turning away and turning back

i just got out of a meeting with the Production Manager of Syracuse Stage, a LORT C regional theater here in town. He's a nice guy, and we had a really interesting talk. He gave me a tour of their facilities, and there were moments that were almost overwhelming.

In 1987 I was taking an after school acting class at out local community theater, and they told us that some extras were needed for the mainstage play that was going on, which was "My Fair Lady." So I played a street urchin at the age of 14, and during the show I looked around and saw these people wearing all black (cool) with flashlights and tools and stuff (very cool) and hanging out with cultivated bored-but-superior looks on their faces smoking cigarettes outside the heavy green loading doors at the back of the theater (holy crap so very cool omigod omigod). I volunteered to be on the running crew, and to help build sets, and it changed my life.

Looking back, it is obvious to me now that I was at the beginning of exploring the line between the workers and the worked-for, somehow identifying with the people who do "real work" (not that I really knew what that meant, then or now) and the people who don't. And I wanted (and still want) to be on the side of the line where people are working. Even at parties, I tend to help clear dishes or play guitar, providing entertainment. When stressed, I find I have to do something with my hands, to tidy the room, or do dishes or make something. To relax I make things: songs or objects or occasions. My hobbies have often involved being on the "provider" side of the equation, most recently volunteering on a traditionally rigged tall ship as crew, instead of wanting to go aboard as a passenger.

This is not going to be a post about my relationship with the entertainment industry, however. There are things there that I do want to write about at some point, but suffice it to say that in 2006, nineteen years after I fell in love with live theater, I filed for divorce. I had been starting to form some ideas about objects and how I wanted to make them, and about my (very complicated, like everyone else's) relationship with them, and it became clear that theater was not what I wanted to be doing. There were other factors of course. I had also fallen out of love with New York City and was growing to resent it more and more.

So I turned away. I turned and walked away from eighteen years of a career and a way of thinking and a vocabulary and a set of norms, and decided to try something else entirely. It was not easy, initially. I had been in the entertainment industry longer than I had been out of it. I had never really had a job that was not somehow connected with it. All of my ideas about how to live and how to think and what to expect professionally and personally had been shaped by entertainment. Over the last three and a half years I have been navigating a new way of thinking, a new set of expectations. I have learned a lot, and am generally happier now than I was from about 2002 to about 2006, for a lot of reasons, both personal and professional.

Theaters, all of them, have a particular smell. No matter where you go, there is a "theater smell," the smell years of paint and lumber and super heated lights and sweat and laughter and tears. It is a smell of flame-retardant salts and tension, of several hundred people in a room experiencing a single moment all together. Maybe it is a vibe instead of a smell. It is unmistakable, though, and I bet if I were blindfolded and led into a theater I would be able to tell immediately. It is a smell that hit me in the center of the chest today, and for a moment made it hard to breathe.

Then I fell in to the comfort of jargon and conversation, of discussing methodologies and techniques and power structures. It felt strangely calming, like stepping off the deck of a storm-tossed ship on to the dock in my home port. I had just met Don but I actually knew him a great deal better than I know some of the colleagues I have been teaching with or near for the last two semesters. All of my shibboleths applied here, all of my assumptions held true.

It was an arresting experience.

Walking through the theaters and shops conversations started, conversations about integrating design work, about sustainable initiatives in the entertainment world, about the possibilities of making more responsible choices in the entertainment industry and in the design industry.

I do not think I want to return to the entertainment industry. I do not think I have an interest in being a set designer again. But maybe my new path includes working with some members of that industry to find ways of doing what they do in a cleaner, healthier way. Many of the lessons I learned in my former life have given my life a heading over the last few years, how interesting to think that this new way of thinking might turn around and help set bearings for my former colleagues.

spring evening

it has been glorious weather the last couple of days. Sunny, warm-almost-hot. Daffodils are blooming, crocus are wide wide open in the way that says "spring is HERE!" The sun has been out, which has made me take the man-cub on walks and bike around town, and tonight the warmth made me have an extra beer and take a guitar out on to the porch and sit for a while.

On our porch are four of my "Notirondack Chairs." They were designed around three very specific behaviors: Playing guitar (you need a chair without arms), drinking beer (you need a place to put it if you are playing guitar), and being with friends. So these are chairs that have one arm (which also lets them be arranged as a loveseat when you are done playing) but a wide arm on the other side for the beer. The back has a pretty vertical attitude to the seat, which makes it perfect for playing music. After dinner tonight, in the gathered gloom of our quiet neighborhood at dusk, I finally put them to the test.

I have a guitar that I bought at Musician's General Store in Brooklyn. It is small, the size that the Martin guitar company calls "parlor sized." When you look inside you can tell that someone made it at home, there is glue running down the inside, and the neck is very wide, like a classical guitar. The tuning pegs are of a '5o's vintage, small and plastic, white in a way that is not even trying to be ivory. The sound is singular, if not great. I have a special spot in my heart for this guitar. It is the one that I always carried on boats, because it is small. To this day, the strap is a piece of seine twine, a tarred sort of polyester string that is ubiquitous on traditionally-rigged sailing vessels. There are many and many a good evening, rum-soaked or not, playing and singing in that guitar. We always made up with volume what we lacked in skill, and never worried when we forgot a verse.

So I brought the little guitar out on to the porch, and sat in the chair, and played (quietly) and drank a beer. The wind wandered by, my fingers walked up and down the chord for "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry," and the beer was cold. What a lovely moment, arresting to be physically in a situation that I had created theoretically. Nothing earth-shattering, just a happy convergence of time and intention.

on a Saturday in early March 77 years ago, Franklin D Roosevelt stood behind a podium. In the face of a crushing Depression, he had been elected President, and was now facing a public that was skeptical about the government, that had no confidence at all in the banking system, and that was jobless and in some cases homeless in unprecedented numbers.

Sound familiar? It sure does to me.

FDR delivered his "nothing to fear but fear itself" speech, which is the part of his First Inaugural that people remember, when they remember anything at all about it. I was re reading that speech recently because a student of mine went to the FDR memorial in D.C. If you are ever in our Nation's Capital, you should go the FDR memorial. It is truly the most beautiful and moving memorial on the Mall, and I am saying this even though it is near the Lincoln Memorial, which might help put it in perspective.

As I was reading this stirring speech again, I was came across this:

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work must no longer be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they have cost us if they teach us that out true destiny is not to be ministered unto, but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men."

Change the "men" to "people" and this is a credo that we all could do well by adopting. Joy in the creative process, a feeling on everyone's part that we are all stewards of each other, and a disdain for simple wealth. If we could all think that way, this world would be a hell of a place.

Now we are being told that we are coming out on the other side of yet another situation in which the rich have lied and cheated, causing massive unemployment and the loss of homes and savings on the part of a great many Americans. The number of people that were surprised by the events of the last little while makes it clear that we all need to spend more time reading the story of what has come to pass already.

It also seems to me that it is usually the people who do no actual work that cause the problems. One does not seem to read about crooked carpenters or weavers or potters or writers very often. There seems to be something about people who make things that keeps them more or less honest. I wonder if there is something in the "thrill in the creative process" that Roosevelt wrote about, something in the work of turning raw material into a finished object or meal or house that makes one respect the person to who the finished thing will go enough that there is less impulse to lie or cheat. Maybe not. Maybe I am glorifying the worker for the sake of glorifying the worker, which is a tendency that I have, I know.

Either way, this weekend I intend to thrill in the creative process a little, myself. And to read some more of Roosevelt's words.

time passes

The first college I went to was the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It is a medium-sized state school, neither good nor bad, just what it is. I went there for theater because a mentor and teacher and good friend of mine went there. I really had no idea what the hell I was doing.

Somehow my parents steered me towards this "alternative" program called "Residential College," which was about 125 or so students living in an old beautiful brick dorm on campus. There were "core classes" we all took (though, truth be told, I was awash in hormones and was not able to really appreciate what was happening around me), and then we pursued our major outside of those. This college was created (I think) and run run by two amazingly patient and kind people: Murray and Fran Arndt.

I had them both for different classes. Murray was interested in Grail literature, and that interest that has stayed with me all these billions of years later; Fran got me into Mark Twain. Being that I have a tattoo of Twain's words on my arms, I would say that she had a pretty deep effect on me as well.

I did not do a good job of being a student at UNCG, and I did not pay as much attention as I wish I had. I sort of exploded into my own sexuality and workaholic narcissism, in the way that a lot of college students do. The more I work on methods of teaching, and the more I spend time with my students, the more I remember with chagrin this time.

Fran recently stepped down as Director. She had her hand on the tiller for decades, and of course someone else should step in. In the newsletter that we get in email she published the following letter. Virginia is her grand-daughter, Emily was her daughter. She passed last year. I apologise if it is a little specific to a particular moment in my own life, as opposed to the larger conversations that I try to have in this forum, but it was so touching and so well-written that I felt a need to reproduce it here:

Dear RCers and ARCers,

Time brings changes in names and in directors. This

will be my last letter as such, and it is difficult to know

what to say. Keats closed his truly last letter with “I

always make an awkward bow,” but then he was John

Keats, dying at 25 with some magnificent poetry to keep

him alive forever. I seldom bow and have not curtsied

since I was in piano recitals as a child. But it is hard to

say good-bye with any grace.

You and this program have been a large part of my

and Murray’s lives, more perhaps than you can imagine.

The names of students and even faculty who were and

are friends often elude us, but the actual people are

always firmly imbedded in memory. Still, I am glad we are

all wearing nametags at the reunion. It has been a good

ride, and you have taught me more than I have you,

although I do hope that some of my favorite books and

films stay with you and are passed on to your children. I

have heard more than once that Grail Literature has

messed up someone’s ability to just see a movie or read a

book without always finding patterns. Sorry. But

sometimes some patterns are helpful. Some of them even

give us the faith and courage to endure.

I am now often reading with Virginia the books that

were once mine and then Emily’s. It is good to believe

that some experiences with literature are able to link

generations. Some of you earliest RCers may already

know this, and I really must leave before grandchildren

begin to apply. I do look forward to hearing from you,

seeing you sometimes at Valle Crucis or reunions.

In the last years I am starting to believe that nothing

ever really ends, it just changes form. Ashby Residential

College will change forms; it must to survive. But the

same truth and spirit that Warren, Dick, Murray, and I

have found so important will remain.

My love (when I bow or curtsy I fall down),

Fran

I hope that I have this kind of effect on my own students, this kind of deep effect that gets under the skin and stays there. The kind that manifests without thought. The process of inquiry that makes it possible to find joy in the support beam of an old mill, or in watching a leaf slowly change color in autumn in the way that makes the memory of an old poem resurface.

Teaching in the moment is hard. Teaching from a twenty year remove is genius.

we are all connected.

there is building not far from the building in which I work that is being gutted. It is one of many venerable mills and warehouses in this area that were built along the Erie Canal over a hundred years ago when it was a thriving thoroughfare. Now, like so many of those buildings, it is a derelict relic of a time so far gone that many people don't remember it even existed. This particular building is slated to become condos and artist galleries, to be given a new life now that its former life has ended, which I think is great.

I was approached by someone involved in that to take some of the big old beams that are coming out as part of the demolition process and turn them into benches that will ultimately be put in front of the building. It is a great idea, and a project I am excited to be a part of.

I spent Saturday in the shop with two students who were interested in being a part of this process. We had a great time, and for me it was relaxing (though tiring) to be in the shop for a solid day of moving wood around.

We spent a little time before they started designing looking at the old beams, reading as much

history as we could from them. We talked about what the mill building was when it was built and thought some about the people who built it. Though the wood was obviously mill-cut, the final shaping for installation was done with hatchets, in some places, which speaks of a time when carpenters had hatchets in their tool boxes.

When I cut off a sample chunk and resawed it on the band saw, the beautiful grain of the Douglas Fir was revealed, and we spent

some time smelling it and looking at it, and talking about fir and

where it comes from and how it grows and all of the things that were made from it. We looked at the difference between the hundred-year-old patina on the outside and the fresh golden color of the inside and talked about that contrast. Finally, after all of this, they started to design these benches.

An interesting thing occurred: Though I was careful not to insert myself into the design process in any way, the design that the students came to looked very much like something that could have come off of my drawing table. Here is an in-progress dry-fit of some of the parts:

The lines are clean, the material is simply presented and the history of the wood is honored. These students have different design styles from each other and from me, so this turn of events was unexpected. Which got me to thinking.

Is there something inherent in a reverence for history and an excitement about historical material that has a universal aesthetic? Could it be possible that, given an appropriate understanding of the provenance of the material, there are design choices that everyone would make?

This is a dangerous line of questioning, of course, implying that there is a pre-determined design path. But I can not help but wonder. I can not help but wonder if we all took the time to really get to know where we came from, to really look thoughtfully at all of the processes and chains of events that brought us to this moment, this Now, if we would not stand in more of an accord with regards to where we are going. If everyone all together made themselves aware of the history of our making, of the history of our building, of our governing, of our belief systems, if that would not help bring us together and unite us in a more thoughtful process as we figure out what kind of world we want to move through, and what kind of world we want our children to move through. I think it might help, at the very least.

So this is my assignment to everyone I meet up with today: Find one thing that is near you right now and really look at it. Think about how it came into your life, and then think about how it got to wherever you found it. How many trucks across country, how many miles on a container ship from Asia? What are the raw materials? Where did the petroleum for the plastic come from? Who got it out of the ground? Where did the tree that provided the wood (or the paper pulp) grow, and who cut it down? What kind of processing plant created it, and who works there? How do they work? What is their life like? What about the person who sold it to you? What is their life like? What is important to them? After thinking about all of this for a few minutes about one object, look at all of the objects in your house and realise that there is a similar thought process about all of them. Even gum wrappers. Even dish soap.

Boggles the mind.

evaluation

the least pleasant part of being a teacher is the ritual of grading. I have always made jokes about colleges that don't give grades, but as an educator there is some merit to the philosophy. The students here seem to be really fixated on grades, some of them so much so that when and "unfair" grade is assigned, it can prompt angry emails, heated discussions, even tear-filled office visits.

This led me to do a little reading about grade inflation, and about what people think about it. One of the colleagues that I am teaching with this semester said that he has even noticed it in himself over the past five years, that at some point a "C+" became a "B-."

I absolutely understand this trend. Never having taught a class in which grades could be evaluated by raw data, I can't speak to the process for grading, say a 100 level math test, or a "names and dates" type history test (though I do not know if such things still exist). All of my teaching is done in a studio setting, and involves in-depth, exploratory conversation with each student. While I love this process, a side effect is that I tend to get emotionally entangled in each student's journey, which makes me more compassionate toward them than perhaps I should be.

One conversation that comes out of this line of observation is the one about "process over product." Is it more important that the students learn to apply a critical, thoughtful design process to each design challenge, or is it more important that the end product look good? Depending upon which side of the bed I get up, my answer to this changes. And this is not what I am writing about this morning.

This morning I am more interested in evaluation in general. A grade is an evaluation on a really comforting level. We understand where "B" stands next to "A" after all. We understand that "Average" is perceived as "Bad" while "Above Average" is perceived to be "Average." This all makes sense. But these are all external judgments, and though they may apply within certain constructs, they are all pretty arbitrary constructs. I was reminded recently of how I felt about "success" as a set designer when I first moved to New York, that the yardstick went from "anonymity" at the bottom end to rave reviews in the Times and the Voice at the top.

It is a construct for evaluation that is as valid as any other, I suppose, but it was so freeing when I decided that it no longer applied to me, that I would rather be evaluated based on whether a line that I spliced held, or, when I got to graduate school, whether a chair held the person sitting in it in a comfortable way. In some ways it is a shift to a system of evaluation in which complete anonymity is at the top of the yardstick: If the user does not notice that they are successfully using the object, if it functions so perfectly that there are no issues at all, then it is at its most successful.

Of course, it is a little disingenuous for me to imply that I don't have an interest in being published or recognised publicly (I only just now notices that "published" and "public" share a root. I will have to look in to that later). And there are external evaluation processes that matter to me a great deal: Karen's approval being one, my student's successes being another. But I think I am shifting as I get older toward processes of evaluation that value experiential success over opinions of observers, for the most part.

I have been talking to a couple of the students here about how little their grades will matter when they get out and are working. A client is not going to ask what grade they made in Sophomore Design. Or choose another designer because that grade was a “B.”

The other side of that, of course, is that as we have no other commonly accepted evaluation criteria, a great many other decisions are being made based on a student’s grade. The most important of these is financial aid: In a time and at a university in which the price tag for an education at the collegiate level is sneaking towards $200 000, financial aid is a necessity not just for students from working-class backgrounds. Even the very privileged students that we tend to have here often rely on some kind of financial aid, which is often heavily dependant on GPA.

Which comes back to being emotionally tied up in the process of our students. And to what an education is really for. As a Program, the Interior Design faculty got together and re-wrote our mission statement. We talked a lot about what kind of graduates we wanted to produce. Not once did the subject of GPA come up, not once did we even think of using that rubric as a useful yardstick. We came to the conclusion as a collective that we want to produce “curious and critical thinkers.”

I love the process of inquiry. Most of what I do as I stand at a student’s drawing table is ask them “why?” They are beginning to notice that, too, and some of them are asking it themselves, which makes me very proud. I feel like the most important thing that I can teach them is to look in the face of all of the dogma that bombards them (religious, retail, political, social) and to question question question to make sure that they think it is valid. That is the real success as far as I am concerned. And in the end, that is what I want to evaluate.

But it is not something that one can do once and then be finished and get a grade. This inquiry HAS to be an on-going process. When we stop asking questions we stop thinking for ourselves. And this is what I am confronting in my students: That they do a great deal of work until the deadline, but then they want to stop and move on, to put the project in their portfolio and never look at it again.

So this morning I have been thinking about how to evaluate them in such a way that they continue to question. What system can I use as an educator that encourages a continued critical inquiry while simultaneously providing a useful and compassionate comment on a student’s progress?

I am still working on this. I have a feeling I will be for some time to come.

delight

as most people do, I have a set of objects that are part of my daily accoutrements. Nothing earth shattering, most of it, probably very similar to the things that you carry. About six months or a year ago I decided I wanted one of those things to be a pocket knife. For many years a pocket knife was a standard part of my life, but I sort of fell out of the habit. It seemed a little too macho so I kind of let it go.

But I decided I wanted to carry a small knife, one that I could use to open letters, that kind of thing. What used to be called a "pen knife" in the days when pens were made of feathers or reeds and had to be constantly trimmed to stay sharp. So I started combing the flea markets and antique shops looking for the right pocket knife. Something small, with only one blade (maybe two), wooden scales on the handle. Something that is clearly a tool not a weapon, so that there is no false manly implication that I know how to defend myself. We get so specific with this kind of thing, and often I find that I get too specific and can not find just the right thing, so I never have it at all.

Karen found one for me for Christmas:

It is small, and I like the squared-off blade (developed by a Civil War amputee who needed to use the edge of his pants pocket to open his pocket knife as he only had one hand). The handle feels good in my hand and it is nice to have a good, sharp knife sometimes. So even though it was not quite what I had in mind, it has rapidly become a part of my daily coterie of objects. And it got me thinking about delight.

We all have objects that delight us, that have an emotional resonance beyond mere use. Many of the objects that I have made have this quality for me, that when I sit in them or hold them or stir scrambled eggs with them the experience is heightened and made more important and exciting, somehow, than they would otherwise be. I find that, for me, it is often objects that were made by someone I know and given to me that have this quality, though that is not true across the board. And though it is not true for everyone, I wonder how many people respond more to a made object than a bought one.

Of course, this gets into a bigger discussion about what is actually made and what is manufactured, and where the line is drawn, and whether there is any way to draw that line. This is a discussion that many much more erudite people than I are having, and is not really the thrust of this entry. I am more interested at the moment in celebrating the objects (bought or made) that bring me delight on a regular basis. The pocket knife (which is bought, after all, and industrially produced) is one. It is the kind of object that I enjoy holding in my hand, and that I enjoy using. And it has made me think about the objects that I have made for other people, and about whether they bring the same kind of delight to them.

What are the processes by which delight can be woven into the making process? How does an object move beyond being a mere object, and become my knife or chair or spatula or hat? Of course retailers have been trying to figure that out for years, and are not any closer to figuring it out, which makes me wonder if it is impossible to mass-produce.

Maybe delight is about stories. Maybe it is about memories that an object contains. Maybe it has to be about what the end user brings to it, and how the object gets woven into the user's lives.

This obviously bears more examination. In the meantime, though, it is nice to be aware of the delight that we feel in the world around us, even in carrying a humble pocket knife.