Cristofori's Dream

I  finally got this sounding fairly good. It's a little clunky in spots but overall. not too shabby.

Another Semester Smoked

Summer Semester I took two classes, one four-week intensive (Ethnomusicology) and one eight-week intensive (The Craft of Fiction). I learned,in the former, about all sorts of ethnic music in America. In the second class, I wrote all kinds of essays about various works of fiction. I got an A+ in the first class and an A in the second.

Fall Semester has started and I have three classes: Drawing Four, Italian II, and The History of Eye, Vision and Brain Theory.  Off to a good start.

In piano news, plugging away, working of theory, dexterity and various pieces including a jazz version of Over the Rainbow, a piece of music I seem to be obsessed with.

Ciao!

Summer Semester: Its Horrors

I had a month off between semesters so I decided to work on Joplin a bit more and add--get this--SYNCOPATED peddling.  Yes indeed.  Syncopated peddling to an already syncopated piece of music.  After driving myself insane for about three days, it finally clicked, sort of, and is sounding fairly good.

Summer semester began yesterday and what was I thinking?  I took two classes, not difficult subjects really but Summer term is an entire semester compressed in to four weeks.  Which means each day covers one unit.  When I came home and began the homework for both classes, I realized doing a week's worth of homework for two classes in one evening was insane.  I can do it but the next month is going to be hectic.

So what if I won't sleep or get anything else done?  I'll have two more core requirements out of the way, which means (drum roll) ALL of them will be out of the way.

You can survive anything for a month, eh?

EH?

Raise a Glass of Cognac to the Scholar and Gentleman

My grades were posted, one by one.   First came a resounding A +. in Advanced Drawing, which was a good start.  Next, an A in Art History: Renaissance to Present.  I layeth the smack-down on the final, it lay whimpering in the corner.  The topic for the essay portion I selected from the list of possibilities: Art and Religion.  Oh man.  I wrote so fast and furiously I inflamed an impressive writer's cramp.  I turned in my neat blue exam booklet shaking my aching writing hand while the Prof laughed.  I'll bet laughter was scarce while he waded through my 50,000 word manifesto re: the artist's role in documenting the vox spiritu of civilization.

The third Ace in my hand was dealt by my painting professor, the one who assigned thirty-odd paintings in one semester.  The final painting, a four-foot by forty-inch composition rendered on a canvas stretched on a frame we built ourselves in the campus wood shop, you may see here.

A week passed before we took the dreaded Italian final exam.  I studied all week,  I admit I struggled with this class.  It moved at breakneck speed and my brain, calcified by age, stubbornly refused to absorb the lingo at the blistering pace, especially at 9 AM.  My performance on the tests has been shaky.  I took the two-hour final, not certain about any of it.  I had some time left, so went back and checked my answers.  I found mistakes, corrected them.  But were they mistakes?  I changed them back,  then changed them again.  Then back,  Aggh.  I remained trapped in this paranoid cycle until time ran out and I had to turn in my paper, not sure if any of it was correct or if my answers had deteriorated into the ramblings of a lunatic.

On the bus back to my car my brain whispered that I had made numerous errors, and correct answers danced in front of my eyes in the manner of genii conjured from a bottle.  I arrived home convinced I'd failed the exam, and by extension the entire course, and would have to retake it in Summer school.  In fact, I had set in motion plans to do this very thing before taking second semester Italian as my mastery of the preliminaries was so shaky.

By Sunday my conviction of dismal failure was rock-solid.  We were supposed to have our grade by Monday, so I checked online every hour.  By 6PM there was no word, and I had sunk into the blackest pit of despondency.  I slunk to bed at 10PM, no news of my fate forthcoming.  Summer school started the next day, and I figured I would simply start all over in the fall.

This morning, Tuesday, I checked online and couldn't believe my eyes.  Through some sinister witchcraft, I made a B in Italian. That's correct--a B.  I would have been happy with a D, the lowest passing grade.  A C would have launched me into an ecstasy rivaling St. Teresa's.  But a B?  My mind couldn't cognize this miracle.  Had I been at the local park, gnawing on a tuna sandwich, and happened to see Jesus tip-toeing across the duckpond with a glowing halo playing about his brow surrounded by a swarm of cherubim holding the hem of his robe above the festering pondscum, I wouldn't have been more disbelieving of what my eyes reported.  Nodding, I logged off, prepared coffee, drank it slowly, not quite convinced, because I'm sometimes given to hallucinations.  Once I saw Freud and Einstein sitting next to me passing a bottle of schnapps while exchanging anecdotes about amusing times in Thompkinsville, KY.  But I digress.  After allowing plenty of time for caffeine to work its magic on my neurons, I checked my grades again.  The B stood proud and tumescent amongst the As. It was real.  I had not only passed Italian, but did so with a modicum of dignity.

My new plan is to solidify my basic Italian and get a running start of the intermediate material before second semester.  I also intend to keep my workload in check so I'll have time to play my piano.  I really missed it.

Finals Week

It's Finals Week, and the Men's Room on the third floor of the Fine Arts building smells of oil paint and desperation.  On campus, wild-eyed, disheveled students stagger about mumbling to themselves, attempting to retain the tiniest morsels of information within traitorous cranial sieves.

At the beginning of the semester there were twenty-four students in my Italian class. By the end, eight remained. It was like some weird survival game. I kept looking for hidden cameras. I had a perfect attendance record, even though one week I had a gruesome flu that wracked my frame like Torquemada's henchmen. I was afraid to miss a single class. Some of the younger contestants were missing three or four classes a month. If you missed a class, you fell so far behind the attrition rate comes as no surprise. The pace was so furious I thought at one point the teacher had to be kidding. This course was the intellectual equivalent of a Chuck Yeager stress-test. Material appeared on the exams we didn't cover in class, and indeed we wouldn't absorb until the following week. We were asked to conjugate verbs and complete sentences containing words and phrases we hadn't yet learned. Since this was my first semester, I can't say whether or not this is typical, or if we had fallen behind the scheduled curriculum. We covered 225 pages of the textbook this semester, as well as auxiliary material. I've been studying for the final coming up Friday, filling in gaps I may have missed on this whirlwind ride.




In piano news, I had little time to practice, but attended my lessons, which I bumped to every two weeks due to my hectic school schedule. The Painting class topped out at thirty-two paintings, an incredible amount of artwork, and my Drawing class had around a dozen assignments, which was a bit more reasonable.  One of these was an "Installation," which means you make a three-dimensional creation and then go vandalize the community by installing it in a public place. I created a statement--a mutant infant with tentacles growing from his face, crawling from a trashcan-- about how industries pour mutagenetic chemicals in drinking water and put it outside the Kelly Business school.

I have three finals out of the way and the last one is Friday.  I began learning a new piece, or rather began work on a piece I dropped about a year ago: "Over the Rainbow," and I just about have it down cold.  I also have on the table an arrangement of Gorden Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind." I found a clip of some dude playing it, and I downloaded the sheets for it:





I intend to raise a glass of fine Cognac Friday after the Italian final, and enjoy the weekend.  Summer semester begins May 8th.  I'm curious to compare second semester Italian to this first introduction. I hope second gear has a slower pace. Ciao, Ragazzi.

Primavera

I'm juggling five paintings, three of them part of a tryptich for end-term, one a giant multi-figure composition, also for end-term, and the fourth an in-class assignment. I have a hired model for the multi-figure, with whom I'm working after-hours. My friend Tom is modelling for the tryptich, and the in-class model handles those duties.

Italian seems to be going well, so far, and Art History is no problem. That class is too easy. I sometimes forget I'm taking it at all and fall asleep during it. The tests seems so easy I think they must be deceptions, and I look for potholes and hidden mines. But this is because I took Art History before and I know most of this already man.

I drew a giant 7' x 4' nude in drawing class in about two hours, and called it Giant Dave.

I think all the painting is going to pay off, but I have numerous shows in April and wonder what's going to happen When Worlds Collide.

Mid-Terms

Paranoia, an ever-present humming in the beehive of my subconscious, had me firmly convinced I was spectacularly failing each and every one of my classes. Especially Italian, with Painting running a close second. Italian class moves so fast it's alarming, and even these twentyish Adoni and Houri sport a dazed and glassy-eyed appearance on their ruddy countenances in reaction to the blistering pace. Bear in mind they don't work, live on power-drinks, and are somewhat less than half my doddering age. I sometimes feel like a monkey caught in a tsunami clinging to a grapevine.

In an attempt to buttress the teetering Jenga-tower of my calcified brain, I procured a tutor, a native Italian, and if not for this secret weapon I would have been left bleeding in the dust. As it was, I pulled a "C" for mid-terms, but it landed on the border and was almost a 'B.' However I got a high 'B' on my midterm oral exam, so I am turning a corner, and feel much more confident with the lingo. I think the second half of the semester will progress much more heroically.

In spite of dire forebodings worthy of Roderick Usher, my Painting mid-term evaluation went very well. My main concern has been I can't finish the paintings we do in class. We've been doing four paintings a week, and before this, back when I was a productive painter, I used to do four paintings a year. All my homework assignments were polished productions but those piteous class paintings were all unfinished canvases. This didn't seem to matter. In fact the instructor told me he felt this was a good way to teach: to keep everyone a little out of breath. I now think of this as Asthmatic Art Academy.

Yet I feel myself slowly adapting to this type of frenetic production, and have been adjusting my creative process accordingly.

Drawing? Who knows, but I sense I have done well. My drawing instructor, a tiny Asian woman, suffered a concussion wrestling (yes, you heard correctly, and no--there is no video, I already asked) so delayed the midterm evaluation until after Spring Break (which I am now currently enjoying in hedonistic languor). Art History is also delayed until after break, but no problems there; I could get a 'B' while taking exams while somnambulistic, which describes my condition during most of the lectures. I took these classes already, but IU won't let me transfer the credist, so I have to take them again. Dang it.

I'm plotting my strategies for second term, so I won't be quite as stressed. I'm going to work ahead of the game instead of trying to hang on to a roller-coaster as I have been doing. I've contacted a model about working with me for my final painting project and he's planning with me to make it spectacular, and for drawing I'm working up some preliminary exercises to allow me to hit the ground running upon my return. I'm trying to work smarter, not harder.

People have been asking if I'm having fun, and if it's worth it, and if I'm happy. I really don't know. I feel that my mind is sharper and I'm stretching my limits, so this is a good thing. I won't really know how I feel until the end of the semester when I can reflect on the progress I've made.

As we Italian-speaking people say, Arivederci