Saturday afternoon in the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

The chimes have just struck noon, and the carillon has played its selection of Lenten hymntunes. I am back in the labyrinth, soaking up the sunshine.

My intent is simply to relax. There’s nothing pressing on my agenda, no deadlines, no concerts, no Literacy Task Forces. So I’ll read, and do crossword puzzles, and probably nap.

I could work on the yard, but I think I will put all of that off till another sunny day.

What’s still left to do? Oh, plenty. Now I have lots of areas that need grass or moss or something covering the ground. The mound in the center needs a ground cover, since the bluestar stuff I planted earlier died, despite being featured prominently in the new Southern Living as having been used in a lovely Buckhead garden by one William Tingle Smith, of whom I could tell you some charming tales from our Period Dance days.

There’s the putative dance floor, which as you can see I have tilled but not yet leveled or shaped. This requires a lot of thinking and looking and probably drinking.

There’s multiple plantings of various ferns, but I really want to wait until it’s warmer before attempting all of that.

I have cut and sanded, but not stained, new armrests for the old glider. Also, I need to find nuts and bolts to attach them, which was not an automatically easy thing to accomplish when I went to Home Depot last time to accomplish it.

There is still the drilling of pavers for the little plinths out in the labyrinth. I got one finished, and then cold and rain sidelined that operation.

There’s this little deal. These are the leftover bits of pavers after I lopped them for the curves in the labyrinth. My plan is to drill a small hole through them and thread a rod of some kind that will hold them up, then install it as a sculpture somewhere in the complex. It’s an idea stolen directly from Andy Goldsworthy. He, of course, would not be drilling holes or threading rods, but then again he’s an international artist of some integrity. I’m just decorating my garden.

More as it occurs to me.

Later in the afternoon:

Cat with Platonic solids.

Friday afternoon in the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

It is Friday, March 6, and I am enjoying the first warm afternoon of the year, sitting out by the labyrinth and sipping cosmopolitans, my own recipe.

There is a gray cat sitting in the center of the labyrinth, looking very blasé about sitting on the black granite, when she knows very well she is holding down the universe. I think too she is using it as a vantage point in case I rise from my seat, so that she can immediately run before me to the food bowl.

My plan was to make potato soup for supper tonight, but I may decide not to. The cosmopolitans will be a big help in my reconsideration. Just sitting in the sun, listening to my Pandora new age station over my outdoor speaker, and not thinking about tasks, even simple, non-essencetial tasks like making supper, is a dream. Watching the labyrinth. Watching the grass in the labyrinth.

The cat has moved from the center of the labyrinth to the entrance and thence to the steps. She of course used the Straight Path which is forbidden to us humans.

I feel I should explain my previous post. It reduced Marc even to a simple ?, even though I think (I’m on my second cosmo) that we discussed it at Lacuna on Wednesday.

I’m feeling a profound disturbance in the Force, and I think it’s me. Here’s what I think is happening: the tide has turned, and now it’s incoming. Still not clear? After major projects, I think most creative people (I’m generalizing, of course; I mean me) feel a bit bereft. Their creative tide has gone out, and there at the turning of the tide, there is a feeling of stasis.

Wise creators know not to resist this turning, but to sit and enjoy other things while their creative impulses settle and find something new. My tide was abruptly sucked out to sea when I found that there was no longer any need for me to be writing a symphony for the GHP orchestra.

But now, after a prolonged turning period, I am beginning to feel that onrush of ideas and impulses that signal a new period of creativity. This is always exciting, but it’s also a time of extreme anxiety.

There’s the time issue, foremost: when am I supposed to start on… whatever it is I’m meant to be working on? What schedule should I set for myself? (I’m one who works best on a schedule.)

You will have noticed that I haven’t said what it is I expect to work on. That’s because I’m not really sure. I’ve started painting again, of course, and I can always work on that. But there are these short stories that seem to have claimed part of my brain, and I am intrigued enough not to dismiss them out of hand.

There’s all the Lacuna material that is lined up like a flotilla of airplanes on the runway. I could hammer out “We’re Frauds” and “We’re Bears,” plus “The Boy Who Was Afraid of Nothing,” at the very least. I could generate scripts for any of the ideas on our gigantic performance graph.

There’s the music. There’s always the music. I could finish the two-piano arrangement of “William Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” thus improving its chances of performance several-fold. I could continue my self-imposed exercises. I could look at Day in the Moonlight again, and I need to. I could go back to the trio for piano, trombone, and saxophone. And I could always go back to the symphony.

You see my problem: the tide has turned, it;s surging up the shore, and I don’t know exactly how to respond yet. There is a disturbance in the Force, and it’s me.

In the meantime, however, I think I will have another cosmopolitan.

Painting, 3/3/09

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One way to deal with the Dakota:

Just cover it up. The ochre stripe came to me last night as I tossed and turned. The “sky” area may go Prussian blue tomorrow.

In other news tonight, I almost had a solution for the center omphalos of the labyrinth. We had stopped at a home furnishings place in Buckhead, and there was a glass bowl thing with a hole in the bottom that would have been perfect: about an inch thick, and gold. Alas, it’s too small. I shall have to take it back. But I’m really thinking that the central bowl should be gold. That presents its own problems, of course.

A day off

Posted on by Dale

So it snowed yesterday, and of course the whole school system shut down. [I will have to make up this day, because as a day laborer I am paid to be onsite for 180 days, whether or not there are children to be taught or work to be done. But let that pass.]

I’ve gotten a lot done today, most of it involving driving back and forth to Michael’s no fewer than three times. Don’t ask. But the original plan for the labyrinth is now framed, as is the photo of the roller coaster where we spent our wedding night.

I piddled around with a short story that crawled into my head a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sharing anything about them till they’re finished, if ever. Short stories have not been my métier heretofore. It doesn’t have a title. We can call it “Swimming,” if you like.

And finally, finally, just a few moments ago, I began a painting that started bugging me on Saturday.

Here’s the deal: the New York Times offers for sale prints of photos from their archives. Here’s the one that jumped out at me:

It’s of skaters in Central Park, 1884. That’s the Dakota apartment house in the background, reigning in solitary splendor on Central Park West.

I don’t know why this idea popped into my head, but it suggested itself to me that I should clip this thing out of the newspaper, attach it to a board, and then paint over it, exploring its composition as an abstraction. What do you think?

Here’s my first pass:

Here are my thoughts so far: a large whitish field on the bottom half, blackish hieroglyphics scarring the surface. A hot gray stripe above that, cooler gray swath above that. Above that, I don’t know yet. Blocks of Prussian blue. Vertical scrapings across the cool gray swath. I don’t know about the Dakota yet. Browns will begin to figure into the composition at some point.

I’ve begun by simply blacking out the figures, then blocking out some items in Prussian blue. I’m of half a mind to leave the two men in the lower right corner.

Back to the painting.

Pass #2:

Now I’m curious about when the black marks down front are going to stop looking like humans.

Pass #3:

What am I to do with the Dakota?

Labyrinth, 3/1/09

Posted on by Dale

No new news, just snow:

First, as it begins to snow.

Then, as it’s more or less done:

And the long view:

Someday it will snow enough to get a really pretty shot. But I thought this was a good beginning. (Notice, too, how the grass is really coming along.)

Listening, 2/26/09

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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.

Painting, 2/24/09

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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.

Labyrinth, 2/18/09

Posted on by Dale

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.