Wow, what a day. I feel like death. I’m just totally wiped out. We had a bomb threat today at the school. Turned out to be nothing but the first class ended abruptly as we were evacuated. Amazing the power of that little word, that it can get people to move so quickly, especially when it’s shrouded in mystery. THey wouldn’t tell us why we were being evacuated at first, just that we had to get out right away. When I worked at Apple, we had a lot of bomb threats, but no one took them seriously. We’d make sure we brought a basketball out to the parking lot with us, and I learned to never leave my keys behind, You never know how long it’s going to take the fire department to comb through the entire building. I suppose I should have taken each threat more seriously, but I guess back then I had less to live for and felt a little immortal. With age comes paranoia and fear. But you get to shake a little of the melodrama and lack of perspective so I guess things balance out.
Anyway, the cold medicine must be working because I can’t stop typing and it feels like my fingers are not connected to my brain, like I’ve hired a secretary to type up my thoughts. Hello secretary, bang up job you’re doing!
The first class of the day was interdisciplinary Critique with Ted Purves and Angela Hennesy. We are going to work on our artist statements, portfolios, and try to make sense of our work in relation to the rest of the art world. Sounds interesting. We had a fun exercise today. The teachers brought in random copies from the copy store across the street, rejects from larger syllibuses. The first one I got was such a dud, they said we could trade it in. The second one was eerily made for me. THe assignment was to parse through the text and find words that you could make some sort of statement out of, hopefully with some sort of relationship to your work. You could rearrange the words in any order, but all the words had to come from the text. Here’s what I was able to write:
“The honey bee wished to show as a mystical truth, that we must have patience rather than anger. That positive content has more strength and wisdom than crude art. Truth is attained through crisis and devastation. Knowledge is reflected in great art.”
The original text was about government and monarchies. Go figure. I kinda like it. Tonight is Poetry and Performance with Diane Majors. I was about to say I don’t feel very poetic but maybe I can just open a book to a random page ad repeat today’s earier exercise.