Spaceship Earth

Someday girl I don't know, when were gonna get to that place/ Where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun/ But till then tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

—Bruce Springsteen

Calder presented on Le Corbusier and Bucky Fuller, radical visionary architects. He asked us to write definitions: what is Utopia? and what is Utopian architecture? Two answers:

“Utopia is an idea that inspires people to try to create a better world, most often with other people with similar feelings, that the world can be made better—people working with a set of ideas of more just, fair, happy, evolved and intelligent world.”

“Utopian architecture is the buildings we need, and not more than we need, to keep us safe, warm and alive, which also include beautiful art, which does not overly strain the environment in which it exists.”

Calder told us about Le Corbusier, (1897-1967), how he attended a Froebel’s Kindergarten, and studied Theoretical Architecture…He told us about how Le Corbusier was a painter, modernist, his five points of Architecture, Modular 2 (golden ratio)Villa Savoye, Villa Le Roche, Notre Dame de Haut, Chandigarh, his furniture, windows (very Mondrian-ish), “Chairs are architecture. Sofas are bourgeoise.” “A house is a machine for living in.” “One hundred times I have thought of New York as a catastrophe, and 50 times I have thought of it as a beautiful catastrophe.”

Then he showed us Bucky Fuller and all Bucky’s inventions and how he went about answering the question: How will humanity survive on this earth? Will we survive, and if so, how? Calder told us about Geodesic domes, the Biosphere, Dymaxion car and house, Triton City, and Bucky Fuller’s quotes: “More with less”; “I’m not trying to imitate nature, I’m trying to find the principles she’s using,” and the idea of “spaceship earth.”

All students ended Calder’s projectmaking Geodesic Domes out of Marshmallows and toothpicks for Calder’s project.

Rose made a presentation on the Golden Ratio, and the kids made their own golden spirals. Each of the Golden Spirals has been decorated in some form or fashion, including on young lad who incorporated the art of Piet Mondrian, from the mention of Mondrian in Calder’s project, into his coloring of his golden spiral. Something about that clean order in Mondrian's grids is counter-balance to the wild effusion of adolescent energy.

All students worked on Planet Advertisements movies: “come to Neptune, and learn to be yourself!” team-building! fun, inventing characters, using the iMovies application, recording, improvising, synching the music and scripts, synching the credits, synching the video clips, revising the scripts, bringing in the props, adding in the fact, perfecting and proof-reading the brochures, re-filming, re-editing, trying to make it great, all to induce our customers to come to Neptune, Mars, Jupiter and fly on Halley’s Comet.

8^th Graders Building rockets for Space Museum. Made of scrap wood, tape, and butcher paper. We listened to “Rockin’ the Beer Gut,” by the Trailer Park Choir, and “Straight To Hell” by The Clash and “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. (a rip of “Straight to Hell”), “Love is My Religion” by Ziggy Marley, and “Billie Jean,” by Michael Jackson, and “East Jesus Nowhere” by Green Day, “A Kiss from a Rose,” by Seal, and “Born to Run,” by Bruce Springsteen.

7^th graders worked building Geodesic dome version of the sun for the Space Display/museum, while the 9^th Graders made Stained Glass.

We finished To Kill a Mockingbird. We probably noticed 2000 thousand things in the book. Boo’s heart is seen; Bob Ewell’s is hidden in darkness. Boo Radley is a gentle man, and Scout becomes a lady. That being young means also being wise. They killed the mad dog with one shot. They used 17 shots to kill an innocent man. Scout dreams of being part of Boo’s life, and imagines the perfection of sitting on the porch and saying, “Hidy Do.” The emotions of the characters come out, act in the world in good or bad ways, and then must always go back in. Boo goes back and never comes out again, something we felt was sad, sad and beautiful. Each person chose to sing a song, imitating or re-creating, either to make beauty and justice or ugliness and injustice.

Yared read the poem “Mockingbird” by Mary Oliver, which contains much that relates to the book.

Mockingbird

By Mary Oliver

Always there is something worth saying

about glory, about gratitude.

But I went walking a long time across the dunes

and in all that time spoke not a single word,

nor wrote one down, nor even thought anything at all

at the window of my heart.

Speechless the snowy tissue of clouds passed over, and more came,

and speechless they passed also.

The beach plums hung on the hillsides, their branches

heavy with blossoms; yet not one of them said a word.

And nothing there anyway knew, don’t we know, what a word is,

or could parse down from the general liquidity of feeling

to the spasm and bull’s eye of the moment, or the logic,

or the instance,

trimming the fingernails of happiness, entering the house

of rhetoric.

And yet there was one there eloquent enough,

all this time,

and not quietly but in a rhapsody of reply, though with

an absence of reason, of querulous pestering. The mockingbird

was making of himself

an orchestra, a choir, a dozen flutes,

a tambourine, an outpost of perfect and exact observation,

all afternoon rapping and whistling

on the athlete’s lung-full of leafy air. You could not

imagine a steadier talker, hunched deep in the tree,

then floating forth decorative and boisterous and mirthful,

all eye and fluttering feathers. You could not imagine

a sweeter prayer.

Who are the steadier talkers? Who will stand on the outpost of perfect and exact observation? Who can locate the bulls-eye of the moment? Who can fill the silence with the right song? The streetlights as pools of living truth. Attticus taking off his tie in the court case, reveal his inner beliefs, showing his whole self; Mayella coming close to saying the truth. The stitching of Jem’s trousers: symbolic of the force that mends and repairs, creates and encourages; These are the questions and ideas that arise in To Kill A Mockingbird.

WE ate lemon drops and had packs of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum, not in honor of Dumble Dorf, but in honor the screening of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Was it a perfect day? Pre-valentines Day decorations. Baked goods, constructing a giant rocket out of paper and twigs, a sun made out of sticks, geodesic domes made from marshmallows, a play we made of poems written by us, moving from the dust-bowl to stardust, from singular to billions and back again.