Month: April 2012

Cracking the Whip.

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I’ve been neglecting this blog for the past few days.

Naturally, I have plenty of excuses: a miserable bout of spring allergies, a busy Easter weekend, new clients to sort out … My creativity really shines when it comes to thinking up excuses. Unfortunately, as a teacher once pointed out to me many years ago (Mr Lambert, 7th grade), if you have to come up with more than one reason for failing to do what you’ve committed to do, then obviously none of your reasons is good enough.

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Speak, Apologize. Repeat.

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  • “Oops.”

Back in the mists of history —  about the fifth grade, I think it was — a teacher informed me that my mouth seemed to operate a bit too much ahead of my brain. Since fifth-grade teachers are prone to such Delphic utterances, I just nodded and said “Yes, ma’am,” as I always did, and continued on my way, without the slightest idea what she was going on about.

Time has not improved my mouth-brain coordination, but over the intervening decades I’ve begun to understand what she meant.

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The Play’s the Thing

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  • Kit Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare: He also wrote some great plays, but highbrow? Not by a looong shot.

A friend recently pointed out a DVD of a new performance of William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and observed that she generally did not enjoy such “highbrow” entertainment, even though the star of that particular staging was an actor she adored. If Shakespeare could hear such sentiments, I think he would be both flattered and very, very surprised.

There are no hard and fast rules about what is “highbrow” and what isn’t: like pornography, we all generally know it when we see it. Shakespeare, opera, live theater generally, and movies with subtitles are highbrow; professional wrestling, monster truck rallies, the NFL, and fireworks are not. At different times, however, the guidelines have been very different.

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In Living Color.

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  • An assemblage of a collage. It may be overkill. (“Pop Art: Homage to Richard Hamilton”, by Dave Holcomb.)

Despite two decades behind a computer (I’m old enough to remember Photoshop 1.0!) I still enjoy getting my hands dirty whenever I can with the kinds of art that don’t involve a mouse and a keyboard.

A big part of the appeal for me of non-digital art is the chemistry of it all: the paints and pigments, chalks and charcoals, glues and glazes. I do a lot of collage and assemblage1, not so much because I feel that I can express myself better with glue and wire than with paint, but because I get to play around with so many different types of stuff.

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A Heart Unloosed

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  • Juana Inés de la Cruz, at about age 15.

On the Mexican 200-peso note, in place of the usual frock-coated revolutionary leaders and be-feathered Aztec potentates, is a portrait of a woman, wearing the cowl of a nun.

She’s an attractive woman, but with a gaze that’s steady, even stern: she doesn’t look patient, or particularly warm, but her face is decorating a piece of currency, so you have to think she might be someone worth knowing.

That woman is Sor Juana, Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun, and one of the greatest minds of the 17th century.

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Saying it with Flowers

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  • Camellia japonica, state flower of Alabama

I’ve been staying away from politics in this blog — well, mostly — but I think there’s one political issue that hasn’t gotten enough discussion this election cycle: State Flowers.

No, I’m not making it up:
State mushrooms: Minnesota: morel; Oregon: pacific golden chanterelle.

State muffins: Maryland: corn muffin; Minnesota: blueberry muffin; New York: apple muffin.

State bat: Virginia: Virginia Big-Eared Bat.

No, really, I mean it. If our elected officials feel that the selection of a State Mushroom, State Bat, and State Muffin is important enough to occupy their time and attention, then perhaps it should occupy a little bit of ours.

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