Art that Craves Attention

Art 
Artist
Funny
Imagination
Small
Movement
Wave arms
Run
Hide
Straight



The  woman  is ______________
She  has  ___________________
The  art  is __________________
The  art  _____________, _______________, __________.

Teaching Design for Change

bamboo house

https://www.ted.com/talks/elora_hardy_magical_houses_made_of_bamboo/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/elora_hardy_magical_houses_made_of_bamboo/transcript?language=en

Flight school/crash school

 a scary way to learn these lessons

Cult of Death

Cult of Death

Is it still a “free” country if everybody does what they’re told? If you do only what the society and the advertising and the church and the rules tell you to do, if you never materially, objectively step over any line, are you free?

You may be content to live within dictated bounds, content to think in terms of what is “normal,” but freedom is something else. Sure it is worth fighting for, but fighting, in the commercial sense of the term, where our army wipes out their villages in order to preserve our prosperity, does not produce anything I would call freedom, or anything I would call worth fighting for.

Freedom comes in two forms: it is either (1) an empty word that serves to keep the herd in the pen and focused on their assigned tasks, or (2) a peak experience that keeps calling you back. Type One freedom is what we encounter most frequently, in the form of freedom to choose laundry detergents, freedom to choose which channel to watch, freedom to attend the church of your choice, freedom to vote for either of two candidates, both of whom are funded by the same corporations.

Type Two freedom is something else. It is a woman living in a tree for two years, so the logging company can’t cut it down. It is walking through a forest, when the smells and the sounds and the sensations of a chilly morning are more real than your job or your car or your debts or your name. It is writing, when you lose track of time and place and forget every detail of your temporal existence and just let the words flow to the page. Type Two freedom is that Chinese guy standing in front of all those tanks. 

Far from being a legislated form of social order, Type Two freedom consists in breaking the rules, following the spirit, acting without permission. It flies in the face of reason, flies in the face of the profit margin, and flies in the face of wisdom. Our stifled souls scream for it, but instead of taking a firm stance on an important issue, instead of taking the risk of actually being alive, we settle for taking a trip to the mall. “Boldness,” as Thoreau said, “has genius and magic in it.” Or, as Sir Walter Scott put it, “One hour of life crowded to the full with glorious action and filled with noble risks is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.” When the meek inherit the earth, will it be only the grave?

Freedom is neither fought for nor legislated, it is taken in the teeth when the opportunity presents. And opportunity presents every day. Every minute. We know as we surf the web, or as we watch TV we know that Life is someplace else. Life, Freedom, God, Peak Experiences, these are with us always, but starved, impoverished. We hear their cry, in the form of that silenced scream in our choking heart. We hear it. We hear the scream when we learn that the food aid being sent to Africa is almost entirely from genetically modified crops, and nobody knows what will be the long term effects of eating that stuff. We hear the scream when we bypass a newspaper article about school funding, or about meals-on-wheels, or the latest mass murder headline. The scream comes up from our soul, and in wordless horror it asks us, begs us to rise to the challenge, to do something, for God’s sake. But we turn the page and look for news less depressing to read about. Sports, maybe. That was your chance, passed by day after day, your chance to live. Life is against he rules. The cult of death is far easier to follow. Just sit there reading the news and everything will be fine. Go to church and recite the same empty prayers and everything will be fine. But really believe? Materially and objectively demonstrate true belief in those words from Christ’s lips, and act on faith? That might make your preacher nervous. Don’t take the risk. What’s the good of it? 

I’d like to have a chance to talk to the man who stood in front of those tanks at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Nobody ever took down his name, except perhaps in the book of life. He vanished in the crowd. Where is he now? What can he tell me about peak experiences? Or that Buddhist monk who, back in ’63, incinerated himself to protest the Diem government in Vietnam, the government America had installed there. What would he have to say about freedom? Would he express regret? Would he say it might have been wiser to just go with the flow? Get a house and a car, get a job in a plant that produces I-Pods and retire comfortably? Or would he maybe say that his only real taste of life was that single moment, that three terrible minutes of absolute self-discipline when the flames made every nerve in his body scream with agony, but he held his position, never flinching at the worst pain imaginable, in order that his life could mean something. Would he regret that act, or would he see it as a peak experience, three minutes of real life that he wouldn’t trade for all the laptops in China? The man who stopped the tanks, does he wish he’d just walked on home, minded his own business? Or does he instead look back and reflect upon that single moment as having been the defining act of his life, three minutes when he really existed, before he blended back into the shadows of mass culture? Jesus! Is that not worth the price of cutting the umbilical cord?

You want to make America strong? Legislation won’t do it, aggression won’t do it, and corporations won’t do it. What the nation needs is women who will climb up into trees and not come down till the bulldozers retreat. We need men who will stand in front of tanks.

Yarn Bombers, Wooly Taggers and Guerilla Knitters

It was way back in the good old days of 2008 that I first learned of them. I was in San Francisco to give a scholarly presentation at  the Popular Culture Conference at the time.

The conference was a wild event. Popular Culture includes, well, almost everything. Somebody does it, whatever it is, and they were all there, gathered together in the town that defines Popular Culture. Lots of people dressed as their favorite Star Trek characters, lots of sessions about Spider Man, lots of research papers about Professional Wrestling. The guide book listing all the sessions, times and locations was three inches thick for a four-day conference. There on page 472, down in the corner, was my session: Screenplay Writing in the College Composition Classroom.

It went well. But after all the preparation and planning for my presentation, I found that the best part of the conference was everything else. I spent day after day enjoying all the other presenters' scholarly talks on things I would not have thought could be scholarly topics. One that I attended was "Post-Modern Clothing Design and Marketing." A member of the panel  had failed to show up, so I stepped in and gave an impromptu talk about making shoes, with the self-made shoes on my feet as examples.

But what made that session most memorable, what ultimately changed my life, was a slide show about the Church of Craft.

























 The Church of Craft believes that people should make things. That's it. No hymnals, no ceremonies, no prayers or dogma, just handcrafts. Rather than listen to a preacher, their spiritual convocations involve sitting in a circle in somebody's living room, the coffee table piled with tools and materials and, usually (from what I can tell),  cookies. They just get together and make stuff and talk and eat cookies. They figure this is  enough spiritual enlightenment for anybody.

Every major city around the world has a branch now: Houston, Tokyo, Athens, Des Moines--the photo above is in Prague--and the list goes on. They are everywhere, and they pose a threat to America's Corporate Value System. They seem peaceful enough, but as I listened intently to tales of heroic exploits of the great Crafters of yore, my spine tingled. This, I thought, this is how the Industrial Revolution ends, not with a bang but with a crochet hook.

I guess any fanatical sect is going to have a dark side, and the Church of Craft does not keep theirs a secret. They are so reckless, so driven, so willing to risk everything to spread their faith that, well, I'll let these photographs tell the story...

Portland

London

Montreal

Perth

Saskatoon

The Black Forest

What began as a seemingly harmless social organization has grown to be a worldwide assault on the very foundations of our lives. They are all around us, quietly undermining the institutions that we Americans have come to take for granted: television and shopping. Sometimes their gatherings take a turn for the dark side, and the church will go out in the wee hours of night, raking the coals of hell with their knitting needles. People wake in the morning to find that they, their houses, their pets, their bicycles or their trees have been "yarn bombed." All of a sudden their entire world is covered in coozies.

For the remainder of my visit in San Francisco I kept noticing knitting in the oddest places. They--the Guerilla Knitters, the Yarn Bombers, the Wooly Taggers --call their nocturnal creations by many names, but one of the more prevalent is "coozies." I saw a bicycle that had been parked in the same place for too long fall victim to the wooly taggers: its handlebars were tagged with a nice warm wool handlebar-coozie. Trees, telephone poles, and handrails are particularly defenseless when a gang of yarn bombers goes out late at night looking for something that will stay still long enough to get bombed.

In their own fuzzy way, the Church of Craft is offering the world a new vision, a  radical, fanatical, twisted (spun?) vision of what life is all about. They seem to believe that it's not about gasoline or electricity, not even about power at all. They think it's about knitting.

I returned from San Francisco a changed man. The very next semester I began  to preach the new gospel, thinking of ways to work the Church of Craft into my writing assignments. I had high hopes for one student, Beatrice. While the rest of my students spent their class time texting, Beatrice sat on the back row knitting. She was covered in knitwear from afro to All Stars, and seemed to be as placid and peaceful as a summer breeze, never perturbed by the small stuff like homework and grades. Beatrice operated on a higher plane than the rest of us. Unfortunately, when I assigned a research paper on the Church of Craft, Beatrice disappeared. I later learned she got pregnant and her parents  had dragged her out of that school. I'm sure her kid will never want for baby booties.

If you do a little research, you'll find that Church gatherings are unevenly mixed: mostly women, not as many men. I suspect they'd get more guys to join if they changed the name to something more male-appealing, such as "Concealed Carry Class of Craft" or "Chain Saw Soul." But maybe the issue is something more inherent in male-ness itself. Guys tend to do forms of craft that make it hard to keep up a conversation, and even harder to keep metal shavings and sawdust from getting into the cookie jar. But the Church of Craft remains at least ostensibly open to all comers, regardless of spiritual or mechanical preferences. Their single, all encompassing commandment is "Do Your Own Thing, but Don't Burn the Cookies."

Me, I would love to live in a world where everybody just did their own thing. It gives me no thrill to see a row of people who look like little business clones, dressed for success, or mile after mile of men in chinos and polo shirt. People who have a "my own thing" to do are far more interesting. The interesting people in life are like the interesting places, interesting foods, and interesting experiences: unexpected, surprising, richly textured. These are also the characteristics that make for great stories, great life and, if you think about it, great coozies.




To view some of the author's own creations ... visit his shop, Shibumilife, at ETSY.com.

Orcs R Us

“Do you know how the orcs first came to be? They were elves once. Taken by the dark powers, tortured and mutilated, a ruined and terrible form of life.”
          

The more I learn about nuclear power, genetic modification of foods, and the rise of technology in almost every corner of life, the more I believe we are torturing and mutilating ourselves. It would be hard to create a more perfect hell than the one we are moving toward. Endless war, where everybody is a potential enemy. Guaranteed cancer—unless you do what you are told and get the magic pills. Already, any cell phone can be activated without the owner knowing, anytime Big Brother wants to listen.... the perfect panopticon.


The "panopticon" was originally an idea for prison design. In 1975 a guy named Michel Foucault had the idea that prisons could save money by using an architectural design in which a central tower was glazed with one-way windows. Guards watch through the windows, but prisoners never know whether or not there is a guard watching them, because the windows are one-way.  The resulting psychological uncertainty meant that prisoners would tend to play it safe. Fewer guards would be needed, fewer problems.


Cell phones have made America a giant panopticon. With a cell phone in every pocket, and making no secret of the fact that they can be monitored, you get the prison effect on an entire population--and the people pay you for their imprisonment! It's a sweet deal if you are into unlimited power.... The only thing better would be phone implants.

Now, into this environment, add constant pollution, radiation, genetically-modified foods, and you end up with birth defects, cancer, a million drugs to "treat" a million sicknesses, and you have created a perfect hell right here on earth. The icing on that rotten cake is the cult of the "beautiful people."  Whom to you serve?