“The Envoy” by Jane Hirshfield

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.x

I don’t know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something—terror? happiness? grief?—
entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

x

Jane Hirshfield, “The Envoy” from Given Sugar, Given Salt. Copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield.

Ray Harryhausen

Martin McNeil/WireImage, via Getty Images

Ray Harryhausen died today. He was an intrepid animator devoted to stop action. This is the tedious and painstaking technique of minutely moving parts of objects/models, taking a single frame, and then minutely moving them again, taking another single frame, over and over again, in order to achieve seemingly flawless movement of an object or model on film. He developed a process, Dynamation, which combined live action and animated action which allowed the two techniques to interact with each other increasing the sense of filmic reality. His father, a machinist and inventor, often created the small models that he used with an intricate skeleton that could be moved in small increments. His mother often sewed the clothes (if needed) for the models to wear. Having seen King Kong in 1933, he was hooked on stop-action and worked on films like Jason and the Argonauts (featuring incredible sword fights between Greek warriors and skeletons), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, One Million Years BC (where Raquel Welch, in her second film, is carried off by a raging dinosaur), The Three Worlds of Gulliver, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Clash of the Titans. George Lucas said, ”Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.”

And part of his appeal to my sensibilities is that I grew up with his monsters and beasts all around me, especially on weekends.  My mother worked for a while at the Colony Theater in Toledo as a ticketseller in the little booth in front of the theater (remember those booths?). She obviously didn’t make a lot of money in this job but had the amazing perk of free tickets for her kids and family. So my brother and sister and cousins would spend whole weekends in the movie theater watching all kinds of monster films, many of which were Harryhausen’s. We would bring salami sandwiches for lunch which would “garlic” up the theater and sometimes we would have some change to buy a sugary treat from the concession stand. (It was in the Colony Theater that I remember testing M & M’s claim that they melt in your mouth not in your hand. I proved their claim false.)

Sometimes we would watch the same films more than once as we waited for my mom to get off of work. Sometimes we would collect empty popcorn boxes strewn by patrons on the floor for prizes offered by the theater. Sometimes there were hula hoop contests and other entertainment in between the features.

This is all to say that monsters on youtube or even on large digital monitors can be effective, but there is something profoundly nerve-wracking and intensely frightening and literally larger-than-life about an animated monster on a cinemascopic screen (the kind they have since divied up into three or more theaters). And in the midst of that scariness there was something really eerie about stop-action that was enthralling and utterly engaging. As a viewer you knew how the animation was done, yet it still compelled and wowed you. Stop action as opposed to its digital counterpart has a touch of rawness and stiltedness about it that somehow makes it paradoxically incredibly believable and fantastical. “There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy,” Harryhausen said in 2006. “If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.”

Ray Harryhausen has passed on, but his monsters and dinosaurs, skeletons and beasts still animate my memories.

“Companion” by Lydia Davis

Bodies of Memory

Last night, we saw Bodies of Memory, a performance piece created by a friend of ours, Ginny Sykes. Using dance, film, original and published music (live and recorded), and photographs projected onto a large screen, Bodies of Memory explores how generations of women, (three sisters and a mother) deal with a paternal suicide. The powerful intermingling of the media helped to layer the complexity of the narrative. Shadows of the dancers meshed and interacted with filmic images of flowers, or family photographs, or films of dancers creating visceral conflict and resolution, accompanied as well with sound poems and live music which accentuated the tensions. In the program, Ginny writes, “Each person struggles with questions of identity, love, and separation, against the background of the father/husband’s death…society’s constraints and the rules governing all of their lives are challenged, while a figure from the future suggests a way forward.” Using dance as the primary means of telling the story of this trauma allows for aesthetic transformation and healing. This is the story of Ginny’s mother, her mother’s sisters, and her grandmother. The great granddaughter is the way forward.

What is so appealing about Ginny’s work is her continual reaching and stretching for ways to express herself. She is willing to let loose and break boundaries, artistic and otherwise, to make her points. She is not satisfied with the enormous accomplishments she has already achieved, but is now exploring filmic techniques and performance more deeply and meaningfully than ever before. She is a collaborator and team player who can let others vest their energies into the whole while still maintaining her strong singular vision. (Her communal spirit was tested in the 40 plus public arts projects she has worked on for many years in Chicago, involving school children  and community in their design and execution.) Drilling into her family story through its many stratums in Bodies of Memory requires the audience to viscerally interact with the abstract and conceptual meanings presented and it also opens the personal crevices we all own and layers those on top of what we are experiencing in this performance piece. It makes us all look to our own Bodies of Memory and examine the habitual choreography we all perform.

From the program:

photo by Joe Mazza

Ginny Sykes’ work includes painting, performance, installation, film and public art. She returned to collaborative performing in 2007, at the invitation of Victor Sanders, co-creating Velocity, Lessons of Water and Thirst, and Divided beauty…Her solo Return/Redux was shown at Oakton Community College’s conference Chicago Feminisms: Past, Present, and Future in 2009. In 2012 she made her first film She Wants to Know about her installation work in New Zealand. Sykes most recently exhibited in Surface at Chicago Art Sourced, Select Fair in Miami, Supermarket 2013 in Stockholm, Sweden, and Santitos at the Loyola Museum of Art. Sykes has completed over 40 public art works for communities, schools, and civic spaces such as On the Wings of Water at O’Hare airport and Arc of Nature at the Open Lands Lakeshore Preserve. She received an award from the Illinois Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects for Rora, an interpretive history of the Chicago River. Sykes has taught in both the Museum and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Evanston Arts Center, Lill Street Arts Center, and Illinois Arts Council Art education programs. Her work is in the publications A Guide to Chicago Murals, Urban Art Chicago, and the Chicago Public Art Guide. She has a BFA in painting from Washington University and studied at Studio Cecil Graves in Florence, Italy. She is completing her masters in the Women Studies and Gender Studies program at Loyola University, Chicago.

rehearsal image

Flying the friendly skies

I haven’t posted for the past four days because I was on our 8^th grade class trip to Washington DC. with 130 8th graders. Internet was intermittent and well, by the end of the day, I was just plain exhausted. Actually it was a wonderful trip. DC is an awesome city filled with all kinds of sites and museums, chockfull of history, monuments from every time period and era, large and small, commemorating important events and people in America’s shared journey, and all very accessible to lots of people at the same time. It’s also an incredibly exhausting trip—on the go from 6am to 11pm, having to be upbeat and observant, playful and vigilant with teenagers 24/7.

But none of the students acted as disrespectfully as the man who sauntered up to the counter at the gate, where I had been waiting in line to find out information about why our return flight was delayed. A student was in line with me to keep me company. There were two United Airlines workers behind the counter. One was busy handling a large group of women who were coming from a Headstart conference and needed to switch flights to American because otherwise the delay would make them miss their connections in Chicago. There was another woman behind the counter but she was entirely focused on her computer screen, not recognizing those of us in line so none of us bothered to interrupt her, thinking she was working on some critical information regarding some flight or other.

As we in line patiently waited, this very tall man sauntered up to the counter in front of all of us and leaned against it.

A bit irritated, I said, “Excuse me, but there is a line here.”

“Oh, but I have status,” he replied loudly for everyone to hear.

I guess I must have had a shocked look on my face, surprised at his mean-spirited  behavior. “And any staring at me is not going to make me change my behavior,” he said looking directly at me with a very large grin. It was clear he was a man who always got his way.

A woman behind me said, “This is a line and you f—ing need to go to the back of it.”

“If you gave as much money as I did to the Obama campaign, then you could stand up here too.” I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that except that it felt awkwardly embarrassing.

He leaned over the counter and quietly asked the woman behind the computer screen his question. She actually answered him, even though she had heard this entire exchange (it was too loud to ignore). She did not say she was busy behind her computer. She did not tell him he needed to get to the back of the line. She actually answered his question. I guess this is what it means to fly the friendly skies.

As he walked away, he looked at the growing line and said in a booming drawn-out and dramatic voice, more fit for a Shakespearean monologue, “Thanks for all the ill will and thanks for dropping the ‘f’ bomb. That was very liberal of all of you.” Then he and his inflated ego walked away, with victory in each of his steps. The woman behind the counter shrunk behind her computer and continued typing.

The student, who was waiting in line with me, said he never thought that people like that actually existed. He thought that such characters could only exist in books and that he had never seen an ego quite that large. I responded that the man’s ego only seemed really big and that it was probably a lot smaller than his own. This demonstration of monumental arrogance and exaggerated self-importance was probably the most memorable monument my student saw all week.

Creative Responses to All Quiet

In response to their reading of All Quiet on the Western Front, my students created poetry, diary entries which contrasted with letters home, did drawings, a hooked rug (see below).  One student destroyed a copy of All Quiet, filling a bag with its ripped out pages, gluing the pages to the outside as well, with a quote from Vonnegut, “Tiger got to hunt. Bird got to fly. Man got to sit and wonder why why why. Tiger got to sleep. Bird got to land. Man got to say he understand.” In the painting above, the student showed each of the main characters from left to right: Kemmerich with leg wound, Haie with the wound in his back, Kropp and his leg wound, Paul, Kat holding two geese with a splinter in his head, Mueller/Tjaden in the airman’s boots, and Detering and the cherry blossoms. Their huge shadows are of small scared children.

One student wrote a 98 page short story/ novel, “The Third Estate,” in response to this book. The class was pretty impressed with the energy that went into that project. There was a rap, actually quite good, which also included a detailed rendition of the causes of World War I (“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori/ This is a rap of World War I and its story”), a song called “A Pair of Boots,” a sensitive piece composed for the piano, even a playlist of thirteen songs was created, with explanations for each song selected and how each one relates to the book (including song artists Death Cab for Cutie, Regina Spektor, Marina and the Diamonds, and Stealing Sheep).

I need to always remember, honor, and give space for the many creative talents of my students.

Dear General Shinseki- part II

OK. I should have expected this. The students wrote their letters to General Shinseki on Thursday (see Dear General Shinseki) and they were more focused and on task than I had seen them all year. They were earnest and thoughtful. They were serious and committed. Even the students who are not always the biggest cheerleaders of school experience were hunkered down and spent the entire double period writing the letter. Because of all of our close reading and discussions and exploration of historical context, they were ready to put their energies, ideas, and creativity to paper. And they had a lot to say. I was most surprised by all of the questions they had for me —Where does the period go- after the citation or after the quotation marks? Did I do this right? Is there a comma here before the quotation marks? Should “general” be capitalized? Does this make sense? Since when are 8th graders, one month from graduation, so concerned about proper punctuation or articulating their ideas so “clearly”? “When we write for you, we know what you want, but this is different. We have to explain things.” Isn’t “being aware of audience” what I have been trying to teach them all year?

The next day GF said, “The letter to Shinseki was a nice way to reflect on All Quiet  because it let us really express ourselves much more than responding to a quote or essay question that you assigned, by connecting it to something real.”

TR added, “Instead of giving you our opinions about the book, we gave it to someone who can possibly change the situation….not that you are not capable.”

“It was a good way of putting our knowledge into the world,” EN said. “It connected the actual, tangible, goin’ on all around us outside world to things we’ve been doing behind closed doors, in a classroom.”

Below are just a few quotes from the letters that made me smile at the poise and confidence my students demonstrated with their words:

…I am fourteen years old, and in the eighth grade…, but that is of no import. I wish to be considered in the same way as you would consider an adult, since I write as such.

Greetings. You have received letters like this and will receive more (roughly forty from my peers alone), telling you how to do your job. My apologies but I am going to be one of the people who writes those letters.

We’ve just finished reading All Quiet on the Western Front, a war novel chronicling the experiences of a young man fighting for Germany in World War I—experiences which have given us some window into a world we (or at least I) have never seen as more than the ARMY STRONG booths at amusement parks.

…As I’m sure you can see, General, there’s a problem.

Thank you for taking the time to read my passionate response to a powerful book and concept. I hope that one day these statistics will not exist. That one day there will be no homeless veterans, no untreated cases of PTSD, and no veterans in jail. I hope that one day we’ll live in a world where the battlefield at home is nowhere near as severe as the battlefield overseas.

I will definitely post any response we may get from the General.