I do apologize for not blogging regularly these days. Perhaps I need to blog about that.
Just joking. I can’t even get my thoughts together for that kind of metablogging. I’d like to think that my brain is in such a creative turmoil that I’m afraid to commit any of my ideas to writing. Sure, let’s just go with that.
So my most recent CD in the ongoing Listening Project is Symphony No. 3, Philip Glass. The CD contains the aforesaid symphony, plus Interlude No. 1 from The CIVIL warS; Mechanical Ballet from The Voyage; Interlude No. 2 from The CIVIL warS; and The Light.
At first, I was not overly engaged by the music, but the more I listened to it, the more I understood each piece and even began hitting the back button on the car stereo to hear a track again, always a sure sign of my listening investment.
The third movement of the symphony in particular caught my fancy. It’s the slow movement of the work, beginning with a Glassian pulse in the low strings. (The entire work is for strings only.) Eventually, after the chaconne-like harmonic progression has been established, a solo violin enters, sweetly singing in a higher register, with a syncopated upward leap in its melody. Then, without our even noticing it, a swirling triplet figure detaches itself from the underpinnings and becomes a second violin melody in counterpoint to the first one, and then another, and then another, until we have multiple melodies spinning up and down their scales and trills and melismas. All the while, the throbbing accompaniment ebbs and flows, and we keep the upper melody as signposts on the way. It is quite lovely.
I also quite liked The Light, a symphonic poem which is the usual Glass thing: counterpoint, syncopation, stirring outbursts and climaxes. Quite a happy piece by his standards.
So this one’s a keeper.
At the moment my two Listening companions are Discreet Music, Brian Eno, and Skys, by one Michael Danna. I’m about done with those, I should have posted this piece days ago. Because of my impromptu Wikipediaing of Glass, I have dug his Symphony No. 8 out of the pile and will work on that next. I also retrieved the Symphony No. 2 from the shelf and will give it a whirl.
The problem with this is that then I start hearing this kind of music in my own head. I’m not sure that’s where I want to go with my music.
I began my “close observation” painting the other day but haven’t had time to blog about it.
Here’s the first pass:
Bold, ugly, blocking out shapes and masses.
Second pass:
Still pretty “slashy,” but already getting more detail in the handle and around the rim. Also, I reshaped everything: the mug is wider, and the handle is more accurate.
Behold: grass!
A small shot, but you can see the green beginning to arise beneath the straw.
It actually has gotten greener since yesterday, and by next week I expect to have a good start on the lawn.
Of course, this is probably the winter rye, which sprouts fast and is an annual. The actual grass probably hasn’t even come up yet.
Still, it’s a start, and I think it will go a long way to showing others who remain unconvinced of the whole venture that it will be a quite lovely space indeed. It will in any case be prettier than what was back there before I started, which was this:
Pretty scuzzy, actually. So in any case, the cool elegance of the labyrinth is a vast improvement.
Here’s a shot of the new landshaping I did the other day:
This is where I decided to keep the dirt level in front of the glider at least past the little oak tree.
I used some of the leftover paving stones to create a little earth dam there. It juts into the bank of the northern arc of the labyrinth, but does not touch it. I hauled the remaining dirt from the carport down and filled it in.
In other news, I went researching the availability of ferns today. I found several varieties that will serve admirably in the low sunlight and mostly moist soil in the yard. Now I just have to figure out how best to deploy them. They are not cheap.
Last week I planted a few nandinas down at the back corner. There was already one there, a “volunteer” as a lady of a certain age in Newnan would say, and it dawned on me that they would look good in a clump in that particular spot. For one thing, they would cover up the ugly job someone did, and it wasn’t me, in finishing off the chainlink fence there. For another, they would remind me of my grandmother’s back yard, which had a row of unkillable nandinas along the hogwire fence between her backyard and what used to be ours when I was wee.
I also planted some ground cover, the name of which I do not recall, on the mound in the labyrinth. It does not seem to be doing well, but that might have been because of the cold weather. Perhaps as it warms up it will revive and cover the mound with a lush carpet. It could happen.
Over the weekend, outside of Greensboro, NC, we came across this:
I made Ginny pull over so I could get out and take a picture.
Yes, it’s too easy to make fun of rural-ish ventures such as this. It makes me look boorish, an issue that has arisen in the 341 poem as I try to figure out what I’m trying to say in that particular work of art.
And yes, a Tuff Man contest in the arts center is no more ridiculous than the Miss Georgia Teen pageant that our own Centre hosted several years ago. In fact, I’d say it’s exactly equivalent: the investiture of prescriptive sociosexual norms in a communal glorification.
However, this dichotomy of macho manhood and the arts has raised itself [ed. note: that was for Marc] in our efforts over at Lacuna Group. Four of our five artists involved there are men, and part of the material we’re grappling with is the risks/pleasures/pains of defining ourselves as creatives in a society that does not necessarily see that as congruent with Tuff Man ideals.
So it amused me to see an arena that we probably regard as a haven from such things hosting such things. The worm i’ the’ bud, as it were. And with one more serendipitous link to that charming phrase, I’ll open the floor for discussion.
I haven’t really painted anything in a couple of days, on the road, busy redefining literacy assessment in Georgia, that kind of thing, but I thought I’d post a little of what I’ve been doing.
This is a little sketch I did on the backside of a series of little tiny sketches which would be too small even to photograph unless I actually used the camera instead of my iPhone, and I’m too lazy for that.
The goal was do a hardcore study of shadows and mass, and in that I think it’s successful. I had intended to make this a more complex thing, but I kind of like it as it stands.
One reason I like gouache as a medium is that it can be blended even after drying. (It can also be used on the palette after drying; very economical.) In this case, I could go back in with shadows and reblend the edges between light and dark, shifting the edges to one side or the other.
My next study will be to see if I can get even half the reflections right. One thing I do realize is that the “white” of the mug itself has to be gray, because otherwise the hotspots of the reflected lights have nowhere to go. My intention is to layer and layer and layer the paint, probably working in fresh stuff from the tubes in a fairly thickish, flat manner, just keep adding and correcting what I see until I’m happy that I’m nearly correct in my observations and the translation of same.
Grass is growing in the labyrinth.
Here’s what I haven’t bought since January 1:
Books:
Music:
And most of all:
This is the Take-Away Tray from the Museum of Modern Art. It was featured in The Week magazine on their little Consumer page. I like it for the back yard, both for toting drinks and for moving around the dozens of votary candles necessary for evening activities. However, for $90 “on sale,” it is definitely on the Do Not Buy list for the time being.
I’m also not buying updates to iWork and iLife; a complete upgrade to my Adobe DreamWeaver suite is also waiting for a paycheck or two this summer.
Here’s what I have bought: tango lessons, and a couple of dinners out, and a few presents for friends who needed them. Some materials for the ongoing labyrinth project. Not bad.
I am beginning to detect a pattern to the stack of CDs on my desk: they are lackluster works that did not appeal to me on first listening, and my giving them all a second chance does not seem to be helping.
My most recent trudge is through Music for Quiet Listening, a Mercury Living Presence re-release. As I’ve noted before, the contents are the winners of the Edward B. Benjamin Award for Restful Music, and no, I’m not making that up. It was given from 1953 to 1971 at the Eastman School of Music to that student composer whose composition seemed “best to introduce restfulness in the listener.” How they made it through that difficult time in music is beyond me.
Anyway, the pieces on the CD are soggy modal meanderings that I honestly cannot distinguish one from another. There are twelve of them, and I could not tell when one ended and the next began. I’d look down at the stereo and see that somehow we’d made it from track 3 to track 8 without my noticing.
Ginny pointed out that most of it sounds like 1930s movie soundtracks, and I swear track 7, “Larghetto,” by one Paul Earls, was used in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
So, another CD on the giveaway pile. Next up: Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3.
One of my Lichtenbergian goals for this year was to begin painting again. My short term goals are a) to explore surface, i.e., abstraction; and b) to do a series of small paintings of a coffee mug.
This was my first effort, from last week sometime. I just wanted to whack one out, to see if I could actually pay attention to what I was seeing.
I chose a coffee mug because of its basic cylindrical shape and lack of surface features. My goal is to learn to observe and to replicate that observation, of shape, shadow, and reflection, and not to get bogged down in textures. Even with the no-features of the mug, I will have enough to be going on with, trust me.
So anyway, this was the first, get-it-out-there object, and it’s not a failure. I got the shadows pretty well, and for a quickie (it took me less than three minutes for the whole thing) it’s not bad in a Museum of Bad Art kind of way.
The problem, my problem, is the handle. I spent part of yesterday afternoon’s voir dire session trying to figure out the topology of a handle. It’s not hard, is it, just a torus intersected by the cylinder. But make that torus of highly glazed, white ceramic, and it’s a little bit tougher to see. There are no edges to speak of, and the actual shape is confounded with shadows and highlights.
That kind of twisty, ribbony kind of shape is the kind of thing our left brains love to assume they “know” what it looks like, and you have to force the left brain to shut up and let the right brain actually observe what’s there. My left brain “knows” that if I draw two ovals offset and connect them (like we used to do in elementary school with two squares to draw a cube, what, you didn’t do that?), it should produce a handle, but the results so far have not been satisfactory for my for-the-moment-semi-photorealistic purposes.
So I have a couple of left-brained plans to work on that. One is to print out a photo of the thing and just trace the shape, reduce it to lines.
It also occurred to me this morning that if I had a mug whose handle was striped, it would help define those fuzzy edges. Then it occurred to me that I could do that myself, and so I did, striping the “edges” of the handle.
Now I can see more clearly where the weird shift is in the loop.
So there’s my project for the next few days, painting-wise.
