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Rectangle Redemption

September 26, 2013
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We human beings must love rectangles. We make so many of them! Plate glass, envelopes, stamps on envelopes, sheets of paper to stuff in envelopes, cross-sections of containers, garage doors, non-garage doors, dominoes, playing cards, and on and on. Thinking outside the box is also thinking beyond the rectangle.

But rectangles, or near-rectangles, do occur in nature: cell formation, muscle striations, constellations, fault-slipped rock formations, and on and on. Some eye sockets are more rectangular than circular.

When I was a kid my mom collected S&H Green Stamps, filling in rectangular arrays with the rectangles-with-punched-out-semicircles of the stamps. When she turned them in for merchandise, it was a form of rectangle redemption; thus does my seemingly-random acrostic have some basis in fact.  But it’s a tenuous stretch. Luckily, when you stretch a rectangle, it remains a rectangle…

Here are the words:

Romance wears her nylons sheer
Eco-Friendly’s more austere
Creature comforts may be weird
Take an object choose a theme
Tell a truth that makes us beam
Any shape provides a step
Necessarily adept
Given one who wears a kepi
Leaps & bounds’ll come & go
Even-keelers use the known

 

it was alien possession, i tell you

September 24, 2013
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on a froth of comet tail
the solar-wind-borne
misadventure
began:
the diatomaceous
thought-harvesting array
cast its sub-etheric net
randomly
and struck analoguic gold:
in the northern-by-western quadrant
of a planet circling its star
at a distance of 105.5 starwidths
came a sense/memory impression
of such indulgent delight
that the array took possession
of the creature who’d forged the memory
and force it to re-enact the event
whence the memory had sprung.

thus it was, my dear,
that i had no choice
but to buy and eat
a second candy bar
from the vending machine
last night.

thank goodness
i wasn’t thinking
about women,
eh?

where are you going?

Morning Fritter, 2008

September 24, 2013
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Here’s one whose words seem to have stood up well. Some day this will be read at an open mic.

My laptop’s a distraction–90 proof
Migoodness it is hard to stay Aloof
MHO is that too much time goes >poof<

O I’m just saying what I want to hear
OutRAGEOUS waste-o-time stand up & cheer
O stay the course PROduction-wise–don’t veer

Right now we love Escape more than Houdini
Rock on, O Comfort Food–deepfried linguini
Remember, Pudding’s gold–like a Cellini

No! STOP that, fella–focus on intent
Now stick to Straight&NARROW–be unbent
No argument–that’s where some Time-chunks went

INTEGRITY is demonstrated best
Intensely and with quietude–if blest
In Reticence you may well pass the Test

No need to feel you’ve GOT to Move&Shake
Not much but your Well-being is at stake
Now PAY that sleep debt to be wide awake

Get up get dressed get fed get what you’re after
Get Who’s On First on YouTube–you need laughter
Get–stuck AGAIN! The Devil’s quite the Crafter

On this blog at least four Devil-mentioning posts have been made, and that’s not counting “Molybdenum Demon,” the as-yet-unposted best of the lot. Stay tuned…

No Words But These; or, The All-Important Title

September 23, 2013
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This is one image. It might be a thousand different works of art, in a quality range from squalid to splendid, without changing a pixel. It all depends on what I call it.

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare asked. “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.” But it does matter. Soldiers will fight wholeheartedly for Operation Just Cause; they may balk at putting their lives on the line for Operation Extensive Collateral Damage or Operation Get People To Hate Us.

A person goes to the art museum, sees something like the above image hanging on the wall, ten feet high and eight wide, and needs a clue. The first place to look for a clue is the title card down and to the right (though the REAL first place to look is the Artist’s Statement, if any). “Moon and Sea.” Ah, that helps. “The Battle Over White Sands.” Okay–got it: visually similar to contrails. “Behold! A Distant Star!” –If this were the title, much would depend on whether the viewer was a fan of Silver Age Marvel Comics in general, and Fantastic Four #37 in particular. If a fan, the image will be enhanced by the memory of the sinister Skrulls softened by the admonishing Anelle. (Alliteration inspired by Stan “The Man” Lee, natch. ‘Nuff said!)

“Tendrils Yearning.” “Tonal Delicacy #937.” “Blue, 1998.” “The Deconstructed Ant.” Give me a day and I’ll give you a thousand titles, and a thousand different experiences. But the two titles at the end of that long list will demand much of you:

“Call It What You Will”

“Untitled”

Late Bloomers, Belated Tribute

September 22, 2013
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Here’s another ghost of journal pages past. I “remastered” my drawing from June 2008, effacing the poster-title-like date from the top of the page (long story as to why it was there in the first place) and colorizing it. The message is one I keep telling myself, though I’m still a young pup of 59:

Let’s applaud the Don’t Give Uppers
And the Singers for their Suppers
Taking Bows and Ripe Tomatoes
Ever striving for what Fate owes

Bandoleros may beset them
Losses–no time to regret them
Oven mitts for Hot Potatoes
Oldses drive you through Mankatos
Making lemonade from lemons
Easy garlands knit with stem ends
REAL success is pure Innateness
Some time may ALL know your greatness

As a fan of the late James Gandolfini, and whereas the above page was inspired by Edie Falco, I’ve just done a quick sketch of the man who made Tony Soprano stone-cold real to millions. I was pressed for time today, and did not give my subject the focused attention he deserves, and he died months ago, so perhaps this is too little, too late. But it’s something I hope is better than nothing.

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Concealed, Hidden or Otherwise Occulted

September 21, 2013
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A long time ago TIME Magazine started letting image elements get in front of part of the cover’s logo. Had I unlimited disposable daily time, and a three-hundred-year lifetime, I might review the TIME covers and find out exactly when this started happening, and find out whose decision it was to do it, and the rationale behind it. Something tells me that Norman Rockwell’s SATURDAY EVENING POST covers might have started that trend. Alas, I have not the time/inclination to check.

Thousands of years before TIME enhanced through concealment, human beings did it with clothing. There is something reality-altering about cloth giving hints about what is beneath it.

About thirty-six years ago an art student at the University of Arizona installed a window blind in front of his painting of a nude. The intrigue to see what was behind the blind made Peeping Toms and Thomasinas out of many of the art showgoers.

About half an hour ago I finished the above image. When I scanned it I missed the fact that I’d let a corner turn up on the glass, so the lower left-hand corner cannot be seen. And elsewhere in the image there are words obscured or completely concealed by arrays of bubbles.

There are four acrostic poems on the page. They range from silly stupidity to the most profound thinking I’m capable of expressing; but the poems serve the image primarily as design elements. I invite you to squint your eyes enough when looking at the page to make the words illegible; this will give you a different experience than reading while viewing. One of the poems has a magic-trick-esque incompatibility of one end of the acrostic to the other; and in fact that poems can be transcribed several ways, none of which I care to disclose, being out of disposable time.

Portraiture: Hit or Misc

September 20, 2013
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Rummaging through the image archives I found a spate of portraiture tries from five years or so ago. These are the best of a not-all-that-good bunch.

Here’s James Joyce:

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Robert Heinlein:

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Margaret Bourke-White, with a seeming touch of Clint Eastwood:

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Eleanor Roosevelt:

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The enigmatic and tragically-overlooked Alice Sheldon, alias James Tiptree, Jr.:

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The prolific inventor and thug hirer Thomas Edison:

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And, last but not least, the physically driven, self-sculpted Mikhail Baryshnikov:

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The drawings, though all flawed, represent the work it has taken to make what I do now, though flawed, less so with time and trouble. The best two-word advice for the art student, courtesy of stellar artist and sensei Darlene Goto, is “SLOW DOWN!;” the best three-word advice, available through the public domain, is “Practice, practice, practice.”

Geckolalia

September 19, 2013
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Even though there is no such word as Geckolalia, an Internet search revealed a definition in a WordPress blog called Practicing Noticing: “The tendency to repeat after lizards.” And the real word Echolalia means a tendency to repeat what has just been said. To repeat what has just been said. To repeat–you get the point.

In the Valley of the Sun, in residential areas, geckos often make a successful living hanging out at front porches, snagging small bugs and looking cute with their nictitating eyelids seeming to extend to their entire pinkish bodies. They have sticky or suctiony toepads that enable them to stick to walls and even ceilings. They seem a little not-of-this-earth and magical.

The acrostic may work as an extended metaphor for creatures who hunt prey and avoid being prey themselves by being hidden in plain sight. The end letters demanded, as they so often do, unconventional rhyming words. Does A rhyme with I? No, but Flea rhymes with III (Three).

Here are the words:

Goshawks gawk from angles aerial
Eyes for detail small as flea
Ceiling clingers dodge a burial
Kestrels clueless: Stooges III
Out unbugging sand verbena
Others hunt in prey’s arena

 

Illustrious Ancestry

September 17, 2013
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Some time in the late 70s my great-Aunt Zilpha, now deceased but then living in the tiny upstate New York community of Oxford, gave me a softcover book entitled Franck Taylor Bowers 1875-1932. The cover of the book, a photographic self-portrait of the artist, is the main photo source for my image. Thank Goodness his first name had its peculiar spelling. It makes him a perfect triple acrostic.

Franck was no N.C. Wyeth, but he was good enough for Binghamton, New York, where a retrospective of his work was displayed in 1977, becoming the basis for the book Aunt Zilpha gave me. An Internet search reveals that his father, LaMont Bowers, a financial advisor for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., may have had something to do with the Ludlow Massacre, a shameful episode in the history of American labor relations. Tsk tsk on him if so, and tsk tsk on him for saddling Franck with family business obligations (anchors and other ancillaries) when Franck could have been painting his way to greatness. Instead, eight years of his life was misspent on anchors and invoices.

Franck died of aplastic anemia four days after his 57th birthday, so I have outlived him by two years and counting. He did some nice drawings and paintings, some of which are findable via Internet search. It would make my day if someone reading this honored his memory by checking out some of his images.

The words:

FLAWLESS execution with a pen or pencil nub
Raw sienna add cerulean to brush or rub–go
Anywhichway & pursue your muse w/ebb & flow
Nobody sincere is selling you a line to toe
Continental voyages took dilettante to doer
Kept an artist-voyager alive and new toujours