Home from Chicago

Well, I made it out of Chicago.

The snow hit late Saturday afternoon and it was ugly. The wind was howling and the stuff was coming down in icy, wet sheets. Many flights were cancelled Saturday night and I wondered if my Sunday afternoon flight was on the chopping block as well. Thankfully, there was a lull in the weather Sunday afternoon before things picked up again that night and I was able to fly back to Seattle without a hitch.

I enjoyed Chicago. They people have a good vibe. They seem very down-to-earth and honest. I love Seattle, but the folks here can be a little too full of themselves, take themselves too seriously. The mid-western sense of humor was a nice change.

The McGraw-Hill focus group that I took part in taught me a lot about the corporate world and made me very thankful for being in academia. Although I make a lot less than someone working at McGraw-Hill, I have a freedom of thought and opinion that is priceless. It makes me think of that Utah Phillips song where he asks, "What sense does it make to give someone your brain for eight hours a day on the presumption that they will give it back to you in an unaltered state? Fat chance!" I may not be rich, but I am me and I don't have to worry about compromising what I believe in because someone else doesn't like it. This is one of the beautiful things about getting tenure. Not many jobs give you that kind of security.

So now I'm back in Seattle. The weather got cold again, the forecast says we might even get snow tomorrow. I don't know about that, but I did have to scrape my windshield this morning. I don't mind the Seattle winter too much. It recharges my batteries and makes summer even sweeter.

Visiting Old Friends

Today was my first full day in Chicago and I spent most of it in the Art Instiute of Chicago. I was told that if there was one thing I was to see in this city, it was the Art Institute, and I must admit it did not disappoint. In fact, it knocked my socks off.

The building is big. So big, in fact, that it spans railroad tracks. The ingenious architects used this opportunity to create a long, narrow gallery currently full of medieval weaponry, to connect the sections of the museum over the tracks.

Probably their most notable pieces fall under the American Modern classification, and I was very pleased to see Edward Hopper's Night Hawks. It's not big painting, but it is powerful. There's a loneliness in it and a yearning for closeness that any traveller can appreciate.

The big exhibit right now is called Cezanne to Picasso. It's about Vullard, an art dealer who worked with many of the greats during the French Impressionist movement. Having lived in Paris and studied this work for a long time, I was very familiar with it. It's also some of the best-known art in the U.S. Even though much of it is over 100 years old, Americans still think of it as 'hip'. I have to admit it's great art, but it's also f'ing old and I honestly prefer to see stuff I haven't seen before, but it was like visiting old friends. They are familiar, and comfortable, yet they still excite you and and make you feel good.

There was Cezanne with his sloppy, bold colors and shapes that are so stripped down. His strokes are lines and his fascination with light really inspired all the following impressionists. Matisse was well represented, particularly his Fauve period, which I find a bit immature, but it is fun to look at all those pretty colors. Renoir was there with his soft, angelic use of color and light - faces that glow in a dream. Degas shows his explosions of color and his passion for movement and dance. And then there is Picasso. Almost like a savior to the rest of them, he mastered all of the techniques before him only to completely strip down his work to its very essence and render the guts of the thing for everyone to see. He's like Dylan on canvas. He makes it look simple, but in fact only he could pull it off. I watched one woman walk into the Picasso room with hands spread wide open, as if to say, "Here I am. Take me." Also like Dylan, Picasso completely copied the genius of others before him. In Dylan's case it was folk singers and bluesmen like Woody Guthrie and Ledbelly. For Picasso it was the 'primitive' artists. Art from Africa, Oceania and Native America was such an obvious profound influence on him, sometimes it looks like he was photocopying. He tapped into an artistic tradition thousands of years old and utilized it to bring his own art beyond what all the European masters could have ever taught him.

But the two artists that really got to me this time were Van Gogh and Gaugin. I don't think this is a surprise to anyone, but these guys were good. They were also both kind of nuts, which probably explains some things. Van Gogh uses colors that are so incongruous but work so well to evoke a sense that you carry with you, even if you don't want it to. You may not want to look, but you have to. You know that the feat performed in front of you is nothing less than sheer genius. They had Starry Night over the Rhone. Dumb struck I stood there and watched how geometric force and color collided into an effortless night-scape. His portrait of Mme Roulin was haunting and intimate at the same time. She reminded me so much of my father's mother - strong hands and powerful eyes.

More than the rest, I love Gaugin for the unabashed pleasure he derives from studying the human form. There is a sensuality that some might call erotic, but I think of it more innocently. His figures are bold, his colors are deep and images are pure. It helps that many of his scenes involve beautiful Tahitian women. But hey, who am I to judge?

The contemporary stuff was a bit weak. I guess you can't have it all. Oh! The coolest thing, though, was in the kids' gallery. They had a "Touch Gallery" where marble and bronze busts of real statues were secured to tables and kids could actually touch them. One kid spent like a minute trying to pick this one statue's nose. It was great! How often are you told in museums, "Don't touch!" They could touch all they wanted. Heck I even copped a feel.

First Night in Chicago

So this is my first night in Chicago. I've never been here before, and I'm hoping to explore the city tomorrow. So far my impression is that it's big. It's big and tall - kind of like those stores at the mall - with lots of steel and concrete. No wonder most of northern Minnesota is big hole in the ground and the Appalachians are shrinking by the minute; what was earth is now big freaking buildings with lots of boxes in them where people sit at computers, waste paper and seriptitiously write their blogs about how much work sucks.

So the plane landed at 7pm and it's currently 11 pm. In those four hours I met two very interesting fellows. The first is a professional dog show judge from Ventura, CA. I never got his name, but he LOVES dogs. I don't mean in a perverse way, just in way that would allow a man to talk to a complete stranger for 45 minutes non-stop about the engineering and art of dog breeding. This dude was a hoot! I never thought someone could get excited describing the history of the Doberman pincher. I couldn't help but mess with him. I asked him if he ever owned a mut. "Oh, when I was a kid," he said. "But you don't know what you'll get. That's the problem with mixed-breeds. When I get a dog I want to know what it's temperment will be and how it will respond." I wonder if this guy ever woke up to find that his dog took a dump in his slippered and eaten his wallet. Something tells me 'no'.

The second character this evening is a 63 year old dental implant expert from Montreal. The guy looked like a mad composer from the Muppets, complete with ascot, huge nose, long hair and a gotee that made me think of a 19th century snake oil salesman. He also had this habit of sucking on his teeth. I wonder if it had anything to do with spending years studying 'what goes in your mouth'.

I had a beer with him at Miller's Pub. After he explained the art of crowns and molds, I thought that the conversation couldn't get any more exciting, but low and behold this dude is also a poet. "I write about children and activism," he said. "You know this war thing? (suck) Your president is a dipshit." I love the elogquence. Doesn't it just roll off the tongue. Then I discovered he has some ideas about God. "What happened was (suck) the world was visited by aliens 4 maybe 5 thousand years ago (suck). We know this. Everyone knows this."

What I love most about meeting characters like this is how they try to demonstrate an expertise in my field, whether it's teaching or biology, or whatever I've decided to tell them I do. "Biology! I love (suck) biology. You know those fish (suck) in the ocean? Incredible." He continued to talk about environmental issues, too. "Global warming. I don't (suck) know. Maybe, maybe not. What I do know is these heavy (suck) metals are bad. That we are fucking up." Yes we are, I reassured him. Yes, we are.

He gave me his contact info. I'm hoping to get one of his poems. If I do, I'll make sure to post it.

Lands of the North

I just got off the phone with Matt Donahue. He's currently living on the North Slope of Alaska, working as an engineer for a construction company. He told me that walking home tonight the temp was 38 degrees BELOW ZERO, and that it will hit 50 below by the end of the night. Crazy. I don't think humans were meant to live in conditions like that. The very thought of it makes my bones hurt. Hell, I bitched today that it was too cold when the wind picked up and dropped the thermometer to 45.

The thing is, humans have been living in the arctic for a long time. As a matter of fact some of the oldest, continuous societies in the world are in the arctic. The Inuit have been living there successfully for over 10 thousand years - five times longer than Christianity. They do it mostly by consuming large quantities of marine mammal and exposing as little skin as possible to the elements - not many inuit nudists.

They developed a society based on the basic elements they had at their disposal: whale, caribou, seal and snow. Anyone who can live in a house make of ice is a star in my book. They don't rely on foreign oil to drive cars to Wal-Mart to buy huge TVs that run on electricity produced from strip-mined coal. Nope, fun is all about dolls made from walrus skin and brushing your hair with bowhead balene, or telling stories about that one huge blizzard that was so bad, the day after seabirds were literally frozen to the ice and the whole tribe feasted for weeks. Ah, the life.

All I can say is that I like my comfortable house and its trappings, and I don't know how I feel about eating whale blubber. Maybe that doesn't make me one of the tough ones, but the way I figure it, if I ever find myself having to live with the Inuit, I'll reminisce back to this very moment. The house is warm, I ate a delicious meal, watched funny sitcoms on my second had TV and fell asleep in my warm bed, with visions of walruses and sugar plums dancing in my head.

President's Day

So I celebrated my day off from work by doing a crapload of grading. It wouldn't have been so bad if the students hadn't done, well, so bad. Sometimes I really wonder if they are thinking while they take their tests. It's painful. Then I realize that in that brief moment of frustration, I probably cared more about their success than they did. Well, that's not entirely true. They care. They care about succeeding in the overall game of being a 'success' in life, but they have a hard time focusing on the immediate problem or question that's in front of them. I need to remember that the mode of thinking that I ask of my students is not how most people engage their brains most of the time. Furthermore, they don't realize that the purpose of the class is to get them to engage their brains differently. That's the key. That's the credit they earn. Forget the GPA. It's about exercising some mental muscle.

God, I sound like a public service announcement.

The other thing that happened was that I discovered some serious cheating on the last exam. This is the first time I've found such a blatant example. The really sad thing is that the guilty student is really nice. But he/she is also a total stress-case and probably freaked during the exam and just peaked at his/her neighbor. Now I've got to deal with the situation. Ugh. Had this happened a few years ago when I was just starting out, I probably would have just brushed it under the rug, but my philosophy on such things has changed. I'm not so concerned with students liking me - getting tenure helps with that. I'm sick of seeing people who don't take responsibility (observe any level of government, business or dysfunctional family) and end up getting in trouble because they're not facing the reality of the situation. It's a shitty cycle and one that I don't want to help propagate.

Therefore, I will find myself feeling like a total schmuck telling a nice person they did something wrong and penalizing them severely for it. I wonder if this is what parenting is like.

My Photo

Day 1

Well, as a means of avoiding grading my Oceanograpy 101 midterms, I'm starting a new blog whilst listening to vintage Clapton. There are worse forms of procrastiantion I guess.

I'm not exactly what the purpose of this blog is, other than I've had this itching feeling that I need to get my ideas out of my head and into some communicable format. You'd think that being a teacher would give me enough of an outlet, but maybe I'm more of an megalomaniac than I thought. Actually, one reason I'd like to do this is to separate my work life from my personal life. I'm a science instructor at a community college in the Seattle area, and I can't speak as freely in class as I would sometimes like. It's important for a scientist to remain objective and not to be an advocate (most of the time), and more importantly, I do not want to alienate my students. But I got stuff I want to get out of my head -politics stuff, religion stuff, observations about society at large. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure there are other people out there who would like to read what I have to write. At the very least, my friends and family will...I hope.

Okay, I 've got to get back to grading. But in the meantime, here's a previous posting from last summer. It should give some idea of the kinds of things I'll be writing about.

-Woody

Monday, July 24, 2006

This is an entry from my Journal, dated July 8, 2006

Well, I'm in Anchorage, AK.

This is, officially, the farthest north I have ever been. Pretty cool.I have to say, it's kind of an odd town. People had told me it sprawls and that certainly is true. It also has that careworn look to it, like buildings around Yachats, OR. It's probably all the sand and gravel during the winter. Or maybe it's just winter period.

The people look hardy and are friendly. Maybe even what one might call "real". They are very patriotic and the Saturday Market began with a singing of the Star Spangled Banner. Everyone stopped and I took my hat off and placed it over my heart. Looking around I saw people of all races, white asian, native, black, looking towards the loudspeaker. There wasn't a flag to salute, though there were a ton of them ringing the perimeter of the market grounds. Maybe it was just me, but the moment didn't feel particularly patriotic. More perfunctory than anything. Fidgeting behind their tables, deciding which trinkets to put out. the retailers seemed to be more annoyed than sentimental.

I made my way to the Anchorage Museum of History and Art where I'm currently sitting. It was 11 AM and I have to catch a bus @ 3PM. My bus pass gets me a free voucher, so I figured I'd check out the museum before getting on the bus to Seward.

Upon arriving at the museum, I realized there was a cafe inside and I could use some real food. I dragged my bags to the counter, bought a sandwich and a soda and sat down at one of the tables. I began eating my sandwich when a nice, young lady from the counter walked over and asked me to move to a table that wasn't in the main foyer. I looked around and realized that behind some large columns, hidden in the shadows, were a few tables where people who bought from the counter were supposed to sit. I, unwittingly, had seated myself in the 'real' cafe, where people who get waited on sit.

In addition to the lack of condiments, my new table, also, lacks a view and any semblance of dignity. Looking around at the other crappy table patrons, I see that we have a lot in common. The guy seated on the other side of my particular large white column is wearing light hikers, not unlike my own, and brownish pants. I don't know what else he's wearing because everything from mid-shin on up is obscured by the aforementioned large, white column. The guy behind me works for one of the tour companies. I can tell by the little logo on his shirt. I hear at least one other diner, probably two columns over. I can hear the crinkling of the cellophane from his counter-bought meal. This is not the sound of money. Actually, it is the internationally recognized sound of "I don't have any money, so I had to buy this crappy sandwich wrapped in plastic."

I'm curious to see who sits in the real cafe, the one that has tables with salt and pepper and little flowers on them, and where patrons will have view of other patrons, who like, them, have the distinction of getting to watch other people eat while they enjoy their fresh croissant sandwich.