School, snow and searching
Here are five things from the past two weeks
Here are five things from the past two weeks . . .
1:
Winter break is over and school has started again.
While I’m teaching I frequently look at the clock hanging on the wall to make sure I don’t ramble for too long. Why does it seem like wall clocks only exist within institutional places like prisons and the DMV? The particular clock in my classroom makes a loud THUNK whenever the minute hand moves (my class is 2.5 hours long so this happens about 150 times, but who’s counting?). It aggressively signifies the passage of time and audibly reminds us of our obsession with keeping time.
Untitled (Perfect Lovers) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres turns the wall clock into something else entirely. It’s a beautiful piece of art that positions two clocks on a wall next to each other set to display the same time. They continue to keep the time together in perfect unison day after day on the gallery wall.
At least that’s how it starts. As time goes on, the batteries and the internal mechanics within these cheap clocks begin to fade and the clocks fall out of sync and start to show different times. Sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes or even hours. If left for long enough, these clocks will completely stop working, one continuing on after the other has died.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres manages to take an ordinary object and transform it into something that makes me think about love, loss, the truth (Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Does it matter?) and how small changes add up over time.
2:
We discovered Mike Birbiglia by watching Sleepwalk With Me randomly on Kanopy.
If you’re unfamiliar with his work, start with The New One or Thank God for Jokes. He does a wonderful job telling one cohesive story while taking a bunch of tangents. He’s able to weave jokes together with serious emotions in a way that feels effortless. Things that are simultaneously serious and silly are my favorite things.
Carly and I saw him at Comedy on State and he showed up with a stack of colorful notecards and said, “I’m working on some new material, your laughter will determine which jokes survive,” and then proceeded to make fun of our small airport.
His new special The Old Man and the Pool is on Netflix.
3:
I’ve been thinking about drawing snow.
4:
If you love Where’s Waldo? or I Spy, Google recently made The Most Searched Playground which allows you to “Uncover 25 of the most-searched people, places, and moments from the past 25 years.”
It’s dizzying in both its scale and attention to detail.
As you can imagine, there are a ton of references and fun moments tucked into every part of the map. Some of my favorites include the QWERTY monorail, a pizza boat and some graffiti that just says GO VEGAN.
5:
I have this comic by Tonči Zonjić hanging on the wall in my office.
I’ve had to physically point to it multiple times this week to remind myself to just do the next thing. It’s my favorite piece of advice since I tend to feel like I need to do everything all at once and do all of that stuff perfectly the first time otherwise it’s not worth doing. “I just need to do this one thing,” throws all of that out the window.
This comic is a from a series titled NOT/BUT and it’s full of brilliant advice and perspective for people who are way too hard on themselves.
Also, does anyone else write “make a to-do list” on their to-do list so they have something to cross off?
ALSO:
Thanks for reading! See you in two weeks.
I have never thought this deeply about clocks before. Thank you for giving us a glimpse into your mind.