L’Image Aumentare : Pearl No. 160

 OK, it's not really No. 160, it's more like 3 or 4, depending on how you are counting. The 160 refers to the new set of markers I mentioned in a previous post. They arrived, but really didn't live up to my expectations. First, about a third of them were greyscale obviously designed for folks who worked in pencil, a skill I neither have, nor aspire to. But, I did get the set at a half price sale, so still a pretty good deal. However, I realize that I should have paid more attention to myself when I talked about the variability of marker shades.

Let's take a quick look at Pearl as she is today:

It would be nice if I had been able to achieve all those colors with my new markers. Sigh. I discovered that to approach the hues I wanted, I had to haul out my old markers that I had foolishly packed away as "back-ups" and mix them together with the new set. In some cases literally "mix them," do an undercoat of one color and then top it off with another to either "tone down" or "pop up" the shade I was looking for.

So now I have this situation on my "palette table."

 

Certainly gives one a deeper respect for those artists from the old days who ground their own colors and mixed with egg or oil or whatever. So a tip of the hat, or marker, or whatever to them!

Pebbles in The Stream

 I have been reading about a variety of recent anthropological discoveries that have been raising new questions about who we are as a species, and how we fit on the tree of life here on earth. Those discussions, and a few weird dreams featuring people and places long gone by, have got me thinking about "evolution and identity" from a far more specific and focused perspective - mine.

So here is the metaphor I have been playing with: think of yourself as a pebble in a stream - with a tip of the hat to the old TV series, Kung Fu, “Can you catch the pebble, Grasshopper?" We are not isolated in the stream at any point in our lives; rather we get tossed around with, rubbed up against, tumbled over, all the other pebbles around us.

I remember having, maybe when I was 11 or 12, a "rock tumbler kit." It consisted of a round plastic tub, maybe 3 inches around and 4 or 5 inches deep. You took the top off and dumped in some water and the prepackaged rocks and grit. Then you put the tub onto the electric tumbler that "tumbled" the rocks and grit around and around, for as long as you could stand waiting. 

If you managed to just walk away and let it tumble for a few days or a week, when you opened the tub, the rocks had changed; some just smoothed a bit, but others polished - all significantly changed.

Our lives, as pebbles in the stream, are a lot like an existential rock tumbler with all of life's tossing, rubbing and tumbling codifyingp the people, relationships, beliefs and values of our life at any particular time that we pop the top off and take a look around.

Then the seasons change. The rains come and the stream floods, or they don't and the stream slowly swirls us into new eddies, or maybe a dam gets built downstream making our stream into a lake, or merges our stream with others, becoming a river. A shift in schools, a graduation, new relationships, the arrival of children, the departure of same, the death of a parent, all these sweep us along, jostling the other pebbles of our lives, leaving some behind, sweeping new ones into our next eddy, tossing and rubbing.

The point is change. We are often inclined to resist the inevitability of change, my generation more so than my children's or grand grandchildren's. We were taught to think in terms of "my home town," "I work here." "'Til death do us part." All affirmations of a permanent eddy. No more rides in the tumbler. Stasis.

Which is, I guess, why we are still surprised when life proves us wrong and the tumbler jerks like a rusty merry-go-round and commences on yet another jostle toward new eddies. We, as the Brits would say, "move house" for some planned or unanticipated reason. Friends, suddenly grown old, die on us, as do pets whose shadows still lurk, at the corner of our eyes, in their accustomed places.

But other tumblers, dreams, music and sometimes reality, can send us crashing into ripples of forgotten eddies - breathing new life into memory. I encountered the "reality" version a few years ago in "the city," which here in the burbs means downtown Chicago. I may have shared this with you back when it happened, but I am of the age when I do repeat my favorite stories. Anyhow, I was standing on a corner waiting for a walk light, just minding my own business, when I glanced over at the other "standees" and was stunned to see an old high school girlfriend standing a few feet away! Actually, it was my "young" high school girlfriend - looking just like she did when we were 18!

Yeah, I know, that should have tipped me off sooner than it did. But I just kept staring until the light changed and the crowd swirled us apart. I was most of the way across the intersection when I recalled that said "old" girlfriend had a daughter who was attending Northwestern, and had contacted my sister, who worked there for many years, about some Nothwesternish issue. Being aware of the culture frowning on old guys accosting young women on the street, I did not try to catch up to her and ask, "By the way, is your Mother from Springfield, Ohio?" Rather, I choose to believe I had seen the daughter, not some time-traveling apparition of the mother from a distant eddy in the stream.

Dreams and music are eddies of a different flavor. Dreams, at least mine, reflect a kind of "weird" bipolar realty. As I have shared before, I am always the central figure in the dream, but I am quite comfortable interacting with the various supporting actors in my dreams whom I have never met in real life, yet with whom I am apparently well acquainted. We seem to like each other.

The point is that on those rare occasions when people I actually have known in the real world do enter my dreams, they always appear in their "eddy guise," that is to say they look, act, and sound as they did when I knew them, and I, perhaps in an attempt to "catch the pebble, grasshopper" regress similarly. Weird? I'm not sure - perhaps dreams which do seem quite freeform, actually may be somehow linked to some irrefutable aspects of the time-space continuum.

Music is much more straightforward. It does kick us directly into the WayBack machine - and there we are, hands in dishwater, but somehow are 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago with that same tumbling cluster of pebbles we remember - maybe not well, but as we choose to remember them. The internet gives us wonderful control over these visits back up the stream of our lives:

"Let's see, graduated from college in '71, makes high school about '67. So let me type 1967 into Pandora. Oh, yeah! Hi there pebble!

Mom played all those old World War II songs on the piano. I can type in the dates, or just "popular songs for WWII" Whoa, ho! Pebbles from around the piano!"

So music really does time travel us among the eddies in the stream. But very selectively. A pebble from the late 50s. Pat Boone sang a song with the lyric "Twix 12 and 20 are the years you remember." I think the span is significantly wider than that, but not infinitely so. Music does transport us among the eddies, but we don't necessarily always move down along the contemporary musical eddies. 

Before the Internet we depended on CDs, tapes, TV and the radio to give us music, to play the sounds of the eddies of the moment for the pebbles we were tumbling with.The Internet vastly broadens the musical eddies to which we have access, but the pebbles with whom we share our real life still influence the tunes to which we attend and with which we still identify. 

This is unlike the current celebrities, whose names I only vaguely recognize, who have no relevance to "my music." I do realize, and am somewhat fascinated by, the rise of the "Swifties." But must confess I have never heard an entire Taylor Swift song. Tried - just wasn't anything there for me, but obviously is there for the Swifties.

But here let me play this for you, Blackbird, Beatles, 1968

What? Who are The Beatles? Whose child are you?

The Color of Excess

 One of Christine's favorite sayings is "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!" I'm not sure she intended me to follow that line of reasoning as I began to accumulate a store of markers for my images, the current state of which is reflected in the image below.

There is method to the seeming madness. The markers in the jars are the current palette for Pearl. Those are the shades, hues, widths, etc., that I consider before touching marker to the Pearl image. That process is a touch mystical, sort of like dowsing for water. (See note: According to Wikipedia Dowsing is a type of divinationemployed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, A Y-shaped twig or rod, or two L-shaped ones, called dowsing rods or divining rods are normally used, and the motion of these are said to reveal the location of the target material.) So, I run my hand and eye gently over the collected markers and pick up the one "that feels right." The plethora of other markers in the plastic bags are back-up in case the dowsing doesn't choose a color. The dowsing usually does narrow the options - like maybe a red, purple, violet or pink. So I pick up those bags of markers and gaze at them with what I hope passes for insight, and pluck up a marker.

Now let me clarify, lest you think this collection and process exceeds the normal demands of an obsessive artist's palette. Actually the impetus to gather these markers together occurred to me while working on Pearl's hair - an image which I recently shared with you here on the Wall. What happened was one of my markers ran out of ink! Check out the little blank spot between the feather feature and the grid feature off Pearl's shoulder. Empty!

That is more than a little scary for me. Think about it, markers aren't paint brushes, they are reservoirs of color attached to various types of tips that let you apply the ink to the surface you are working with - paper, canvas, cloth, glass - whatever. The problem is no matter what the color of the top of the marker, or the best intentions of the various manufacturers, the color of the ink in each marker can be unique. So when that individual marker runs dry you may never be able to duplicate that precise shade. So naturally, I panicked 😱! 

Visions of a mass "dry off" danced in my head, resulting in no "dowsible" colors for that blank - or other portions of Pearl. There was only one obvious solution - replace the entire palette. Fortunately Michaels was having a 50% off sale on their 160 colors adult artists marker set. I immediately placed my order and am now fretfully awaiting delivery of 160 new glorious markers while attempting to reorganize my limited studio space to accommodate the new arrivals - since naturally I will keep the old ones as backup.

Difficult? Absurdly so, but . . .

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!😜

L’Image Aumentare: Pearl2

 Let there be hair!

L'Image Aumentare: Pearl 1

OK, I'm going to move from prose to images for awhile.

I have always loved Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring, called by some the Mona Lisa of the North. I actually prefer Vermeer's image to DaVinci's. I mean seriously

say you were at what the Brits call a "drinks party," and these two women were there:

Which one would you want to have a glass of bubbly with? Really!

Anyhow the Pearl image has been spoofed a number of times, usually to comic or distorted effect. That is not my intention. Mine is intended as more of an homage. And I thought it moight be fun to let you watch the process as it unfolds:

Here is the first design step, the "cartoon" if you will:

The blank spots at her shoulders will probably come last. It is my intention to fill them with a miniature version of this image, completed of course and rotated:

I'm just not sure how to do it!

Living in the Moment

 No, that's not a typo down below these first two paragraphs, but yes, it is the signature you see often see on my emails when I send you Wall links. But like many "auto" bits in our digital lives, email signatures often become part of the "white noise," of 21st century communication, like the supermarket checkout ritual: "Have a good day." "You too."

I actually spent a good deal of time composing that signature, or "sig" as we often, and ironically, refer to it. And I too often forget it is there. I shouldn't, and I'll explain why - perhaps in too much detail - down below the signature:

"Who we are is a quality of the moment. What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise. So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you."

Hi there. Back again! OK, here we go.

A few days ago I was talking with my brother-by-another-mother, actually talking as "live on the telephone." As the conversation took turns it never would have done when we were growing up back in Springfield, Ohio, Dan used an interesting phrase a couple of times; "living in the 70s." 

Now I need to point out that up until the very early years of the 1970s, Dan and I had spent most of our lives in close proximity. So I interpreted the phrase as referring to those last couple of years "in the seventies" when we were attending Kalamazoo College. 

However, in the specific context of our current phone call, the phrase was a bit of a stretch. Strange, as Dan has a Ph.D in English from UNC, is an accomplished writer and doesn't use the language  as  casually as I sometimes do. So it wasn't until later that the sluggish lexicon of my mind realized that he was referring to our current situation - living with the interesting complexities of life in our seventh decade.

Whoa. Strange collision of realities. In 1970 we were both completing our undergraduate degrees and rushing off to graduate school and matrimony. Hence we were, naturally, infallible, invincible and immortal - full of, as a short-lived soft drink of the era, 3V Cola, put it, Vim, Vigor and Vitality! Yet, in this current reality we are living the year that marks three-quarters of a century existing here on the third rock from the sun. We are both retired, in second marriages, proud grandfathers, a tad less infallible and invincible, and certainly convinced of our own mortality. But, and this is important - also somewhat wiser.

Which, naturally brings us to the question of which “70s” is preferable? The “ins and im” and “3 Vs” of the 1970s or the more compromised, but more thoughtful, reality of our chronological 70s? And what does that have to do with my email signature?

To explain I must return to the year when Dan and I popped into the world seven days apart, in November of 1948. This year also saw a song called Civilization by Danny Kaye and The Andrews Sisters climbing the charts. The fact that it was better known as Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don't Want to Leave the Congo, is a clear indication that this was a song so replete with cultural insensitivity that it must have been offensive even then in 1948. However, like many bits of art removed from their chronological reality and examined with a more reflective eye and ear, we discover some insight in this, admittedly catchy, little tune.  

First, Mr. Kaye sings a couple of lines about the hassle of life in "civilization," that concludes:

"When they've got two weeks vacation 

They hurry to vacation ground.”

Causing the Andrews Sisters to inquire:

"What do they do, darling?"

To which Kaye responds,

"They fish and they swim

But that's what I do all year round!"

Which makes me consider the notion that in our youth, my early 20s of 1970, my focus was, as it is for most 20-year-olds, on the future and how my many successes were going to change the world.  Then "real life," arrives with its ups and downs, successes and failures, compromises and challenges.  And, strangely, somewhere along the line, the old gospel notion of "laying your burden down," creeps into your consciousness. 

Perhaps having the freedom to "swim and fish" isn't your idea of what you want to do "all year round," but still the idea of that freedom does have a certain allure.

And so I realize that the advice contained in my email signature, about cherishing and living in the moment, is something to which I should pay continuing attention. I have made my peace with the fact that I am not going to change the world single-handedly. But perhaps my children, and those myriad other children whom I taught over my 50 odd years in the classroom, will.

In the meantime, they will think, write and create -

"But that's what I do all year round!" 🤪

There Must Be a Better Way

 I don't usually use this space to complain about arboreal issues but I felt the need to make an exception as I stood in the kitchen amidst the decimated remnants of what had to have been untold numbers of trees and sundry plants, modern and ancient.

But let me begin at the beginning as authors are wont to do. Like many folks these days both my better half and I use medicines delivered by a "self-injecting" pen-like device. (Fully prescribed medications, obtained by our personal physician - nothing "dark web" or back alley.)

You may be familiar with these injectors - you hold them against the injection site, click the button on top and the injector, "injects," with varying degrees of discomfort - 1 equaling "Huh, no big deal" to 10 being "Ahhhhh, damn, damn! That hurts!" Well, after one such attempt the reaction was, "Hmmm. Nothing." The injector had failed.

A brief conversation with our friendly neighborhood pharmacist informed us that we needed to seek replacement of this pricy, or "spendie" depending on your local dialect, little gizmo from the company whom manufactured it. So we contacted them.

This required a number of back-and-forth emails amongst ourselves, the drug company and our doc, all necessary, it seems, to determine that neither we nor our physician or any close relatives or casual acquaintances were now, or had been at anytime, employees or representatives of a currently active drug cartel or other nefarious entity operating outside the law in this or any other incorporated area. We indicated that we had, to our direct knowledge, no such relationships.

All this led to a large, 18x15x15 package arriving on our porch. See large box in attached photo. Stickers on the box indicated it should be opened immediately and refrigerated.

"Honey," I called, "The frozen turkey you order has arrived." She indicated, firmly, that she had ordered no such product, nor any other large perishable foodstuffs.

The package, we discovered after digging through all the items you see in the pic, was "necessary" to deliver one, count 'em, or rather count it, I repeat one medical auto injector 6 inches long and about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. We are left with multiple "ice packs" and a futuristic double-walled, form-fitted, government and FDA approved styrofoam container suitable for mailing medically approved human organs or suspicious biohazards anywhere in the world.

And I need to mention that the company also sent an only slightly smaller set of double boxes for us to return the defective injector - same size as the replacement - a three-quarters of an inch in diameter tube six inches long. The multiple prepaid labels were, we assume, designed to prevent us from selling the defective injector on the dark web where the 1.5ml dosage could generate millions for the aforementioned cartel trolls who spend hours lurking online for just this kind of score.

I shudder to think of the countless hours spend by various government committees, not to mention the billable hours spent by equally countless attorneys - public and private, whose machinations have generated the, no doubt, hundreds and hundreds of pages of dense legal prose the contents of which define the requirements that - in order to stay inside the law - result in big pharma pushing a variety of polluting industries to ramp up the harvesting of acres of trees to produce the boxes and the pumping of millions of barrels of oil - harvested from the ancient plant life mentioned waaay up at the beginning of this post - to produce the styrofoam and "freezer friendly" global warming cold packs shipped to us. (Try reading that sentence in one breath!)

But really, don't you think big pharma could of just sent a letter saying something like:

"Hi. We are so sorry our injector failed. Enclosed please find a check for $47.50, the retail cost to compensate you for the cost of the failed injector. Please return the failed injector to the physician who prescribed it. They will be able to prescribe a replacement.

Please pardon us for any inconvenience caused by our defective injector. As additional compensation we have enclosed another check in the sum of $2,500.00 to allow you to purchase a purebred puppy of your choice.

Peace and Good Health,

Your friends at big pharma."

OK. I made up that bit about the puppy - but have you priced lab puppies recently?! But other than that, doesn't that seem a more reasonable solution to our simple injector replacement request than the web of factory production, phone calls, emails, signatures, and postal deliveries in which we were unwitting participants? 

Really.

L’Image Aumentare: Mike’s Hands

 Hi All -

Please pardon the duplications, I am working on cleaning up The Wall list. More about that later. Anyhow here, once again, is the image my Italian buddy, Mike Angelo, and I have been working on 😜.

Cheers!