Kismet Arts Tangent

Self-portrait on the veranda. The sunniest day of this quarter, I imagine. I got my coffee from Peet’s down the street. Starting off the day with… apparently some composer named Mantz. It sounded more like Vivadi to me, but hey, there was 200 years worth of decent classical, it’s hard to keep all the files straight in the filing cabinet of my memory. (By the way, any of you who store information like that are bound to be bad at remembering because you’re not utilizing your strength of spatial memory to the fullest extent… anyways…)

I went to the library today. The kids were quiet and learning. I was surprised and loved that. There was a bulletin board and a large white piece of paper with the question scrawled in turquoise marker: Are the arts DANGEROUS? And I thought, I hope so.

My first drawing class with Claire Cowie was inspirational and lofty-sounding. The syllabus presented things that I haven’t really explored. The kind of exploration that requires the headlamp and the nerves of steel. I am preparing myself for my clumsiness. I don’t think I am as good at drawing as the pictures I imagine I am going to create, but aim high. I purchased a sketchbook. My first one in years. The white pages, the fresh start, the encourangement of a teacher, all that is bound to give me the freedom to flourish. Claire emphasized how art and school are sometimes oppositional. Art is spontaneous and its origin is within. School is structured and compulsory and comes from without.

That night, I went to Amon Tobin’s ISAM audiovisual spectacular at the Paramount. I was amazed, bewildered and inspired by the bombastic beats that swung high and low across the stange and through the projections into my mind. Awestruck, my heart was racing, my mind was racing. I felt a constant churning as if the industrial beats were electrodes attached to different parts of my brain, stimulating mostly the project node. The imagery and sounds of plastic wrappers electronically amplified gave me a new lease on what I thought was possible in the alignment of art and sound.