EARGASMS track 2

 

       

scriptworkgonnahappengonnareadthesemensstoriesthoittakemetoaplaceidontwannabelikebillysingingandhavingtovomititupeachtimeshesangstrangefruitwonderifshetookherfloweroutforsoutherntrees.

Cellular Listening...

Negro in Algerian Costume by Charles Cordier

(let us sit and chat u an i.. 

silvered bronze eyes shifting in story...

i could hear u the fist time we met...

and im listening still...

there will be a place setting for you too...)

If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

The Berlin Study
In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.
As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.
We’ll call this group the elite players.

For a point of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school’s education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as their professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group.

We’ll call this group the average players.
The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.
Flush with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question: Why are the elite players better than the average players?
The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long,Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life.
The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell…


Decoding the Patterns of the Elite
We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music. The time diaries revealed that both groups spent, on average, the same number of hours on music per week (around 50).
The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice — the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability.
This might not be surprising, as the importance of deliberate practice had been replicated and reported many times (c.f., Gladwell).
But the researchers weren’t done.
They also studied how the students scheduled their work. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat.
The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best — the subset of the elites who the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany’s two best professional orchestras — there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two-sessions a day schedule.
This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players’ lives.
Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players.
Also consider relaxation. The researchers asked the players to estimate how much time they dedicated each week to leisure activities — an important indicator of their subjective feeling of relaxation. By this metric, the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players, and the best of the best were the most relaxed of all.
Hard Work is Different than Hard to Do Work
To summarize these results:

• The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
• but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
• and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.

I’ve seen this same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers. It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I even coined a name for it: the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar.
This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

• Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
• Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.

This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.

The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.

Taking Bruce w/ me today...

"In building a statue, a sculptor doesn't keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the inessentials until the truth of its creation is revealed without obstructions. Thus, contrary to other styles, being wise in Jeet Kune-Do doesn't mean adding more; it means to minimize, in other words to hack away the unessential. In combat, spontaneity rules; rote performance of technique perishes. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity." 

"Everything you do, if not in a relaxed state will be done at a lesser level than you are proficient. Thus the tensed expert marksman will aim at a level less than his/her student. "

"The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum. It is the halfway cultivation that leads to ornamentation. Jeet Kune-Do is basically a sophisticated fighting style stripped to its essentials....

Boards don't hit back. Defeat is not defeat unless accepted as a reality-in your own mind.  Do not be tense, just be ready, not thinking but not dreaming, not being set but being flexible. It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come."

The Making of Madam Coal Belly

"Madam Coal Belly....I will speak for you today..."  ~Food for the Gods

...A woman, who's been around for a long time. watched a lot of shit go down.  she stuffs and holds it deep in her belly...It glows orange. aflame.. She shares a pillow at night with her ol' man river...

Phylicia Rashād Interview with Bill Boggs

The inner reality creates the outer form.

The universe bares no ill to me. I bare no ill to it.

live in constant awareness of that truth within. 

Food for the Gods

 Poster Design by Emily Trueswell

Inspired by the killings of Black men at the hands of police and other institutions of authority, this work utilizes mixed-media and mask- puppetry to explore the process of dehumanization, positive and negative space, invisibility and well...the MAGICAL-less -ness of it all! A three-part expression of rage, indifference, and celestial knowings.

Friday April 12th and Saturday April 13th
Pre-show reception with food at 6:30

Show starts at 7:00pm and 8:00pm
Open Space Theater, Sarah Lawrence College 

Getting ready for monday...

Wrapping up pre-prodction.

mind pour:

• armatur wire "s" hooks: loop twice around bar
• drill control rod into masks
• dry brush masks/and trim
• build table w/ rob. (ask rob options for outer square of maze)
• home depot, buy molding/create table elegance
• buy longer rods for sails
• order magnets
• Slide pipe 2,  12'' towards rear of space. --re hang curtain
• re make large bowl. (paint a gold cracking)
• keep spike tape round wrist (2 colors)
• spike rails, spike, labyrinth path 
• Get Wooden clothes pins , paint green
• send DAPs a thank you card for pre-show reception
• send out budget to Dean for remaining of funding.
• find/test set of puppet hands that clasp together
• Chalk.
• purchase glitter (cosmetic)
• get flour sifter
• send choreographer video's for her to down load to dropbox
• schedule conference to discuss next draft of script
• Move "coal belly" into open space
• ask lighting designer about possibility of beer bottle lanterns ( wire or jute handles)
• ask about projection screen for lobby
• ask about curtain to be used as projection screen and dinner tabel divide
• "stop and frisk"
• send sound designer: 
•  wind, sea gulls, original audio file, police sirens, invisible man, james baldwin
• download amiri baraka "blue skys" clip
• send followup thank you to class for thier presentations and writings. 
• insert thank you in program: racial americana class, felicia, DAPs, Dean,
• scan story boards for cast and production team/up load to drop box
• respond to poster designer--more yellow thru the blue
• email regarding costume designer (mother, frank, girl and shoes for puppets--brown leather)
• think of very nice gift for production manager