Index Card A Day, Day Two, offered the daily prompt “Carnival.” Not much came to mind for that, but when I tweaked it to “Car Knee Val” I was off and running. The “Val” is supposed to be Val Kilmer in his Iceman days.
I just finished watching the climactic conclusion to MAD MEN, which has been hyped to pieces and made the capstone to a binge-watching marathon. I trust it won’t spoil things for those who haven’t yet viewed it to say that I hope that the Coca-Cola Company paid through the nose for what must be the ultimate Product Placement. I also wonder if the series was conceived with this punchline in mind. I note the precise timing of the ending with one of the most famous happenings in advertising history.
Remember the scene in WAYNE’S WORLD where Wayne and Garth scoff at “selling out,” all the while holding up blatant product-placement products? Pepsi was one of those products. I wonder if this whole series was Coke’s revenge.
Mad (brought to you by Coca-Cola?) Men
Merchandising brought this dream
M I N E D to order per a scheme
AVARICE, you weave your lace
And you net by product’s place
Does this coca-chewing clan
Deal in…cola? That’s the plan
A few months and a seeming hundred years ago, I was living in Cottonwood, Arizona, and working at the front desk at Sedona Winds Independent Living Retirement Community in the Village of Oak Creek. Every 3-to-11 shift I worked part of my job was to create a new menu for the next day. When the dining room closed for the day I’d remove that day’s menus from the menu holders and then place the next day’s menus in the holders. We recycled some of the menus as scrap paper. Many of my posted images on this blog were created on the backs of those menu scraps.
One such remained unfinished at the time of my departure from Sedona Winds and subsequently from Cottonwood. I remember it had a swirly, flowing backdrop and some of a triple-acrostic poem entitled “Body of Work.” I thought of it as perhaps 80% finished and in need of a bit more structured image and a good punchline/last line for the poem.
After I finished the Pat McMahon page, I thought “Body of Work” would be a good one to finish. Alas, I have not been able to find it, though I looked every place it could possibly be. (Of course that’s not true, and I’ll probably smack my forehead with my hand when it turns up.) Lacking the original, I set about making another one. The above result bears almost no similarity to the original, nor should it–I’m different now, and have hundreds of hours more pencil work under my belt. The spirit is probably similar, though. It is an admonition to Produce. Not for the first time on this blog, I’ll print Thomas Carlyle’s famous quotation:
Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day: for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.
My grandfather, Paul L. Householder, gives us the other quotation, the one on my image: “Do the thing and you shall have the power.” Daydreams are good only to the extent that they raise yearning to the level of a need to accomplish. Soon or late the daydream must end and work be performed to make the daydream real.
At sixty years of age, my memory is starting to decay. My left elbow thinks it needs oil a la the Tin Woodsman, and my linework, I being left-handed, gets the occasional elbow yip sending my line askew. My eyesight is astigmatic enough to give me two full moons for the price of one. But I will Produce until my night cometh.
Yesterday I was looking at the Rotten Tomatoes movie-review website and the movie poster for the comedy documentary MISERY LOVES COMEDY came up. It features the co-creator of SEINFELD (and admitted model for the character George Costanza), Larry David. He has a beautiful, open-countenanced grin on his face, and I was drawn to drawing it. As I drew it occurred to me that his name lends itself to a double acrostic of five lines. The next thing to occur was that a limerick has five lines. I’ve written hundreds of limericks. Why not one more?
Well, one reason why not, in this case, is that DAVID is a lousy right-side bookend for a limerick’s double acrostic. D and D end letters can easily be made to rhyme, but not with the third partner, A.
But LARRY, while a challenge, is doable. Many French words end in L and are pronounced with a long A. L and A and Y are mutually rhymeable. And with Cirque du Soleil partaking of skewed thinking, as does Larry David, the rhyming became an easy L A Y indeed. (Bad pun of the day. I am sorry, a little bit.)
And if my portraiture misses the mark a bit (I don’t think it does, but I’m not the person to ask; you are) I can always claim I didn’t draw Larry David, but David Larry. Same goes for the content of the limerick if it’s not such a good match.
Deriving from Cirque du SoleiL
Anonymous Nays to ye YeA
Vault over the barrieR
Inviting the carrieR
Deliver canned laffs to the fraY
to the spirit of winsor mccay
i have thatthere and thishere to say:
you drew like a wizard
your drawings a blizzard
that sculpted your times and today.
I am thrilled to report that the Stan Getz drawing, prepared for, executed, and framed, has been delivered to the gentleman who commissioned it, and he has indicated that he is completely satisfied with the result. He also added a $20 bonus to the $200 we agreed on at the outset. The above image is the drawing in the frame, cropped to preserve the anonymity of the owner, who is holding the framed drawing so that I could take a picture of it.
Previously, I’d taken pictures of the drawing, and also tried scanning it in halves and splicing the halves, since it was too big to fit on the scanner bed. Here’s that spliced image, photoedited for color and drama:
Before we parted company my friend and benefactor paid me a compliment that I’ll gladly keep. He’d seen Stan Getz portrait attempts, and many of the artists ALMOST got him, but not quite; “but you got him.” Now that makes my day, and makes me smile.
My friend, the poet Victoria H. (the H is silent), kindly loaned me a saxophone she had at her house. It helped, getting my hands on a real sax and pressing some of the keys. With a photo source, you’re not quite sure what’s going on, especially with such a complex mechanism. The pads, and pad stops, and keys, seem to be of arbitrarily different sizes in the photos. Now the saxophone is coming to life in my mind.
No more detail studies for this project! It’s the whole sax, or no sax at all. 🙂
I’d just finished the Stan Getz bio, and, looking for more Getz/Saxism, I looked on the magazine rack of the Burton Barr Phoenix Public Library where I’d returned the book (STAN GETZ: A LIFE IN JAZZ) for Down Beat Magazine. I found it, except its name is jam-sessioned into DownBeat. But lo and behold, KENNY BARRON was on the cover!! Stan Getz called him “The other half of my heart.” Another bonus was that there was an ad for a new cleaning system for musical instruments that involves light, and the photo of the sax on the ad was in gorgeous detail. So I thank the magazine and the LIGHT folks for the photo springboards, and ask them to please not sue nor cease&desist me.
Here’s what happened:
Between the ears: “It’s great to be doing all these saxophones and Getzes, but how about a break?” “OK. What did you have in mind?” “Let’s take a good piece of paper and a pencil and one of those magic erasers and just see what happens.” “Not looking at anything? You sure?” “Yeah, let’s go. What’s the risk? One piece of paper–one hour of time?” “OK then.” And here is what happened.
At this point I’ve learned enough about Stan Getz’s face to picture it and describe it without looking at a photo: Pale. Nose slightly aquiline. Short but not weak chin. Deep-set eyes, with sockets sloping upward toward the middle of the face. Ears small but protrusive. (Birth trauma trivia: Stan’s poor mom, Goldie, had 35 hours of labor. The doctor went in with forceps. Stan’s head was so big one of his ears was almost torn off and needed suturing. The doctor said they couldn’t leave with Stan until they’d paid an additional $52–a huge sum of money in 1927–for the ear work. “$52?” Al Getz gasped. “That’s too much. You can keep him.” Then he paid up.)
Here is a first take on a solo headshot of Stan Getz. There will be four more.
Words:
Smoothened F then sharpened G
Talk with tune of what will be
Anthemed improv free of rust
No one’s catspaw no one’s klutz
One with Clay, Image and Text 