12. Accidental Art:

During the Thanksgiving break, I went to The Museum of Modern Art. Among all of the fantastic modern art works, I found a special view at a tiny corner. It was actually a normal glass near many masterpieces on the fourth floor. Although the glass was not noticeable, the landscape that was framed by the glass was pretty amazing to me

It was a huge glass from bottom to the top of the wall. A think brown blind warded behind it. Through the gaps between those horizontal lines of the blind, a part of New York was exhibited in front of me. I regarded this special art work as a picture. At the left part of it were many classical buildings with the typical New York style. Posters, advertisements, and hundreds of dark green glasses reflecting light. Different colours form traffic lights looked like some tiny dots that produced by oil painter. Apparently, a painting of NYC could never be a still life. It was full of movements. Everyone knows yellow cabs’ position in New York. At the bottom of this painting, many yellow rectangles rushed on the grey street. Pedestrians come and go; they twisted their ways though the cabs, and each of them made the painting even more energetic.

The right part of the painting was what I liked the most. It was a building stand right opposite of MOMA. It had little wall, and most part of that side were glasses. Therefore, everything in it can be seen by its audiences. It was a office building, but its decoration style was very modern. Furnitures were mostly white with red, beige, and green. Each floor had different arrangement, but they all took simplicity to extreme. Buildings, streets, and inner decorations. The fantastic glass mixed three elements harmoniously. It lived in Modern Art Museum, and it was indeed an accidental art.

15. Eavesdropping:

Sit in a place and listen to the conversations around you. Choose one and create a story using the actual dialogue you overheard.

“ Why don’t you eat lunch?”

“ Oh, no. Dining Hall is disgusting!”

“ I agree, but you need to eat something anyway. You will be hungry!”

“ Don’t worry. I only have two periods left.”

A slim girl is drinking apple juice, and she totally ignores the concern in her friend’s eyes.

“ It is one thirty now. I have to go! See you guys.” The girl catches her bag, and rush out of the Dining Hall.

The first class after lunch is math. She is sleepy and tired. It seems the apple juice did not give her much energy. She wants to focus on what her teacher wrote on the white board, but the only thing she can do is close her eyes and fall in sleep. She dreams of Turkey. Thanksgiving is coming! In her dream, everyone in her family sits near a long rectangle table. A huge, and sweet-smelling turkey is lying in the middle. Beef just came out from her mother’s kitchen, and some good-looking desserts are waiting to be welcome. “ Oh, mom. You are the best cook ever! ” She smiles.

“ What are you talking about!” She is pulled back by a small and nervous voice, “ Wake up! Teacher is coming!” She opens her eyes. “ Is the class over? ” “Nope, we have ten minutes left.” The girl has a sigh. She feels hungry and sad because of the missing Thanksgiving meal.

The next class is biology. The girl has a test today. She has prepared for it since last week. “ It is not hard.” she thinks. Suddenly, she feels dizzy, and the whole world starts twisting in front of her eyes. Finally, she faints away.

The white wall of health centre is the first thing shows up after she regain consciousness.

“Oh, crap!” she recalls her biology test.

“I should aways eat lunch no matter how disgusting the food is!”

16. World of magic (second draft)

I have an amazing blue notebook. It seems normal, but it can lead people to another strange world once they open it. I found it in an old store. Actually, it was for my math homework. However, everything changed after I opened this crazy notebook. The first page was just a normal white paper with many horizontal lines. Suddenly, the lines started disappearing, and a weird picture emerged from the white. It was a little boy in the picture. He was only five years old I guess. He seemed confused. After two seconds, I was even more shocked! The boy started moving in my notebook! I wondered if it was really a notebook. I looked at the boy’s face; he was as terrified as me. I was curious, but I did not want to scared this little boy. Then I tried to open the second page. Same as the last one, after a few seconds, a person’s face appeared on the paper. Nonetheless, this face looked more familiar. “ She works in that store!” I recognised her. Some words appeared near her neck. Apparently, she was writing on the paper. “ Hi, sorry for not telling you before this. This notebook, so called The Mirror, can be used for communication. They existed in pairs before. Now, since the order has been broken, it is no more meaningful to us. Exploring the world with it! You are lucky. ” I did not know how to respond. This was so unbelievable! I saw her smiled to me, and disappeared gradually. This kind of notebooks were separated everywhere, which means I can get touch with some strangers randomly! That sounded excellent!  In the next few days, I took The mirror with me all the time. Whenever I opened it, someone would always appear from the other side of the world. I think I own a treasure now. I have made many new friends with The mirror, and each page of it witnessed my amazing time with them. This magic notebook is still used for recording, but in another more fabulous way. 

Details

It is a normal lip balm. The top of this lip balm is a pink cover. It is made of plastic. Like most of the lip balm, it's a cylinder. The cover is not clean. Something black stick on that. Under the pink cover is its orange body. It is also plastic. A piece of bright yellow paper sticks around it. The background of the paper is full of grapefruit that drawn by light orange lines. The brand of this lip balm is a line of big and red words" BURT'S BEES ", and two red thin lines lies on the two side of the words. Under the brand is a little pink rectangle with white " REFRESHING " on it. " LIP BALM with PINK GRAPEFRUIT" is typed right below the rectangle with small black words. Five lines of INGREDIENTS are very tiny and slim. Between the INGREDIENTS and the brand is the bar code, and two bees are at each side of it as decorations. At the bottom of this lip balm is the axis that used to push the balm out, and it is also orange. As it shows, this balm smells like grapefruit.

This is a cylinder lip balm.

Its cover on the tip is pink, and its body is yellow and orange.

It smells like grapefruit.

Galileo——An Amazing Play

Galileo had always been a hero in our mind. He was a great physicist and astronomer. However, after I watched the play GALILEO that was wrote by Bertolt Brecht, and acted by students in my school, I changed my view toward him. Moreover, this play also helped me get into the world that Galileo lived before.

The story happened during 1500-1600. Galileo was short of money. One day he knew about a telescope that had been found by others, and he replicated it, and published to the world as his own invention. Then he used the telescope to substantiate the former heliocentric model of the solar system. Nonetheless, the heliocentric model was against church’s well, because this model doubted the exist of god. Galileo had some students, but he finally gave up his informal teachings because of the torture and threaten from the church.

In this play, I think Galileo’s daughter Virginia is a very meaningful character. Virginia had no mother. She was a kind and beautiful girl. After Galileo published the telescope, Virginia fell in love with Ludovico. However, Ludovico left because Galileo insisted his informal teachings. Finally, Virginia became a nun, and took care of his father till he died. To be honest, I think Virginia’s life was pathetic. She did not have anything a normal young girl should have. She had no mother when she was a kid, no husband after she grew up, and no child till she was old. She did not blame anyone, and just accepted her own life silently. From her life, I can learn more about the society at that time. That was a patriarchy society; young girls could hardly decide who they were married with. Marriage was established above family and fame. Virginia’s marriage failed because of her father’s actions; apparently, that was unfair. At the end of the play, Virginia and Galileo still lived in their old house.  She cooked for her father, and took care of everything. I felt sad about her, because she was not only one girl in the play, but also the reflection of thousands of girls in the past.

Besides the story, the actors are amazing on the stage. Their fabulous performance and natural expression made the play more vivd and attractive. As a protagonist, Charlotte Lesser did a excellent job! I could tell how much time she had spent on this play. She acted Galileo, a man. Her way of walking, and talking almost gave audiences a real feeling of a seventeenth century male scientist. Moreover, other actors were also fantastic! They did not seem nervous at all of acting in front of teachers and classmate. They put themselves into the play, and that was exactly one of the most important step of a good play.

I like this play every much, and I would definitely recommend my friends to watch it. From those short two hours, I learned a lot. I knew about the history that has been covered by the text book, and the society in hundreds years ago. For the most important, the actors were the soul of the play. As an audience, I want to show my gratitude to the actors for such a wonderful play!

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht born About this sound Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht; 10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956) was a German Marxist poet, playwright, and theatre director.Brecht left the Berliner Ensemble to his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, which she ran until her death in 1971. Perhaps the most famous German touring theatre of the postwar era, it was primarily devoted to performing Brecht's plays. Brecht has been a controversial figure in Germany, and in his native city of Augsburg there were objections to creating a birthplace museum. By the 1970s, however, Brecht's plays had surpassed Shakespeare's in the number of annual performances in Germany.There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Máiréad Ní Ghráda, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner, Robert Bolt and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joseph Losey, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley.

Galileo Galilei

 Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) made major contributions to the fields of physics, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics and philosophy. He invented an improved telescope that let him observe and describe the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, sunspots and the rugged lunar surface. His flair for self-promotion earned him powerful friends among Italy’s ruling elite and enemies among the Catholic Church’s leaders. His advocacy of a heliocentric universe brought him before religious authorities in 1616 and again in 1633, when he was forced to recant and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. Galileo was born in Pisa, Tuscany, on February 15, 1564, the oldest son of Vincenzo Galilei, a musician who made important contributions to the theory and practice of music and who may have performed some experiments with Galileo in 1588–89 on the relationship between pitch and the tension of strings. The family moved to Florence in the early 1570s, where the Galilei family had lived for generations. In his middle teens Galileo attended the monastery school at Vallombrosa, near Florence, and then in 1581 matriculated at the University of Pisa, where he was to study medicine. However, he became enamoured with mathematics and decided to make the mathematical subjects and philosophy his profession, against the protests of his father. Galileo then began to prepare himself to teach Aristotelian philosophy and mathematics, and several of his lectures have survived. In 1585 Galileo left the university without having obtained a degree, and for several years he gave private lessons in the mathematical subjects in Florence and Siena. During this period he designed a new form of hydrostatic balance for weighing small quantities and wrote a short treatise, La bilancetta (“The Little Balance”), that circulated in manuscript form. He also began his studies on motion, which he pursued steadily for the next two decades.

Letter

Dear Ms. Guarino,

First of all, I am so sorry that I did not have my homework today! I did not mean to be that. Believe me, I had a crazy weekend, and I will tell you where my homework is right now in the story below.

Last Friday, I went to the supermarket with my sister Jenny. She just picked me up from school, so that I had my bag with me. We wanted to buy some food for the weekend. However, when we went to the food shelf, a stupid cat rushed in front of me and beat my bag. I was scared, because all of my homework was in the bag, and I was longing to finish it! Therefore, I started fighting with the cat. It was screw. The cat ran away when it found out it had no chance to win. I thought" I am definitely not let that stupid cat destroy my beautiful homework!" Then I abandoned my sister, and ran out of the supermarket after the cat. Although the cat did not turn around at once, it was like it knew I was right after it. 

Why would a cat like my bag? I asked myself. Maybe it was a trap! I was afraid some bad guys were hiding behind the wall. However, it was too late. I have already run into a little street with only one conner in front of me. Suddenly, the cat stopped, and stared straight into my eyes. " Do you know why you are here?" OMG! The cat started talking! I even suspected if I was in my dream! " What are you?" I asked, " You are definitely not a cat!" " Uh, of course not a cat." Its shape was changing, and it got taller and taller! Finally, a young girl of my age stood in front of me. " Are you kidding me! A witch?!" I was almost wordless. " Clam down." She was a pretty witch with brown curly hair,"You are the person we chose. We did not live on this planet before. We lived on a planet where the paper was only for little cats to play. Paper has energy! The spirit of trees live in the paper, and we need this kind of energy to sustain our bodies. However, you people are stealing them from us! Therefore, I need your help to destroy all the homework on the earth, because homework is useless and wasteful. Can you help me?" I thought a lot in a few minutes. I loved my homework, but for the thousands of cats on another planet, I decided to help her destroy the homework.

Ms. Guarino, now you know why I did not have my homework today. Although my homework have been destroyed, its spirit went back to another planet. I was not too lazy to do that. I have to sacrifice my homework in order to save them! I know you love the cats, and I believe you must understand why I did that. I will do the homework on my iPad tonight. Thank you so much!

Sincerely,

Amanda