My girlfriend Melony, known to her friends as Mel, was sitting next to me in my apartment’s tiny dining area, checking her phone. She looked Mellow.
Often her texts are accompanied by hearts. Mine too.
Words:
Methinks meknows a gal
Encryptically well. O
Let the Glow-wax flow
Five years ago today this blog began. My intention and goal was to do at least one blog post a week. One post a week would have made this Blog Post #261 or so. On the other hand, if I’d done a post a day, which quickly became my ambition, this would be Blog Post #1826.
But one thing I’ve learned, and relearned, in these five years: Quantity doesn’t mean much in blogging; QUALITY means much more. Post a thousand blogs, and the more you waste a viewer’s time, the bigger the crime you commit.
That said, the ability to draw, to sculpt, to compose poetry, to genuinely CREATE–generally, the more time spent doing creative things, the better we get at not wasting a viewer’s time. We become more creatively fit. We try things. Go down dead ends and beat ourselves against brick. Pull out something from our psyche with hard pliers, and hurt for it. Phone it in, and hurt for that too.
It is our job as creatives to be perpetually dissatisfied, to weep over the masterwork our efforts could have been but weren’t, to try, try again until we morph to some degree from tourist to native, and to not settle into a comfort zone of facile confidence. Ours is–must be–the most important job on Earth. Our job is to be a voice of the best that Civilization has to offer.
And so, both humbly and arrogantly, we must start with self-portraiture. We discover who we are, what we like, at what we excel, and at what we may never succeed. It is important, just as it is important for a hot fudge sundae to start out both hot and cold, that our focused seriousness be alloyed with relaxed, carefree play. This enables us to explore, and it gives our inner fire some motivation and Zing.
Today I started a page inspired by Billy Crystal’s “Fifteen Rounds,” which tells the life first of Cassius Clay and then of Muhammad Ali, from victory at the 1960 Olympics to defeat many years later at the hands of Leon Spinks. I have watched the two YouTube versions of this performance at least a dozen times. The theme is pure Ali: “It’s never too late to start all over again.” That mantra has helped me get through some tough times in these five years.
Near the end of “Fifteen Rounds” a determined Ali asserts that he wants to take on ol’ Leon again. “I’m old, I don’t like training, but I’m gonna do it. Gonna do my pushups, gonna do my situps. I’m gonna RUN WITH THE MOON!”
And so will we, Friends. When this work in progress is finished enough to be ready for your subsequent view, we will run with the moon!
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!!! 🙂
Pencil is my favorite medium eleven months of the year. Inktober is a different story!
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. 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
Today Greater Phoenix became the Valley of the Partially Eclipsed Sun. I poked a pencil-hole in a sketchbook page and viewed the eclipse indirectly, sketching the nonshadowed part of the page. The time was 10:38 AM, which according to an online source was close to the ideal viewing time.
After calligraphing the double acrostic, which seems sexist but is double-straitjacketed by the acrostic format and my notion of Calypso-esque lyrics, I had the left third of the page to fill. It occurred to me that the Jackson Browne song “Linda Paloma” refers to the corona of the Sun, which is viewable at totality sometimes. This yielded the image-notion of a white dove against the disk of moonshadow.
Words to the acrostic:
Erin go braless all to C
Cali go kitnish at high tea
Lolly go pop! at sound of bell
Iris go eyeroll and send us to hell
Please pretty Ladies I love you–don’t stop
Send me to heaven and then call the cops
Ever so often effacement will go/Wit’ an eclipse and Calypso like so
She says to pronounce her first name Jay. She tells me her life took a turn in New Mexico. She lays five bucks on a kid soliciting for his youth group, and he tells her a joke. She speaks of life casts she made at the former arts venue Paper Heart. Phrases like “trying to impress the Universe” and “never drive faster than your angels can fly” come easily to her. She went from taste-testing soup to test-driving cars. She is a broiler chef, a mother, a force of nature, an outlaw, and a hell of a woman.
Words to the double acrostic:
Jaunting through a lifelong Hajj
Juxtaposng wound and badge–U
Are the Broth–no soup du jour
And have the instinct to be sure
My girlfriend, Melony Terry, is a hair stylist par excellence. Many call her Mel. I started to do her portrait today, using the double acrostic “Stylin’ Mel,” which refers obliquely to comic-strip character Smilin’ Jack, about whom I knew little. I found his image online, drew him for Melony’s page, then called her to ask for a photo of her with her styling shears. Alas, she cannot accommodate me till she goes to work tomorrow, so my page on her skidded to a halt.
Meanwhile, I learned that the real-life physical model for Smilin’ Jack was Roscoe Turner, who was a colorful character indeed, being perhaps the first human being to take his pet lion (Gilmore, named after a sponsor) into the sky with him.
Today is also the birthday shared by two of my closest friends, Steve Boyle and Tom Sing. My post “Two Finest Friends” has more information on these gentlemen.
It is the first day of the month. It is my personal superstition that it is important to do things on the first day of the month that I want to, or ought to, do every day. It has been a long time since I did a blog post. This First of August ends the drought.
The United States of America, personified by the incompetent, incoherent President Who Would Be King, Donald Trump, has lost its honest, decent way. Incompetent and incoherent as this illustrated sonnet may be, the acrostic of it has its heart in the right place: Let us honor Honesty and Decency.
Words:
Have Love and Care, should Uh-Oh morph to Oh.
Horse fed and curried–curry on, O Pooh.
Omit!! and disregard downed Jericho:
Omniscience and egocentrists do.
No Hands on deck means mutiny anon
Nor strand induces cries of oui, c’est bon
Etceteras and gestures à la Bono
Etch handiworks pegged by both Pegg and Ono.
Since candied snow does not exist,and deer
See thousands of near misses, the affair
That grandees of Compulsion make cohere
Tell sandy waves of crazies not to stare.
Yet fake and zany posts unstay the staid
Yield fine fandangos for the Chambermaid.
My thanks to my marvelous new Girlfriend, Melony, for providing on request a word to get me going on this post. The word she gave me was “Honesty.”
One with Clay, Image and Text 