The Call Of The Goblins

“Lie close,” Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”

“Come buy,” call the goblins...

from “Goblin Market”
by Christina Rossetti
at The Poetry Foundation

“Goblin Market”
at Wikipedia

Albert Wolff, for example, became art critic of Le Figaro—a position of such power that Manet virtually insisted on painting his portrait, despite Wolff’s almost invariable hostility to the work of the Impressionists. A good deal of bribery and intrigue went on in the world of art criticism. Artists and dealers paid for fulsome introductions to catalogues; and galleries found that papers and periodicals were more likely to review exhibitions favourably if they advertised in their columns. Even Manet’s portrait painting seems at times to have been used to reward services rendered. Among those whose portraits he painted were virtually all the critics who had been favourable to him...


“The one painter whom I like very much, from what I have seen of his here, is Cezanne; above all it’s his well-modelled apples that I like (I only know these three paintings by him). I almost forgot to mention that there’s an unfinished painting of Albert Wolff by Uncle Edouard, a wonderful portrait such as only Manet could have painted, which must be an extremely good likeness. Looking at this portrait, one has to say ‘what a marvellous thing’—especially considering how stupid and ugly the sitter is! Also in the collection are some of M. Degas’ racehorses, and some of the beautiful drawn dancers of this great master.”

Julie Manet
diary entry for the
Duret auction, 1894

both quotes from
The Chronicles of Impressionism

“Why don’t you buy that Hitchcock book?” she asked.

“What?” I asked.

I looked over at what she was doing. She was sitting at my computer, logged into my Amazon account and looking at my browsing history.

“Why don’t you buy that Hitchcock book?” she said again. “I like that title: ‘Spellbound by Beauty’ That’s a cool title.”

“It’s a terrible book,” I said. “I read it from the library. It’s worse than that Paris Hilton book—I mean with contradictions from chapter to chapter. No editing at all. Just awful.”

“What about this movie?” she asked. “You talk about it all the time. ‘Prometheus.’ Why don’t you buy that?”

I laughed. “It’s an awful movie,” I said. “I mean, it’s interesting and all, but it’s really awful. I own the director’s cut of the original ‘Alien’ and it’s the same kind of film. Parts are interesting and it’s fun to think about the film, but so much of the film is just dumb that I don’t want to spend the money.”

“You’ve got to buy something,” she said.

“Get away from that computer,” I said. “I bought the painting knives. That was a good idea. I don’t want to buy anything else.”

“Buy the Hitchcock book,” she said.

“What is it with you and buying things?” I asked.

She laughed. “It’s the ‘Goblin Market,’” she said. “When I was a kid, I didn’t want to buy things from the goblins. I wanted to be one of the goblins.”

“The goblins were evil,” I pointed out.

She laughed. “The goblins were cool,” she said.

I reached past her and logged out of my Amazon account.

“Better safe than sorry,” I said.

She laughed. “Good thing I don’t have any fruit right now,” she said. “I’d rub it into your face.”

“I see,” I said. “So I like the Impressionists because of one person’s paintings, Berthe Morisot. You like the Impressionists because that was the time when paintings turned into just another assembly line product of the Industrial Revolution.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” she said. “Now I’ve got a taste for fruit. Do you have any oranges? What about blueberries?”

“I don’t keep any fruit around here,” I said. “The fructose isn’t good for my blood sugar.”

She just made a face at me.

I laughed. “We could take a ride to the grocery store,” I said. “You know. And buy some berries.”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet.

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


Tools For A Bridge Over A Canal On Mars

Is Paris Hilton A Supervillain?


Parking Lots

Can We Reboot The World?


“The Garden’s Edge”

Mother And Daughter At The Writing Desk

Today I’ve got a couple of things that are not directly related to each other, but since they’re both more or less about the same subject—the Impressionist painters—I’m going to do both of these things in the same post.

Today’s post started because all summer I’ve been trying to track down a particular quote I’d read two or three years ago. I remembered some things about the quote but I’d forgotten the context. It was either Berthe Morisot writing to her mother or her sister Edma, or it was Edma writing to Berthe. It was either about a painting by Caillebotte or one by Bazille. It was possibly in a book about Berthe, or one about Caillebotte or one about Bazille or one about Monet (Monet and Bazille were close friends) or it was in a general survey of Impressionism. And although I remembered the general content of the quote—the writer was asserting that the painter accomplished a certain difficult type of effect in a painting—I didn’t remember any particular words that would help me do an automatic search for the quote.

So I was screwed. I couldn’t either search the internet or ask a librarian for help because although I knew the quote I wanted existed, I didn’t remember any of the particulars a librarian or a search algorithm would need to track down the actual quote itself.

This kind of thing happens to me a lot, and I just kind of push the thought off into the background of my mind and trust myself to latch on to what I’m looking for when I accidently stumble across it in the course of general reading about other things.

And that’s what happened.

A couple of days ago I found the quote I was looking for when I was angrily tracking down the source of another quote.

Quotes!

Here’s the other quote, the one I was angrily trying to get a source for. I’ll save the good quote for last.

“The portrait of one madman by another!”

(That’s a Cezanne in the upper left and a Renoir in the lower right.)

I’ve read a lot of art books lately and I’ve seen this quote attributed to entirely different people and entirely different contexts.

For instance, in Sue Roe’s book “The Private Lives of the Impressionists” this quote is given to Renoir speaking to Victor Chocquet, affectionately describing the portrait Renoir painted of Chocquet. (Chocquet was a middle class government official who spent large amounts of his less-than-excessive salary supporting the “rebellious” young Impressionists—they rebelled against the Salon, not against wealthy or even modestly wealthy patrons.) In Silvia Borghesi’s book “Art Book: Cezanne” the quote is given to Degas sarcastically describing Cezanne’s portrait of Chocquet. Neither book notes the original source of the quote.

One of the most carefully documented books about Impressionism I know about is Bernard Denvir’s “The Chronicle of Impressionism.” It not only sources everything, but usually provides a reasonably complete context surrounding interesting quotes. And it turns out the source of the ‘madman’ quote is the daughter of the source of the quote I’ve been trying to track down all summer and this book contains both quotes.

In 1899 Victor Chocquet’s extensive art collection was auctioned off, and many well-known people from the art world attended. Julie Manet, daughter of Berthe Morisot, was there and so was her friend, Edgar Degas. Degas apparently had very much liked and bid on but not succeeded in buying the Renoir portrait of Chocquet and had playfully described the painting to Julie as “The portrait of one madman by another,” and Julie had recorded the quote when she wrote about the auction in her diary.

Those Morisot girls!

When they weren’t gossiping they were journaling about the gossip.

Julie seems to have picked up the habits from her mother. Berthe seems to have spent so much time gossiping and journaling that you wonder when she found time to devote herself to painting such extraordinary paintings.

At least I wonder about that.

And so much of Berthe’s journaling and letter writing sounds so trivial—“Degas has a very pretty painting of a very ugly woman in black, with a hat and a cashmere shawl falling from her shoulders”—that to my ears she doesn’t really sound like the kind of person who would paint so many of the extraordinary paintings attributed to her.

Here’s a more full context of that little quote, because it contains the quote I’ve been looking for all summer. This is from a letter Berthe wrote to her mother in 1869 after attending the Salon exhibit which included Manet’s portrait of her on the balcony.

“I myself look more strange than ugly. It seems that people are using the phrase ‘femme fatale’ about the painting.

“Degas has a very pretty painting of a very ugly woman in black, with a hat and a cashmere shawl falling from her shoulders. The background is that of a very light interior, showing a corner of a mantlepiece in half-tones. It is very subtle and distinguished. Antonin Proust’s entries look very well, despite the fact that they are badly hung. Corot is very poetic, as usual. I think that he has spoiled the sketch we saw at home by working too much on it in his studio.

“The tall Bazille has painted something that is very good. It is a little girl in a light dress, seated in the shade of a tree, with a glimpse of the village in the background. There is much light and sun in it. He has tried to do what we have often attempted—a figure in the outdoor light—and he seems to have been successful.”

(That’s a Degas in the upper left and a Bazille in the lower right.)

So that is Berthe writing to her mother. I’m interested in Berthe Morisot’s reaction to the Bazille painting. She writes, “He has tried to do what we have often attempted—a figure in the outdoor light—and he seems to have been successful.”

Hmmm. Morisot certainly painted many figures in landscapes, however hers strike me as being vastly more “successful” than Bazille’s, although his is certainly nice.

In Morisot’s landscapes there is almost always an implicit sense of drama as subtle interactions take place between the foreground and background, and in Morisot’s landscapes the figures are almost always interacting with the setting rather than making eye-contact with the viewer.

I much prefer Morisot’s paintings to Bazille. But I’m struck by Morisot’s wording: “He has tried to do what we have often attempted.”

Who’s “we”?

Is she simply referring to herself, using the editorial plural? I don’t really remember her writing about herself that way in other letters.

Is she simply referring to the Impressionists as a loose group of friends, all painters who have attempted to capture outdoor scenes in natural light? Could be.

Or is she referring to herself and her sister Edma?

Edma, of course, and Bertha took lessons together and often painted together when they were young. When Berthe wrote that letter, however, Edma had “retired” from painting to be a “respectable” middle-class wife and devote herself to her husband and children.

Or did she continue to paint?

I don’t know. This is very interesting to me. So far as I know, only two paintings by Edma have survived. One is Edma’s portrait of her sister that I’ve posted about before, in Edma In Heaven Laughing. The style is controlled and detailed, quite consistent with the careful and evocative paintings attributed to Berthe. I’ve never seen the other.

I don’t know. It’s interesting that Berthe wrote to her mother that phrase, “He has tried to do what we have often attempted.”

She could be referring to herself and her sister.

I don’t know. There seem to be two entirely different styles of painting traditionally attributed to Berthe. One is tight, controlled and very evocative. The other is loose, rough and almost decorative.

Certainly to my eyes the very loose and roughly finished paintings attributed to “Berthe Morisot” seem more consistent with the “voice” of the Berthe Morisot that we “hear” reading her letters and journals.

The controlled, evocative paintings seem to come from a different hand. I wonder: Was that careful, almost dramatic hand Edma’s and was Edma the “we” Bertha was referring to in that letter?

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



“The Garden’s Edge”

“Hold Me Forever: A Doll Philosophy”


Edma In Heaven Laughing


The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #1

The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #2

The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #3

The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #4

The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #5

What The Dinosaurs See

She held the torn picture of a guitar in her hand.
She looked around. There was nothing to see but wreckage.
And there was no music, only wind over debris.

“I wonder what it’s like,” she said, “to see something, scream,
and to know there’s nothing to be done, nowhere to run.”

“We have science, Miss Stapleton. We’ll understand this.”

She held the torn picture of a guitar in her hand
and her fingers gripped it so tightly that it ripped more.

The Torn Picture Of A Guitar

CDC OFFICIAL: “I’ll take your questions.”

REPORTER: “Is it a virus?”

CDC OFFICIAL: “We don’t know.”

REPORTER: “How does it spread? Is it airborne?”

CDC OFFICIAL: “Airborne is a possibility. We don’t know.”

REPORTER: “Is this an international health hazard or a military concern?”

CDC OFFICIAL: “Both.”

REPORTER: “Are these people alive or dead?”

CDC OFFICIAL: “We don’t know.”

Opening credits
of Zack Snyder’s remake
of “Dawn of the Dead”

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

“How do the dinosaurs recognize you?” I ask.
“To my eyes you look like a beautiful woman.
You sound like one. You smell like one. You feel like one.
Do dinosaurs see beyond the human spectrum?
Are they sensitive to energies I can’t know?”

She smiles, I think, and says, “Do you know when I knew
what you are? Do you know when I figured you out?”

I back away. I shouldn’t have spoken to her.
But it seemed so safe. I knew I could get away.

I speak not because I have anything to say
but just to stop her from saying another word.

“I was wrong,” I say, “to think I could get away.
I know there isn’t anywhere for me to go.”

I’m moving as fast as I can without tripping.

“I understand now,” I say, “why we must not talk.”

She opens her mouth and I turn and start to run.

I’m far enough away so I can’t hear her speak.

She laughs. Her laugh is loud enough for me to hear.

For an instant I’d seen what the dinosaurs see.

DAVID: “It must feel like your God abandoned you.”

SHAW: “What?”

DAVID: “To lose Dr. Holloway after your father died under such similar circumstances. What was it that killed him? Ebola?”

SHAW: “How do you— How do you know that?”

DAVID: “I watched your dreams.”

from “Prometheus”

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



The Girl Who Talks To Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Girls And The Night Behind Me

Motion Beyond The Fox Point



“Indestructible And Ungraspable”

The Loch Ness Monster Versus Pretty Flowers

Real And ‘Real’ Liminal Entities



“The Garden’s Edge”

Music At The Garden’s Edge

“How far away can a musician run?”



See Monsters?

The Prettiest Ophelia Is An Asteroid

8347 Lallaward (1987 HK)

Classification: Main-belt Asteroid SPK-ID: 2008347

Discovered 1987 Apr. 21 by C. S. Shoemaker and E. M. Shoemaker at Palomar.

Lalla Ward (b. 1951) is a British stage, film and TV actress and artist. She played Ophelia in the BBC TV production of Hamlet (1980) and is best known for her work as Romana, a companion of "Dr. Who" in the British series of the same name. She is the wife of writer Richard Dawkins.

8347 Lallaward (1987 HK)
at JPL Small-Body Database Browser

Ward was in a relationship with her co-star Tom Baker whilst working on Doctor Who, and they lived together in a flat in Deptford. The couple married in December 1980, but the marriage lasted only sixteen months. Ward attributed the separation to work commitments, different lifestyles and conflicts of interest.

Ward said in 2004 that her long friendship with Douglas Adams, with whom she worked on Doctor Who, meant more to her and was "more valuable and more enduring" than her marriage to Baker. In 1992, at his 40th birthday party, Adams introduced her to his friend Richard Dawkins (biologist and author of such books as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and, later, The God Delusion). Ward and Dawkins married later that year.

Aside from acting, her other talents include book illustration, and she is particularly adept at sketching animals. One example of this was the 1985 Shell Calendar, which features embroidered pictures of sea birds. Ward also illustrates Dawkins's books, and has also been known to help create material for his lectures.

“Lalla Ward”
at Wikipedia

The prettiest Ophelia is an asteroid
between the red planet Mars and ochre Jupiter,
much smaller than both of those planets named after gods
but so much more real than a name from an ancient myth,
a real woman, artist, actress, a loved companion.

The prettiest Ophelia is an asteroid
orbiting around the Sun more slowly than the Earth
as if she’s a figure in a Morisot painting,
peaceful in a park on the outskirts of a city
but looking at the city, the hectic rushing crowds.

The prettiest Ophelia is an asteroid
always above us now but she’s still here with us, too,
as if she’s a figure in a Morisot painting,
a real woman, artist, actress, a loved companion,
something from Shakespeare walking offstage to us smiling.

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



Real Things, Not Real Things And Other Things


It Shall Be So Madness Must Unwatched Go


Memory Studies As A Flourishing Field


Planetary Colors And The Grail Quest


A Telescope For Tartarus


Dinosaur By Moonlight: A Puppet Show


A Bird Who Could Fly To Neptune


Soft Gadgets In Marigold Space


Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton

Ode To A Louisiana Sinkhole

Digging Britney Redux

Of all the holes I’d like to fall into
I think I’d like to fall into you most.
Are there dinosaurs down there inside you?
Is Atlantis there? Are rocket ships there?

If I fell far enough down into you
would a woman wearing a pelt catch me
and would I wake up with her holding me
as a zeppelin hummed flying overhead?

I can feel the Earth move under my feet
and you are like a crucible bubbling—
Water and salt and whatever oil is,

methane rising like messages of love,
and I would turn into gold falling down
inside you until your fire melted me.

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


The Loch Ness Monster Versus Pretty Flowers

“Britney To Razor Blades”

Hot Red Earth, Cold Blue Jazz



In Louisiana The Bottom Fell Out Of A Swamp

Synthetic Arcadia And The Hole

The Sinkhole, The Supervillain, And The Plan

Puddle Monsters: Terror In The Distance

The Louisiana Sinkhole: An Apocalypse Opera



Song For Leviathan — An Impossible Ode

Halloween Trees (Ode To)

Ode To A Flute: On Getting Blown Right

Ode To An American Zombie

A Short Ode To A Quick Sketch

Ode To “Smallville”

Ode To The Concept Of Cotton Candy

Motion Toward And Away—Ode To Pamela

A Story About Monsters For Halloween

A few months ago I did a post about birds in a big parking lot near here, Change: Sudden, Incomprehensible And Deadly.

A large department store went out of business. When the parking lot became abandoned, local traffic began to speed through the lot as a shortcut. The many seagulls, pigeons and other birds that spent their day in the parking lot had a difficult time with the new traffic patterns—cars drove quickly and didn’t look out for the birds and many birds got hit or run over.

I wondered what the birds thought about that sudden change in traffic behavior, presuming, of course, that birds think about things in any way that we would understand as thinking.

The birds, of course, wouldn’t know that the store had gone out of business. The birds simply found themselves confronted with automobiles suddenly behaving differently than automobiles had behaved for years and years, for many bird generations.

Now even bigger changes are afoot for the birds!

Now the parking lot has been almost completely fenced-in and demolition crews have brought in heavy machinery to begin tearing down the very large building itself.

I wonder what the birds think of this?

Presuming, of course, that birds think about things in any way that we would understand as thinking.

What I mean is that the big building has been there I think for more than a decade. Again, that’s many, many bird generations. The building was—from a bird perspective—part of the landscape itself.

And now the very landscape is changing. Getting ripped apart by things.

And I wonder what birds think when they see something like this. Obviously any human can understand it is a vehicle, but I wonder if birds in any mental way associate something that looks like this with the cars and trucks they’ve moved among for years. Certainly the cars and trucks birds witnessed never “behaved” the way this thing behaves—reaching out and grabbing the landscape and literally ripping it apart.

If birds think at all, this situation must push bird cognition to its very limits.

Do birds in any way “realize” that what they regard as their landscape is just a plot of land being re-developed by a different species of animal, living creatures like themselves but with different characteristics and abilities?

To the birds it’s their whole world. To us it’s a trivial zoning issue.

And of course predictably for me I’m wondering if in some abstract way this could have meaning for us.

Many things we would regard as “magic” or as “miracles” would make sense if our conception of the larger reality around us was as limited and misleading as—presumably—a bird’s conception of its landscape is limited and incomplete.

And more than just limits and completeness are at issue here.

I mean, suppose a particular bird was very thoughtful. Suppose this very thoughtful bird perched on a wire somewhere looking down at the scene in that parking lot and tried its very bird-best to understand it.

What could that bird ever hope to understand as we would use the word understand?

Not much, I think.

The issue for the bird is not that its understanding is limited and incomplete.

The issue for the bird is that a larger—and from our perspective a more “meaningful”—understanding is closed off to it by its bird-nature. The bird’s not going to come to grips with zoning issues and re-development schemes. The bird’s not even going to come to grips, I’d guess, with the differences between buildings and hills, between parking lots and pathways between trees. To the bird, I’m guessing, the ground is just “the ground”—that is, landscape.

Should we suspect, then, that our own thinking, even though we can reason abstractedly, is still somehow not just limited and incomplete, but somehow fundamentally unable to come to grips with reality around us in a truly “meaningful” way?

And if we were to accept such a paradigm of thought, what would the consequences be?

It certainly wouldn’t mean that thinking itself is futile.

Birds can live completely fulfilled bird-existences even though they may never understand, for instance, that a parking lot is fundamentally different from, say, the gravel shore around a pond.

If human thinking and human understanding is somehow similarly defined by the nature of our physical being, we can still live a completely fulfilled human-existence even if we “understood” in some abstract way that our grasp of reality was in some way completely and utterly, umm, missing the “big picture” and that the “big picture” was something we couldn’t ever understand.

This certainly isn’t a new thought. This is sort of the message God gave to Job, and the Book of Job is one of the oldest narratives available to the human race.

But isn’t it interesting that almost trivial speculations about birds dealing with changes to a shopping area leads in one way or another to such intriguing or possibly even illuminating thoughts about ourselves?

And I can’t help but wonder if a couple of birds might look at “simple” demolition equipment like this and see the giant claw-thing grabbing and ripping apart the landscape and say—in bird-talk, of course—“Check out that monster down there! It sort of looks like those mythical dragons the old birds tell the chicks about to give them a fun scare at night!”

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



See Monsters?


On Stepping Into The Surround


Beautiful People Are Courageous

Strange Energies Of The Twentieth Century

We would be driving along and spot a Christmas tree lying perhaps in the front yard of somebody’s lovely house in Pacific Heights or beside an Italian grocery store in North Beach. We would suddenly stop and jump out and rush over to the Christmas tree and start taking pictures from every angle.

The simple people of San Francisco probably thought that we were all completely deranged: bizarre. We were traffic stoppers in the classic tradition.

199, 215, 227, 233, 245.

We met the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti out walking his dog on Potrero Hill. He saw us jump out of the car and immediately start taking pictures of a fallen Christmas tree lying on the sidewalk.

277, 278, 279, 280, 281.

As he walked by, he said, “Taking pictures of Christmas trees?”

from “what are you going to do with 390
photographs of christmas trees?”
by Richard Brautigan

1.

I said, “I wonder
what happened to the photos
of the Christmas trees?

One time Brautigan
and a photographer friend
did a whole series

but I’ve never heard
that anyone did a book
of the images.”


2.

Someone made a face.
“Old hippie photos?” they asked.
“And why would I buy

a book of photos
taken by two old hippies
of old Christmas trees?”


3.

I said, “Don’t pretend.
You’d buy it because you’d love
to throw it away.”



A Postscript To
Strange Energies Of The Twentieth Century

The first draft of this
was about Walter Cronkite
but that didn’t work.

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



The Tokyo-Montana Express
at Brautigan.net


*


Machines Of Loving Grace


It Shall Be So Madness Must Unwatched Go

Real Things, Not Real Things And Other Things

I don’t have much for today, but a couple of the things I have are really interesting to me, so I’m going to post about this stuff today so that at some point in the future I can come back to it in—I hope—much more detail.

*

First of all, I need to mention that not last Friday but the Friday before last I said at the end of my post Ophelia’s Songs that I had a big allergy attack. It was really awful. When that stuff happens, it takes me days to recover. So all through last week I was taking Benadryl every night to get to sleep. I felt terrible, and Benadryl gives me mood-swings the day after I take it to sleep. So during the day last week I was feeling sad (even though I knew it was the medicine affecting my thinking). That’s why my posts may have sounded more, umm, despondent than normal last week. But I started feeling better this weekend and, I hope, this week I’ll have more energy.

*

When I started feeling better this weekend one of the things I did was visit one of the suburban libraries around here.

The library next to the hill where the vampires live!

(That’s from my post about the library, Real Estate Gothic.)

I took out a book to re-read that I’ve read many times before. And I took out two DVD sets that I’d never seen before. The book and DVD sets don’t immediately seem related, but in my thinking they very much became related and that’s what today’s post is going to be about.

*

The book was “Landscape Into Art,” by Pavel Machotka. It’s a book written by a psychology professor who is also a painter and photographer. He visits many actual locations in France that Cezanne used as motifs for paintings, and speculates about how Cezanne may have been thinking about the scene and about the techniques Cezanne used to convert his thinking and vision into a painted canvas.

I don’t like landscape painting at all. And I don’t know enough about painting to come to any worthwhile conclusion about Cezanne myself—was he a genius or an energetic, delusional idiot? I don’t know. But books about Cezanne are often very interesting and this book is one of my favorites.

I don’t like landscape painting at all, but I very much like portrait images—drawings and paintings. I have some kind of mental block about working with people I know, but with strangers it’s my favorite kind of art. So I try to internalize the speculations from Pavel Machotka about Cezanne’s work with landscapes to see if I can make any use of them in my thinking about portraits.

This is a very intriguing issue for me because obviously I’ve given it a lot of thought over many years and, really, I’ve made no—so to speak—headway at all.

It’s frustrating and fun at the same time. It’s frustrating because I’m usually able to think things through once I apply myself to them but this whole issue is obscure to me. On the other hand I feel very engaged with this issue because I feel I have so much to learn and so much in front of me still to do.

And, although I didn’t expect it at all, the other stuff I took out from the library over the weekend touched a little bit on these very issues, portraits and images and the meanings underlying them.

*

For people who don’t know about Doctor Who, the basic background is that the show was an immensely popular British TV show for decades and decades. Then it was canceled. After a few years the BBC assigned some producers to bring the series back on the air. They attempted to pick up more or less right where they left off, with the same series continuity. I enjoyed the show in its early years and I especially liked the show during the years they had a great writer named Douglas Adams as the script editor. But I had never watched any of the “new” episodes. I thought the show, especially under Douglas Adams, had set a writing standard so high that modern writers wouldn’t be able to even come close to matching it. And since the show had so many elements early fans really loved, I thought it would be painful to watch what modern writers and producers did to it. So I had avoided the new episodes. But when I mentioned Doctor Who in my post When The Light Is All Reflections a couple of weeks ago I got to thinking about it and I thought, well, I’m not dead yet, I might as well make a little effort to stay alive and see what current generations are watching as “Doctor Who.”

So over this weekend I watched the complete fifth and sixth series with an actor named Matt Smith as the Doctor and an actress named Karen Gillan as his current companion Amy Pond.

And it was one of those times when my thinking was right on the money. I found it horrible—something like actually painful—to watch the new episodes. The actor and actress seemed to be doing everything they could to bring life to their characters. They were both energetic and attractive and reasonably pleasant. But I found the stories stupid and heavy-handed and endlessly pointless—ridiculous arbitrary plot conflicts and ridiculous arbitrary plot solutions to every problem. All the worst characteristics of the original series, but without any of its warmth and fun and real humor, without any of its redeeming features.

So I won’t be keeping up with the new Doctor Who.

However—and almost predictably—the actress Karen Gillan who plays the Doctor’s companion Amy Pond was very pretty so I looked her up at Wikipedia. And I saw something interesting.

This is the Wikipedia picture of her character Amy Pond. She plays a plucky young Scottish woman. As with most television these days there were lots of tight close-ups and Karen Gillan did a great job, I thought, fleshing out the character. “Amy Pond” seems reasonable and convincingly real. The plots I thought were awful but the actress did the best she could with the nothing—the less than nothing—the writers, directors and producers gave her.

And this is the Wikipedia picture of the actress Karen Gillan.

This is really interesting to me because the picture of Karen Gillan as herself appearing at some convention doesn’t “look like” the character Amy Pond at all. I don’t know if I would have recognized her if I saw her.

This is really interesting to me, the way an actor or an actress can get into a character, animate a character, bring a character to life with seemingly real expressions and reactions. But, then, when you see the actor or actress in real life the reality is so different that it is hard to even put into words. Obviously it is all an issue of muscles in the face and how the head it carried on the neck and shoulders and how the body is moved. But a good actor or actress will make such tiny, tiny changes to all those little things—subconscious and conscious things—that it becomes something like real life magic.

And it’s interesting in a larger way because we all—so to speak—play characters ourselves from time to time and in various ways. We express moods, emotions, reactions.

Photographs, of course, can capture every little thing. So if an actor or actress is “in character” the camera catches everything the actor or actress is doing, even if the performer isn’t consciously aware of it.

This seems to me to be an interesting test of an artist’s rendering ability. And an interesting test of art overall.

Can an artist, I wonder, draw or paint a person so well that the differences between an actor or actress in character or out of character would be visible?

It seems nearly impossible to even specify or enumerate the items or elements that would be different between two such images. A photographer can capture such things simply because a camera literally captures everything that is physically there in a scene from a particular vantage point.

But when an artist looks at a person, does an artist see enough to consciously or even subconsciously capture enough in a rendition to embody whatever the subtle differences are between an actor in character and an actor not in character?

This is interesting. As I’m getting my energy back, I’m probably going to be doing sketches of that Karen Gillan photograph from the convention, and sketches from some similar poses from screen captures from her episodes in character as Amy Pond.

If I get anything interesting I’ll do another post on this topic.

I’m certainly not the only person who’s ever wondered about these kinds of things. I've posted before (and here and here) about writer-director Wes Craven’s film “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.” There is a scene in that film where actress Heather Langenkamp is portraying actress “Heather Langenkamp” and writer-director Wes Craven is portraying writer-director “Wes Craven.” When the two characters in the film discuss why the monster is attacking “Heather,” the real writer-director Wes Craven wrote this bit of dialogue for the characters to exchange:

“HEATHER”: “Isn’t there somebody who can stop him?”

“WES”: “Actually there is a person in the dream, sort of a gatekeeper, so to speak. Somebody Freddy has to get by before he can come into our world. That person’s you, Heather.”

“HEATHER”: “It’s me? Why me?”

“WES”: “Dramatically speaking, it makes perfect sense. You played Nancy, after all. You were the first to humiliate him, defeat him.”

“HEATHER”: “That was Nancy. Not me.”

“WES”: “But you gave Nancy her strength. So in order to get out, he’s got to come through you.”

And of course Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” in the sixteenth century, explicitly juxtaposing stage actors and “real” people in a stage play even back then.

Actors, acting and real people being real people and what we can perceive about each other. Real things, not real things and other things.

It’s an interesting topic. Probably my favorite topic. I’m always trying to figure out where monsters fit in.

But That’s How A Melville Metaphor Ends

In the mind’s ocean
every woman’s bare shoulder
is a great white whale.

The Mind’s Ocean

“O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”

Ahab
in Melville’s “Moby Dick”
quoted in The Mind’s Ocean Redux

I’m not a big Herman Melville fan but
one time I wanted to impress someone
and somehow I remembered Ahab’s quote
and maybe something like a butterfly
maybe something like a Red Admiral
a small butterfly as butterflies go
I said that quote like a butterfly goes
drifting along at the edge of a storm
or maybe I said it like a whale goes
drifting along under a madman’s boat
or maybe I said it like a spacecraft
drifting along above a storm in space
or maybe I said it like a pigeon
drifting along above electric lines
and I wonder now how I remembered
that Melville quote because I’m not a fan
and when I think back I can’t remember
if I read “Moby Dick” for school or fun
but the woman I wanted to impress
wasn’t impressed and that’s the way things go
but I still remembered that Melville quote
though I can’t imagine how I did it
and it bothers me now the not knowing
but to finish off this Melville topic
I am also bothered because I know
these watery weathery images
aren’t a dense enough flow of chaos
to obscure the silhouettes of the shapes
the whale butterfly spacecraft and pigeon
and that someone I wanted to impress
well that woman I wanted to impress
still won’t be impressed and in fact will laugh
because she’ll see through all this Melville stuff
and not caring I’m not a Melville fan
she’ll laugh and say “These syllables are mine!”
but of course not one syllable is hers
so she won’t really laugh and say the words
but that’s how a Melville metaphor ends
so I’m happy with this one even though
I’m still not a big Herman Melville fan.

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


Plastic Snow? (A Saturn Update)

Plastic Snow? (A Saturn Update)

Polythene is a British variant of the word polyethylene, a plastic material. The name 'Polythene Pam' came from the nickname of an early Beatles' fan from the Cavern Club days, named Pat Hodgett (now Dawson), who would often eat polythene. She became known as 'Polythene Pat'. She said in an interview, "I used to eat polythene all the time. I'd tie it in knots and then eat it. Sometimes I even used to burn it and then eat it when it got cold."

“Polythene Pam”
at Wikipedia

[I’m replacing the original LA Times quote here with a more clearly written report from NASA. -- Mark, Friday morning]

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has tracked the aftermath of a rare massive storm on Saturn. Data reveal record-setting disturbances in the planet's upper atmosphere long after the visible signs of the storm abated, in addition to an indication the storm was more forceful than scientists previously thought.

Data from Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) instrument revealed the storm's powerful discharge sent the temperature in Saturn's stratosphere soaring 150 degrees Fahrenheit (83 kelvins) above normal. At the same time, researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., detected a huge increase in the amount of ethylene gas, the origin of which is a mystery. Ethylene, an odorless, colorless gas, isn't typically observed on Saturn. On Earth, it is created by natural and man-made sources.

Goddard scientists describe the unprecedented belch of energy in a paper to be published in the Nov. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"This temperature spike is so extreme it's almost unbelievable, especially in this part of Saturn's atmosphere, which typically is very stable," said Brigette Hesman, the study's lead author and a University of Maryland scientist who works at Goddard. "To get a temperature change of the same scale on Earth, you'd be going from the depths of winter in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the height of summer in the Mojave Desert."

First detected by Cassini in Saturn's northern hemisphere on Dec. 5, 2010, the storm grew so large that an equivalent storm on Earth would blanket most of North America from north to south and wrap around our planet many times. This type of giant disturbance on Saturn typically occurs every 30 Earth years, or once every Saturn year.

Not only was this the first storm of its kind to be studied by a spacecraft in orbit around the planet, but it was the first to be observed at thermal infrared wavelengths. Infrared data from CIRS allowed scientists to take the temperature of Saturn's atmosphere and to track phenomena that are invisible to the naked eye.

Temperature measurements by CIRS, first published in May 2011, revealed two unusual beacons of warmer-than-normal air shining brightly in the stratosphere. These indicated a massive release of energy into the atmosphere. After the visible signs of the storm started to fade, CIRS data revealed the two beacons had merged. The temperature of this combined air mass shot up to more than minus 64 degrees Fahrenheit (above 220 kelvins).

According to Hesman, the huge spike of ethylene generated at the same time peaked with 100 times more ethylene than scientists thought possible for Saturn. Goddard scientists confirmed the release of the gas using the Celeste spectrometer mounted on the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona.

The team still is exploring the origin of the ethylene, but has ruled out a large reservoir deep in the atmosphere.

"We've really never been able to see ethylene on Saturn before, so this was a complete surprise," said Goddard's Michael Flasar, the CIRS team lead.

NASA Spacecraft Sees Huge Burp
at Saturn After Large Storm
NASA Mission News, 10/25/12

I know a woman
with a very sexy yawn
and if I paint her

with acrylic paints
a person could make the case
the finished portrait

would be like a storm
in outer space but I bet
she still would just yawn.

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



“Ethylene”
at Wikipedia


*


The Dragons Of Saturn

Robot Above The Clouds Of Saturn

Dragon Storm: Ammonia Snow

Dragon Storm: The Woman Looking Away



Red Bull, Hershey’s And A Woman Yawning

A Cartoon Can’t Buy A Yawn

This Woman From The Canals Of Mars

Tools For A Bridge Over A Canal On Mars



Buying The Beatles Forever

Exotic Snows And An Ink Drawing Of Plants

Birds Know About Wires

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


Electric Golgotha


Sense Of Place


All The Issues Of Perspective

“hippie pigeons”

“Midnight Flowers”

Bricks and broken porcelain
Cut my back where she pushed me to the ground
In the alley there was no other sound
Except our screams


*


“What the hell is that?” she asked.

“It’s the chorus,” I said, “of my pretend punk song, ‘Midnight Flowers.’”

“Pretend punk?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I have a pretend punk band called, Bag Full Of Dead Rats. ‘Midnight Flowers’ is the love song off our pretend album, ‘Pissing In The Alley.’”

“Pissing In The Alley’?” she asked.

“Well, that’s the A-side,” I said. “It’s a five song suite. The B-side is a five song suite called, ‘Kissing In The Alley.’ It’s social commentary, see? Because kissing rhymes with pissing and they’re both things that everybody does but one is considered romantic and the other isn’t.”

“A punk album with suites of songs?” she asked.

“You want to go out in the alley,” I asked, “and copulate?”

She giggled and put her hand over her mouth. She turned away, cleared her expression and turned back to me. She pointed at me and said, “You know what? I am not going to let you drink anymore Red Bull. Enough is enough. Enough is more than enough.”

She turned away and walked toward the kitchen.

I just sneered at her back. It was my pretend Billy Idol sneer.

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


Five Songs: #3 – Shadows

On Stepping Into The Surround

Rembrandt images like this often have a wide, dark surround. This separates the internal image, arranged by Rembrandt’s aesthetics, from ‘normal’ reality framing it. There are areas of extreme dark and extreme light to activate the areas of our brain which construct a light source and surfaces for the light to fall on. There are areas of high contrast, well-defined edges to activate the areas of our brain which construct edges and forms to contain edges. There is an area of bright color to activate the area of our brain which constructs hues on surfaces. And there is an encompassing arrangement of smooth gradients and soft, soft transitions which link all the visual areas without sending our brain the cues to switch off the other construction projects in progress—the light, the surfaces and forms, the colors...

Rembrandt, Magic And Constructing Reality

Last year for Halloween I did a post about some trees in an empty lot near here. The trees had been spray-painted with orange X’s but there was nothing festive about the orange X’s because I suspected it meant the trees were going to be cut down and, sure enough, just a few days after I took a photo of them the trees were cut down.

Halloween Trees (Ode To)

Carnage Candy


Every now and then I get off the sidewalk and walk through that empty lot and nothing much has changed. Once or twice during the summer a work crew goes in there and cuts down all the weeds and wildflowers. So far nobody has cut down any more trees. And nobody has cleared away the stumps from the trees that were cut down last year.

Over the weekend I walked through that empty lot and I saw that on many of the tree stumps there were big, really big, mushrooms. The mushrooms were all at least as large and some larger than my hand with my fingers spread completely.

Here’s a medium shot of one of the biggest stumps, with a little wild diorama on top—dirt, leaves, twigs, and really big mushrooms.

I got a close-up of the mushrooms, too.

The tree stumps with mushrooms were extraordinary scenes, all in miniature.

The bright sunlight on top of the mushrooms, the dark shadows underneath, the subtle umbers of the mushrooms, the bright greens of the background leaves.

I could have kneeled there all day trying to get a composition just right. It would have been nice to stretch out low on the ground and get some blue sky into the picture. But the empty lot isn’t far from a busy street and I didn’t want to look too crazy.

I was feeling kind of sick over the weekend and this kind of stuff always cheers me up.


*


The empty lot didn’t charge admission
but there were stages scattered all around
and on every stage was a little show.

When I looked the shows seemed to get bigger.

When I took some photos for a moment
the shows were so big they surrounded me
and for a moment I stepped into them
the shows that became bigger when I looked.

There wasn’t a script so I had no lines
but I may have improvised something like—

“The dark under the mushrooms is darker
when the sunlight is so bright on the top.
When your eyes adjust for the bright sunlight
you can’t see into the dark underneath.
You can imagine almost anything
something mundane or something magical
emerging from that impossible dark.”

When I took some photos for a moment
I was down in there and then I came out.

Ophelia’s Songs

Part One: Ophelia’s Songs
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“On a synthesizer,” she said, “I can sing a duet
and hear my voice along with the flute voice weave a texture
and both voices of the duet are under my control
and the harmony and counterpoint can be more subtle
than two musicians no matter how practiced could produce
so this mode of making song never existed before
this duet of voice and flute both performed by one singer.”

Synthetic Philosophy, Liminal
Entities And Scripts

“I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist’ring angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.”

Laertes
Hamlet, Act V, Sc. 1

Part Two: Little Drummer Girl
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

She said, “This is in four-four. I know you like waltz time and this has a little three-four feel to it. Have you ever thought of playing this in three-four?”

“Just a second,” I said. “We’ll give it a shot. This just takes two or three buttons.”

I pressed the Style button called ‘Ballroom’ and selected the first waltz setting with a slow tempo. Then I pressed the Sync Start button.

I played the arrangement again, but this time to the three-four beat. The notation looks very, very similar, but the different pulse makes for a different feel. And it felt better. I changed the last chord just a bit.

“That’s better,” I said. “That’s closer to what I had in mind. If that’s what I had in mind, how come it didn’t occur to me to do it? Why do you suppose I was I trying to fit it into four-four time?”

She said, “Play it again. Let me listen.”

I played the arrangement again in three-four time.

She said, “I don’t know. But I notice at the end, when you turn it around you hurry it up instead of going into another full bar and you hit three eighth notes. With the dotted quarter, that creates a three-four measure with four notes to it. Since all the other measures are quarter notes or dotted half notes, those three eighth notes are a little bit of syncopation. But since there are four notes there in that measure, you may have been focusing on that and thinking those four notes in the measure defined the meter of the melody, when really they were just a little bit of syncopation in the turnaround.”

I made a face and looked at my workstation and asked, rhetorically, “Why didn’t my machine tell me that?”

She laughed. “Hey, look at that first transcription. The machine did a pretty good job of fitting the three-four feel into four-four bars. It was just trying to do what you told it to do.”

“Oh, great,” I said. “Now I’m going to feel inadequate for giving my workstation the wrong directions. And I’m going to feel ungrateful for expecting it somehow to see into my thinking and figure out what directions I really wanted to give it.”

She laughed again. “Maybe the machine will forgive you. You were in—” she giggled “—you were in the throes of creation. You were thinking of the music, not the technicalities of notation.”

“You figured it out easily enough,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but I was just listening,” she said. “And I know you.” Then she smiled and held her head very high. “And besides, drummers—I mean, percussionists—are all geniuses. You can’t expect machines, even fancy workstations, really to do what we do.”

Part Three: The Chemicals of Amazon
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A character in a Richard Brautigan novel
once said the automatic pistol was invented
to kill more people in a war in the Philippines.
I imagine something similar to this is true
in a metonymy and metaphor kind of way
for the Kindle and other digital book readers.

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


“The Hawkline Monster”
by Richard Brautigan
at Wikipedia


*


Ophelia’s Flowers


Machines Of Loving Grace


Machines Of Rapacious Hate


It Shall Be So Madness Must Unwatched Go



The Application Of Beyond Understanding

“The Little Drummer Girl is about spies
as Madame Bovary is about adultery
or Crime and Punishment about crime.”

William Buckley
quoted at the link above


*


A Behind-The-Scenes Note:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This final version of today’s post
is very different from the first
version. Just in case anyone
was looking in and saw all
the changes, all I can say is
my sinuses and allergies are
killing me right now, and
I’m having trouble thinking
at all, let alone thinking clearly
enough to create a sensible post.
So I made a lot of changes
after I posted the first version.
I don’t like doing that, but
I also don’t like talking much
about celebrities. So that’s
a behind-the-scene glimpse
of this post. Lots of changes—
but I like this version better
than the first, although maybe
it’s not as funny. I don’t know.
Now I’m going to take
some Benadryl and possibly
sleep the entire weekend.

Ophelia’s Flowers

“You like my Teva shoes, don’t you, Gale?” I asked.

“Actually, I think Nike shoes probably would be more cool,” Gale said.

Everyone kind of raised an eyebrow.

I said, “Gale’s being provocative. Gale’s a thrill-seeker, she likes living on the edge. Gale’s underwear doesn’t say ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Wednesday.’ Gale’s underwear says ‘What is time?’”

Everyone kind of smiled and it was close but no one actually laughed.

Gale said, “How would you know what my underwear says, Mark? You’ve never seen it.”

Everyone kind of raised an eyebrow.

I said, “I see it in my dreams, Gale. And in those underwear pictures you’re always putting up on Twitter.”

Gale yelled, “I DO NOT PUT UP UNDERWEAR PICTURES ON TWITTER!”

Everyone laughed, so I won. Gale made a face and wound-up to throw a cupcake at me, but instead unwrapped the paper from the cupcake, took a bite of the cupcake, and crumpled up the paper wrapper and threw the crumpled up wrapper at me.

I had gotten into a bad mood. People were talking about buying things from Amazon and I said I had recently bought some painting knives from Amazon, but it was an Amazon associate store, not Amazon directly.

Somebody said they had just bought one of the new Kindles, and someone else said they had just bought a DVD.

I said, “Come to think of it, just yesterday I went to Amazon to order a movie, but instead I bought a book. I bought an actual novel. Like in the old days when Amazon was a bookstore.”

Somebody said, “A book? What, you mean like with pages and a cover and everything? I remember those.” They made a face and shook their head and everyone laughed.

I was the only person in the room who had recently purchased an actual book from Amazon. It was something like the punchline of a joke. A book. And everyone laughs.

Conversation moved on to other things. Clothing. Shoes. Brand choices.

It cheered me up a little, getting something thrown at me by a beautiful woman. But to be honest down in my deepest secret soul I was still thinking about books having become something like a punchline.

Books.

It makes me want to throw something at someone but I don’t even have the vaguest idea of who I should throw something at or what I should throw.

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


Machines Of Loving Grace


Aberrant Forms


Heaven From Hell


La Seule Chose Que Je Peux Faire

Real And ‘Real’ Liminal Entities

“It is cinema as a dream. In dreams, people act strangely. One sequence doesn’t seem to match, exactly, to other sequences. It’s cinema as a dream. We think about it. We wonder about it. We project our own meanings onto it. It’s not something a real cinema buff complains about. It’s something we pay extra for.”

The Loch Ness Monster Versus Pretty Flowers

[laughs] this is me quoting
myself quoting myself about
the film “Prometheus” !

The Art Institute of Chicago owns seventeen [!] works by Berthe Morisot, including the watercolor version of “On The Balcony.” Unfortunately, although I’ve been checking every now and then, they never seem to have more than one Morisot piece on display at a time and I’ve never seen “On The Balcony” taken out of storage.

But you can visit the Art Institute website and see reasonably good images of some of the Morisot pieces in their collection. “On The Balcony” is my favorite, but I also like this piece a lot:

That’s Morisot’s daughter Julie in a little sketch. I love fragmentary images like that set against a whole sheet. To me there’s something almost dreamlike about an image set against a wide surround.

And here’s a cool thing about that image: It’s a colored pencil sketch! It’s from the end of the nineteenth century, around 1890, and Berthe Morisot, like Degas, didn’t hesitate to experiment with strange media. Colored pencils!

It’s amazing thinking back to a time when colored pencils were considered “new technology.” I’ve already done a post about oil pastels and their interesting double history, European and Japanese.

Colored pencils and crayons as cutting-edge technology.

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this is because I’ve seen strange—to my eyes—reactionary trends to abandon technology and embrace trivial, and not so trivial, elements of the past and I don’t know that I see any good reason for most of these trends.

Now that digital watches can be accurate to within a second over months, I see a lot of people getting wind-up, mechanical watches. Very expensive mechanical watches, too.

Now that everyone knows smoking kills you and makes your whole body smell like garbage, I see more and more people returning to the cigarette habit.

And I got started thinking about this recently because in the science fiction film “Prometheus” the director wanted the rich woman on the spaceship to have the fanciest, most visually compelling symbols of wealth and coolness and modernity imaginable. So this is what part of Meredith Vickers’ cabin on the spaceship [!] looks like in the vision of director Ridley Scott:

Talk about liminal entities!

Now, I feel dull and hopelessly working-class because when I saw the movie I didn’t even recognize that, but I’ve since learned it is a Fazioli grand piano, from their specialty line, called an M. Liminal. They sell for around $500,000 but I’ve heard that if you shop around you can sometimes find one for around $450,000.

This is something I just don’t get at all.

Even as a dream. Or maybe I should say especially as a dream.

I would never go back to mechanical watches. I would never go back to suicidal (and ugly) recreations like smoking.

And even if I bought an acoustic guitar, it would still have pickups, almost certainly at least two different kinds.

It’s the twenty-first century and music is about music—that is, carefully arranged sounds. Synthesizers today, I bet, can create sounds that nobody would be able to distinguish (without looking) from the sounds produced by that acoustic piano.

I can’t even imagine the thinking behind a half-a-million dollars acoustic piano.

It wasn’t really that long ago that cutting edge artists were experimenting with and embracing colored pencils and crayons as wonderful new technology.

Colored pencils and crayons.

Real liminal entities!

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



Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts


Synthetic Philosophy, Liminal Entities And Scripts


Synthetic Pigeons, Liminal Entities And Scripts


Watercolors, Liminal Entities And Scripts


Synthetic Hyperborea, Liminal Entities And Scripts