Art in the Age of Mehanical Reproduction

I'm in Palo Alto this week, here for 10 days attending a publishing course at Stanford. It's really funny: the attendees here range from 20-somethings to 50-somethings, with the average age being 38, yet somehow being on a college campus, taking classes in college classrooms, sleeping in college dorm rooms, and eating in college dining halls is causing us all to regress. We're acting like *high school* students.

We pass each other notes in class, and complain about the lecturers, and save seats for one another at lunch. There's one guy here who seems to be looking for a hookup, and he keeps trying to get the "military girls," as he calls us, to come out partying with him. He's got his eye on one of my coworkers, and I think he figures if he can just get her drunk, maybe he'll get somewhere. Like I said, high school.

So tonight, after a truly amazing lecture by a graphic designer named Nigel Holmes, we decided to bike over to the Rodin sculpture garden here at Stanford. I love Rodin, and I visited the Rodin Museum in Paris a couple months ago. (Yes, dahling, I was just in *Paris*. Oh, stop it, it was while we were on the honeymoon.) It was kinda weird to see many of the same sculptures here in California. The thing with Rodin and his sculpture is he kept the molds, so it's possible to continue to cast "original" Rodins. So there's a Thinker in Paris and a Thinker here in Palo Alto. Which is actually kinda fitting.