No Pictures For You!

I haven't been able to post any images since Tuesday. The Babel Fish post was a complete struggle. So far so good.........

Babel Fish vs God

I've been trying to find a Latin translation of the word grandmother for a couple of weeks. My quest sprang from a conversation with B, concerning how one would describe an 'avuncular grandma'. (I think you had to be there to understand......)
My last resort was Babel Fish, the online translation tool. Alas, no Latin, but I did discover what a Babel fish was. My ignorance in this area stems from the fact that although I spent many years in the book business, I never read any Douglas Adams. Blame it on a generalized suspicion of any book that becomes too popular, I suppose. I finally saw a few scenes from the movie a couple of months ago, but the Babel fish part apparently escaped me at the time. I decided to investigate a bit and here's what I came up with:

“The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

This was a useful plot device for Adams, as it allowed various alien races to communicate while speaking different languages. Adams wrote that the idea that all aliens would speak English was to him, very strange.

The Babel fish triggered a joke about the existence of God:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
" That was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

In the dvd of the movie, this scene was placed in the "Deleted Scenes" section. Too bad. I think it would have gotten a huge laugh.

Dang!

Well, this beats the 'penguin in a sweater' post. It's 75 degrees at 1 AM. Wow!

Wanderlust A-Go-Go

Six Hours Of 'Six Feet Under'

I watched six consecutive episodes of the last season of 'Six Feet Under' last night. I was up until 4 AM and I think that explains a lot about the mood I've been in today.
Fortunately I was in my pajamas and had no belt or shoelaces close by. Whew.

The Right Attitude

Eeughhhh. Enough of that. This gal seems to have her priorities straight.
"If I have only one life to live, let me live it..........."

In bed and on the telephone!
(And you thought I was going to say "as a blonde", didn't you?)

Second Thoughts

Maybe it wasn't The Tilt-A-Whirl...............

The Cheeto Effect: Quick-Fried To A Crackly Crunch

It's been a week since I've posted anything and I haven't even checked the counter to see who's been visiting. The weather here is beautiful. I have four days off (with two to go), so what's the problem? I did finish a cd compilation and then I started a new one on Thursday. The theme is based on a crazy Civil Defense manual that I found online. Check it out.

As I've suspected, without the proper planning we don't stand a chance. With that in mind, I decided to go shopping for a suitable means of protection so that I can go about my business with the requisite sense of security; knowing that if I at least have enough time to get home, everything will be OK. Here's a souvenir of my trip to The 'Family Fallout Shelter' Fair. I must have ridden the Tilt-A-Whirl one time too many while I was on the midway. Why else would I feel so queasy?

I Want That One

Would I be more likeable if I were to own a real badger, instead of pretending to be one? Could we still keep the jam?

Pop Quiz

This picture was taken in:

1872
1972
2002
This is not a real photograph and
at no time have I ever cut my own hair.

1,111 Hits

Wow. June 13th, 2006. 8:50 PM. Thanks!

Soul Sister

Something's been up with the Blogger software for the last 24 hours. The only way you can post an image is if you remove all of the formatting and then pray that it lands somewhere within your post... The image on the left is a sculpture by Lenore Tawney. It's called "Bird Boy". I mentioned a few posts back that I was trying to compose something about her, because her work is so wide-ranging in terms of the materials she uses and because her compositions possess the ability to evoke incredibly powerful and yet diverse feelings.

The piece to the right is called "In Utero", and it was part of a travelling retrospective which came to Chicago shortly after I did. Suspended high above my head, the silky pale pink cocoon glistened and changed color in the shifting light. Wow. I've read articles about kids who've viewed the piece as part of their first gallery experience. How exactly does that chair stay up there? They're always mesmerized. This is a great example of a piece that's wonderfully accessible on so many different levels. We should all be so lucky in our work.

Tawney was born in Lorain, Ohio back in 1907 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 20's. For many years, beginning in the 50's she has worked in the realm of fiber arts, but in 1964 she also began constructing collages and assemblages out of found materials, like Mr. Bird here. Within these works, she incorporates calligraphy with objects found in nature. Speaking of her technique and materials, she notes "When I'm working, whatever I want is always within reach." Often what is in reach is a fragile egg shell, a pebble, a pressed flower petal, a page from a rare manuscript or an animal bone. In contrast to her monumental weavings, these small works reveal an intensely personal and symbolic world, creating imagery that has been compared by many to the work of Joseph Cornell.

Until I saw Tawney's pieces, I felt that Cornell was the only artist I could truly recognize as a kindred spirit, speaking to me as he did through his boxes composed of stars, shells, exploded watch workings and all of the other cast off treasures he collected and catalogued in his garage. For me, finding Lenore Tawney was the equivalent of finding a sister or aunt that your family never mentioned, but the existence of whom you had sensed from time to time and very much hoped to discover one day. I would love to fill this post with a multitude of examples of her work, but with the current state of the site, I'm glad I can at least get a couple to "stick".

(cough)

BEK Revealed, At Last

OK, I've given up making apologies for why I've been ignoring my writing. At least there's a certain consistency; I've temporarily given up on doing much of anything. One of the most time-honored ways to avoid everything that's crappy in your life is to watch a dvd ("time-honored" being a relative concept). A couple of nights ago I was finally able to see the last episode of 'Six Feet Under' and wow, was it good. I'd forgotten how much I used to enjoy making my friends with premium cable record it for me by whining relentlessly until they caved. Week after week. Times being what they are, even tho' we're all employed I don't know a soul who can pony up the $1000 or so that it now takes to get HBO, and so a year later I'm watching a show that originally aired in 2005.

The other thing that I'd completely forgotten was that my favorite cartoonist was an executive producer (i.e. writer) for the series. The dvd had a retrospective that featured clips of everyone involved in the creation of the show and finally! There he was. The elusive Bruce Eric Kaplan.

I've managed to get a screen capture so that you can see him, too. In searching around for some images of his books to show you, I came across the intro for his book "This Is A Bad Time", written in 2004. It's a little lengthy, but pretty funny and insightful. I'm hoping his words will serve not only as some kind of inspiration to get me back on the path to creativity, but also as an explanation for why I love his work so much and will frequently use it to illustrate whatever point I'm trying to make.

"When I first started drawing cartoons, I lived in a very small apartment in Los Angeles on a shady street near the corner of Fairfax and Willoughby. It was the second floor of a two-car garage. Actually, it was half of the second floor. In the other half lived my neighbor Sharon. Sharon was okay, but her laugh carried. Which was bad, but not as bad as the family who lived in the building about five inches from my window. They generated an ungodly amount of noise, most of it centered around a baby that they seemed to call "cha—tool" for some reason.

So there I was, living in a space that was meant to hold just one car and maybe some old boxes or tools or whatever it is people put in (half of) a garage. I had very few possessions, but, even so, it was quite cramped in there. That's why I drew not at a table but sitting on my bed, hunched over like some kind of beetle. After a few months of that, my back began to hurt from the hunching, and I came up with a new system. I sat on the floor and placed my pad on the low platform bed, atop which a flat, flat futon rested.

Oh God, remember futons? This was the late '80s, and I was in my early 20s. I had come to Los Angeles thinking I would stay for a year or two. But, of course, I never left. I just drifted from one bad assistant job in the entertainment business to another. For many reasons too horrific to go into, the worst was as a production assistant on a cerebral palsy telethon where the entire staff was at war with each other. That was one surreal nightmare . . . and it just went on and on and on.

For a while, I had a steady job as an assistant to a television producer of variety specials, but then he went to Europe for six weeks. He didn't want to pay me while he was away, so he indentured me to a writer friend of his during the interim. Does any of this make any sense? Maybe you had to be in Los Angeles in the late '80s. But, to tell you the truth, I was and it didn't.

Now I was the assistant to this woman who hadn't written anything that had been produced in 10 years. And so she had gone mad, although naturally she had been very highly paid in her downward descent. It was unclear why she needed me since the only thing she ever wanted me to do was to pick up two-liter bottles of Diet Sprite for her. She made this request constantly, over and over again. She would call from various locations around the city, asking me to go to the supermarket and drop them off at her undecorated house in the Hollywood hills. I would say, "But, ——, you already have a lot of bottles in the pantry. I put some in there yesterday." She would be annoyed when I pointed this out, but she didn't back down. She needed her Diet Sprite, I needed to support myself, and so the pantry got more and more crowded. She must have drunk some now and then, but, honestly, she didn't even seem to care much for Diet Sprite.

I wish I could say that my personal life was better than my professional life at this time. But it wasn't. I took random stabs at romantic relationships, but somehow I could never seem to . . . now why am I telling you all this? I'm not sure, except that I was just thumbing through the drawings in this collection, and I stopped to look at one and remembered that I was sitting on the floor of the half of the second story of a garage on a street off Fairfax when I drew it. And I remember which job was paying my bills at the time, who I was not in love with, and what song was being played every ten minutes on the radio. I also remember what I was scared of, how intensely I held my beliefs (which, of course, changed moment by moment) and what people in my life intimidated me. The particular drawing that I stopped at was, in fact, inspired by a person who intimidated me back then—it was someone I had gone to college with who was now much more successful than I was (not that that was so hard) and utterly comfortable with himself and confident of his "gifts." I thought, I could never be that comfortable with myself, and wondered why. The result of these ruminations was a cartoon about a contemplative fish who should perhaps be more secure.

Which is all to say that these drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here's the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be as free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It's great.

Every morning (to this day, I have the same routine, except now I have a desk, albeit a pretty crappy one), I sit down and think about why I am disgruntled or why I am not as disgruntled as I was yesterday and out come these little drawings . . . after much angst and staring into space and occasional lying on the ground moaning. And each week I send off 10 or so to The New Yorker. And maybe the magazine buys one or two. (Or very often, none. I might mention here that sometimes I merely pump out insane bile that wouldn't interest one single person on the planet, just like any other journal writer.) And then, finally, they are published. Mostly in The New Yorker, but sometimes in other places as well, such as L.A. Weekly. Maybe they appear days after I did them, but sometimes it is weeks, or months, or even years. And when I look at them, I think back to why I drew whatever I drew and I laugh. Or sometimes cringe. Or, every now and then, just wonder what the hell was wrong with me.

You know, now that I have told you all this, I feel slightly embarrassed. But, still, here they are, reader. I open them up to you, and I hope you enjoy them in some way."

“http.mediabistro.com”

Again???!

US OFFICIALS: AL-ZARQAWI DEAD
Military confirms that al-Qaida's leader in Iraq has been killed.

Most likely, he's "Not quite dead, yet". Didn't he grow a new leg and get away the last time we 'killed' him?

This site is now officially on 'Elmo Alert'.

Thanks to J for the inspiration for the caption.

On Whose Terms, Mr. Thurm?

Here is your horoscope for Tuesday, June 6:

"While it's important to have appropriate emotional boundaries, make sure you don't stay behind them longer than is necessary. There is a difference between a sense of privacy and simply isolating yourself."

I'm in a rather peculiar state of mind which has been brewing for the last few days. I've written before about what it means to be dissatisfied; or at least alluded to it in my post about Jennie the Sealyham terrier in Maurice Sendak's book, 'Higglety, Pigglety, Pop'. Today, I am caught by a feeling that the shape of my life is not exactly being formed by my own desires or needs. I saw this horoscope this morning and I thought, "How ironic. Isolated is exactly how I feel." It was a sensation quickly felt and it passed almost immediately, to be replaced by the realization that I need to figure out where the responsibility for this feeling lies. I've spent most of my adult life without a family and as a consequence, a connection with the world has been of the utmost importance to me. My friends are my family; my various jobs have mostly been the conduit to constructing this gossamer, yet resilient network. It stretches from one coast to the other, but in this town the threads are sparse. I spend vast quantities of time alone when I'd rather not, but I've also grown rather resourceful at creating my own entertainment. Writing is certainly one form. If you know me at all, then you're already familiar with the attributes of my life in its present configuration, so I won't bore you with the "minutiae of me". Having discovered last night that I've been passed over for a promotion, I was irritated last night and irritated this morning, and actually I was irritated when I started composing this post many hours ago, but now I'm fine. I'm fine with just about everything when I really stop and consider it all, but the thing I'm not so very fine with is that the nature of much of my life sometimes feels as if it's being dictated by others, but is that really the truth? Living as I do, in this land populated by legions of the overly self-contemplative and self-obsessed, I'm giving myself permission to "go native" as it were, to wonder why I've been O.K. with this state of affairs for so long. Why have I been willing to find acceptable what feels and looks like a mere two-dimensional representation of the world that I want to live in? Incomplete relationships that start and stop at the convenience of others, jobs of no particular weight or heft, the occasional care and feeding of the creative genius who dwells inside me; half-measures all around. Who's in charge here? Do I really want more than this, or is this actually as much as I need? "More" would take change, "more" would take action. Heavy lifting would be involved, I fear.

I pause this rant for a sidebar. Back in the 1980's, SNL had a brief season of glory when the cast consisted of, among others; Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Martin Short, and Billy Crystal. This was the season that gave us Short and Shearer as the incredibly earnest, yet athletically-challenged synchronized swimmers, and it's just about the only skit they trot out to represent this period whenever they do a retrospective of "greatest hits". There was another though, that a few of us will never forget and still refer to; the 60 Minutes parody. Shearer's performance was uncanny as an overly made-up and very intimidating Mike Wallace and Short played Nathan Thurm, an attorney retained by the company who produced the "Minkman Schnoz", a prosthetic gag nose which was the centerpiece of various litigations; all stemming from its tendency to explode. As "Wallace" hammered away at the details, "Thurm", who was smoking a cigarette with the longest ash on record, grew sweatier and sweatier, refuting comments he had made seconds before by looking at us through the camera and denying them all. "I did not say that. Did YOU hear me say that? Is it me, or is it him? It's him, right?"

And that brings me to now. Unable at some level to accept the fact that I alone am responsible for whatever this is that I've created, and that I alone can defend it, change it, or pay the court costs; be it a dangerously explosive fake nose or a life lived under the radar; sweating profusely, I turn to face the camera and ask, "Is it ME?"

One final note. This is my 150th post, and for that I do take full responsibility; along with the trash that needs to go out, the bills that I've been neglecting, and the black coffee I'm consuming since I can't get it together to walk to the store for cream. A life of the mind can sometimes be so, uh, sedentary........

Creativity On Hold

I haven't written a thing in a week and I'm not happy about it. I've been trying to put together a piece about Lenore Tawney, an artist who works in fiber, wood and paper. I've been trying to assemble a new CD compilation. The only thing I've been able to do is put together this new piece of.....whatever it is. The other-worldly space ship image is actually the inside of a steam powered locomotive boiler. I call this "Center Of The Known Universe". I'll be back soon. Maybe even tonight!