Just as the grumpy fellows above are pictured removing unsavory items from their domain, so too do I vigorously expunge spam from this site on an almost daily basis. However, this morning’s bleary-eyed persusal confounded my non-caffeinated brain: the spam scanned as poetry to me.

Obviously not a true sonnet, but still. Enjoy.

undistinguishableness hydroaromatic rewash tablespoon sentience conusable unmodifiableness heptadecyl

snoek preludious remarker unteamed anecdotal gemsbuck decisive myristate

trouserian peristrumous yamassee unwiliness undebatable panhyperemia morgenstern dryopteris

mock guerickian taphouse hunchy saple forestarling specularly axine

suaharo ohio thunderlike hyperpiesia gentlemanlike enterocystoma frontogenesis saucedish

Note: My thanks to my photographic cohort and his wife for allowing me to traipse all over their property on this, and several other occasions.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

~ Joseph Addison [1672-1719]

And of course, a little something from Shakespeare:

So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.

~ From A Midsummer’s Night Dream, [III. ii. 208]

The first film is ‘Mermaid’, Русалка (Rusalka) after Alexander Pushkin’s poem. It is in Russian.

The following clips are the artist’s take on Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Unfortunately, the film is in two parts here, and not of the quality deserving the artist’s effort, but it’s still quite stunning. This version is in English, however there are other higher quality clips on youtube that are not, should one wish to switch languages.

Since I seem to be on a roll posting random youtube clips, I thought I’d go ahead and post a recent one I stumbled across. However, I’m ahead of myself — let me put a few things into context. As usual, I’ve started right at the end, instead of the beginning.

I am nearly ashamed of my most recent purchase, yet at the same time, I’m hopelessly enamored — ensnared, even. I say ‘nearly’ because I detest the self-absorbed idiots I normally see with their heads wiggling in thrall to the siren song of this object.

Yes, I speak of the holy-of-holies in today’s culture: an iPod.

I bought one. I am an hypocritical heathen. Perhaps just a small one, since it’s a nano. Little. Less heathenish. Riiiiiight.

Now the hard part; confessing my adoration of this device. I’ve had it for all of about 12 hours now, and I’m already slipping into the gloriously tepid waters of consumerism — what things can I buy to stick on my nano? Lectures from great universities? Waterproof cases for snorkelling in tropical waters to my own soundtrack? Sleek skins to declare my DIFFERENCE [oh, the irony] from all other iPod owners? Skins — now we’re getting somewhere.

The youtube above was actually on a site where I surfed around for a while amongst designs whipped up by an interesting crew of visual artists and graphic designers. I recall the graphic designers in college being a sordid lot; always vulture-eyeing something for marketing potential, and fairly gliding along on their own dreamtrails of snake-oil-yet-to-be-sold. However, I am surprisingly unsurprised to see painters submitting designs in homage to this little technological wonder — I almost feel compelled to set up an altar to it myself! But enough.

As seems to be typical, bliss follows bliss in an odd concatenation of coincidences: my own artistic preference for specific mood-oriented soundtracks leads to the purchase of the nano, which in turn leads to pointless accessory-surfing, which leads to the discovery of a fellow artist [one Audrey Kawasaki], which leads to a contemplation of line and form [and, rare for me, sensuality]. Ms. Kawasaki’s images also remind me, in a cursory fashion, of a friend of mine. Said friend recently mailed me a box of goodies, wherein was contained a tasty read: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom.

All of these things are so inter-swirled as to defy actual comprehensible explanation, so I’ll stop for the moment. Suffice to say, I am creatively well-pleased, and have not been so [on a variety of levels] for some time.

www.bitterfilms.com for more madness.

An audiovisual homage to the most patient person I know.

Thanks for everything.

The usual suspects.

The long silence of sand and stone
Whispers into the dark belonging to the night birds.
Waves glint with inner timeless wisdom,
And a crown of cloud-frost haloes the moon.
Eternal spirals twist restlessly in forgotten shells.

Sea-phantom forms writhe into the pearled shell-depths;
Living stones, striving in the muck
Under the unblinking eye of a summer moon.
The delicacies hide from the sun and its hungry bird-maws –
A Strong rationale, the wisdom of the unseen.

Wisdom,
Shells,
The wild cries of birds,
And the singing, silent stones –
Yes, these things gather under moon and sun.

Sun and moon – locked forever in chase,
Never growing wise to the mortal strivings
Of stones turning to sand,
Of shells, empty and hollow,
Of the broken pinions of weary, frail birds.

Memories haunt the night, like the fragile birds –
Calling themselves together in moonlight,
Curling themselves into shell-spirals,
Piling their wisdoms together
Into little cairns of stone bravery in the surf.

Soon the stones become birds,
And the wisdoms rub smooth into moon-pearls, hidden in shells.

The atomic goldfinch — a mixed media doodle for someone stuck studying chem and aviation.

I hope all goes well for her.

It’s been ages since I’ve dabbled in many of the artistic techniques I was shuffled through as an ungrad in college. One I particularly despised at the time was a course in printmaking. Mind you, I had no bones with the professor, nor the material of the course itself — instead, I loathed the tedious nature of the process, which I partially chalk up to my general attitude of impatience at the time. On the other hand, relief printing *is* genuinely dilatory if done with any attention to craftsmanship.

Recently, I had the opportunity to revive my slumbering knowledge of printmaking when I was chosen as one of six finalists in a local competition involving the creation of theatrical posters. After submitting my resume, I was called in for an interview, at which time I was presented with the finalist’s project of creating a poster mock up for the musical Annie Get Your Gun. In addition to creating the specific show poster, there was mention that the visual style of the poster must be sustainable for any and all theatrical productions for the 2008 season. I chose relief printing, since it’s quite flexible in terms of color and design [yet distinguishable as a style].

I did a stylized sketch from an 1890s photo of a cowgirl [not being particularly taken with any of the images of Annie Oakley herself], and then scanned it in, cropped it, and dropped in a suitable font in Photoshop. Here’s the initial sketch and the photoshopped version including the font placement:

I then printed out the photoshopped version and hand transferred it to the printing matrix [in this case, I decided on doing a 9x12 linocut, as opposed to an actual woodcut in hopes of saving my hands]. Here’s the printing block after I’d finished carving it:

After a number of early prints where I spent time going back to the block to tweak things [removal of extraneous bits, etc.] I printed a set of “blanks” on sketchbook grade paper that I was willing to test drive color schemes on. The first image in this blog entry is one of two color tests I did using Prismacolor colored pencils over the water soluble ink. Here’s the second color test:

After reacquainting myself with the fickleness of inking [it's so damn easy to get it too light or too dark!], I switched to a higher quality all cotton paper for a set of prints that I intended to hand paint. Of course, seeing as I was using a water soluble ink, it was imperative that I sealed each pulled print with a good layer of sprayed-on acrylic coating — otherwise the ink would bleed horribly when I applied color. Here are some of my painted versions of the print:

There’s quite a bit of variation in each print — for example, the version of Annie in red is obviously a very light print, whereas the version of Annie in the green shirt was a rather heavy print. The painted versions did have a slight amount of bleeding despite the clear coat. *shrugs*

I found the process interesting, and surprisingly speedy [the project took me a week from start to finish, including research time, carving, printing, and coloring]. I’ll probably dabble in printmaking a little more, using less commercial themes, of course. I was politely notified earlier this week that while I was not the winner of the contest, the theater was interested in having my prints up for sale to the public in the lobby of the theater during the run of Annie Get Your Gun.

I agreed merely because I have no idea what the hell else I’d do with these things.