Impossible Kisses

The Question For Frankenstein’s Friend

2012-02-15T02:29:00.001-06:00

The monster continued to utter wild and incoherent self-reproaches. At length I gathered resolution to address him in a pause of the tempest of his passion: “Your repentance,” I said, “is now superfluous. If you had listened to the voice of conscience, and heeded the stings of remorse, before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.”

“And do you dream?” said the daemon.

from “Frankenstein”
by Mary Shelley

So Mary Shelley possibly with help
from her poet boyfriend wrote a novel
and at the very climax of the book
the monster describes itself as alone
more alone even than Satan himself
who has fallen angels for companions
and the monster asks its creator’s friend
by Frankenstein’s body, “And do you dream?”

Frankenstein’s friend makes an attempt to state
the context he sees around the monster
but the monster has a soliloquy
to deliver and the ability
to define and describe its own context
and the monster with its creator’s friend
is still alone and delivers its speech
and is still alone and still a monster.

What would Frankenstein’s friend if asked today
“And do you dream?” even attempt to state—
“I like when the TV flashes bright lights
and I like when the TV yells at me” ?—
to put a context around the monster
Mary Shelley never could have foreseen
even if her poet boyfriend had helped
even if the lonely monster could care?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Other Way Of Making A Frankenstein’s Monster

Return To The Other Way Of Making A Frankenstein’s Monster

The Question Clarisse Asks Montag

The Opposite Of Washing Machine

Halloween On An Inclined Plane

ITV Gives 'Frankenstein' A Feminine Makeover

Before And After ‘Nuts Do Hop’—A Valentine

2012-02-14T05:16:00.000-06:00

I stopped what I was doing
and scribbled in my notebook.

SHOUT POND
NO PUSH DOT

She stopped what she was doing
and read what I had written.

“Shout pond?” she asked. “No push dot?”

I smiled and she made a face.

“Okay,” she said. “I give up.”

“Come on,” I said. “Try harder.”

The face she made got harder.

“Okay,” I said. “Donut shop.
They’re ‘donut shop’ anagrams.”

Her face didn’t change at all.

She looked from me to the words
then she sighed and closed her eyes
and her face became softer.

“I cannot believe,” she said,
“I’m going to say this, but—
‘Nuts do hop.’ Are you happy?”

I wrote it in my notebook.

NUTS DO HOP

I said, “That is very good!
See, you’re getting good at this!”

She put her fingers over
her closed eyes and shook her head.

She asked, “What have I become?”

I said, “Even more sexy.”

She made an eye-rolling face
but I tackled her before
the expression settled in.

By our rules that means I won.

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Pamela At The Doorway To Atlantis

Landscape With Tiny Dirigibles. Or Not.

Hen Politics, And Passages Between Worlds

Vicki Over Her Shoulder: A Sketch

2012-02-13T00:35:00.002-06:00

She said, “I don’t know that you’ve captured the real me.
Is that really how you see me? Pink and orange?”

“It’s just an acrylic sketch,” I said. “I’m playing
with shapes. Playing with brushes. And playing with you.”

“You’ve given it a name,” she said. “And you started
by doing a rough drawing on an index card.
Ten shapes? Is that all it takes to paint me? Ten shapes?”

“I was playing with shapes,” I said. “But I can see
I made one mistake that wrecks this as a likeness.”

“What’s that?” she asked. “You mean the pumpkin orange hair?”

“In this acrylic sketch,” I said, “your mouth is closed.”

“Oh shut up!” she said. She pressed her lips together
to keep from smiling, but when she saw me staring
at the shape her lips made she opened her mouth wide
and stuck her tongue out at me. Then she turned, quickly,
so that her hair bounced brightly as she walked away.

She didn’t look back at me over her shoulder
but that’s okay. In the little painting, she does.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I’m trying to experiment
with ways to get a handle
on doing stuff like this
that specifically avoid
anything ‘photographic.’

This is the index card version:

*

An Up-To-Date Vicki Inventory

Dinosaurs And Robots And Vicki’s Smile

The Best Reason To Study Astrophysics

Repurposing Vicki

This Woman From The Canals Of Mars

Jeanne Hébuterne — Art As A Grail

Orson Welles And Miley Cyrus K-i-s-s-i-n-g

2012-02-10T02:33:00.001-06:00

“Every radio program tries
to be more dramatic than life as every play
tries to be more dramatic than life and
every movie, not less so.”

Orson Welles and Miley Cyrus
Sitting in a tree
Orson Welles and Miley Cyrus
K-i-s-s-i-n-g
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I first played this melody, these arpeggios,
on guitar where grabbing the third an octave up
isn’t too hard because of the way strings are tuned.

On keyboard playing this with one hand is a stretch,
but if you pivot fast on your index finger
and reset fast for the next root it’s possible.

On keyboard you can play the root with your left hand
making it the treble note of a larger chord,
and the rest of the arpeggio is easy
for the right hand and there’s no rushing to reset.

On keyboard, too, of course, there is extra drama
in playing the root in a low chord’s treble note
and then still playing this as written right-handed
with the necessary pivoting and shifting.

When you add in Orson Welles and Miley Cyrus,
I mean when you sing along with your own playing,
this little five-bar tune becomes larger than life.

What a movie that would be—A young Orson Welles
brought back by extraordinary special effects
in a romance with Miley Cyrus as herself
and a larger-than-life jazz soundtrack about love.

What a wonderful scene that would be—Where Orson
explains to Miley that entertainment should be
more dramatic than life, not less so. She would nod,
swoon and they’d kiss. It would be a synthetic kiss
because he would be only a special effect
but with a jazz soundtrack bringing it all to life
it would be more dramatic than life, not less so.

Orson Welles and Miley Cyrus
Sitting in a tree
Orson Welles and Miley Cyrus
K-i-s-s-i-n-g

The thought is more dramatic than life, not less so.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Orson Welles at Wikipedia

*

Moon Dust In Waltz Time

You Damn Punk Kids

Dracula, The Wolfman And Miley Cyrus

Women From The Ancient Cities

Kimberly When Empires Crumble

2012-02-09T02:40:00.001-06:00

There is a big parking lot behind a restaurant
and there are decorative pebbles between the sidewalk
and the parking lot. Kimberly and I were walking
along the sidewalk. I stopped, pointed into the lot.

“Look at that pile of pebbles,” I said, “stacked up, balanced,
almost as if someone built them into a pattern.
No one did. I saw how that pile of pebbles happened.
After the last snow, a car missed the exit. One tire
drove over the pebbles and sprayed a bunch of the rocks
onto the snow. The next day the Sun melted the snow.
As the snow slowly melted the pebbles settled down
on top of each other, gently, forming the pattern.
It looks like someone arranged them but it’s just nature.
Geologists think glaciers can move boulders around
in a similar way but at a much larger scale.”

Kimberly looked down at the pebbles and up at me.

She said, “So you saw how this pile of pebbles got made?”

I nodded. I said, “Yeah, I often walk past this lot.”

Kimberly nodded, too. Then she stepped into the lot
and kicked apart the pile of pebbles, sending the stones
scattering across the asphalt. Then she looked at me.

“Now you know,” she said, “how that pile of rocks was destroyed.”

I said, “You’re still mad at me for telling you that parts
of Stonehenge were restored, like other sites, aren’t you?”

“No,” she said, still looking at me. “I wouldn’t say ‘mad.’”

I had once pointed out to her that some standing stones
in Europe had been restored by archeologists
and really had not survived intact thousands of years
the way many new age guide books sometimes present them.

Standing on the asphalt surrounded by scattered rocks,
she was looking at me. The expression on her face
was the same as just before she had kicked the pebbles.

“When your face is like that,” I said, “it kind of scares me.”

She looked at me a moment longer then walked over
and put her arm around mine. Without looking at me,
she guided us back to the sidewalk. She said, “That’s good.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Empire Of Kimberly’s Innocence

Curious About A Curious Woman

2012-02-08T04:33:00.003-06:00

So yesterday I did a little sketch.

I was someplace where there was a very pretty woman and I thought she looked interesting and, particularly, I thought she had an interesting expression, very curious. So I had a go at making a very fast sketch to see if I could capture something of her “curious” look.

It’s just a little sketch, and I used a cheap pencil (again!) but it was all kind of spur of the moment and unplanned. I’ve got a scan of my sketch, but first here is a photo of my notebook to give you an idea of the size of the little sketch:

The image is only about four inches by two inches. I’m so frustrated with myself. I tell myself again and again to work large and work dark, but when I actually buckle down to work I fall back into my old habits.

Anyway, I wasn’t too unhappy with the little sketch so I scanned it even though it is light and my scanner is not the best:

I thought this wasn’t too bad. It only took something like about five minutes and I was trying to be inconspicuous.

I need to throw away my cheap pencils. If I simply don’t have cheap pencils, then I won’t be tempted to use them. But I don’t know how to force myself to work larger. I keep reminding myself, but when I sit down to sketch something my first lines are always framed almost as if I were working on an index card.

But I wanted to post this image because it’s been a long time since I’ve put up a drawing. And since it really is a priority for me to get better at this I want to have examples up for myself to work against, to compare to, to improve from.

*

So I need to think about this, I need to come back and look at this post after a couple of days have passed.

I’ve got a couple of projects in mind where I’d like to use drawings or paintings rather than photographs. But I need to work larger and with more firmness.

I’ve got a curious expression on my own face right now because I’m wondering how well I’d do if I took more time, worked larger, and asked a woman to pose for me.

I don’t know.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This Woman From The Canals Of Mars

A Small Magnifying Glass On A Mirror

The Lost World Of Stacy And The Llama

‘Hortense Had Her Adventures’

Jeanne Hébuterne — Art As A Grail

A Playground In Which To Grow Strong

2012-02-07T01:06:00.003-06:00

A Mussel Of A Different Color

That is one way of playing the first four bars, the first musical phrase, from Bobby Darin’s great song, “Dream Lover.”

I love little phrases like this. A lot of times I like little musical phrases more than I like the whole song that contains the phrase. In this case it’s a great song, too, but I especially like some of the little phrases like this that make up the song.

Even though this is only four bars long, there is movement and resolution and you can hear (and see, in the notation) the little interplay between eighth notes and longer notes, the way little rhythms repeat and get changed around.

There’s a word in the music world, “ostinato.” It refers to using short musical phrases repeatedly as a compositional device. Some people use it more than others. Some people enjoy it more than others.

Many people, for instance, only know Ravel from his “Bolero,” which was just a few bars long, but orchestrated beautifully. Ravel himself wrote, “Before its first performance, I issued a warning to the effect that what I had written was a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of ‘orchestral tissue without music’.”

I think there is a lot of music there. The music’s in the arrangement.

One of the most famous composers forever linked to ostinato as a technique is Bernard Herrmann (Pedals, Patches And A Composer).

Wikipedia has an interesting page on ostinato, and the introduction is:

In music, an ostinato (derived from Italian: "stubborn", compare English: obstinate) is a motif or phrase, which is persistently repeated in the same musical voice. An ostinato is always a succession of equal sounds, wherein each note always has the same weight or stress. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in itself. Both "ostinatos" and "ostinati" are accepted English plural forms, the latter reflecting the word's Italian etymology. Strictly speaking, ostinati should have exact repetition, but in common usage, the term covers repetition with variation and development, such as the alteration of an ostinato line to fit changing harmonies or keys.

If the cadence may be regarded as the cradle of tonality, the ostinato patterns can be considered the playground in which it grew strong and self-confident. —Edward E. Lewinsky

I suppose a person can be derisive of “short melodies.” It’s easy, of course, to make a case that the modern world is so fragmented, so chaotic, that our very ability to recognize or conceive of extended coherent passages in entertainment or art has been eroded.

Although that’s true, I don’t believe it is really relevant to the issue of ostinato if the phrases are well-conceived and well-arranged.

For instance, a Shakespeare sonnet is shorter than a Shakespeare play, but the shorter form is not inherently less—in any way—than the longer form. The emotional and intellectual impact and enjoyment of a sonnet can be as great as a play.

And there is a danger, too, in thinking that length in and of itself creates some kind of value. Stephen King, for instance, has written some novels that are as long or almost as long as, say, “Atlas Shrugged.” Are any of those long Stephen King works comparable in any way to the long “Atlas Shrugged” in terms of content, quality and impact? An extended work—just because it is extended—is not necessarily of any value.

Of course, a short piece is not of value just because it is short. It is almost trivially easy, for instance, to count out seventeen syllables and write a haiku. But the trick of writing a haiku isn’t counting the syllables, but rather conceiving of and embodying some kind of single coherent thought that creates a unified sense of impact.

I would say that ostinato as a technique is especially valuable in times of fragmentation and chaos.

Listening to and recognizing well-conceived and well-arranged short themes and short phrases gives us a chance to exercise our esthetic resources playfully, to enjoy a process in an easy context, so that we may later feel more confident and relaxed in a more difficult context.

As a would-be musician, “simple” four bar phrases can be much more useful in a practical way than an entire song. For instance, playing scales in all keys can be very boring, and harmonizing an entire song can take a lot of time. But taking a well-conceived little musical phrase and transposing it from, say, C to F then Bb then Eb then Ab then Db then Gb, or from C to G then D then A then E then B, can be actually fun. It is making real music, thoughtfully, rather than just firing the muscles in the fingers and making sounds.

At some point in the future I’m going to write more about this business of little things versus bigger things. But it seems fitting to keep this post about short things short.

Here is one of Bernard Herrmann’s most famous pieces of music. This is the credit sequence from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.” It is just a couple of minutes long, and unlike “Bolero” there is almost no development in the arrangement at all. It is just one musical phrase set against a second musical phrase, and the contrast is repeated.

Some people heard this music as kids when they were too young even to consciously separate the score of a movie from the other elements. But this music is so cool that they remembered it their whole life.

And maybe when something stands alone so passionately—the way this music does—it is such a vehement unity that it is a way of actually striking back against the chaos and fragmentation of the modern world. I think it is.

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Dream Birds Untangle Dream Knots

Dream Lover Fantasy Update

An Orchestra That Goes In And Out

An Orchestra That Goes In And Out

2012-02-06T01:22:00.001-06:00

V-Accordions have revolutionized the music world, and Roland has dedicated itself to the ongoing development of these amazing instruments. The FR-1x series is the newest addition to the famous V-Accordion family. These compact, lightweight models offer the same flexibility and portability as their popular FR-1 predecessors, but add significant features, including USB functionality and advanced bellows-pressure circuitry for enhanced sensitivity and precision. With new-generation speakers onboard and an expanded 7-segment/3-character display, the FR-1x piano-type and FR-1xb button-type set a powerful standard for a small lightweight accordion.
Full range high quality speakers on board in bass reflex box: 7 W x 2
USB memory port for Wave/MP3 player, new-sounds upload, data loading/saving
Professional look with friendly user interface and 7-segment LED
Standard and Free Bass modes
16 Accordion Sets, 16 Orchestral sounds, four Virtual Tone Wheel presets, eight User Programs
Available in black or red

I’ve never been tempted to play an accordion
but Roland makes a synthesizer accordion
in fact they have an entire product range of the things
and if I ever meet a woman who has been forced
to learn to play accordion by Old World parents
I would show her these squeeze boxes to wear on her chest
because these squeeze boxes can sound like an orchestra
but it would be an orchestra she wears on her chest.

An orchestra that goes in and out and in and out.

I’ve never been tempted to play an accordion
and I’ve always been attracted to women and flutes
but the thought of showing an accordion player
an arrangement of “Dream Lover” that goes in and out
makes my eyes go wide and I have to remind myself
to blink because I start seeing that squeeze box squeezing
and the music in my head is a whole orchestra
playing along with me singing for a dream lover.

An orchestra that goes in and out and in and out.

I’ve never been tempted to play an accordion
but I have been tempted to stare at a woman’s chest
I mean a woman’s chest without an accordion
strapped to it so a woman with a synthesizer
strapped to her chest is something like the best of both worlds
and I wonder: Could this woman be the next big thing
a chest to stare at that everyone politely could
while an orchestra there on her chest played “Dream Lover”?

An orchestra that goes in and out and in and out.

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Another Look At Another Venus

Dream Birds Untangle Dream Knots

Dream Lover Fantasy Update

Flutes In Space! Or: Landscape With Giant Moth

2012-02-03T02:18:00.003-06:00

“Mothra and the Twin Fairies”
by Jonathan Case

Someday I’m going to meet beautiful, tiny
Japanese women who sing songs for Mothra and
I want to be able to play and sing along.

I’ve met women who aren’t beautiful, tiny
Japanese women who sing songs for Mothra but
I’m never able to convince myself they’re real.

Moths, Scorpions And Unreal Women

In a spacecraft orbiting a planet
there’s no gravity and a flute will float
until someone grabs it and starts playing.

That’s not science fiction. Flutes have floated
while in orbit and so have flute players.

I might be wrong, but I don’t imagine
Ian Anderson ever imagined
he’d play a flute duet with a woman
in a space station orbiting the Earth.

We know what we are, not what we might be.

We know today, tomorrow is a dream.

I can imagine two tiny women
from Japan singing to a giant moth.

I can imagine myself performing
along with them on guitar or keyboard.

If the real future is more fantastic
than what is in our imagination—
Ian Anderson did play a duet
with a woman playing flute in orbit—
not one second I invest practicing
scale construction and chord voicings ever
will be wasted. My imagination
starts with tiny women and giant moths.

We know what we are, not what we might be.

We know today, tomorrow is a dream.

Did a real Molly Malone ever push
her wheelbarrow through the streets of Dublin
while singing about what she was selling?

A woman astronaut did play her flute
from a space station orbiting the Earth.

Songs for giant moths. We practice today
so we can face the music tomorrow.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

NASA Astronaut Cady Coleman,
Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson Perform
First Space-Earth Flute Duet
at NASA News

*

Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton

Molly Malone Redux

The Name “Gillian”

A Bird Who Could Fly To Neptune

Landscape With Tiny Dirigibles. Or Not.

2012-02-02T01:58:00.001-06:00

The pigeons walked around the parking lot
like tiny dirigibles hovering
just above the ground. The birds’ coo-cooing
sounded like small dirigible motors,
a low humming propelling the airships.

She read what I wrote. She asked, “Are you mad?
Pigeons? Tiny dirigibles? What kind
of simile is that? You mean the birds
are carrying passengers back and forth?
You mean the birds will drop bombs on London?”

“Maybe I should reverse the sense,” I said.

The pigeons walked around the parking lot.
The birds didn’t look anything at all
like tiny dirigibles hovering
just above an undulating landscape.

She said, “The landscape is undulating?
Is the landscape having trouble breathing
because of the feathers flying around?
Dirigibles getting their summer moult,
preening, pulling out their winter feathers?”

“How hard should I try to keep this?” I asked.

The pigeons walked around the parking lot.
He wondered why the motion of the birds
made him think of tiny dirigibles
hovering above a rolling prairie.

She made a face. “Do not try to keep this.
Pigeons are not tiny dirigibles.
The parking lot is not breathing heavy.
The simile was bad enough. Don’t try
to make a hot and bothered metaphor.”

I made a face. She made another face,
and exhaled an exhausted kind of sigh.
“Give me what’s left of your Red Bull,” I said,
“for energy. In case I keep working.”
She banged down the can, and then stomped away.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pamela At The Doorway To Atlantis

“When All My Words About Britney Disappear”

This Airship, This Woman, This Dream

The Night Outside My Window

2012-02-01T01:35:00.000-06:00

There is a strip mall west of where I live. A few months ago the business owners erected a new spotlight that shines on the facade of the buildings twenty-four hours a day. The light makes it hard for me to get a good view of the western horizon after sunset, but bright lights are almost always pretty if you look at them with the right frame of mind.

Here is one view of the night outside my window:

I don’t like to give titles to things like this, but if somebody made me give a title I guess I’d call this “An Improvisation In Green.”

There is green, but the other colors appear, too.

I love simple, almost accidental, stuff like this. I can imagine writing a story about this, or poetry, or music. And it is almost, but isn’t quite, abstract.

The improvisation part is because this is all pretty random. I just stood at my window and let my point-and-shoot camera pick its own settings. (That’s not completely true. The only input I gave was to select the streetlights on the far left for the automatic-focus control point, then I half-depressed the shutter button to activate the internal electronics before I physically moved the framing slightly right to encompass the spotlight.)

Then I opened the image in a very simple photo-manipulation program—Microsoft Office Picture Manager. But instead of adjusting the parameters to achieve something like a “real” rendering of the actual visual scene, I just had fun and pushed various levels to one extreme or another until something ‘looked pretty.’ Here is what the value settings looked like.

That’s all pretty silly, but I wanted to create a rich dark backdrop for the bright colors. I actually didn’t change the saturation controls much at all. When the value levels hit extremes like this it sort of enhances the hues just by itself.

I like images like this—the spaces, the tensions, the contrasts, the harmonies.

I’m not sure what is the psychology involved, but I wouldn’t be able to paint something like this even though I would have more control over the very dynamic elements that are so much fun. I’d guess it is something about self-confidence and experience and being relaxed. I have no self-confidence about anything, I have little real experience with anything, and I’m not relaxed at all about anything.

But I’ve played with photography for a long time, so I suppose that other than writing it is the only activity I can be almost a little relaxed about.

So this evening I played with the night a little bit.

(I once saw a video of the beautiful Nancy Wilson, from Heart, making faces while hair stylists and makeup artists and costume designers glammed her up for a photo shoot. She looked at the camera and shook her head, and said, “It’s all fake. All fake. Totally fake.” But it wasn’t really all fake. Just reality, a little glammed up.)

This is what the real night outside my window looked like before I slathered on the glamour for a fun composition:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Mystery: Paintings Never Painted

Amy Winehouse Makes It Official

Beautiful And The Damned, Emo And The Glammed

Things Not Jazz: Ice Cream Sadness

Sense Of Place

Nancy Wilson!

The Question Clarisse Asks Montag

2012-01-31T11:37:00.004-06:00

“But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

“You sound so very old.”

“Sometimes I’m ancient. I’m afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I’m afraid of them and they don’t like me because I’m afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembers when children didn’t kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different.”

Ray Bradbury
from “Fahrenheit 451”
imagining the future in 1953

In Oscar Wilde’s book, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,”
Dorian, the immortal beauty, murders Basil,
the painter who created the portrait that changes
instead of Dorian, that ages, becomes corrupt.

But what drives Dorian’s hatred in the murder scene?

Is Dorian furious at his external soul,
the painting that is punished for his own transgressions,
and does he kill Basil for the part that Basil played
in his immortality, his endless awareness
of what he is and his terror that others might see?

Or when Basil begs Dorian to repent, to pray,
to undo the connection to the magic picture,
does Dorian panic thinking Basil might succeed?

Many years later, I mean later than Oscar Wilde,
Andrew Wyeth created a series of paintings
that would become famous known as the Helga paintings.

So far as I know, nobody killed anybody
as a consequence, as a sequel, to those paintings.

Wilde wrote in England. Wyeth painted in New England.

Now it is many years later, I mean later than
the Helga paintings, and I wonder if New England
has aged, or is endless and aware like old England?

I’ve known beautiful women. I’ve wanted to paint them.

In something like awareness of something like panic,
my temptation is to keep my desires to myself.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” at Wikipedia

Wyeth’s Helga Paintings at Wikipedia

*

Songs For Hippies Don’t Scare The Pigeons

Not A Premise Beyond Belief

Kite Flying In America (With Trout)

“This Was A Different World”

On Not Playing A Synth Workstation #1

On Not Playing A Synth Workstation #2

Rocket Summer People

There’s A Hand Raising A Phone

Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Seeing Things In Christina’s World

A Mussel Of A Different Color

A Mystery: Paintings Never Painted

2012-01-30T04:19:00.001-06:00

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film “Blow-Up,” a photographer suspects a picture he took almost randomly in a park may have unwittingly captured an image of a crime or the aftermath of a crime. But the details in the background of the photo are too small to see clearly. In his darkroom the photographer creates larger and ever larger prints from his negative. Eventually he creates a print that is so large the image depicts the random grain particles of the film negative as much as it does the scene from the park. The photographer’s neighbor comes in and, unaware of what the photographer is doing, looks at the large print and observes, casually, that the image looks just like one of the abstract paintings her boyfriend paints.

For me that moment would be my pick for one of the most incredible moments in all cinema.

Earlier in the film when we see her boyfriend’s abstract paintings, they are hardly worth a second look. They seem to depict nothing, just random shapes.

Later, when we know the photograph contains the image of a crime, the enlarged grain particles from the negative present the appearance of being random but we know they contain critical information. We can almost see it.

The blow-up print from the film negative becomes a kind of backward comment on abstract art—Does abstract art contain critical information as well, just above or below our threshold of perception?

Although the film is ostensibly a mystery story, by the end it has become a comment on the nature of reality, or at least the nature of our perception of reality.

*

This weekend I had intended to do some painting but I never did. I’ve got some heavy card stock that can stand up to being properly prepared with gesso and I’ve got some modern, high-tech water soluble oil paints. But I’ve never even taken the plastic wrap off the paints.

*

You can mix many pretty types of gray
if you start with four high-chroma colors.

Red mixed with green right from the tubes make gray.

Red mixed with blue will create a purple
and that purple mixed with yellow make gray.

Red and yellow mixed together make orange
and that orange mixed with blue will make a gray
that doesn’t look quite the same as the gray
made with the same paints starting with purple.

Yellow and blue isn’t quite the same green
as green from the tube and when mixed with red
it is still another version of gray.

And of course black and white straight from the tubes
make gray with almost no color bias
although it always will be warm or cool.

But if you never unwrap the plastic
and take the tubes of paint out of the box
you don’t get any shade of gray at all.

I talked to a pretty woman about
politics over the weekend. She said
talking politics gave her a headache
but she’s the one who brought up the subject
when I was talking about cameras.

Talking politics gave her a headache,
she said, and then she told me all about
why she supports the Occupy movement.

I’d rather have talked about cameras
but I listened because she was pretty.

I should have stayed home and unwrapped my paints.

I should have stayed home and mixed up some grays.

It’s a mystery to me. I mean paint
wrapped in plastic. Paintings never painted.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Five Student Colors Of L. S. Lowry

The Margins Of Water In The Wild

“Sexy As The Dead Bridges”

A Thirty Year Old Mushroom

Nancy Kominsky 1915-2011 RIP

Songs For Hippies Don’t Scare The Pigeons

2012-01-27T01:14:00.001-06:00

Don’t scare the pigeons
I just put out some bread
Look at them eating
That’s what it’s like inside my head

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I wrote that little melody and bit of verse
this afternoon. To play it I split my keyboard
and play chords with my left hand and flute with my right.
I like to experiment with the harmony.
Sometimes I support the flute with a piano,
other times with a guitar or synthesizer.
And I change chord voicings, change bass and treble notes.

Getting technology to work doesn’t scare me.
I’m not scared by theory, or practicing technique.

For me that stuff is like throwing bread to the birds.

People scare me. And I wish I could fly away
the way pigeons fly away when people scare them.

That’s what it’s like inside my head. And some people
scare pigeons for fun. They think: They’re just stupid birds.

That’s what it’s like inside my head. I remember
a guy laughing at me because I was shopping
wearing a sport coat. I wanted to fly away.

That’s what it’s like inside my head. Just stupid birds,
and some people run through just to send them flying.

I like pigeons. There’s wilderness around cities
and pigeons could fly away if they wanted to
but they stay with us even though we frighten them.
I guess they like the people who don’t frighten them
enough that they put up with the other people.

Hippie girls used to put flowers in rifle barrels.
That was brave. And it didn’t frighten any birds.

Even the Time magazine hippies who just danced
were in it for the dancing, not to frighten birds.

Songs for hippies. That’s what it’s like inside my head.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thinking About Arranging “Layla”

Aberrant Forms

Freedom From The Wild/Lost In Metonymy

Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Synthetic Philosophy, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Synthetic Pigeons, Liminal Entities And Scripts

The Occult Technology Of Lost Songs

The Pigeon That Laughed At Hemingway

2012-01-26T00:21:00.002-06:00

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a pigeon. No one has explained what the pigeon was seeking at that altitude.

That of course is not the epigraph
Hemingway wrote for “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
In Hemingway’s version, it is the carcass of a leopard.

A pigeon isn’t a carnivore,
it doesn’t run fast and kill gazelles.

A pigeon isn’t solitary,
it doesn’t sit on a branch at night
watching the savannah, eyes glowing
in light from the Moon or just the stars.

A pigeon isn’t a distant thing,
it doesn’t live here only in zoos
where a synthetic environment
pretends to be someplace far away.

A pigeon isn’t literary,
it doesn’t flesh-out a metaphor
of a dying writer bickering
with Helen, a woman photographed
by Town and Country though they never
featured her breasts in their photo-spreads.

A pigeon isn’t love found and lost,
it doesn’t embrace, swoon, kiss or slap,
it isn’t decorated, fake, rich,
tough, martyred, sexy, drunk, impotent,
nostalgic, cynical or remote,
and pigeons usually don’t sit
in front of a typewriter bleeding
or typing or not typing at all.

A pigeon isn’t skillful with words,
it doesn’t craft thoughts into phrases
people repeat over drinks in bars,
but sometimes when a pigeon makes sounds
its coo-cooing vocalizations
could be mistaken for soft laughter.

A pigeon isn’t a carnivore,
it doesn’t run fast and kill gazelles,
but sometimes it sounds like it’s laughing
so Hemingway went with a leopard.

The Pigeon In Science And Romance

2012-01-25T00:27:00.003-06:00

So last Saturday I drove over to pick up Jennifer.

When I got there she asked if instead of going out to dinner could we stay in, and could I help her daughters with a school science project? I said sure, and the next thing I knew Jenny and the girls were whispering something in Latin and there was a flash of light and a puff of smoke and they transformed me into a pigeon and stuck me into a little high-tech cage with flashing lights and levers and bells and one of the damn levers electrified the floor, but only sometimes, depending on which light was flashing.

Damn punk kids today with their witchcraft and science!

Look, Jennifer snapped a pic:

(Okay, I admit that account is fictionalized, just a little bit. But it’s true to the spirit of many of my nights out. And that picture isn’t really Jenny’s girls, but rather is from the Wikipedia entry about Skinner boxes, what kids today call operant conditioning chambers.)

*

Pigeons can make sounds but cannot say words
at least real wild pigeons cannot say words
but after scientists get done with them
and they’re not real wild pigeons any more
they might be able to say exactly
what happened what scientists did to them.

Of course they might not want to talk to us.

I mean pigeons won’t want to talk to us.

Scientists almost always want to talk.

Maybe the pigeons will talk to witches
and tell the witches what scientists did.

Kids might pretend to be both scientists
and witches but what do their notebooks say?

Isn’t growing up a bifurcation
at this point at this particular point
for those who are both? Don’t they always choose
consciously to stop or else to not stop
calculating means and deviations
and all manner of other statistics
derived from thousands of mortalities
of animals in their experiments?

The pigeons might not want to talk to us.

Mice, probably, will be out for our blood.

Maybe witches will put in a good word
for the people who tried to separate
statistics from science in their thinking.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

You Damn Punk Kids

Freedom From The Wild

Dragon Storm: The Woman Looking Away

“The Clock Had All His Attention”

This Scary, Pumpkin Time Of Year, Part Two

Synthetic Pigeons, Liminal Entities And Scripts

2012-01-24T01:50:00.000-06:00

The Pigeon As A Gadget

There’s no city here
but the pigeon switches on
my city thinking.

‘A Pigeon On A Rock’ And Other Stories

There are no paintings here but if someone
painted a pigeon—I mean an image
of a pigeon not a pigeon itself
although these days I suppose an artist
would be more inclined to find special paint
and carefully paint a pigeon’s feathers
then turn loose the bright colorful pigeon
to mix with a flock of standard gray birds
where a crowd of people at lunch could see
the painted bird flying with the others
while the artist captured people’s faces
reacting to the colorful pigeon
with a high-definition camcorder
hoping probably to sell the project
to a corporation to advertise
how their products and customers stand out—
I’d like to see that painting and I hope
it would be carefully crafted in oil
because acrylic paint is just plastic
and I’d like to compare an oil painting
of a pigeon to a real wild pigeon
because I wonder if real wild pigeons
are as real and wild as an oil painting
or have pigeons become as synthetic
and plastic as an acrylic painting.

I would carefully study the painting.

Through a window behind me in the street
a car would be visible driving past.

Driving the car visible behind me
would be a beautiful woman talking
on her cell phone to somebody not there.

The Pigeons Of Atlantis

Brave birds. They stay gray
when everything around them
is a bright color.

‘A Pigeon On A Rock’ And Other Stories

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Synthetic Philosophy, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Three Clouds Overhead Started Shouting At Me

‘A Pigeon On A Rock’ And Other Stories

2012-01-23T01:28:00.001-06:00

A Pigeon In The Sand

The woman reading
doesn’t notice the pigeon
standing by her feet.

The Pigeon As A Gadget

There’s no city here
but the pigeon switches on
my city thinking.

A Pigeon On A Rock

A pigeon watches
from one rock. A wave crashes
against another.

The Pigeon As A Shore Bird

As the Sun goes down
I ask, “Where do beach pigeons
go when it’s dark out?”

“Well, Holden Caulfield”—
she calls me Holden Caulfield
but that’s not my name—

“we’re lucky we know
where to go when it’s dark out.”
She thinks we’re lucky.

The Pigeons Of Atlantis

Brave birds. They stay gray
when everything around them
is a bright color.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Perfect Day For Love And Squalor

Red Bull, Hershey’s And A Woman Yawning

The Ax Ismail/Holden Caulfield Connection

Der Gelbe Hai

“Questi Cazzi Di Piccione”

A Fun Offering To The World Gadget

Thinking About Arranging “Layla”

2012-01-20T23:52:00.105-06:00

Over at Wikifonia you can get an arrangement of Clapton’s “Layla” for free. I wouldn’t call it a great arrangement, but it’s free and anyone can re-arrange it. It’s pretty straightforward music, once you get the hang of the key change:

And this, of course, is the real deal, this is Layla herself, Pattie Boyd. I link to her biography in my post The Good Old Days—Umm, Yeah.... Whenever I use a phrase about ‘hippie girls’ I am almost always picturing Pattie Boyd as the archetype. I suppose—although I guess it doesn’t matter in the cosmic scheme of things—I suppose I think of Pattie Boyd as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. More accurately, I guess, I suppose I think of Pattie Boyd as the most beautiful woman I can imagine.

This is Pattie Boyd more recently, from a 2005 photography exhibit. I posted one of her photos in Equally And As Hopelessly Lost. She’s still beautiful. But, to be honest, she kind of frightens me. I wouldn’t want to meet her in real life. I don’t mean she frightens me because she’s beautiful. I’ve known, somehow, some beautiful women. I mean Pattie Boyd frightens me because there seems to be no connection at all between her beauty and her character. She doesn’t seem to have a bad character, just something completely disconnected from her phenomenal beauty. I’ve come to realize this isn’t entirely unusual. But it is one of those simple facts of life that is very hard for me to come to grips with in any practical way, and I’m afraid I still make a fool out of myself when I meet a woman and I jump to conclusions about her based on her looks.

When I play and sing Clapton’s “Layla”
I arrange it and imagine it
as a duet, where a woman sings
the verses and a man the chorus.

I change some words here and there. Instead
of looking to ease my worried mind,
I sing, “Won’t you heal my broken mind.”

Some people used to believe music
could change the world. Rearrange the world.

Or they pretended to believe it.

But even if today people laugh
or don’t even waste their breath laughing
because they’ve read, say, Pattie Boyd’s book
or they’ve read, say, Eric Clapton’s book,
and they know nothing was what it seemed,
Pattie Boyd did look like Pattie Boyd
and Eric Clapton did write “Layla.”

I’m trying to re-arrange my mind.

It’s broken and the pieces don’t work.

But if I move the pieces around
I’m hoping I can find some order
that works enough for me to pretend.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“Layla” at Wikipedia

“Wonderful Tonight” at Amazon

“Clapton: The Autobiography” at Amazon

*

Aberrant Forms

My “Year Of The Cat” Fantasy

“I like songs that are ‘story’ songs. ...”

Distracted By Suspicions Of A Harmony

2012-01-19T23:57:00.057-06:00

There’s tennis going on in Australia right now. It’s the first Grand Slam tournament of the year. In her match yesterday, Maria Sharapova beat an almost unknown American girl 6-0, 6-1. It took just barely over an hour.

The post-match interview started out like this:

PRESS: Do you draw a lot of satisfaction from a match like that?

SHARAPOVA: As opposed to what?

If I knew Maria Sharapova
I suspect I’d have to repurpose her.

I mean, she’s very pretty. I’d enjoy
drawing her, trying to capture her look.

But if I were writing, say, a story
about a man involved with a woman
and he comes to suspect she is a witch
with hidden motives and hidden passions
and I also wanted to illustrate
the story, a woman as beautiful
as Maria would be a great model,
but hidden motives and hidden passions
can only be hidden things if something
gets between them and the rest of the world—
visible motives, visible passions.

As opposed to what? I’ve always wondered
that very question. But every time
I try to focus and work out something
I get distracted thinking of witches
or maybe scientists or musicians
or painters. So I never get too far
figuring out the “As opposed to what?”

That’s fine. I’ve got a lot of energy.

A harmony parallel to nature
should be expected, I guess, to require
some heavy lifting and shoving around
to get things lined up right and parallel.

The purpose of the visible motives
and passions is to conceal the hidden
motives and passions—just in case someone
has a reason for looking for such things.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Two Women And Someday

The Dragon With The Girl Tattoo

Thinking Of Mountains

Cookies And High Heels In A Clean Kitchen

Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton

The Name “Gillian”

2012-01-18T23:57:00.048-06:00

Born Walter Llewelyn Hughes, he was educated at Dudley Grammar School and Wolverhampton College and lived most of his life in Bilston. He ran his own furniture store, Walter Hughes Ltd in Bradley and became Managing Director of Brasteds Ltd (a contraction of Bradley Bedsteads). In 1931 he married Doris Higgins; they had two children. He was a member of the British Interplanetary Society and British Astronomical Association, and became president of Bilston Rotary Club, and High Chief Ranger of the Ancient Order of Foresters. He was also a member of Bilston Tennis Club, was elected a member of Bilston Borough Council and was in due course was appointed a magistrate.

Writings

In 1955 he was asked to talk at Bilston Rotary Club when the scheduled speaker cancelled. He spoke on space and astronomy, and as a result was asked to speak at nearby Coseley library during Science Fiction week. In preparation he read a large number of science fiction books, was not impressed, and thought he could do better. At the age of 47 he wrote his first book in secret under the pseudonym of Hugh Walters. He later said: "As I was also a magistrate and a local councillor, I felt [that writing science fiction] left me open to ridicule. People tend to treat science fiction as a bit of a joke, so I juggled with my name and came up with Hugh Walters."

Of his writing Walters said: "I believe a good SF story should (1) entertain, (2) educate painlessly, and (3) inspire the young people of today to be the scientists and technicians of tomorrow"

His first novels mostly dealt with the exploration of other planets in our solar system. Written for a juvenile audience, they had a scientific foundation, anticipating such advances as ion engines. Walters turned to writing novels concerning alien visits after all the planets had been explored.

The main characters in his novels were two British astronauts, an American, and a Russian. Their names were Chris Godfrey, Tony Hale, Morrey Kant and Serge Smyslov, respectively. Later missions used a pair of telepathic twins, Gill and Gail Patrick, for communication.

The covers of the first 14 books had cover illustrations by the Faber and Faber illustrator Leslie Wood.

His books are still present on the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society recommended reading list for children and young adults.

Hugh Walters at Wikipedia

Two sisters, Gillian and Gail Patrick,
were twins and telepathic. One of them
traveled to the outer solar system
on adventures with young astronaut friends
and although nobody understood why
not even engineers or scientists
the telepathic link required no time
for thoughts to bridge the distance between Earth
and the planets of the outer system
although radio communications
might take, for instance, four hours to travel
one way from Earth to a craft at Neptune.

Gillian Patrick was fiction, of course.

And maybe telepathy isn’t real,
or maybe it is, no one knows for sure.

But thoughts can travel from here to Neptune
something close to instantaneously.

This was a different world. And it is.

I like the name Gillian. And I like
that different world—of adventures, friends,
and distances thoughts bridge in an instant.

The real outer planets are still out there.

Is the real Gillian still out there, too?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Bird Who Could Fly To Neptune

Wine And Cigarettes And Children’s Art

Egyptian Queen, Grace Slick, Beyond Apollo

Exotic Snows And An Ink Drawing Of Plants

“This Was A Different World”

A Note From The Synthetic Wilderness

“I like the name Gillian”

A Note From The Synthetic Wilderness

2012-01-17T18:39:00.004-06:00

“Dave and I felt like such freaks making our first record,” Welch recalled in a phone conversation from Vancouver this past summer, early in the North American tour to support the release of The Harrow and the Harvest. “I could not have felt more like a Martian back then. In the studio next to us is Céline Dion, and she’s cutting the vocal for the song for Titanic. That’s what was around us in the music world. But I’m really happy now. I feel like we have so many more comrades out here in the acoustic wilderness, and I’m so flattered and honored that a bunch of these people point to us and say that we’ve been inspirational to them.”

Acoustic Guitar: Gillian Welch

Last night, sometime in the middle of the night, there were two large explosions near here. Both explosions started with a very bright flash of light, bright enough to illuminate my bedroom even through the closed blinds, followed immediately by a very loud bang—not a deep, rolling bang like thunder, but a sharp report, like a large caliber gun firing. Last night I thought a couple of electrical transformers exploded on power lines. But our power wasn’t interrupted.

This morning there were five big Commonwealth Edison utility trucks parked by the end of the block, so I guess it was a couple of transformers blowing up.

I didn’t get a chance to ask any of the technicians what happened. When I was around, even though there were five trucks parked on the block, there were no technicians working anywhere nearby. (There is a donut shop within easy walking distance, so it might not be too big of a mystery where the work crews had disappeared to.)

Last night when the explosions happened I was sitting on my bed playing guitar. Although I don’t own an acoustic guitar, my electric guitar was plugged into a battery-powered gadget so even if power had failed, I still could have wrapped up my practice session.

Anyway, that bit of electrical excitement got me thinking about the current issue of Acoustic Guitar Magazine. They have a cover story about Gillian Welch.

I have mixed feeling about Gillian Welch. Back when I did my post “The Point Of A Pin” I embedded a YouTube clip of hers, where she and her partner perform an acoustic arrangement of the Jimi Hendrix song, “Manic Depression.” That was a very cool performance, but someone complained and got the video removed from YouTube. Hmmm.

I’m not really sure if Gillian is what I’d call an “acoustic holdout.” Certainly she is famous for performing acoustically. But after her first brush with fame when some of her music appeared in a movie, the very first thing she did was grab an electric guitar and plug in. On her Wikipedia page for everyone to see—if that site isn’t trying to blackmail people into supporting their politics by shutting down—there’s even a picture of her with an electric guitar, and some quotes about how she tried to write songs that were more up-beat.

For the 2003 release, Soul Journey, Welch and Rawlings explored new territory. Welch said: "I wanted to make it a happier record. Out of our four records, I thought this might be the one where you're driving down the road listening to it on a sunny summer day." Rawlings again produced the record. The album also reflected a change in the typically sparse instrumentation: Welch and Rawlings introduced a dobro, violin, electric bass and drums, and Welch later said, "Everything's not supposed to sound the same, you want it to reflect change and growth."

Gillian Welch at Wikipedia

Now, I don’t have any dislike for electric instruments. And I actively dislike depressing songs. But I like principles and I like people who formulate their own principles and stick to those principles. But I know, too, it’s the twenty-first century and everyone’s got to eat.

So I just don’t know about Gillian Welch.

I mean, maybe Gillian Welch is an acoustic holdout. But—not to be cynical here—maybe she is just another folk singer who failed as a pop crossover act who now has returned to folk because those are the only promoters who will pay her.

I don’t know. The issue of Acoustic Guitar doesn’t raise any serious questions at all, rather it just lets her promote her current folk album. Around here it’s (usually) hard to find the magazine in real life, but her interview is available at their website at the link above.

*

I like the name Gillian
but I’m an electric man
and I’m a digital man
and if I could I’d convert
the motion of my guitar’s
metal strings as they vibrate
within a magnetic field
to a discrete midi stream
to drive a synthesizer
outputting a guitar sound
made from synthetic waveforms.

I like the name Gillian
but we—I mean men, women—
are what we make of ourselves
how we synthesize ourselves
not where the day takes us or
how the hands at night shape us
and I don’t believe a song
is noise or tone or image
but it is synthesized too
and synthesizers are things
and synthesizers are us.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

See Monsters?

“The Primitive And What Came After”

Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts

Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts (Redux)

Quasi Una Zombie Fantasia

No Lights In My Kitchen (Or Anywhere Else)

The Thunderous Glamour Of Batteries

The Thunderous Tragedy Of Batteries

And yes I know Roland has a
special pickup guitar synthesizer
available now, and I know
Sonuus makes a monophonic
gadget, but I’m holding out
for a kind of combination
of the two things—a simple
gadget for standard guitars
that works polyphonically.
Someday it will happen.

Hen Politics, And Passages Between Worlds

2012-01-16T05:16:00.004-06:00

If you’re feeling supportive and constructive about hen politics you can:

VOTE BE HEN

And if you’re feeling contrary and destructive about hen politics you can:

VETO BE HEN

With the same set of letters you can be for or against something.

It’s not really about hen politics, of course. Both phrases are anagrams for “Beethoven.”

*

So Beethoven walks into a bar and the bartender notices that Beethoven has a chicken on his head.

The bartender says, “Do you have a chicken on your head?”

And the chicken says, “No, I have a composer growing out of my ass.”

*

On Sunday night I walked to the grocery store. Walking back home, I noticed that the sky was pretty clear. The stars of Orion were bright in the south. I looked just little to the east of Orion and right above the ground clutter on the horizon the star Sirius was even brighter. I looked a little farther east and a bit higher up in the sky and I could see the stars Castor and Pollux in the zodiac constellation Gemini.

I wasn’t really thinking about Beethoven or anagrams or old jokes when I left the house.

I was thinking about notebooks and journals and blogs, and a couple of quotes from J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. I haven’t read the books, but I’ve read a little about them at Wikipedia. Early on, the villain of the saga uses magic to put a piece of his soul into an enchanted diary. Later, when a young woman finds the diary and thinks it’s a blank book, she starts writing in it. The piece of the villain’s soul then is able to take possession of her. (Harry Potter eventually saves her and destroys that piece of the villain’s soul. The girl becomes Harry Potter’s girl friend, then, in the saga.)

To Rowling, a diary is a very scary object, having said in an interview: "The temptation particularly for a young girl, is to pour out her heart to a diary." Rowling's little sister Diane was prone to this, and her great fear was that someone would read her diary. This gave Rowling the idea to have a diary that is, in itself, against the confider.

Tom Riddle's Diary at Wikipedia

My sister used to commit her innermost thoughts to her diary. Her great fear was that someone would read it. That's how the idea came to me of a diary that is itself against you. You would be confiding everything to pages that aren't inanimate.

Now, the diary to me is a very scary object, a really, really frightening object. This manipulative little book, the temptation particularly for a young girl to pour out her heart to a diary, which is never something I was prone to, but my sister was. The power of something that answers you back, and at the time that I wrote that I'd never been in an Internet chat room. But I've since thought "Well it's very similar." Just typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back, and you don't know who is answering you. And so that was always a very scary image to me, in the book, and I thought it worked very well in the film. You could understand when he started writing to see these things coming back to him, and the power of that, that secret friend in your pocket.

The Diary of Tom Riddle
The Harry Potter Lexicon

So I went shopping and saw some stars and when I got home and put the food away I randomly starting jotting down some thoughts and it just occurred to me that Beethoven’s name contained some interesting letters and, almost immediately, the VOTE BE HEN anagram suggested itself. Then because that sounded like a joke to me I wondered if I could think of any other Beethoven jokes that involved chickens and that variation of the head/butt thing occurred to me.

I can’t say a magical diary took possession of me and inserted the thoughts into my brain.

But I did think for a moment that it was as if my walk under the stars was a walk through a passage between worlds—I started in a world where I didn’t know anagrams for Beethoven, where I didn’t know a joke about Beethoven with a chicken on his head, and I walked under the stars through a passage between worlds into a world where I did know those things.

It’s a passage to a pretty silly and trivial different world, as different worlds go, I guess.

But it’s good to go places. And, anyway, down in my deepest secret soul I enjoy chicken jokes more than stories about evil witches.

So that’s how my week is starting.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

An Unclear Story About Walking To Mars

Pamela At The Doorway To Atlantis

Passages Between Worlds

Not A Premise Beyond Belief

2012-01-13T02:12:00.003-06:00

I know that people would say that I exploited her and then cast her aside. That would hurt me even more than when they criticize my pictures. Contrary to what everyone thinks, I am not greatly interested in what is said about art, mine or anyone else’s. But if I have to give an opinion on what is good, I would put it this way: everything that has a sense of humanity, a sense of modernity, is interesting. Everything that lacks these qualities is worthless. Humanity and modernity.

That is a fictional inner monologue
of Edouard Manet thinking
about Victorine Meurent,
from “A Woman With No Clothes On”
by V. R. Main

I am still preparing for today’s session and she does not assume the full pose straight away. Using soft soap, I wash off the woman’s face that I painted yesterday. The hard, thick lumps of paint I have to scrape off with a palette knife. Victorine sits with the elbow of her visible arm propped against her knee and the hand holding her chin. She is waiting and thinking. Her head is in profile.

“Please do not move from this position. Just turn your head towards me.” She does as I ask. And there I have it. Here is a thinking woman, rather than just a nude posing in the company of two men engaged in a discussion. A thinking woman. A woman of modernity.

That’s also from “A Woman With No Clothes On”
but comes earlier in the book than the first quote

The book “A Woman With No Clothes On” is a fictionalized account of the relationship between Edouard Manet and Victorine Meurent. The premise of the book is that Meurent, a reasonably skilled painter herself, conceived of the idea for the famous painting ‘The Luncheon on the Grass’ and executed a rough painted sketch. Manet fell in love with the idea of the painting and convinced Meurent to allow him to over-paint her sketched idea using his more polished technique.

The author of the book, V. R. Main, is an accomplished female writer with a background in academia and the arts. The book is a work of fiction. However, Morisot, for instance, has written of how Manet would sometimes ‘correct’ her paintings for her, sometimes extensively re-working large areas. The premise of the book is not a premise beyond belief.

The book begins with a series of real quotes, including an actual quote from Edouard Manet, although it does not note where the quote was taken from: “Those who live in the next century will see better.”

Manet, of course, lived and worked in the 19th century. I spent some time in that ‘next’ century he was looking forward to, the 20th century, and I don’t know if Edouard would have felt we lived up to his prediction.

*

A thinking woman as an image
of modernity. It’s like a dream.
Now there are TVs and orgasms
and what can anyone think about?
Money, for more relaxed orgasms?
Money, for TVs with bigger screens?

A thinking woman as an image
of modernity. Some years later,
I mean later than Edouard Manet,
Georges Seurat created a painting
of the Eiffel Tower. Metal arches
that cars drive through. A spire for tourists.

A thinking woman as an image
of modernity. It’s like a dream.
My grandmother’s sister was the first
woman in our family to drive.
My mother thought her aunt Harriet
was wild and fun. And very modern.

A thinking woman as an image
of modernity. Some years later,
I mean later than aunt Harriet,
my friend Joanne bought a new sports car.
“Pretty sexy, huh?” she said. “Get in.
Buckle up. I’ll take you for a ride.”

*

The book “A Woman With No Clothes On” begins with a series of real quotes, including an actual quote from Adolf Tabarant, a biographer of Edouard Manet, speaking about Victorine Meurent: “We will probably never hear the last word on this strange girl of so many different faces.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

‘The Luncheon on the Grass’ at Wikipedia

*

Is This A Junkyard Church

In The Mind Of Everyone Seeing Paris

“The Garden’s Edge”

Exotic Snows And An Ink Drawing Of Plants

The Difference Between Flowers And People

Candle Questions

2012-01-12T02:03:00.000-06:00

Blow out a candle
and make a wish. It can’t hurt.
But what if it could?

What if the candle
doesn’t want to be blown out,
wants to keep its flame?

If you tell your wish
to a candle you’ve made mad
will it wreck your wish?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“The Clock Had All His Attention”

Fluorescent Lights On A Book Of Shadows

This Woman And A Flickering Candle

I Can’t Sleep In My Kitchen

“It Wasn’t A Temple But A School”

2012-01-11T03:13:00.001-06:00

A while ago I looked up a title in a library’s computerized card catalogue. This is what came up:

I was at the “Palos Hghts” library so I was looking for “Y.A. G.N. MOR pb.” which I guessed meant the book was on a shelf in the area for “Young Adult paperback Graphic Novels alphabetically by MORrison.”

I wrote down the title, author and call letters on a piece of note paper.

Different libraries put graphic novels in different areas and as I was trudging up the stairs to the kids’ area I was getting all grumpy at the thought of trying to figure out which sub-section of the kids’ area I’d have to look in for the graphic novel.

At the top of the stairs the first thing I saw was that the librarian on duty was one of the prettiest librarians I’ve ever seen in any library anywhere. So I instantly stopped being grumpy and I walked over to the librarian and held out my note paper with the call letters on it. I said, “Excuse me, can you help me find this book? The call numbers are just a long string of letters that look like a foreign language.”

I think she knew I was faking because she smiled as she took the paper from me even before she looked at it. But she was nice and translated the letters for me—I had guessed correctly—and then stood up and walked with me to the correct area. She found the book on a bottom shelf and handed it to me, still smiling.

Turns out I didn’t enjoy reading the book at all. I didn’t like the writing, didn’t like the art, didn’t like the whole idea of the book.

The best part of my experience with that book was talking for a few minutes with the pretty librarian while she located the book for me.

*

I was thinking about this recently because I’ve still got that business of the neighborhood hobby shop closing down on my mind.

I’m going to miss having those people to talk to.

And also recently I bought myself a new gadget as a kind of combination birthday present and Christmas present. I didn’t go to a store, didn’t talk to any sales people. Nobody had to help me. I just ordered it from Amazon and Amazon shipped it out.

For me, lots of times the best part of some experience is talking to people I meet along the way.

But nowadays many things are either so automated often there is no reason to talk to anyone at all, or the people you talk to are just bored clerks pressing buttons who don’t really want to talk to anyone anyway.

And, of course, being me, I would think of something like this, too:

“My God,” Elliot said. “They trained them.”

Munro nodded. “Trained them as guards to watch over the mines. An animal elite, ruthless and incorruptible. Not a bad idea when you think about it.”

Ross looked at the building around her again, realizing it wasn’t a temple but a school. An objection occurred to her: these pictures were hundreds of years old, the trainers long gone. Yet the gorillas were still here. “Who teaches them now?”

“They do,” Elliot said. “They teach each other.”

“Is that possible?”

“Perfectly possible. Conspecific teaching occurs among primates.”

This had been a longstanding question among researchers. But Washoe, the first primate in history to learn sign language, taught ASL to her offspring. Language-skilled primates freely taught other animals in captivity; for that matter, they would teach people, signing slowly and repeatedly until the stupid uneducated human person got the point.

So it was possible for a primate tradition of language and behavior to be carried on for generations.

from “Congo”
by Michael Crichton

Using language, talking to each other, we are constantly teaching each other. Teaching each other, at least, about ourselves, and, really more importantly, talking to each other is how we teach each other what our culture is around us, and how we ourselves learn what our culture is around us.

But what happens when people don’t get to talk to each other?

Or when they talk but it is only trivial interaction patterned after some badly produced TV show, or a badly written book, or a badly illustrated comic?

Then our “primate tradition of language and behavior” gets all screwed up.

*

Three of us—Matt, Linda and I—got to a door at exactly the same time. I stepped aside and looked at Linda. “After you,” I said. “Ladies first.”

Matt stepped aside, too.

Linda smiled and started to walk between us, but then she stopped. She looked from Matt to me and asked, “Is this sexist? I mean, it’s the twenty-first century. Why do guys still say ‘ladies first’?”

I pointed downwards. “We still say ‘ladies first’,” I said, “because we still like to look at your butt when you’re walking in front of us.”

Linda smiled and pointed down, too. “It’s the twenty-first century,” she said. “Maybe I want to look at your butts. You guys go first. Go ahead. Men first.”

So Matt and I walked through the door first and Linda came in after us.

“Very nice,” Linda said, walking behind us.

“I don’t know,” I said, “is this something like sexual harassment now?”

Matt just exhaled a long sigh. “It probably is,” he said, “but I wouldn’t know which one of you to write up. I’m just going to pretend I didn’t see or hear any of this.”

*

“Conspecific teaching occurs among primates.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Is This A Junkyard Church

An Up-To-Date Vicki Inventory

2012-01-10T02:53:00.000-06:00

“I forgot you took these pictures,” she said.
“Look how young and energetic I look!”

“They’re from last year,” I said. “Or less than that.
You were the same age then that you are now.”

She said, “It has been a long, umm, ten months.
And have you done anything with these yet?”

I shook my head. “I have trouble drawing
from photos,” I said. “I used to like it.
But now for some reason I never feel
any energy working from photos.”

She said, again, “It’s been a long ten months.”

I said, “If I could forget the ten months
the way you forgot I took the pictures,
maybe I would forget I have trouble
working from photographs. I could finish
this project and go on to something new.”

She looked at me and her eyes got narrow.
“If you forgot,” she said, “the last ten months
then you wouldn’t remember me, would you?”

“Well,” I said, “I would have the photographs.
And then maybe I would have drawings, too.”

“But you wouldn’t,” she said, “remember me!”

She looked at me and gasped. Her eyes got big.
“You would forget me, wouldn’t you?” she asked.
“You’d forget me if it would help you draw!”

I said, again, “I’d have your photographs.
And then maybe I would have drawings, too.”

So now, just to take an inventory,
I have her photographs but no drawings,
I can still remember the last ten months,
and where she punched me on my upper arm
there’s a big black and blue mark that still hurts.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Repurposing Vicki

The Best Reason To Study Astrophysics

Dinosaurs And Robots And Vicki’s Smile

Sun (And Moon) Over Scarborough Fair

2012-01-09T02:02:00.012-06:00

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without any seam, without needlework
Then she’ll be a true love of mine

Tell him to buy me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea sand
Then he’ll be a true love of mine

Two verses from
“Scarborough Fair”

The Father of Gods and Men consented at once to all that Cupid asked . . . Then he called a full assembly of the gods, and announced to all, including Venus, that Cupid and Psyche were formally married, and that he proposed to bestow immortality upon the bride. Mercury brought Psyche into the palace of the gods, and Jupiter himself gave her the ambrosia to taste which made her immortal. This, or course, completely changed the situation. Venus could not object to a goddess for her daughter-in-law; the alliance had become eminently suitable. No doubt she reflected also that Psyche, living up in heaven with a husband and children to care for, could not be much on the earth to turn men’s heads and interfere with her own worship. So all came to a most happy end. Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) had sought and, after sore trials, found each other; and that union could never be broken.

from Edith Hamilton’s account
of the impossible trials Venus
gave Psyche in “Mythology”

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time playing the traditional ballad, “Scarborough Fair” on guitar and keyboard. Not the Simon and Garfunkel version (which I hate) but the traditional version, in an arrangement I made myself. I’m using the song to learn alternate voicings of chords on keyboard.

But the song is very interesting, just as a traditional song. The lyrics tell of impossible trials a man gives a woman before she can be his true love (again?) and equally impossible trials a woman gives a man before he can be her true love (again?).

First of all, the business of “impossible” tasks is a very ancient plot device. Fairy lore is rich with such accounts, and even Greek mythology has many. One of my favorites is when Psyche is in love with Cupid but Venus is trying to prevent the romance. So Venus gives Psyche endless tasks which she, Venus, thinks will be impossible but fate (or Fate) always intervenes and Psyche somehow accomplishes every task (more or less).

I’ve always thought it was interesting that almost everyone knows about, for instance, the tales of Hercules or Jason and the Golden Fleece, but very few people know about the adventures of Psyche. I’m guessing it is some kind of stupid gender bias, but you never know. There could be some kind of even deeper meaning.

I believe in such things.

Anyway, the song “Scarborough Fair” doesn’t really have a happy ending. It doesn’t really have an ending at all. It just recounts a man and a woman asking someone to pass along their notions of impossible tasks for an old lover to accomplish before the old love can be rekindled.

But there might be more to it than that.

Nobody really knows what the chorus means, the “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” business. But I guess most historians point out that during the Middle Ages those were aromatic herbs used to ward off the awful smells associated with death from the Plague.

So some people believe “Scarborough Fair” contains allusions to death. Perhaps the impossible tasks refer to one lover being down in death and singing that when the other lover also has left the material world—when tasks impossible for a mortal become possible for them—then the two lovers can be reunited.

So far as I know, there is no accepted “definitive” reading to “Scarborough Fair,” but all the elements are very interesting to speculate about and to me that makes playing and singing the song much more fun than if the lyrics were straightforward.

It’s interesting that in the chorus about “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” there is an accidental. Many (most?) folk melodies are drawn from what we today call the major scale and use accepted intervals. “Scarborough Fair” includes a slightly dissonant interval, just the one, and it is in the chorus about the aromatic herbs associated with death.

That’s a pretty interesting little element.

*

This might sound strange, but one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this kind of stuff is because a little neighborhood hobby shop here in this suburb recently closed down. I’m guessing they couldn’t compete with the giant craft stores that sell some hobby supplies, and with online places like Amazon and others.

It’s too bad, because at the neighborhood hobby shop the people who worked there actually used most of the things they sold so you could always talk to them and get advice for how to use whatever you were buying. At the big craft stores the clerk are just, well, clerks.

Anyway, across the alley from the building where the neighborhood hobby shop used to be, one of the homes has wide, decorative posts driven into the ground next to their yard. In the summer, on sunny hot days, I’ve often seen snakes coiled up on top of those posts basking.

In my whole life, that’s the only place I’ve ever seen snakes basking in the Sun.

So because of the snakes, and one or two other reasons, I’ve always considered that location, around where the neighborhood hobby shop used to be, to be kind of a special place.

I don’t really know what that means, exactly—a “special place.” But some places are special in one way or another.

I believe in such things, too.

*

So, anyway, that’s what I was doing over the weekend. Learning different chord voicings on keyboard and practicing them by making up harmony arrangements for the traditional folk ballad, “Scarborough Fair.”

And thinking about all the possible things the odd lyrics of that song might mean.

And thinking about, too, this odd location in the suburb where one of the last really cool stores used to be, and where snakes bask in the summer Sun.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Two Notes (later):

1) In typical arrangements, the “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” line would begin on the second beat of the measure and not need ties, but I wanted to call attention to the accidental. And it is possible, of course, to do an arrangement that features the line “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” by starting it on the first beat and harmonizing the accidental itself. Why would you want to do that? Well—

2) A reading for “Scarborough Fair” that I’ve never heard but which is interesting is that the singer, a man or woman, is actually the dead person and they are addressing Death itself, asking Death if He is going to Scarborough Fair and asking Death to tell, comfort, the one He is going for, that when they leave the mortal world they will be able to do impossible things and lost loves will be reunited. (The song can be sung as a kind of ode: “Are YOU going to Scarborough Fair, Parsley-sage-rosemary-and-thyme?” The ‘you’ would be “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,” i.e., Death itself. The song, read that way, can be thought of as a kind of centuries-old folk version of “Don’t Fear The Reaper”!)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“Cambric” at Wikipedia

*

Skirts Like The Sound Of Dirigibles

When The Night Shapes Itself

Clouds Drift As If They’re Listening

You And Me, I Mean, Mare Carminum

Exotic Snows And An Ink Drawing Of Plants

2012-01-06T01:29:00.002-06:00

U.S. scientists say instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence of complex molecules on the surface of Pluto.

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard Hubble has discovered a strong ultraviolet-wavelength absorber on Pluto's surface, pointing to the possibility of complex hydrocarbon molecules lying on the surface, researchers said.

Scientists at the Southwest Research Institute and Nebraska Wesleyan University said such molecules can be produced by the interaction of sunlight or cosmic rays with Pluto's known surface ices, including methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen.

"This is an exciting finding because complex Plutonian hydrocarbons and other molecules that could be responsible for the ultraviolet spectral features we found with Hubble may, among other things, be responsible for giving Pluto its ruddy color," researcher Alan Stern said in an SRI release Tuesday.

New findings on Pluto's surface announced
UPI Science News

Short wavelengths of light from the Sun
and energetic cosmic rays
that come from someplace no one knows
interact with exotic snows
far away on Pluto’s surface
adding energy and changing
atoms and simple molecules
into complex hydrocarbons.

Red ochre against gold ochre.

Patterns only the most advanced
telescopes in existence see.

Patterns that will randomly change
slowly, a season long and slow
almost beyond imagining,
as Pluto continues away
from the Sun before turning back
before coming back where the warmth
from all the wavelengths of the Sun
will melt and even vaporize
the exotic snows, returning
the patterns on Pluto’s surface
to the atmosphere there as gas.

Where do songs go when we sing them?

Can we throw away a drawing
by crumpling and throwing away
the paper the drawing is on?

If the most advanced telescopes
in existence can see colors
and shapes of colors on Pluto,
is there something somewhere somehow
listening to the songs we sing
looking at the drawings we draw
and making a science of us
if what we do is recorded,
cold patterns in exotic snows,
or tossed away, like rising steam?

One time I made an ink drawing
of some plants and gave the drawing
to someone and she said, “You know
some people make money from things
like that.” I knew that. And I know
Pluto’s cold and getting colder
and its atmosphere is turning
into exotic snows falling
into patterns on its surface.

Patterns only the most advanced
telescopes in existence see.

I wonder: Are there telescopes
lost in the metonymy here
is there something somewhere somehow
that’s making a science of us?

A man named Charles Fort suspected
that we are property. Maybe
it’s not about science at all,
and it’s something somewhere somehow
like that observation, “You know
some people make money from things
like that.” I know almost nothing.

And Pluto is moving away
from the Sun and getting colder.

But Pluto will come back closer
to the Sun and warm up again.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charles Fort at Wikipedia

*

Pluto In Magic And Alchemy

This Woman And That Song: Apologies

A Small Magnifying Glass On A Mirror

Freedom From The Wild/Lost In Metonymy

Planetary Colors And The Grail Quest

A Bird Who Could Fly To Neptune

Dinosaur By Moonlight: A Puppet Show

A Small Magnifying Glass On A Mirror

2012-01-05T01:57:00.002-06:00

See with what large letters I have written to you with my own hand!

Galatians 6:11

OPHELIA: My lord, I have remembrances of yours
That I have longèd long to re-deliver.
I pray you, now receive them.

HAMLET: No, not I,
I never gave you aught.

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

Yesterday I was thinking about something
and while I was thinking I absently sketched
some objects in front of me on a book shelf,
a small magnifying glass on a mirror.

It looked like this photograph but less detailed.

I sketched with a plain mechanical pencil.

The finished drawing was very low contrast
but it looked like the objects in front of me
and creating the image gave me the chance
to think about something with a focused mind
even if the finished drawing was too light
to scan and function as an illustration
for whatever I might write about mirrors
and magnifying glasses and what they do.

When I finished I spent a little more time
comparing the very low contrast drawing
to the real magnifying glass and mirror
which in real life contained even more detail
than this photograph but even doing that
I was really thinking about something else
and the drawing and then the comparing stuff
just let me focus on something while thinking.

After a while I had other things to do
and since I knew I’d never use that drawing
to illustrate anything that I might write
I tore that page from my notebook and tossed it.

It was just a drawing I made while thinking.

Today I gathered up all my cheap pencils,
put them in an old box and stored them away.

I’ve got pens and even if I’m just thinking
whatever the hell that means—I’m “just” thinking?—
from now on I’m going to absently sketch
in ink that is dark and reproducible.

Tossing a drawing I made with my own hand
is too much Shakespearean madness for me.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton

This Woman From The Canals Of Mars

Song Birds And Bird Songs And Songs

2012-01-04T03:00:00.001-06:00

My new calendar has photos of song birds on it. But the publisher just used stock photos. So if the photographer for the photo house identified the bird, the calendar includes what kind of bird is shown. If the stock photo has no information, the calendar identifies the image just as “bird.”

This is January’s song bird, and it’s identified as a “bullfinch.”

I’ve never seen a bullfinch in real life. It’s very pretty, though. I like the color orange and I like birds, so an orange bird gets thumbs up from me.

I bought a calendar with song birds on it for a particular reason.

A few days ago in Another Look At Another Venus I mentioned that I haven’t listened to a lot of orchestral music. That’s true. One reason is that I like to learn about things by talking to people and, as luck would have it, every time I meet someone who’s interested in classical music they turn out to be someone I have a very hard time talking to. I don’t usually have a hard time talking to anyone, but by some twist of fate, the few classical music people I’ve known have been, for me, difficult.

But a few months ago I found a website that approached classical music from a very interesting angle. I also enjoy learning about things if I have a well-defined perspective to use when evaluating what I’m learning. So I’ve been planning on listening to more classical music this year, using this website I found as a jumping off place.

Here is a quote from the website:

The glorious melodies of songbirds have long been a source of inspiration for composers of music. Some composers imitate bird songs to reflect the seasons or nature, or to create a sense of comfort or lightness in their music, while others use them to give the impression of conversation. Birds are very chatty, social creatures, after all! Still others use a fragment of bird song as a theme for an entire piece of music, just for its beauty alone.

Composers have also used bird calls, rather than bird songs, in their music. Bird calls are different from bird songs—they are simpler, more repetitive, and have less variation. Calls are used to signal danger, hunger, a food discovery, aggressiveness, to call groups together (called flocking), or to harass a predator. While both male and female birds engage in bird calls, bird songs—with more pitch and rhythm changes—are primarily done by the males who sing to attract female mates, and to defend territory.

This is pretty cool. It’s an introduction to classical music from the perspective of bird songs! The website is:

How Tweet It Is: Bird Songs in Classical Music

Here is a chart of recommended composers and their pieces which contain music inspired by bird songs. If you click on the chart it will expand. But the chart is also at the website:

I’ve been meaning to get going on this for a while, and I bought the calendar to remind me. I have no particular idea where to start, but I may just pick one of the names I’ve never heard of—Respighi’s “The Birds”?—and get a CD or check iTunes or something.

I’m not making this a top priority, and my calendar lasts all year, so I’m just going to relax and enjoy slowly learning a little about classical music. Now that I have this post up, I can refer back to it for info.

*

Birds seem happier
with their bird songs than people
who say they enjoy

classical music.
Unless I’ve met a skewed set
of people. Or birds.

I’m going to trust
the birds I’ve met on this one.
They’re wild, but they sing.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Song As Eternal Monster Inside Sound

Street Lights And Slutty Bluetits

Quasi Una Flying Car Fantasia

The Dragon With The Girl Tattoo

2012-01-03T02:05:00.001-06:00

There once was a dragon named April
who ate grapes and more grapes till she was grape-full.
She discovered a way
to make breathing flame pay,
regurgitating raisin flambé by the crepe-full.

Yeah, I wrote that. Monday night. It’s fresh!

I believe that will be the last thing I’ll write about dragons for a while. I wanted to wrap up the topic with something special.

Well, maybe one last thing—

*

A dragon isn’t a gadget, a little thing
that does something useful or something you enjoy.

A wristwatch is a gadget that tells you the time.

A little keyboard that you can carry around
is a gadget that lets you make music sitting
in bed, or in a motel room on vacation,
or, I suppose, sitting on a motel room bed.

Possibly the Loch Ness monster is a dragon
bringing tourists and tourist dollars to Loch Ness.

That’s useful. And Loch Ness tourists enjoy themselves
even if they don’t see the monster, just the loch.

But, still, the Loch Ness monster isn’t a gadget.

If a mad scientist constructed a gadget
duplicating a dragon’s functionality,
the virtual dragon or counterfeit dragon
would certainly fail in some spectacular way
because mad scientists’ creations always do
and then the fake dragon would be functionally
the same as a real dragon and the fake dragon
would still be a gadget, too. Mad scientists laugh
because sometimes science can be something like art.

The mad scientist’s quest for a dragon gadget.

Cézanne said that true art doesn’t copy nature,
but is a harmony parallel to nature.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Mad Scientist Is Always Laughing

Thinking Of Mountains

A Flute Landscape

Two Dragons

2012-01-02T00:01:00.009-06:00

One time I was looking around his [Ray Harryhausen’s] garage and up in the rafters of the garage something was sticking out. There was like the skull of something going behind some boxes. I couldn’t see what it was. It was all in pieces. It was the dragon from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.” I just thought: Oh, what a sad end for such a wonderful creature.

Special Effects Wiz Dennis Muren
Quoted in, “Ray Harryhausen Chronicles”
(DVD Bonus Feature)

A couple of months ago I did a post about the movie “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One” — Posh People Squabbling. I didn’t like the movie much. I didn’t think it was a bad movie, just boring, endless bickering between people, some nice, some nasty. Anyway, over Christmas even though I didn’t like the first part, I watched “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two” just to be complete. I expected to fast forward through the movie the same as part one, but I ended up liking part two very much. Even though many of the scenes were very similar to the first part and all the same filmmakers worked on the second part, I enjoyed the second part a lot. (I even went back and watched the first part again—I still didn’t like it, still fast forwarded through most of it.)

One of the most remarkable scenes in the second part was when the heroes escaped from the bank on the back of a dragon. It was an extraordinary dragon. I mean special effects-wise. Probably one of the very best special effects shots I’ve ever seen in my life.

It reminded me of another famous dragon and led me to think of how movie technology has changed over the decades.

This is the famous dragon from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” which was released in 1958:

Many, many special effects masters of the current world watched this movie when they were kids and fell in love with films and special effects for the rest of their life. (Many kids, too, were inspired to become musicians by Bernard Herrmann’s amazing score for the film.)

This is the dragon from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two,” more than fifty years on from the Sinbad dragon:

Special effects-wise that’s the Mary Poppins of dragons: It is practically perfect in every way.

One thing stands out about comparing these two dragons.

The first, Ray Harryhausen’s dragon, was created and filmed by one person, Ray Harryhausen. Perhaps his father made the armature, maybe Ray made it himself. Ray animated the dragon, brought it to life, move-by-move.

The dragon from Harry Potter required—literally!—many dozens, possibly hundreds, of designers, artists and programmers to bring it to life.

My first thought was: Holy cow, if the rather simple dragon from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” inspired so many people to devote their whole life to fantasy films, to creating wonderful special effects, just imagine the extraordinary result “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two” will have on young people, just imagine all the wonderful work people inspired by the film will create.

But then I wondered if that will be true at all.

I mean, most film buffs learned very young that Ray Harryhausen did the effects for his movies by himself. Film buffs who experimented with stop-motion movies learned that it is an incredibly time-consuming and almost mind-numbing procedure to take thousands of still images and put them together into an animated sequence. But in a way it is fun—almost like meditation. And it is very satisfying to imagine and design a sequence of animation and then bring it to life and clean it up and augment it with sound and editing.

But film buffs today know that special effects are sequences output by various computer programs and then cleaned up by dozens or even hundreds of anonymous computer artists sitting at screens and moving a stylus across a digitizing tablet. A director or designer will decide on the action to be displayed. A lead animator, perhaps, will put in this-or-that bit of amusing incidental business, and then everyone else just goes through the motions. From what I’ve heard and read it is literally an assembly-line process, where the individual workers have essentially zero input into the overall content of their work.

Will any young people today—when they learn how special effects are done—will any young people say to themselves, “Gee, when I grow up, that’s what I want to do, sit on an assembly line of graphic artists and make sure the edges in the middle of the picture are properly blurred”? Will any young people say to themselves, “Gee, when I grow up, I want to sketch storyboards and send them overseas to slave-shop computer artists who will convert them to an animated sequence”?

It seems so wonderful, looking at the final image, the completed movie. But unlike fifty years ago, I wonder: Will all that sense-of-wonder today translate into any inspiration at all?

*

On the topic of dragons, in case anyone is worried, when Rubber Lizard isn’t working he’s not stuck out in a garage or up in any rafters. He usually hangs out on top of the bookcase with Little Plastic Doll and Tina. He always has someone to talk to.

I strongly suspect there’s a reason
some women will be able to talk
to dinosaurs when the beasts return.

There are two dragons to every one.

There’s the dragon we see and talk to.

And there’s the dragon that animates
the dragon that we see and talk to,
that curls its tail and up-roots a tree,
that forms the whispered dragon-talk words,
that shapes the flame when the chemicals
in the dragon’s mouth combine to fire.

There are two dragons to every one.

One is rare these days. But the other
gently wrecks and whispers and breathes fire
just to stay in practice. And for fun.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The French Word For ‘Dragon’ Is ‘Dragon’

Dragon Storm: The Woman Looking Away

Dragon Storm: Ammonia Snow

The Dragons Of Saturn

Two Swans

Two Women And Someday

Harps And Flutes, Swans And Monsters

The Girl Who Talks To Dinosaurs

2011 Complete Index

2012-01-01T16:12:00.000-06:00

December 2011

Friday, December 30, 2011 -- “When All My Words About Britney Disappear”

Thursday, December 29, 2011 -- A Catastrophic Failure (With Music)

Wednesday, December 28, 2011 -- This Woman And That Song: Apologies

Tuesday, December 27, 2011 -- Another Look At Another Venus

Monday, December 26, 2011 -- This Bright Old World Of Ours As A Rune

Friday, December 23, 2011 -- Christmas Witches: Sound Synthesis

Thursday, December 22, 2011 -- “The Primitive And What Came After”

Wednesday, December 21, 2011 -- Parsimony And Aberrant Forms

Tuesday, December 20, 2011 -- Dragon Storm: The Woman Looking Away

Monday, December 19, 2011 -- Lost In The Villainy

Friday, December 16, 2011 -- The Real World In Georges Seurat’s Notebooks

Thursday, December 15, 2011 -- Two Women And Someday

Wednesday, December 14, 2011 -- Returning From A Walk To Mars

Tuesday, December 13, 2011 -- Synthetic Philosophy, Liminal Entities And Scripts...

Monday, December 12, 2011 -- The Role Of Headphones In Bach’s World

Friday, December 9, 2011 -- In Napkin Legend — The Napkin Tetraptych

Thursday, December 8, 2011 -- An Unclear Story About Walking To Mars

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 -- Reduction Of The Muse

Tuesday, December 6, 2011 -- “The Whole Earth As The Village?”

Monday, December 5, 2011 -- Looking Back: The City Or The Monster

Friday, December 2, 2011 -- Parking Lot Shadow As A Color-Space

Thursday, December 1, 2011 -- Aberrant Forms

November 2011

Wednesday, November 30, 2011 -- I’m An Idiot—Episode 748

Tuesday, November 29, 2011 -- Dinosaurs And Robots And Vicki’s Smile

Monday, November 28, 2011 -- Song As Eternal Monster Inside Sound

Friday, November 25, 2011 -- Gadget Bliss

Thursday, November 24, 2011 -- A Flute Playing And Fog Hides The Shore

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 -- The Fons Et Origo Of Mad Laughter

Tuesday, November 22, 2011 -- On Being ‘The Girl’

Monday, November 21, 2011 -- Footsteps Like Mad Paint Marks

Friday, November 18, 2011 -- The Loch Ness Monster Vs. Los Angeles

Thursday, November 17, 2011 -- Clean Shaven And Ready For Movie Talk

Wednesday, November 16, 2011 -- The Angle Of Repose Of Corpses Redux

Tuesday, November 15, 2011 -- Susan Didn’t Take Anyone With Her

Monday, November 14, 2011 -- Secret Gadgets And Gadget Secrets

Friday, November 11, 2011 -- Song For Leviathan — An Impossible Ode

Thursday, November 10, 2011 -- Dream Lover Fantasy Update

Wednesday, November 9, 2011 -- Notes On This Notebook Odyssey

Tuesday, November 8, 2011 -- Headphones (The Good And The Bad)

Monday, November 7, 2011 -- Carnage Candy

Friday, November 4, 2011 -- See Monsters?

Thursday, November 3, 2011 -- Sasquatch And Anime Girl, #6

Wednesday, November 2, 2011 -- An Expedition Through Photography

Tuesday, November 1, 2011 -- Skirts Like The Sound Of Dirigibles

October 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011 -- Halloween Trees (Ode To)

Friday, October 28, 2011 -- This Is Not “Fashion Bulletin I’m Yours”

Thursday, October 27, 2011 -- Pamela At The Doorway To Atlantis

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 -- Just A Real Thing But That’s Enough

Tuesday, October 25, 2011 -- A Fun Offering To The World Gadget

Monday, October 24, 2011 -- There’s No Pain In The Sky

Friday, October 21, 2011 -- Buying The Beatles Forever

Thursday, October 20, 2011 -- “Ha, Ha, Rubber Lizard Loves Taylor Swift”

Wednesday, October 19, 2011 -- The Face The Lonesome Cowboy Sees

Tuesday, October 18, 2011 -- Memories Of Faces/Lost In Shadows

Monday, October 17, 2011 -- Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Friday, October 14, 2011 -- Blows Against The (Expensive) Empire

Thursday, October 13, 2011 -- Behind-The-Scenes On Ten Thirteen

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 -- You And Me, I Mean, Mare Carminum

Tuesday, October 11, 2011 -- Clouds Drift As If They’re Listening

Monday, October 10, 2011 -- When The Night Shapes Itself

Friday, October 7, 2011 -- The French Word For ‘Dragon’ Is ‘Dragon’

Thursday, October 6, 2011 -- Kite Flying In America (With Trout)

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 -- Checking In On Disbelief And Recognition

Tuesday, October 4, 2011 -- There’s A Woman With No Clothes On Here!

Monday, October 3, 2011 -- About Not Seeing Comet Garradd

Sunday, October 2, 2011 -- 2011 3rd Quarter Index

September 2011

Friday, September 30, 2011 -- A Flute Landscape

Thursday, September 29, 2011 -- Real Water Colors (With Figures)

Wednesday, September 28, 2011 -- Dinosaurs And Hippie Girls Is A World

Tuesday, September 27, 2011 -- Watercolors And Dive Bombers

Monday, September 26, 2011 -- Mice Elf Again

Friday, September 23, 2011 -- The Thunderous Tragedy Of Batteries

Thursday, September 22, 2011 -- The Thunderous Glamour Of Batteries

Wednesday, September 21, 2011 -- The Equinox And The Tropics And Me

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 -- “Indigestion” (And A Victorine Meurent Update!)

Monday, September 19, 2011 -- Hood Ornaments And Exploding Stars

Friday, September 16, 2011 -- A Captain Kirk Exorcism

Thursday, September 15, 2011 -- Making Noise Between Puddles And Clouds

Wednesday, September 14, 2011 -- Passages Between Worlds

Tuesday, September 13, 2011 -- Hidden In The Shadow Of The Index

Monday, September 12, 2011 -- Japanese Train Stations Forever

Friday, September 9, 2011 -- Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts (Redux)

Thursday, September 8, 2011 -- Gadget Angst

Wednesday, September 7, 2011 -- ‘Hortense Had Her Adventures’

Tuesday, September 6, 2011 -- What I Learned Today At Barangrill

Monday, September 5, 2011 -- A Thumb Update (And Book Report)

Friday, September 2, 2011 -- The Underwear Distance Of Love: A Puppet Show

Thursday, September 1, 2011 -- A Butterfly In Shadow And Everything

August 2011

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 -- Blood All Over My Kitchen!

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 -- Folklore Of The Carnivore: Taylor Swift

Monday, August 29, 2011 -- In Which I Wrap Up The Cheese (Trilogy)

Friday, August 26, 2011 -- Writing About Photographing Rembrandt

Thursday, August 25, 2011 -- On Being Unhappy (And Happy)

Wednesday, August 24, 2011 -- A Civilization Of Leaves

Tuesday, August 23, 2011 -- Lithosphere Atmosphere Ionosphere Coupling

Monday, August 22, 2011 -- Kangaroo Girl And The Yale Boys

Friday, August 19, 2011 -- Movies, Keyboards And Skirt Police

Thursday, August 18, 2011 -- All The Questions About Atlantis

Wednesday, August 17, 2011 -- Pretty Blue Flowers At The Gates Of Hell

Tuesday, August 16, 2011 -- The Craft Of Wreckage

Monday, August 15, 2011 -- Clown As Supervillain

Friday, August 12, 2011 -- Where The Scorpion Sits Down For Tea

Thursday, August 11, 2011 -- Throwing Rocks At Tin Cans

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 -- Beautiful People Are Courageous

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 -- The Mythic Landscape (And French Writers)

Monday, August 8, 2011 -- Where I Torment, Torture And Traumatize A Teen

Friday, August 5, 2011 -- An Albireo Question

Thursday, August 4, 2011 -- The Evil Light In Perkins’ Eyes

Wednesday, August 3, 2011 -- Distance From Paris To Berlin

Tuesday, August 2, 2011 -- Leaving Mandy Moore

Monday, August 1, 2011 -- Cool Snail Ben Safe At Second Base

July 2011

Friday, July 29, 2011 -- Expeditions And Wilderness Parties

Thursday, July 28, 2011 -- Scraps For Alison With Love And Squalor

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 -- What Is Electric Sugar?

Tuesday, July 26, 2011 -- Anal Sex And Death In Los Angeles

Monday, July 25, 2011 -- This Woman From The Canals Of Mars

Saturday, July 23, 2011 -- Amy Winehouse Makes It Official

Friday, July 22, 2011 -- Big Clouds, Big Scorpions, Doing Stuff

Thursday, July 21, 2011 -- A Sketchbook Page With No Sketches

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 -- Weather, Fringe Talk And Debunking

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 -- Posh People Squabbling

Monday, July 18, 2011 -- Too Beautiful To Comprehend

Friday, July 15, 2011 -- Dinosaur By Moonlight: A Puppet Show

Thursday, July 14, 2011 -- The Library That We’ve Made Of Ourselves

Wednesday, July 13, 2011 -- Scientist At A Hamburger Stand

Tuesday, July 12, 2011 -- The Wind, Here In The Sea Of Clouds

Monday, July 11, 2011 -- Enceladus Was A Child Of Gaia

Friday, July 8, 2011 -- Freedom From The Wild/Lost In Metonymy

Thursday, July 7, 2011 -- The Criss-Crossing Of Sara’s Hair

Wednesday, July 6, 2011 -- Wild In The Parking Lot

Tuesday, July 5, 2011 -- Ode To A Flute: On Getting Blown Right

Monday, July 4, 2011 -- This Girl Like Fireworks

Monday, July 4, 2011 -- 2011 2nd Quarter Index

Friday, July 1, 2011 -- “Hold Me Forever: A Doll Philosophy”

June 2011

Thursday, June 30, 2011 -- No Lights In My Kitchen (Or Anywhere Else)

Wednesday, June 29, 2011 -- Almost Invisible Bokeh

Tuesday, June 28, 2011 -- Ha! Man Throws Away Library!

Monday, June 27, 2011 -- Nuclear Accidents, Sociology, The Word ‘Bistre’

Friday, June 24, 2011 -- On Not Playing A Synth Workstation #2

Thursday, June 23, 2011 -- On Not Playing A Synth Workstation #1

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 -- Birds And Three Pretty Birds

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 -- Another Quick Megan Fox Moment

Monday, June 20, 2011 -- Music At The Garden’s Edge

Friday, June 17, 2011 -- Hot Liquid Savage And A Cup Of Paintbrushes

Thursday, June 16, 2011 -- New Birds (In The Parking Lot)

Wednesday, June 15, 2011 -- Maggie And The Fish Head

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 -- A Quick Lunar Eclipse Note

Monday, June 13, 2011 -- Loch Ness Apocalypse

Friday, June 10, 2011 -- “The Librarian And The Painter”

Thursday, June 9, 2011 -- Coming Attractions: The Librarian And The Painter...

Thursday, June 9, 2011 -- “A Little Bit Of A Storm”

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 -- Les Paul Versus Taylor Swift!

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 -- The Lost World Of Stacy And The Llama

Monday, June 6, 2011 -- Can We Reboot The World?

Friday, June 3, 2011 -- One For My Baby

Thursday, June 2, 2011 -- Tennis, French Scumbags, Classic Science

Wednesday, June 1, 2011 -- The Built World Redux—Art And Souvenir

May 2011

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 -- Edma In Heaven Laughing

Monday, May 30, 2011 -- Thinking Of Mountains Redux

Friday, May 27, 2011 -- “The Garden’s Edge”

Thursday, May 26, 2011 -- Motion Beyond The Fox Point

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 -- Style And Substance And Acoustic Terror

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 -- Nancy Kominsky 1915-2011 RIP

Monday, May 23, 2011 -- Dragon Storm: Ammonia Snow

Friday, May 20, 2011 -- “Where Did The Cows Go?”

Thursday, May 19, 2011 -- Irving Berlin’s Piano

Wednesday, May 18, 2011 -- Nuclear Accidents, Beatles, Mean Snakes

Tuesday, May 17, 2011 -- The Best Reason To Study Astrophysics

Monday, May 16, 2011 -- Click—It’s A New Week

Friday, May 13, 2011 -- Pedals, Patches And A Composer

Thursday, May 12, 2011 -- Beautiful Bugs, Annoying Clicks

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 -- Perfect Pages

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 -- Asteroid Scheila Is Not A Comet Update

Monday, May 9, 2011 -- The Monster Thought Of The Waldensians

Friday, May 6, 2011 -- Don’t Paint Your Wagon: Off, Off Broadway

Thursday, May 5, 2011 -- The Book Of Love In The City Of The Dead

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 -- A Quick Robot Guitar Note

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 -- “The Clock Had All His Attention”

Monday, May 2, 2011 -- Four Pictures, Three Without Cars

April 2011

Friday, April 29, 2011 -- Insect Pathology And You: The Musical

Thursday, April 28, 2011 -- “The Piano Singing Back To You”

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 -- Everything’s Happening In Parking Lots

Tuesday, April 26, 2011 -- Exciting Waveforms

Monday, April 25, 2011 -- The Girl Who Talks To Dinosaurs

Friday, April 22, 2011 -- Moon Dust In Waltz Time

Thursday, April 21, 2011 -- Little Complicated Things And Stuff

Wednesday, April 20, 2011 -- The Five Student Colors Of L. S. Lowry

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 -- The Time Of The Dinosaurs

Monday, April 18, 2011 -- A Beard Tangled With Headphones

Friday, April 15, 2011 -- Harps And Flutes, Swans And Monsters

Thursday, April 13, 2011 -- King Solomon, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Laurie Strode

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 -- There Are No Pianos In The Bible

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 -- Fukushima I Nuclear Accidents

Monday, April 11, 2011 -- Ayn Rand, The Tower Of Babel, Breakfast

Friday, April 8, 2011 -- Creatures Of Darkness And Light: The Movie

Thursday, April 7, 2011 -- Repurposing Vicki

Wednesday, April 6, 2011 -- Is The Key The Little Key?

Tuesday, April 5, 2011 -- Two Swans

Monday, April 4, 2011 -- Flying Saucers And Beethoven

Sunday, April 3, 2011 -- 2011 1st Quarter Index

Friday, April 1, 2011 -- Sex With A Monster: The Musical

March 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011 -- Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts

Wednesday, March 30, 2011 -- Moths, Scorpions And Unreal Women

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 -- Shōbijin And Daikaijū

Monday, March 28, 2011 -- Bambi, Godzilla And Intimacy Issues

Sunday, March 27, 2011 -- Singing In My Closet

Friday, March 25, 2011 -- Sheet Music Talk

Thursday, March 24, 2011 -- How Illumination Works

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 -- Luc Montagnier And Bad Memories In Good Water

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 -- Writing Versus Multimedia

Monday, March 21, 2011 -- When You Press Down A Piano Key

Friday, March 18, 2011 -- Sense Of Place

Thursday, March 17, 2011 -- Technology And Food

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 -- Even Puppets Yell At Me!

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 -- Motion Toward And Away—Ode To Pamela

Monday, March 14, 2011 -- I Don’t Know What Lost Means Any More

Friday, March 11, 2011 -- I Don’t Know What Distance Means Any More

Friday, March 11, 2011 -- Wrapping Up Roland

Thursday, March 10, 2011 -- Looking Over Its Shoulder At The Giants

Wednesday, March 9, 2011 -- Quasi Una Atomic Octopus Fantasia

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 -- “Different, But Not Individually Evil”

Monday, March 7, 2011 -- Robot Pilots, Kites, Cutting Strings

Friday, March 4, 2011 -- Waterfall In My Kitchen

Thursday, March 3, 2011 -- I Can’t Sleep In My Kitchen

Wednesday, March 2, 2011 -- Romance In My Kitchen

Tuesday, March 1, 2011 -- Beethoven And Three Plates In My Kitchen

February 2011

Monday, February 28, 2011 -- Violence Of The Sun In My Kitchen

Friday, February 25, 2011 -- Ghost Behind The Scenes

Thursday, February 24, 2011 -- Ghost Of A Different World

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 -- Beethoven, Britney Spears And A Ghost

Tuesday, February 22, 2011 -- Do Ghosts Play With Toys?

Monday, February 21, 2011 -- Oh-Oh, Ghosts

Friday, February 18, 2011 -- Louis Lumière’s Beautiful Beast: A Puppet Show

Thursday, February 17, 2011 -- La Seule Chose Que Je Peux Faire

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 -- A Perfect Day For Love And Squalor

Tuesday, February 15, 2011 -- Hot Rods, French Girls, Monster Lizards

Monday, February 14, 2011 -- Beautiful Impossible Math Thing

Sunday, February 13, 2011 -- February Ketchup

Friday, February 11, 2011 -- Robot High Heels

Thursday, February 10, 2011 -- Robot By Television Light: A Puppet Show

Wednesday, February 9, 2011 -- Robot Above The Clouds Of Saturn

Tuesday, February 8, 2011 -- Robot In The Rain

Monday, February 7, 2011 -- High Heels, But Not Sweet Polly Purebred

Friday, February 4, 2011 -- The Real Reason Dinosaurs Eat Electricity

Thursday, February 3, 2011 -- Extinct Entertainment And Dinosaurs

Wedday, February 2, 2011 -- Dreaming Of A Dinosaur In A Maidenform Bra

Tuesday, February 1, 2011 -- Dinosaur And Woman: A Puppet Show

January 2011

Monday, January 31, 2011 -- Things Libraries Throw Away

Friday, January 28, 2011 -- Moonlight Becomes You

Thursday, January 27, 2011 -- Quasi Una Flying Car Fantasia

Wednesday, January 26, 2011 -- Like Before The Internet Went Psycho

Tuesday, January 25, 2011 -- The Sound Of One Hand Chording

Monday, January 24, 2011 -- Feral Kangaroos And Women

Friday, January 21, 2011 -- Something Heroic And Remote

Thursday, January 20, 2011 -- The End Of The World Shaken Not Stirred

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 -- Pretty Flowers, Taylor Swift, Killer Whales

Tuesday, January 18, 2011 -- Romance, Cinema And Science Fiction Dreams

Monday, January 17, 2011 -- Thinking About Perspective

Friday, January 14, 2011 -- Basically Just The Lovemongers Doing Zeppelin

Thursday, January 13, 2011 -- No Bird Shadows On The Analemma

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 -- “The Honeymoon Machine”

Tuesday, January 11, 2011 -- An American Tune In Oostburg

Monday, January 10, 2011 -- Cars Are The New Birds

Friday, January 7, 2011 -- Famishius Vulgaris Ingeniusi

Thursday, January 6, 2011 -- Hot Red Earth, Cold Blue Jazz

Wednesday, January 5, 2011 -- “Pretty Horrifying But Actually Very Real”

Tusday, January 4, 2011 -- Anagnorisis

Monday, January 3, 2011 -- A Place To Read Books I’ve Never Read

Sunday, January 2, 2011 -- 2010 Complete Index

“When All My Words About Britney Disappear”

2011-12-30T02:34:00.001-06:00

The only art instruction book I’ve read
that builds its entire approach to sketching
around careful shapes and careful values
with a result something similar to
the black and white sketches of Georges Seurat
will be published in a new edition
in the second quarter of the new year.

It’s an old book that has been out-of-print
for many decades. Around here just one
library had a copy. They tossed it.

I’m looking forward to the new release
even though I’ve read the book many times
and made photocopies of some sections.

I’m trying to get better at drawing.

Of course reading books won’t make me better
at drawing careful shapes, careful values,
and reading a book I’ve already read
seems particularly inefficient.

But if I was after efficiency
I’d use a camera—they’re good gadgets.

And if the words and drawings in a book
are themselves careful shapes, careful values,
reading such a book again and again
might carefully shape and shade my thinking.

That doesn’t make me better at drawing.

But if I do get better at drawing
the only way I will recognize it
is if my thinking is shaped and shaded
carefully—like a Georges Seurat drawing.

This new year I’ll be reading an old book.

The twenty-first century doesn’t care
if I can draw. I own a camera
and libraries, now, throw away old books.

But soon enough it is going to be
the twenty-second century and then
everyone now will wish they’d learned to draw
because these kinds of things skip centuries.

I’m trying to get better at drawing.

This new year I’ll be reading an old book.

A twenty-second century woman
will look up when she hears dirigibles
and that’s what she will see—dirigibles!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

*

The Real World In Georges Seurat’s Notebooks

Things Libraries Throw Away

The Lost World Of Stacy And The Llama

Digging Britney Redux

When all my words about Britney disappear
a woman remains—stripped because of the heat,
curious, looking up to see what’s coming,

on guard, crouching with her cat and with a spear.
Above, there’s sound, like a song, musique concrète—
That sound is dirigible engines humming.

A Catastrophic Failure (With Music)

2011-12-29T00:45:00.001-06:00

Today’s post is going to be a little ... disjointed.

Basically, today’s post is about the catastrophic failure of a post idea.

Usually when I get a clear, specific idea for a post I am able to work through the steps of making the idea real without too many problems.

Sometimes, every now and then, I’ll hit some snag where the idea doesn’t seem as good once I start actually doing the work. Maybe a cartoon doesn’t seem funny or interesting. A story doesn’t seem to have any entertaining element. Some hoped-for bit of logic never materializes. So then I usually try to change whatever my original thought was into something that I can use. Instead of a cartoon maybe I’ll try a stop-motion video. Or instead of a stop-motion video I’ll try just sitting down and playing something on guitar. Almost always I can end up finding a way to use my original thought.

Every now and then, however, no matter how I try, some idea just will never fit into any form that I feel works here at the blog. Then I have to just abandon that idea. I try to put the thought out of my mind and hope that someday it will come back when I can make use of it properly.

That’s happening right now.

I don’t really want to abandon this idea, but since the year is running out I also don’t want to drag a troublesome idea into the new year. So for today’s post I’m just going to put up what I have and explain what I was thinking and make it a standalone post all by itself. Maybe someday I’ll come back to this and use the raw material in another way or something. I don’t know.

Here’s the deal.

A few days ago I had an idea for a new stop-motion video for Little Plastic Doll. The basic idea was that it would be a sequel of sorts to “Ha, Ha, Rubber Lizard Loves Taylor Swift.” The backstory was going to be that Little Plastic Doll was kind of jealous of Rubber Lizard singing to the picture of Taylor Swift, so Little Plastic Doll was going to write a “Taylor Swift-type song” to show Rubber Lizard that she could write a girl’s country song, too.

Right away I hit my first snag. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never actually heard a Taylor Swift song and I don’t want to listen to any. So I was going to just have to guess at what a “Taylor Swift-type song” would sound like based on what I’ve heard people say about them. It’s not good to write about something based on guesses, but I was going to do it. I’ve heard her songs are sort of almost always about a young woman’s fantasy of meeting a cool guy. So I turned that into an idea about a young woman who meets a guy who turns out to be a superhero and she’s just pissed off that he never calls because he’s always somewhere saving the world.

Then I hit my second snag. The song was way too long for a stop-motion video. The software I use (right now) to make those stop-motion videos is terrible and really only works for things that are about a minute long. The song I came up with has six verses (I’m an idiot) and even if I was going to make it no matter how I tried I couldn’t think of how I’d fit the story of the song into any of the “locations” I use for making videos.

Then I hit my third snag. I couldn’t think of any way to change the basic idea so that I could use it. I didn’t want to sing the song myself because it’s clearly a “girl’s song.” And although I can draw a single cartoon, I can’t draw well enough—or certainly not fast enough—to create a comic book-style series of images to go along with an illustrated video of the song. And just the lyrics of the song, without any context around them, didn’t seem all that interesting.

So I was screwed. This seemed like one of those idea that I just had to abandon.

But I kind of like the song, and it still seems kind of fun to me, this notion that a young woman would just be pissed off and sing because she was angry at a superhero for not spending enough time with her instead of saving the world.

And that is pretty much the backstory to today’s post.

The year is running out and I don’t want to abandon this stuff, yet at the same time I don’t want to drag it into the new year with me. So I’m typing up this endless explanation, and now I’m going to insert a graphic of the music for the basic melody and then put up the lyrics for the song I came up with.

That’s today’s post.

*

This melody isn’t exactly perfect. I was still experimenting with changing things around here and there. But this is the basic idea. A simple repeating structure for each verse, and the last line of each verse tells the story and maybe drags out the time a little, a bit of free-form rhythm to the general eight-bar structure.

And here are the lyrics. It was supposed to be Little Plastic Doll singing her version of a “Taylor Swift-type” love song. (I also like this because in “Hold Me Forever: A Doll Philosophy” Little Plastic Doll sang about how much she loves it when her phone rings and here she is singing about how much she hates it when her would-be boyfriend’s phone rings. But this is just way too long. And there really should be an instrumental verse before the last lyrical verse, so this would be even longer.)

After we danced
I waited for your call
After we danced
I waited by the window
After we danced
I waited for you
But you were off doing something

We danced
I waited for your call
After we danced
I waited by the window
After we danced
I waited for you
But you were fighting supervillains

We danced
I waited for your call
After we danced
I waited by the window
After we danced
I waited for you
But you were saving the whole world

We danced
I waited for your call
After we danced
I waited by the window
After we danced
I waited for you
Then my dream came true

We danced
I waited for your call
After we danced
I waited by the window
After we danced
I waited for you
Now it’s me and you
(Until your phone rings!)

We danced
I waited for your call
After we danced
I waited by the window
After we danced
I waited for you
Now it’s me and you
(Until your phone rings
And you have to save the world
Again!)

This Woman And That Song: Apologies

2011-12-28T03:54:00.000-06:00

So once I knew this woman who said
all men owed her an apology.

But when she said it she was smiling.

I don’t have that as a video
and I don’t even have a sound file.

As it happens I have a cartoon
and a poem about the moment.

Where do songs go after we sing them?

Through a microphone and interface
and into a computer sound file.

I just played and sang a song without
switching on a recording device.

And I didn’t sing it to someone.

Where did that song go when I sang it?

Is it here in this poem somewhere?

If I say it’s nowhere and I’m wrong
then who would I apologize to?

Another Look At Another Venus

2011-12-27T02:24:00.000-06:00

The astonishing man was Ravel, of whom we always think in terms of lush orchestrations. He was a very fine pianist, and—with the exception, I think, of his Piano Concerto—he always wrote his compositions as piano pieces first of all. Then he orchestrated them. I find this very curious. If I’m writing an orchestral piece, I write straight for orchestra. But Ravel, who was one of the greatest orchestrators of all time, and the musician I admire most of all, performed what I think was an extraordinary operation on almost everything he wrote.

I’ve never much liked orchestral music. I haven’t heard a great deal of it, but I’ve had opportunities to hear it and because I’ve never felt any engagement with the form I’ve never followed up on most of those opportunities.

On the other hand I’ve always loved small groups, things like chamber music, where you get to see traditional orchestral instruments in simple settings, playing music where you can watch and listen to individual musicians playing parts and follow the individual voices. I love all stuff like that.

I wonder what the future of orchestral music will be?

For people who like it, to my eyes the future looks bleak for at least two reasons.

One is that some advanced synthesizers now can automatically generate orchestral scores. That is, an 88-key keyboard can be sectioned off into octaves and when a musician plays something on the keyboard, parts in the low octaves will be played by orchestral instruments with a low range and keyboard parts in the high octaves will be played by orchestral instruments with a high range. This can happen in real time and, after a piece is played and recorded, a musician can go into the score and manually rearrange things however they choose. But I strongly suspect commercial pressures to get music written and recorded will cause musicians to work quickly and simply accept default choices made by the machine with little tweaks here and there. So, orchestral music as a true expression of an individual composer’s personality will vanish, and be replaced by orchestral music that just exemplifies a composer’s superficial style choices.

A second reason is that as people are raised with simplistic art and entertainment, their expectations change and their very thinking about art and entertainment changes. A friend of mine once read “Atlas Shrugged” and when he finished he said he didn’t think it was good or bad, just another novel, but he asked me, “Why was it so long?” He said he kept on imagining the story could have been over after each section, rather than keep going to a new sequence of events. I said the story is plotted something like an orchestral piece of music, where each character has his or her own theme and conflict and story-arc and the themes and conflicts mirror each other and illuminate each other and everything plays off everything else, a sequence of small crescendos building to the actual climax where the main transcending themes are resolved. He thought I was nuts, and he thought I was just rationalizing, just making up excuses for Ayn Rand’s—in his eyes—arbitrary decision to make the novel so long. As more and more people never develop the ability to conceive of complex art and entertainment as fun and satisfying in a personal way, fewer people will create it and those who do, I strongly suspect, will approach their work in a very insular way, isolated from the mass-market, from pop culture. And without feedback from participation in the overall culture, art and entertainment becomes vastly less than it could be, even if it is created sincerely.

Or so it seems to me, at least.

I think the future of orchestral music is disco.

*

Linda went off to a new age workshop
and before she left we went to dinner
and I said, “New Mexico sounds peaceful
but everything I’ve heard about these things
is that the so-called ‘workshop day sessions’
are just a socially acceptable
excuse for people to hook up for sex.”

Linda made a face and sighed a big sigh
and said, “You think everyone thinks of sex
all the time just because that’s what you do.”

So Linda went off to New Mexico
and instead of coming back late Sunday
she came back early Friday afternoon.

Linda said, “You know I hate to say this
but oh my God I can’t believe how right
you were about everyone having sex.
We were supposed to be talking about
meditation but at every session
people would pair off or join up in groups
and the only thing people talked about
was whose room haven’t they done it in yet.”

I asked her, “And did you have a good time?”

She made a face, sighed, said, “I drove to town
and spent the whole week in the library.
At night I drove back and locked my room’s door.
Finally I just quit and came back home.”

I said, “At least you got some reading done.”

She said, “Air fare. Room and board. Car and gas.
All that money and I sat reading books.
Do you know how much that fucking week cost?”

I pointed at her. I said, “‘Fucking’ week.”

She said, “I said you were right, I was wrong,
you don’t have to rub it in. Oh— Shut up!”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Another Venus

Fluorescent Lights On A Book Of Shadows

This Bright Old World Of Ours As A Rune

2011-12-26T00:58:00.003-06:00

I was drawing a cartoon
about a woman who played
with monsters, monster games made
to play out under the moon,

not described in word or rune,
where blood is black, colors grayed
by full moon light, blood is trade
by new moon dark, death a boon.

Real monsters took a woman away.
I didn’t know her. I knew her art.
She tried. Played what no one wins. She lost.

I wish more than anything today
we could help each other win our part.
We can’t. We’re alone with monsters. Lost.

Lost (For Brittany Murphy)

I saw the waxing crescent Moon tonight.
It was only a day and five hours old.
Venus was in the west too, bright and bold
just south of the Moon’s thin, dim, orange light.

Bright Venus and a young thin Moon. The sight
made me think of Amy Winehouse. She’s cold
as the night now, but close enough to hold
as a thought. A twilight thought at midnight.

Did Amy ever look up at the stars?
Did she ever know anyone who knew
which star is Venus, or where’s the young Moon?

If nothing else this bright old world of ours
took those people away from her, the few
who know such things, and made her world a rune.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(I wrote this in the early AM hours
of Monday, 12/26. But for me
it was late Sunday night. And I
was still thinking about seeing
the beautiful 2% illuminated Moon
just after sundown late that afternoon.)

*

The Difference Between Clouds And Conquistadors

I’m Sorry The World Did This To You

Kate Moss (And Why My Life Is Derailed)

Never Having Kissed Amy

The World And The Supervillain’s Nightclub

Ode To The Concept Of Cotton Candy

Amy Winehouse In The Sea Of Crises

Expedition To Amy

Posh People Squabbling

Amy Winehouse Makes It Official

Pretty Blue Flowers At The Gates Of Hell

Christmas Witches: Sound Synthesis

2011-12-23T00:11:00.001-06:00

Static on a TV screen tuned to an unused channel.
The flat white of a snow-covered parking lot with no cars.
Raindrops from a storm splashing on the surface of a lake.
Noon sunlight on a single puff of cloud in a clear sky.

“Clouds and rain and snow are all water,” the green witch said. “But
static on a TV screen is only technology.”

“Water turns into these things,” I said, “when acted upon
by the forces of nature. And a television screen
becomes an infinity of things when acted upon
by the force of a finger pressing a remote control.”

The green witch started to say something, but stopped, then started
to say something else, but stopped. She remained silent, thinking.

“Our lips can speak or not speak,” I said, “when acted upon
by the force of our mind pressing against our skin and bones.”

The green witch looked at the words silently, then looked at me.

For a moment we looked at each other without speaking.

Then the green witch said, “I’m thinking about what happens when
one person touches another person.” She stared at me.

“Did I just touch you?” I said. The green witch smiled. And she laughed.

A guitar is a mechanical approximation
of a synthesizer that can sound like any guitar.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Christmas Witches I Mean Wishes

Christmas Witches: A Present Of The Past

Christmas Witches: Ogres And Showgirls

“The Primitive And What Came After”

2011-12-22T02:18:00.001-06:00

The green witch said, “She’s in Los Angeles doing what you call villainy.”

I said, “It won’t be the same without her.”

The green witch smiled and asked, “If she were here, what do you think would be the same?”

random holiday talk

De Santillana and von Dechend state in the Introduction to Hamlet’s Mill that they are well aware of modern interpretations of myth and folklore but they find them shallow and lacking insight: “...the experts now are benighted by the current folk fantasy, which is the belief that they are beyond all this - critics without nonsense and extremely wise”. Consequently, de Santillana and Deschend prefer to rely on the work of “meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, Boll and, to go farther back, of Athanasius Kircher and Petavius”. They give reasons throughout the book for preferring the work of older scholars (and the early mythologists themselves) as the proper way to interpret myth; but this viewpoint did not sit well with their modern critics schooled in the “current anthropology, which has built up its own idea of the primitive and what came after”.

that quote is from
Wikipedia’s entry on “Hamlet’s Mill”
and the quotes within it
are from “Hamlet’s Mill”

My guitar is like prehistory now
because my fingers have traveled through time
and can play on keyboard synthesizer
chord voicings similar to the voicings
I use in arrangements for my guitar
and the synthesizer can synthesize
acoustic or electric guitar sounds
so my fingers all modern and high-tech
can make sounds not exactly the same but
so similar that if you close your eyes
or even if you keep your eyes open
wild dogs crying out in the night might not
be able to tell the two sounds apart.

At least that’s my current folk fantasy.

My guitar is still right next to my bed.

My room wouldn’t be the same without it.

But if my guitar could talk would it say,
“I’m here, but what do you think is the same?”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lost In The Villainy

Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts (Redux)

No Doubts About The Party

Christmas Witches I Mean Wishes

Christmas Witches: A Present Of The Past

Christmas Witches: Ogres And Showgirls

Parsimony And Aberrant Forms

2011-12-21T01:50:00.001-06:00

An avalanche of more than 100 apples rained down over a main road in Keresley, Coventry on Monday night.

The street was left littered with apples after they pelted car windscreens and bonnets just after rush-hour.

The bizarre downpour may have been caused by a current of air that lifted the fruit from a garden or orchard, releasing it over the junction of Keresley Road and Kelmscote Road.

One driver said: "The apples fell out of the sky as if out of nowhere. They were small and green and hit the bonnet hard. There were other cars on the road at the time too and everyone had to stop their cars suddenly."

... Keresley parish councillor Sandra Camwell said a freak black-out happened on the same road last year.

She said: "Strange things do happen in this part of the world. I think it's highly likely that apples did fall from the sky. We're in an area with a spooky history, where there have been witches for centuries, after all."

Apples fall from the sky over Coventry

Coventry is in central England
north of London and apples fell there
seemingly from nowhere from the sky
hitting cars and disrupting traffic.

Assuming there wasn’t a grounds crew
working a couple of blocks away
cutting down a stand of apple trees
using an industrial shredder
spewing apples out into the sky
falling apples hitting cars is strange.

But lots of things fall out of the sky
and the press always finds an expert
who blames falling fish or frogs on wind
and now an intense vortex of wind
is being blamed for dropping apples.

Meteorologists think of wind.

Coventry people think of witches.

If Christmas witches can make apples
fall from the sky disrupting traffic
can they also make dinosaurs fall?

Dinosaurs falling out of the sky
would disrupt traffic if disrupting
traffic makes Christmas witches happy.

It’s always been kind of bloodthirsty
the saying Kill two birds with one stone.

Maybe birds are getting back at us.

Or something else up there in the sky
interested in parsimony
interested in disrupting cars
interested in Christmas witches
interested in Christmas wishes
of dinosaurs wanting to come back.

If dinosaurs fall out of the sky
the meteorologists will have
a harder time explaining it than
the local people of Coventry.

In fact maybe you could even say
the meteorologists will have
a hell of a time blaming the wind.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Aberrant Forms

Frogs From The Sky!

Puddle Monsters: Puddles In The Sky

Dinosaurs And Robots And Vicki’s Smile

Dinosaur And Woman: A Puppet Show

Christmas Witches I Mean Wishes

Christmas Witches: A Present Of The Past

Christmas Witches: Ogres And Showgirls

Dragon Storm: The Woman Looking Away

2011-12-20T02:16:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I talked about musical duets and a woman who played violin.

That reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what.

I thought about it all day. Then, late Monday night, I sat down and looked over at my bookshelf and went from left to right, staring at each of the books and thinking, “Is it something from that book? Is it something from that book?” all the way across the shelf.

And the method worked!

This is what I was thinking of:

“In that syrupy operetta Das Dreimaderlhaus, Franz Schubert pays court to all three maiden daughters of his patron. Paul Kammerer broke the record by falling in love successively with the five famous Wiesenthal sisters. Four of them were ballet dancers, the fifth played violin.”

The fifth played violin!

None of those love affairs worked out very well. And one of them—with the eldest sister, Grete, a dancer—apparently played some part in Kammerer’s suicide. At about the same time the evidence became available that someone—Kammerer’s assistant?—had faked the nuptial pads on the toads, Grete decided that she would not accompany Kammerer to Moscow. Apparently the combination was too much for Kammerer and he went for a walk in the woods and shot himself in the head. Reports were that he held the gun in his right hand and, for some reason, reached around and shot himself in the left side of his head.

“The only explanation of sorts was offered, not by a psychiatrist, but by an intuitive woman. Though Kammerer was an abstemious man, he might have had a few drinks to give himself Dutch courage before he set out on his last walk. Sitting with his back to the rock, he might have hesitated for a long time, then, with a sudden swinging gesture, brought his arm around his face and the gun to the left ear. There is more panache in such a gesture than in the conventional lifting of the gun, right hand to right temple. Even if not drunk, the gesture would fit an impulse of sudden desperate exaltation—and end with a flourish. His death had a touch of melodrama, but so had his life. He was a Byron among the toads.”

That’s what I was trying to think of!

“He was a Byron among the toads.”

The girl playing violin yesterday was reminding me of Kammerer and one of the younger Wiesenthal sisters. And that was reminding me of Koestler’s outstanding epithet for Kammerer: “He was a Byron among the toads.”

There are worse ways a person’s life could be summed up!

*

There’s a storm raging on Saturn
but we can’t walk to Saturn’s moons
and stretch out on a rock to watch
dragon-shaped clouds swirl on Saturn
and maybe strum on a guitar
improvising a song about
a knight watching a dragon grow
but holding his station sword raised
somehow brave somehow standing firm
somehow not driven mad in fear
by the dragon growing larger.

If a scientist discovered
a star-gate a portal between
everywhere and anywhere else
would that matter when a woman
right there became the only thing
he could see and she looked away
and then the star-gate stopped working
and all the scientist could see
would be dragons and all of them
would be swirling chaos growing
like clouds at night blocking the stars?

The scientist should have written
a song and closed his eyes and sang
and maybe played along without
looking at his guitar strings or
watching his fingers press down keys
and what could the dragons have done
and what could swirling chaos do
or the woman looking away
everywhere far away again
from right there from that one firm spot
where a scientist stands singing.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Paul Kammerer at Wikipedia

*

Dragon Storm: Ammonia Snow

An Unclear Story About Walking To Mars

Where The Tree Goes Into The Ground

Lost In The Villainy

2011-12-19T01:19:00.002-06:00

For a second, for that fleeting instant,
it was as if I left reality
and for whatever’s the smallest unit
that can be used to measure time’s passing,
for whatever is a quantum instant,
I felt like I was living in Smallville
walking somewhere and Lana Lang walked past.

As small as that quantum instant might be
my hand is shaking remembering it
because I also remember clearly
being happy with Lana walking past
in Smallville and wanting to not come back.

The Fons Et Origo Of Mad Laughter

Today’s post deals with a bit of a loose end, but only from last week.

Last Wednesday I did a post about how movies almost never show people playing musical instruments or reading books, Returning From A Walk To Mars. But since I’ve mentioned the TV show Smallville a lot here at the blog, it seems worth pointing out that show often had people sitting down and playing the piano for fun or relaxation.

I’ve already included one picture of supervillain Lex playing his grand piano in my post Love Sonnet With Piano Wreckage And Worms. I’ve always liked that moment because it was Lex talking to Lana-as-the-witch.

I’ve also always liked this moment:

Lois’s sister has come to visit Smallville and when Lex discovers she plays violin, he invites her over to the mansion. He plays his grand piano, she plays violin.

I’m sighing as I type this. Yeah. People playing music together for fun.

That’s from Season Four, episode 16: “Lucy”

Of course, in that episode it turns out that Lois’s sister is kind of a bad girl, and she’s trying to pull a con job on both her own sister and Lex, to steal $50,000 from him.

So Smallville did often show characters playing music for fun and relaxation. But Lex is a supervillain and Lucy was a run-of-the-mill villain. Villain’s play music for fun and relaxation.

*

Over the weekend I learned to play
a simple keyboard arrangement of
“The Night Has A Thousand Eyes.” I first
created the arrangement playing
guitar, then worked it out for two hands
on keyboard as chords and melody.
My keyboard can split to piano
on the left, violin on the right,
so I can pretend I’m performing
with a beautiful villain hoping
to tug at my heartstrings with a con.
That’s okay. I’ve read there’s a saying
in France: In every kiss there’s one
bending to kiss, one tilting a cheek.
When two musicians play together
the villainy is called a duet.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Temping At Impossible Kisses: Chanteuse

Jennifer Connelly sings “The Night
Has A Thousand Eyes”

The Real World In Georges Seurat’s Notebooks

2011-12-16T01:03:00.003-06:00

Recently I discovered a web site
built a few years back by a museum
to showcase the drawings of Georges Seurat.
They’ve even put up graphic depictions
of four of his sketchbooks that open up
and display a few pages of his work.

I’ve never liked Seurat’s finished paintings
but I’ve always liked his rough oil studies
and it’s hard for me to put into words
how much I love his drawings and sketches.
Except for some paintings by Morisot,
or as I’d want to put it ‘Morisot,’
nothing in the whole history of art
seems as wonderful—as magic!—to me
as the drawings and sketches of Seurat.

Artists before him and artists after
have sometimes made similar drawings but
Seurat was unique in his vision and
how he reduced it to values and shapes.

The craft skills couldn’t be more mundane but
the mind behind the craft made the craft art.

In my world there are the stars in the shapes
we call constellations, and the drawings
and sketches created by Georges Seurat.

There are aspirations to be the one
or aspirations to be the other.

Even if all the power grids on earth
collapsed those notebooks would still shine like stars.

Once described as “the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence,” Georges Seurat’s mysterious and luminous works on paper played a crucial role in his career. Though Seurat is most often remembered as a Neo-Impressionist, the inventor of pointillism, and the creator of the painting,
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, his incomparable drawings are among his–and modernism’s–greatest achievements. Working primarily with conté crayon on paper, Seurat explored the Parisian metropolis and its environs, abstracted figures, spaces, and structures, and dramatized the relationship between light and shadow, creating a distinct body of work that is a touchstone for the art of the twentieth century and today.

from the introduction
to the New York Museum of Modern Art
exhibit: Georges Seurat: The Drawings

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The sketchbook pages above are from
sketchbook IV, near the end

*

Is This A Junkyard Church

Edma In Heaven Laughing

“The Garden’s Edge”

Blows Against The (Expensive) Empire

I Can’t Sleep In My Kitchen

*

My two favorite books about
Georges Seurat are:

“Seurat: Drawings and Paintings”
by Robert L. Herbert

“Seurat and the Making of 'La Grande
Jatte'” by Robert L. Herbert

Two Women And Someday

2011-12-15T01:42:00.001-06:00

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained...

from “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”
by Wallace Stevens
quoted in ‘The Difficulty To Think
At The End Of Day’

Once I knew two women and someday
I’d like to write a book about one
and in the book I’d tell a story
about a writer who writes a book
about a woman he calls a witch
and in interviews he will drop hints
the book is based on reality
and a real woman will come forward
and say he wrote the book about her
but she will insist she’s not a witch
but the writer won’t be interviewed
with her because he’s afraid of her
and even when a TV station
offers him a huge amount of cash
to appear with her he refuses
and she gets everyone’s sympathy
but people think the writer writes well
so they buy his book and he gets rich
but people think he’s nuts and he’s mean
to portray the woman as a witch
when she’s obviously really nice
but then the plot gets complicated
when a reporter who does a piece
about the woman dies horribly
so some people say “Is she a witch?”
and some say “Did the writer do it?”
and my novel will tell that story
about was the woman a witch or
was the writer crazy all along.

Once I knew two women and someday
I’d like to paint an image of one
sitting in a lawn chair at sunset
watching a wild rabbit in the grass
and the whole painting would be for her
and even though I’d paint the rabbit
as very wild as king of the ghosts
the woman would be even more wild
and everyone seeing the painting
would say “That’s a pretty cool rabbit
but look at that woman wow artists
are the luckiest people on earth!”

Once I knew two women and someday
well only witches know the future.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Faux Mischa Dreams

This Scary, Pumpkin Time Of Year, Part Two

Returning From A Walk To Mars

2011-12-14T00:31:00.003-06:00

In the second Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen, when the beautiful evil robot Alice (Alice has appeared here before in One Quick Megan Fox Moment) chases the heroes, for some reason that’s never explained the heroes run and hide in the college library. Alice follows them and, of course, destroys the library. End of scene.

In Scream 2, when Sidney tries to use a computer in the college library to access some database, Cotton Weary confronts her, forcing the plain clothes cops to arrest him. End of scene.

Two popular movies with scenes set in college libraries.

Although neither scene involves books.

Sam, Mikaela and Leo only go to the library to hide from a beautiful evil robot, and Sidney goes to the library to use a computer.

I guess you can say, for what it’s worth, in both scenes there are at least books visible on screen. In one scene the books get blown up and in the other books are just background props to people using computers. But there are books visible on screen. No one reads the books, but the books are there. Books exist.

I guess you can say, too, for what it’s worth, that both scenes associate libraries with bad things: An attack by a beautiful evil robot, and a confrontation with a possible serial killer.

But both scenes do at least show books.

*

I haven’t studied it scientifically
that is I don’t have exact numbers for this
but I think in general movies depict
libraries more frequently than they depict
characters playing musical instruments
but like musical instruments books in films
aren’t things people spend quality time with.

Movies have movie music but they don’t show
characters sitting around making music.

And movies show libraries but they don’t show
protagonists sitting around reading books.

I read at some obscure blog that the premise
behind the Thematic Apperception Test
is stories derived from unclear images
mean more than the unclear images themselves.

Is anything more unclear than modern films?

Movies have movie music but they don’t show
characters sitting around making music.

And movies show libraries but they don’t show
protagonists sitting around reading books.

Somebody’s telling somebody a story.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

An Unclear Story About Walking To Mars

Synthetic Philosophy, Liminal Entities And Scripts

2011-12-13T01:15:00.002-06:00

If a woman plays flute on a keyboard synthesizer
a modern machine will produce good articulations
and a modulation wheel will make them even better
and it’s tempting to think somebody hearing the playing
might not be able to tell a synthesized performance
from a real woman really blowing into a real flute
but there always will be one big difference no matter
how nuanced and sophisticated the synthesizer:
Sitting at a keyboard even if she’s using both hands
a woman with a synthesized flute can still talk, talk, talk.

“On a synthesizer,” she said, “I can sing a duet
and hear my voice along with the flute voice weave a texture
and both voices of the duet are under my control
and the harmony and counterpoint can be more subtle
than two musicians no matter how practiced could produce
so this mode of making song never existed before
this duet of voice and flute both performed by one singer.”

She was talking philosophy and seducing me but
to my ears the philosophy sounded synthesized and
my ears just heard: This gadget lets me play and talk, talk, talk.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Flute Playing And Fog Hides The Shore

Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Irving Berlin’s Piano

The Role Of Headphones In Bach’s World

2011-12-12T01:10:00.001-06:00

But if Bach were alive now, I’m absolutely sure that he’d be working at music in the same way that we do in the business today. Above all, he was a worker and a craftsman, and he didn’t enjoy much reverence in his time. He was really hard-working; he trudged hundreds of miles to try to meet Handel, because he’d heard so much about this famous man who was the toast of London and a friend of the king. (Poor old Bach never did meet him; he missed him by a day.) He lived comfortably, but never in luxury, which was hardly surprising since he fathered twenty children by his two wives. There was no choice but to work hard, running a choir, playing the organ, and constantly writing music for his patron, the duke of wherever it happened to be at the time.

The duke would say: “I need a cantata for Sunday week because it’s the wife’s aunt’s birthday.”

Bach would say: “It’s going to take me a while to write it, your dukedom.”

But that never helped, because the reply would inevitably be: “Sorry about that, Johann, but I do need it for that day, and you do want to eat next week, don’t you?”

So Bach would go home and think: Oh, hell! What am I going to write now? Ah, I know. There was a good little tune in that string quartet I wrote three months back. I can take that out and give it to the sopranos. He would literally do this, pinching his own material, rearranging it, and then saying to himself: That’ll do. He’ll never know I wrote it before.

And when he presented the duke with his cantata, sure enough, that worthy wouldn’t recognize it, and would be delighted. “Great. You’ve done it again, Johann. Terrific.”

Bach would just keep churning it out, writing away like a film writer of today who has a deadline to meet—and God knows, Bach had plenty of those. So whether or not he’d have a regular number-one spot in the hit parade today, I’m quite certain that he’d be in there pitching.

“Did you know,” Britney says, “that Bach has twenty children, with two different wives?”

Beethoven strikes chords a little harder and pointedly ignores her.

Britney says, again, “I read on some blog that Bach has twenty children with two different wives.”

Beethoven strikes a chord progression with his left hand, and plays a melody with his right. He looks intently from one hand to the other.

“I know you can talk and play at the same time,” Britney says. “So I read on that blog that Bach is writing movie music now. You know, there’s a lot of money in composing music for films.”

Beethoven stops playing. He stares at the keyboard in front of him. He takes a deep breath and lets it out, slowly. Reaching out with his right hand, he leans slightly toward Britney.

Britney leans forward.

Beethoven’s right hand reaches under the bench he’s sitting on, and comes back out holding a pair of headphones. He plugs the headphones into a jack on the left side of the keyboard, puts on the headphones and, still not looking at Britney, returns to striking chords and playing melodies.

Britney frowns, but then laughs and leans back to watch Beethoven play even though she can’t hear him.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Headphones (The Good And The Bad)

In Napkin Legend — The Napkin Tetraptych

2011-12-09T23:49:00.037-06:00

In napkin legend
scientists always scribble
some key idea

on table napkins
and artists always sketch out
some perfect design

on table napkins
and the hot girls and cool guys
jot their phone number

on table napkins
as some lonely person smiles
and rock and roll stars

write solid gold hits
by listing some rhyming words
on table napkins.

These are napkin dreams.
When somebody just spills beer
napkins think, “Oh, fuck!”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Footsteps Like Mad Paint Marks

Distance From Paris To Berlin

Beethoven, Britney Spears And A Ghost

An Unclear Story About Walking To Mars

2011-12-08T23:57:00.002-06:00

“And she doesn’t look like that woman. And neither do I.”

Norman was struck by the conviction with which Beth denied any resemblance or association to the mummified woman. “Beth,” he said, “what do you suppose happened here? Why is this woman the only one left?”

“I think she was important to the expedition,” Beth said. “Maybe even the captain, or the co-captain. The others were mostly men. And they did something foolish—I don’t know what—something she advised them against—and as a result they all died. She alone remained alive in this spacecraft. And she piloted it home. But there was something wrong with her—something she couldn’t help—and she died.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

Fascinating, Norman thought. He’d never really considered it before, but this room—for that matter, this entire spacecraft—was one big Rorschach. Or more accurately, a TAT. The Thematic Apperception Test was a psychological test that consisted of a series of ambiguous pictures. Subjects were supposed to tell what they thought was happening in the pictures. Since no clear story was implied by the pictures, the subjects supplied the stories. And the stories told much more about the storytellers than about the pictures.

from “Sphere”
by Michael Crichton

“If you could walk to Mars,” he asked, “would you go?”

“Walk to Mars?” she asked.

“I don’t mean through outer space,” he said. “I mean if there was something like what fringe people call a star-gate. Some kind of mystical portal. Maybe a lost or a secret cave. A magical doorway. If you could walk through some metaphysical passageway between this world and that one, would you walk through it?”

“Isn’t the atmosphere on Mars not breathable? In the movie ‘Total Recall’ didn’t people sort of explode because of the low pressure on Mars?”

He looked at her and smiled, tightly. “That’s at the Martian equivalent of what we call sea-level here on Earth. But just as atmospheric pressure here becomes less if you climb mountains and greater in deep valleys or cave systems or extreme construction excavations, the atmospheric pressure on Mars increases the farther down you go below the surface. So let’s say the passageway we’re talking about opens far down within an immense rift valley cut deeply into the Martian surface where the atmospheric pressure is safe for a human. Would you walk through that passage?”

She smiled and her eyes were bright. She asked, “Why are you even asking me this question?”

He asked, “Why are you avoiding answering it?”

Still smiling, she said, “Because it’s crazy?”

“Would you go?” he asked.

She sighed and said nothing. She looked away from him. Then she looked back and saw that he was still looking at her, still waiting for an answer.

She sighed again, loudly, and made her eyes very big. She asked, “Would you go with me?”

He smiled. He leaned to her and kissed her.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pamela At The Doorway To Atlantis

This Woman From The Canals Of Mars

A Long Walk

Reduction Of The Muse

2011-12-07T23:45:00.046-06:00

The woman posing is called by the name
Amy Greenspon. She buys and sells art work.
She says she doesn’t believe that fashion
is art. She describes her own fashion look
as dress down casual with an urban
sensibility. I tore out the page
because the photo’s a tough one to sketch.
Her head is tilted but only a bit.

I’m Looking At A Photo On A Page

Big Reductions At The MCA’s Karen Kilimnik Exhibit

“The only thing deader,” someone recently said to me,
“than a book is a painting. The only paintings today
that anybody sees are the paintings in the background
of a film set or a television show set picked out
by some production designer just to be a background.”

Possibly related to the context surrounding that
comment about books being dead and paintings being dead
recently I looked through some old blog posts about painting.

This drawing of Amy Greenspon kind of leaped out at me.

I’d forgotten I drew it and I’d forgotten I planned
to turn it into a painting to explore “reductions.”

I still have the pencil drawing but not the photograph
from which I’d copied the pose with the oddly tilted head.

Poor Amy! She was going to be a painted image
but now she’s just a picture of a drawing in a blog.

Bad time to be a writer. Bad time to be a painter.

Really fucking awful time to be a beautiful muse.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Lost World Of Stacy And The Llama

“The Librarian And The Painter”

Jeanne Hébuterne — Art As A Grail

“The Whole Earth As The Village?”

2011-12-06T16:27:00.009-06:00

Leela called up the stairs. “It is here, Doctor. I did it. The beast is finished!”

She looked down at the shattered body of her foe.

“Your triumph will be short-lived, Earthling,” whispered the Rutan. “Soon our Mother Ship will blast this island to molten rock.”

“Empty threats, Rutan. Enjoy your death, as I enjoyed killing you!”

The Rutan quivered and pulsed weakly. “We die for the glory of our race. Long live the Rutan Empire.”

The glow faded and died, and the Rutan died with it.

With a savage grin of triumph, Leela turned and went back to the lamp room.

The Doctor had rigged together one of his amazing contraptions, taking apart the reflector lamp and the giant telescope and re-assembling them in an entirely different order. As far as Leela could make out, the power of the carbon-arc lamp would be reflected through the telescope and finally focused through Palmerdale’s diamond, which the Doctor was now fitting somewhere inside the telescope. He made a careful, final adjustment and looked up.

“They are hard to kill, these Rutans,” said Leela.

“Been celebrating, have you?”

“Of course. It is fitting to celebrate the death of an enemy.”

“Not in my opinion, but we haven’t time to discuss morality.”

from Terrance Dicks’ novelization
of his Doctor Who script
“Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock”

So Leela had time to spend a moment chatting with the monster she just had mortally wounded and the dying Rutan had time for a bit of philosophy before passing away. But the Doctor, however, couldn’t take any time to discuss morality.

That’s the British for you. They’re always too busy with this, that or the other thing to talk about philosophy.

At least they say they’re too busy. Maybe, of course, they simply don’t have any philosophical foundation for their busy actions and they are hoping nobody will notice if they just act real busy.

Brits.

I used to think the whole world was turning into Los Angeles, but maybe the whole world is turning into London, and Los Angeles is just the first city to completely change.

A philosopher named Josef Pieper wrote a book called, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, but Pieper was a German philosopher.

The British are famously busy, and the Germans are famously slackers, aren’t they?

I notice that Pieper’s book isn’t available on Kindle.

I wonder if there’s a deeper meaning there, to the lack of a Kindle edition of a famous book about leisure as the basis of culture?

I’d speculate about it here, but I’ve got to go do some work . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Five Student Colors Of L. S. Lowry

Music At The Garden’s Edge

“The whole Earth as the Village?”

“Hold Me Forever: A Doll Philosophy”

Orbis Non Sufficit And The Status Cow

Distance From Paris To Berlin

*

An Impossible Kisses production note:

Josef Pieper is the second so-called
“German Catholic philosopher” I’ve
singled out here at the blog. Way back
when I talked about our local library
purging books in

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From
Atlantis #3: Fons Et Origo

I mentioned
Dietrich von Hildebrand
and his extraordinary book
“The New Tower of Babel.”

These philosophers were not
popular with the Nazis and
they’re not popular in our
current culture. Hmmm.

Looking Back: The City Or The Monster

2011-12-05T00:32:00.003-06:00

Looking back
over your shoulder
you look away from me
drawing your face

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“It’s really a waste of time, isn’t it?” she asked.

He sighed.

“No, really,” she said, “they make digitizing tablets that attach to a laptop, don’t they?”

“This tool in my hand,” he said, “is called a painting knife. In slasher movies, girls always get killed with a knife, don’t they?”

“I’m just saying,” she said, “that either you’re going to use that image or you’re not. If you’re going to use it, this way you’re going to have to scan it. Or photograph it. And if you’re not going to use it then, really, what’s the point of us doing this? So, I mean, if you were doing this on a tablet, you wouldn’t have to waste time scanning and color-correcting and cropping and stuff.”

He sighed, again, and continued working.

“You’re ignoring me now, aren’t you?” she asked.

He didn’t say anything.

She posed silently for a moment, then made a face—a kind of combination of pressing her lips together into something almost but not quite a frown and rolling her eyes—and turned to look over her shoulder.

“Are you looking for the monster?” he asked, almost yelling. “Or are you trying to see all the way back to Los Angeles?”

“Don’t yell at me!” she said. “This is very hard for me. In Los Angeles people don’t just sit and do nothing.”

“Yeah,” he said, “in Los Angeles people work away really hard at doing nothing.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Are we done?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think we are.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Loch Ness Monster Vs. Los Angeles

A Flute Playing And Fog Hides The Shore

Song As Eternal Monster Inside Sound

Parking Lot Shadow As A Color-Space

2011-12-02T20:14:00.000-06:00

Next, we meet
Misaki-san.

Her fashion point
is orange and her
preferred fashion area
is Shimokitazawa.

Fashion snap shots in Harajuku

Misaki’s fashion point is orange
and she is very beautiful
and if I could buy a ticket
for a train here in Chicago
that traveled on train tracks to her
I would visit her in real life
to talk about Japanese trains.

The fashion world, mainstream or fringe,
might call my fashion point woeful —
not ‘empty-lot’ but counterfeit
‘empty-lot,’ parking lot shadow —
a color-space no computer
could organize and no craft knife
could cut into lines, curves or planes.

If clothing is a train we wear
and fashion is paying the fare,
I walk along the tracks and stare
at the landscape ripped up and bare
between stations, out in the air,
somehow spared from industry’s care
like empty lots: Wild flowers grow there.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Harajuku Station Forever

Japanese Train Stations Forever

This Is Not “Fashion Bulletin I’m Yours”

Beautiful People Are Courageous

Aberrant Forms

2011-12-01T23:46:00.060-06:00

Guitierrez sighed. He looked around at the tourists at the other tables and said, “This has to be in confidence, okay?”

“All right.”

“It’s a big problem here.”

“What is?”

“There have been, uh ... aberrant forms ... turning up on the coast every so often. It’s been going on for several years now.”

“‘Aberrant forms’?” Levine repeated, shaking his head in disbelief.

“That’s the official term for these specimens,” Guitierrez said. “No one in the government is willing to be more precise. It started about five years ago. A number of animals were discovered up in the mountains, near a remote agricultural station that was growing test varieties of soy beans.”

“Soy beans,” Levine repeated.

Guitierrez nodded. “Apparently these animals are attracted to beans, and certain grasses. The assumption is that they have a great need for the amino acid lysine in their diets. But nobody is really sure. Perhaps they just have a taste for certain crops—”

“Marty,” Levine said, “I don’t care if they have a taste for beer and pretzels. The only important question is: where did the animals come from?”

“Nobody knows,” Guitierrez said.

from “The Lost World”
by Michael Crichton

Dinosaurs and hippie girls is a world
of aberrant forms, high dynamic range
and probably no wide-spread power grids.

And batteries only will last so long.

An acoustic guitar, finger-picked, plucked
or strummed, only will create so much noise.

And how hard can you blow into a flute?

Scientists will debate the important
question, Where did the animals come from?
at least, that is, until the scientists
are chased down and eaten by dinosaurs.

Somewhere, then, a gentle and pretty girl
will ask, Where is that music coming from?

The music will be very quiet but
the gentle and pretty girl will hear it.

ACOUSTIC GUITAR: Was 1979’s New Chautauqua your first serious foray into acoustic guitar playing?

PAT METHENY: In high school and even through the Bright Size Life album [1975], I don’t think I ever played acoustic guitar. Linda Manzer showed up around 1982 or ’83 with the guitar I featured on “Lonely Woman.” I didn’t know something with that kind of sound and balance even existed. It opened up a whole world for me. Around that time, I also started playing some nylon-string guitar on the record Travels. After that point, my acoustic life emerged.

But the hard reality in jazz is that the true acoustic guitar—without pickups or mics—has a very limited set of applications because of the instrument’s small dynamic range. Issues about dynamics on the guitar are pretty huge, so I kind of went at full bore on the electric side. For this record—as acoustic as it is—I still thought a lot about what mics to use and how to use the DI. All those elements are a big part of what makes acoustic guitar a viable platform for me in my day-to-day life as a musician. I spend a lot of time on mics, pickups, strings, and so forth.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts

Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts (Redux)

Dinosaurs And Robots And Vicki’s Smile

Motion Beyond The Fox Point

See Monsters?

Dinosaurs And Hippie Girls Is A World

I’m An Idiot—Episode 748

2011-11-30T23:43:00.024-06:00

So I went to a library and three beautiful young women beat me up and took all my money!

[coughs]

Okay, actually that didn’t happen. But that’s the Hollywood version of what happened. It makes for a much better story than what really happened.

The real story doesn’t have much of a plot and doesn’t have much exciting action. But since it really happened and it really bugs me and this is my blog I’m going to waste a post on this little sequence of events.

This does involve beautiful young women and money, so if you’re at all interested in those two elements, this trivial little story might be of at least passing interest to you.

So today I went to two different libraries. I returned books at both libraries. Nothing bad happened. The librarians at both libraries were nice to me, even talkative, and the books got checked-in and cleared from my record properly.

On the way home I stopped at a convenience store (for Redbull and cookies) and I bought one of those instant winner scratch-off tickets for $2.

When I got home I ate the cookies, drank the Redbull and scratched-off the instant winner. It was, in fact, a winner, but only a $2 winner. So I just put it aside.

At some point late this evening I was sitting around, bored, and I decided to take a walk to a convenience store and cash-in the $2 winner. So I did.

When I walked into the convenience store, there were three beautiful young women standing at the counter. I don’t know how old they were, but one of them was trying to buy a pack of cigarettes, so they must have been whatever the legal age is for cigarettes.

But they were about a dollar short.

The three beautiful young women were searching through their pockets, pulling out pennies and nickels and dimes, trying to get enough money for the cigarettes, but they were about a dollar short.

So I’m standing there and soon a line forms behind me and everyone is waiting for these beautiful young women to find change to add up to a dollar.

Finally I said, “Are you girls only a dollar short?”

One of them said, “Just about a dollar, yeah.”

I took a dollar out of my pocket and handed it to them. “It’s the Christmas season,” I said. “I’ll do a good deed. Merry Christmas.”

So one of the beautiful young women took my dollar and handed it to the clerk. The clerk sorted through the change on the counter and gave that beautiful young woman something like six cents back and handed her the pack of cigarettes.

The beautiful young women smiled at me and said “Thank you” and left.

The clerk watched them leave, then shook her head at me. “I’m sorry about that,” she said.

I shrugged. “I got to do a good deed. And just imagine what it must be like to be their parents.”

The clerk made a face. “The awful part is the girl buying the cigarettes wasn’t short of money. She had a fifty dollar bill in her purse. She just didn’t want to cash the big bill.”

I stared at her. I said, slowly, “She had fifty dollars, and I gave her a dollar?”

The clerk nodded. “Yep.”

I stared at her, then turned around and stared at the woman in line behind me. “I’m such an idiot,” I said.

The woman behind me smiled. “You’re not an idiot,” she said. “You’re just a nice guy.”

“She had fifty dollars,” I said, to everyone in line behind me, “and I gave her a dollar. This is what women do to guys.”

The other people in line smiled.

“Sorry,” I said, to the women in line behind me. “I don’t mean to blame all women for me being an idiot and giving those particular three women a dollar when one of them had a fifty dollar bill in her purse.”

Everyone was pretty understanding and the general consensus was that I shouldn’t feel too bad and I shouldn’t regard those three beautiful young women as representative of all women.

One of the women in line behind me said, “You meet women who take advantage of you and you meet men who take advantage of you. It’s just the world. You’re lucky you’re only out a dollar.”

So I’m an idiot, and I’m an idiot who has one less dollar in his pocket than when the day began.

I gambled on the instant winner ticket and I got back the two dollars I spent for the ticket.

I stood in line behind three beautiful young women and I lost a dollar.

Gambling is safer than women!

Dinosaurs And Robots And Vicki’s Smile

2011-11-29T23:19:00.002-06:00

I can imagine these images of Vicki
smiling in a world gone mad a world of robots
a world where dinosaurs hunt among the robots
to eat humans and the robots don’t interfere
with the dinosaurs chasing down humans for food
the robots don’t help humans plant crops or catch fish
the robots work away at something no one knows
and Vicki knows people who try to be hunters
and Vicki knows people who try to be farmers
and Vicki knows people who try to live on fish
and everyone who knows Vicki loves when she smiles
because her smile is gentle in a world gone mad
and some people wonder if Vicki smiles that way
because she knows what the robots are working on
but I don’t care I just enjoy drawing Vicki
and painting her trying to get her smile just right
because if I can draw or paint her gentle smile
what the dinosaurs and robots do won’t matter.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Repurposing Vicki

The Best Reason To Study Astrophysics

The Craft Of Wreckage

The Built World Redux—Art And Souvenir

Blows Against The (Expensive) Empire

Dinosaurs And Hippie Girls Is A World

Hey Juli look— It’s 162 words
of metafiction as in I never met a comma
I really liked

Song As Eternal Monster Inside Sound

2011-11-28T12:42:00.005-06:00

(Update note at bottom of post -- Mark)

It’s just sound
It’s machinery
But it’s you and me
And now we’re playing it forever

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“It’s just two people playing a song together,” she said. “But you think it’s more, don’t you?”

He didn’t say anything.

“We have the video files,” she said. “And the audio files. And the lead sheets. But you think there’s more, don’t you?”

He didn’t say anything.

“We have our memories,” she said. “What more could there be?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Molecules vibrate then stop,” she said. “Are atoms cascading, still changing state? Are entangled particles spraying out across the galaxy? Are imaginary morphic fields resonating with each other? You think there is an eternity and we can touch it?”

“In the morning when you look out across the water,” he said, “do you check to see if the monster is out there?”

“That’s me,” she said, “checking to see what the weather is like.”

“This is me,” he said, “still playing that song with you.”

She tried to look away before he could see her smile but either her head turned too slowly or her lips moved too quickly.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Loch Ness Monster Vs. Los Angeles

A Flute Playing And Fog Hides The Shore

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Tuesday Update:

I don’t like to make changes to a post after I post it.

Sometimes I correct typos, but I almost never even change a word, unless add a note explaining why I’m making the change.

I’m going to make a reasonably big change to this post because it’s part of a series and I want it to be consistent.

Here’s the deal. When I write a post, I’m focused, almost always, on the words. I try to get what I’m saying to sound correct to me, and to convey what I want it to convey in a style I’m happy with. Even if it’s a video or a song, I look first at the words involved.

Then I try to make everything else at least reasonably adequate to support the words.

I like, very much, including little snippets of music notation but I’m not very good at it. I’m trying to get better, and I will. But sometimes I do stuff that I’m sure would make a real musician cringe.

I try to double check things, verify my music notation with automated players and such, but, still, music notation is a world that I am not that practiced with or relaxed with.

Anyway, so, this post has a little melody that I like a lot and the music notation captures the the melody reasonably well. But what I posted Monday was in 4/4 time and the first two posts in the series were in 3/4 time.

It’s just that I have only a certain amount of time to do these posts, and I have only a certain amount of experience with music notation. When I’m making up a melody or capturing a melody on keyboard or trying to notate a melody directly into a music program, it is more natural for me to use 4/4 time rather than 3/4, although, I’m sure, to any real musician the difference probably just makes them laugh.

Anyway, I should have taken the time to re-write the melody from yesterday from 4/4 time into 3/4 time to be consistent with the earlier posts. I did, later, and then I thought I’d just ignore it, but it bothered me and I decided to update this post.

So I changed the melody at the top of the post to be consistent with the earlier posts in this series. Here is the original 4/4 version of the melody. Played slowly, they both express the melody I was trying to capture. (To my ears the 3/4 version sounds slightly better somehow but I’m probably just nuts.)

Gadget Bliss

2011-11-25T23:57:00.105-06:00

Before meeting Pam for lunch, I spent time
talking about music technology
with a recording studio owner.

He told me he’d be willing to sell me
his Yamaha Motif synthesizer.

“It’s in perfect shape,” he said. “Nobody
ever uses it. All of my clients
either just play real instruments and hate
the technology stuff, or they’re experts
at the virtual studio programs
running on computers so they don’t need
the fancy keyboard workstations at all.”

I’m reasonably good with computers
myself and I’m trying to get better
at playing what he called ‘real’ instruments.

So I didn’t buy his fancy keyboard.

Exciting Waveforms

That story is completely true. A guy that owns a studio did offer to sell me a Yamaha Motif. I declined.

Now look at this picture:

That’s a current ad running for one of the newest models of the Yamaha Motif series.

Oh boy. Now, people who have read this blog for a while know that I once wrote a post called Hypnotized By Advertising. I bought one of those Tascam devices just because of that ad I wrote about in that post. I can’t really see down into my deepest, secret soul, but I suspect my thinking is something like, “Well, if I buy one of those gadgets and learn to use it really well, then if I meet a girl such as the girl who appears in the ad we’ll have a lot to talk about and maybe she’ll like me.” I don’t know. But I know I am a sucker for advertising and I’m a sucker for advertising that features beautiful women.

So look at that new Motif ad. Look how beautiful the woman is on the left playing the 61 key version of the MOX. And doesn’t she look all blissed out playing the gadget?

If I bought one of those gadgets and learned to use it really well, then if I met a woman such as the woman who appears in that ad we’d have a lot to talk about and maybe she’d like me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an idiot. (Well, not completely.) I know advertising is all fake and manipulative and designed to do to people exactly what the ad does to me. But, you know, nonetheless, the ad does it to me even with me being aware of all that.

And I’m not even in the market for a synthesizer workstation. I’m very happy with my Yamaha arranger workstation.

But there are two things that nag at me about this.

One is that this new Yamaha Motif has sounds that are a couple of generations updated from my Yamaha. On my keyboard not only can I play a synthesized guitar sound, but I can choose a “strummed” synthesized guitar sound. And I can split my keyboard and play a polyphonic strummed guitar with my left hand, and with my right hand play a monophonic flute sound that even gets some of the breathing dynamics correct in the flute sound. That’s a lot of fun, to say the least. And the new Motif would be able to do all that a lot better with updated hardware and software.

The second thing is, again: Look how beautiful the woman is on the left playing the 61 key version of the MOX. And doesn’t she look all blissed out playing the gadget?

Oh boy. Remember a long time ago there was a movie called “Transformers”? The first one. Look at this picture from that movie:

Okay. I didn’t like that movie at all, but I sometimes watch it and pretend it is the story of that girl on the right. It is actress Rachael Taylor playing the character “Maggie Madsen.” Maggie is a brilliant computer wiz and she’s energetic and, oh yeah, she’s my pick for one of the sexiest characters I’ve seen in modern films. Let’s look more closely at her costume.

So this Maggie character is smart and beautiful and energetic and she wears clothes you can see through!

Now look back at that ad for the new Motif. (If you click on the ad, the picture gets larger and more detailed.) Look at the beautiful blissed out woman. She’s wearing a see-through shirt, too!

It’s a look that short-circuits my brain. And my brain circuitry is kind of leaky to begin with!

So, here I am. I’m very happy with my Yamaha arranger workstation and I’m really proud of the two posts I did comparing arranger workstations to synthesizer workstations.

On Not Playing A Synth Workstation #1

On Not Playing A Synth Workstation #2

So I’m not in the market for a synthesizer workstation. But I can’t get that ad out of my brain.

And because I enjoy doing music posts here at the blog, my brain also nags at me saying the new Motif has much better computer integration than my current keyboard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My brain is just looking at the woman in the see-through shirt.

Anyway, this is something that’s on my mind now. Instead of my brain worrying about poetry or fiction or drawing or painting or writing songs or the metaphysics of monsters, some big chunk of my gray matter is sparking away at these images of women in see-through shirts and the insane notion that if I bought a new keyboard somehow I would be closer to snuggling up with one of these women.

And, you know, I’ve bought a lot of gadgets in the past. Secret Gadgets And Gadget Secrets They’ve been fun, but I don’t think I’ve ever achieved anything like gadget bliss.

[As I’ve typed today’s post, I’ve been sitting here, frowning, shaking my head the whole time.]

Dreaming of gadgets
taking me to gadget bliss
and see-through women.

A Flute Playing And Fog Hides The Shore

2011-11-24T23:27:00.004-06:00

Lost in the fog
There’s a shape
I can barely see
But it sees me

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“So what’s the deal with you and flutes?” she asked.

He said, “If a woman is blowing into a flute, she can’t be asking me dumb questions.”

“Shut up!” she said, laughing.

*

He said, “I’ve been a few dozen yards off shore in a small boat on a Wisconsin lake. Fog comes in and the shore becomes invisible. Could be any distance away. I’ve been a couple of miles off shore from some coastline blue water cruising in a sailboat. Fog comes in and the shore becomes invisible. Could be any distance away. The size of the body of water doesn’t change the effect the fog has on a person trying to see the shore. People see monsters in Loch Ness, and people see monsters in lots of other lakes. Some of the lakes people see monsters in are too small to imagine any kind of large animal living in them. But if monsters are something like fog—something that gets between us and something else, something that we see because we see it set off against something else—then the size of the body of water wouldn’t matter at all.”

She said, “You think monsters are like fog? Something like weather?”

He said, “I’m not saying monsters aren’t living things. Whatever they are. But I’m not sure we’ll ever see monsters if we go out looking for them. If we see them because they get between us and something else, then we’ll only see monsters when we’re trying to look at something else.”

She asked, “Have you ever seen a monster?”

He said, “I’ve never seen, you know, something like a bigfoot hairy ape or a sea monster plesiosaur. But I’ve been looking at something and then somehow realized that I was seeing something completely different from what I thought I was looking at. I’m not sure monsters always look like monsters.”

She asked, “How far away is Los Angeles from Loch Ness?”

He said, “About five thousand miles. As the crow flies.”

She said, “Of course, a monster crow could fly that distance in no time at all.”

He kissed her.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Loch Ness Monster Vs. Los Angeles

Los Angeles, Nonetheless, Is

See Monsters?

Affannato

Harps And Flutes, Swans And Monsters

A Flute Landscape

Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Irving Berlin’s Piano

The Fons Et Origo Of Mad Laughter

2011-11-23T23:50:00.033-06:00

This is all pretend of course. It’s actress Kristin Kreuk pretending to be Lana Lang and actor Michael Rosenbaum pretending to be Lex Luthor. And “Lana Lang” and “Lex Luthor” are cartoon characters anyway. It’s pretend pretend.

I don’t remember where I was walking
but today I saw a woman whose face
looked like the face of the actress who played
“Lana Lang” on the TV show Smallville.

For a second, for a quantum instant,
somewhere in my head I said, “It’s Lana.”

For a second, for that fleeting instant,
it was as if I left reality
and for whatever’s the smallest unit
that can be used to measure time’s passing,
for whatever is a quantum instant,
I felt like I was living in Smallville
walking somewhere and Lana Lang walked past.

As small as that quantum instant might be
my hand is shaking remembering it
because I also remember clearly
being happy with Lana walking past
in Smallville and wanting to not come back.

I spend so much time lost in fantasy
that it feels strange to feel so terrified
at having slipped away for an instant
but I ask myself what if this woman
had a voice that sounded like the actress
who played “Lana Lang” and had noticed me
looking at her and had smiled and said, “Hi.”

I don’t think I’d be here typing these words.

It’s like a LuthorCorp experiment
is going on around me in real life.

And Chloe says these things never end well!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

LuthorCorp Experiments: The Hero’s Commitment

“the fons et origo of mad laughter”

Freedom From The Wild/Lost In Metonymy

On Being ‘The Girl’

2011-11-22T23:45:00.004-06:00

A fast course in insect pathology
And you
That’s all a monster asks for
When he’s living in a hole
Without you

She said, “Why would the monster want a fast course in insect pathology? I understand why the monster would want the girl. The monster always wants the girl. But the monster is already a monster, right? So why would the monster want a fast course in insect pathology?”

He said, “You’re assuming the monster starts out with an existential, material form. A giant ant. A giant spider. Something like that. I’m assuming the monster starts out as something more ethereal, a kind of energy field, or, as I’d put it, a kind of morphic resonance potential. When the possibility of monster behavior comes into existence around that monster potential, the monster takes shape, becomes an existential, material reality, and acts out monster events. That’s why the monster needs a course in insect pathology—to properly manifest an appropriate monster appearance.”

She said, “Did you think of that when you wrote the song? Or did you make that up just now when I asked you the question?”

He said, “You know, a monster might not want you.”

She gasped, putting one hand over her mouth. She pointed at him with her other hand and spoke through her fingers over her mouth.

She said, “That’s the most awful thing you’ve ever said to me!”

He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

She said, “If you didn’t mean it then take it back.”

He said, “I take it back.”

She said, “Do you really take it back or are you just saying that because I asked you to?”

He said, “You know, a monster might not want you.”

She said, “You said it again! Stop saying that! Oh my God!”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bluetits

Street Lights And Slutty Bluetits

Footsteps Like Mad Paint Marks

2011-11-21T16:50:00.002-06:00

On the train from Paris to Berlin
I watched a waiter fold a paper napkin
He creased each side then spread them wide
To tuck each corner in
On the train from Paris to Berlin

Distance From Paris To Berlin

A crumpled napkin
in an asphalt parking lot
under the first snow

under the footsteps
of people walking to cars
and walking from cars

becoming pressed flat
a two dimensional shape
a shape that was white

with defined edges
but then is smeared glazed over
lost but visible

under snow and grime
and footsteps like mad paint marks
designed by no one

almost no one sees
a crumpled napkin goodbye
like a lost painter.

The Loch Ness Monster Vs. Los Angeles

2011-11-18T20:20:00.002-06:00

A singer-songwriter, I’ll call her “K,”
flew out of Los Angeles to Loch Ness
to spend some time writing material
for an album about Los Angeles.

Her producer stayed in town. When someone
asked him where K went, he said, “She’s over
in England trying to write some new crap.”

A would-be novelist who plays guitar,
I’ll call him “M,” exchanged e-mails with K.

K asked, “Are you sure the Loch Ness monster
never has been rumored to eat someone?”

M said, “If it would make you feel better,
if I were the monster I would eat you.”

K said, “If the monster doesn’t eat me
I’ll have to go back to Los Angeles.”

M said, “Catch the monster and take it home
with you. You know, for the publicity.”

K said, “Are you kidding? Los Angeles
would eat that thing alive. Monster sushi.”

Come to Los Angeles and die
Everyone’s pretty here
It’s the world you see on TV

Come to Los Angeles and die
You won’t get in the way
No one will even notice you

Come to Los Angeles and die
There’s no admission fee
To this thrill ride by the ocean

Come to Los Angeles and die
Feel the love, share the joy
Leaving here is a dream come true

Come to Los Angeles and die
Come to Los Angeles
Come to Los Angeles and die

An unreleased song from
an unreleased album, both
of which may someday be called,
“Come To Los Angeles And Die”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Anal Sex And Death In Los Angeles

Los Angeles, Nonetheless, Is

Dead Monkeys. Swimming Pools. Movie Stars.

Clean Shaven And Ready For Movie Talk

2011-11-17T17:50:00.002-06:00

This morning I was a little late getting the day started, so instead of shaving and then showering I combined the two and shaved in the shower.

It happens now and then. I’ve known people who always shave in the shower. The theory is the hot water and steam open pores and extend hairs so when you shave the razor gets at the very bottom of the hair and you get the very closest shave possible.

I usually shave first. My hair grows so fast it hardly matters how close my morning shave is. Four hours into the day I always look like I’m starting to change into a werewolf.

So because I was late today I shaved in the shower and since I don’t have a shower mirror when I shave in the shower it’s all done by touch. Later, after I dry off and dress I have to look in a mirror and check the hairline by my ears to make sure the left looks reasonably level with the right. Sometimes it looks like I shaved while standing on the side of a hill. Then I have to spend a final moment with the razor making my left hairline match my right.

After shaving in the shower today and working just by touch my left hairline and my right hairline matched almost exactly.

This is the kind of thing that make me happy.

*

Stuff like this makes me happy, too:

“This is November,” I said. I pointed. “You’re still wearing pumpkin-colored pajamas.”

“What color pajamas should I wear?” she asked.

“Well, it’s Thanksgiving,” I said. “You should be wearing turkey-colored pajamas.”

“What color is that?” she asked. “What color are turkeys?”

“I think turkeys would be blue,” I said.

“Why would turkeys be blue?” she asked.

“They’re blue because they’re sad,” I said. “They know they only have a couple of weeks to live.”

She grimaced. It’s a face I’ve seen before. She shook her head. “I can’t believe I walked into that,” she said.

“No, it’s great!” I said. “It’s banter. It’s like in movies. We were exchanging banter. We’re like movie stars. People in movies say stuff like that, then the scene ends.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Why Don’t Turkeys Wear Bras?

The Angle Of Repose Of Corpses Redux

2011-11-16T23:56:00.056-06:00

“The angle of repose or, more precisely, the critical angle of repose, of a granular material is the steepest angle of descent or dip of the slope relative to the horizontal plane when material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding. This angle is in the range 0°–90°.”

Books and DVDs aren’t granular
at least not exactly but they do share
the same angle of repose more or less
ninety degrees for both media types.

I own four Michael Crichton books and six
DVDs of Wes Craven movies and
nine DVDs by Ray Harryhausen.

Ninety degrees is not a gentle slope
and if I were going to tumble down
from one of these three piles I’d pick the pile
of Crichton books. They don’t have teenage girls
fighting for their life against a slasher
and they don’t have beautifully designed
stop-motion animation of puppets
but I have spent more time inside those books
than all the DVDs put together.

But books aren’t what they used to be and
movie analysts are afraid movies
are losing regular audiences.

Books and DVDs aren’t granular
and we’re not at least not exactly but
everything can get tossed into a pile.

Everything does get tossed into a pile
for a special occasion photograph
or when nobody wants it anymore.

Libraries are throwing away their books.

Movie studios are selling their films
for five dollars on convenience store shelves.

Work sets us free. Free to settle into
the what-we’re-made-of angle of repose.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

*

*

Ray Harryhausen:

Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger
It Came From Beneath The Sea
Earth Vs The Flying Saucers
20 Million Miles To Earth
Mysterious Island
First Men In The Moon

Wes Craven:

Nightmare On Elm Street
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Scream
Scream 2
Scream 3
Scream 4

Michael Crichton:

Travels
Sphere
Congo
The Lost World