I have tried vegetarianism, but I so far can’t make a go of it. This is my guilt in action.
Wing Bone
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Tag Archives: illustration
Rage and a Spit-Take–Two Bits
Two recent journal pages of mine refer to the two unpleasant subjects Rage and Spit. When I woke up this morning, “Shave and a Haircut/Two Bits” was looped in my head, I think to clue me in that I ought to base today’s blog post on the two pages.
RAGE is known to all except (perhaps) the freakishly evolved. I wonder if the Dalai Lama has ever experienced rage. Rage usually makes us do regrettable things. This to me is exemplified not only by mass shootings but by the Lynch Mob. About forty years ago I read The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilberg Clark, and the author managed to imagine the dynamics of a Lynch Mob utterly convincingly. I commend this fine book to your attention.
Is Rage ever a good thing? Does it ever drive positive behavior? Ought we to genetically engineer Rage out of our genome, if we could? I wish we knew.
The Spit-Take is an unignorable part of American physical comedy. Actor A is drinking something; Actor B says something unexpected and/or outrageous; Actor A diffuses the contents of Actor A’s mouth into the local atmosphere. In cinema, the Spit-Take has been around since 1906. That’s more than a hundred and six years ago! In television, the Spit-Take has been around for at least fifty years, having been popularized by Danny Thomas of “Make Room for Daddy” fame. On YouTube, there is a video by my friends, Phoenix-area poets Kevin Patterson and Bill Campana, containing no fewer than half a dozen Spit-Takes of what purports to be Champagne. The interested reader may use the phrase “Bill Campana 1957” to find the video (I could provide a link, but you have to REALLY WANT to see it, so I’m not making it easy). If you drink coffee while watching the video, point your mouth away from your computer screen, for you may well end up doing a Spit-Take yourself.
Cheers!
Testing 1 2 Three
Here is the text of the acrostic sonnet:
The challenges that meet us every day
Essentially define us over time
So if we promptly Act–get off the dime–
That which seemed insurmountable–is Hay.
If Wishes turned to Courses, we’d all Golf
Not much else COULD we do, there’d be so many,
Got Jokes–enough to make a young man Henny–
1-liners fit for each Tom, Dick and Rolf.
2 live the Here and Now is much more serious
Travail avails itself of every life,
Heroics may be needed when the strife
Ramps up from Not Too Bad to Deleterious.
Each Crisis Met puts more tools on your shelf
Enabling reaching farther than yourself.
–Which, granted, is SO much easier said than done. But, Friends, it would have been easier for me to say Help Yourself or You Can Do It and have done with this blog post. Struggling through fourteen lines of acrosticized iambic pentameter to tie in with a crucial line from a Who song has made me a little bit better poetically. I wish you well with your own struggles to be a better You.
Mars plus Soupy plus Al equals Duck-Billed Platypus…
… because it is a Mars/Soupy/Al (Marsupial).
In a lifetime of concocting horrible puns, this is one of the worst. As far as I know, the planet Mars and Soupy Sales and Al Pacino have never before been linked to such nefarious purpose.
The text of this triple acrostic is nigh-impossible to read, doing as it does Loop-the-Loops with internally-repeating text strings, so here is a plain-text transcription:
My Mephistopheles has an Agenda
Mmmost unmysterious–yet an enigma
My bane is mucilaginous pudenda
My oddities extend to the 6th sigma
And if by chance I riff a lot, my VISA
Augmented by demented tours of ASIA
And psychical applause from Mona Lisa
Agrees then to succumb to Euthanasia
Responding to despondent plaintive plea
Retributive spare parties hunt the Fauna
Responsible for plaguing Earth and Sea
Repeatedly whipped-creamedly with Sauna
Spawn-taneously we may Breed until
Symp symphony then contraceives our Will
Fans of the Sonnet will note that this is one such: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, Shakespearean rhyme scheme, concluding final couplet. In my immodest and self-aggrandizing opinion, no one else on Earth could have written a triple acrostic, the letter lengths of which are three/five/two, with a metaphor of such stick-together oddness summed up by the punned acrostic, cleaving to sonnet parameters, with a Zero Population Growth message embedded. Plus it has Loop-the-Loop calligraphy and loopy illustrations. Hope you like it!
Thought Word Deed
Here is a page based on what a brief quotation from James Joyce’s FINNEGANS WAKE was based on. For the Thought, I include one of Maxwell’s equations (with a boost from Gauss’s Law); the Word is from my hero Groucho Marx; and the Deed is a crude re-enactment of a portion of the journey that culminated in humanity’s first (hu)manned trip to the Moon. The seemingly-random-but-not juxtaposition is an odd tip of the hat to Joyce, who juxtaposed like crazy, and crazily, in FW. For another hat-tip to him, here’s this:
Lastly, here’s a tip of the hat to Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss mentioned above, possibly the ablest mathematician who ever lived.
Birdness
Today’s journal page is based on a photo of two of my ceramic birds, which in turn were based on vessels I threw on the potter’s wheel. There is something meta-ish about doing a drawing of a sculpture, but I also found it exciting to be intimately familiar with the forms I was drawing, having sculpted them: I could ignore the visual and enhance the tactile, and it would not ring false. I KNEW these birds.
Here is the page:
And here is the photo it derives from, of my two bird sculptures:
It’s plain to see I took great liberties with the image. I might have felt less free to do so were the sculptures someone else’s creation.
Picnic Up In The Sky
Many of us have dreamed something like this. Let us dare to hope that sometime in our lifetimes there will be a safe way to negate the nagging pull of the Earth’s gravity…
Two James Baldwins
Yesterday I attempted portraiture of Anne Hathaway and was not too successful, in my own estimation. As a portraitist I have my good days and not so muches. But “try, try again” I shall, just as I did with James Baldwin on two way back when occasions:
One with Clay, Image and Text 