AMEN.
This (via Rob Walker) made me think of a college experience, one that I’ve tried to institute as a meme (so far, unsuccessful).
3D design was a ‘foundations’ course. Normally, it’s a series of rote exercises to get you to think about both aesthetic form and practical value. RISD famously makes students build a chair out of paper (no glue, fastener, etc), but that you can sit on.
Usually you take 3D your first year in art school. Several friends coincidentally skipped it (wanting to race to sexier classes), and decided to wait until the last quarter, thinking they would have a gimme class to offset the senior thesis/project.
So my friends forgot how excited you are in Year One and over-work. They walk into 3D class and find out the first assignment is to make a shoe. Out of tape. That you can wear in class.
They are very bitter, since you can’t make it in five minutes, even with four years of drug consumption and performance art events under the belt. But my friend Curt discounts their worry.
After class, in my apartment, he lays out his elegant and efficient solution: “First, you make a sugar mold of your foot. Then, put tape over the mold, pour in water and pour out the sugar!”
Everyone stares at him, slack-jawed. Make a sugar mold? Of your foot? Was that a class we missed? Is there some secret five minute sugar mold process we don’t know about?
For years now, we have used this phrase as short hand for an interim solution to a problem that is more complex than the entire problem.
You see this often in movies. Think Ocean’s Eleven. The amount of money they hoped to steal was on the order of $110 million. What is required was building a replica of a massive underground vault. Add to that the other opportunity costs and you figure the sunk costs (some of which are alluded to in the movie) are on the order of $30 million. For a job with very low likelihood of success.
But if you have $30 million, can’t you just put it in a Hedge Fund for five years? So Ocean’s Eleven (and the successors are even worse) is absolutely a Sugar Mold Movie. I’ve been trying to get this into the lexicon of movie conceits (like the Fruit Cart). Help a brother out.
