Friday, November 28, 2008
Black Friday
I worked one real Black Friday at the old Stern's dept store in Willowbrook Mall. It was crazy, not so crazy you'd be trampled or shot to death. Later, at Pearl Arts & Craft in Woodbridge NJ, Black Friday was the day holiday shopping traffic began around Woodbridge Mall across from Pearl & the Toys r Us next door in the same strip mall. That was crazy. It wasn't an especially crowded day at Pearl. The managers always expected it would be busy, I don't know why. Friday was a day off for me & the managers rarely bugged me to switch my schedule around. Pearl ran one big annual sale, in August, aimed at the back-to-school customer, particularly college fine & graphics arts students, who had to invest big bucks on everything from drafting tables to rapidograph pen sets to yards of canvas to life drawing books. There was a similar, smaller sale around Christmas that included specials on holiday decorations.
What I liked about Pearl was that it was a creative person's gift store, or at least a place you could buy presents for creative people. This brought a lot of clueless customers into the store looking for all-in-one arts or crafts supply sets. Pearl had those in abundance, & they were a waste of money. But you could put together a great grab bag of goodies for a modest cost if you gave it a little thought & weren't in a hurry. I often talked customers out of buying expensive kits & instructional books for supposedly genius kids & steered them toward the separate arts supplies; water based markers, colored pencil sets, pads of newsprint paper.
Most creative children are intimidated by neatness (although a few are obsessed with it). A kit in something that resembles a briefcase, with slots for every item, looks great to adults, & even children can appreciate that aspect when they unwrap it,
but it can make kids feel they have to do projects, not waste anything, & keep all the stuff orderly. Creativity doesn't work that way. Creativity is messy & disorganized. They learn organization & economy as part of the creative process. They find out they have favorite colors, & those colors get used up faster. If they start a picture & hate it, they must feel free to rip the page out of the pad, crumple it up, & throw it at the dog. The primed canvas & imported French watercolor paper they can't waste come later. They dump everything into a box & searching for what they need teaches them that favorite things require their own special places. Go ahead & toss in some cheap, junky stuff, I'd advise (not saying it proves that they can't depend on cheap, junky stuff when they're in the Throes of Inspiration). Crayola really does make better crayons, choose a smaller box of those with the logo every child knows over a bigger box of something else. But there's nothing wrong with the two-color "3-D" markers that come with the cardboard glasses. & yes, coloring books are great if they're cool dinosaurs, knights in armor, beautiful horses, & even, yuck, Disney characters. But reserve judgment if these are not colored with a grasp of realism. Children often color things the way they ought to be, not what they are. Some people listened to me. When they didn't, I went back to my book dept.
If you recall, the decade of the 90's was the computer decade. Then (as it would be now), I thought my job was to pry kids away from computers & video games. Arts software for kids didn't interest me, a child pushing a mouse around. Software was the equivalent of an adult telling kids what to do, placing limits. The computer was a grownup invention & was becoming a hypnotic babysitter & grownup conspiracy to prevent children from making a mess.
As a writer, I appreciated the computer, loved word processing software; by the new millennium I knew four different wp programs & had websites. I had no problem giving up typewriters. But I also knew that poems were broadcast from the beautiful twisted magnolia tree at the back of the yard where I grew up. I had written poems on bar napkins, inside matchbook covers. My favorite Picasso story was of when he was inspired by the fish skeleton on a supper plate, so he immediately imprinted it on some clay he had laying around & used that for the basis of a new piece. My favorite art quote was from Paul Klee: "A line is point going for a walk." It was from a small book & included an illustration of a point becoming a line. It wasn't a straight line - Klee had the most enviable of lines; I wanted my writing to be like his lines. Neither of those artists ever became fully adult.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
What I liked about Pearl was that it was a creative person's gift store, or at least a place you could buy presents for creative people. This brought a lot of clueless customers into the store looking for all-in-one arts or crafts supply sets. Pearl had those in abundance, & they were a waste of money. But you could put together a great grab bag of goodies for a modest cost if you gave it a little thought & weren't in a hurry. I often talked customers out of buying expensive kits & instructional books for supposedly genius kids & steered them toward the separate arts supplies; water based markers, colored pencil sets, pads of newsprint paper.
Most creative children are intimidated by neatness (although a few are obsessed with it). A kit in something that resembles a briefcase, with slots for every item, looks great to adults, & even children can appreciate that aspect when they unwrap it,
but it can make kids feel they have to do projects, not waste anything, & keep all the stuff orderly. Creativity doesn't work that way. Creativity is messy & disorganized. They learn organization & economy as part of the creative process. They find out they have favorite colors, & those colors get used up faster. If they start a picture & hate it, they must feel free to rip the page out of the pad, crumple it up, & throw it at the dog. The primed canvas & imported French watercolor paper they can't waste come later. They dump everything into a box & searching for what they need teaches them that favorite things require their own special places. Go ahead & toss in some cheap, junky stuff, I'd advise (not saying it proves that they can't depend on cheap, junky stuff when they're in the Throes of Inspiration). Crayola really does make better crayons, choose a smaller box of those with the logo every child knows over a bigger box of something else. But there's nothing wrong with the two-color "3-D" markers that come with the cardboard glasses. & yes, coloring books are great if they're cool dinosaurs, knights in armor, beautiful horses, & even, yuck, Disney characters. But reserve judgment if these are not colored with a grasp of realism. Children often color things the way they ought to be, not what they are. Some people listened to me. When they didn't, I went back to my book dept.If you recall, the decade of the 90's was the computer decade. Then (as it would be now), I thought my job was to pry kids away from computers & video games. Arts software for kids didn't interest me, a child pushing a mouse around. Software was the equivalent of an adult telling kids what to do, placing limits. The computer was a grownup invention & was becoming a hypnotic babysitter & grownup conspiracy to prevent children from making a mess.
As a writer, I appreciated the computer, loved word processing software; by the new millennium I knew four different wp programs & had websites. I had no problem giving up typewriters. But I also knew that poems were broadcast from the beautiful twisted magnolia tree at the back of the yard where I grew up. I had written poems on bar napkins, inside matchbook covers. My favorite Picasso story was of when he was inspired by the fish skeleton on a supper plate, so he immediately imprinted it on some clay he had laying around & used that for the basis of a new piece. My favorite art quote was from Paul Klee: "A line is point going for a walk." It was from a small book & included an illustration of a point becoming a line. It wasn't a straight line - Klee had the most enviable of lines; I wanted my writing to be like his lines. Neither of those artists ever became fully adult.
Labels: culture, holidays, shopping
