Welcome to the rebellious blog of an obsessively overly perfectionistic artist, who is compelled to create and occasionally write about the proccess. Do artists really have to be crazy to create? Perhaps not, but the water is warm, so dive in and find out! RSS Feed "Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you being a genius." - Auguste Renoir 1/31/2006 CONGRATULATIONS!!! song du jour: What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong mood: smiling Got word a few days ago that Uriah's entrance into the world came safely. Congratulations to David Jon & Monica on the birth of their son. This photo that came with the good news is priceless. Smiles like that on newborns are a bit rare! :-) Seeing Uriah's photo brought back a sudden memory of how utterly yummy Skyler smelled when he was still what his father used to call "a fresh one." Having no biological clock and never needing to ogle in every passing stroller, I liked babies ok, but I was hardly baby obsessed. Upon having one, I flipped a bit the other way (although never enough to have another one...never...ever...operating room flashbacks! ...yikes...breathe...ok, I'm alright now.) What was I saying? Oh, right, after having one of my own I got slammed into the reality of just how marvelous these little critters are. The smell of their skin and hair is indescribable, but think something along the lines of your most favorite warm fuzzy sweater and fresh baked cookies. Sitting in the NICU day after day for a month, I had little else to do but snuggle, sniff, and watch Skyler sleep, (After he came home it was more like snuggle while listening to him scream.) and I remember marveling at his expression and freaky hand gestures (He conducted then too.) as he drifted off to dreamland. I sneak in sometimes to watch him sleep now that he sleeps in his own room (mostly), for that is the time that he still looks just like that tiny baby with the same sleepy expressions. To David Jon, it's hard to say the usual parenting advice, "enjoy it now because they grow so fast." Most days I still feel in the thick of it, but it's true. They change daily, so enjoy it, even the insanity and the chaos, and snuggle in and get a whiff of heaven. 11:41 PM - permanent link email this entry to a friend 1 comments 1/26/2006 Mommy, I Prefer to Be Called Maestro song du jour: Carmen: Overture, Bizet mood: happily dismayed A couple of weeks ago, after a big weekend at Gran's Skyler came home and dragged said gran into the living room so that she could play the piano while he conducted. My mother had been attempting to convince Skyler that she can, in fact, play the piano in the hope of his letting her teach him how to do more than bang on it. Since Skyler didn't remember hearing her play, he'd been insisting that he, not she, was the true virtuoso. I was busy making dinner, sockeye salmon, our favorite, and heard the obligatory "Mom! Come here!" I went in, expecting to find my child waving his arms like a loon to excerpts from Carmen and the 1947 Episcopal Hymnal, and to my complete shock there was my child, a small stick from some construction set held horizontally between his fingerstips (like most conductors do), standing in front of 2 boxes, stacked to serve as a stand for his sheet music, and conducting. For Real. When most people faux conduct they usually wave their arms wildly in and out in a horizontal swoop. Skyler was bringing both hands up on the 1 and down on the 2. (Not the 4 pattern yet, MD, just the 2.) No matter what else distracted him, when he started again, he automatically picked up on the first beat. I was freaking out, but then I realized it was a given that my mom would have taught him how to do it correctly, and I was just impressed that he had learned and could always find the beat and the 1. Watching him, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that I won't be able to afford to send him to Julliard. Hyper parent as that sounds, it's a weird family deja vu. His grandfather was offered a scholarship, but his great grandparents couldn't afford to keep up their eldest in NY city. If they could have, I probably wouldn't be here. After he went to bed and the grownups got to talk, I told my mom what a wonderful job she'd done teaching him how to conduct. She blinked. "I thought you taught him!" "Huh?" I replied. "Me? The only place he could have learned that around here is watching Tom or Bugs Bunny conducting Jerry or Elmer Fudd, and observant little remote control obsessed cartoon watcher that he is, I think that might be reaching a little. I'm not surprised, though, that the tiny tyrrant would want to be the one in charge instead of just another member of the orchestra. In any case he gets all the credit for always finding the first count of each phrase." "Well, at my house he tells me what instrument to play, and he conducts me. I play a lot of air violin." [In a fit of laughter, V nearly spews sweetened iced tea all over her mother.] Today Skyler announced that he's going to become an Arabic singing pop star because he wants to be rich. My child is quite sheltered from pop culture (but not world pop music), so I don't where he gets these ideas, however, Amr Diab tickets recently went for over $100 just to get in the door, so I certainly wouldn't discourage his efforts. ;-) 5:43 PM - permanent link email this entry to a friend 0 comments 1/23/2006 song du jour: New York State of Mind, Billy Joel mood: mild wanderlust Hee hee Between tapes of slightly more intelligent TV, I caught glimpses and eventually got hooked on a cheesy BBC drama called Mile High. Does the story line even need any explanation or elaboration? I didn't think so. In checking to make sure I was catching the latest episode and not wasting my time on reruns, I found this test for your perfect Sex-tination. Mine's New York. Apparently I can dine in style and ride thru Central Park with my true love and then pick up some sexy sleaze of a hot body in an East Village dive. Well, I'd rather be in Aruba, but I'd certainly settle for NY. The irony is that Sky's father called yesterday to let me know he won't be spending his weekly 3-1/2 hours with his son because he's in (drum roll please)...New York. Yes, definitely give me Aruba. ;-) 1:55 AM - permanent link email this entry to a friend 1 comments 1/20/2006 song du jour: Round Midnight, Thelonius Monk mood: catching my breath Color Me Splattered In my 'timeshifting' lifestyle, I only recently got a chance to watch a PBS program that ran a few weeks ago on the legacies of 20th century American painters. Since I missed taping the first minute of the program, I have no idea what the title was, and PBS.org does NOT make it easy to find out even when shopping their DVD's. Whatever this excellent show was, it traced different lineages from American Realist painters like Thomas Eakins through the Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning, Pop Artists, especially the significance of Andy Warhol and beyond into the 80's with Cindy Sherman and Jean-Michel Basquiat. (humor me, and follow those links at some point. Working on a Mac in Blogger, it just took me 15 minutes to find, copy, and paste in all that code!) I'm a little weird about 20th century art in general. It's hard to study it and not become wrapped up in it. De Kooning's work I have to force myself to look at, and I'll usually allow my friend, Dana, to drag me to a Picasso show if some museum has managed to con Atlanta's 'ooo, look at our big new building and our one (and only) Monet' High Museum of Art into hosting a worthwhile show. Picasso I deeply appreciate but don't really like. Of the cubists, I viscerally prefer Gris. As un-PC as it's become to say, I think Warhol was brilliant and shouldn't be underestimated for what he brought into our awareness. He created a persona out of almost a lack of one. Most people, in thinking they get his irony and his attitude, miss it entirely. It always surprises me how much I respond to Jackson Pollack's work. As meticulous about craftsmanship and detail as I am, staring at a Pollack drip painting is a welcome relief like the tension of all that order went SPLAT and then was carefully cross sectioned to reveal the secrets of its untamed inner landscape. For anyone who's ever tried their hand at dribbling paint in an 'anyone could do that' approach, it's soon obvious that elevating mess to that level of artistry isn't easy at all. There's nothing all that mesmerizing about staring at the mess on a drop cloth from painting your ceiling, but whether you like Pollack's work or not, if confronted with a real live painting, odds are you'll feel compelled to look at it for a while. My godmother creates 20 x 30 foot paintings on raw canvas and usually begins them with a similar approach and then 'paints into' the choreographed splatters. When I was a kid, she pushed me into painting that way, and I discovered just how hard it really is. As I watched the video footage of Pollack painting, it's so obvious that the paint gestures were the radiating energy, born of carefully measured intuitive choreography. How he stepped and moved from one end of the canvas to the other was exact and intentional and seeing him in action is a good lesson in how art devoid of context may still stand alone, may still speak to us, but is richer for including the vibrancy of the mind that created it. My 2 favorite quotes from the whole 2 hour program: Think about the time that they [Pollack and de Kooning] were doing that work. Bohemia wasn't something you could get at The Gap. - Fred Tomaselli At a certain point these rhythms and those patterns and those directions become incredibly calculated, and they've been rehearsed sort of over time. It's like a dancer. When you do a certain set of moves over and over and over again they become encoded as a pattern of the way the body is going to move. After he [Pollack] did the first one, everything else was plotted after that, as far as I'm concerned because you can't be spontaneous within the frame. If you're using the same tools, then you mean to acheive the same end. That's mastery in a way. That's artistry. - Henry James Marshall 4:10 PM - permanent link email this entry to a friend 0 comments 1/13/2006 song du jour: Rocket Man, Elton John mood: the tail end of another cold (yuck!) Yesterday, I Rescued a Flying Saucer from my Roof I'm not kidding. That was after I got it out of a tree, which was before I rescued a Spiderman air pump plane from the side street. For this I was declared a HERO! Necessity is the mother of invention? No, the mother invents whatever is needed to deal with whatever situation arises. When I was miserably pregnant and dreaming of the day I would play with my child, I had no idea it would involve learning so much about aeronautics. Spiderman was easy, just a trip through the gate and to the curb. (So what if, once again, my neighbors saw me out on the sidewalk in my jammies?) The saucer in the tree required my using a 25' bamboo pole retrieved from my neighbor's yard clippings and set aside (left on my deck since last September) for the fence I will one day build around my back garden. I'm sure watching a 5' 0" woman navigating a giant stick 5 times her size and yelling at an under 4 footer to stay out of the way was utterly charming to behold. The pole just reached the tips of the branches that held a propeller driven piece of Styrofoam that would have left Da Vinci knowing he was dead on about lift. When it went up on the roof, I figured this present had a 2 day life span. I asked the pilot a number of questions concerning its final moments. We went back thru the house and out the front. I was hoping to see it in the yard, but there was nothing in site. "I have an idea! But you'll have to be really really quiet. We have to wait until the traffic dies down." "What are you going to do?" "Listen for it" "What?" "Listen for it. I'll hit the remote control and see if I can hear the motor." "Can you hear it?" "No, there are too many cars." "What?" "Ok, shh!" "Can you hear it? Can you hear it" Can you hear it?" "No." "Why not?" "You're asking me questions." "Oh...Can you hear it now?" "SHHHHH! Listen!" [a faint whrrrrrrr] "It's on the side! Let's go back around!" "Do I have to take my shoes off to walk thru the house again? "YES!" (sigh) The spacecraft in question was perched diagonally on its back just at the edge of one of the gables. (It's a helluva roof.) By flicking the motor on and off in short bursts, it began to rock then slowly roll off the roof at which point MASA (Mom's Aeronautics and Space Administration) emergency back up crew hit the control and brought the spacecraft to a graceful one point landing. Today, I noticed mission control opted to fly the saucer in the dining room. - For Al, who told me he needed more material through which to live vicariously. ;-) 12:24 AM - permanent link email this entry to a friend 0 comments 1/04/2006 song du jour: not now mood: thoroughly disgusted What America Does Best: Creating Our Enemies of Tomorrow After listening to the latest new blips about the Middle East, I wanted to scream. (This is why I limit my news gathering to once a week.) Oh, big surprise that our attacking Iraq has turned it into Al Qaeda headquarters. I said that when there was first talk of invading. Now, I know I'm smarter than the average bear, and that I and at least half the population have a good 20 IQ points over the average politician, but it is still beyond me how they can be so bloody STUPID! I suppose if we don't create enemies, then we never get to have politicians try to convince us that they are saving us from them. Canada anyone? France? Mars? (Venus?) 12:02 AM - permanent link email this entry to a friend 1 comments

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