MacGathering days. Deborah Shadovitz, of Mac writing fame (all sorts of Mac magazines, the Adobe GoLive Bible, etc., etc.), has been a friend since we met long ago in the late lamented L.A. Macintosh Group. The LAMG's MacFair was legendary. And Deb has for the last three years been trying to create anew a Southern California Mac gathering with that spirit and energy. This year was year three.

Friday I showed up at 7:45 am to help with setup, registration, and "room guarding" [two sessions taught by the talented Michael Pliskin]. The evening saw a reception and keynote address, given by Jeff Levy, the KNX radio computer guy, who has finally embraced Macintosh computers.

Saturday I was a bit more selfish, attending audio and podcasting seminars (my weakest area on the Mac, outside of straight programming). VERY VERY VERY VERY cool. The lineup of podcasters was impressive, knowledgeable, fun!

a farewell to mo

Mo Better Meatty Meat Burgers. The best sign in Los Angeles. Arguably the best NAME in Los Angeles. And it stuck out like a sore thumb, clinging to the northeast corner of Pico and Fairfax, white wrought iron and walls, silly neon burger and all. I have passed it a hundred times driving north on Fairfax, often swearing that I was going to bring a camera (or, more recently, a digital camera) and grab an image.

And now Mo Better Meatty Meat Burgers is gone. REALLY gone. Razed to the ground as if it was never ever there.

Did I ever eat there? No. This non-carnivore isn't about to EAT a meatty meatburger, after all. But it was so distinctive. Individual. So NOT McDonalds, NOT Burger King, NOT Carl's Jr.

Bye bye, Mo.

Disney Hall | NOT Hebrew School

Range, variety, intensity, wit.
Beauty, connectedness, fractal mutation.
Life, the Universe, and Everything.

In my previous post, I wrote about discovering that I was to be sitting alongside my Hebrew School teacher at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. I had rushed out to the Disney Hall to get a seat at the all-Reich concert at Disney Hall, part of the Minimalist Jukebox series. Finding Mrs. Bender was pretty trippy, I grant you.

Some of my readers have been asking me...... "What about THE CONCERT? DID SHE LIKE THE CONCERT?"

Well, first of all, the concert was INCREDIBLE. Superlative. The performances were exquisite. Reich weaves together and overlays repetitive and mutating melodic-percussive phrases and lines, with extraordinary result, but if they are not performed well, they can be a mess. This was not a mess. This was a revelation.

Moreover, the concert hall's acoustics elevated the crispness and clarity of the music.

So NU? How did the Fabulous Four (Mrs. Bender included) like Steven Reich and Minimalism?

They hated it. They HATED it.
"This isn't music! It is all the same!"
"How dare they give such concerts to subscribers?"

At the intermission I actually had to ask the man sitting immediately to my left to stop grousing OUT LOUD during the performance. Mrs. Bender, glaring, DEMANDED to know what I possibly could see and enjoy about this music, how I could even begin to listen to it, let alone TAKE NOTES!!??!! I gave my best art-professor description of the process of confronting an unknown artwork, listening in new ways, for new things, from a different paradigm, from a point of view of inquiry.

Oy.