Tag: Cash

Collectanea 30.25 Syrup-Ceiling-Advisors

/ Derek Mueller

Week of July 21, 2025

Another Grows Short

“Sometimes a branch grows long and another grows short, although the pattern stays the same the branches can point in different directions. They seem like different trees, but if you look carefully…” (16).

—Bruno Munari. (2017). Drawing a Tree. Edizioni Corraini. #branching #pattern #directions #trees

Dawnwatcher Heliotropism

Figure 1. “Morningdala Gloryala.” In seasonal presences, summertime’s acuity.

Erin Manning on Sap-to-Syrup

“Experience grows from theoretical premise, but does so incorporating ecological emergence. It becomes sensitive to how a process is interlaced with the complexity that makes it singular in all its different ways. It’s not just a question of knowing what to look for – it’s about having been attuned to the quality of a practice over a long duration such that its minute shifts are discernible in the feel. It’s about being in the care of its many durations” (para. 8).

—Erin Manning. (2025). Promiscuous Pedagogies – on Creativity. Three Ecologies. Substack. https://threeecologies.substack.com/p/promiscuous-pedagogies-on-creativity

5ives

Degree-Granting Institutions, Year, and Chairs of My Dissertation Committee Members

  1. University of Texas–Arlington, 1997 (Victor J. Vitanza, chair; Frank, Kellner, Kolko, Van Noort)
  2. Case Western Reserve, 1980 (P.K. Saha & Frances Wolpaw, co-chairs; Stonum, Sweeney)
  3. West Virginia University, 1984 (Patrick W. Conner, chair; Almasy, Elkins, Madison, Miles)
  4. SUNY-Albany, 1997 (Not available in the Proquest filing)
  5. Michigan Tech, 1999 (Marilyn Cooper, chair; Selfe, George, Durfee, Bolter)

Writing Studies Tree bonsai, How might we re-activate, or re-engage, the invisible ramuli of advisory genealogies?

The Big Kettle Drum

Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because a miss-mixed gallon was nine bucks at the hardware. Opportunity in the mistakes of others. Also being dumbshit because only recently have I discovered that one gallon will not quite cover the entire ceiling. Another fifty bucks for a second dark blue gallon to finish. Step ladder to reach. Step up, step down, step up, step down. Temporarily anchored thin chain segments to release the old, rusted, and very heavy florescent light bays each into a cradle so the electrical wires can stay put. Paint around the edge. La la. Johnny Cash Unearthed for a while. Hymnals for church of holler projects. Jesus, let it dry. Re-attach with same mildly corroded lag screws. Right shoulder aches familiarly. Pain Friend forewarns a visit. Overhead painting summons the pair of 1995 surgeries. Back when I was twenty-one. Pins to hold its many unpredictable slippages, hem in structural flaws. Paint on Monday and Thursday afternoon because those are the right recovery intervals for the age I happen to be now. Not finished but soon. Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because.

Disappeared

“Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in schools disappeared. Suppose all of the standardized tests–city-wide, state-wide, and national–were lost. In other words, suppose that the most common material impeding innovation in the schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this ‘catastrophe’ into an opportunity to increase the relevance of the schools. What would you do? (59).

—Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. (1969). Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Delta. #reboot #education

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m tiring out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the ninth in this series from Week 30 of 2025, or the Week of July 21). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

2025 John Lovas Award showpiece arrived in July’s mail. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Living Portrait

/ Derek Mueller

I suppose The Johnny Cash Project is as close as I will come to a Grammy nomination. Seems the crowdsourced sketch-video put to Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave” has been nominated for Best Short Form Music Video at the 53rd annual Grammy event coming up in February. In case you haven’t heard of it, here’s a bit of background on The Johnny Cash Project, including a recent version of the piecemeal video.

As far as I can tell, the video is continuously redrawn, with new frames entering into circulation and with old frames dropping in rank as participants assign a five-star rating to existing frames. Many months ago I spent a whopping thirteen-plus minutes sketching frame #1271. Whether or not it was my finest (or even a remarkable) artistic moment may take many more years to determine. My efforts have been rewarded with an average rating of two out of five stars (.400 is kicking butt in baseball and in drawing, right?). Anyway, ratings are not what is important here (ignoring momentarily that the Grammys are a contest).

Grammy win or no, the Cash Project has a pedagogical double that I remember each time it turns up again in this or that RSS stream–the class-drawn music video pieced together from snippets of lyrics and whatever drawings they motivate, all spliced flip-book-style into an on the fly music video. The rawness of DIY; the investment of “I did that.” D. has done this a couple of times with first and second graders who illustrated “What A Wonderful World.” Before the Cash Project, I hadn’t given too much earnest thought to a corresponding compositional project worth pursuing in the classes I typically teach. The Cash Project is a far more mature (i.e., serious-seeming) digital monument, and, that being the case, it has pushed me to reconsider possibilities for small-crowdsourced projects, maybe by adapting something like this and incorporating Google Docs-Drawing (with placeholder images and layers).  I like the way these music video projects link (implicitly collaborative) crowdsourcing and gestalt; the summative experience is more forceful than, say, reading a wiki entry, although, ideally, their logics could be linked–with one used to illuminate the other. Maybe.

Undoubtedly, I’ll be too tired to stay up and watch the Grammys. And that’s if I even remember when it is on TV. But I’m hopeful that The Cash Project gets its due. Here’s a glimpse of the competition.