Last week I had seen a ton of posters up around campus about a performance art piece that was going on called Piano Burning.  The posters made sure to advertise that the performance would include an actual piano being burned.  While I was sitting in the music lab arranging my song for Exit (unfortunately I didn't finish because the program crashed and I lost motivation and just played guitar) I heard some of the music majors talking about it and a few of them were talking about going to get the piano and scrape all the paint off of it before burning it.

On Thursday night I had a group meeting at 8:30 and the piano burning was at 8:45, so at first I was a little concerned that I would miss it.  Luckily my group sat down and someone said "So what if we went to see the piano burning instead?" and the whole group immediately stood up and we went off to watch it.  I brought popcorn.

The event was pretty cool.  While nobody played the piano while it was burning (which was how I originally imagined the event), it was still a pretty fascinating thing to see.  There were a ton of Carleton students, faculty, and Northfield community members watching, and we all crowded around the Bald Spot for the piece.  I took a ton of pictures, which weren't that good since my camera isn't great.  Luckily, Nate Ryan (my friend who made the Duck Bus documentary) took some really nice ones.  Here are some of my favorites, and you can find the rest here.

A local Northfield blog also wrote about it and has a little video up from the event.

The next day was a very special Convo for me.  There have been a number of Convo's I've really enjoyed (Sally Ride, Steven Levitt, etc) but this was one that I was really really excited for.  Phase II (the multiracial group) has used Kip Fulbeck's book "Part Asian, 100% Hapa" a number of times.  It's a book of portraits of people who identify as multiracial.  This is the book cover...

And this is the sign for his exhibition...

Kip is an artist/professor/photographer/spoken word artist/surfer/filmmaker/guitarist, and not only was his speech really enjoyable, I got to have dinner with him the night before and lunch with him the day after, and he had a lot of really interesting things to say.  It was great to hear about someone who was working in the art world in a number of various mediums, and working as a professor and how his teaching and personal art have mixed together.  He has another book out (that I admit I haven't read yet) that is a book of portraits of people with tattoos called Permanence and a "fictional autobiography" called Paper Bullets.

This was midterm break, which is always great.  At the beginning of 6th week we get the Monday off.  It's a nice relaxing time.  I had a looooong Monday though.  But luckily my roommate (since freshman year) and I took a late night trip to the grocery store and got ice cream.  Did I mention it's spring?