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Spatial Delivery — Sine Here, Please

May 9, 2013
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The starship Enterprise, as conceived by Gene Roddenberry, whom Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, called “The Great Bird of the Galaxy,” will endeavor in the 23rd Century “to boldly go where no one has gone before.” But Arthur C. Clarke, much more scientifically attuned than the late great Roddenberry, says, “The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”

Meanwhile humans of two different hegemonies have ventured beyond our atmosphere. This page has a hint of the magnitude of that very real endeavor, the various forces (gravitational, ideological, economical, teleological, and so forth) influencing the effort, and the hope and the despair of the future of human space exploration. Part of the hint is that in free fall, there is no rightside-up; we groundlings can’t take in a page like this in one glance, or even one gaze. Betters than us (or is it we?) will follow, I hope.

Rest In Peace, Ray Harryhausen

May 8, 2013
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Peter Jackson and George Lucas both cite this late, lamented man as the one who made what they did in LORD OF THE RINGS and STAR WARS possible. And Nick Park (hmmmm–double acrostic possibility!), creator of Wallace and Gromit, says he was “one of the true greats.”

I will never forget the fight with the skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS. What artistry! What fine four-dimensional sculpting!

Here are the words to the “Rest In Peace Ray Harryhausen” acrostic:

Reliable magic makes crowds ooh & aah
Ethereal sunbeams become Shangri-La
So sculpt a Medusa & snake up her hair
Then rattle the skeletons Jason can’t bear
Intriguing ensnaring of slow & unwary
Nefarious creatures cf C. J. Cherryh
Put Mighty Joe Young in a place like Samoa
Enjoy fleeting fortune as weird as an emu
And what kind of hope say the murmuring trees
Can memory seemingly borne on a breeze
Endure for the man who gave FREEZIN’ a reason

Here are the words to the “Stop Motion Animation” acrostic:

SpecTACular ocular transcend of medium
Spellbinding bean-counters to charm & ungreedy ’em
Sporadical life-likeness fast- or slo-mo
Tumultuous mayhem as red as merlot
Osiris and Horus and fine Nefertiti
Occulting Rosettas with sketch & graffito
Put hard work & vision in–pay as you go
Proclaim a new wonderment of the unknown
Please let us acknowledge the seeds he has sown

grasping rasputin

May 7, 2013
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This post could have as easily been titled “Die Hard: 1916.” Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was hard to kill. The first assassination attempt was disembowelment; it took him 10 weeks to recover. In the second, multifarious, and ultimately successful attempt, he was shot, poisoned, bludgeoned, and dumped in the water. An autopsy revealed death by drowning.

Later, he was disinterred and burned, and legend has it that he sat up before succumbing to the flames. Read his fascinating story on Wikipedia, if you dare!

Rodman Edward Serling, or Remember the Twilight Zone Where…?

May 4, 2013
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A popular conversation-opener at Unit VI Elementary in the mid-60s was “Remember the Twilight Zone where…” The Twilight Zone was the gold standard of Cool TV Shows. How tragic that its creator, narrator, and author of the majority of its episodes, Rod Serling, died long before his hair turned completely gray. He would have been Serling Silver.

The sad fact is that Rod Serling was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes and work, work, work. He died in a hospital of a different kind of broken heart. But his family life, as described by his daughter, Anne Serling, was rich with love and high good humor. I’ve just read an advance copy of Anne’s memoir, AS I KNEW HIM: MY DAD, ROD SERLING, and good Heavens, I wish I had met and known him. Read the book, which is heartily endorsed by Carol Burnett, Robert Redford, and Betty White, and you too will wish my wish.

Appropriately for a page dedicated to the six-Emmy-award-winning creator of The Twilight Zone, I write this at 4:14 AM local time.

At the upper right is an ersatz Twilight Zone intro, which, if you’re a fan of the show, you will not be able to read without hearing Mr. Serling’s unforgettable narrative voice.

Here are the words to the acrostic:

Risky business, television–hey, ask a man who knows
O those censored teleplays–the jerks would predispose
Dimwits dumbing down unto a low denominator
Mangled messages with wounds so often proving fatal
Ah, but this man persevered with WORK fulfilling wishing–in
Noting his sad passing we must add that he’s gone fishing

Calm/Rage/Temper-A-Mental

May 3, 2013
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Many years ago, in Mr. Richmond’s Senior English class at Glendale High School, I wrote an essay in which I admitted knowing almost nothing about the subject. Milnor Richmond, in his profound wisdom, circled the admission in red and wrote “Don’t admit it.” I have never forgotten that…

…but I haven’t always taken his advice, literally, literarily, or figuratively. About this page I wish to admit that it has serious flaws. It doesn’t say all that much; what it has to say is confusing; and the face that is supposed to represent Rage doesn’t: it just looks like a guy about to sneeze.

All that said, I don’t think the page is a waste of time to look at. As another wise teacher, Darlene Goto, former Drawing & Composition instructor at Glendale Community College, would often say to a student, “It has possibilities.” I am creatively arrogant enough to say that if I ever take a decent amount of time to realize the page’s possibilities, I’ll have a text/image for the ages. (Now I hear Mr. Richmond’s gravelly voice saying, “Don’t declaim it.”)

Hear are the words to the two acrostics:

Cold fury’s touch will sear
A blast of HATE is near–a
Lunatic–don’t beg
Methinks Fate will renege

Thoughtful speculators dream
Essays to assay a meme
Many wingbeats tax a swan
Pray consult a clairvoyant [French pronunciation, not American]
End with panicked dash, mach schnell–a
Runaround leaves us unwell

National Rationale

May 2, 2013
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In grade school they hit us with Nationalism, and they hit us hard. We pledged allegiance to the flag, and then we marched in place to “You’re a grand old flag/You’re a high-flying flag/And forever in peace may you wave/You’re the emblem of/The land I love/The home of the free and the brave…” The song later boasted “where there’s never a boast or a brag…”

Miss Heath, the pouter-pigeon of a Chorus teacher, wasn’t done with us yet. Here’s one she played so many times I still remember it 50 years later, though I’ve never heard it since:

This is my country,
Land of my birth;
This is my country,
Grandest on Earth.
I pledge thee my allegiance,
America the Bold,
For this is my country
To have and to hoooooooold!

So what’s wrong with a little patriotic zeal? Well, it perpetuates Us as opposed to Them. And, folks, we’re all of us on Earth in the same leaky boat right now. We have much to do, we world citizens, or, say most climate scientists of repute, things are going to get tipping-point uninhabitable before this century’s end.

My modest proposal, implied via my latest journal page, is that we change focus.

Here are the words to the acrostic:

Notorious illusions make us fear
And nictitate our vision–make unsclera
The blinding process yields an idiot
Invading Homeland’s soul & presidio
Oppression strikes peones y patrón
Nulls personality with harsh persona
And M I C R O —L O C A L I Z E S commonweal
Let’s focus on Cassatt & Ming & Schiele

Disarrray, with Three Rs

April 30, 2013
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Unfortunately, when you illustrate Disarray with a text component, the text become nigh-impossible to read. That’s why I’m grateful for the annotative aspect of blogging–I can provide the text in readable format, thus:

Discussion’s fine if density goes SHEER
It helps when once-opacity turns clear
Still: bubbles effervesce in Perrier
And NOW is quickly LOST in yester-day

Does it seem random? (Note to historians of the future: in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the word “random” developed a pejorative connotation.) I’d like to point out that Disarraneous rhymes with Miscellaneous.

Why are there three Rs in my Disarrray? Just seemed right.

Lacrimal Ductwork

April 29, 2013
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This page has an odd provenance: I’d just eaten French toast. There was a puddle of butter/syrup on the plate. A bagel was available to sop it up (Goodness GRACIOUS, what a Glutton), but the puddle didn’t want to cooperate. Then I remembered that magic of physics known as Capillary Action, and set two bagel-quarters inside-down and waited; lo, they did absorb. This led me to read up on Capillary Action via Wikipedia, and that led to lacrimal ducts, and acrostic compulsion led to Lacrimal Ductwork.

The acrostic defies pure rhyming, but the first thing that occurred to me was that “you” rhymes with the “goût” of the French expression “chacun à son goût,” which may be translated to “each to his own.” Then the first line sprang to be, but the third line could only be near-rhymed, and, Heaven help me, I could not resist trying “hermaphroditic.” This led to thinking about how Man’s Inhumanity to Man might be cured with androgyny (anyone under forty read THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. LeGuin?), and then the poem pushed me aside completely and wrote itself.

Here are the words:

LIQUIDITY may not need Liquid
And TRAGEDY may not need U
CAUSALITY’s hermaphroditic
RIGHTEOUS? Chacun à son goût.
IDEALLY we’d never kow-tow
MISANTHROPY makes us so do
ANDROGYNY’s a higher power
LUCIDITY unkinks a Kook

I don’t think it’s too much a stretch to relate all this to Lacrimal Ductwork, which involves Crying.