Many of you who missed the Spring Animation Showcase have been asking to see “Little Guys!” in all of it’s completed glory. To you, let me just say that there’ll be some “Little Guys!” related updates to Paganomation.com very soon. Does that mean you’ll be able to see the film? You’ll just have to wait and uh, maybe see.
Today was the Tisch Salute to the Graduating Class of 2007, and it went down in all of its mediocre glory. Getting there at 3:30 (for a 5pm start time) seemed relatively unnecessary. I guess maybe they assumed it was best to allot for college kids to be an hour and a half late, and if you were later than that, well, forget it. There was a lot of standing around in lines — actually, that was all there was. Not the most comfortable thing in the world, feet-wise. They didn’t even bother looking at our tickets which were SO IMPORTANT THAT WE GET BECAUSE THEY’RE SELLING OUT FAST COME RSVP AND PICK THEM UP.
The highlight was definitely keynote speaker Laurie Anderson, whom I’ve been a relatively huge fan of since since I first saw her do host segments on “Alive From Off Center” at MT&R. She talked about the confusion of being an “artist” (that is, what exactly the hell it means you’re supposed to do) as well as her time as artist-in-residence for NASA, which is definitely one of the best job titles ever. Much of her work — at least of what I’ve seen and heard — involves story-type pieces, and so it seemed kind of a natural fit for her to come and talk to the graduating class.
The rest of the Salute wasn’t terribly engaging, especially for a self-proclaimed school of the arts. There was a dance… thing about caffeine (maintaining the art school expectation of pouring out clichés), as well as a musical number about wasting time post-college and not accomplishing anything in your 20s. It kind of begged the question as to why there were no film and TV pieces, or recorded music, or ITP… stuff. Animation students are used to being overlooked, so it wasn’t terribly annoying. It just seemed sort of one-sided that we had to sit through their work as a captive audience when no one was forcing them to sit through ours.
Of course, no one was there to prevent us from heckling, either.
Alas, this was supposed to be the “good” graduation with comparison to this Thursday’s All-University Commencement, the last NYU graduation thing to take place in Washington Square Park before they move the fountain to line up with the arch. Yeah. I’m wearing sneakers this time.
- David