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Stars, Key & Hutch

July 11, 2013
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A couple of days ago a dynamic duo named Beth & Paul sold me an oak desk/hutch they’d advertised on Craigslist. The hutch is eminently drawable but needs company; thus this page was born. It is a sometimes thinly, sometimes thickly disguised celebration of puns and other word-association sorties, sorta. (Like those last two words.) (Like those last two words?)

Here is the quadruple-acrostic transcription:

Some friendly Flicka ate her oats & whinnied, meaning Pooh
The queen of Egypt slaked her thirst & Brutus he et tu
Avoirdupois was pounded out & tried & found in want
Recovery’s de-livery’s a frisked & bucking bronc
So roar at ease Sorority: shellac & conquer conch

Fan + Taz + Sum = Phantasm

July 8, 2013
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The Fan is the fan in my study. Taz is the Tasmanian Devil, with which I’ve taken a couple of liberties, but nowhere near as much as the Looney Tunes folks took, bless them. The Sum is a summation, derived from withered memories of first-semester calculus class of more than half my life ago. It all makes weird sense if you think of the fan as a disseminator of etheric force, Taz as apocalyptic primality, and the Sum as the glide-path approach to an unreachable asymptotic discontinuity.

Here are the words:

Filaments become the warp & weft from eldritch looms
Analogued anomalies evolve as strange as Mu
Numinosity precurses curse: the ZAP of Doom

For my Girlfriend on her Birthday

July 6, 2013
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Here is a real Old-School Acrostic for My Kind of Gal:

D is for Delight–it’s what you swim in
E of course is Elegance–très chic
N: you are the Niftiest of women
I is your Identity unique
S is for your Sweetness: you enrapture
E is for your Eloquence divine

–That’s D E N I S E whom mere words cannot capture;
Would that you, O Birthday Girl, were mine!

Love,
Gary

daaaawwwnnn

July 5, 2013
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I have heard and read that the most popular beginning for the lyrics to a blues song is “Woke up this morning…” I think I know why: every day is like a little lifetime, and when you wake up you are born.

the day be
gins with ligh
tened sky, with
coffee drip, with bright-hurt
eye–& when you
get a Breakfast
in you, time will let
the day continue.

Appley Encore

July 4, 2013
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I wasn’t very happy with my apple drawing yesterday, so I tried, tried again, with the notion that if an apple does an encore there better be some core involved.

Here are the words, and I hope my friend and correspondent Michel Lamontagne forgives the atrocious use of French.

An Appetite may intervene
Perhaps divert to soup tureen
Perhaps les pommes’ll suit Jean-Luc
Legumes en table–not too cuckoo
Esprit de corps will cause to soar
Yet Winesaps please us even more

Smoke Alarm, Meet Unbad Apple

July 3, 2013
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A bad apple spoils the bunch, but an unbad apple can brighten a day and keep you out of the waiting room. A smoke alarm makes a piercingly awful noise, but you’ll be glad it did. So here’s to these two little-sung inanimate-yet-not Heroes.

Smoke Alarm words:

SHRIEK! & so begins a drama
Manic panic all asnarl
Out the door go babe & mama
Knocking shut-up life ajar
Enervation but no harm

Unbad Apple words:

Useful crispbit snack for gal or fella
Untold myth unwrit by Ray Kinsella
Nature’s firework: round & red, with pop
Buy, compare: our manmade food is glop
Ah, the pectin’d über-treat bodes well
Diminishing one’s load to ‘bag’atelle

NOTE: Ray Kinsella is the author of Field of Dreams. He kind of played fast&loose with J. D. Salinger’s privacy in the novel, perhaps trying to achieve the coup of bringing Mr. Salinger back to the public light. Note that in the movie Salinger has been replaced by the fictitious Terence Mann, magnificently played by James Earl Jones. All of that reminded me that the Garden of Eden story does NOT mention an apple; apples, as Harlan Ellison pointed out, are not indigenous to the Mideast. (See Ellison’s “The Deathbird” for story-springboard use of that.)

Edgy Fauna (Poem Sold Separately)

July 2, 2013
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Above is a pencil drawing using not the point of the pencil but the edge. If you hold the pencil as if it were a snake you were handling, with the sharpened part of the pencil being the snake’s head, you’re ready to draw with the edge and not the point.

Below is a poem I wrote today. I write a lot of poetry that I don’t illustrate. (Title suggested by my ineffably transcendent Girlfriend, Denise…)

cool water

i toast
my tribe
and then
imbibe
o cool water

the sun
may scathe
but i
then bathe
with cool water

let’s walk
the lab
his paws
to dab
in cool water

the rain
is steady
your face
is ready
for cool water

row row
your boat
and let
it float
on cool water

Wander Window

June 30, 2013
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Here is an oblique salute to comic-book artists, who must think of their multiple illustrations on a page both as individual images and as elements in a greater composition.

I seem to remember an issue of GRAPHIS Magazine, perused in the Glendale Community College Library (which has since evolved, or something, into a “Media Center”) by me in the early 70’s, that was devoted to the comic-book art of old-school Jack Kirby and (then) new-wave Neal Adams. But before the issue got to those two gentlemen they asked themselves who the FIRST Comic-Book Artist was, and they offered Francisco Goya as a possible answer: he’d done a multi-panel sequence of a monk disarming an armed robber.

All two-dimensional artwork is one or more Wander Windows. The quality and delivery effectiveness of the window wander capacity depends on a few factors, skill of the artist being but one of them. Interaction, not mere execution, is key. (Wow, that sounds pompous; sorry!)

Here are my acrostical words:

Wallops whaling with Kapow
As the foe goes Yai-Kai-Yai
Now the damsel frames a frown
Double-Dee’d unless she lied
EC Comics’ Anti-Hero
Rousted bouts down Pain&Fear Row