blue's clues

A few minutes ago I thought of a person from the past. His name is Paul Kosberg. He was a strange chap, creative as heck and perhaps a bit shady. To be honest I had wondered if he was still alive or blew himself up firing glass so I googled him. After some reading I stumbled upon a sentence in the search result summaries: I'm pretty sure the teacher was a dude named Paul Kosberg. Paul was really really weird. He was genuinely a good guy, and genuinely a fucking hippie. As I clicked on the link I immediately noticed the name of a good friend - Hunter. It was evident to me that from that moment I would be rejoining Hunter in our experiences of the Kaua'i Academy of Creative Arts (KACA). Here is his post, after which I will be following: http://www.huntermorrison.com/2009/01/with-memories.html

Hunter and I had become friends though elementary school. We more or less belonged to the same circle of friends - the dweebs, the nerds, the misunderstood. As children some of us were quite nihilistic towards our view of the world. In fact, Hunter and I had been disciplined by our computer lab teacher for wishing nuclear winter upon the world. I think Hunter whispered it first, then I said it much, much louder. Being the little bastard that I am/was, I ratted Hunter our when I was asked to leave the class. And so, we sat outside on this long bench with a built-in planter at one end. It was raining that day. I remember sitting there, staring at the fourth and fifth grade buildings, the green grass, and the sole piece of playground equipment in that area - a curious tornado-shaped basket with three separate chutes. None of us knew what the hell that thing was for, and as such, we used it for a variety of experiments. Invariably one of the chutes was clogged with a stray slipper. In fact, one could often seen the gray soles of slippers on most of the corrugated steel roofs. Mind you, we were all in fifth or sixth grade. We had come up with new ways to play with our footwear, which we later regretted walking to the gravel and dirt bus stop. Those who hung on to their slippers had the privilege of putting them on their hands to run faster in relays. I think we were all convinced that those slippers made a difference. Looking back at it I realize that it is no mistake that those who ran quickly were those prudent enough to not throw their slippers all over creation in the first place. I think many of them are successful today.

But I slightly digress. All that I am establishing is that Kalaheo School was naturally a creative place to begin with. We had pretty excellent teachers, although we certainly didn't recognize them in that regard at the time. We always had some sort of art class going on, either in music with Mr. Griffith, clay with Deb Rosenbaum, woodworking and instrument making with Ken Nitta, and the like. I remember constantly playing with clay, painting with tempra. With the patience of what must've been saintly people, our class - Hunter and my class - left that place in 1996 or 1997, I believe. At that time the school split in two. Some went east to Kauai Intermediate and High School, while the rest of us went to Waimea Canyon School. There was little interface between the two; we were lucky if we saw each other at the newest and most grand of all Kauai attractions: Borders at Kukui Grove.

But before Hunter and I went our separate ways, we were united for one last time at the Academy. Now, Hunter describes it aptly. It wasn't the grandest of prospects. Still, there was something exclusive about it - one applied, paid fees, found transportation, and operated in a very small circle of highly gifted individuals. I also remember being one of the "minorities" there. My impression is that children that were there had some connections to one another through their parents. KACA wasn't geared towards the deadhead, and if you were there you thought out of the box, to be sure. So there you were, sequestered in this quad for half the day. Nobody came in, nobody went out. You were simply together in your respective classrooms according to the period. Socialization was therefore very local, very fragmented. I don't think I knew many names of persons outside of my classes.

There were two classes which comes immediately to mind: Painting with Penny and Mixed Media.

First, Painting with Penny was amazing. I remember when I first signed up I had no idea what was going on. As the weeks went by, the "-ting" wore off and the sign came to read "Pain with Penny." I don't think that would be a fair assessment of the period, but I remember it being quite apt for those awful live-portrait sessions, with the familiar Deb Rosenbaum standing in the middle of a semicircle as we children desperately tried to master watercolor portraiture with little advance instruction. "Look for the negative space", we were told. Of course, that meant to look for the triangle of open space between the body and her angled elbow, but I don't think many of us paid any attention to that. The real stars of the show were two women. First was this middle aged woman with a bassoon for a voice, named Penny Nichols. She would constantly be wearing some hastily dyed dress which swayed back and forth as she waddled to opposite sides of the classroom. She was the main instructor, after whom the class was named and was an excellent artist in her own right. The other woman, an aide, was named Suzie Urminksa. Her mother was a Ukrainian who lived alone. I had brought a tablet with the Russian alphabet with me to study each day. Eventually she spotted it and told me that her mother would come one day and speak to me in Russian. I was so nervous. Suzie had a sister named Natalie and together they were chess champions of some caliber. Hunter once asked Suzie if she had played chess by mail, and to our surprise, she had. "It look a long time", she said. Suzie was a petite girl, plain in the face but beautiful nonetheless, who wore her already short hair up for most of the time. Some days it would be wrapped in a bandana - I would say, "Privyet Babushka Suzanna!" She would smile and remind me to turn off my voice recorder, which was always on in my breast pocket of my jacket. Of course, I never listened.

The material for that course is equally as memorable. We had to paint from magazines, stills, and portraits as I have mentioned. We were taught the value of blues and purples in representing shadow. We were shown how to extract a pool of watercolor off of our Windsor and Newton cold pressed watercolor paper, masking taped to a small brown fiber board. I think out of all of the things we did there the watercolors were my favorite. I remember her showing us how to stretch the paper and dry it properly, how to perform a gradiated wash, and how to maintain areas of white to highlight things without the aid of masking tape of "frisket". I don't know what "frisket" is, nor am I sure if that is the correct spelling, but she made it clear to us that we wouldn't need it if we respected our white areas. Come to think about it, we learned a lot of technique in that course.

There were few rules there. One of them was simple: never use black to outline. We took our boards out one day and did pastel drawings of the trees. I remember that Penny had an uncanny way to represent everything in an impressionistic style. Even the lone red and white transmitter tower in the distance was accurately, although stylistically, included in the lush landscape drawing. She wanted us to do the same. Near the end of the course she wanted us to enter this contest called "Mango Madness", hosted by the Borders. She selected only one of our works of art, a lovely painting by a girl named Windsor Flynn, to enter. I don't think the rest of us cared. Hunter and I had a tablemate named Kela. He was more interested in drawing a spider or mosquito on a piece of coconut flesh than anything else.

Now, were we behaved in this course? More or less. As I had mentioned, we carried around a small tape recorder. We had this absurd fascination with Blues Clues at the time, so we'd listen to my rudimentary recordings of the show. Of course, we'd sing along, just Hunter and I. Sometimes Suzie or Penny had to restrain us, but that wasn't often. We were never placed in detention or sent to the office. Penny was a sweetheart and took even the most serious of matters lightly. Best of all, Penny treated us kids as if we knew what we were doing. She was critical but equally as affirming. She was also very diplomatic: I remember asking Penny what she thought of Suzie's artistic skills. She replied, "Well, Suzie...Suzie is an excellent chess champion, did you know that?" I answered, "Yes, I know that but I was asking about her painting", after which Penny laughed and walked away, the train of her dress swaying with her butt. She liked to use blue dresses, by the way.

Mixed Media was a whole different story. I mentioned before the name Paul Kosberg. The man was the first true hippie I had ever met. This guy always wore a backwards baseball cap, a housepaint stained shirt, khaki shorts, white socks which had turned brown, and light brown leather hiking shoes. His arms were hairy and he had a long pony tail he'd stick through the back of his cap. His aid was a beautiful young woman named Andrea Alfiler, which I could've sworn sounded like she was saying "Andrea Adolfhitler". She was a soccer chick and always wore these red shorts. She was amazing.

The class itself was a two period one. The room was on the east side of the quad, on the end. From my chair I could see Penny's door, and from the other, I could see the flagpole. Through the windows ahead of me I saw more buildings where the grown up kids were doing their thing in music and the like. But for the time, I was under Paul's not-so-threatening control. I could tell when Paul was coming around because I smelled him first. Then I saw his blank gaze. He almost looked like one of those sharks preparing to bite his prey. It was a cold look on his face. He would show a small group of kids to do a certain thing, then have those kids teach the others. He'd be quite graphic about what would happen to us if we didn't obey safety rules. He'd talk about the shards of glass kicked up by a diamond-tipped dremel tool which would fly into your respitory system and cut your insides up if you didn't grind the mirrors under a thin layer of water. Paul told us stories about a Parisian man he met that ate glass. Somehow I associate Paul with glass and silicone. Always, the glass and silicone.

If Penny had emphasized technique, Paul emphasized licence and freedom. One day I wanted to dissect something badly. I made some crude "organs" and enclosed them into a clay body. With Hunter, we began to cut open the clay body, exposing the sinews and organs. We thought it was a great idea to fire it in the kiln, which we did. If I remember correctly, that piece went to Hunter's grandmother, who lived in Kalaheo near another friend named Malachi. Paul wanted the two of us to use this big box somehow. Eventually, Hunter and I made this dragon named Al. We painted it with this awful green tempra mixed with too much water. Its wings and jaw could flap. We wanted to cover the entire thing in multicolored felt, but Paul was apprehensive. He told us that the class was costing the Academy too much money, and that if he was able to pull things together he promised "You'll get your stinking felt!!!" Did I mention that he sometimes got angry?

Hunter was right. He ate and drank out of preserve jars. He ate vegetables. He also did make us exercise. Now, Hunter and I were perhaps the most freethinking of the kids there. We weren't afraid to question, to challenge the system. This gained us some notoriety with Deb, the administrator of the program. Before every class, Paul would have Andrea take us for a short run, some stretches, and some chinups from a bar suspended in the left doorway. One day, Hunter and I had enough and refused. Paul did send us to Deb that day, who couldn't quite figure out what she should do with us. We were placed in silent detention as she typed on her computer. Awkward.

The entire thing ended with a big open house for all of the students. A tent was pitched in the quad, and every classroom was open for parents to browse. At the end, I left the Academy and didn't see Hunter for quite some time after that. He went on to Kauai High and eventually to college on Oahu, where I met him a couple of times after that.

What did I take away from KACA? First, I learned that mischief is always better when done amongst the average hippie. I think Hunter kept up with the art, but I didn't. I did retain a respect for the fine arts but I don't have much of a desire to do them again. I briefly experimented with watercolor on my own but it wasn't the same. I had lost my artistic community upon whom I had come to rely for much of my motivation without having realized it when I was there.

It was here that I began to hone my skills of dissent - what could be said, what could be said, which buttons to push and which ones would only end up hurting myself and others. We were not unruly children, but we challenged the structure in ways the other kids weren't. I began to speak to adults as a young adult, not so simply as a child. Things seemed to make them tick, and there were somewhat clear lines of taboo. We could politic and lobby - it came natural to Hunter and I. What we couldn't anticipate, though, is having to let go of our prima facie prejudices against these artists. From the wacky gymnastics instructor who made gobbling sounds, to a coconut tree freak, to the overacheiving asians we had there - those people were unshakable. I could see the roots of a love of the craft there, and caring and wonderful people who guided us in the very best ways they knew how. I think that's what Hunter and I were reacting against, in a certain way. The status quo needed dissent which was relevant to blips within the situations. In fact, that is the thing I carry with me to this day from the Kauai Academy of Creative Arts.

Indeed, dissent is an art unto itself.