In August I again became a college student, enrolling at South Mountain Community College so that I could be in their 3D Design class. The third sculptural project for the class is due today, November 6, 2017, in less than nine hours. The assignment: Make ten gesture drawings, have the instructor approve one of them, and create a wire sculpture based on that drawing.
I had never worked with wire before. It is fantastically fun to be doing so now!
The Inktober prompt for October 31st is “Mask.” Here was my response:
I thought it fulfilled the requirement but that there was more to say. So here is another take:
Indeed–Happy Halloween, friends!
Coming into the home stretch. Tomorrow is Halloween, and the last prompt, “Mask,” will have a post all its own.
At the request of Nikki A. Holmes, a lively friend of mine, I also did a page with the prompt “Epic.” Here’s Epic Nikki:
It’s been fun, Inktober, but what with work and 3D Design class and the Senior Center’s walking program and the World Series, it’s sometimes been tough fun. I’ll be glad to be taking a break–HOLY MOLY!! November 1st starts National Novel Writing Month! It never ends!!! 🙂
These past six days have yielded Inktober pages good, bad and ugly, but all sincere.
Here they all are at once, Friends, with a bonus origami crane to boot. The prompts: Teeming, Mysterious, Fierce, Fat, Graceful, and Filthy. As to the last, the portrait is of you-know-who but is unlabeled and meant to be more generic, because there are SO MANY creeps like him out there, proving that not only does power Corrupt–it Engorges.
Here are another six days’ worth . . .
Pencil is my favorite medium eleven months of the year. Inktober is a different story!
This is just a little ways up the Echo Canyon Summit Trail on Camelback Mountain, in Phoenix, Arizona. I took this picture after working an 8-hour shift at the airport, getting on the  Sky Train, getting on the #44 Valley Metro bus, getting off on the stop before Macdonald, and walking amd walking–and reaching the trailhead, and Hiking.
I was hoping to see my friend Natalie Lobherr on the trail. She’d Facebooked that she would be there at 2:00 PM.
Unfortunately, I didn’t clock out till 2:30, despite asking for an early out; didn’t get rolling on the bus till 2:55; didn’t reach the trailhead till 3:25 or thereabouts. Natalie is capable of doing the hike in one hour. I feared I’d missed her.
Fortunately, after I pianissimoed up to marker 6 and my legs said “enough!” and I waited a while at the “rehydration” landing, here she came, clearly weary, but chugging away for all she was worth (priceless). She saw me and put her hands palm up sideways in that “what the hell and here I am” gesture. And I hugely grinned.
I love the word Hike because its first definition is, noun or verb, one of my favorite activities. I also love its other meanings, which unclude launching a football and adjusting a skirt upward.
Today started well and then got better. Eight hours and thirty-one minutes of sleep. Spinach omelette and coffee. Cardboard serial-plane sculpture of a gorilla well started. Then the capstone: Phoenix Art Museum presented best-selling, Hugo-winning Kim Stanley Robinson, who spoke with eloquence and humor about climate change and comedy.
I had met Stan more than twenty years ago. His mother-in-law and copy editor, Dorothy “Dot” Morrison, was a friend and co-worker with my then wife, Joni. For about fifteen minutes I had the privilege of talking to Stan about his novelette, and Robert Heinlein and his Scribner’s editor Alice Dalgliesh, and hiking, and stuff I no longer remember. I asked Stan which sf authors he admired, and he mentioned Edgar Pangborn, whom I had never read.
In the years between then and now, I read Stan’s THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT and 2312. Â I didn’t get too much into his Mars trilogy, for which he is most famously known, intending to binge-read it the way I did LORD OF THE RINGS one Christmas break in the late 60s.
Stan is a fantastic storyteller and exceptionally intelligent and imaginative. And here he was in town again, about to sign my copy of NEW YORK 2140. He looked up at me and I said, “I was a friend of Dot Morrison. I’ve met you.” He offered his hand to shake and I shook it. Then I showed him the page I’d worked on before and during his talk. It is festooned with quotes from the talk. “Hey, look what you inspired. Double acrostic.”
He half grinned and said “Right on,” his self-confessed Old Hippie coming out.
I didn’t want to Bogart my time with him, so after confirming that Dot, whom I’d lost track of, had passed on, and Stan signing my book, and my telling him I admired his use of the between-lives Bardo in THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, I said thanks and goodbye. He said he’d be sure to tell his wife about me, friend of her mother.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Resisting the lure of exclaiming Hélas
Incepting a zep’lin as Candle or Bra
Conceiving a model who posed for Maillol
Existence ain’t in the Bardo with Bardot
“I picked up my bag and went looking for a place to hide
When I saw Carmen and the Devil walking side by side.
I said, Hey, Carmen, come on, let’s go downtown.
She said, I got to go, but my friend can stick around.”
–Robbie Robertson, “The Weight”
As mentioned above, there was a man with a full gallon jug affixed to a chain walking the Phoenix streets earlier today. As he walked he lifted and lowered the jug.
When a glaze kiln is first cracked open there is sometimes a noise, a ting, like that made by a flicking fingernail on rose glass. It is caused by unequal shrinking of clay and glaze and the micro seismic shift thereunto appertaining.
As long as the Earth is in free fall around the Sun, its weight is exactly zero. Nor may you weigh tings.
“So on we go.
His welfare is my concern.
No burden is he
To bear–
We’ll get there.”
The Hollies and/or Neil Diamond, “He ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
One with Clay, Image and Text 