Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

May 21, 2016 · 5:05 pm

Critiques in Color

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I recently posted about being synesthetic and discovering how I am different from normal people.  Here is the post if you are interested..   Then I discovered that Kanye West is also synesthetic as he gushed some southern-fried crappie-doo about how wonderful he is as an artist because he sees the colors of his music.  Well, now I don’t want that mental affliction any more.  I don’t wish to be anything like him.  Of course, it has to be incurable, doesn’t it.

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Now I am wasting today’s post on another metacognative thinking-about-thinking style of paragraph pile when I could be rhapsodizing about the humor of Dave Barry or the wisdom of Robert Fulghum, the author of

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Here it is on Amazon.

I could be shamelessly promoting the work of artists whose works I love instead of examining the random filing cabinets in the back rooms of my stupid old head.  But I can’t because I now need to explain myself to myself again.  Self doubt and self examination are features of being an artist.  We reach a point where we have to think about how we do what we do, because if you don’t know where the magic comes from, you might not be able to call on it the next time you need it.

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I am a self-taught artist.  I have had art classes in high school and college, but never professional art training.  I know how to manipulate the rule of thirds, directional composition, movement, perspective, and lots of other artsy-craftsy techniques, but it is all a matter of trial and error and an instinct for repeating what works.  I have had a good deal more professional training as a writer.  But I do that mostly by instinct as well.  Trained instinct.  I have reached a point where my art is very complex and detailed.  And I don’t mean to suggest there are no flaws.  In fact, I am capable enough to see huge, glaring mistakes that really skew my original intent and make me feel hopelessly incompetent.  But others who see it and don’t know the inner workings of the process can look past those mistakes and not even see them.  Given enough time to look at my own work with new eyes, I am able to see at least some of what they see.

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Now that I have totally wasted 500-plus words on goofy talking-to-myself, what have I really accomplished beyond boring you to death?  What’s that you say?  You are not dead yet?  Well, that’s probably only because you looked at the pictures and didn’t read any of my sugar-noodle brain-scrapings in loosely paragraph-like form.  And if you did read this awful post by a colorblind artist who doubts his own abilities, you probably didn’t learn anything from it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is, I care about doing this, and I need to do it right.  And I managed to learn something… how to ramble and meander and make something that is either a hot mess… or something that vaguely resembles self-reflective art.

 

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May 6, 2016 · 3:53 pm

Wisdom From the Bob Ross Bible

If there is a Church of Sacred Landscapes then Bob Ross is its Jesus Christ.  That is not a sacrilegious statement of bizarre cult-mindedness.  Painting is a religion that has its tenets.  And Bob Ross explained to us the will of God on his painting show on PBS.  All the illustrations used in this post come from the Facebook page Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. All the wisdom comes from things the Master said on the show.

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Bob Ross was the prophet of the paintbrush.  He would present us with a lightly prepared canvas at the beginning of the show and then proceed on camera to take his brush and palette knife, and all his paints, and create a piece of the world before our very eyes.  And he was not Picasso or Van Gogh or even Norman Rockwell.  He was not a talented artist, but rather a very practiced one who knew all the tricks and shortcuts to sofa painting, the art of knocking out scene after scene after scene.  He could make his little piece of the world in only half an hour, and he made it obvious how we could do the same.  His work was not gallery quality… but his teachings were Jesus-worthy.1918971_1025737477472968_4026443126606690255_n

His work was natural, flowing, and realistic in the random complexity it presented.  He took standard paintbrush strokes and pallet knife tricks and made them dance across the canvas to make happy little trees.

His painting methods presented us with a philosophy of life and a method of dealing with whatever mistakes we might make.

And of course, any good religion must take into account the existence of evil.

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Bob Ross tells us that evil is necessary as a contrast to what is good and what is true.  We need the dark.  But we don’t have to embrace it.  Bob’s paintings were never about the dark bits.  He always gravitated towards the light.

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Of course, sometimes you have to beat back the darkness.  A good artist takes care of his tools.

Bob Ross admonishes us to look and to learn and love what we see.  The man radiated a calm, gentle nature that makes him a natural leader.  His simple, countrified wisdom resonates because we need calm and pastoral peace in our lives.  It is one of the main reasons mankind needs religion.

So I definitely think we ought to consider building a Bob-Rossian Church of the Sacred Landscapes.  We have our prophet.  The man has passed away, yet he is risen to paint again endlessly on YouTube.

And if you are willing to try… Bob Ross will smile upon you.

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May 2, 2016 · 1:54 pm

Lost (a Review of the TV Series)

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I may have mentioned in yesterday’s gloomy and fatalistic post that I watched the entire six seasons of Lost on Netflix.  I have to say, I fell in love with it after two episodes.  And now that I have watched every single episode of the show with rapt attention, and even backed it up at times to watch important ideas again, I am ashamed to admit I have no earthly idea about what it all means.  I also mentioned in the post yesterday that in the final part of the final episode, we discover that all the main characters are dead.  Of course, we saw many of the characters, even some of our favorite characters, die during the series.  But this was a unique series with all of its flashbacks and flash-forwards and flash-looptie-loops… and dead characters were often seen on the show again the very next week after being shot with a gun three times, or killed in a fall from a tree inside a crashed plane, or killed by the black smoke monster.  It pushed the very limits of the believable and sometimes crossed the boundary from tragedy to comedy so quickly, you almost had to believe some scripts were created by the ghost of William Shakespeare (or the ghost of the Earl of Oxford for those of us who believe Shakespeare was a fictional character too).

(Here is the character key for this stolen bit of fan art by somebody who is not me;

Goofy – Michael
Minnie Mouse – Kate
Max – Walt
Pluto – Vincent
Mickey Mouse – Jack
Scrooge McDuck – Ben
Donald Duck – Sawyer
Daisy Duck – Juliet
Horace Horsecollar – Sayid
Gus Goose – Hurley
Arizona Goof (Goofy’s cousin) – Locke
Phantom Blot – Smoke Monster)

But as confusing and weirdly cerebral as the series was, it made a certain sense.  I understood the basic meaning of the story before I ever found the creator quote that confirmed all my suspicions.

“This show is about people who are metaphorically lost in their lives, who get on an airplane, and crash on an island, and become physically lost on the planet Earth. And once they are able to metaphorically find themselves in their lives again, they will be able to physically find themselves in the world again. When you look at the entire show, that’s what it will look like. That’s what it’s always been about.” – Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, [1], January 16, 2007

With this explanation in view, I can fully comprehend the main villain-or-was-he-a-hero-at-the-end?  Ben Linus is a man so full of lies and deceit and plots that he can only be dealt with by believing that everything he says is untrue.  Yet, we find out along the way that the baby girl he stole from the crazy French woman was raised as his daughter, and he actually loved her.  We learn about the terrible things that happened to him as a child.  And so, though at times he seems almost inhumanly cruel, we discover that his is the most lost character of all.  Wouldn’t you know it, he turns out to be a teacher in the end?

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My favorite character of all, Hugo Reyes, called Hurley throughout the show, was the kind of person I always admired and befriended throughout my teaching career, whether he was a fellow teacher, a student, a girl, or a boy.  Everybody liked Hurley.  His super power was taking care of people and making things turn out right.  Of course, he had to deal with the numbers from the Fibonacci series that made him into millionaire when he used them to win the lottery.  The numbers seemed to be a curse for him, causing bad things to happen to him more frequently than good things.  And, of course, he is the source of much of the comedy that lightens the darkness of series (which uses black humor more than the happier kind).

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I can’t recommend that you watch the entire series the way I did, only because I don’t wish obsessive-compulsive behavior on anyone.  But I truly loved it.  And I don’t know what I am going to replace it with.  Maybe I just have to watch it all again.

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April 29, 2016 · 11:49 am

Synesthesia (Part Two; The Color of Music)

Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test.  But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week.  I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop.  The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music.  They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it.  For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.

I was shocked when I first saw it.  The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music.  The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong.  But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently.  And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia.  If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.

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Music synesthetically works in two directions for me.  The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.

If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do.  The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.

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The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me.  If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness.  The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange.  It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;

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And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.

Beauty

Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything.  But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too.  Poor you.  It is not a treatable condition.  But it is also not a burden.  Learn to enjoy it.  It resonates in your very soul.

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April 27, 2016 · 1:59 pm

Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

 

 

It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

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Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

Creativity

Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

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April 22, 2016 · 3:28 pm

Doodle Day

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If you do art, then you also doodle.  Really!  No matter how hard you may try to keep it a secret, you doodle, and people all know it.  So, since the secret is out… Here are some of my doodles.  This jester-sort-of-half-white-clown was a doodle yesterday while watching TV… something I do with my hands while my mind is doing something else.

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Here’s another doodle… same day, different piece of paper, different TV show.

But not all doodles are meandering swirls and girls.  I have a whole book of home-made cartoons that start with a blank page and end up with a page that furthers whatever curious cartoon story I am trying to make.  Here are a few examples of that.

Now, I know your doodles probably look nothing like mine.  My doodles are seriously demented.  I have doodled enough that I have seriously worry about going blind.  And my doodles are influenced by a lifetime of bad arty-habits.   But they do give me practice.  They also help me think.  They relieve stress.  And they make an easy and somewhat racy post.

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April 16, 2016 · 3:23 pm

60’s Rock and Roll (Poems made of Memory)

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  1. Pete Townshend is Now Old

I heard it and didn’t believe

Who heard it, you say, and then leave?

Yes they heard it and didn’t believe

Who sang it, you say, for reprieve?

Don’t shoot me, they sang it, believe!

Who told it, the pinball retrieved?

Yes they told it, and now I am peeved

Who wrote it and must be believed?

Yes they wrote it and made me believe

A pinball wizard, his song has grown cold

And finally they sang it and now it is sold

And a generation loved and laughed and were bold

But both Pete and Roger are now really old!

TheWho

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  1. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart

They were the soul of the movement

And love did surround them

The little girls screamed and that’s how

We all found them

With a real nowhere man

Living in a nowhere land

And poor Elinor Rigby’s lost love

There were one, two, three steps

Right down Penny Lane

Blue meanies and lovers regret in the main

And light shines upon us from somewhere above

But the thing I regret beyond yesterday

Is the fact that love grew and then went away

And in the darkness a shot rang out…

And John’s voice was silent…

As tears replaced cheers and grew dark all about.

Sgtpeppergatefold

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  1. Monkees and Mayhem

I saw her face, and I’m a believer

I laughed when she laughed and never deceived her

On the last train to Clarksville in the quietest car

I watched her bright antics and loved from afar

The song they were singing was really quite frantic

And never could I be quite so pedantic

To tell the daydream believer her show was now over

And move on to leave her for a dog, name of Rover.

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April 9, 2016 · 4:17 pm

The Lovely Lennon Sisters

Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich lived on the family farm outside of town, a little more than two miles from the tiny farm town of Rowan, Iowa.  I walked it more than once.  It was faster to walk the railroad tracks between the two places.  About a mile and three quarters as the crow flies… three hours as the boy investigates the critters in the weeds, throws rocks at dragonflies, and listens to the birdsong along the way.  But the point is, my maternal grandparents lived close enough to have a profound influence on my young life.  Much of what they loved became what I love.  And every Saturday night, they loved to watch the Lawrence Welk Show.  And that show had highlights that we longed to see again and again… on a show that never really went into reruns.  We lived to see Jo Ann Castle play the old rinky-tink piano, Bobby and Cissy doing a dance routine, and most of all… the lovely Lennon Sisters.

I always wanted to be the things they wished me to be in the song “May You Always”.  I wanted to “walk in sunshine” and “live with laughter”.  They presented a world of possibilities all clean and good and wholesome.  As a young boy who hated girls, I had a secret crush on Janet Lennon who was the youngest, though a decade older than me, and on Peggy Lennon, the one with the exotic Asian eyes.  They sang to me and spoke directly to my heart.

You have to believe in something when you are young.  The world can present you with so many dark and hurtful experiences, that you simply have to have something to hang onto and keep you from being blighted and crippled by the pain.  For me, it often came in the form of a lovely and simple lyric sung by the lovely Lennon Sisters.  When you are faced with hard choices… especially in those dark moments when you think about ending it all because it is all just too much to bear, the things stored in those special pockets of your heart are the only things that can save you.  For me, one of those things will always be the music of the Lennon Sisters… especially when watched on the old black and white TV in the farmhouse where my grandparents lived, and helped to raise me, every Saturday night in the 1960’s.

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April 7, 2016 · 3:03 pm

Apple Blossoms Return to Texas

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There are certain things that keep me going when my connection to the mortal coil begins to chafe and itch.  Apple blossoms are one of those things.  The apple blossoms have bloomed in our two Texas apple trees in April of 2016.  As I was raking endless live oak leaves out of my yard, making it harder for myself to breathe and continue living because I am allergic to live oak… and most of the rest of Texas to boot, I saw that the apple blossoms had burst forth from their buds.  Between coughs and gasps for breathe, it made me smile.  I ended the raking of endless live oak leaves after only thirty minutes and one sack of leaves.  I am laboring in the face of impending doom, but I am not stupid.  I needed to live to rake another day.  Otherwise I’ll never get it done.

But apple blossoms are worth the heartache and pain and toil of life.  They are not only something to remind me why I keep going.  They are a reason for being.  So I used my phone camera to take a picture of an open blossom.  Then I photo-shopped in a picture of my novel character, Valerie Clarke, the character I created as an amalgam of my lovely daughter and the pretty little girl in my third grade class that I fell madly in love with when I was a little boy.  Like most artists, I am quite capable of slapping beautiful things and ideas together haphazardly to make something that is either a huge pile of kitschy crap, or even more beautiful.  And like most artists, I am entirely too close to the feelings and memories and realities that make up this work of art to ever know for sure which of the two things it really is.  Forgive me if I chose the opposite one that you did. I try not to offend with my Paffoonies.  I try not to be a creep or a bore or a Philistine… but those things are not always possible to avoid.  But there are apple blossoms, and sunrises, and a number of other things as well that, in the end, balance out the equations quite nicely.

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April 6, 2016 · 3:37 pm

Where Does Creativity Come From?

Ima mickey

Okay, I hooked you in with a title that sounds like I actually know something and somehow have some expertise to share beyond the usual brain-drippings of a noodling writer-type idiot.  Unfortunately I don’t.  I am a practicing creative person.  But do I know how it works? I do not.

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I suspect that it has something to do with my actual life experiences.  I am not God.  When I get a creative idea, it is made from known things.   I don’t snap my fingers and make a snerflkuppie, the first one that ever existed, and give it actual substance and reality.  Okay, metaphorically I did just make the first snerflkuppie… It is about three feet tall, has glossy purple fur and three legs.  Four puppy-like eyes, a wide mouth, and no nose… I dare you not to try and picture it in your mind’s eye.  But there isn’t one skipping about in this universe.  I can only take known things and recombine them in unique and surprising ways.  My novels are about kids doing kid stuff… you know, like time travel, being kidnapped by aliens, uncovering werewolf plots, and making magical cookie people.  Stuff that really happened.  And I am a former teacher, so I have experience knowing real kids.

Urkel

If you think kids you see depicted on television and in the movies are realistic, you have never played a video game with a real kid.  You have never had them tell you what they are really afraid of.  You have never come to the conclusion that they actually know a whole lot more about sex than you do.  And kids are not afraid to try something new for the first time (unless, of course, the thing they are going to try is what their parents want them to try for the first time).  You take liquid one and mix it with powder two, watch it fizz, and then drink it.  You don’t know if it will taste good, turn you into a muscle-bound Mr. Hyde-type monster, or blow you up like a firecracker.  But you made it yourself and you are going to try.  We generally think of kids as being creative and undisciplined.  We expect time and experience to take the unruliness, as well as the creativity, out of them.  It is the thing we refer to as, “growing up”.  But I think being creative is, to some degree, remaining a child.  I am a child because I continue to hold play-time in high regard, and do it as often as I can.  Writing words on paper, or on my laptop, is playing to me.  Drawing pictures with pen and ink and colored pencils is also playing to me.  Fortunately mixing chemicals from the cupboard like a mad scientist and testing them on my sister is no longer playing to me.  (And that, Nancy, is just a joke… I never actually did that… I think… I hope…)

The Car Chase of Life

The metaphorical car chase of life… with an old dog behind the wheel.

So, there you have it.  The ultimate answer.  Where does creativity come from?  I do not know.

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