This was fun to draw, and I felt blissful while it unfolded. it is a candidate for a larger-scale drawing or painting. 7″x10″ is good for working out main compositional details but 20″x30″ and up would provide more detail breathing room, and more opportunity to knock people’s socks off.
On Da Warp Path
Once upon a time we got our stuff @ A & P
Now we get nostalgic at the sound of Sha-Na-Naa
Dreaming of the Dark Age with its LSMFT
As the next Apocalypse draws nigh–YAY!! Sis Boom Bah
Notes
“A & P” refers to a chain of grocery stores, the #1 chain in the United States for most of the 20th Century. (“A & P” stands for “Atlantic & Pacific.”) In 2015, following Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, the A & P stores were liquidated.
“Sha-Na-Naa” refers to a band with a similar name, Sha Na Na, formed in 1969 and still active. {romulgators of the musical genre Doo-Wop, their perhaps most famous hit song is “Good Night, Sweetheart (Well, It’s Time To Go).”
“LSMFT” stands for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” The Lucky Strike brand, now owned by the British Tobacco Corporation, is no longer readily available in the United States.
“Sis Boom Bah” is part of a cheerleading chant originating in 1867. The Sis and Boom are intended to be imitative of an ignited firework going up into the air and then exploding.
Here is how I spent my midmorning. I had had a cup of coffee and fiddled around on the Internet some. Then for about the millionth time I realize that much of my life was going down the Shallow Fun drain. So I codified my concern with this poem, which I posted to my Facebook group Poets All Call:
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Toxic Enjoyment
Naturally, after I posted the poem the question arose: What IS the best use of my time right now? A two-hour drawing followed. It is flawed, and, despite the two hours, rushed. I hope the viewer will derive some (non-shallow, heh heh) enjoyment from the cryptic storytelling involved, and perhaps from the crude force of the draughtsmanship.
This one is atypical of my drawings in that the drawing details are in caption form at the bottom, and part of the image. I may do this more, and the images thus captioned may become postcards, or refrigerator magnets, or elements for a gallery-like montage. Time will tell.
Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers fully appreciated Ethel Merman’s phenomenal voice, precise diction, and fluid, eloquent gestures to sell their songs with gusto and ferocity. Bette Midler is The Divine Miss M, but she is not the first. Midler is more than fair-to-middling, though, and for my money the heiress of the Merman mantle. And they both have referred to themselves as Broads, and they both have a lusty, ribald side.
I learned through my brief obsession with Merman during the last couple of weeks that though she hit the heights professionally, in her personal life she was hit hard with tragedy and heartbreak. When she sang “There’s No Business Like Show Business” she had been everywhere the song goes, with the possible exception of being escorted out of town by the sheriff. But she often had it tougher.
For some reason, I was thrilled to learn of her hearty sexual appetite. Perhaps in some improbable corner of the Multiverse, Chance brought her together with a young man less than half her age . . .
Ethel’s Merman
Eros gives Fantasy wings, it would seem
Time for Romance with an undersea theme
Here in the depths who knows what may occur
Energized Whales Blue Humpback and Sperm
LUST finds fine expression in seabed’s gymkhana
‘S all Good, precious girl–find Fun à la Pescan
Pescan: adjective. “Of or relating to Fish.” Not for the unpesky. 🙂
Fun fact: The Salty Señorita is a popular bar in Old Town, Scottsdale, Arizona, about five miles from my apartment’s doorstep.
Today I’m a little bit lonely for cats, so I made two of them with my new Gouache set. This partakes a little of a two-colr spot-illustration style popular when I was a toddler.
A couple of days ago I went to Arizona Art Supply and got a gouache set, a pointed sable traveler’s brush, and a block of hot-press watercolor paper. My new policy with art supplies is if I buy them, I must start using them the day I buy them.
This is my first effort with my new supplies. Started with red and a simple checkerboard exercise. Then did some blue, with a Leave A Blank Rectangle In Each Square rule, amended to allow for two at lower right. (I was learning as I painted that the ceiling fan’s circulating action caused the painting my ad-hoc palette to skin up. There’s some clumsiness and unintended dry-brush toward the top.)
When I looked at what I’d done, it seemed like a reductive, mutant version of the flag of my country, the United States of America. Instantly it seemed like an apt metaphor for the reductive, mutant version of “Patriotism” peddled by former President Donald Trump to seduce his misled minions. (I have said more than once that Trump is not a leader; he is a MISleader.) So my first Gouache foray became political, with red and blue mixed and watered to create text, signature and date.
Last I heard there were five different kinds of Life–Plants, Animals, “Protists,” and two kinds of algae. Maybe. Probably not. My brain is in cognitive decline, and I don’t have time to look it up, and the point anyway is that within the strictly-biological definition of “life” some enormous variation is possible.
But there’s non-biological life too. Human beings have developed a self-replicating form of mechanism. Maybe. Probably not, but something like that. My dim memory says it’s chimerical, and much like the “biots” Arthur C. Clarke presciently described in his rollicking, imaginative novel Rendezvous with Rama.
We also speak of artwork as if it were to some degree alive. We use words like “vitality” and “animated” to codify our viewing expderience. If the work of art is representative of wildlife, we may judge is in comparison with what it is meant to represent.
So we come to this, one of my recent creations. It began when I finished my oatmeal and took a second spoon and put it in the empty bowl with the first. I liked the way the spoons and bowl looked, so I took a pic and made a drawing based on the pic. It seemed to want a bone, so I drew a bone, and shadows. I decided to construct a double acrostic, “bowl/nest.” When I came to the second line the word “owlish” suited the meter, and it was an easy link to the endword “scene.” (Acrosticist’s Tip: ALWAYS start with the endwords, if you want your poem to rhyme AND scan AND make sense!!)
And then I looked at my drawing again, and I saw that I could make bowl, spoons and bone a literal manifestation of an “owlish outlook.” BOOM, I was in Surrealsville, where dwell Auguste Redon and Sal Dali and Tanguy and other guys and gals. And I’ve had years of sculpting birds of chimerical DNA. So, to use a wretched pun involving a letter of the Greek alphabet, a Chi-Miracle occurred, and suddenly the bowl/nest was nested in the eye socket of an improbable owl. I made the other eye a teakettle to preserve kitchenality.
Weird? YES, WEIRD. I’ve laid the foundation for Weirdness in my first paragraph: LIFE IS WEIRD. And Art sometimes demands creation beyond the initial notion of the artist. Here we see what happens when we let Art call the shots.
bowl/nest
bone & spoons & mindset clean
owlish outlook makes the scene
when the Elements amass
link your arms & hold on fast
Bones and Spoon
Barnacles & Ocean Deeps
Overtures & Thanks a Heap
Now we sow & now we reap — O
Evergreens & v e r t i g o
Ship to shore & lands unknown
A few days ago, on Facebook, I posted a photo of some chicken bones I had arranged in a pattern similar to the ones drawn above. I spoke about an art class I’d had long ago whose teacher, Darlene Goto, had me doing bone drawings. People inferred that my photo was not a photo but a drawing I’d made, and they were impressed by the photorealism. Despite my assertion that it was a photo, the notion that it was a drawing persisted. So here I’ve done a drawing, and when people see it on Facebook, they will know how different my drawings of bones look from my photos of bones.
As for the words, they serve to meet a challenge I set myself, using the acrostics “Lonership/Ownership” and “Boned/Owned.” Both acrostics are two sets of two words per line. With the first, the words on the left are nouns, describing something variable. (The bottom word “P” may be found in the dictionary as “the sixteenth letter of the alphabet,” but in mathematics P means Pressure.) The words on the right are specific cities.
The “Boned/Owned” acrostic has colloquial or slang words on the left, and what those words might be interpreted to mean on the right.
Does that seem silly? It does to me, now; but when I was constructing these arrays, I looked at them as exercises that may make me a better acrostic poet. It’s also like a Ouija board in that maybe, just maybe, certain words come out a certain way for a reason, if only to better understand our own motivations.
The acrostics themselves are more straightforward. If you are in a state of Lonership, you completely own your behavior and your circumstances. If you are unhappy with either, the more you own them, the more you are in a position to improve them. As for “Boned/Owned,” I acquired the chicken bones I photoed and drew from a chicken that I bought and ate. I owned the chicken carcass, and so own my carnivorousness, my callousness in lack of empathy for the chicken, my enhanced nutritional health as a result of eating that chicken, and all intellectual property, including the page above, that I derive from the use of the chicken bones as subject matter.
Lastly, the parody of “When You Wish Upon a Star,” so familiar to watchers of Walt Disney’s Sunday TV show when I was growing up, was done both to fill space and as an oblique protest/statement. It is not enough to wish for something without action. But there is substance to a saying I remember from reading What Color Is Your Parachute? in 1991, when I was out of work and seeking guidance on how to find some. “Pray, as if it were all up to God, then work, as if it were all up to you.” No matter what I believe or disbelieve, I have found that piece of advice invaluable.
It’s 2022. It’s more than fifty years since the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told a cheering multitude of a dream he had. Part of his dream was that people would be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. Who could argue with that?
All kinds of people are arguing with that, here in 2022. Some of my classmates (Glendale, Arizona, Glendale High School class of 1972) cannot bring themselves to say three simple words: “Black lives matter.” Yet those same people have no problem saying the three simple words “Blue lives matter.” (For those of my worldwide readership that do not know, “blue” in this case represents law enforcement.) A husband of a classmate of mine sent me an article that posited that the man who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck and kept it there till he died was a “fall guy.” There is derisive response to the accurate teaching of history. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel with accurate information about the Holocaust has just been banned in a Tennessee school. I conclude from these symptoms, and many other things I have seen and heard in the last few years, that Racism in my country is on the surge.
What can I do about it? For all it’s worth, I can denounce it. I can try to understand it and codify it and urge anyone listening to do the same. I can become more aware of its presence. In short, I can do almost nothing.
But I must stand up to be counted. The image above is the best my artist/poet self can do to make something that is relevant and unique to my perspective. And my perspective includes the notion that Racism is insidious and murky and omnipresent, that it thrives on denial and suppression, and that there are powerful forces at constant ready to divide us. So my image includes a smple from Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges, who is almost exactly my age, and of a Black man getting a drink spilled on him while doing nothing more than tying his shoes. I have a quotation from Paul Simon’s “Blessed,” written long ago, which I took the liberty of substituting one word to fit my theme. The other elements of the image are ambiguous, and the acrostic poem is somewhat effaced, as if censorship and/or vandalism was in play. But here are the unoccluded words:
diss tort shun
doesn’t take an awful lot a People to oppress
if you have some folks on top to scourge unwonted flesh
sadists of fascisti circumvent a pervenu
slow your roll, Utopians–the time is WAY too soon
As with most of my acrostics, there is some “loss of signal” due to the Procrustean strictures of meter, rhyme and acrostic spine. I would have liked a better word than “parvenu” but it was the closest to the Them vs. Us syndrome that words-ending-in-u had to offer. But I felt I got lucky with “unwonted” because it is so phonetically similar to “unwanted” that most of us will subconsciously connote one for the other.
I hope a change for the better will come in my lifetime. But I don’t have all that much lifetime left to me: even if I live to be 100, the journey is more than two-thirds over. But I intend to denounce Racism until my dying day.
One with Clay, Image and Text 