Prankmeisters are real... or not

In Junana, Scratchy spent a good deal of time at college working out pranks to gain cred and have fun. In the actual Reed College there is a fine tradition of pranking, one that has the entire city of Portland on edge at times. One of Reed's former prankmeisters, Igor Vamos, joined in the Guerilla Theater of the Absurd, and pranked the campus and the town for years. Now a member of the Yes Men, he continues to bring live theatre into corporate meetings across the planet.
What is the essence of a great prank? It has to be more than a simple joke. A great prank needs to mine the river of absurdity that all forms of the serious create by their posturing. The serious and the absurd are linked at the waist, and the prank flings open the curtain on this fact.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oter/3574042146/ oter cc license on flickr

Do the Brainwave exercises and Jorge will smile at you

How does the Brainwave in Junana work? Why don't schools use this now? These are questions I've gotten from readers. I have to remind them here that Junana is fiction. The Brainwave exercise is based on current research into "brain-based education." The links between education and the workings of the brain have been explored for quite a time. Harvard's Graduate School of Education has a program called Mind, Brain, and Education, which is devoted to advancing knowledge in this area. In Junana, the Brainwave looks at the intersection between short- and long-term memory. It proposes some physical movements that help the brain open up long-term memory so that students retain more of what they experience. This is the type of potential impact that new brain-based education findings are looking to achieve. Eric Jensen has a great overview piece on brain-based education.

Don't forget to do the Brainwave everymorning... or drink your latte!

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanmkr/266895606/ urbanmkr cc license

Living in the Museum Museum

When Desi tells the tale of the "museum museum" we are left with a sense that, as absurd as this might sound, it's no different than the kinds of cultural recycling we are encountering today in movies, music, and fashion. All around us, people with the means to produce new cultural objects are choosing instead to repackage and represent the same old content. Comic books, blogs, and soon Tweets will be recycled into movies (I confess, I loved the Iron Man flick). Fair enough, if it sells, right? Still, at some point we need to leave the museum, step out of the box, and find new ways to build new cultural capital. The means of doing so are all around us (you probably have an HD camcorder somewhere within reach). When Queen Victoria opened up the Crystal Palace in 1851 (photo), she started a century and a half of museum building. At the time it was extraordinary. Now, it's just lame, particularly when you are surrounded by cultural objects directly from the museum museum that has become our cultural engine.
photo URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crystal_Palace_-_Queen_Victoria_opens_the_Great_Exhibition.jpg