After Bernie’s mittens and folding chair pose at the Inauguration went viral in January, many people tried to memorialize the tableau in their own ways. Many, many memes followed.
As a part of the online LEGO MOC (My Own Creation) community, I’m always looking out for cool creations that touch on moments in popular culture. One of the best MOC makers out there is @ochre.jelly – click that handle for more of their work.
Anyway, ochre.jelly made an awesome version of Inauguration Bernie, and I liked the design, so I decided to do a version myself. Here’s ocher.jelly’s version:
Below are some shots of the two versions I made. I tried to make some different choices in regards to the hair (wilder!) and jacket arms (more puffy!) in particular.
And here he is in his acrylic case. This is one I made for my friend Allison for her birthday this year. I also made a second copy, which has some slight differences, that you can see below:I used more curved pieces on the arms, and tried a different plate for the “mask” area. Below you can see my alternative chair design as well.
If you’d like to see more of my LEGO MOC works, check out these links here:
Five years ago today I suffered cardiac arrest. Every year I pull up the imagery and look at things – I was completely out when these images were made and it’s strange to see my ghostly, unconscious face in some of them. I have all of my various scans and catheterizations from the event, and I also have the placement of the stent, which I’ll share short clips of below.
Early morning of 2/18/2016
Thank you to Alison, Mechell, and the EMTs and cardiac folx who helped me survive those initial hours. Thanks to Danno and Mr. C, Christopher and Julie, Daniel and Sharon, and Sarah (among many others), for coming to visit me. Thanks to Mom Bourgeois for much aid through her own time of grief. Thanks to my dad who gave me two aspirin 30 minutes before my heart attack and thus probably saved my life. Thanks to Bobby Schembre who flew out and drove us back after it all. Blessings to my students, grads, and fellow faculty who helped maintain all of the school things, and mad props to the cardiac team at University Hospital (including my drill instructor cardiologist) who helped make me much healthier today than I was when it all happened.
I’ve been teaching in some capacity for almost 20 years now. In that time I’ve had the opportunity to not only evaluate my own modes of teaching but also to look back and analyze how my favorite (and otherwise) teachers approached the central tasks of instruction.
The core of that reflection is contained in my Teaching Philosophy (I’d be happy to send you a copy if you’d like to read it) as a three-fold charge: Facilitation, Encouragement, and Tact. I’ve tried to live out those values in my teaching, and I think that the best teachers I’ve had have demonstrated each in unique, powerful ways.
From Mrs. Ebensperger and Mrs. Goodwill (1st and 2nd grade) through Mrs. Carpenter (8th grade) and Mrs. Dudley (Middle and High School Art), most of my teachers could be said to embody thoughtful, encouraging modeling of concepts and strategies for learning. I would say that most of my early teachers functioned as allies and guides.
Once I got into the specialized realm of art school, though, there was more of a continuum between those who taught their own particular praxis and those who taught a broader, more generous approach. This is when I started to think about a tension between The Gatekeeper and The Advocate. I wonder if we end up teaching from a context of our own traumas and learned experiences… perhaps those who have had mostly positive and affirming experiences are often most able to extend them to others. If, however, person’s central project is to ensure the validity of their own perspective it is certain that their teaching will favor their values, their aims, and their sources of knowledge.
Of course, this kind of implicit bias is not limited to people in the arts nor is it always bad. But I think it makes sense to be aware of it. When I first sketched the graph below 10 years ago, I was thinking about these issues.
A proposed array of teaching modes in Fine Arts Education.
I think the continua expressed here are fairly obvious. It makes sense that The Gatekeeper would be invested in maintaining the integrity of particular theoretical and conceptual details while The Advocate would probably be more interested in a gestalt openness and investment in the potential for broad exploration within intersecting contexts.
In every instance where I felt most seen and understood as a learner, it was because my teacher heard me openly and talked to me as if I were like them – a student and artist and explorer. Lisa Gregg Wightman, my drawing and printmaking professor at Pratt, was just like this. She did not scoff at my novice ideas or weak technique; she facilitated my growth in strategies and skills. She asked me serious questions and drew out my self-reflection. This demonstrated “generosity of spirit,” a concept later described to me by Barry Gealt (my main professor in graduate school at Indiana University). You can read more about that here.
If you’re a teacher, where do you think you fall? Here’s a link to my chart – feel free to play around with it. I don’t think that one way is inherently better than any other way, but I do think it’s good for us to pay attention to our own proclivities, asking ourselves what works and what best serves our students.
The way Ms. Loftus deals with the intersections of so many huge issues is MASTERFUL and full of authority, quality research, and INSIGHT. The best art should, in the words of Gregg Bordowitz, “return [us] to [ourselves] strange” – that is, great art causes us to reflect and see our experiences and understandings from other angles and in new light. That’s what Loftus does. LISTEN.
I first read Lolita the summer before beginning college, and the book led me into a long love affair with Nabokov. That first year as an undergraduate I read Glory, Invitation to a Beheading, King, Queen, Knave, and The Eye all in quick succession. Later on came Ada and Pale Fire and other works. I read these works mostly in a vacuum; until I met my future wife I had no one else with whom to discuss the works.
I think this solitary reading dovetailed with certain aspects of my upbringing in such a way that I missed a LOT of the cultural assumptions surrounding Lolita. Assumptions (projections) such as: the notion that it was a “love” story, that Dolores Haze was some kind of “femme fatale” who manipulated Humbert, or that Humbert was misunderstood and relatable. I read the book as what it was: the testimony of an unreliable, unfaithful narrator who was attempting to make me, the reader, complicit in his abuse by convincing me of the ultimate appropriateness of his attitudes and sensibilities. The ultimate gas-lighter, Humbert obfuscates and violates the truth even as he destroys Dolores – a 12 year old who has lost her mother, father, and brother only to be intentionally captured by a predator.
It is not a love story. It is not cute. It is devastating and heart-breaking.
A couple years after reading the book the 1997 Adrian Lyne film adaptation was released on Showtime. I taped it on VHS at my friend Peter’s house. I was confused by the film. It seemed to miss the point of the novel, and much of the horror and oppressiveness was lost, left to be shown in just a few moments (perhaps the best one is where (Dominique Swain as) Lolita screams at Humbert, “I EARNED THAT MONEY!! MURDER ME! MURDER ME LIKE YOU MURDERED MY MOTHER!”). In my own first reading, I had more than one instance of having to pull my car off my the side of the road or go into my bedroom and close the door to cry. The sadness I felt for Dolores at the end, the disgust I had for Quilty’s conniving, and the anger I felt at Humbert’s pathetic audacity (re-imagining the Dolores who had finally gotten away from him back into his lust-vision as a way to comfort himself) were nothing like the gauzy sex-dream of the movie.
Loftus unpacks the socio-cultural background that informs how Lolita has been received and promoted over more than half a century, bringing important research to the fore. Through interviews and archival footage, she examines the construction of the myth of Lolita. In this Loftus clearly demonstrates the value of the original material and honors not only the character of Dolores Haze, but also the women who have played her over the years. This podcast is REALLY, REALLY worth your time. I appreciate the way it caused me to reexamine my own attitudes (What WAS I thinking when I read it the first time? Why DO I love Lana Del Rey? In what way SHOULD we approach telling the stories of people who have been abused as children? What IS my susceptibility to culturally-promulgated ideas about “nymphets” or “spring/winter romance?”).
eikonktizo 