Confession: I drew this in about fifteen minutes using a graphite stick and the seat of my pants. I then almost used a bogus meant-to-intrigue title, “Unavoidable Implications,” with the intention of having people see things that weren’t there. Well, I’ve been Phony-Baloney before with such fudging, and I may well be again (I only hope it’s not as cut-and-dried Phony-Baloney, though), but not this time. This is a tone study, and it emanates as if chiming, so “tone chime” it is.
For better or worse, here is the final version of a drawing I’ve been working on for more than three weeks. It is based on an illustration accompanying an acrostic poem, “Spectral Sanctums,” I wrote late last year. (Interested? Here is a link: https://onewithclay.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/spectral-sanctums/ )The illustration was of a smaller scale, 8-1/2″ x 5-1/2″, and had no cutlery nor stoneware on the placemat. This one’s 22″ x 30″, the largest-scale drawing I’ve made since the 80s. Here’s a photo Denise took this morning of me holding the drawing:
My working title for this drawing was “Homage to Bruegel.” Pieter Breugel the Elder had painted landscapes and peasantry and then let you know what was REALLY going on via the title; thus “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” has the requisite elements of ploughman, shepherd and fisherman vying for attention while poor doomed Icarus’s legs are all that can be seen as Icarus plunges into the sea. Analogously, I have a fork in much smaller scale off the placemat and seemingly on a different trajectory than the place setting. It is meant to compound the “what’s wrong with this picture?” incongruity of a dinner setting against the Cosmos.
But Denise instantly upon seeing the drawing came up with a title that I like much better, so “God’s Dinner Table” it remains.
face-a-doodle-do
some look glum but aren’t
some look grim and are
some reveal and some conceal
and some are just so far
saw a mad one shuddered
saw a doll admired her
squint in the mirror makes clearer and clearer
age always makes us look tireder
changing with weather and shadows
moods and events lifestyles races
what a kaleidoscope much more than i’d a hoped
fashion or freak show of faces
Tonight PBS took us to the New York Metropolitan Opera and a performance of THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. You don’t need subtitles to be able to tell there’s a whole lot of Silliness going on. And yet Figaro and his antics have been gracing stages worldwide for more than 200 years. So I find to my considerable comfort that Silliness and Staying Power are not mutually exclusive.
Here I’ve done something quite Silly. The title’s two puns, there’s a Pathet-ically obscure reference, a human Mickey Mouse wears Mickey Mouse ears and a tie festooned with Minnie Mice, and there’s nothing but name-dropping in the lower right hand corner. But: there’s tricky asymmetric balance. There’s a pulse in it of letter size variance and oddly “coincidental” alignment. And there’s a relaxed unforcedness to it that implies an omnipresence of freedom. There’s subtler stuff I won’t describe but I hope will be discovered. So it exists and I deem it worthy of a viewer’s attention. A few days later, though, I may well wonder what the Hell I was thinking . . .
thyme out
there’s no such thing as the Pathet Lao
howbeit Romeo where art thou
yet SPICE invigorates sweet & tart
mercator fibs but o boy can he chart
enticed inducements wave & dart
tie min
tandy, jessica/novak, kim
ian, janis & hendrix, jimi
elfman, danny or elfman, jen
This post/dispatch is being generated from a hotel room in Flagstaff, Arizona. The image suffers some by being neither scanned nor photoedited; but since it covers some unpretty truth, perhaps it’s so much the better.
Game Changer
Guys had shop and girls Home Ec
Astrophysicists went tech
Anthropologists did Mecca
Artists felt the figures beckon
Modern work’s on shaky decking
Miss a paycheck reap the wreckage
Endtime horsemen’s horses nicker
Sumup: All are born unemployed. Some become unemployed. And all eventually have unemployment thrust upon them. The silver lining is that we are more than our jobs, and meeting the challenge of learning that fact yields a far more spiritual reward than “Pay to the order of…”
Using the problem-solving compulsion of a materialistic Westerner, it is easy to demonstrate the sound of one hand clapping. One needs only clap the four fingers against the thumb pad and hand heel. It sounds like the underwater applause of diaphanous tail fins. (No, it doesn’t. Maybe the emerging koan is now “What is the sound of underwater diaphanous-tail-fin applause?”)
At any rate, yesterday I started a doodle, got what I wanted from it, and abandoned it. Today I was looking at the pomegranate tree by the driveway and lines metrically near-identical came. I unabandoned my doodle and added a title and the two lines to it. The result is a quasi-koan, though I’d love to hear arguments that it is not.
One thing Clark Gable and Jackson Browne have in common is the nonuse of their first names. Wikipedia says they were born Clyde Jackson Browne and William Clark Gable. Another thing they had in common was their alleged scandalous involvement with movie stars. Mr. Browne was with Daryl Hannah and Mr. Gable was with Loretta Young. Ms. Hannah has alleged that Browne physically abused her; Ms. Young alleged that Mr. Gable fathered her child. One story has been discredited; one has not.
Both of these fellows indulged in derring-do. Jackson Browne wrote one of the greatest protest songs of the 20th Century, “Lives in the Balance.” Mr. Gable flew combat missions in WWII.
And why do I put myself in their company? Well, my hair is straight and used to be brown, like Jackson’s; my moustache is semi-sparse, like Clark’s. All three of us did some time in California. None of us is 99 and 44/100 % pure. And all three of us have had a woman close to us die before her time.
But that isn’t it. Not really. The thing is, Jackson Browne and Clark Gable both possess a quality I want. They have both been Champions, and so I wish to be. I’m not a Champion yet, but I’m encouraged by my Champion’s Training of late.
No need to wish me luck, Friends. If I have it in me to be a Champion, Luck is something I won’t need.
A week ago my dear and wonderful friend of more than twenty-four years, Karen Wilkinson, was alive and well. Friday she was stricken and felled by a brain aneurysm. Monday they removed life support and, I infer, harvested what organs of hers they could use.
While she was still not technically dead, I tried feebly to do creative things. Here’s what I did on Sunday the 4th:
The would-be poem seems finished but is not. After Karen died, I tried again, and wrote what I intend to read at the Caffeine Corridor poetry event tomorrow night:
fiddle away over and out
there was this girl in a jeans skirt in the spring of 1990
librarian glasses and face and demeanor like talia shire in rocky
but with a violin that spoke for her
boldly stepping into the sound of the livingroom band she’d just joined
and the girl and her fiddle turned three needy guitars into contrapuntal gold
at times trumping them with platinum
years later “roller derby queen” by jim croce reached new heights
when during the instrumental the sound crescendoed
and the fiddle did a trick of stringzipping into the stratosphere
followed by a beat of complete and magic silence
followed by the resumption of the raucous rollicking sound
the girl and her fiddle went with her piano-playing pal to jazz camp
and they grinned and grinned on their return
elsewhere in 2007
much of the band went to a cabin near grand lake colorado
played and played and sang and danced and snored and hiked and played and played
the promised moose never showed but the music flowed and made all all right
and the fiddler bent and swayed with that music and folded her excellence into it
her face focused transcendence
her rosined bow a dervish
sometimes she’d take the fiddle away from her chin and sing
because she wanted to hold voice-hands with the rest of us
and through a miracle of wishful thinking and overdub
i hear her voice and fiddle now together
Tick, tick, tick. The Deadline Clock is inexorable. The Glendale Juried art show will cease accepting entries at noon on Saturday, January 3rd. But I and my entry or entries (max: 2) must be there by 10:30am or sooner, because I and my Sweetheart must be miles away by 11:15.
Here is a work in progress, and it has a LONG ways to go–and that’s not counting matting and framing. (Faithful blog readers will recognize it as compositionally similar to “Spectral Sanctums,” but words have been excised and the ubiquitous Spoon added.)
I may not meet the dreaded Deadline, but it’s great to be using the drawing board for something other than a dumping ground for stacks of papers and other impedimenta.
Wish me luck, Friends!
Snow is falling here in Cottonwood. Earlier I had made up my mind to drive to the Village of Oak Creek to retrieve a CD a friend had burned for me, which I’d foolishly left in my drawer at work and forgotten to take home. (In my defense, I’d had an unexpected 12-hour shift…) But the falling snow convinces me, with little experience driving on snowy roads, to stay in the warm and cozy. I’ll get the CD tomorrow, and put it in the truck before my shift begins.
The moral of this non-story is that sometimes the best thing to do is no thing at all. Thus this page:
Now let us be quite candid
Uplift & have & hold
Then we’ll be even-handed
Hubraics countermanded
It does no good to scold
Nonaction is an unflipped coin
Gong yet unbashed an unboinged boing
