Signs

Posted on by Dale

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.

Painting, 2/18/09

Posted on by Dale

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.

updates, 2/17/09

Posted on by Dale

Grass is growing in the labyrinth.

Here’s what I haven’t bought since January 1:

Books:

  • Percy Jackson: the demigod files, Rick Riordan , Sort of a one-off volume in the tradition of Rowling’s Beedle the Bard, giving us short tales concerning Percy and his buddies at Camp Half-Blood.
  • Percy Jackson: Book 5: The Last Olympian, Rick Riordan , The final installment of the series, to be published in May. These are great little tales.
  • The graveyard book, Neil Gaiman , The 2009 Newbery winner.
  • Wabi Sabi, Mark Reibstein , The 2008 Caldecott winner

Music:

  • Mystic chords & sacred spaces, Steve Roach, and Body Electric, Vir Unis , These showed up in my Pandora “New Age” station one day when I was working on the labyrinth. I can always use more labyrinth music. Perhaps I should write some of my own. Hm…
  • Time Cycle, Lukas Foss , He had like his 100th birthday or something recently, some kind of celebration in NYC, and this alerted me to his stuff.
  • The death of Klinghoffer, John Adams , A student production in NYC got good reviews and revived interest in the work.

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.

Listening, 2/11/09

Posted on by Dale

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.

Painting, 2/10/09

Posted on by Dale

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.

A complaint

Posted on by Dale

So I’m surfing through Huffington Post this morning, I have the morning off because of jury duty this afternoon, and come across this article on “releasing energy” in your life that’s tied up in incompleted tasks. Blah, blah, blah blah. Sure, fine.

It links to this handy-dandy “incompletion trigger list,” so that you don’t miss any of those pesky tasks and thus remain mired in your own sloth and slovenliness. Go look at it.

Heavens to Morgoth, people, I think I’ll just roll over into a fetal position now.

Or is it just me? Are the rest of you delighted to find such a tool to organize that vague cloud of lowering, unfulfilled duties?

Labyrinth, 2/8/09

Posted on by Dale

I got to work all day in the yard today, beautiful weather, lots to accomplish.

My major project, and there are no pictures because I didn’t take any when it was daylight and now I’m out by the fire, was to level out the ground in the northeastern quadrant. The ground just sort of sloped away in front of the glider/swing area down to the fence on the north edge of the property. I thought it would look better if it were level at least in the glider area, so I built a little “dam” at the 1:00 position and filled it in with dirt. It will be very lovely once the grass has grown.

Moving the dirt down from the carport area means that that area is now smooth and ready to be seeded. It also means the huge blue tarp I bought when the dirt was delivered could be moved to the back yard to be dried and folded. So that was major.

This was minor, but it was important. As I laid out the labyrinth last September, I took four clay pots and set them into the ground to hold citronella candles. Now that everything is finalized, I was able to move those pots into the actual positions of the four cardinal points of the compass.

It was actually a bit odd, I found myself resisting making the change, because, after all, isn’t this a semi-sacred space? How can you change what you’ve already put down? But I slapped myself, figuratively, to remind myself that where the pots had been placed were not the actual points of the compass. Now they are.

I also did a fair amount of cleaning up: tools put away, re-routed the extension cord to the porch by cable-tying it to the tree and up to the deck, tables rearranged, many leaves raked and put on the street, and the brick edging for the glider area reset.

Finally, I took the large terracotta pipe that I uncovered when I tilled the entire area and set it in the ground at the entrance to the bamboo area. Lichtenbergians will know the area I’m talking about and will also understand the term lingam.

Now it’s 8:30 and I’m sitting by the fire after a generous supper of hamburgers and fried accoutrements. Also several life-giving beverages. It’s just about time for dessert.

Listening

Posted on by Dale

In the Ongoing Listening Project, I am done listening to the Gesualdo Tenebrae. As promised, the harmonies are twisted and startling. The texts are unfamiliar, however, so they don’t jump out at me or stick in my head.

The other problem is that half of each piece is extended recitative/chanting. Very nicely done, but not memorable, and the motets themselves get lost. I tuned out the chant and wouldn’t even be listening by the time the motet started.

So this will go into the collection, but I don’t think I’ll be downloading it to the iTunes collection.

I moved on to a CD called Pacifica, by one Fred Frith, if that is his real name. This is a CD that Marc discovered online, decided it sounded interesting, and in what I’m sure was an act of kindness sent it to me as a gift back during one of my “Oh woe why can’t I compose” periods. Marc has always encouraged me to break free of the tyrannies of Western formal music, forgetting that I don’t play any instrument well enough to improvise. (I downloaded the iPhone app Ocarina last night, so maybe I can learn that.)

So I popped it into the CD player in the van, and I toughed it out for several days. It has not grown on me. I understand the process, but I am not engaged by the product. It’s mostly ugly. This one goes into the Lacuna Fun Tub so I can share it with Marc.

Now I’m listening to another Mercury Living Presence re-release, entitled Music for Quiet Listening. This is the one filled with mellow pieces from the middle of last century, all winners of a competition funded by a music-loving businessman who hated the serialism that was so fashionable in our schools and conservatories at the time. He put his money where his mouth was and commissioned pretty music.

I’ll report back in a few days.

I do not understand

Posted on by Dale

So today’s Composer’s Datebook talks about Ellen Zwilich’s “The Gardens” Symphony, and it sounded interesting enough for me to buy it, if I were allowing myself to by anything before June.

What I do instead these days is go to Amazon and put it on my wishlist. That way, when I finally run out of things to listen to and read and am honest about being able to buy stuff again, I haven’t lost any of my momentary interests to the flood of time.

However.

On Amazon, there is “one new or used” CD of this piece, for $68.88. It was released in 2000 and is clearly out of print. It is nowhere on the iTunes Store.

Why is this? In this day and age, there is no reason, none, not one, why a complete back catalog cannot be available on demand. It’s on CD, for heaven’s sake, it’s already digital. Just plop it on a server and serve it up!

Someone is missing the point out there.

Tango lessons

Posted on by Dale

Last night Ginny and I went up to the Take Hold dance studio/ballroom on Miami Circle (off Piedmont Avenue), where a concern called Tango Bohemia offers Argentine tango lessons. It’s a series of eight lessons for beginners.

Despite our past with dance, despite the fact that our ability to partner each other was a major attraction in those first hormonal months together, we were a bit at a loss as how to do this. Since we haven’t had an opportunity to dance with each other, I mean actually dance, in so long, we’re going to have to relearn that touch. Still, we had a great time and look forward to the next seven weeks.

I don’t know what we think we’re going to do with this skill once we’ve learned it. I mean, does Alamo Jack’s have tango nights? I’ll put in a dance patio on the upper part of the back yard where the Mercedes used to sit, overlooking the labyrinth. We can string paper lanterns for illumination, and dance with the glitter of fireflies and our love.