Archive

Tag Archives: illustration

Image

One of my favorite songs is “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. It has many memorable lines. The one that most catches my breath is “I had some dreams; they were clouds in my coffee…”

Yesterday I spent two and a half hours in an Urgent Care Center. A subcutaneous horde of nastiness had marched north and south of my right elbow, making its presence known with swelling sufficient to unknuckle three knuckles of my hand, and a flaring pink-red that sought my heart. So there is no acrostic poem to go with the drawing, and the drawing is doubly sketchy. But today is another day.

Image

Just this minute I did an Internet search on Syria. Floating to the top was the headline “In Syria, Anger and Mockery as Obama Delays Plan.” Dare Ya, Dare Ya, DOUBLE Dare Ya–which is about at the same level of maturity as Now Look What You Made Me Do.

For fifty years, intervention has been a colossal failure. Treating a symptom often does nothing for the disease–and with such as insecticides and 9/11, it exacerbates.

So here is yet another never-does-any-good-but-I-gotta Anti-War message. Standing up to be counted is important for everyone, though almost valueless as a tool for change.

Here are the words:

THE WAR OF MADNESS, AND VICE VERSA

7th Street has traffic lights some amber
There’s an antechamber bright & fissile
How the jackals howl to hear a panther hum
Eventide brings humming of a missile
Magistrates may murmur of chrysanthemum
But their yen: a limbered-up Haboob
Ebb tide brings its jetsammed torpid tube
Ridges are a favored place to clamber

The words only make sense as metaphor. They do make more sense than what is happening in battlefields past, present and future.

Image

…and they are correct. I was delivered by Caesarian section fifty-nine years ago by A. Franklin, M.D. of Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, California. Two women brought me into the world: the A was for Ann or Anne (my memory is a bit sketchy).

The photo above was taken where I now type, the Burton Barr Library in Phoenix, Arizona. I came here from up north in Cottonwood expressly to see the play RENT with my beloved daughter Katharine, whom everyone calls Kate. That will be at the Phoenix Theatre, easy walking distance from here.

The drawing I hold is the one my readers most told me to complete (see previous post “More from the Unfinished Vault”). It is of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth dancing with great joy, or, at the very least, seeming to.

The words:

Rattling the rafters & raising the roof
Intricate steps is the way of the hoofer
Train with your partner till you got it made
AH to be DANCING unfettered unstayed

So far this birthday has been great fun. I hope to make another post before the day is done.

Image

Last November I participated in National Novel Writing Month. I wrote over fifty thousand words under the title AULD LANG SYNAPSE, which was about the creation and use of nanotechnologized dust that made it possible for people to switch bodies via wireless synaptic exchange. The novel is still a disorganized, unfocused mess, but I liked a minor character who called himself the Mighty Eater of Food, and here I make a superhero out of him. (EATING as a superpower? You think that’s ridiculous? I invite you to do an internet search on Matter-Eater Lad, late of the Legion of Super-Heroes.)

Lately I’ve been dwelling on my own struggles with weight control (“Belly-Worshipper!” I trash-talk myself with scornful “stinkin thinkin”), and recently wrote a mock children’s song called “Gobble Gobble Gobble.” This is part of that tapestry.

I threw in an additional challenge to my triple-acrosticization, and demanded that each line contain a pun on a color. Why? Well, it’s my contention that many art innovations are arbitrary and/or newness for the sake of newness. But once you decide to do it, do it as best you can.

The words:

EH! Don’t want to con-fuschia
EW! I’ll TEAL ya–let’s climb
Now! Rosed Tuckling is crucial
NEXT: to Beiging–sub-Lime

In the Quantum Multiverse, some of me have done some of these. A minuscule percentage have done all of them. But I only have so much lifetime, and the most I can say for sure about the me who is talking now, in this universe, is that ONE of these will be done by midnight Friday.

Which one? Please tell me, because I really don’t know…

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Here’s a Threefer Wall:

Image

Image

Image

Joined Shapes

Juxtapositioning makes strange bedfellows
Outcomes often are Hobson’s choicish
Inferences drawn in Freehandia
Never seem to reflect Reality’s grip
Edentate is the lower jaw of Time
Delivering a superfluity of bones

Meteoric Messages

Making contact may not seem
Either metaphor or meme
Till it leads to warm embraces
Expeditious tracks & traces
Or a bite from fly or flea
Rousing more’n Golly G
It’s so easy to confuse
Crankiness with front page news

Self Poor Trait

Soapbox pour esprit de mort
Endocrines do bar the door
Let us cellophane the Sea
First inquiring: Que vous dit

Two posted self-portraits in less than a week. All is vanity. The Poor Trait of the acrostic is an annoying tendency, similar to James Joyce’s, to obfuscate via private language and joke.

 

Image

They fly and crawl and jump, sting and bite and pinch, buzz and chirp and hum. They are a nuisance and a test. We have much to learn from them.

The words:

Wayfaring without a brain to speak of is so stark
Hum & chirp & whine & buzz & swarm till heavens darken
Ants & hornets, EARWIGS, gnats–survivors go go go
There’s a subtle wisdom in the chase avoid & sow

Image

Here is a subject more serious than a heart attack–and I speak as one whose father died at 49 of a massive myocardial infarction. Since it is so serious I consulted with my exceedingly wise Girlfriend, Denise. The heart of the matter seems to be that trust does not pay for women nowadays, in a world with date-rape drugs and such atrocities as are described in THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES.

I’m a little ashamed that my effort here is so clumsy. Perhaps in a few years, with more mastery of form and worldly experience, I’ll revisit the subject. Meanwhile, this is the best I can do.

Words:

Dances with the devil bring a sorrow unsurpassed
And a smile is nothing more nor less than what it is
Maladjusted yearnings leave forensics teams aghast
Seeing HARM inflicted on a wife or niece or sister
Evil forcers vain and lustful go back clear to Zeus
Let us pray evolving souls bring no such thugs to roost