Here are the words to the triple acrostic:
Form a talc & mortar marvel; that’s your métier
Raise a fine calzone structure heedless of feng shui
Amortize a LOAN for each divinely feathered wing
Notify the press it’s fit for Smith or Jones or Singh
Kaftanesque design may suit a form & function best!
Kool-Aid’s never to be had at Taliesen West!
Today I finished an abstract doodle with poetry and some coherent image. Here are the words:
Recurrence to motifs refer
Add frankincense and then de-myrrh
Note, Samson, how reliably
Delilah cranks your Model T
O sure as Hm is spell’d H
M Your actions will from that place stem
(Hm really is spell’d H-M, just like Sh is spelled S-H. This is an example of how, to make the acrostic fit AND rhyme, you have to go to the extreme of ending the line on the next line, which sounds impossible, but that’s what they said about the square root of negative one, about which, see one of my previous posts; sorry, its title escapes me.)
I am throwing in my Patrick Swayze portrait in remembrance of the late, great Roger Ebert, who years ago saw fit to bring it to the attention of his Twitter followers, bless him.
For a creative AND compulsive person, Prolificity is a real Monkey on the Back. Lately, with moving and full-time nightwork and a now-long commute, my Monkey is an unwelcome screecher of a creature. He screeches THE SHOW MUST GO ON! and YOU’VE VIOLATED THE EVERY-SINGLE-DAY COVENANT! YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE! and batters my unbettered psyche.
Well, screw The Monkey. It is not an all-or-nothing world. I am happily romantically involved, gainfully employed, and I just became un-uninsured, so mostly things are sunny. (Still, it bugs me when an every-day streak ends.)
“Quasimodo” can be translated to mean “not completely formed,” and all of the images I offer on this post are such. Peter Lorre always seemed to me a quasi-Quasimodo, so this incomplete page of him–in glorious black and white, like the best of his movies–suits the theme exspecially well.
Doodles are almost always Quasimodos: we ever know when to stop. But hey, you fellow doodlers out there: a well-spent doodling hour can happen if you have a timer go off every five minutes or so, and you scan the doodle in its current state, and then continue. At the end of the hour, look at the scans in sequence, and you’ll feel like you’ve created something that’s Alive. You can also print the best of them and doodle yourself a new tangent. Warning, though: you have better things to do than doodle, and this can turn into a real time-suck if you get hooked.
Here’s something I did with my French Canadian friend Michel Lamontagne in mind. I’m hoping he’ll look at it and want to finish it. His mind is agile, and his image-sense startling.
Here are the words to “Secret Socket.”
Select eclectic trends if apropos
Elect electric-haired politico
Contort & make a body twitch & tic
Resort to form you rock with single click
Each win will amp the voltage that you mete
Teach Sinless Pride and Life just can’t be beat
In this day and age, “this day and age” may be an obsolete term. Things are shifting and blurring. Is it the Information Age? the WMD Age? the New Age? the Toast Age, thaks to global warming? Perhaps “these uncertain times” fits more.
On this day and page, I announce Project Paris, with my stated intention to be in Paris, France on my 60th birthday, which is 450 days from now, and (this is crucial, and the only real reason for Project Paris) in the company of my awe-inspiring Girlfriend, Denise. Paris is the gift I wish to give her.
Upcoming posts will put more flesh on the Project Paris bones. Meanwhile, here are the words to the triple acrostic:
Demonstrated decadence & scorn: Age Noriega
Dilettantes & fops & wastrels: it’s an Age of Sega
Draft The E-Shop Age & there’s no place for a Bodega
Ancient P I O N E E R S & MOVERS shook a willing leg
Artisans & kings & serfs all laid a feudal egg
Add a Renaissance or two & take us up a peg
Yarrowstalks’re meeting & conferring at The Hague
Yesteryear’s passé & yet Eternity is vague
YES to Fine/Tuned Here & Now & NO to Shock/Awe Plague
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Sighing relieves
And so does sleep
Varsoviana
Erst was so chic
Darers don’t eke
Trivia: the Varsoviana was Conrad Hilton’s favorite dance.
Sometimes it’s all unclear because…It’s all unclear. Some things apparently resist clarity.
Here are the words to the acrostic:
Much of LIFE lacks clean design
Undue twitches make us whine
Rye bread vigor needn’t dwarf us
Kiteling, TRIP the LIGHT Amorphous
Dylan has his Mighty Quinn, to which I riff: Come all at sea/Come all on land./You’ve not seen nothin’ like the Ampersand.
I just cannot get enough of this handy symbol. Six years ago, in the first year of my attempt at daily art-journaling, on the 8th of March, 2007, I did this:
It is no coincidence that the Ampersand is placed close to where the pulse may be taken.
Here are the words, then and now:
Hope Not
Breathing is a part of Life
As are irritation,
Revelation, rest and strife,
Knowledge, information.
Tapestries of taste & sound
Have their place inside us,
Rigorousness may abound
In the world beside us.
Cauliflowered clouds may bloom
Energized unfolding doom.
Hope So
On the other hand
Here is a Mighty Pen
Noting ampersand
Onwarding again.
the mighty ampersand
antitheses unite
metastases to fight
pragmatic schemes alight
snarkiloquent if slight
delectables delight
The Celadon family of ceramic glazes is often ideal for a vessel with carving on it. The glaze is intensified in the incised area.
I played with the idea of illustrating this with an animation cel, a scene from Much Ado About Nothing, and a portrait of Nia Vardalos, but that would have been both distracting and (in the worst sense of the word) precious.
Here are the words:
Clay & glaze can
CRAZE a clay man
Effervesced Chi
Ends old ennui
Lepidoptera
Lulling Opera
A limited copyright is hereby granted to any reader who wishes to print a copy of the image so as not to strain her or his neck and/or eyesight reading the darn thing. It will not be transcribed. My rationalization of not going to the trouble of transcribing it is that it is best experienced in situ.
For those of you who do not know what a shaggy-dog story is, and do not want to go to the trouble of doing an Internet search to find out, this: a shaggy-dog story is a story whose punchline is some awful pun, for the sake of which the story was built. This is not a shaggy-dog story, but a shaggy-dog PARABLE, and my hope is that it has more reward to the reader than the pun at the end. For a similar reason (I think), Robert Heinlein wrote JOB: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE, and Homer of yore told the long story we call THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY by way of demonstration that Deities play with our lives, for ends that disregard ours.
A few posts back I attached an image of a Lynda Barry portrait in progress. Today I attach a different image, hommage-ing and burlesquing Ms. Barry’s drawing and calligraphic styles to a modest degree, and tell myself to revisit the subject after taking one of her creativity workshops. Taking one of her creativity workshops is the latest entry on my Bucket List.
Here are the words to the acrostic:
Loose lips & CRUDDY’s wisdom to absorb
Yon Deathtrail is New Mexican, old Maya
Neur-author’s pea-green DEMONS! give what for
Dark-sided Truth’s found through her creaking door
And ERNIE POOK’S COMEEK will never dry
If any reader should happen to know Ms. Barry, please convey this message: “Best regards from an admiring fan to a true-voiced genius.”
One with Clay, Image and Text 