i've already spent a good portion of the "spring" this year collecting and piling rocks on the beaches around seattle, so when i saw the preview for Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, i knew i had to see it. he is a scottish environmental sculptor who creates ephemeral sculptures in nature. the film is ok but the visuals are really stunning, and watching Goldsworthy work and talk about his work is pretty cool, even though i generally hate voice over. he piles rocks, builds things out of flowers and twigs and leaves and tide pools and river currents. words are not the medium for this. see it if you have a chance. it is sort of slow moving though, so if you end up renting it, you may want to use it more as ambient visuals than active watching.
another passtime i've taken up is writing notes upside down and backwards, left handed, and most recently also in spanish. i think this accesses a different portion of my brain.
i've been seing a lot of music lately: Mars Accelerator, Kinski, Wally Shoop, Arab Strap, Bright Eyes, Long Winters, Bettie Seveert, Palo Alto, 4 hurs of Bach around the Clock, Pussy Chop Banana, Euphonison.
i'm going to see M. Ward and Vic Chestnut and the Dirty Three soon.
i'm skipping Cat Power and Crooked Fingers this go round, cause really, there is only so much money in the world, and most of it doesn't belong to me.
angelel said at 2:15 PM 04-23-2003: That's an interesting thought, accessing new parts of your brain but...
Disclaimer: puke, disgusting! This is where my enormous nerdyness comes in... and everything I've learned in my brain and language class:
You are not necessarily accessing new parts of your brain, but are more likely using more parts of it simultaneously. The pathways between these areas that you are using may be what you are excercising, not any new areas per se.
First, you are accessing your Wernicke's area, the area in the Left hemisphere of your brain which matches semantic concepts with actual words in both English and Spanish and figures out the correct spelling (obviously, your Spanish is stored apart from most of your English vocabulary in Wernicke's and is slightly more difficult to recover if you are not bi-lingual) After Wernicke's sorts these words out in the correct syntactic order, the information is then sent via the arcuate fasciculus (and corpus callosum) to the Right Pre-motor Cortex which plans movement for your left arm and hand. These plans get sent to your right Motor Cortex which executes the orders for moving for your left arm and hand. As you are writing, certain scattered areas in your right brain that are involved with viso-spatial processing are communicating with your right pre-motor cortex so that you write in the desired direction. However, it is your Wernicke's in collaboration with your visual cortex that are being your editors. If wernicke's is not satisfied, you then erase, revise, corect spelling errors or other repairs.
That was for you, Shelly, in case you were interested. They have done experiments on this sort of thing to see if you do start using new parts of your brain. The answer is pretty much no, although, you are using more areas associated with other functions (visio-spatial relationships, co-ordination) than if you were writing regular. The overwhelming majority of both Right and Left handed people, process language in the left hemisphere. For efficiency reasons, the brain refuses to allow any other area to really take over these functions.
I'll stop now.
shelly [email] said at 2:51 PM 04-23-2003: AWESOME!!! thank you so much for typing all of that out, Angele. can you suggest any reading (more technical than something like "drawing on the right side of the brain" but not-too-technical) which would explain brain function with activities like drawing? i'm interested in the difference (if there is one) between drawing from a model vs. drawing from imagination. i started being interested in all this when i realized if i answer the phone while i'm working in my studio, it is really difficult for me to switch to converstion mode, though i'm usually a pretty verbal person. does the brain process things like drawing, or like math, the same as spoken/written languages?
angelel said at 1:00 AM 04-24-2003: ummmm, I don't know of any good books off hand. I'll ask my psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic professors tomorrow. They should know of something non-boring and rather tasty to read.
shelly [email] said at 4:18 PM 04-23-2003: they were really good. they were the opening band for soundtrack of our lives, so the set was pretty short. i've heard that there new album is really good, but i haven't heard it.
kara [email] said at 4:20 PM 04-23-2003: I remember on the walk home from school as a kid I'd always pick up rocks and pile them into this one place in my yard, until mom got made and made me scatter them.
shelly [email] said at 5:25 PM 04-24-2003: my feelings exactly. but being a grown up means that no one can tell you that you CAN'T have candy and beer for dinner.
