A quick announcement: Chapter 510 in Oakland, the writing center where I illustrate and make poetry with kids and am sometimes a Grumpy Prime Minister, is throwing a big ol raffle in the month of June, so get in there and get you some cool stuff!! It all goes to support expanding kids’ sense of their selves and ideas. 💖

Sloth and Manatee

There’s a lot of discussion these days, about Big Technology Machines that are going to Reshape The World and whatnot.

I imagine this has gone on many times, like when the printing press happened, or electricity, or the Industrial Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or what have you. What do you suppose were the discussions of the ramifications of the wheel?

Anyway, that’s all good, but as you may have noticed, the Big Machines never do win, and the reason for this, I believe, is something that you can find in any group of like three or more second-graders.

I’ve taught art for a long time. “Taught” is a relative term, because I don’t teach anything. I am more of a co-conspirator than a teacher. Because I have learned, again and again, that you can march into a class with some project, and “make” the project happen, or you can accept that within two minutes your project plan will have mutated, and that this is where the magic is.

That is, if you are willing to let this happen.

I decided a long time ago that I could put my energy into control, and discipline, and results, or I could let in the energies, and encourage and travel along with them, and see what happened.

This feels like a major theme in our world. There is so much trying to get people to comply with machines and machinery, to get results that someone wants, harvesting humans and their minds and energy like crops.

And then, there is what happens when you put three or more (or ten, or twenty) second-graders in a room and give them art supplies.

This is why, in the end, the machines never win. They leak, they break, they get overrun. People alter them. They use them for unintended purposes, for better and for worse. They do sabotage or they just don’t read the instructions. They go underground and devise ways out. Sometimes literally.

There is really nothing like letting a kid have an idea, all their own, and saying “wow, that’s cool,” and encouraging them along in their construction of a house that is taped together with a pipe cleaner creature living inside or their design for a game or an animal or a device involving yarn and cups and glue.

Machines do a lot of damage while they are trying to win, and so our job is to be quicker to say that’s nice, machine, be useful, but then get out of the way, because I have messy nonsensical stuff to do and this is where the magic is.

Get Sloth and Manatee Books at Radiator Comics!

Cartooooons

Best of Brainwaves Volume One: The Fountain of Stuff

Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat

License Cartoons from CartoonStock

Aaaaaart

Plus: Accidental Animation

I started out doing some character stuff and then added a beat and then GarageBand put it thru the wrong instrument and it sounded cool so then things got out of hand and here is this

Things Of The Week

Okay watch this animation, and then watch this on how it was made

Here’s a whole initiative dedicated to the personhood of whales.

Here’s a recording of sounds of pushing analog buttons on various devices (plus lots of other sounds in the site)

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you get to hang out with a second-grader, may you follow an idea somewhere that makes no sense, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy