Autum came crashing in on NYC this weekend. The weather turned so quickly that it felt like God was channel surfing. (I’m bored! Let’s make it Fall!) And with the season has come the actual beginning of the new MFA program here at the ICP. It was unnerving to sit down in front of the incoming class of eleven (eager? guarded? cynical? hungry?) students and realize that for the next two years I was going to be helping them structure a new kind of educational experience. I found myself getting a little teary actually, as I tried to explain what I hoped we would do with this oppurtunity. Very strange all in all as I would never have thought to be the chair of a graduate program. Seven years ago when I moved back from SF, I was passing out towels to muscle queens at the Chelsea gym. Is this a step up? The next two months are an insane minefield of activity and commitments. In the past I’ve dealt with situations like this by shutting down and going into crisis mode. I hope that this time around I can do something different. One thing that is strange is that all of this is laced with making work, so that things are tumbling out in a way that I would not anticipate, and I find myself taking odd moments here and there to develop pieces. I’ve wanted to make this LJ activity a way to start to codify some of my thinking about studio practice, and now I find myself operating with only the meagerest of physical studios (about ten square feet in my apt.) and hardly any practice to speak of.