The John Baker Tuesday Morning Experience

"Painting and Sculptor from the 1900's to the 1950's" is my Tuesday morning class. After a morning of telling myself to get out of bed, until I finally do, after which I get a coffee and muffin on the way to the T, and then walk down windy Ruggles St, it's a relief to watch John Baker mumble about his cataracts and why he can't judge the focus of his slides. Let it be noted that this is professor John Baker's last semester here at MassArt, and he is fully aware that he is the last professor at the college, let alone the current decade, to use slides. He excuses this with insisting that slides are better quality than other photographic representations of paintings or sculptures. From my experience of this class, that is a big, fat lie. Many of these slides have seen better days, and its arguable that if you are going to represent a 2-d image in any way, that it's going to suck either way because its not the real thing. Therefore, it seems more likely that Baker probably is just too stubborn to let someone pry the slides out of his fingers before making a damned Powerpoint.
With that being said, Baker is charming with his cute little Buddy Holly frames and sweatervest. A sharp dresser and a funny mumbler, he'll entertain you with his speech patterns and will academically sweet-talk his way out of anything before you have the chance to really think about what he just said. An example of this other than his b.s. explanation of still using slides, could be when one student asked how much sculpture is really in the class considering its hardly mentioned in the syllabus yet in the title of the course. To that he mumbled poetically on and on about David Hockney (which will presumably be discussed later in the coursProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 during only one class). By the time he had finished his monologue on David Hockney, most paying attention realized he knew what he was talking about when he shifted the subject to something else he preferred, but didn't have any real defenses for the question at hand. Much of Baker's class experience echoes this, so the general attitude seems to be we'll just let him blabber on about what he wants and take note of the cohesive moments and laugh at his old-school vernacular or dramatized phrases.
Professor Baker Quotes
"that was the cat's pajamas!"
"hip, I'm not"
"a pharmacological FAD?!"
"how could this have grown up in the prairie?"
"Oh! The weight of the past is crushing us!"