Posts Tagged ‘dreams’
0Finally, we visited the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design today (after two failed attempts). And admission was free! Apparently they have invented some sort of “National Design Week” to promote itself. And design. Well, it was pretty much as I expected. Very… institutional. But still worth a visit.
The first floor was an exhibition titled “Design USA,” which was a show consisting of the winners of the National Design Awards from the past 10 years. The winners showcased were pretty predictable—many famous names like Diller Scofido + Renfro, Stefen Sagmeister, John Maeda, Adobe, Herman Miller, IDEO… I think Pentagram was mentioned a few times. I kept getting exasperated at how insular and limited and.. like, self-congratulatory the design world feels sometimes. These are names I hear over and over until it’s drilled into your head. You’d think no one else has any good ideas or knows how to innovate.
What is this almost constant sparkly feeling I’ve been experiencing for the past 3 days? Might it have something to do with marathoning Cardcaptor Sakura (undubbed, mind you) for 2 nights in a row? Because I don’t think it’s the beer I put in the chili last night, as boiling will quickly dispatch any alcoholic content, leaving only deliciousness.
Though I was somewhat of an anime fan in HS, I’ve gotten a great deal more suspicious since then. Right now I’m of the opinion that anime, as a genre, has some kind of unholy power that other forms of fiction do not, turning otherwise normal people into rabidly obssessive zombies who don’t know (or don’t want to know) the difference between reality and glossy cel-animated dreams. Yang disagrees, citing Trekkies as a cultural group whose fandom is of a magnitude to be seriously reckoned with. But I still think there is a difference. Anime is hyperreal, whereas Star Trek and Dungeons and Dragons and the like are merely fictional. The type of world that anime sucks people into is far more divorced from reality, by being a super-perfect and super-desirable version of it. That, coupled with the fact that it is foreign, and therefore seductively exotic to some, is a recipe for sanity purée.
What was I talking about. Oh, right, Cardcaptor Sakura. For Sakura I make an exception, for the simple reason that it has so much beauty and innocence and sweetness that it will make your heart explode. Strangely enough, once you brave the first 5 episodes, any and all suspicions of anime fan-service crap quickly evaporate. And when you are done watching, you will bask for days in the intense loveliness of a little fictional girl who has precious little logical acumen but copious amounts of heart.
…Which is what I am going through right now, I guess.
There are so many flaws with this show, but oh it is so good. For a little kids’ TV series it has a surprisingly high degree of character depth, plot integrity, and overall complexity. (The animation work itself is impressive too though they seem to have an inability to draw hands.) And the exquisiteness of its love story is rivalled only by the other Tina-shattering work of entertainment of late, Wall-E.
Okay, friends who read my blog, if you have any prejudice against anime like I do, I exhort you to put them aside for a bit and waste I mean devote 30-odd hours of your life to watching the Cardcaptor Sakura series. It will make you a better person. Yes, even you, Elliot, with your manly heart of frosty man-ice. =P
My mind is aflutter and I can’t sleep because I’m thinking so hard about grad school (meaning, I end up thinking about the rest of life, because after grad school that’s it, no more school, forever, for me anyways). I am looking at Cranbrook (dreamily), CCA (enthusastically), MICA, SAIC, SVA and RISD (cautiously). I think those are the 5 for now. Not sure if I will end up applying to all of them – maybe just three.
My criteria: room for creativity, room for personal growth, less focus on structure and more on experimentation, but with a healthy dose of reality. Cranbrook fulfills the first three to a T, the last, not so much. CCA seems to be a good mix of all those things, plus it’s got a prime location (SF Bay Area). MICA seems to have a very technique-centered, no-nonsense approach to design… blah, but it is a good school. SAIC comes recommended from Chantal, though I have yet to research more about it. SVA I heard about because Sagmeister sent his intern Amy Wang there (I am such a sad, sad groupie, I know), but it’s in NY and, despite that it’s great to visit, I don’t think I’d like to live and work in NY for any duration of time. And RISD… well it’s RISD.
Why am I so worked up about this? Maybe because I watched a TED lecture by Jonathan Harris today? Maybe because I realized just how amazing of a person he is, and now I have another role model to hold myself to? That brings my tally of Amazing Designers to Adore to 2: Harris and Sagmeister. If they had a gay child, he/she would be a very profound, very sexy synthesis of talent and heart -> what I want to be. Someday.
Ahhh, grad school!
