Sherpa's Wonderin's

Spotlight part 1

I recently asked a friend if she would answer 10 questions for this blog. She agreed and dear friends, you get the pleasure to be acquainted with the fabulous Amelia (biblio on another "site").


1)Magic 8-ball or tea leaves to predict the future?
I have to go with tea leaves. it’s much more specific than a magic eightball and leaves more power in the hands of the predictor (as opposed to the predictee). plus it has a symbol for almost every letter of the alphabet (except J and X and we all know that very little of importance starts with J or X; except Joy of course). if you’re interested in tea leaf reading, check this out: <link> the obvious problem is that i don’t drink much tea. maybe i don’t want much of a future?

2)You’re in a bar fight with Dame Judy Dench and Kathy Griffin. Which founding father would you like to watch your back?
i’m thinking Patrick Henry. he’s a fiery one, isn’t he? he could enter the brouhaha declaiming “give me victory or give me death!” and Kathy Griffin, being a redhead and therefore probably rather fiery herself, would rise to the occasion. i’m sure he could take her. in the meantime, i think i can manage dame judy. she is over 70, after all, so i think i’m more than her physical equal. plus she was raised a quaker, and they’re pacificsts. she might put up no fight at all.

3) From now on you can only eat one food for the next 3 years. Which food would you pick?
see this is one of those trick questions. if i had to pick one food, i would say burritos. but does that mean i can put different things inside of my burritos? that would be pretty nice. but if i can’t, then i’d go with breakfast burritos—with eggs, beans, bacon, and cheese and maybe a dash of some salsa. if i can vary the amounts of ingredients that would be even better cause it would allow a little variety. if i have to pick something that never changes, ever, then i might go with bread and cheese instead. a nice French bread with either a sharp cheddar or a mellow brie.

4)What’s your definition of art?
art is two things. in an ancient sense, it is skill and can be used about almost any area of knowledge. i like this definition of art because it acknowledges that most if not all people are creative and creating creatures (that’s a lot of derivatives of “create” all in a row)—that we each have the potential to produce important meaningful things and work. but obviously art is much more specific than that now. so dealing with a more contemporary sense, art is a creative representation in any number of media—words, paint, stone, metal, plastic, performance, among other things. but for me, art is more than simply a representation. it needs to be a representation that achieves certain things. not specific things. i’m concerned with the kind of relationship it makes possible with its viewers. representations that are manipulative (think Thomas Kincaid) are not art because they do not authorize the viewer—don’t open the viewer up to discovery, but instead they feed a certain interpretation to the viewer along with their content. to me art should create opportunities for exploration and understanding and discovery—of its content or subject, of the artist’s mind and perspective, but also of the viewer’s self. you shouldn’t ask me these kinds of questions if you don’t want long involved answers. :) i could go on, but i won’t. i think i’ve gotten the gist of it down.

5)If you have to pick one constitutional amendment to be ratified, which would you pick? Gay Marriage Amendment or declaring flag burning illegal?
hmm. i’m going with flag burning. there’s tons of ways around the flag burning prohibition that would still allow the same message to be expressed (e.g., a flag that’s slightly different colors, a flag that has 11 stripes instead of 13, etc.). the gay marriage one is just too permanent.