Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Mugshots: Ask Dr. Science!

Posted on by Dale

Here’s a fun one:

This mug was always part of the grand prize at the NCTC interactive dinner theatre murder mysteries.  It came from the inimitable Archie McPhee in Seattle, and yes, we visited the home store on the same trip we bought my new kilt in 2010.  It was nerd heaven.

I actually have two of these.  I think I ordered one to be a prize in a putative You Don’t Know Jack tournament in the faculty dorm at GHP, but that never came off and so now I have two.  I’d be willing to part with it, so first come, first served!

Dr. Science is a wonderfully snarky anti-anti-science humor site/column/blog/radio bit with the tagline, “Ask Dr. Science!  He knows more than you do—he has… a master’s!”  I’d hear him every now and then on NPR, and occasionally his column would run in the Funny Times (which, if you do not subscribe to, you should).

I was thinking when I started this post that there wasn’t really any neurosis or ritual associated with the mug, but upon reflection I see that there is plenty.

Just carrying this mug around invites multiple meanings, all inhabiting the mug at the same time.  First is the literal statement which just dares people to confront you with your hubris.  Of course, when you’re carrying the mug at an elementary school, it’s even more fraught: the kids giggle because it’s true, and your fellow faculty members have a tendency to get a little defensive.  (Sidenote: it is always amazing to me how the general public assumes that because you teach children their ABCs and 2 +2= 4, your mental capacity must be somehow commensurate.  When I announced I was leaving East Coweta High School for Newnan Crossing, I had people actually ask me if I were taking a pay cut.  No, really, we’re not paid by how tall they are.  At any rate, the people I worked with at the Crossing were amazing; there are more than a couple I would hire for GHP if they had the content I was looking for. Never ever underestimate the elementary educator.)

Where was I?  Daring people to challenge you on your genius: without putting my hubris on display overmuch, I risk even more of a reaction, because people automatically assume that I think that I do know more than they do.  (It doesn’t help that in many many cases I do.)  I would never carry this mug to a family gathering because the response would be vicious and neverending.

Which means that another layer to the mug is the false modesty that any of us with any brains are familiar with.  One has a hearty chuckle with the person reading the mug, assuring them that, you know, it’s a funny mug, isn’t it?  You show them the other side: see, it’s a catchphrase, that’s all.  Social comity is maintained.

And there’s another layer undercutting said comity: the hipster NPR in-the-know-ness of it all.  I may not know “more” than you, but I do know who this clever descendant of Firesign Theatre is.  And you don’t, you sad little man with your blinkered worldview.  And I shift the handle back to my right hand. Heh.

Mugshots: Hopper

Posted on by Dale

I don’t know that I have an answer to this one:

This is a mug I bought at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993, I think, a visit about which there will be another mug and another post later.

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper, is one of my favorite paintings, and I cannot tell you why.  That’s the neurosis we will explore in a moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is such a favorite that my lovely first wife actually gave me a very nice print of it.  I had it framed, and she suffered me to hang it in the bedroom:

And I have a t-shirt that is in my GHP bin:

It is a great irony that when I was at the Art Institute gift shop and saw the mug and knew I had to have it, it wasn’t until I bought the thing that I realized that my favorite painting was hanging in that very building—and I had failed to catch it!  At that point it was too late to re-enter the museum and find the wing I had missed, and so I have never seen my favorite painting face-to-face.  I have the mug, though.

But why?

Again, I have no ready answer.  The piece is generally regarded as emblematic of mid-20th century American disaffection/angst, and I don’t think of myself as that kind of person.

I could be wrong—I have felt that level of ultimate disconnectedness from others around me.  Perhaps the painting evokes that sense of loneliness that I know I have suffered from at different periods of my life, and from which I have fled to GHP and the Lichtenbergians.

Still, in the pie graph of my soul, that slice is such a very small percentage that it cannot explain why I love this painting so.  If I were to choose to live in the world of any painting, I’m sure it would be some Rubensian scene of Dionysian revel, not this silent, clean, brightly lit Moderne eatery with its  coterie of strangers after midnight.

Perhaps I love the depiction of such dark loneliness: spare, elegant, balanced.  If I’m going to descend into the dark night of the soul, this is the way I want it, not some baroque and fussy misery, full of trash cans and derelicts and honking traffic.  Even in my personal hell, I want meditative silence.  (Personal heaven, of course, is Rubensian Dionysism.)

As for ritual, this mug doesn’t really have any attached to it.  I never, for example, picked it up to signal any kind of weariness or despair, because 1) that’s not who I am; and 2) that would be cheesy.  If I used it for any kind of signifier, it would have to be in the same vein as the t-shirt: Yo, I’m an art geek, and this is the way I roll. Hopper.  Yeah, that’s right.  ::nods smugly::  How about another cuppa joe there…

 

Mugshots: Utilikilts

Posted on by Dale

Freedom!

Here you see the triskelion-like logo of Utilikilts, built from its motto of “Form Follows Function.”  The mug came from the Seattle home store and was brought to me by Kevin McInturff.  He called and offered me the choice of a mug or a t-shirt, and one of my neuroses is that I’m pretty sure my torso in a t-shirt does not do justice to the product.  But I can rock a coffee mug.

My love affair with these sturdy masculine unbifurcated garments began when my son decided he wanted to wear a kilt to his senior prom, and that idea came from our trip to Scotland in 2003.  Actual tartan kilts are very expensive, and so of course I went to the web to find a kilt rental service. The wonders of the internet being what they are, I found several services in Atlanta, but I also came across the Utilikilt.

[Synchronicity break: the man from whom we rented the kilt was from Athens, and so he met us at St. Phillip’s Cathedral in Atlanta—where he was playing a music gig—so Grayson could try on a couple of kilts for size.  He had his young son with him.  While Grayson was in the men’s room, I wandered over to peek into the gorgeous sanctuary.  As I approached it, out came Mozelle Christian, who was the founder of the State STAR Student program.  I had not seen her in a couple of years, but I recognized her immediately and she me. (For those who do not know, I was Barbara Petzen’s State STAR Teacher in 1983 and have chaired the selection committee for about 20 years.)  Four or five years later, the inevitable bagpiper at GHP (we always have one, and yes, he wears his kilt) was the young son of the kilt guy.  It’s like living in a novel, guys.]

Anyway, I offered to buy Grayson a Utilikilt for graduation, since he was heading off to the dirty freaking hippie school of Guilford, and he accepted, choosing the Survival model.  I was already at GHP that summer (2006) and as I was getting ready to hit the Order button, I decided I wanted one too. I ordered the Mocker, since it was a little dressier than the other models.

The dressier styling was important, since I intended to wear it about the campus, which I did as soon as it arrived.  Instant sensation, of course: the GHPers were thrilled and intrigued, and I was cool.

As the years have gone by, I added an Original to my wardrobe, and Grayson handed over his Survival, which I now use for yard work.

These things are immensely comfortable, and the pockets are capacious, especially the Survival model.  At GHP, it has become my trademark so much that I come across things like “You know you’re not at GHP any more when you wonder why your assistant principal isn’t wearing a kilt” on the internet, or a student in Jobie Johnson’s class at Gwinnett School of Math, Science & Technology whispers to me, “You’re not wearing your kilt?”, or when at a STAR Student Banquet one of the Regional STAR winners bounces up to me and blurts out, “Mr. Lyles, I didn’t realize you were the kilt guy!” in front of my brand new DOE boss.

Now there are two other faculty guys who wear their kilts during the summer, though theirs are more traditional style, and as I mentioned, there are always at least one or two boys who bring their dress kilts and wear them to evening events.  We’re all cool.

This daring sartorial display is completely neurotic of course: every summer, I take a deep breath before heading out the door the first time, because I know that I risk 1) being ridiculous; and 2) being called out on it, if not by GHP kids, then by the many other types inhabiting the campus.  And of course I know that I look nothing like the men in the photos that Utilikilts.com decides to publish on its website, mainly because they’ve never published any photo I’ve sent in.

Utilikilts vision:

Me:

Like I said, they’re comfortable.

My wearing of this garment at GHP is also a ritual: it’s one of the many ways we shake the kids out of their presumptions about their reality.  If the director of the program is wearing a skirt, along with half the science department, we’re not in Kansas any more.  They begin to learn the GHP lesson that different is gooder than nice, or whatever it was Sondheim said.

Another ritual with the kilt: at Newnan Crossing, I would raise money for Relay for Life by challenging the car riders to donate $500—and if they did, I would direct car rider traffic in my kilt.  If the rest of the school chipped in another $300, I’d wear it all day:

So why do I keep the Utilikilt mug?  Because it is a talisman of my macho, cool, comfortable kilt.  You wish you had one.

Mugshots: BookCrossing

Posted on by Dale

You know how some things catch your eye and your heart, and they seem like a really important idea—because they are—but after a while you really forget you were ever a part of them?

BookCrossing.com is one of those ideas for me.

The idea is very simple: after you read a book, register it at BookCrossing.com with its own unique number, and then release it in a public place (which you have noted in the release notes online).

Others will find it and take it to its new home, whereupon they—reading both the bookplate and the bookmark you’ve left inside—will go online and let the world know they’ve picked it up.  Then they’ll release the book, and we weave a comfortable web of like-minded readers across the globe.

I did this quite assiduously for nearly five years  I ordered the official kit of stickers and bookmarks and bookplates (although none of that is necessary) and was quite supportive of the cause.

Generally I would release my books across the street from my house on the low concrete wall.  I think maybe once someone registered them, although they were all taken within 24 hours or less.

And of course I ordered the mug.  I’m all about supporting the cause if it means a mug.

My member name was theOtherDale, because some jerk somewhere had already claimed Dale, even though he had not released a book in years.  Jerk.  But I’m still there.  It seems I released 45 books altogether, the last on September 17, 2009, although its record says TBR, “to be released.”  That’s The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, and now that I think about it, I may have loaned it to a Lichtenbergian.

Before that, though, we have to go back to December, 2008, to the last book I actually released: One: the Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership.  I didn’t like it,  I find.

So what did I release?  Wizard of Earthsea, a couple of Wodehouses, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, Rules for Old Men Waiting, East Side Story, Lucky Jim, The Known World, The March.  Award winners, many of them.

Ah, February House, a non-fiction work which is now apparently a very appealing chamber musical.

An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth, which should be a movie.

Wicked, which ought not to be a musical, at least not that one.

More of course, but enough of listing.

So, neurosis and ritual…

Part of the charm for this… ritual… is the idea that I get to show off the depth and breadth of my reading.  Philosophy, National Book Award winners, Booker Prize winners, witty British humor—see who I am, you passersby?  And what a pleasant frisson for you, dear stranger, to go online and find that the book you have picked up, perhaps guiltily even though it’s clearly labeled as traveling, was sent into your life by Dale Lyles.  You know, the theatre guy, and doesn’t he do Governor’s Honors in the summer?

Clearly not, since no one who ever picked up a book made it their business to register it.

Is that why I stopped doing it?  I don’t think so—I think I just stopped buying so many books and reading them. And the ones I did buy and read I started to pass around to my friends.  You will note that the Lichtenbergians were founded right about the time that I stopped.

When the downtown Carnegie opened again, I suggested to the persons vested in that venture that it would make an excellent BookCrossing Zone, because I think the concept comes closer to saving the world when it’s centralized in some way.  People have to know where to find the books, and I’m sure it’s useful to be a regular at some spot.  I thought the Carnegie would be excellent, but the coffee shop downtown would probably be better, as would Redneck Gourmet, actually.

But I have failed to become the local champion.  I am not alone, as can be seen when Hunting for a book in Georgia.  Lost steam there somewhere.  It now appears you can link your  BookCrossing account to your Facebook account—I wasn’t even a member of  Facebook the last time I released a book.

Still, it was a pleasant thing to do, and a gracious way to get rid of books you had no further need of—or indeed, that you didn’t like and had no intention of finishing.  I keep the mug to remind myself that if I got serious about cleaning out books again, I have a noble way to do that.

 

Mugshots: Essays in neurosis and ritual

Posted on by Dale

I know, Marc is salivating already.  (Well, he’s drooling, let’s put it that way.)

As noted elsewhere, I am at a standstill in my creative life.  Not only am I not working on anything, I have no impetus to work on anything.  It’s very curious.

This is despite the fact that I do have the percussion piece due sometime next month.  But am I fretting?  No, and that’s what worries me.

So, in order to grind out something just so I can make my brain/soul cry out in agony to stop it already I’ll work on the freakin’ percussion piece and the Five Easier Pieces and even oh god oh god oh god the symphony, I am forcing myself to write a series of posts on mugs in my kitchen cabinet.

Yes, you read that right.  Mugs. In. My. Kitchen. Cabinet. As it must appear to you, I am desperate.

A little background: one bare year ago, when I was still checking out books to kindergarteners and pretty much loving it, my morning routine would consist of having one cup of coffee while I answered emails, and then a second cup as I drove to school.  I would not have finished the second cup by the time I got to school, and so I would take it inside and finish it as I got into the morning.  The next morning, I would repeat with a different mug.

Eventually, after a week or two, I’d have more mugs at school than at home, so I’d bring a Tupperware® tub to school and bring them all back home, wash, rinse, repeat.

These mugs were collected over time and filled a shelf in the kitchen cabinets, stacked double.

However, when I started the job in Atlanta, I realized that juggling a mug of coffee up the Interstate was a rather different deal than tootling over to the Crossing, and so I switched over to my Lichtenbergian travel mug, which was safer and kept the coffee warm.

This left the other mugs stranded high and dry, and I didn’t often use them any more.  (There is a second shelf of hand-made mugs that I generally prefer to use on weekends—we’ll do a series on the neuroses involved there.)

And of course my lovely first wife asked why those mugs were taking up so much room if I were not going to use them.  Why not get rid of them?

The answer was, of course, that I couldn’t.  They weren’t random, they were collected, and each represented something.

But what? The question hangs in the air.

So now a series of essays in which I examine these mugs and try to explain why they still mean something to me.  I’m actually a fairly uninteresting person, neurosis-speaking-wise, but I’ll try to make it worth reading.

(Ironically, as I dragged out all the mugs on the shelf to take photos of them, I found that nearly half of them held no meaning whatsoever to me. Ha.)

New art

Posted on by Dale

This weekend my lovely first wife and I went up to the American Craft Council Show at the Cobb Galleria.  My goodness—beautiful, beautiful things!  Do yourself a favor and mark your calendar for next December or January to make plans to attend.  Then save your pennies, because you will need them. These people are not weekend arts show exhibitors—they are professionals.

The best plan is to plan to see the show two of the three days.  The first day will overwhelm you, and then the second day you can go back to absorb more and to make saner, less impulsive purchases.  Not that this plan saved me at all.

I made a couple of smallish purchases, a hand-marbled silk tie and a nifty little stylus for my iPhone/iPad.  (Yes, I know that Steve Jobs disapproves.)  That was yesterday.  We spent the night at the Embassy Suites, and here’s a tip: eat lunch at Stoney River or Canoe or another nice restaurant, but eat dinner at the sports bar there in the hotel.  The food was good and there’s not an hour-and-a-half wait to get in.  In fact, there’s no wait.

So today we went back.  I had in mind to make a major purchase; my plan was to go back through the hall and narrow down my two or three choices to one.

However, I also wanted to take a closer look at everything that interested me, and that’s where my plan went awry.  I had admired the work of Ken and Julie Girardini but hadn’t gone into the booth to look very closely.  And when I did, I saw Traveling Together and knew that it was my purchase of the show:

The little boats are cheesecloth coated in wax and shaped over wireframes.  There is writing inside the boats.  It’s perfectly lovely.

And then I went a little crazy.  One of my choices that was part of my plan was Ed Kindera, metalworker, who had two main products: steampunk items which were truly amusing and bells, big sheet metal temple bells.  I bought a bell.  And then, when I was toting it to my car and realized that it was too heavy to hang on anything I actually had in the labyrinth, I bought a stand.

To wit:

I placed it over a fern that should be taking off this year.  (And if not, it can be replaced with something more vigorous.)  I will probably have to anchor the stand to the ground, because the whole setup is extremely top-heavy.  Here’s the bell itself up close:

I did not buy a mallet.  For the time being we will use a rubber hammer to strike it.  It works beautifully: the bell has a clear tone that lasts at least 20 seconds.

No regrets on the insane amount of money I spent.  Art is required.

What did I not buy?

One of Valerie Bunnell’s mixed media sculptures.  One of Paveen Chunhaswasdikul’s steampunk mugs.  One of Scott Amrhein’s staggeringly beautiful glass vessels. One of Michael Mikula’s rigorously gorgeous aluminum and glass sculptures. Or one of Scott Hronich-Pernicka’s fascinating-for-obvious-reasons dichroic glass globes. (That one was close.)

I’m already saving my pennies for next year.

Update on the northpoint: it weathered the rain quite nicely.

Next up: the westpoint… I might actually get around to working on the stone circle.

Behold!

Posted on by Dale

I was out walking the labyrinth one night last week, concentrating on the classical element Earth, hoping for some insight into making the percussion piece more true, and what I ended up with was a flash of clarity about the northpoint.  After all these years, I knew what it should look like.

Here’s a shot of what it kind of looked like:

Except for the addition of a large square stone at the top, by the path, that was it.  Not very interesting and not very inspiring.

So this morning I dropped the cat off at the vet and headed over to Mulch and More, where I picked up the following:

I overbought, but that’s OK.  I have another project in mind for which I can use them.  It’s fieldstone, by the way.  (Also by the way, I took today off because I had to meet with the lawyer to probate my mother’s will.)

This took a lot less time than I thought it would, so much so that I barely have any documentation of the process.  To wit, I stripped away the existing stones:

I dug a hole, leveled it, and laid out the base:

I built the little towery thing (and yes, you have another image in your mind, or will…):

Notice the stones lying in the bottom.  More about that later.  After that, it went so quickly that I didn’t get any more photos until it was done:

And from a more head-on angle:

It’s pretty interesting, I think.  It makes a very good impression from the path looking down, but it didn’t photograph well.  I will be anxious to see how the bank of dirt holds out against the rain this weekend.  And I’m ready for the peacock fern to cover it immediately.

So what do you think?  Should I leave the bottom of the structure just plain dirt?  It would make it easier to maintain in many ways—just scrape the leaves out or spray it with Round-Up.  The other option is to fill it with the stones I stripped from the old structure.  I may play with that to see how it works.

UPDATE: After a lovely evening out by the fire last night, I can report that it functions quite beautifully with a plain dirt floor.  It is now raining heavily; I do wonder what it will look like by Sunday morning.

Earth Dance, part 2

Posted on by Dale

This is going to surprise you, but I am not whining about my composition and how it’s going.

No, really.

I’ve observed something very interesting about my work on Earth Dance this time around.  I’m not struggling with it, which is not to say I’m just breezing along like some Mozart or Puccini, just pouring the music out onto the page (or in my case, the screen).  It’s still a very hard slog, but I’m not struggling.

Instead, I just excrete some work out there and play with it for a while, and then without any hesitation whatsoever skip a few measures, put in a double barline to remind myself of the new place, and start over with new excretions.  No pain, no gain, and no sweat.

I’m also sanguine about where the whole thing is going.  If I don’t like the sound of it, if it’s not chthonic enough, I’m OK with that.  Just start a new excretion.

If I like what I hear, also no problem.  I’m not at all concerned about taking it in a wrong direction, or even in any direction.

All I’m doing is excreting.  Sooner or later, I will hear what I want to hear.

I have come to understand my working habits and my approach to success.  Why should I worry about what I’m pretty sure is going to be a purely entertaining piece?

No, I’m not ready to share any of it yet.

Earth Dance: the beginning

Posted on by Dale

As promised, here is the framework for all the complaining you will enjoy between now and June.

Last summer, on the last night of GHP I think, Dr. Ryan Smith—our percussion teacher—asked all the composers on the music staff to write a piece for percussion ensemble to be played in 2012.  He was generous enough to include me in that request; I was actually surprised and gratified.  To my protestations that I don’t know how to write for percussion, he merely pooh-poohed me.  (Perhaps he was thinking of my “Dance for Double Bass Duo and Marimba”?)

I didn’t bother thinking about it until after the new year—I had other things to deal with, after all.  Still, if I’m going to do this I need to start now, so while driving up and down I-85 I began thinking about what I might do.  I’m a lot more comfortable with the tuned percussion—I really don’t  know how to write for all the really interesting things you can bang on—so I began planning on marimbas.

And because I’m radical like that, I thought I might include some low strings, some cellos, double basses.

So at the moment, the ensemble is for two marimbas, a vibraphone, a djembe, and bongos, plus two cellos and two double basses.

The working title is “Earth Dance.”  I’m pretending it’s the third movement in a suite called Elemental Dances: Fire/Water/Earth/Air.  We’ll see  how that goes, of course.

Last night’s work was just trying to create crap, and I largely succeeded.  There was one theme that was attractive, but I’m going for ponderous/savage/dark, so it may not work.

More as it fails to develop.

Return of the whinging composer

Posted on by Dale

Tonight I forced myself to sit down in front of  the computer and begin banging on the keyboard in some kind of attempt to begin composing the percussion piece for this summer, so you know what that means: months of my whinging about how it’s going—or more usually, not going.

But first, it has been suggested that I post the world premiere performances of Six Preludes (no fugues).  You are spared the whinging for a moment.

I will not post all six; Maila Springfield hinted that she might not be happiest with all of them.  But I think her performances of the first four are quite lovely, so I’ll post those.

I’ll let those sink in for a day or two.  As for the percussion piece, there’s really not anything to whinge about at the moment.  Perhaps I’ll set up the framework for all my complaining tomorrow.