Process XLVIII

Joseph Beuys

Technology was not my friend this week. Not only for my Thursday night in-class presentation on Joseph Beuys, but also my Friday morning Styles seminar for seniors. Just to remember, never incorporate YouTube into my PowerPoint, it creates a variety of confusion.

It’s not that I was reliant on the app, but how long do you try to figure it out before flying without it? It’s frustrating. It makes me look unprofessional, and I hate that.

We were to choose an artist to present and our professor had presented us with a list but I was stuck. Choose someone I was already familiar with? That didn’t seem like learning, so I asked him to suggest someone, and he chose Beuys.

I’m not going to recap what I learned here, suffice to say there is a world of art out there with which I am shockingly ignorant. How could someone be so enigmatic and significant and yet I had never heard of him?

Last night 10 Minutes to Midnight: 9 Quirky Plays for the Holidays opened at Cleveland Public Theatre to a sold out house. I think my experience deserves its own post, for now I just wish to point up the program’s content warning on the website:

Content Warning: 10 Minutes to Midnight includes adult language, and themes of domestic violence, religion, sickness, and drug use.

My two, two-minute plays alone include adult language, sickness and (egads) religion.

Holidays and holiday shows can be fraught. The Mysterious Affair at Styles is Christie’s “World War One” story, and so to close my session with the seniors at Vitalia yesterday morning, I shared the animated short "December 25, 1914" from Simple Gifts. It brought women my mother’s age to tears. But they said it was beautiful.