First day of watercolor* Dreams & Attempts * Laurie Anderson's Rules or Living*

First day of watercolor 10x10*

Yesterday I began doing 10 days of watercolors.  I have two books on learning watercolors.  I assembled my supplies and then did the pretty basic practice above.  The gradation bars was done by adding some blue to the "palette" tray and adding 2-3 drops of water between each bar.  The first real product/benefit/ result of the 10x10 was an idea I developed from the table of contents: each lesson is called a "project," and they get slowly more complex in some way.  My idea was to do this non-intimidating and "creative" and productive process in AP Lit class.  So, I interacted with ChatGPT to formulate some ideas.  I kept playing with the idea during a long afternoon walk.  The ideas from ChatGPT are not solid gold, but they are more comprehensive and disciplined than I am (in like creating a list of 20 possibilities of student projects).  And the interaction keeps me thinking.  For instance, just now I find myself thinking that the analogue can be pretty exact:  I show an image -- either a video or a still image -- and ask students to recreate it in words.  I can ask them to use syntax, word choice, pacing, metaphor, etc. to do this.  I can work with mood, selection of detail, imagery, etc. 

My point is that this forced 10x10 has already provided some results

blagh

From James Clear:

Every great advance — whether in an individual life or the world at large — has come from dreams and attempts.

Devise more dreams. Make more attempts.

Laurie Anderson's Rules for Living*

Mason Currie notes the 3 rules here.  

First, some context on the interview: Anderson was talking about her 2015 documentary Heart of a Dog, which she made in the years after her beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, passed away. At one point, the interviewer tries to ask Anderson about her final months with her late husband, Lou Reed, who had died two years earlier. Anderson doesn’t really want to go there, so instead she offers “some rules that he and I made about how to live,” which she says they spent a lot of time thinking about together. Their premise, Anderson explains, was that life moves fast and is often complicated, so if you had some rules that you could always keep in mind, it would make it easier to navigate confusing situations and life in general.

Here are the rules they came up with:

OK, so the first one is: Don’t be afraid of anyone. If you can imagine: living your life, you’re not afraid of anyone. That’s number one.

Number two is you get a really good bullshit detector, and you learn how to use it. You know, just: “Is that really happening or not?”

Third is to be really, really tender. And with those, you’re covered.

 as an addendum: 

BE LOOSE!

OK, here’s a possible fourth rule from Anderson herself, via a 2016 interview with the Louisiana Channel.