When I worked at a newspaper, I didn’t often get to write silly headlines. This is one I got to write as part of a bracket contest in which readers voted for their favorite toys.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Author: Michael Janairo
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Haiku movie reviews, October 2015
American Sniper (2014)
Why show so much death
Dealt by this U.S. soldier,
But not his killing? -
Plårk, plårk, plårk
My wife has created a new word: plårk.
It could rhyme with “park” or “pork” — either way seems to be fine.
She has the word printed on T-shirts that she gives to her first-year drawing students. The idea she is trying to impress upon them is that making art is a combination of “play” and “work.” Thus, “plårk.”
I imagine the word being used as follows:
- “This assignment is plårk.”
- “Did you plårk yet today?”
- “Yeah, man, I plårked earlier today, and I’m going to be plårking later with some friends.”
I suppose a sample declension would look something like this:
- I plårk. I plårked. I am plårking. I have plårked.
- You plårk. You plårked. You are plårking. You have plårked.
- They plårk. They plårked. They are plårking. They have plårked.
She says that in every class period at least one or two (sometimes more) students are wearing their “plårk” T-shirts.
With about 50 students a semester, maybe in a few years the word will be in common usage by scores of young artists, plårking their way through the world.
What do you think: Will plårk catch on?
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Haiku movie reviews, September 2015
Two Days One Night (2014)
Co-workers are asked:
Vote for or against her job.
Is this a real thing?John Wick (2014)
This guy is angry
He’ll mess you up very bad
Dressed in a sharp suit -
Where I’ve Been: Part 2 — In Class with Lydia Davis
For five weeks, on Tuesday nights in October and the beginning of November, I’ve spent a few hours in a room at the University of Albany with a few fellow writers and the multiple-award winning writer Lydia Davis.
My classmates — all published writers — were talented and well-spoken, even if a few weren’t as gregarious as others.
Speaking of gregarious, Lydia encouraged all of us to track metaphors in are daily lives — to include them in the things we overhear and read as part of our writer’s diaries — and that common abstract words like “gregarious” were derived from metaphors, because the word stems from a Greek word for “herd.”
As for what to include in our writer’s diaries, Lydia suggested that she writes “whatever goes into my mind that interests me.”
Most of the class was a writers workshop, reading fellow writers’ stories-in-progress and talking about them, which is always interesting to me. And we got to know each other by sharing what we’ve read in the past year — and that “reading diary” moment generated a long reading list for me.
In terms of talking about the craft of writing, Lydia shared what she called five different kinds of narration, which she wasn’t sure if she had ever seen before but thinks she may have made up as a way of taking a writerly approach to reading to discover what a writer was doing in certain passages (and how a reader may want to make use of those moments in his or her own writing).
These five categories aren’t anything new, but they offered a practical way of reading:1. Action: characters do things
2. Comment: a reflection on something from a point of view
3. Description: things shown through sensory detail
4. Dialogue: characters talk
5. Exposition/back story: things get explained, or histories get filled inIt was all good stuff, and I enjoyed my fellow students’ writings immensely.
So even though this all came right in the crush of the new website I have been working on, I’m glad I was able to take part. And it was free, courtesy of the New York State Writers Institute.
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Where I’ve Been: Part 1 — Making a Website
Hello (again) world.For the past eleven months I’ve been working on creating a new website at my day job at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Not that I’ve created it. The design firm Linked By Air (which is awesome) did the design and development work. Everyone on staff at the museum pitched in with ideas, research, and content. I just helped to shepherd the thing through. The site launched last month. You can find it at: http://skidmore.edu/tang.
My goals going in were (1) bigger images, (2) responsive design, and (3) social sharing.
Linked by Air sought to emphasize the museum as (1) a contemporary art museum, (2) a museum with a growing collection, (3) an institution that is a model for college teaching museums.
The “teaching museum” aspect, I find, often requires explanation. The first question I got from a journalist just last week went something like: Do you find that your mission as a “teaching museum” limits what you can exhibit?
The short answer is no. The longer answer involves explaining that the museum’s mission is central to the college’s liberal arts mission. I often say that the museum itself is the realization of the college’s liberal arts ideals. That realization manifests itself in many practical ways, through various levels of museum use by staff and faculty in all departments, including visits to exhibition or to select objects in the collection; “study exhibitions,” in which a class helps develop and research work in an exhibition; and interdisciplinary exhibitions curated by the museum and members of the college faculty.
So, yes, my last post was more than two months ago, but in that time I’ve been hunkered down (mostly — more tomorrow in Part 2) on the new website. How well the new site meets its goals, I’ll leave for you to discover. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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Haiku movie reviews, August 2015
Locke (2013)
One man at the wheel
Wife, job, honor on the line
Such weight in his voice
Walk Hard (2007)
Silliness abounds
In this rocker’s storied life
Long live rock clichés!The End of the Tour (2015)
Smart, talky guy flick
Drinking (or not), sex, suicide
— My wife hated it
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
Thorin is a dick
Should anyone forgive him?
Bilbo needs a rest20 Feet from Stardom (2013)
Powerful singers
Risk it all in the spotlight
Very few shine on
