Archive

Uncategorized

Stringing letters together with the English language in mind sometimes creates multiple pathways. Thus r o u n d a b o u t can be variously agglutinated to Ro und Abou T or Round Ab Out or R ou NDA B ou T, etc. And l a v a l a m p may become Lava Lamp or Lav Al Amp or or Laval AMP, and so on. Our thoughts might be otherwise diverted if we’d ever heard the band Yes sing :Roundabout,” or if we’re old enough to remember a lava lamp in a coffeehouse.

Any or all of this, or something else, might modify the flavor of those two strings of words. But if you SEE a Lava Lamp, or you are DRIVING THROUGH a Roundabout, your experience becomes not strings of letters but tangibility.

2020 0607 roundabout

r o u n d a b o u t

reminders like the tick and flea
obsess us with the honeyed b
upend the lava lamp and goo
now set the font in bold urdu
deliver us, o passe-partout

Friends, I’ve been hacking away at this drawing for days, and it’s still unfinished but at the same time teetering on the edge of Overworked. It is ambitious, and doing it stretched me some, and the next one will be better, and the young couple savoring a moment provides a bailout in that the conceit is that they are imagining these fantastical surroundings, and they deliberately leave their conceptualization incomplete, so that it will last until they finish it, which they won’t, so Forever.

There will either be a remake or a similar-themed image in the future. This time round it was make-it-up-as-you-go-along, but next time I’ll write all the acrostics first, calligraph them straightforwardly, print them, and THEN position them in space. You see in the drawing that some of the 3Difications are more convincing than others. The next one(s) will be better.

The full drawing will follow, but this detail is the heart of the matter…

20200603_161848

 

 

There’s a sort of warning in the background of this image, a sampleresque homily which has been, to my knowledge, as yet unwritten. It says “Ambiguity S O C K S.” it is sort of self-demonstrating.

I got ambitious, and my have overreached my ability –I KNOW the viewer needs all the help she or he can get, yet there’s a lot of chaos here. The double acrostic poem, “Kitchens Sync,” gives another clue as to why. A lot is thrown in.

2020 0526 kitchens sync ii

kitchens sync

kundalini yoga sends
intimation to yr friends
take a ride on grammerly
challenge all yr fammerly
help a sea or gutter urchin
end a quest 4 what yr surchin
need of job r wife r clinic
seeds yr future megacynic

When Kitchens Sync, i.e. become synchronous or achieve synchronicity, the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink” expands to become “everything INCLUDING the sinks of more than one kitchen.” I hope and trust that some enjoyment of this poem/image may be derived by looking for patterns. One example that may be missed if I don’t mention it is that the poem has one instance of the shorthand word “yr” (for “your”) in every other line of the poem. That wasn’t done gratuitously. It’s intended to reinforce the connection between the reader and the poem’s arc.  Whether it works or not is a matter of opinion–YOUR opinion.

The center figure seemed to me to look a bit like the late Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson once ran for public office, and used a symbol of his own design for the political party he was trying to get off the ground, of a two-thumbed hand gripping a peyote button. My guy doesn’t have two thumbs on his hand, but including the thumb there are six fingers. I think I owe the whimsy of that to Marc Chagall, who once gave one of his figures a seven-fingered hand. After I post this page I’ll see if Chagall had any other reason for doing that other than the sheer anarchic joy of it. If not, that was plenty–doing a little time in the Anarchic Circle is good for an artist’s refreshment. 🙂

Scale–weighing device, or pay grade, or skin recrudescence…or Order of Magnitude. Just imagine: You and your love partner(s) could each be any size you want…or any PART of you thereof might be…as Virtual Reality improves, you won’t have to imagine any more!

2020 0526 scale