Birds And Three Pretty Birds

I’ve just got a couple of little things today.


Birds

Last week I posted about a new kind of bird I’ve been seeing in a large parking lot around here. I thought it was some kind of plover, but I wasn’t sure. I’ve looked around a little more and now I think the new kind of bird around here is a kind of plover called a “Killdeer.”

Wikipedia says they’re fairly common birds. I’ve never seen one before this spring, but I’ve seen a lot of them recently. I think the Killdeer is the only plover with two bands, so that seems to be the distinguishing characteristic. I’m not a birder, but I think this bird is identified.

They sure do like to run around on asphalt.




Three Pretty Birds

Against my own advice—Can We Reboot The World?—I went to a library and checked out a book I’ve been thinking about reading for a long time. This book:

I really like all three of these women. They’ve all written great songs. I think I admire the songs of Joni Mitchell the most, but of the three, Carly Simon was always my favorite. Her voice is just so beautiful and she is so pretty.

This is one of those books, though, that I’ve kind of been saving.

A Place To Read Books I’ve Never Read

I would actually kind of prefer to be reading this book when I was, say, a hundred miles offshore on a blue water cruising sailboat making waves for Africa or something.

What I mean is that I know I’m going to be really depressed reading this book and I wish I had the resources to put the whole contemporary world out of my mind and just move on to some place else where the issues raised by reading a book like this just would be a thing of the past.

What I mean is that these three women wrote and performed such beautiful music, but I know this book is going to be about how fucked up their personal lives were and that stuff is just so depressing that, in general, I would just rather not know about it.

But sometimes if you put up with all the nonsense you get some interesting back-story about the music business so it is good, every now and then, to buckle down and force yourself to wade through all the tribulations some woman had to go through just to sing a nice song.

I guess.

Anyway, I’m going to give it a try.

The reason I decided to buckle down and try to read this book now is one night I was flipping around at Amazon and I looked up this book to see what readers were saying about it. I jumped right to the complaints and right away I saw a very funny review.

The funny review kind of confirmed some of the things I thought I would discover about the book if I ever read it, but the tone of the review was so funny that it kind of gave me courage and reassurance that someone else out there would complain about the very kind of things I’d be complaining about.

Here is the review that cheered me up even before I looked into the book and got depressed myself:

I have never seen writing quite like this. Others have mentioned the mile-long sentences, the paranthetical digressions that rip apart sentences and paragraphs on almost every page and the general herky-jerky nature of the narrative. All true. But what really got to me were the author's strange use of strange new adverbs ("pioneeringly," "karmically," "welcomely," etc.) and the overuse of hyphenated composite adjectives. Surprisedly, I began keeping a list of these in-contemprary-American-English-unfound expressions. For some this might seem like nit-picking, but I don't think I've ever read a book in which the writing itself intruded so much on my experience of reading. By the time I was reading about "mountain-life-idled Carole," I was beginning to feel like "Weller-writing-addled" Daniel!

But it wasn't just the writing. Others have pointed out the excessive attention paid to who was sleeping with whom, and the fact that the author did not interview two of the main subjects of the book. The latter really is a problem and at times the book reads like a series of short biographies of people you have never heard of who had some passing acquaintance with one of the three subjects. In general, there is a lot of irrelevant information and I thought the author had an unfortunate tendency to name-drop. For example, in a book about these three women, you would expect to see attention paid to James Taylor. But why do we need to know that some other girlfriend of Taylor later went on to date Woody Allen and other celebrities? Who cares? Likewise, it seems like everyone mentioned in the book who went to Harvard - no matter how fleeting the reference or how irrelevant to the context - is identified as "Harvard educated." Now, I know there is a class and priviledge argument being made about Carly Simon, but who cares if the bass player who intruduced Carole King to some musician or other went to Harvard? You have the feeling that the first questions in every interview were: "What celebrities have you slept with?" and "Did you go to an Ivy League school?"

More fundamentally, though, the premise of the book is a little forced. The women are very different artists. Joni Mitchell was never a Top 40 hit-maker like Carly Simon and early-70's Carole King. When those two women were riding high on the charts, Mitchell was already artsy counter-culture by comparison. And the author does very little to explore her significance in popular music, relying instead on period reviews and cliches about Mitchell's career. A more interesting group of subjects would perhaps have been Laura Nyro, Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones. But then the whole sex-partner overlap story would have been out the window.

For readers born after 1980, the book might make some interesting connections between pop music and wider cultural history. Otherwise, though, the cultural history here is pretty superficial. The 50s folk scene was dominated by men. Well, sure. The sexual revolution was a mixed blessing for women. Yep, read about that too.

Still, I read the book from beginning to end and was never seriously tempted to put it down. (If I hadn't been reading it on my Kindle, though, I would have thrown it across the room a few times!) Once I decided to take absolutely everything in it with a grain of salt, I just let it happen. My main interest was in Joni Mitchell and I think the treatment of her work was probably the weakest in the book. But I found the discussion of Carole King's environmental activism in Idaho surprising and quite interesting.

So, I cannot recommend that you not read it, but you should go into it with your eyes open.

D. Watson
Amazon Customer Review

I don’t know who “D. Watson” is, but I strongly suspect that I will enjoy that review more than I enjoy reading the book. But I’m trying to be strong.

The author of this book, Sheila Weller, apparently writes for Vanity Fair magazine a lot. Yech. I’ve mentioned Vanity Fair once not too long ago. In an internet sort of way, I know someone who works there—Things Libraries Throw Away

Still, I’m trying to be strong. So I’m trying to read this book. Maybe I’ll do another post, someday, recounting how far into the book I got before I gave up and couldn’t take all the grief and heartbreak the women think they had to put up with. Or maybe I’ll enjoy reading the book. I’m nervous, but I’m giving it a shot.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



The Optimum Expressive Moment Of Time And Place


It’s Children Screaming



Extinct Entertainment And Dinosaurs



What Love Looks Like In Words


The Hidden Princess Of Mount Shasta


Mischievous Girls: A Cautionary Tale



Losing Cool

Another Quick Megan Fox Moment

This is not one of those days when I have nothing to say.

However this is one of those days when what I have to say is not exactly earth-shaking. However I want to do this post anyway, so I’m going to do it.


Today’s post is, sort of, about Megan Fox. I’ve written about her once before.

One Quick Megan Fox Moment

I’m not a Megan Fox fan, but I’m still going to do this post about her.

Sort of.


But I want to do some background.

First of all, just the name Megan means a lot me. My first girlfriend was named Megan and I’m still amazed—looking back at what a lunatic I was as a teenager (I mean, look at me now and just imagine a kid just like me but with more energy and even less awareness!)—I’m still amazed any girl wanted to be called my girlfriend, so I will always look back on that Megan with love and I will always react to the name ‘Megan’ with fondness.

Secondly, the name ‘Megan’ has some conflict for me. There’s the fondness because of that girlfriend business I mentioned in the last paragraph. But there is also something like fear, or even soul-wrenching terror, because the young girl in “The Exorcist” was named ‘Regan’ (you know, rhymes with ‘Megan’) and that was/is my pick for the scariest movie ever made. (I still have trouble watching it, and, generally, I just don’t watch it.) I can’t even own a copy of the novel. (To make matters worse, when I went to a Catholic school, my class once went on retreat and stayed at the seminary where one of the real-life models for one of William Peter Blatty’s priest characters was living when something bad happened and the Church instructed him [!] to stop doing whatever research into the occult he was then doing. I slept in a room just downstairs [!!] from the actual real-life room that priest was doing his ‘research’ in. Holy cow!)

So, anyway, that’s some background. Just the name ‘Megan’ pushes a lot of my buttons. The old girlfriend button. The Megan/Regan button. The whole terror-of-Satan button.

One last piece of background. Here at the blog I’ve written about the way the modern pop culture business is obnoxious and brutal in its treatment of women. Even ‘Star Trek’ of all things was less-than-wonderful.

Pirates And Reality Revisionism

Star Trek And Reality Revisionism

Gender Terror And Reality Revisionism

So I’m going to do another post—this brief, brief post—about Megan Fox even though I have no particular affection for Megan Fox herself. As I said in my previous brief post about her, I’ve never even rented the DVD of her movie “Jonah Hex.” She seems really dumb and I don’t like dumb women and she has a tattoo and I don’t like tattoo women. But she has a first name that gets my attention and her particular tribulations with Michael Bay seem to me to be an example of the kind of grief women have to put up with in the pop culture business.

Okay. That’s some background. Here’s today’s post.

*

I mentioned a while ago that after starring in the first two Transformers movies, Megan Fox got fired from the concluding movie in the trilogy. Or, at least, the third entry in the ‘franchise.’

People have, for the most part, joked about why she got fired. For instance: Top 10 Reasons Megan Fox Was Fired From ‘Transformers 3′

Now, the story coming from the production side of the issue is that Megan Fox got fired by Steven Spielberg because he got pissed off at her for her idiotic comparison of Michael Bay to Hitler.

Whatever.

I’ve become kind of interested in how fans are going to react to her not being in the third film.

Now, people from my generation remember Tina Louise and 1) how we were angry at her for not doing the Gilligan’s Island reunions; and 2) how we were angry at the producers for going ahead with the reunions without her. More recently, people like me were kind of proud of Kristin Kreuk—Lana Lang from ‘Smallville’—for leaving the show when it got so horrible and then not coming back and being part of the awful final season.

So now some people are wondering about “Transformers 3.” Some people think it will be the biggest film of the summer, and might even set box office records.

But people don’t really know what to expect from fans of Megan Fox.

Will her absence have no effect at all on box office?

Will enough people be upset with her not being in the film to actually cause a noticeable hit in ticket sales?

(I actually talked with one guy who didn’t know that Megan Fox had gotten fired and, when he found out she wouldn’t be in the movie, changed his plans and canceled his plans to go to see the film on opening day. Now he plans on just waiting for the DVD.)

I myself wasn’t going to go see it anyway.

But I’ve been checking out industry reaction leading up to the release and today I saw something interesting at an industry blog. I even left a comment of my own at the story. But I was most interested in something somebody said a few comments after mine. Somebody left this comment and interesting observation:

Wow…the most posted story of the day.

Sort of gives one pause…why?

So the answer to the question, “Who cares?’ is…many folks, apparently.

Megan wins!

Michael Bay Says Spielberg Told Him
To Fire Megan Fox Over Her 'Hitler' Remark

(That wasn’t me. My comment was four comments up.)

Anyway, so it looks like a lot of people are interested in Megan Fox getting fired. And it looks like a lot of people are letting their hatred for Michael Bay influence them, at least, to have a little sympathy for Megan Fox.


Hmmm. I wonder how the movie will do, and I wonder if—however it does—I wonder if the Megan Fox business will influence the ticket sales?

Music At The Garden’s Edge

Something like two thousand years ago, when the status quo of Roman occupation became unbearable to early Christians they were able to leave the Middle East and re-locate to the fringes of the Roman empire in Europe.

Something like five hundred years ago, when the status quo of Roman Catholicism and secular nationalism became unbearable to Europe’s Protestants they were able to leave Europe and re-locate to colonies in the ‘New World’ here in North America.

Today, when the status quo of consumerism and global corporatism becomes unbearable to Christians—or anyone else—where can anyone go?

Escape From Earth And The Status Cow

NUMBER TWO: I am definitely an optimist. That’s why it doesn’t matter who Number One is. It doesn’t matter which side runs the Village.

NUMBER SIX: It’s run by one side or the other?

NUMBER TWO: Oh certainly. But both sides are becoming identical. What in fact has been created is an international community—a perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they’re looking into a mirror, they will see that this is the pattern for the future.

NUMBER SIX: The whole Earth as the Village?

NUMBER TWO: That is my hope. What’s yours?

NUMBER SIX: I’d like to be the first man on the Moon.

The Chimes of Big Ben

In Ken Russell’s story of the White Worm
there is no witch to reveal the secret
to a brave knight of how to kill the Worm.

And technology—that is, dynamite,
in the Bram Stoker version of the tale—
doesn’t make everything right in the end.

In Ken Russell’s story of the White Worm
the most beautiful woman is a snake.
And even if this beautiful woman
wants to murder you, music can charm her.

Music charms her. A song usurps her will
and she can only dance to the music.
This doesn’t make her happy. When music
stops, the musician often gets murdered.

But how long can a musician perform?

And how long can a recording play back?

Even nuclear power plants melt-down.
And then not only does the power stop
but the core melts through the containment site.
So recordings can’t play without power.
And the musician dies from the fallout.

The White Worm is a very old story.

A woman’s dancing at the garden’s edge.

How far away can a musician run?

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The “Lambton Worm” at Wikipedia


Bram Stoker’s “Lair of the White Worm” at Wikipedia


Ken Russell’s “Lair of the White Worm” at Wikipedia



*



“The Garden’s Edge”



Sense Of Place


A Little More Venus Talk



The Monster Thought Of The Waldensians



“Where Did The Cows Go?”



I Can’t Sleep In My Kitchen


Hooking Up Is About Love



Maggie And The Fish Head



“The Clock Had All His Attention”

Hot Liquid Savage And A Cup Of Paintbrushes

A paint brush for years lost at sea
has been rescued and brought back home.
Brushes have nightmares of being
lost where there’s no one to hold them.
I may have imagined it but
I think my brushes read this news
last night and danced in their glass cup.

Paint Brushes Have Nightmares And Sometimes Dance

Ever wondered about how long your Series 7 brush might last? Well back in 1994, Emma Pearce, then Technical Adviser at Winsor & Newton, found out in a most unusual way.

"Like so many people, I've always had a real fascination about the Titanic, fuelled at art school by those wonderful black and white photos of the grand staircase, staterooms, 1st Class promenades and reading rooms, the construction photographs and the passengers boarding in Southampton.

The 1994 exhibition at Greenwich Maritime Museum was the first following the locating and salvaging of the great ship, the prospect of seeing actual items retrieved from those rooms and decks was really exciting, certainly one of those landmark exhibitions in one's lifetime.

So I queued and travelled round with the hoards, amazed at each exhibit; the ship's compass, a chandelier from the 1st Class public room, a printed luggage tag, a suitcase still locked, pieces of coal, a steward's jacket with his name written on, even a bottle of champagne still corked. It was fantastic.

Then I turned a corner to pore over another cabinet and saw a paintbrush, fascinating I thought. Naturally, as a painter and Technical Adviser I leaned close to have a better look. My gasp at seeing it was a black lacquered Series 7 was clearly audible to those nearby. It truely looked exactly the same as those in my paint pot! How could this have been 2 ½ miles down for more than 75 years?

Now many of us who lovingly care for our best Series 7 brushes can be using them for many years but the ability to survive in those conditions and remain usable is surely the ultimate endorsement of quality!"

“A Titanic Discovery by Emma Pearce!”

originally from Winsor and Newton
now retrieved from a Google cache
dated: May 29, 2011 02:30:37 GMT

I wonder: Does that paintbrush want to go back?
I mean the watercolor paintbrush rescued
from the deep Titanic, a ghost ship, ghost-crewed,
where only a ghost artist down in the black

cold deep might paint in a ghost counterattack
on the black cold deep, moving in a ghost mood
to paint a ghost image never to be viewed,
endlessly drowned in the black cold deep attack.

My paintbrushes, there, on my desk in a cup
watch me record music, compose photographs,
film videos with thousands of images

on land, here, where the Sun goes down and comes up
on me arranging words into paragraphs.
Cold ghost artists haunt hot liquid savages.

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Haunted



This Airship, This Woman, This Dream



Pretty Crates Above Train Tracks


Thinking About Watercolors, Drawings And Photos


The Lost World Of Stacy And The Llama





That image is from my little film
“Creatures of Darkness and Light.”
It took hundreds of images to make
that brief animation, none of them
painted with watercolors or
with a brush of any kind.

I am haunted by this.

New Birds (In The Parking Lot)

Around these parts—urban and suburban areas of the Chicago south side—the bird situation is usually pretty standard. There are sparrows and pigeons. And robins, blackbirds, crows, gulls and some hawks. Sometimes you see a cardinal or a blue jay. And once or twice a year you see something odd, like an escaped canary or something else yellow or multi-colored.

This spring things have been a little odd, bird-wise.

First, starting near the end of winter, there were almost no sparrows at all around here. I’ve never seen that before.

Then, as spring got started, there were a lot of robins. I mean, a lot. People would stand in front of their house talking to neighbors about all the robins running around.

Now, lately, I’ve been seeing a whole new kind of bird running around a particularly large parking lot around here. This kind of guy or gal:

These little guys or gals spend the whole day running around the parking lot. They fly fine and if you get too close (these photos are my little point-and-shoot camera at full telephoto with digital assist) they take off easily and dart around the sky with ease. But they land and then seem to like to run quickly around the asphalt.

And they peep. Loudly. Their peeps are so loud you’d think the peeping sound was coming from a bird twice as large.

I’ve never seen this kind of bird before. After looking around some bird guides, I guess they might be some kind of plover. To my eyes they look like a Little Ringed Plover, but those are European birds. I don’t know.

I wanted to post this because I’ve mentioned the sparrow situation before. And I’ve done a picture of the robins. This is the latest odd bird thing around here. Normally a year goes by and you don’t really think about birds at all. This is the third odd bird thing in the last few months.

Parking lot birds.

They’re pleasant enough—they don’t seem to do anything bad. They just run around and make a lot of peeping noises.



Little birds watching
the big trucks driving away,
rumbling and peeping.

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Hot Red Earth, Cold Blue Jazz


Cars Are The New Birds


No Bird Shadows On The Analemma


Quasi Una Flying Car Fantasia



Technology And Food



Everything’s Happening In Parking Lots



“Where Did The Cows Go?”


“Yet Baghdad Is”


Shanghai In The Epipelagic Layer


Extinct Entertainment And Dinosaurs


The Application Of Beyond Understanding


Quasi Una Petroleum Fantasia



Motion Beyond The Fox Point

Maggie And The Fish Head

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in Nuclear Accidents, Beatles, Mean Snakes that I was watching a film called “Vipers”—a killer snake movie, about a resort town terrorized by hundreds of mutant vipers.

It’s not a good movie by any metric, but there is one character who is fun to watch. She is a disgruntled teenage girl named “Maggie,” played by actress Genevieve Buechner.

She is always yelling at adults and running off to do what she wants to do.

At one point she yells at her parents and storms off to be by herself. They never explain why, but she stalks down to the town docks—maybe to buy a hot dog?—and a fisherman is just catching a fish. But as he reels in the fish, something bites the fish in half. The fisherman holds up the head of the fish right when Maggie, all grumpy, is walking past. She looks at what’s left of the fish, then at the fisherman, sneers, and walks away.

Maggie and the fish head.

It’s my favorite part of the movie.



*



Damn punk kids. They don’t care about the mutant snakes
underwater biting an old guy’s fish in half.

Damn punk kids. In new blue jeans and little backpacks
walking around all grumpy, frowning and sneering.

Damn punk kids. The mutant snakes want to eat you, too,
along with the fish and the old people you hate!

The worst part of getting old like Peter Townshend
isn’t mutant snakes, it’s sneers from the damn punk kids.

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You Damn Punk Kids


Street Lights And Slutty Bluetits


The Damn Punk Human Who Isn’t Jamie



The Sound Of One Hand Chording


Pictures Of Lily As A Zombie


Saturn/Books/Mean Things/Rock And Roll


Doris Day Day


Get Well Soon, Marianne Faithfull! #4:
The Twenty-Six Muscles Of The Human Face

A Quick Lunar Eclipse Note

As I type this, it is Tuesday, June 14, and it is a little before 10 pm Chicago time. The Moon is visible, but the sky is cloudy. I took a couple of hand-held photos a few minutes ago. With my camera on automatic, it exposes for the clouds:

If I speed up the shutter manually, even though there are high clouds, it is still possible to make out some good lunar features. I’ve posted a Moon map in Sense Of Place. Tonight the rising Moon was 99.3% full.

You can see my favorite sequence of lunar features. Starting from the upper center at the Sea of Serenity you can follow the dark patches down through the Sea of Vapours and down farther until you end up in the Sea of Clouds to the lower left. Mare Nubium.

“Honey, we’re home, here in the Sea of Clouds.”

Tomorrow there will be a great lunar eclipse. Unfortunately for us in the West the lunar eclipse will start and end in the afternoon, Chicago time. Wolfram Alpha has the timeline for Chicago:

And Wolfram Alpha also can map who will be able to see the lunar eclipse:

(To get those graphics, just go to Wolfram Alpha
and type: lunar eclipse )

People in the Middle East will get a good view. Some Muslims believe the End Times will be “announced” to the world by two signs in the heavens—there will be a month that will start out with a lunar eclipse and end with a solar eclipse.

This will be a good lunar eclipse, but there is no solar eclipse scheduled for later this month.

So, on one hand, we would seem to be safe. On the other hand, if there IS an unscheduled solar eclipse at the end of this month, that would be a pretty darn good sign that something really big is going on in the heavens.

I think we’re reasonably safe.

I mean, at least I think there will NOT be an unscheduled solar eclipse later this month.

There is still the methane and other gases upwelling from the Gulf of Mexico, and the radiation spreading from at least three melt-downs in Fukushima.

So, you know, we’re not safe.

But we are safe from bizarre astronomy beliefs.

So, you know, there’s that.

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Whispering On The Moon


Amy Winehouse In The Sea Of Crises



Sense Of Place



Moonlight Becomes You

Loch Ness Apocalypse

If the Loch Ness monster can be a high-fashion sweater
or a box of tissues or an aquarium goldfish
and I think the Loch Ness monster can be all of these things
and anything else it might want or need to appear as
then I think I finally understand that young woman
and her strange interest in my interest in monsters.

On the internet nobody can tell if you’re a dog.

In real life no one can tell if you’re the Loch Ness monster.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .




On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog



*



Ashley And The Green Sweater (Part One)


Ashley And The Green Sweater (Part Two)


Ashley And The Green Sweater (Part Three)



Mrs. Blandings And The Tissue Horror (Part One)


Mrs. Blandings And The Tissue Horror (Part Two)


Mrs. Blandings And The Tissue Horror (Part Three)



Goldfish And Sea Monsters #1 of 3


Goldfish And Sea Monsters #2 of 3


Goldfish And Sea Monsters #3 of 3

“The Librarian And The Painter”

“Cinéma du look was a French film movement of the 1980s, analysed, for the first time, by French critic Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma issue n° 448, May 1989, in which Besson was lumped with two other directors who shared "le look." These directors were said to favor style over substance, spectacle over narrative. It referred to films that had a slick visual style and a focus on young, alienated characters...”

quote from Style And Substance
And Acoustic Terror

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



Real Estate Gothic



Coming Attractions: The Librarian And The Painter


Dinosaur And Woman: A Puppet Show


The Donut Shop Parking Lot Is Not Enough


Rembrandt, Magic And Substance Becomes Mind

Coming Attractions: The Librarian And The Painter

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“The Librarian And The Painter”

“A Little Bit Of A Storm”

We’re having a little bit of a storm here tonight. ... About the most interesting thing we’re likely to see around here will be some big branches cracked off trees tomorrow. That’s okay, that’s kind of interesting...

Les Paul Versus Taylor Swift!

What was that I said last night?

The most interesting thing we’re likely to see would be some broken branches?

Oh boy!

That’s one of the main streets around here. The main streets are reasonably clear. But police are blocking off the side streets because as soon as you get off the main streets, all the side streets look like this:

The side streets around here are completely underwater! I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’ve seen sewers overflow. And I’ve seen sewers clog and cause the curb to flood. But all the side streets around here are completely underwater!

Bizarrely, everyone still has power. And buildings don’t seem to be flooding. But the streets are completely under water. I mean, look at this!

I talked to lots of people this morning. One woman who grew up around here said when she was a kid there was a flood as bad as this, but that was something like thirty years ago. I talked to a guy who just got back from driving around in his Jeep and he said he saw places where water was bubbling up through cracks in the street.

That’s my little silver car way in the upper right, under the tree. No big branches broke off and fell down on my car. But the waters rose up and now the water is just below the door level of the car.

I mentioned yesterday that we had “a little bit of a storm here.” I guess I jinxed us, by hoping to see something interesting. Because I sure got to see something I’ve never seen before. A suburb under water!

And it looks like more storms are just a few hours away!

I’m going to try to have a little film tomorrow. Puppets singing, puppets romancing, that kind of thing. I wrote a special song for it. But I have no idea if power will hold out or if I’ll have to turn my attention to other things—like trying not to drown and stuff!

I’m going to try to have a little film tomorrow.

Les Paul Versus Taylor Swift!

This post isn’t really about Les Paul versus Taylor Swift. That was just pretend for an exciting headline. Sorry. (I do mention both of them, though, later.)


*


To be honest I don’t have much today. I did some new music today (I started on electric guitar—Les Paul reference—then switched to keyboard), but I want to get a video to go with it, so I will try to have that for Friday.


*


We’re having a little bit of a storm here tonight:

There’s a lot of lightening and it is really windy outside. The trees are blowing back and forth and tomorrow there probably will be a lot of big branches broken off and fallen on cars.

I’m parked under a tree, but I’m too lazy to go out there and move my car.

This is the kind of weather when, in horror movies, the mad scientist sends up kites with wires attached to them to catch lightening and bring his monster to life.

Too bad that good stuff never happens in real life.

If I were doing a movie, I’d have a night like this be the setting for when the dinosaurs burst up through the cracked asphalt of parking lots and start rampaging through cities.

Too bad that good stuff never happens in real life, too.

About the most interesting thing we’re likely to see around here will be some big branches cracked off trees tomorrow. That’s okay, that’s kind of interesting. But it’s not as interesting as mad scientists bringing reanimated corpses back to life or dinosaurs returning to our world to start their rampage.


*


About the only other thing I have for today is to recommend everybody head over to Google’s search page. The “doodle” for Thursday (June 9) is in honor of Les Paul’s birthday. I think he would have been 96. It looks like this:

Google put together a little guitar synthesizer and you can play the strings by moving your mouse over them. Also, there’s a built in recorder, the little red button at the bottom. You click on the red button, and then you can play a song on the strings, and then press the red button again. The guitar synth saves your doodled song and plays it back. It’s about the only Google doodle that I’ve really liked.


*


Les Paul of course was a great guitarist and, for the most part, invented the electric guitar as we know it today. He also more or less invented multi-track recording. One of his first big breaks in national show business was when Bing Crosby—of all people!—was impressed with his guitar playing and hired Les Paul for his radio show.

Les Paul started out in the country and western music world.

There’s progress for you. Once upon a time country and western fans had Les Paul. Now here in the 21st century, here in the George Jetson world, we get Taylor Swift.

Just one of the many reasons I’m rooting for the dinosaurs to dig their way out and come bursting up through our parking lots.

There’s a great Les Paul biography available. I posted about it in A Nod To Guitars With Knobs.

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The Built World Redux—Art And Souvenir


The Girl Who Talks To Dinosaurs



The Mad Scientist Is Always Laughing


The Opposite Of Washing Machine



Pretty Flowers, Taylor Swift, Killer Whales


Taylor Swift With No Makeup


Atlas Shrugged, Taylor Swift, Shangri-La


I’m Picturing Taylor Swift Naked



Diane Wakoski And Batman


Primal Forces Of Nature


Halloween On An Inclined Plane



Candles

The Lost World Of Stacy And The Llama

Today I’ve got something I’ve wanted to put up for a long time, but I never could think of a proper setting for it. I still haven’t, so I’m just going to sort of ramble today.


This is a quote I read a long time ago. So long ago that I can’t really even remember what year it was. It’s just a little quote, but it made a huge impact on me.

“Distinctive tonal changes on glazed or metallic surfaces can be represented subtly, by effacing your habitual marks and creating tonal strengths with carefully graded areas of solid tone. Removing your hallmark style can also create an almost photographic effect.”

Valerie Wiffen
Sketching: Drawing and Planning

It was that quote that got me to change the way I was drawing, back then. That business about “effacing your habitual marks” totally changed the way I worked. I went from being completely at sea, doing stuff that I didn’t even like looking at, to doing cartoons like this:

In most art instruction books from around the era when I was attempting to learn to draw, the whole business of “making marks” seemed to be presented as the “creative” part of drawing. The “marks” a person made were presented as embodying the artist’s personality and you, as a student artist, were supposed to “find” your personal style in the character of the marks you made.

But I really hated that. I couldn’t quite put it into words myself, or even form the thoughts properly, but I hated “making marks.”

It was only when I saw that quote about “effacing your habitual marks” that something in my thinking clicked. Instead of focusing on “making marks” I bought a stump and started blending away the marks I made. I started focusing on values and shapes and edge characteristics and I completely put aside thinking about marks.

And for a while I was happy.

I really miss those days.

The trouble is working that way was really time-intensive for me. It took me five days or so to do a cartoon like that Stacy and the llama cartoon.

But it was really fun and peaceful and I loved working that way.

But I don’t know if I can go back to it. When I try I’m constantly aware of how much time I’m taking and how much I could be doing by working in another technique or just doing stop-motion or video or something else.

I’m sitting here sighing as I type this. I did a lot of cartoons drawing that way. I really miss it.

It has become, for me, a lost world.

And it’s a world I want to go back to. I don’t know why it seems so far away. But it feels completely lost to me.

This is what I’m thinking a lot about right now. Getting back to those days of writing and drawing little things that I really like.

Even if they take a long time to create.


That’s all I’ve got for today.

Sorry.

Can We Reboot The World?

At the other end of the spectrum is Mr. Koons, who runs his vast, high-ceilinged studio with an efficiency that discourages personal interactions. Everyone has an assigned task, from painting a section of a canvas by following elaborate diagrams to mixing dozens of paints to produce exactly the right color. Large paintings are lifted up a wall by electric hoists; in one room on a recent afternoon, two painters worked silently on a canvas at floor level while two others painted the upper part from a scaffold. There's a hierarchy of supervisors, including a studio manager, a painting supervisor and several assistant managers. It brings to mind an assembly line, but the 56-year-old Mr. Koons, who is married to one of his former assistants, bridles at the analogy of a factory. "People get misconceptions that it's about production, like a machine," he states. "But I've thought for a year about almost everything before starting to make it."

Mr. Koons, whose use of assistants is widely known, says he supervises the work intently: "I'm here Monday through Friday and I try to travel as little as possible. The paintings are as if I made every mark myself." Mr. Koons says he doesn't mentor his artist employees, and they don't bring paintings into the studio to show him. "This is about production of the work," he says. "I want them to stay focused on the work here."

The Art Assembly Line
Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2011

So a few days ago I read that story in the Wall Street Journal about artists in the fine arts world (really, they need to officially change the name of that to the so-called “fine arts” world and make the quotes and prefix permanent) who hire assistants to do the actual painting for them. OMG. And they’re all so shameless about it:

"I prefer not to be involved in actually painting," says Mr. Gorlizki, who adds that it would take him 20 years to develop the skills of his chief Indian painter, Riyaz Uddin. "It liberates me not being encumbered by the technical proficiency," he says.

OMG.

When I read stuff like that it takes me about a month to get un-depressed.


And today something happened that didn’t help speed the process of getting un-depressed.

I don’t go into libraries very much any more. I’m dumb, but I wasn’t born yesterday.

Anyway. I don’t go into libraries very much any more. But every now and then I want a specific book and I don’t want to buy the book from Amazon so I brace myself and man-up and steel myself and I visit a library.

Sometimes nothing horrible happens. But, usually, something horrible happens.

Today I visited a small suburban library near here. I wanted to get two specific old books. I checked the catalogue on-line so I knew they were on the shelf. Here’s what happened.

I walked into the library and as I walked toward the stacks I noticed that right in the middle of the library some middle age patron was standing there talking on his cell phone. Neither the two librarians at the reference desk a few feet away nor the three staffers at the check-out desk a few feet away in the other direction were saying anything to this guy.

So I sighed and reminded myself that when you visit a library, these days, you see things you don’t want to see. So I just steeled myself more and moved on.

When I got to the stacks and was grabbing the two books I’d come for, I noticed that sitting at a table at the end of the stacks were two teenage girls talking on their cell phones. Nobody was telling them to shut-up, either.

So I sighed, grabbed my books and went to the check-out desk.

As I was checking out my books at the self-checkout machine, I noticed there was another middle age guy sitting right behind me talking on his cell phone. And none of the three staffers working at the check-out desk were saying anything to him even though they were just standing around looking at computer screens and had no patrons to wait on.

So as I checked out my books I asked the three staffers looking at computer screens, “Excuse me, but does this library have a cell phone policy?”

All three of the staffers looked up, then looked at each other. Then one of them—I guess the senior staffer, a beautiful young woman with something like strawberry blonde hair—said, “We usually request that patrons speak quietly on their cell phones.”

I said, “So, patrons are allowed to use their cell phones in the library, they just have to not yell?”

Again all three staffers looked at each other, then the pretty one said, “Well, we used to have a policy of no cell phone use in the library. But that policy proved just impossible to enforce. So now we ask patrons to speak quietly.”

I said, “Wow, I would think—” But I stopped myself. I’m dumb, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I grabbed my books and said, “Thanks for the info. Have a nice week.” And I got out.

When you go to libraries these days you see things you don’t want to see.


Don’t buy any so-called “fine art.”


Don’t go to libraries!

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Things Libraries Throw Away


A Place To Read Books I’ve Never Read



Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #1: Et In Arcadia Ego

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #2: Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #3: Fons Et Origo

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #4: Atlantis

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #5: The Butterflies From Atlantis


Looking Back At Butterflies From Atlantis




I Hear Dinosaur Music. It’s Beautiful Music.


Modern Romance In The Noir


Creatures Surrounded By Stone



Digging Britney

Digging Britney Redux



A Lost World Where Distance Is God’s Anger

One For My Baby

Today is, among other things, me tying up a couple of loose ends.

A while ago I did a couple of posts where I mentioned the song “One for my Baby, One More for the Road.”

I Hear Dinosaur Music. It’s Beautiful Music.

Modern Romance In The Noir

I included a YouTube clip of the song, but it has always bugged me a little that I didn’t play the song myself.

Then, also a while ago, I did a little film, “Dinosaur And Woman: A Puppet Show.” That film used a bit of the melody from “One for my Baby” with me playing it on keyboard. Again, I didn’t do a video of me playing the whole song myself. (But I did explain in a later post that my keyboard playing in that film got me thinking about synthesizers a lot, so that post has been on my mind a lot.)

I like this song. Mostly, I think, because it was one of the songs played by the robot musicians of Dr. Phibes’s clockwork orchestra:

Now I want to say I HATE people who drink and drive—NEVER drink and drive!—but I like this song. I plan on using little bits and pieces of the song in future posts so I decided to buckle down and do a post of me playing the whole song.

This is such a classic that I bought the sheet music.

For someone like me with little—if any—musical ability, looking at the sheet music for “One for my Baby” was at first pretty intimidating. Right away you notice it is written in two keys. My sheet music starts in E-flat, then modulates up a third to G. And, in both keys, there are some half-steps in the melody so there are accidentals in both keys. But when you look closely at the music, it’s not all too hard. It’s mostly four or five little melodies put together, with one section stated first in E-flat, then repeated in G, with more stuff added. On guitar it’s pretty straightforward, even with the key change and the accidentals. On keyboard, well, chord shapes are more convoluted on keyboard than on guitar so although I can play this on keyboard, I decided to stick to guitar for the video. It’s hard enough, for me, to put all this together on guitar. Each section is straightforward, but putting it all together, into one performance, that took some doing.


I should have let the puppets do it!

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Real Estate Gothic



When You Press Down A Piano Key


Exciting Waveforms

Tennis, French Scumbags, Classic Science

I’ve just got a few little things today.

1) Maria Sharapova lost in the semifinals of the French Open today. Geez, I have a terrible history of jinxing people. I did a couple of posts wishing Elena Dementieva luck and she never won a grand slam. In fact, one time after I did a post wishing Dementieva luck, she had to withdraw from the tournament before her next match because of an injury. I’ve got to stop jinxing people. From now on, I’m not going to do any more posts wishing people luck.


2) In my post about Edma Morisot, I used a quote from a book called, “The Private Lives of the Impressionists,” by Sue Rose. I enjoyed reading this book, but I’m not sure how trustworthy the author is. I believe one of the quotes attributed to Mary Cassatt about Cezanne was long ago discovered to come from someone else, I think an amateur American woman painter. But I did enjoy this book.

The most convoluted character in the book, however, was not a painter at all.

The person with the most secret life was the wife of Edouard Manet, Suzanne Leenhoff.

First of all, she was a sad character. The author, Sue Rose, characterized Suzanne Manet as “hapless.” I feel great empathy for hapless people because I often feel completely lost myself. And Suzanne Manet—who apparently did some fibbing of her own—was surrounded by people who made lying a way of life. Berthe Morisot and her mother were particularly awful, judging by their letters to one another. Suzanne Manet treated them kindly and said nice things to them at gatherings and spoke of how happy she would be to have Berthe as a sister-in-law. Berthe and her mother reacted cordially but cooly in public and then, in the privacy of their correspondences, ridiculed the poor woman as being fat and didn’t answer her letters when Suzanne wrote to them.

And, of course, her husband Edouard constantly cheated on her. Endlessly. Openly, in public.

But the most horrible thing is imagining Suzanne’s personal life with the Manet family.

First of all, she was introduced to people as Edouard’s “friend” and the young male child with her was introduced as her young “brother.”

Then it was revealed to people that Suzanne was Edouard’s wife and the young boy was Edouard’s son.

According to the author, Sue Rose, there is apparently some reason to believe that Suzanne was actually, first, the mistress of Edouard’s father and Edouard fell in love with her while she was working for his father teaching the Manet children to play piano. This line of gossip includes the speculation that the young boy was actually the son of Edouard’s father, making the young boy passed off as Edouard’s son really his half-brother by way of his wife and his own father.

Finally—as if all that wasn’t enough—author Sue Rose devotes a lot of space to explaining that Edouard’s mother worked closely with Suzanne to craft the paperwork necessary for French officials to recognize her young son properly as a citizen but still keep the boy’s father hopelessly ambiguous. In fact, Sue Rose refers to Suzanne as a ‘special confidante’ of Edouard Manet’s mother. “Special confidante?” Is that a literary euphemism for lesbian lover? Was this poor woman used by everybody?

There is a reason the evil rich character in the movie “Chinatown” who has a child with his own daughter makes a point of saying rich, empowered people are capable of doing anything. Anything.

At this point I’ve read quite a few biographies of French painters. Monet. Degas. Toulouse-Lautrec. Suzanne Valadon. Of course Morisot. And Manet. Cezanne. Others. (I liked Daubigny.) At some point I step back from the talent and the beautiful art and say: Fuck all these people. Scumbags are scumbags. I very much want to believe Edma Morisot painted the good Morisot paintings just because she, in general, kept her distance from these monsters.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s France.”


3) Finally, I want to recommend an article in the print edition of the July 2011 issue of “Sky and Telescope” magazine.

It’s the article called “Ring Spokes Return.” It describes very obscure patterns some ground-based observers have reported seeing in Saturn’s rings over the decades. Spacecraft photos proved the patterns to be real. Only recently have astrophysicists put forward a physical model to explain the strange patterns.

Scientists now suspect lightening in Saturn’s clouds sends charged particles streaming along Saturn’s magnetic field lines and those charged particles then interact with tiny particles making up the inner rings of Saturn. (Also good reading: Spokes in Saturn's rings caused by thunderstorms on Saturn? by Emily Lakdawalla, The Planetary Society Blog.)

I found this Sky and Telescope article really interesting for a couple of reasons.

First of all, more and more everybody connected with astronomy is coming to realize that electrical phenomenon can be the driving dynamics in shaping many physical systems.

Second, because the patterns in Saturn’s rings are so low-contrast, they have been, and remain, very hard to photograph. So the few astronomers who have studied these patterns had to depend upon naked eye observations through telescopes, and observers who were skilled at sketching what they saw. What a blast from the past, to have naked eye observations, and sketching, playing a major role in cutting-edge science right at the beginning of the 21st century!

Great stuff!

The Built World Redux—Art And Souvenir

Is history outside of us?
Is history what we can see?

Edma In Heaven Laughing

The dinosaurs are in rocks now hard as stone themselves.
Unless they’re doing it someplace we don’t know about
the dinosaurs aren’t keeping notebooks and journals.
They’re not scrapbooking their time away from our soft world.
They don’t have blogs with text and photos and videos
of their hard time. Unless we just don’t know about it.
When they get out they’ll have to make do with memories.
Maybe they’ll repurpose our stars, make constellations
that illustrate a mythology of their rock time.
They’ll pass along memories in dinosaur folk songs.
They’ll share with each other their experience as stone
as they again rampage through this soft world, eating us.

When humans get repurposed as proteins, carbs and fats
I’m going to keep a journal by hand. I’m guessing
power grids will go down and batteries will run down.
I’m going to keep a journal by hand with pictures.
And I have cool acrylic gel so I can scrapbook
small bits and pieces of the wreckage of our soft world
into my journal along with my words and drawings.

When the dinosaurs leave the rocks, the rocks are just rocks.

If we work while we can, we can arrange this soft world
into designs that will persist after we’re eaten.

When the dinosaurs leave the rocks, the rocks are just rocks.

They’re going eat us, rip us out of this soft world.

If we work while we can, when we leave, we can leave art.

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Motion Beyond The Fox Point


I Can’t Sleep In My Kitchen


Creatures Surrounded By Stone


Looking At A Street Light In The Jungle


Modern Romance In The Noir



Careful Thoughts And Getting Lost


Perfect Pages



The Built World Before The Wrecking Crew

I never would look for a souvenir
of the world around us when you were near