Friday, July 17, 2015

Paul Kos

Part of my freelance work for PBS LearningMedia since last October has involved kicking the tires of its online videos to ensure that picture and sound are synced properly, the two-sentence descriptions of the videos don't contain any typos, and so on.

One video I enjoyed watching centers on conceptual artist Paul Kos, who talks about how an artist has to be "in shape" to be creative:

"An artist goes in and out of shape, and by that I mean very similar to being an athlete: When an athlete's in shape, every movement that they do comes intuitively. And in art when you're in shape, ideas are coming faster than you have time to make them. Being in shape is really being able to see accidents; accidents are much more interesting than that which we can contrive while sitting at a desk. But if you're not in shape you don't even see it happening. And when you are, there are accidents all around, probably, every day that are wonderful to take advantage of."

Later in the video we see Kos playing la pétanque with a few other men:

"I find [it] really interesting as a metaphor for art for the following reason: There's a little wooden ball, and that's the target. When you make a piece, if you're too conservative you're copying your older work—it's short, it's on this side of being avant-garde. If you go too far culture can't see it, perhaps it's too personal, and it's way out there—you miss it. But there's no excuse not to make one in three fairly good art pieces. The third one should be somewhere in between, and with the right finesse it'll be right on and you hit the target."

Monday, July 6, 2015

a loose definition of "library"

Every day I receive e-mails from websites such as Beyond and Glassdoor that contain job listings. Here are some of the recent listings I've been sent because I initially typed in the keyword "library":

Floor Supervisor, Shoe Carnival (Bloomingdale, IL)

Cocktailers, Food Runners & Dishwashers, Harry Caray's Restaurant Group (Lombard, IL)

Piano Teacher, Thumbtack.com (La Grange Park, IL)

photo credit: Andy Martinez
Blaster Explosives Handler—Deploy to Antarctica!, PAE Antarctica Contract (Chicago, IL)

Cabinet Sales, Resume Library (Chicago, IL)

Technical Scrum Master, Forbes Technical Consulting (Chicago, IL)

Aww, can't I be a technical scrum master in Antarctica? Everything in life is a trade-off.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

"Highways & Sundowns"

If Hollywood ever attempts a Love & Mercy-style biopic of Gordon Lightfoot's life and career, may I suggest Chris Pratt for the singer's younger years and Bryan Cranston for the later ones?