Last post I made an image from the video; this post completes the series by making a drawing of the image. No ground broken here; just pure pleasureof drawing. Highly recommended!
Tangerine Peel #3: the Pure Pleasure of Drawing
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Tangerine Peel II: Subtler Cubism
It’s over a hundred years since le Cubisme made its first appearance, spearheaded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, with perhaps a precursive boost by Paul Cézanne. The movement purported to offer a different way of looking at things, by chopping up the image with different views of its subject. Then came Comic Books, which chopped up the page with different slices of represented life. Now comes the self-aggrandizing Gary W. Bowers, who presents the same subject at slightly different viewpoints and times, thanks to camcorder technology and nifty photo-editing software. (Andy Warhol gave me a precursive boost with his image multiplicities. Thanks and RIP, Andy!) New Cubism lives!
Serendipitous Semi-Seahorse
Sometimes mundane living delights us with a surprise. This morning I peeled a thin-skinned tangerine, meeting the challenge of keeping it in one piece, and found a Quasimodo of a seahorse in the peel’s underside. Scanner-capture yielded the above result, which comes with the lesson that Life is chock-full of visual wonder–so keep your eyes peeled. [mischievous smile]
trajectoral traditions
Here’s a poem I wrote today to a challenge: “Write a poem about falling.” Paging Michel Lamontagne! Hey, Michel, want to illustrate this one?
trajectoral traditions
conjectural parabolae
ejectional ballistics mark
conjunctival affinity
adjoins the contrapuntal dark
in launch mode is debauchery
testosterone definitives
aborted mission’s mockery
on cnn such spin it gives
in orbit geosynchronous
a lost&found of gps
in vehicles propinquitous
a glockenspiel’s evoked and blessed
a paratrooper plows the air
nefariously various
the chute deployed avoids abyss
a blissful floating down
a kiss
Step Hen King
I think I’ve read more words that Stephen King has written than words by anyone else. (Robert Heinlein and Herman Wouk might be close.) That includes CARRIE, THE STAND (both the cut and uncut editions), THE DARK HALF, THE DEAD ZONE, CUJO, FIRESTARTER, HEARTS IN ATLANTIS, CHRISTINE, MISERY, PET SEMATARY, INSOMNIA, GERALD’S GAME, DANSE MACABRE, collections SKELETON CREW and FOUR SEASONS, THE SHINING, the entire Dark Tower series, and most recently, DOCTOR SLEEP, sequel to THE SHINING. I also read ON WRITING, which I’d recommend to creative people of all media.
Naturally I want to pay some sort of tribute to a man who’s provided me with numberless hours of imaginative entertainment. A few days ago I got this far with a draft of the Stephen King page:
This draft was doomed, but I felt bad scrapping it: I really liked some of the character portraiture, and since I’m an erratic portraitist, when I get it right it breaks my heart not to use it. So here it is.
And here are the words to the acrostic:
SPIDERS help weave his tapestries–hence dyers use batik
Thrown in: all AND the kitchen sink; a float evokes Caltiki
Ectoplasmics & ashenness get kith & kin & kine
Paranormal phenomena are fodder for his Shining
Caltiki? Well, there’s a bad half-Italian movie of the late 50s entitled CALTIKI –THE IMMORTAL MONSTER (or, when in Rome: CALTIKI — IL MONSTRE IMMORTALE) that I’d be willing to bet 500 to 1 Stephen King has seen. He’s got a similar flesh-devourer in one of his short stories; it floats by an anchored raft. (It’s dissimilar enough to be considered an independent creation, though.) The name of the King story escapes me.
Steve, if you ever see this, I echo my apologetic chicken regarding the awful “poultry-geist” joke. I needed to fill up the space. Keep up the good work, man.
It Is What It Is? –What ISN’T??!
Ayn Rand must be turning over in her grave. A long time ago, she proclaimed that A equals A. Now people everywhere are saying “It is what it is,” and not giving Ayn any credit. (Nor, to my knowledge, did John Prine tip his hat to Rand when he put “You are what you are, and you ain’t what you ain’t” in his lyrics to “Dear Abby.”)
“It is what it is” is a semantically empty phrase that usually (in this neck of the woods, anyway) connotes that something not-great but unchangeable exists. As Robert Heinlein was wont to say, “You can’t argue with the weather.”
So why use it for an acrostic? Well, ten years from now it will remind me of the way people were talking ten years ago. (Fifty years ago, kids my age were calling Cool stuff Boss. Cool survived; Boss died.) Also, the end-letters work out fairly well for acrosticization, and enabled a reference to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, heroic mongoose of the Kipling oeuvre, as well as the Robert Mondavi vineyards, which I was privileged to visit in the mid-80s, enjoying their five-course meal accompanied by five different wines.
Here are the words to the triple acrostic:
It pays a Cobra to BEWARE of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
The savage Truth would humble the most cock-eyed optimist
It’s like an alcoholic at a vineyard of Mondavi
So many vampires want to taste the blood of whom they kiss
Opus #300 and/or Eleven Twelve 2013
Two things make this unlike a day like any other. One is that month, day and year in the mm-dd-yy format are in numerical sequence for the second-to-last time this century; the other is this is the 300th time I’ve punched “New Post” at WordPress and deemed the result publishable. Since I’m forever enumerating and otherwise manipulating numbers, the two phenomena are a good fit for “A very SPECIAL episode of ‘One with Clay, Image and Text.'”
Opus #300
Of course the Cosmos has my #
Pale penumbra; 1-2-3
Undercut the Grand Vizier-0
Seek ye Wisdom NOT from her-0
(Some ambiguity is built-in, and some is added. The Pound sign is now employed in referral, and it and a given phrase then referred to as a ‘hash tag;’ it also means both Pounds and Number. FYI: it means “number” in the acrostic. The zeroes are pronounced “Oh,” and, oh, by the way, they do not mean “zero” in the acrostic; they are a syllable dependent on their surroundings. “Her-0” should be pronounced “Hero.” As for the stuff in brackets, Googlers of “Lord William Not-from-here” will get a very SPECIAL lowdown on an intriguing character in the Instrumentality of Mankind mythos according to Cordwainer Smith.)
Eleven Twelve 2013
Endearing 2-some says À Bientôt
Leave 2lips in the sun to bloom & glow
Elopement’s zer0 hour makes them pale
Vivacious c0uple shakes but does not bail
Enlisting Space 13 for their RV
Now Wedded Bliss yields 13 forms of Glee
What better thing to do on this special numerical day than to get married? Truth is, a couple got married on today’s Today Show.
As for the illustration, attempts to deconstruct it may well prove it indeconstructionable. [proud-kid smile]
Aces Ten’d
This is a poem and an image addressing that aspect of reality and/or literature some call “layering”– several things are going on simultaneously, and as your focus shifts your perception of reality changes though reality itself doesn’t. In the image a flashlight shines through a stencil of the number 10, superimposing all or part of the 10 on four aces. That is one way to Ten an Ace.
Calliope is one of the nine Muses. The Muses are goddesses of inspiration in Greek mythology, daughters of Zeus, ruler of the gods, and Mnemosyne, who personified Memory and from whom the word Mnemonic is derived. The other eight Muses are Clio, Thalia, Erato, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Urania, and Melpomene. If you’re a Terpsichorean you have probably correctly guessed that Terpsichore is the Muse of Dance. If you’ve ever ridden on a Calliope, and are unfamiliar with Greek mythology, you have probably incorrectly guessed that Calliope is the Muse of Music. Given another guess about who is the Muse of Music, you might go for Polyhymnia. But that’s also incorrect, or at best only a little bit correct. According to Wikipedia, Calliope is the Muse of EPIC poetry and Polyhymnia is the Muse of SACRED poetry. So who is the Muse of Music? None of them or all of them. The word Music is derived from the greek μουσική, pronounced something like “moose-ee-keh” and translated as “art of the Muses.”
“The calliope crashed to the ground” is a line from “Blinded By the Light,” written by Bruce Springsteen and performed by Manfred Mann. Lots of layers in that song too. One line was quite controversial, but I’ll let Wikipedia tell it: “The most prominent change is in the chorus, where Springsteen’s ‘cut loose like a deuce’ is replaced with ‘revved up like a deuce.’This is commonly misheard as ‘wrapped up like a douche (the V sound in “revved” is almost unpronounced, and the S sound in ‘deuce’ comes across as ‘SH’ due to a significant lisp).’ Springsteen himself has joked about the controversy, claiming that it was not until Manfred Mann rewrote the song to be about a feminine hygiene product that it became popular.“
I love it that no fewer than three of the Muses are designated for Poetry. (Erato is the Muse of LOVE and/or SEX poetry.)
So why Ten an Ace? The answer is derived from the punchline of a dirty joke (technically, though, it’s the answer to a dirty riddle. This post is joked with inconsistencies). The answer is Because We Can. And not just Canners can.
I could go on with this post forever but I’ve got to Layer to rest…[unjustified grin]
Mem War
I’m embarrassed, but not quite ashamed, to publish this one. It was done in haste and the drawing is crappy, but the idea is OK and the pun, though I say so myself, is elegant.
Here are the words:
Motivations vary. Some will give it tooth & claw
Even laying down a life for Flag & Ma & Pa
Money, bragging rights & buzz are ways of keeping power; breathe our last & always there’s a whiff of sweet & sour
Spoon River Blues & Other Spoon Studies
I keep trying and missing with Spoon-capture. A spoon can be a wonderfully reflective surface, or it can be a real mud-dog, depending on a lot of drawing choices. Before the year is over, though, I think I’ll have a good one.
Here are the words, followed by a couple more spoon studies.
Sacred to our folklore is the sacrificial lamb
Poisonous the notion lives are set upon a trammel
Overlooked the making active use of déjà vu
One must wonder what we’d change to make it non-ensue
Never going backwards means that everything is news
One with Clay, Image and Text 