Education and Community Programs

ECP will be hosting an educator from the Presbyterian Ladies’ College of Melbourne, Australia in mid-December. She’s headed to the Walker to learn about all things art education-related for secondary students. (That’s high school, for the uninitiated.)

I’m taking a special interest because I lived in Western Australia for a couple of years while my mom was stationed at the Harold E. Holt naval communication base in the little town of Exmouth. I’ve been thinking of ways to slyly insert this bit of information into our soon-to-be-meeting. Alas, everything I think of just makes me look a little desperate. But I miss Australia sometimes!

Here’s a very typical scene of life in Exmouth - the emus wandering freely. On the military base, guards would open and close the gates to allow emus passage. They headed directly for the base commissary (grocery store) to get scraps from people.

This post at least started out ECP-related.

"And while I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something bigger and better than myself." - Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation, p. 11

Every Nov. 22nd I re-read the front page of the New York Times, from that fateful day in 1963. Now, it's even easier of course, because I can access it on-line from the comfort and convenience of my laptop. This saves me the trouble of pulling out the yellowing and increasingly brittle copy tucked neatly away in my Kennedy scrapbook, along with the photographic images, seared forever in my brain: Jackie, LBJ, Lee Harvey Oswald taking a bullet at close range.

I'm not particularly morbid, and neither is my fascination with JFK. But, as I've come to realize over the past few weeks, after taking in the Warhol/Supernova exhibit at the Walker, reading Assassination Vacation, and viewing the film Capote, I am a product of a popular culture that iconizes violence in infinitely fascinating ways.

Truman Capote befriends, idolizes, and ultimately betrays killer Perry Smith. Andy Warhol silkscreens Elvis, Marilyn, and Jackie. Sarah Vowell frantically cris-crosses the country in search of the next bullet, or grave, or fragment of skull.

And, as with that proverbial car crash, I just can't seem to turn away.

Last night's meeting of The Artist's Bookshelf proved to be such a brain-stimulator, that I had a difficult time winding down and getting to sleep. Well, maybe the Peet's double-espresso I consumed in the lobby beforehand had something to do with my heightened state of neural transmittitude. And maybe all that chatter about Freud and the interpretation of dreams left me so fearful of what I actually might dream (and what it might mean!), that I subconsciously avoided lapsing into prolonged periods of REM.

The focus of our free-wheeling discussion, Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie, led us to a number of unexpected destinations including, but not limited to: contemporary Chinese art, the iconic status of Sigmund Freud, cross-cultural issues encountered in the translation of fiction, current Chinese funereal customs, and the allegedly voracious sexual appetite of Chairman Mao.

We spent a considerable amount of time marveling over the current Huang exhibit, and generally agreed that it somehow aided our understanding and appreciation of the novel under discussion, perhaps because both works seem to embrace and embody a number of paradoxes: East/West, pharmacy/alchemy, contemporary/ancient.

We were fortunate that two of the book-club participants had spent considerable time in China (one in Taiwan, one in mainland China), and were thus able to guide us through some of the cultural nuances that might otherwise have sailed right over our semi-clueless heads.

We ended the evening by pondering a quote from the novel, which seemed in an eery sort of way, to not only evoke the spirit of our discussion, but to acknowledge the artists whose work we had so enjoyed encountering :

"But not even artists, a breed apart, understand the meaning of dreams. They merely create them, live them, and end up as the dream of others." - p. 281

At last month’s meeting of The Artist’s Bookshelf, I jokingly referred to the protagonist in question (Umberto Eco’s semi-auto-biographical hero Yambo) as a “stud muffin.”

Little did I know that such literary luminaries as the creators of a GOOD HOUSEKEEPING column called “Book Babes,” not only shared my thoughts, but displayed a shocking degree of synchronicity with The Artist’s Bookshelf, by recommending, in response to a reader’s request for “literary hunks,” our first two books in precise, sequential order:

"Now let’s go from the brawn to the brains. Yes, ladies, it’s possible to define hunk on a more cerebral level, and that’s why I feel free to endorse two new novels with thinking heroes. Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana features Yambo, a rare-book dealer in Milan who can remember the plot of every book and line of poetry he’s read, but not his wife’s or children’s names. If you like literary allusions, his odyssey through illness is saturated with them.

Another brainy hero is found in Dai Sijie’s Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch. Sijie, author of the bestselling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, builds his second novel around a Chinese convert to Freudian theory who returns from France to liberate his countrymen through psychoanalysis. Mr. Muo may be a bespectacled 40-year-old virgin, but his quixotic vision and Sijie’s sense of the absurd made me fall in love with him, anyway. Like Eco’s, this book plays off a naive wonder that offers a terrific escape from the real world."
-The Book Babes, Good Housekeeping

(In case you are wondering how I ever discovered this gem, I can only say that Google sometimes leads to very scary places.)

I expend a lot of energy here in the Public Programs division of ECP waiting for potential speakers to write or call me back. I send out a lot of invitations to artists, writers, critics, etc, asking them to come give a talk at the dear old Walker, and a number of these invitations are met by total silence. No response. Of course, there are always looming deadlines so I follow up with bothersome second and third phonecalls and email messages, some of which also fall into the ether of lost communication. Some days I sit here and am truly baffled, thinking, What is the problem?! Is it not common courtesy to return a kind invitation from a world-class art institution?

Because of this struggle, I would like to make mention of two notable individuals who receive the Public Programs Rapid Responder Award for the 2005 Fall Season. In first place is Rick Levine, of StarIQ.com who responded to my email invitation in 10 mintues. Read it again! 10 minutes!! This is absolutely unheard of in this line of work and his speedy action truly made my day. (I was working with an already well past-due copy deadline) Rick and his friend/colleague Paul O’Brien of Tarot.com will be here in January talking about the meeting of new media technologies and the ancient arts of divination (read: internet astrology, computerized I-Ching, etc) as the final public program for the Huang Yong Ping exhibition. More on them later.

Second prize goes to Howard French, who gets an additional award for being available to speak despite highly unlikely circumstances. (He lives in Shanghai where he reports on China to the New York Times. In other words, a prohibitively expensive plane ticket away.) Again, working under tight deadlines, I fired off an invite to Mr. French a few months ago to see if their might be any chance he would be interested in giving a talk on China, also for the Huang Yong Ping show. He responded in 24 hours, FROM CHINA (okay, maybe the time difference helped) and said, “Well, I happened to be traveling to the U.S. right around the date you offered, to give a talk at the University of Wisconsin. They have already purchased by trans-atlantic flight, perhaps I could travel to Minneapolis sometime during my stay for a lecture.” My jaw dropped. What are the chances? How often do you get Howard French all the way from China for the price of a direct flight to Madison? We are lucky, I tell you.

And good for you, my fortune is your fortune: Mr. French speaks this Thursday, November 3 at 7 pm in the Walker Cinema. Free tickets available starting at 6 pm.