Imogene Coca | One with Clay, Image and Text

A movie called GONE GIRL featured a bar called “The Bar.” Mention was made of the name of the bar being “meta,” which means self-referential in a self-aware sort of way, sort of. Meta’s been around for a while, as witness this first verse to the theme of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”:

This is the theme to Garry’s Show,
The theme to Garry’s show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry’s Show.

(source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/)

So this is a pencil sketch featuring an acrostic of “Pencil Sketch.” It features Imogene Coca, who as a player in Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” performed in many a sketch. Apologies to the memory of Ms. Coca for such a sketchy description of such an outstanding comedic mind. Apologies, too, for an indecent attempt at caricature without reference to a photo source. This time round I elected to fly by the seat of my mind’s-eye pants and draw without looking at anything except the page.

Here are the words to the acrostic. Each line describes a sketch to be found on the page. Near the lower right-hand corner is a sketch of a pencil, which illustrates the double acrostic in heavy meta.

Party hats seen through refractive glass
Elephant sniffs at a whiskey flask
Nightstick next to an alley’s grate
Cat all tie-dyed per the dyer’s trait
Imogene Coca as a bumbling narc
Lastly–a profile of a matriarch

My own take on Meta is that being self-referential has its place, but self-REVerential–not so much.

Tycho Brahe, that great Danish astronomer, dueled and lost a chunk of his nose. The duel, according to Wikipedia, was “over the legitimacy of a mathematic formula.” After that he wore a prosthetic nose, thought to be silver or gold, but which exhumation proved to be brass. More than four hundred years later, Kim Kardashian had a nose job. Thus the two were fated to meet on one of my journal pages.

I never would have dreamed of giving Kim a gold nose, but the necessities of making a triple acrostic in Sonnet format demanded it. I also had to slop three lines over into the next line to preserve the rhyme scheme.

This is not my first foray into a discussion of enhancement for the sake of beauty. There was this, done in October of 2008:

Much more recently I did a portrait of a woman whose only enhancement, far as I knew, was staying alive for a century. Her beauty stunned me. My drawing is but a rough echo:

Friends, when it comes to Work Done, the best place for it is on the pages of our lives.

—One with Clay, Image and Text

a showcase of the writings and art works of Gary W. Bowers

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Tycho Brahe’s Nose, and Other Work Done