the unprofessional development reader
Great teachers inspire students to be brave and think differently. But professional development rarely acknowledges – or inspires – the courage and curiosity that educators bring to their own classrooms. Unprofessional Development is based on the belief that teachers must be celebrated as professional learners who find truth in discovery and joy in taking bold risks. It is a call to ignite a rigorous and personal creative habit. It is a challenge to resist judgment, perfectionism, discomfort and procrastination, and to put creativity at the root of all learning. Fortunately, many of our creative heroes have written about these very themes, and their essays are collected in this reader. Twyla Tharp explains the importance of rituals for igniting a creative habit. Cheryl Strayed discusses the imperative to generate work in “Write Like a Motherfucker.” Sol LeWitt urges us to “just do.” Lynda Barry addresses the danger of judgment in “On Liking and Not Liking,” and Audre Lorde implores us to transform our silence into action. These essays, and more, are collected here for reference and nonprofit educational use. Unprofessional Development is a charge to write, weld, cook, construct, jury-rig, sketch, stitch, bend and build both in and out of our classrooms. Emily Pilloton and Christina Jenkins January 2016
01: Get Started On the power of beginning with a ritual, from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life “Just Do,” Sol LeWitt’s letter to Eva Hesse “To Be of Use,” by Marge Piercy “Novice Mind,” from The RZA’s The Tao of Wu “Write Like a Motherfucker,” from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar Ira Glass on the gap between doing good work and having good taste On the importance of short assignments, from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
02: Prompts and Protocols “Your Creative Autobiography,” from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life On turning limitations into opportunities, from Ronda Rousey’s My Fight / Your Fight “Embrace the Shake,” by Phil Hansen On classroom rules, from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus Richard Serra’s Verb List (1967–68) “Map Piece,” from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions “The worst assignment I ever gave,” by David Levine in Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment
03: Collaborate and Critique “Creativity Is In All of Us”, from Christian Puglisi’s Relæ: A Book of Ideas On learning about critique by watching Tim Gunn, by Dan Saffer On the ueslessness of “liking” and “not liking,” from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus A critique protocol, from Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures Leah Buechley’s 2013 FabLearn keynote, “A Critical Look at MAKE-ing” Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
04: Get Better and Keep Going Bruce Mau’s An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth Anthony Bourdain on praticing jiu jitsu, in Sweep the Leg, Johnny! Diana Nyad on Why 66 is Better Than 28 On cooking with integrity, from David Chang’s Momofuku Haruki Murakami on endurance, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running On perseverance, from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic On practicing the hard parts, from David Perkins’ Making Learning Whole Seymour Papert’s Hard Fun The Creative Process, by James Baldwin from Creative America, 1962 “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider
01: Getting Started
The Creative Habit Twyla Tharp
Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, 1965
April 14, 1965 Dear Eva, It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itchin, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO! From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and you [sic] ability; the work you are doing sounds very good “Drawing-clean-clear but crazy like machines, larger and bolder… real nonsense.” That sounds fine, wonderful – real nonsense. Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever – make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you – draw & paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistant [sic] approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO! I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work – the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell – you are not responsible for the world – you are only responsible for your work – so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be. But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working – then stop. Don’t punish yourself. However, I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to DO! It seems I do understand your attitude somewhat, anyway, because I go through a similar process every so often. I have an “Agonizing Reappraisal” of my work and change everything as much as possible = and hate everything I’ve done, and try to do something entirely different and better. Maybe that kind of process is necessary to me, pushing me on and on. The feeling that I can do better than that shit I just did. Maybe you need your agony to accomplish what you do. And maybe it goads you on to do better. But it is very
painful I know. It would be better if you had the confidence just to do the stuff and not even think about it. Can’t you leave the “world” and “ART” alone and also quit fondling your ego. I know that you (or anyone) can only work so much and the rest of the time you are left with your thoughts. But when you work or before your work you have to empty you [sic] mind and concentrate on what you are doing. After you do something it is done and that’s that. After a while you can see some are better than others but also you can see what direction you are going. I’m sure you know all that. You also must know that you don’t have to justify your work – not even to yourself. Well, you know I admire your work greatly and can’t understand why you are so bothered by it. But you can see the next ones and I can’t. You also must believe in your ability. I think you do. So try the most outrageous things you can – shock yourself. You have at your power the ability to do anything. I would like to see your work and will have to be content to wait until Aug or Sept. I have seen photos of some of Tom’s new things at Lucy’s. They are impressive – especially the ones with the more rigorous form: the simpler ones. I guess he’ll send some more later on. Let me know how the shows are going and that kind of stuff. My work had changed since you left and it is much better. I will be having a show May 4 -9 at the Daniels Gallery 17 E 64yh St (where Emmerich was), I wish you could be there. Much love to you both. Sol
To Be of Use Marge Piercy, 1982
The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
The Tao of Wu The RZA
Write Like a Motherfucker Cheryl Strayed
Ira Glass on Storytelling
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that. And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that. Watch at https://goo.gl/bXIVrB
Bird by Bird Anne Lamott
02: Prompts and Protocols
The Creative Habit Twyla Tharp
My Fight / Your Fight Ronda Rousey
Embrace the Shake Phil Hansen So, when I was in art school, I developed a shake in my hand, and this was the straightest line I could draw. Now in hindsight, it was actually good for some things, like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid, but at the time this was really doomsday. This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist. The shake developed out of, really, a single-minded pursuit of pointillism, just years of making tiny, tiny dots. And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles, because of the shake. So to compensate, I’d hold the pen tighter, and this progressively made the shake worse, so I’d hold the pen tighter still. And this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues, I had trouble holding anything. And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left art completely. But after a few years, I just couldn’t stay away from art, and I decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage. And he actually took one look at my squiggly line, and said, “Well, why don’t you just embrace the shake?” So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just started letting my hand shake and shake. I was making all these scribble pictures. And even though it wasn’t the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great. And more importantly, once I embraced the shake, I realized I could still make art. I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted. Now, I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism, seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole. So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn’t affect the work, like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas, or, in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours, creating a 2D image by burning it with a blowtorch. I discovered that, if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials, my hand really wouldn’t hurt, and after having gone from a single approach to art, I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons. This was the first time I’d encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity. At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies. I had this horrible little set of tools, and I felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have. I actually didn’t even have a regular pair of scissors. I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at.
So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I just went nuts buying supplies. And then when I got home, I sat down and I set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box. But I sat there for hours, and nothing came to mind. The same thing the next day, and then the next, quickly slipping into a creative slump. And I was in a dark place for a long time, unable to create. And it didn’t make any sense, because I was finally able to support my art, and yet I was creatively blank. But as I searched around in the darkness, I realized I was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that I never had before. And it was then that I thought back to my jittery hands. Embrace the shake. And I realized, if I ever wanted my creativity back, I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it. I wondered, could you become more creative, then, by looking for limitations? What if I could only create with a dollar’s worth of supplies? At this point, I was spending a lot of my evenings in – well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks – but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50. Surprisingly, they just handed them right over, and then with some pencils I already had, I made this project for only 80 cents. It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless. I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas, and wondered what if, instead of painting on a canvas, I could only paint on my chest? So I painted 30 images, one layer at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life. Or what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? So I’d dip my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks. Or, what if instead of relying on myself, I had to rely on other people to create the content for the art? So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam. I slept on the floor and I ate takeout, and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment. Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas. Or what if instead of making art to display, I had to destroy it? This seemed like the ultimate limitation, being an artist without art. This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that I called Goodbye Art, where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation. In the beginning of Goodbye Art, I focused on forced destruction, like this image of Jimi Hendrix, made with over 7,000 matches. Then I opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally. I looked for temporary materials, like spitting out food, sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine. The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn’t actually exist in the first place. So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out,
then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled the videos into the larger image. So the end image was never visible as a physical whole. It was destroyed before it ever existed. In the course of this Goodbye Art series, I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display. What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation, as each time I created, the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project. It did not happen overnight. There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground, or, even worse, after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing. But having committed to the process, I continued on, and something really surprising came out of this. As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of failures, and let go of imperfections. And in return, I found a process of creating art that’s perpetual and unencumbered by results. I found myself in a state of constant creation, thinking only of what’s next and coming up with more ideas than ever. When I think back to my three years away from art, away from my dream, just going through the motions, instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream, I just quit, I gave up. And what if I didn’t embrace the shake? Because embracing the shake for me wasn’t just about art and having art skills. It turned out to be about life, and having life skills. Because ultimately, most of what we do takes place here, inside the box, with limited resources. Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and, collectively, transform our world. Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life. Now, when I run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped, I sometimes still struggle, but I continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities, like using hundreds of real, live worms to make an image, using a pushpin to tattoo a banana, or painting a picture with hamburger grease. One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I’ve learned into something others can replicate. Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity, but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted norms. And instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation. Thank you. https://www.ted.com/talks/phil_hansen_embrace_the_shake
Syllabus Lynda Barry
Verb List (1967–68) Richard Serra
to roll to crease to fold to store to bend to shorten to twist to dapple to crumple to shave to tear to chip to split to cut to sever to drop to remove to simplify to differ to disarrange to open to mix to splash to knot to spill to droop to flow
to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to bundle to heap to gather
to scatter to arrange to repair to discard to pair to distribute to surfeit to compliment to enclose to surround to encircle to hole to cover to wrap to dig to tie to bind to weave to join to match to laminate to bond to hinge to mark to expand to dilute to light
to modulate to distill of waves of electromagnetic of inertia of ionization of polarization of refraction of tides of reflection of equilibrium of symmetry of friction to stretch to bounce to erase to spray to systematize to refer to force of mapping of location of context of time of carbonization to continue
Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings Yoko Ono
The Art of the Art Assignment David Levine
03: Collaborate and Critique
RelĂŚ: A Book of Ideas Christian F. Puglisi
Everything I’ve Ever Learned About Giving Design Critiques I Learned from Tim Gunn Dan Saffer
I went through two years of studio critiques while getting my Master’s degree in design, and have been through dozens of them in the five years since then, but I can honestly say I’ve learned more about how to appropriately give design criticism from Tim Gunn, one of the hosts of the US television show Project Runway. For anyone not aware of the show, it basically puts 16 clothing designers together and gives them challenge after challenge, with judges voting one designer off a week. The challenges can be anything from designing eveningwear for pregnant women to make swimsuits out of trash bags. It’s pretty harrowing on the designers, but luckily for them, Tim Gunn comes into the middle of their design process to offer a critique. Now, I’m sure he doesn’t really have these, but Tim Gunn’s principles for critique seem to be: • The purpose of a critique is to make the design better. It’s not to make the designer feel bad, or to make the teacher feel superior. It’s to provide guidance using an outside, experienced eye. • Be supportive. Even if you don’t like a designer (and Tim hides this pretty well), you can objectively look at the work and try to make them a better designer through gentle steering in the right direction. Never say you hate a design unless you can also (gently) say why and offer suggestions for improvement. • First, figure out what the designer was trying to accomplish. Tim tries to get a sense of what the objective was. If there’s a problem here, if the designer doesn’t know, then the overall design is going to be a mess. If Tim can’t figure it out, the judges won’t be able to either. • Offer direction, not prescription. Tim doesn’t often tell the designer how to fix the design (although he will say what specifically isn’t working for him.) But it is up to the designer to come up with a solution (“Make it work!”). • Humor and metaphor work better than criticism alone. Tim often chooses references from pop culture to make a point. “This looks like The Golden Girls,” for example. Which is devastating, funny, incisive, and instructional all at once. The designer understand where the design has to go (or where to move away from) next.
• Accept multiple styles. Tim’s style is, in all likelihood, very far away from the aesthetic of most of the designers. But he doesn’t try to impose his style on them, just sharpen their own while still applying some universal principles of good taste and design. • Know the domain. If you know what’s been done and what’s being done, you’re better able to offer suggestions (and to alert designers as to what seems dated or out of style). • If you don’t understand it, be cautious in critiquing it. If Tim doesn’t understand where a design is going, he openly admits it (“I’m puzzled”) or (if he likes it) says things like “I’m intrigued…” Know your limitations as a critiquer. • Don’t take it personally. Tim rarely gets upset or angry, even when designers refuse his advice. It’s not his design, after all. Seasons of watching Tim Gunn work have been extremely instructive in forming my own teaching style. Everyone who reviews the work of designers could learn a thing or two from him. http://www.kickerstudio.com/2010/11/everything-ive-ever-learned-about-giving-design-critiques-i-learned-from-tim-gunn/
Syllabus / Lynda Barry
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures Jessica Abel and Matt Madden
A Critical Look at MAKE-ing 2013 FabLearn Keynote Leah Buechley Leah Buechley is a designer, engineer, artist, and educator whose work explores intersections and juxtapositions--of "high" and "low" technologies, new and ancient materials, and masculine and feminine making traditions. She also develops tools that help people build their own technologies. Her inventions include the LilyPad Arduino toolkit. From 2009-2013, she was a professor at the MIT Media Lab where she founded and directed the High-Low Tech group. In 2013, she spoke at Stanford’s FabLearn conference about diversity in the Maker movement as popularized by Maker Media, the publisher of Make: magazine and producer of Maker Faire. Her talk, which can be viewed in full via the link below and which cannot be properly transcribed because it references her slides throughout, is a seminal criticism of MAKE-ing as a branded activity defined by its association with STEM (technology and engineering in particular) and with a predominantly white audience. “I’m going to now throw some rocks at making,” she says at 18:10. http://leahbuechley.com/wordpress/?p=60
Infinity Net Yayoi Kusama
04: Get Better and Keep Going
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth Bruce Mau 1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them. 2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth. 3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there. 4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day. 5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value. 6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions. 7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit. 8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism. 9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere. 10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead. 11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications. 12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves. 14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort. 15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fuelled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant. 16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential. 17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others. 18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world. 19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for. 20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future. 21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again. 22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference. 23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplish- ments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better. 24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it. 25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight. 26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you. 27. Read only left–hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our ‘noodle’.
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions. 29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device–dependent. 30.
Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between ‘creatives’ and ‘suits’ is what Leonard Cohen calls a “charming artifact of the past.”
31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed. 32.
Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object– oriented, real–time, computer graphic–simulated environment. 34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea—I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove. 35.
Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else… but not words. 37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it. 38.
Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old–tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39.
Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces—what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference—the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals—but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40.
Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves. 42.
Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous mo ment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.
Sweep the Leg, Johnny! Anthony Bourdain I am 59 years old and a Brazilian jiu jitsu addict. I used to hang around cold stairwells first thing in the morning waiting for dope. Now I hang around cold stairwells waiting for Jiu jitsu. Every day I’m home in New York…..every day, I head down to the cellar locker room of the Renzo Gracie Academy and put on my gi. Then, barefoot and ready to meet my fate, I head out onto the mats. Usually, I take an hour long private lesson with my principal instructor, Igor Gracie, followed by an hour long class with the general population of mixed belts taught by John Danaher. About half an hour of techniques and drilling, then, the last half hour of class is spent sparring. Four five minute rounds with 60 seconds in between. Invariably I do not “win” these rounds, meaning, I do not “tap” anybody. As much as I might like to, I do not compress anybody’s neck in such a way as to restrict oxygenated blood flow to the brain (thereby causing them to submit or pass out). I am almost always unsuccessful when attempting to bend an arm, shoulder or extremity in ways that God did not intend. Instead, I fight as hard as I can to delay the inevitable – to fend off my training partners – younger, often larger chested and more heavily muscled – almost always more skilled – from passing my guard, crushing my rib cage in side control, getting an arm under my head and pressing their shoulder into my jaw. Every second, every minute I can prevent that from happening is a victory to me. When I’m not in New York, when I’m on the road shooting PARTS UNKNOWN, I go to whatever local gym, yoga studio, garage, cellar claims to teach Brazilian Jiu Jitsu – places where the term “parts unknown” can really apply. Until I walk in the door, I have no idea what I’m going to face; what the local custom is concerning techniques like face-cranks, heel hooks, can openers, knee-on-neck, what the acceptable level of aggression is, whether my training partners will be amiable blue belts, giant Slav white belts with 10 years of wrestling experience, or huge, heavily tattooed Pacific islanders – none of whom even remember having a neck. Will the “facility” be an austere, Japanese style dojo, a freezing garage, an airless, 110 degree closet, a military base, a boxing ring? I have trained in all these places: Glasgow, Maui, Istanbul, Beirut, Budapest, Kuching, Kuala Lumpur, Okinawa, Marseille – and all over the US. As I say at the top of this episode, as I tape my fingers (in the forlorn hope that it might mitigate the osteoarthritis and Heberden’s nodes associated with grip fighting), I will never be a black belt. I will never successfully compete against similarly ranked opponents half my age, I will never be great at Brazilian jiu jitsu. There is an urgency to my training because
I’m sure as shit not getting any younger, or more flexible. I’m certainly not getting any faster. And as I head down the highway on my jiu jitsu journey, the likelihood of the wheels coming off the car grows stronger every day. But I am determined to suck less at this jiu jitsu thing every day if I can. It was to this end that I chose to do a San Francisco show. Yeah, I know: The San Francisco bay area is awesome. It’s a restaurant mecca. But this is not a “Best of San Francisco” episode. Over the years, I’ve done many hours of television on the Bay Area and hope to do many more. This episode is more about what San Francisco is in danger of losing, what some people are doing about it, what’s hanging on, what’s disappearing and what might be next. Right now, there’s a struggle for the soul of the city going on as battalions of techies, engorged with tech bucks invade, driving rents up and infusing perfectly good coffee with pumpkin flavor. It’s a pattern we see nearly every place where the food is good, the views uniquely beautiful: people from elsewhere replacing the people who made the place desirable and awesome in the first place. Whether that is a natural, inevitable and irresistible process or something to be fought tooth and nail remains to be seen. Personally, I’m pessimistic. Time, and change – as I feel, literally, in my bones every day after training – are like the ocean, they wash over you, eventually washing you away entirely. I want to stipulate up front, however, that this episode in particular is a selfish enterprise. It’s all about me, me, me – and I’m running out of time. I wanted to train at San Francisco’s Ralph Gracie Academy with their legendary black belt, Kurt Osiander – and I built this whole damn episode around that ambition. It wasn’t a casual decision. Ralph Gracie (Renzo’s brother) is notorious for his grueling warm-ups. Back in New York it had taken me six months to get up to speed enough physically to be able to keep up with the pre-instruction calisthenics in white belt classes. But Ralph’s, everybody I spoke to told me, was worse. Black belts at Renzo’s would smile pityingly when I told them I’d be going out to train there for a week. “You are not going to enjoy the warm ups,” they’d say, describing a near half hour regime of jumping jacks, squats, burpees, sprawls, push-ups, crunches, sprints, fireman carries, forward and backward rolls, monkey and bear crawls, leg lifts, and other fiendish strategies to thoroughly exhaust the human body — before live training involving six 6 minute rounds — with 30 second breaks in between. (Ralph, armed with a kendo practice sword, has been known during these short breaks to demand “Give me twenty!” of his students, requiring a quick 20 push-ups before continued sparring). While this whole episode was a cynical means to fulfill my jiu jitsu dreams, I would,
necessarily have to appear on camera, and I did not want to look like that guy, gassed out and sitting against the wall while the rest of the class do hip escapes across the room. So, a month prior to the show, I took to vomit inducing strength and endurance training back in New York — just so I could make it past the warm ups at Ralph’s. (As it turned out, they were not, during the daytime classes anyway, as bad as I’d been told). Most of you reading this will have little to no idea what Brazilian jiu jitsu is. I understand. Until a couple of years ago, the idea of rolling around on the floor in a slick of human sweat was about as foreign a notion as anything could be. When I tell people I train, they often do a little chopping motion with their hands that every practitioner has had to endure silently without correcting (there is no striking, much less chopping, in jiu jitsu). So, at the top of the episode, my professor Igor Gracie, and his brother Rolles demonstrate the basic principles. Hopefully this will help you avoid embarrassment – and as importantly, will prevent you from joining the meatheads in booing next time a UFC fight goes to the ground. Jiu Jitsu makes me very happy – regardless of how good or bad I am at it – and how dim my prospects of ever excelling at it. It’s become a family tradition: my wife does it pretty much as a profession, seeking to tear knees and ankles off people – or occasionally, helping to teach others how to do same. My daughter does it because it’s fun – and because every young girl, if possible, should be free of ever being physically intimidated by a boy (I pity the first little boy who shoves my daughter to the ground). I do it because it’s hard. Because it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And because it never ends. Every day presents me with a series of problems that I spend the rest of the day thinking about how I might solve – or at least chip away at. Next day same. And the day after that. It’s like being the newest, worst cook in the kitchen all over again, looking up that impossibly steep learning curve to the broiler station. I liked that feeling then. I like it now. The first day, all those years ago, when my chef addressed me by name at the end of the shift, was a golden moment. When I recently got my blue belt, after over two years of training, it was, other than the birth of my daughter, pretty much the greatest day of my life. That belt doesn’t mean I’m any good at jiu jitsu, by the way. It just means that I worked really, really hard at something. And that presumably, I suck at it just a tiny bit less. https://medium.com/parts-unknown/sweep-the-leg-johnny-2004ad77ec1#.3rmj2z5t2
Why 66 is Better Than 28 Diana Nyad What I Will Do For the Rest of My Life My mother says that her father lived to be 79. Her mother is still living. And my father’s parents are still living. It would probably be a good guess that I will live to 80 years. Which means I have 70 years left to go. I want to see all the countries of the world and learn all the languages. I want to have thousands of friends, and I want all my friends to be different. I want to play six instruments. I want to be the best in the world at two things. I want to be a great athlete and I want to be a great surgeon. I need to practice very hard every day. I need to sleep as little as possible. I need to read at least one major book every week. And I need to remember that my 70 years are going to go by too quickly. – An essay Diana Nyad wrote at age 10, reprinted from “Other Shores,” published in 1978
I was 64 when I became the first to swim the 110.86 miles from Cuba to Florida, something I failed at when I was 28. The truth is, I am a better athlete in my mid-60s than I was, even as a world champion, in my mid-20s. The cliche is that we reach our prime in middle age because we are mature; we have found patience and perspective. We recognize that our time is more and more valuable with each fleeting year. We tap into a well of experience and open-mindedness. All of this is true, but I also believe we can retain our physical vitality into our middle and even older years. I point-blank refuse to cower in the face of weak and faulty statistics, geared for the masses, that pay little respect to the will and potential of the individual. There is no doubt that I am breathing the life force of my prime physical self now, at age 66. I am more resilient. My immune system is a stronger fortress. I can summon a brute strength I never had back in the day. I was a thoroughbred then, more finely tuned but also somewhat fragile. These days I’m more of a Clydesdale, sturdy and stalwart. If you told me I’d be left stranded in the wilderness for many months and could choose at which age I would attempt to survive the ordeal, I’d pick this very age, 66. Yes, this is a one-way journey we’re all traveling, and it has an endpoint. We have to get real. I can’t pretend I’m not a whole lot closer to the end than ever before. I accept the lines on the face, cartilage thinning in the knees, the breasts riding lower and lower. What I rail against is the blanket limitations put on us by … whom? Who has done the irrefutable calculations that say we’re too old to work in our professions? Who decrees the
assigned ages for productivity and creativity and vitality? I accept the laws of the universe when it comes to aging, but I point-blank refuse to cower in the face of weak and faulty statistics, geared for the masses, that pay little respect to the will and potential of the individual. I was recently chatting with a couple. The husband happened to mention that he was 54. His wife corrected him to say he was really 55, as his birthday was coming up in two days. He was adamant, all kidding aside: At that moment, he was still 54. The ultimate irony is that the people most freaked out by the numbers, the wrinkles, the widening of the midsection, waste more of their precious time denying aging than in pursuit of living hard. Think of all the minutes we’ll never get back, the minutes we spent arguing with some stranger that we were not yet 55 but had two more days to go at 54. This is the crux of it all: We rabidly pursue youth in the name of appearing young. Too many of us aren’t exercising our bodies and carefully contemplating every morsel we put into our mouths so that we can retain our youthful dynamism. We think our value lies in what age we are perceived to be rather than in empirical measurements of how we’re performing and what we’re experiencing. We baby boomers are lucky. The concepts of middle age and old age are sliding upward. We are feeling feisty at 50 and 60 and 70. At a recent White House Conference on Aging, the central theme was the vast overhaul of assisted-living and nursing home models. The next group moving toward old age is teeming with fierce independence. We are going to radically redefine the golden years. These days we can reinvent ourselves. We can embrace our “second acts” and be more successful, more spirited, more equipped in all ways, big and small, than we were the first time around. The machine of our youth society dictates that our talents are fading, even our thinking is passe, but ironically it’s that very youth-driven tech culture that can provide us with more avenues of creativity and entrepreneurship than ever before. Trust me, I know we can still dream. They say age is a state of mind. Age is, of course, a state of body as well. It is up to each of us to live bold, vital days, free from subjugation to the mass, limited interpretations of our respective ages. What defines my age – my strengths and weaknesses – I insist be left to my own reckoning. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-nyad-no-limits-aging-20151021-story.html
Momofuku David Chang
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami
In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. Now matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run.The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can’t control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isn’t enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be frugal and make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily. Talent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that’s it. Of course, certain poets and rock singers whose genius went out in a blaze of glory – people like Schubert and Mozart, whose dramatic early deaths turned them into legends – have a certain appeal, but for the vast majority of us this isn’t the model we follow. If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus – the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else. … After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed of the writer of fiction – at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, or two years. … Fortunately, these two disciplines – focus and endurance – are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee results will come.
In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him. … Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate – and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would definitely have been different.
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear Elizabeth Gilbert
Making Learning Whole David Perkins
Hard Fun Seymour Papert I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don't blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a more engaging, less coercive curriculum do indeed end up taking the guts out of the learning. But it is not fair to hold me guilty by association. My whole career in education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that will harness the passion of the learner to the hard work needed to master difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the "touchy feely ... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education. Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard. Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world. I have written here about adolescents in Maine's juvenile correctional facility overcoming their long standing aversion to any sort of school learning by being given the opportunity to invent and construct sophisticated mechanical/robotic devices. Doing this requires concentration and discipline. It requires learning to deal with things going wrong by finding out how to fix the problem rather than by giving up in frustration. And for some of those kids it has meant experiencing for the first time the pleasure of writing because they were encouraged to write about something they were doing themselves and doing with passion. The phrase "pleasure of writing" makes me pause. At this very moment writing is not altogether pleasurable. The ticking of the clock telling me that the deadline is coming close frustrates me. I am stinging from the pain of having to throw out a whole paragraph
because "it wasn't going to work" even though it had a phrase with which I had fallen in love. So maybe "pleasure" isn't quite the right word. Nor is "fun." We need a better word for it and maybe that first grader in San Jose provided the best one. We are talking here about a special kind of fun ... "hard fun." How do we make writing become hard fun? One way is to develop for kids "writable" activities that they love to do. The building of robotic devices acquires "writability" because it lends itself to stage-by-stage description. Its writability is further enhanced by the use of word processors and digital cameras. But beyond technology there is the attitude in the learning culture. An example of what I mean was brought up by a teacher who objected to the idea that children should be allowed to write about what they liked. "When they go to work they'll have to do what they are told." Therein lies a source of many kids' failure in reading. Of course we should teach children the skill of self-control needed to carry out orders. But mixing up learning that skill with learning to write defeats both purposes.
The Creative Process James Baldwin
Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality—a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed. Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world. There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. None of these things can be done alone. But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing beside some silver lake. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control. I put the matter this way, not out of any desire to create pity for the artist—God forbid!—but to suggest how nearly, after all, is his state the state of everyone, and in an attempt to make vivid his endeavor. The state of birth, suffering, love, and death are extreme states—extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. It is for this reason that all societies have battled with the incorrigible disturber of the peace—the artist. I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better. The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive. And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without those traditions that have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is suggested that they can or that they must, is panic. And we see this panic, I think, everywhere in the world today, from the streets of New Orleans to the grisly battleground of Algeria. And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing human damage. The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society – the politicians,
legislators, educators, and scientists – by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being. Society must accept some things as real; but he must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven. One cannot possibly build a school, teach a child, or drive a car without taking some things for granted. The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides. I seem to be making extremely grandiloquent claims for a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead. But, in a way, the belated honor that all societies tender their artists proven the reality of the point I am trying to make. I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist’s responsibility to his society. The peculiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own. For the truth, in spite of appearances and all our hopes, is that everything is always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as men is how well prepared we are to meet these changes, and further, to use them for our health. Now, anyone who has ever been compelled to think about it – anyone, for example, who has ever been in love – knows that the one face that one can never see is one’s own face. One’s lover – or one’s brother, or one’s enemy – sees the face you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions. We do the things we do and feel what we feel essentially because we must – we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet the forces are there: we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot leant his unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities into a relationship resembling reconciliation. The human beings whom we respect the most, after all – and sometimes fear the most – are those who are most deeply involved in this delicate and strenuous effort, for they have the unshakable authority that comes only from having looked on and endured and survived the worst. That nation is healthiest which has the least necessity to distrust or ostracize these people – whom, as I say, honor, once they are gone, because somewhere in our hearts we know that we cannot live without them.
The dangers of being an American artist are not greater than those of being an artist anywhere else in the world, but they are very particular. These dangers are produced by our history. They rest on the fact that in order to conquer this continent, the particular aloneness of which I speak – the aloneness in which one discovers that life is tragic, and therefore unutterably beautiful – could not be permitted. And that this prohibition is typical of all emergent nations will be proved, I have no doubt, in many ways during the next fifty years. This continent now is conquered, but our habits and our fears remain. And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history. We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes the one for the other. And this, I think, we do. We are the strongest nation in the Western world, but this is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an opportunity that no other nation has in moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class and caste, to create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the New World. But the price of this is a long look backward when we came and an unflinching assessment of the record. For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action Audre Lorde
The Workshop: Creativity 101 Painting in the Medium of Food, by Sara Greenberger Rafferty in Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment The Bowline Knot and the Transom Knot, from Philippe Petit’s Why Knot? The Unprofessional Development Credo
Painting in the Medium of Food Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Why Knot? Philippe Petit
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