Open for business...

Here's the latest crazy endeavor we're undertaking.

Nice tie.

Fifth graders can get a little obsessive with ties.

I wish I could remember exactly how it came out. I was in the middle of a lesson, and I think I must've muttered something about a certain level of inattentiveness. Someone in the front row chimed in, "Mr. Shorb...we can't help it...it's your tie!"

"What?"

"Your tie! It's really nice!"

I was immediately skeptical, perhaps with my default setting still on defensive mode from my first two years of teaching. Had these little rascals been talking bad about my tie behind my back?!

But the nodding heads and sentiments of agreement when this student brought it up made me think otherwise. I reluctantly said, "Wait...raise your hand if you think this is a nice tie."

All eighteen hands immediately shot in the air with wide, excited eyes, big grins, and vigorously nodding heads.

Sure, this felt nice and affirming enough, but the rest of the day they just kept giggling at how wonderful my tie was. I would be teaching and could watch each one of their eyes zoned out, closely following my tie, looking back and forth whenever it swayed.

One girl asked, "How many polka dots does your tie have?"

"I don't know...you haven't counted yet?"

"I'm trying! You're moving too much!"

They even told the music teacher about it.

Seriously, it was bad. I'd be in the middle of talking and I would hear someone next to me, out of nowhere, sheepishly mumble, "Nice tie."

It was completely bizarre. I'm still giggling about it. The tie's a hit.

An announcement

So, I guess I never exactly made it very clear to you, Cyberspace, about the fork in the road Erica and I are taking. I tried to explain once, but didn't like how I went about it, so I deleted it shortly after and never took the time to reattempt.

By now you probably know we went to World Team this past summer so that they could put us through wringer and decide whether or not we could handle cross-cultural ministry in France.

They decided we could and invited us to join.

We've accepted.

And there you have it.

That doesn't mean we'll be leaving for Paris tomorrow, but it does mean we're planning to move there within a couple of years or so.

There's so much that could be said at this point, but I'll leave the majority of it for personal conversation, and the rest that's fit for cyberspace will be posted over at our recently renewed France Blog.

Voila.

Pleasantly Surprising News.

Two of my favorite bands are now labelmates.

Anathallo has joined WHY? on Anticon.

And the new album drops November 20th.

Here is one more reason why this year is going to close out nicely for good music.

School

I haven't said a whole lot about the opening of school, mostly because the only things I have to say probably aren't fit for cyberspace.

But today was probably, for a variety of reasons, one of the longest and busiest days of my teaching career, not necessarily in a bad way, just in a long way.

The kids were a little extra bonkers, and everyone including myself tried blaming it on the full moon. That is usually a true theory, by the way, from over three years of teaching experience, but on the way home I noticed the moon was a bit past that phase. So tomorrow at school I'm going to blame kids' behavior on the waning gibbous and see if anyone knows what I'm talking about.

And I'm going to do a scientific study on the calming affects of Six Parts Seven on 10 year-olds. This is a usually true theory as well, by the way, from over one year of using their music in the classroom. It was definitely the only thing that got the nineteen of us through the last twenty minutes of our day without raised voices, death glares, hallway talks, parent phone calls or nervous breakdowns.

So the goal for the first month of school is to get students to write in complete sentences. So far it's not working so well. For example, in the past two days I've received two cryptic notes in my comment box. Each contained only two words scrawled on their respective torn sheets of scrap paper.

"class pet"

and

"nice tie"

It's okay, because I think I like those notes better as incomplete sentences, as they are admittedly quite endearing, making me like their mischievous authors a bit more than I otherwise have been.

If Mr. Stevens doesn't plan on releasing a new album anytime soon, then this will just have to do...

Eagerly awaiting THIS:


















Then, eagerly awaiting my invitation to join the wagon. We have very similar artistic visions, and I think I'd be a valuable asset.

The Big, Bad World of Art

I'm on an art documentary kick, I suppose. I had been waiting some time to see My Kid Could Paint That and finally saw it last week. Then, I took Neville's advice and watched Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? as an appropriate follow-up. I'm so fascinated and excited that I placed the Oscar-winning biopic Pollock as next on my queue, and am looking to see when we can schedule a visit to the MET or Museum of Modern Art in NYC in the near future.

My Kid Could Paint That is the intriguing and mysterious story of a sweet little four-year-old named Marla who is supposedly a prodigy in abstract painting, making hundreds of thousands for her (or her parents?). After an infamous 60-minutes report, though, her "career" takes a turn for the worse. It raises all sorts of really intriguing questions on art, modern art, abstract art, and the art world, not to mention parenting, the power and nature of media, and the human psyche. I found the bonus features just as good as the film itself, with a follow-up documentary capturing reactions and additional commentary, and a really good interview with NY Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. Kimmelman makes excellent points and handles difficult discussions surrounding art very articulately and succinctly. Marla's still making art (or is she?) and selling it. Jeffrey Overstreet weighs in over at Image.

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? is the bizarre mystery of a five dollar painting found at a thrift store by a female truck-driver who didn't know any better. She bought it as a joke for a friend who needed to be cheered up, but when it didn't fit through the friend's door, it found it's way to a garage sale where a local art teacher planted a thought about it being a Pollock. The most amazing juxtaposition of cultures occurs when this feisty trailer-park trucker barges in on the snobbery of the art world, insisting for ten years straight that this painting was indeed a masterpiece worth fifty million dollars. They, of course, wouldn't give her the time of day. Is she chasing after a wild dream that simply isn't true? Do the critics ignore her because of who she is or what the painting is? Is she creating evidence or are they ignoring evidence? It's full of character who are simply too good to be true. It's a wild and fun ride, but sadly, leaves you more cynical towards the art world than anything else.

In the first, Kimmelman reminds us that skill is a lot harder to judge than one might think. A scribble might look simply like a scribble, and thus it's very easy to quite literally say, "My kid could paint that." But, when you or your kid actually gives it a shot, you come to find there's something special about that scribble that makes it pretty much impossible to replicate, thus making it a bit more special than you might have initially thought. (That doesn't necessarily mean the piece of art is worthwhile, nor that you have to like it, but you can't really discredit it on grounds of simplicity.) The same idea is echoed in the second doc, when a painter who has spent time in jail for forgery admits that he could never replicate a Pollock painting. He fools dealers with Picasso's and Monet's and Van Gogh's, but there's something about Pollock's work that is too difficult to achieve.

That idea has hit close to home in recent days, when, as has happened so often in the past, I wish so badly that I could be an artist and make something beautiful, but when I sit down to give the simplest of ideas a try, it fails rather miserably.

Also appreciated were Kimmelman's ideas on the effort needed to sometimes understand a work of art. I feel these are thoughts are so important for our world today, whether you're reading a novel or interpreting the Bible or deciding which candidate to vote for. At the risk of making this post longer than it needs to be, I'll close with his thoughts here...

"I think the beauty of art is that it is in so many ways open-ended. And we should have this in life, that there should be cultural things which allow us to add our own thoughts to them to decide for ourselves whether we like it. But the truth is that a lot of people don't want to have to bear that burden. We want to be told what we are supposed to think. We want to be spoon-fed stuff. And the fact is that most of our culture is about that: making things convenient for us, instantaneously obvious, whether it's fast food or bad television shows or whatever it is, it doesn't really take much effort on our part. So it relieves us of this obligation we actually have as human beings to try to make a little effort sometimes to get something that might be worth it if we put in the effort. But it's funny because we accept it in certain ways but not in others. We accept that you just aren't going to play baseball like Derek Jeter if you just decide to pick up a bat. You have to actually practice a little bit, be in little league, work on skills, and so forth. Effort is required and we admire that effort. It's just that in art the end result isn't as clear to people when they haven't made any effort at all. In other words, when Derek Jeter makes an amazing catch, we think, yeah, that's achievement, we get it. When Jackson Pollock is doing drips, because most people never make any effort to understand why that's an achievement, they just think it's meaningless.

There is a certain point at which it may be obligatory for you to make some effort to try to understand something that doesn't automatically say something. And if that white canvas doesn't automatically speak to you, you may wish to find out what it's doing there as opposed to saying, 'It's just a white canvas what difference does it make?' Or you can choose not to. But like all sorts of achievements in human culture...well, it's true in science, people don't assume that physicists have to make themselves perfectly clear to you otherwise what they're doing is ridiculous. Why should art be that way?"

In case you missed it...

A Nate Su remix with commentary by my brother-in-law...

A hymn overlaid with casual conversation...

A noisy song with fun-to-watch marbles...

A mellow closing number...

You think you know a woman...

My wife just stabbed me in the back and joined Facebook! You can find her over there. Tell her I said hello.