With fall semester coming to a close, the weather is cooling down, and I’m trying to empty out my pantry before I leave the house for a month. 

I like it when foods match the season. Acorn squash, carrots, roma tomatoes and garlic, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, then oven-roasted for 35 minutes fit the seasonal taste requirements. I ate them with a dollop of tomato sauce on top. Mmm…

In the last podcast of the semester, Arizona Daily Wildcat podcaster Kate Saavedra explains that the Arizona Board of Regents is forcing Arizona’s public universities to increase class sizes or face budget cuts. This is resulting in lower standards for SAT scores. Start the podcast at 01:54 to witness evidence of the dumbing down of the student body.

In my ceramics class, our final project was to create a ritual involving clay. I eat oatmeal every morning, so I suppose that’s a ritual for me. I carved a cup of oats out of clay and let the clay dry until it was leather-hard. Then I made a time lapse video of the clay dissolving. The video is about 00:40, but it covers 5.5 hours of time. I filmed the clay beginning at 5:30am to correspond with the rising of the sun.

Andrew: Our job is so awesome!

John: Dude, no it’s not.

A: We get to goof off all day long! We don’t actually have to work!

J: Dude, our job sucks.

A: Wait, what are you talking about?

J: Our job.

A: Our job is so awesome!

In her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Linda Nochlin cites one reason is that historically women were not allowed to draw from the nude figure (restricting them to landscapes and still lives). Nude women, prostitutes, posed for male artists. I wonder if the models were respected by artists, if they were used and abused, or if relationships developed.

There is an anomaly that exists between the way an artist thinks of a model and the way society thinks of a model.

In the art classes that I’ve had with nude models, the models are highly respected, their wishes are granted, and students bite their tongues when a model wiggles too much. They aren’t paid very much for what they do, and they do a lot.

“Today we are drawing this person,” Rosen said she tells students. “That’s what’s so interesting about drawing from life. … Somebody’s willing to sit there for us. They’re sacred. And they should be treated as such. They’re a gift.”

“In society at large, it’s quite misunderstood,” said Corrado, who is now the assistant to the director of human resources at a Chicago company and a working artist. “For example … people I tell [that she used to model], they look at me funny, they look at me weird, like, ‘Oooh, a sex worker.’.” (Source).
 

The above article also talks about how models in the Chicago community know or know of each other. I don’t know if the models in Tucson talk to each other, but art students know who all of the models are.

Sandy always looks stiff and uncomfortable, doesn’t talk much, and is perfect for those ever-tempting macabre narratives.

Theresa is energetic, has wonderful full-body expressions, and even though I’ve seen her dance naked around a room of 20 people, she told me she was nervous about singing at an open mic in a coffee shop downtown.

George (or maybe it’s Stan, I forget) already has large features so he’s great for caricatures. 

Merlin always pulls the narcissistic Captain Morgan pose. I feel like he has a strange fetish for a room full of people staring at him for three hour periods. 

I never know what to do when I recognize a model on the street, fully clothed, going about with their personal life. Do I stop and say hello? Do they want me to say hello? Would I want a student to say hello to me if I were a model? One time I did stop and say hello, and it was refreshing to have a normal conversation (normal as in both of us were fully clothed), but the whole time I was thinking, I’ve seen you naked. The only reason we are having this conversation right now is because I have studied the mole on your lower back, the zit on your cheek, the crooked toenail on your left foot and the tattoo on your breast. Also, in my house I have multiple drawings of you, and in those drawings you are naked.