By Corinne Flax

March 10, 2006

Wood Shop

Here’s the thing about my arts workshop class: we had to do wood shop last night.  Wood shop, something you may recall from seventh grade, or at least that’s when I recall it from.  In seventh grade wood-shop we weren’t allowed to use the big pieces of wood, and we had to get permission to use anything besides glue.  In graduate school wood-shop we were just sort of let loose and told to make whatever we wanted with whatever we wanted.  Saws, drills, rasps, sand-paper, awls, anything and everything was at our disposal.  No power tools, but then I wouldn’t know how to use them.
           
In seventh grade I made a hideous pencil holder.  It must have weighed three or four pounds and was constructed entirely out of large poorly sanded blocks of wood.  I painted it green.  It held four pencils, which went into unevenly spaced holes which I had drilled into the topmost roughly sanded block of green painted wood.  Needless to say the only thing left of this pencil holder are my memories.
           
The second, and I believe final, project that I worked on in seventh grade was a board of wood upon which I affixed the masks of comedy and tragedy.  These masks had to be carefully carved out, sanded down, and shaped.  The board of wood was painted white, and the masks were painted red and blue.  I remember this project mostly because it was so frustrating.  I just couldn’t get my masks to look like comedy or tragedy.  Instead they looked like lump and misshapen.
           
My shop teacher, Mr. Clark was missing at least one finger, which I believe used to be a prerequisite to teaching middle school shop class.  His classroom was very dark because he always kept his shades drawn.  This didn’t stop him from having a profusion of plants on his windowsill.  All of the plants had pressed themselves as far through the Venetian blinds as possible, in a search for sunlight.  Obviously Mr. Clark did not believe in rotating his plants to make them grow straight.
           
Last night my shop teacher was a woman in her mid-thirties who was not missing any fingers. Nor did she have coke bottle glasses, an over bite, an under bite, a stoop, or a speech impediment.  She teaches shop to four year olds, and they get to use the saws.  She showed us a video of this.  While I agree that would shop must be great for the little kids I do not in a million billion years want to teach it.  In fact I would rather not teach art period, except in small and easily managed doses.  
           
The object that I made last night was a nothing thing. I made it entirely out of wood scraps and it had a moveable part sort of.  It wasn’t a box, a pencil holder, a fish, or anything at all.  I used at least eight nails, a rasp, a hammer, a chisel, and a drill.  I did not take it home to show my mom.  I’ll try and remember to bring my camera next time so I can take a picture and share it.
           
Our wood-shop teacher, who in true Bank Street fashion was walking around talking to us during class said to me, “It’s so interesting that you decided to use only scraps!  What made you do that?”  I said “I don’t know.”  But I knew.  The reason I used scraps is this: what is the point in taking a perfectly good piece of wood and cutting it up to make an ugly pencil holder?  I can see why it’s good for kids, but not for me.  I had a lot more fun just messing around, new wood would have meant pressure to create something.

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March 9, 2006

Weekend Plans

Here’s what’s up for the weekend; two art shows, three solid days of work, a reunion with not one but two long lost friends, one with a not particularly lost friend, and I’m taking photos of children’s art.  Pretty busy weekend considering (considering what????).  I’m closing the store on Saturday and Sunday night, which seems to be my new schedule.  Every week from now till April I’ve got Wednesday and Thursday off, and my actual weekend is totally compromised.

But that’s ok!

I don’t mind to much actually because let’s face it, who ever got work done on Sunday anyway?  As far going out on Saturday is concerned I suppose I will miss it, but I’ll just have to make up for it on Thursday and Friday night. 

Tonight I’m going to Fountain, an exhibition that has been set up in opposition to the Armory show.  Check all of this out at www.fountainexhibit.com for Fountain and www.thearmoryshow.com for The Armory.  I don’t have a problem with commercial art, or noncommercial art, or mainstream art, or whatever.  I usually don’t like anything I see at openings because I spend to much time talking to my friends, trying to get at the free wine and cheese, and trying to look cool.  I wish this wasn’t the truth, but it is.  The last time I went to an opening and was honestly into a piece of work I got strange looks, so I’ve more or less given that up.

The other show I’m going to is the third Le Castelevania party which is being thrown at Bar Sputnik in Brooklyn.  You may remember that for the second party I got to write a bunch of stuff for a zine that was being handed out.  Not this time, which makes me sad, but hey I still got invited to show up so that’s always nice.  Here’s the website http://lecastlevania.com/ it’s pretty difficult to read, but I can’t help that.  The people putting this show on don’t want you to understand or like anything, at least that’s my feeling.  There’s a certain aesthetic of anger and dissatisfaction going on here that is appealing to me on a very base level.

As far as the long lost friends go there as mentioned above there are two of them.  One is a friend from college who I haven’t seen since graduation.  She’s going to turn up at Fountain tonight, and I’m so excited to see her.  She works so hard, has two jobs and such, doesn’t get out much etc.  I wonder what she’s going to look like.  The other is a friend who I worked with in MA at my very first Sbux.  He saw on Friendster that I’d moved to NYC and, as it turns out, so had he!  He emailed me and now we’re going to try and get a beer on Friday night.  It’s cool when Friendster actually works to keep people in touch.  I’m looking forward to a lovely weekend, and I hope the same for everyone else.

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March 3, 2006

Another Week In The Life

There’s this old saw about the month of March, the lion, and the lamb.  I won’t go any farther in that direction, just wanted to point out that I noticed it was snowing outside today.

It’s been one of those weeks that leaves me feeling tired and sore, although maybe it isn’t the week, maybe it’s the head cold I’ve been fighting since Sunday.  I wrote my first real paper this week, with APA citations and everything.  One thing I realized was that I was using ‘then’ and ‘than’ wrong, as well as illicit and elicit.  On a more positive note it occurred to me that I was really enjoying writing my paper.  I spent a good five minutes in awe of the fact that I was really enjoying the topic and the challenge of making a concise well cited paper about it. 
           
Said topic was the developmental characteristics of a child during the first two years of life.  We were meant to look at these characteristics in the frame of the Developmental Interaction Approach. This approach is all about looking at the way someone organizes their experiences in order to cope with the world around them.  I won’t go to much more in depth on that, except to say that I really enjoyed writing this paper, and I don’t remember the last time I said that about a research paper.  Let’s hope I stay this involved and excited.
           
Part of what made me enjoy this paper so much is that I really love the class.  The teacher is a really interesting person, and I feel like she has a pragmatic approach to things that I like.  She told me I was wrong a few classes ago, and it didn’t even make me upset or anything.  We were discussing a three year old boy’s behavior in relation to his eighteen month old sister and I said that it looked like normal older child jealousy and aggression.  She did not agree that the level of aggression was normal, or tolerable.  She told me so bluntly, in fact almost aggressively.  I was a little taken aback, and so were a couple other people who came up to me after class to see if I was ok.
           
And I was!

That’s what’s so surprising to me.  In the past if a teacher had spoken to me like that I would have either a)hated them for life or b)been really upset. I wasn’t though, I just listened to her opinions and wrote them down, went home and had dinner.  No sweat, no stress, and I’m tempted to say no tears, no fears.
           
Does this mean I’m growing up?  Probably not, but there’s always a chance. 

New York City hasn’t failed yet to interest and entertain me.  I want to The Market in Nolita on Sunday.  This market is basically a young urban design market where fashion school kids and other young, hip, fresh (or whatever), designers come and hawk their wares.  Also there’s a few thrifters there too with obscenely expensive tissue paper thin Slayer t-shirts.  I happened to meet one of these at a party last week and he told me about the market, his name is Patrick and he had some really awesome stuff that was all out of my price range.  Some of the clothing is amazing, some is amazingly stupid, and most of it is more expensive than you think it’s going to be.  Good gawking though, for those of us who like to gawk, and they played nice music the whole time.  www.themarketnyc.com/flashmain.html Check it out if you like clothing that looks conspicuously over or under engineered.

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February 24, 2006

What What Lost, Now Is Found

What a bummer!  I have somehow lost all the photos I took of the Starbucks Darien party I went to a few weeks ago.  Somehow despite my sister’s reminders to ‘not forget my camera’ I forgot my camera and did not get a chance to look at the photos for a whole week. Finally the camera was returned to me by parcel post, lovingly wrapped by my darling eccentric mother.  She utilized two boxes, three layers of tissue, eight rubber bands, and two layers of biodegradable starch peanuts.  Quick as could be I unwrapped my baby (which wasn’t all that quick given the layers) took the camera home and downloaded the photos.  The problem is that now they are gone.  They aren’t on the my memory card anymore, I deleted them after I downloaded them and I can’t find them on my computer either.

This just in, right after I wrote this I looked around for the photos again...and found them!  Hooray for me!

Now that that’s all settled, I guess it’s time to move on.  I had an awesome time in New Jersey last weekend slumming at Drew with some old friends and something momentous has been decided.  I’m going skydiving in May!  How awesome is that?  So awesome! 

When I told my sister she said  “Why Corinne?  Why jump out of a plane if you don’t have to?” 

My reply “Well Leah I’ve always wanted to jump out of a plane, and I hope to always do it by choice, and not because I have to.”

At any rate it’s definitely  something I’m looking forward to a lot.  Jumping out of a plane and parachuting to earth is my kind of fun.  Perhaps it’s just me but I’ve always loved looking out the window of a plane and watching the world resolve itself as you go down for a landing.  As you head out of the clouds what looked like a series of geometric patterns only moments before resolves itself into fields, parking lots, tract housing, the world as we know it.  Imagine the thrill of being outside the plane while that was going on!  Plus I hear that afterwards you feel like your blood has been changed to electric Kool-Aid and that every part of you just sort of tingles and shakes with the excitement of it all.

Not that I’m finding life dull or anything like that.  As a matter of fact I’m very excited about the tutoring I just started doing with a 12 year old girl who lives in the Bronx.  This girl really likes to read!  It’s so nice.  I was very worried that she wouldn’t like reading, that all of our time together would be awkward and a stretch for me.  Instead I find her to be charming and much more open to thoughts and ideas then I had feared she would be.  Jamie (not her real name) is inquisitive and energetic, but also sweet and kind.  She really is the kind of child who makes you want to go into teaching, which is good because that’s my plan.

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