Metal Finis

I finished the pendant! Okay, it’s not the masterpiece I imagined, but it’s a fun little piece and I like it. I still imagine a better way of working with the clay, so that time isn’t so much a factor, and better craftsmanship can result. But this little piece displays my motto, and has a fresh, impulsive feel to it. Like being on a beach, writing in the sand.

My 2,167th brilliant career idea

Ahhh, yes. It’s time to write in here again. No one likes a neglected blog. Of course, no one reads it. And since the only one I’m pleasing is No One, I should do what No One likes. And No One likes a neglected blog. So I guess I’ll go on neglecting it.  :)

<giggle> that’s my kind of humor. I’m such a geek.

SO. I made a pendant out of silver last week Sunday. Actually, I made it out of silver clay. It was tough stuff to work with, and the rest of the class struggled with it quite a bit. But it seems my design took advantage of the clay’s strong points, and I did not ask much of it outside of that, so by the end of the class everyone was admiring my work, as was I. The thing was going to dry until Tuesday and then get fired, and we were to come back on Sunday and finish the piece, sanding and whatever else you do with a silver pendant to get it ready for wearing.

Well, on Saturday night I came down with a nasty, nasty cold.

So I had to skip the class on Sunday. I was probably the person most excited in the whole class about seeing my finished product … not saying others weren’t excited, but I was abnormally excited, having spent hours thinking about it during the week, buying a chain for it, inventing a more efficient way of working with the clay, and planning a future career making silver pendants to sell. I mean, I took this to the limit of my dreams. I’ve got my jewelry studio all planned, my catalog designed, my prices set …

(ahem.) But I still haven’t seen the pendant finished. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get in there tomorrow afternoon and work on it. I’ve been feeling better, although today I was really tired, but it seems the congestion is nearly gone. If I can be sure the fever is gone too, I think I’ll venture out a bit.

absolutely random thoughts

…because I can. Because nobody reads this blog so I have no pressure to be “interesting.”

- When I was a very poor, newly single mother, I bought a sapphire and diamond pendant off of HSN. Then, many years later, I bought a ring that matched. For some reason, I remembered the ring but forgot the pendant. SO, even more years later, I bought another pendant, thinking I needed it to match the ring. Today, I found both pendants and put them together. They match. But now I can’t find the ring.

- Tonight, just after sunset, the clouds in the sky looked like the smudges I usually clone out in photoshop, thinking they’re smudges on the windshield or dust on the lens.

- Tonight I ate a meal so exquisitely delicious that I wanted to freeze time just to extend the taste in my mouth. Smoky filet, buttery scallops, succulent green beans and perfect garlic mashed potatoes, topped off with a  refreshing wine and a fresh berry dessert. I ate outside and listened to the fountain splashing, with light jazz in the background. The sky glowed dusky twilight and the air was cool and dry. I feel I can now welcome fall, having bid summer such a sweet farewell. (The server must have thought I was a reviewer or a secret shopper or something … she sent me off with a slice of carrot cake, compliments of the house, for no reason whatsoever!)

- I wasted a whole day not working on my computer because the darn thing is so slow. It took all day to upload two cards, import into Aperture, apply some color corrections, and export. It’s still exporting, has been doing so for the past three hours and is only half done. The project I’m working on is a free little thing I’m doing for friends. Kinda frustrating that I’m not getting much of the work I want to be working on done.

- I’m eating my carrot cake right now. Mmmmmmm!

craziness

Half the country is afraid of one man, but I’m afraid of half the country.

the obligatory Michael Jackson post

I suppose I have to mention Michael Jackson’s death here. It seems to be every blogger’s obligation. Well, I won’t wax rhapsodic about his life; enough others are doing that and frankly, I just never felt that emotionally attached to him as a person or as a musician. 

What I do recognize, and it’s only sinking in as time passes, is that his death as an icon, and as an influence on my generation, and especially on my personal memories formed at the culmination of my youth — when life feels like the sweetest agony and every emotion sticks with you like a tattoo for the rest of your life — is monumental. This is the moment in my own life that I’ve only heard about in others’. I personally never really cared about Elvis, either. His life ended before mine seriously began. His music is, to me, not much different from Tony Bennett’s or Bobby Vinton’s or Judy Garland’s: it’s music I hear on the oldies station. But there are those who were formed during the Elvis era, and so the death of Elvis is huge to them. Well, I was formed in the Michael Jackson era. His music is a huge portion of the soundtrack of my youth.

One good thing about living through this moment is that the MJ of recent years is being replaced by the MJ of his greatest years. CNN’s tribute picture is of an early 80’s Michael, when he was on top of the world and looking good. Videos are popping up of his early stardom, the birth of the “moonwalk”, Thriller, Beat It, Billie Jean. I watch them and travel back in time in my mind to where I was when those songs were top, and frankly those were some of the best years of my life. I enjoy the visit very much. I realize that those days are gone, and no matter if MJ had lived on for another forty years, those days would never come back. We are where we are.

I feel the worst for his kids. I honestly feel a little relieved for MJ that his agony is over: the debts, the lawsuits, his ultra-sensitivity that must have made life nearly unbearable at times. I have, when I spent time thinking about it, felt that I could identify somewhat with his crazy misguided innocence. I have honestly never really believed that he was guilty of pedophilia. Not saying it didn’t happen (or that it did) since I wasn’t there, but in a weird way I see an overgrown kid who just wanted to have a childhood, but whose body grew too old for his dreams at the same time that he was handed gobs of money to create a replica. Some people just don’t want to grow up. Money makes it possible to think you can actually create the impossible. And looking in on childhood from outside the window, it looks rosy and pink and possible to go back, although it is all illusion. Childhood is what you live through. LIFE is what you live through. It has nothing to do with what you perceive others have experienced, or more relevantly, what you suspect you’ve been left out of.

I’ve been there. Holidays look the same way to me. So does youth, in some ways. I think at some point you realize the cold hard truth that you are what you are, but if you’ve been in the public eye all your life, the damage is done. Maybe we’d like to ignore MJ’s death for all his faults and foibles, but I don’t think we can, for fear our insensitivity will result in our own death being ignored because of our own faults. The dead deserve respect. It’s the human way.

So anyway, he’s dead. Investigations will be held, perhaps scandals will arise. It will all be part of the ultimate narrative. “Narrative.” The word is inherently linear, active, forward-moving. This is where we are right now, writing the narrative of his death. Writing the narrative of our own lives through his death. Looking backward while moving forward. And this is the story we will tell to the next generation, who will listen with bright eyes and hollow ears, and who will never understand. Until it happens to them.

Philosophizing on how to approach an image

[NOTE: this is a copy/paste from a photography forum I belong to. I originally posted it in the "What Is Art?" section, but decided it would make a good blog post as well. But I didn't want to rewrite it to fit the blog, so here it is, as I originally wrote it.]

——————————–

First of all, this may be in the wrong forum, as it’s more about technique than “art”, but I think it’s the best category anyway because I’m going to talk about how to approach an image to make it say what you want it to say, which is more about art than about technique.

Secondly, this may be basic and very unprofound. But I’ve never read it or heard it stated, so I’m going to post my thoughts. “Good” photographers have mastered this, either consciously or subconsciously. But this might be something for the rest of us “aspiring to greatness” to think about, since maybe we haven’t.

Thirdly, I’ve had no formal training in photography, so if this is College Photography 101 stuff, please go easy on me.

Here goes:

I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between photos as “art”, and photos that simply record a scene. I think it’s all in the way you approach the image before you take the picture, the questions you ask yourself, that make the difference. I’ve seen so many images of places people have been, or flowers, nature, architecture, etc. and I say to myself, “okay, now I see where you’ve been,” but I’m uninspired by the scene photographically, even if the person has perhaps a technically sharp image or is otherwise flawless.

So many people (myself included) see something neat and say, “hey, that’d make a picture!” and then put the camera to our eye and *snap* (of course trying to compose the image as best as possible). And then later we look at it and wonder why we didn’t manage to capture the emotion we felt at the moment we decided to take the picture.

I think there’s a critical question to ask of oneself before taking any picture, and that is, “What is it about this scene that impels me to make it a photograph?” And then, when we’ve answered that question, then ask oneself, “What technique should I use to capture and enhance that particular quality to convey it to others?”

Perhaps a flower has a particular milky white color that I’d like to convey. So maybe I’ll choose to overexpose it just a tad, to bring out the whiteness. Maybe there’s a foreboding nature to a place. So maybe the shadows should be enhanced to give it mystery. Maybe a bridge seems heavy and imposing. So I’ll choose an angle to emphasize that feature. Is what I like about this scene dependent on its three-dimensionality? Maybe I should think about trying HDR, set up my tripod and bracket so that I can at least give it a shot later. Maybe a field seems particularly endless. I’ll choose a wide angle, down low, or whatever.

So my point is, I think it’s critical to engage the mind BEFORE the shot, actively analyzing what you want to achieve, and then making conscious choices as to how to achieve it. I know that’s extremely basic, but it’s not something I really spent time thinking about in the past. I thought pointing a good camera at an interesting scene and making a good composition were enough. I never really engaged my mind to a deep enough level, though. I’d get a few really good images, but I now consider them to be accidents.

I’ve often heard the advice that a good photographer has endless patience. I know I’m guilty of impatience, and I’m working on slowing down, THINKING first, and then spending the time needed to get what I want. And I think I’m seeing my pictures improving, at least in the way that my end product is matching more closely to my initial intentions. I still love following my gut reaction, but I hope that by spending more time in the practice of thinking first, that I’ll speed up my thinking and someday be able to seamlessly incorporate it into shooting from the hip. That’s my ultimate goal.

anatomy of a symphony

Mozart -  Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter,” K. 551

First Movement: Without really hearing much more than the opening notes, I look at the stage, mentally placing my opera singers on it, in their trio early in the show, wondering if my staging would work as I imagined it. Earlier today, as I was in the shower getting ready for the show, I worked out roughly how my story was going to open, and I thought about some staging for when the two men switch places. My stage in my head was really wide with calipers on both sides where the staging would take place, but this is just a big box stage. Typical of most stages my opera would play on, I think. Would it work on this type of stage? I think it would. In fact, I think it would work quite well. Maybe place my heroine up center, raised, while the two men sing on either side downstage. I suddenly become aware of the music. Pretty. Sounds like Mozart. I hope my composer writes in this style. He probably won’t, though. No one writes new Baroque style anymore. Pity. I really like it. It’s simple and pretty. Hey, what if I wrote my own music? It would be hard, but maybe not too impossible. I could puzzle through it, and who knows, maybe I know more than I think I know. I wonder if English lyrics would be pretty enough for the music. Maybe French would be better; after all, that’s where the story originated. But I don’t know French yet. Well, I could work through it with a translating program, and then give it to someone else to look over. I allow myself to daydream that I’ve written an awesome new opera, with modern staging and beautiful music, and in TWO LANGUAGES. I imagine the fuss that would be made over me, the woman from nowhere who didn’t really know music or languages yet still managed to create this stunning work, this new form that brings new popularity to Opera. I imagine with my success that I’d be in great demand, and everyone would see me as an Opera Composer, and I’d get commissions, but the problem is, I’m not a composer! I only have one opera in me! Is there such a thing as a One Hit Wonder in the opera world? I couldn’t write another, it would be too hard. Or could I, there is that Spanish story I was thinking of adapting …

oops, movement over.

Second movement: This is a quiet one. Really, really quiet. I’d hate to have to cough during this one. Uh oh, what is that sensation on my tonsil? A tickle? Oh no, don’t think about it! Dammit why did I start thinking about coughing! Don’t think about that tickle on my tonsil! No. It’s small, it will go away. That small, negligent little tickle on my tonsil. It will go away. If I just. stop. thinking. about it. It’s not going away, is it? It’s getting bigger. Because I’m thinking about it. No. No. Go away. Maybe if I focus on it, like I did that one time in yoga…I’ll focus on it and make it raise up from being a tickle on my tonsil to being a little raised dot, and then I can mentally swallow it. Focus, focus, oh god it’s huge I need to cough! Noooooooooooo! Okay, maybe just one little cough. I’ll time it, when the music gets a little louder …. 

…. it’s not getting louder is it? Wait, wait, this seems like it’s maybe just a little bit louder …

*cough*

God that didn’t do anything did it! It scratched my vocal cords, but didn’t get anywhere near my tonsil. Oh god oh god oh god it tickles, I’ve got to cough … I’ve got to cough … okay, okay, maybe this is a loud spot, no?, oh well I have to just get it over with and

*COOOOUGHHH*

Phew!!!! Wow that was loud, but now it’s done at least. The tickle is gone, thank god. Gone, gone, for the rest of the concert. I hope. Whew! Hope I didn’t bother Delfs. He did stop the concert that one time for a hearing aide, I’ll bet a cough is really distracting. oh but it’s so common. At least the tickle is gone .

*Oh shit.* There it is again.

I can’t cough again I can’t cough again I can’t cough again! I have to wait for this damn movement to end! Hurry up and end, movement! I need water. Why didn’t I put my damn water bottle where I could reach it? If I try to dig it out of my coat pocket now, I’ll be sooo distracting to the people around me! I wonder if they can tell that I’ve got tears running down my cheeks, I’m trying so hard not to cough. I hope they appreciate that I’m making myself miserable rather than disturb their performance for them. Oh my god, but I think I can hold it this time, at least til the end of the movement. Oh, please end soon!!! Please, please please end soon!

THANK GOD! I’ll give it a moment, let someone else cough first … No? no one? Okay, gotta do it, but I’m doing it in the right spot this time, yay!
*COOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH*

Damn, that was loud. Acoustics in here, wow. Amplify everything. Oh for goodness sakes, Mr. Man-In-The-Seat-Next-To-Me, I don’t have tuberculosis. It was just post-nasal drip. On my tonsil. Surely you’ve had that happen? Oh quit shifting in your seat. And guy behind me, I heard you sigh loudly! Man, I suffered so much in order to cough in the right spot, and this is how I’m treated??? Geez.

Third movement: Dammit I’m getting my water bottle, I don’t care. It will help. *GULP* Ahhh, yes it did, problem solved.

……….

Still thinking about that cough………

Fourth movement:

…….. Still thinking about that cough………

INTERMISSION, thank god!!!
Brahms  -  Symphony No. 1

Back pain + head cold ≠ writing

Sorry I haven’t written lately, although I’m happy that my last post was a somewhat philosophical one, rather than the detailed description of how I turned over in bed last night. This week has been frustrating. I was finally feeling good and energized by sleeping well, and then this thing derailed me. My house is disgusting. I’m running out of clean clothes. I’m assuming my neighbors are planning an intervention over my front lawn, if I don’t get out there and mow soon. It’s unfortunate that the most visible grass at the curb also seems to grow the fastest. And is the hilliest, most difficult area to push a mower through.

I made it to my last french classes, zoned but present. I think now I can at least puzzle out the meanings of many french sentences, which is a lot more than I could do seven weeks ago. I still can’t seem to conjure up the names of numbers past “dix” for some reason. When I’m asked to do so, it’s like the stimulus for White Noise to turn on in my head, complete with all the ‘q’s and ‘k’s found in your typical static:

Professeur Lyndsey: “Quel âge avez-vous?“

Étudiante Me: “uhhhh … uhhhh … I should know this … 4qkqqkkqcat … cat … quat …quatro … no that’s spanish … catorze? no … umm: un, deux, trois, quatre … quatre … yeah, I think that’s it … quatre-3? quatre-trois? no, no, that’s four-three. What’s forty? uhhhh … qkqqqkkqkkquatresoin … quatresois … deux … dooo … duhhhh … I should know this! … uhhh ….. uhhh … !“

I’ve also signed up for the June Purge, as in playwrightpurge, as in the yahoo group I’ve been a member of for the past two or so years. The first year the purge yielded me a very finely received Short Story for my creative writing class  … the second year yielded about two days of attempts before I flipped out on my husband and told him I wanted a separation and he jumped out of the car in the middle of Waukesha and started walking home. End of Purge, beginning of Figuring Out Where My Life Was Going To Go Now. (Apparently, it wasn’t going to change much, except for the better. For awhile, at least. More on that another time. Maybe.)

So, Day One of this purge found a most unexpected opportunity: a 5pm submission deadline for a Very Short Play Project (my words) at Indiana University Bloomington. I read about the opportunity at around 10 am -ish. Right away I got an idea, so I (stiffly, painfully) sat down and started writing, and (with a lot of interruptions, as illustrated by these parentheses) I wrote a 4-page play called HELL (interrupted by a chiropractor appointment) and submitted it one minute before the deadline. (I’m assuming their 5 pm is EST, which meant 4 pm for me, and with a 2:15 dr. appt. it was rough but I wasn’t going to miss this chance.) I didn’t even think about whether it was “good,” or formatted perfectly, or whether it got hung up on internet traffic and missed the deadline or anything like that. I did MY part, which was write it and submit it (my first submission to anything outside my own school, btw!!) and I did my best in the time I had, so YAY ME!!!!!  HUGE personal step. 

I received confirmation of receipt the next morning, so I know they got it in time for consideration. I didn’t have the guts to re-read it after I’d submitted it until late the next day. I discovered a formatting error (glaring, once you see it, but perhaps forgivable? I used the word SCENE rather than the word PLACE for some unknowable reason) and I admit the story is fairly simple, although quite graphically covering a rarely-talked-about-in-public-yet-nearly-universal complaint. I suspect the plot device may be one that is too common, as well. BUT, that’s not the point. I don’t much care if it is produced. In fact, I’d be astounded if they use it. The point is, I wrote it and I submitted it and I didn’t have time to chicken out first!

Okay, so I’m committed to this purge and I wrote the first day. Yay me. Day Two didn’t go so well. I was in tears for much of the morning, with severe back pain from lying in bed, while a brand new head-cold came a’knockin’, complete with fever, which pretty much condemned me to bed. A catch-22. When I finally did stand up, I nearly passed out. You know how you get that loud buzzing in your ears as a warning that you’d better lay back down again pronto! Well I couldn’t lay back down, I had a chiropractor to get to. So I gave in and called for help: my friend Bethanie who I’ve given lots of help to in the past, and I finally called in a favor of my own. So she came and picked me up and took me to the chiro, who worked magic on me, and then she hijacked me back to her house to pick up her kids and then downtown (“no time to drop you off!”) for errands and dinner. But amazingly, after the chiro I felt tons better. My lower back “crackled” at some point, not as eventful as a “crack” but still noticeable, and after that I had no more spasms the rest of the day. So, actually had a really nice dinner out. Although I felt like I looked like they’d just picked me up from the Assisted Living Home, with my sweatpants and t-shirt and very visible dorky socks and unstyled hair. Anyone reading this blog who also dined at Bayou on Tuesday evening, I apologize profusely for the sight I must have subjected you to.

A side note: my chiro scared me with the words, “I’ve seen people come in with ruptured discs from sneezing. If you do get sick, do everything you can to keep yourself from coughing or sneezing.” And so I have. I think this is the first head cold I’ve ever had that I’ve gotten through without sneezing once. I did not know it could be done. 

Aaaaand we come to today. My back crackling like popcorn, I’m drippy and watery but NOT SNEEZING.  :D I didn’t get anything written on my intended Purge project, The Opera, but I did get this blog post written, so I guess I can report that I wrote. HA. Lots of people report emails and blog posts, so now I’m one of them. Of course, lots of people report stunningly fantastic projects completed as well … Maureen is on chapter 26 of her YA novel … Mark at CBS is taking a break from full-length plays and tv writing to give his best “novice” attempt at a children’s play … lots of people writing monologues and press releases and organizing their many submissions and completed works, so I feel like such a noobie in this group. But they say anyone is welcome, so here I am. Writing. Yay. 

Maybe tomorrow I organize the structure of Le Opéra.

Je n’aime pas être malade.

The relevance of relevancy

For most of my life, I’ve looked at my parents’ foibles with good-natured humour, chalking it up to, “so this is what happens when you get older, huh?” One specific example is my mom’s tendency to refer to things that happened decades ago as if they were current events. It’s been sort of cute, not harmful in the least, but I would still be slightly critical inside myself, thinking, “oh mom, that is so not relevant to our lives anymore!” I figured that, as time goes by, and for people like my parents who have pretty much kept the same routine for maybe the past 50 years, time must just blend into itself and sorta stand still. What once was is what always will be. 

But for the first time tonight, I found myself randomly thinking about it in a whole new way. What once was is still relevant today. And not only that, there is a deep abiding value to holding the past and the present as one crazy complex package. Maybe I was thinking about it because words from Ben’s play were still reverberating in my head: his argument against the relevance of Shakespeare that actually makes a compelling case for it. Maybe I was thinking about what the high school coach in the bar tonight said about his daughter, a promising athlete recently diagnosed with the first stages of MS, and how she’s a champion because she’s watched her grandfather dealing with the daily challenges of paralysis all her life. Maybe I was thinking of my own family, and my relative estrangement from my parents for the past ten years, and the effect it has had on my son. I dunno. It was subconscious. But it suddenly hit me that the present needs for the past to be relevant now, like trees need nutritious soil or the atmosphere needs gravity. The past feeds us, grounds us, ties us all together into a common world, rather than letting us all go floating off in our own directions. Some of us try to escape it. But we always end up drifting back to the earth, a little bit starving and a little bit lonely. Memories of our pasts — as scrubbed and polished as they tend to get over time, so that the sharp pointy bad ones get blunted and the happy ones gleam — remind us that we’re not alone. That we have stories to share with others. That we need to pass on our pasts to the future, to tie us all together in one relevant organism on this communal journey through space and time.

Bedridden Guide To Heaven

ahh, I think I overdid it yesterday. Either I really was feeling better, or chemicals just hid the pain. In any case, I definitely should not have walked around the block. Although had I not, I never would have known just how much the upper front thigh muscles work to balance the body. They were burning by the time I got back to the house.

SO, again, I’ve got nothing of interest to report about the day outside of how difficult it was to move, and I don’t think I’ll bore you with reliving it again. I had to cancel my sewing session with Becky tonight, unfortunately. I hate to dump leave the rest of the costume responsibility in her lap, but I see no other choice. I simply cannot sit up for any length of time, and I definitely can’t operate a sewing machine’s foot pedal, since every lift of my right leg sends shooting pain through my pelvis. I still have the masks, which I hope to still be able to paint, and I still have the wigs. I worked Regan’s wig into a nice queenly pile today; I think it looks great. Lear’s will also be fun. Cordelia … eh. Prob’ly don’t have to do much with it.

Apparently when my dad gets back trouble, he relies on aspirin and says it works best. So this evening I took Excedrin, and about a half hour later broke into a shaky sweat. I think pain must be an appetite suppressant, because once it diminished I realized just how hungry I was. I guess one egg and a few nuts aren’t enough to nourish a body all day. The sweat was as if I had a fever that broke, which was weird because I didn’t think I had one. But the body does its own thing to recover from injury, I guess. My body is getting sick of being injured, and the simplest biological functions make life agonizingly difficult. Coughing takes careful preparation, I don’t dare even think about sneezing, and today was the first time in my life that I successfully stifled what was sure to be bone-wrenchingly painful vomiting. I felt nauseous the moment I woke up this morning, and while the egg helped, it was eager to see the light of day again when I caught sight of the little pile the dog decided to leave in the sunroom. But just thinking of the pain made me successfully triumph over my reflexes.

Finished another few chapters in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. I’m enjoying it more than I did the first time I tried to read it (when I was 17), but still not really my cuppa tea. I’m thinking more along the lines of, “I could so write like this!” I wonder what the market is for silly sci-fi these days, and if reader sophistication has increased since 1979. Or will geeks always be geeks?

All We Know Of Heaven (by Rémy Rougeau) is a good read, though. If yesterday hadn’t been Towel Day, I’d be farther through it. Damn my need to experience socially frivolous pop-culture traditions and investigate their origins! (Damn my hatred of feeling left out of anything!)