Art and Movies

Well, I have to get one more post in before the end of September, which is today. The IPad is raking up too much time. Now I have a near drawing program which I use to waste time. I tried several, and settled on this one, which I think was designed by a 12 year old kid. I had some questions about it, and I had barely emailed a query than the answer zoomed into my inbox. The only problem is that it doesn’t have a zoom function, which makes it hard to work on fine detail. Otherwise, it has a lot of colors and brushes.   So did the others, but this is the easiest. Working so much on the Pad has caused me to try to sweep my fingers on this laptop, or try to pinch things to enlarge them, with no results except to smear the screen. Anyway, here are a couple of attempts at digital paintings, one of which is the late, great, still missed Dupree.

Movie reviews:

“Arbitrage.” Of which you may not have heard. I happened to see an interview with Richard Gere on the TV. He plays one of those hedge fun guys who helped crash the economy and gets away with it. Well written, well acted and not deserving to be missed.

“The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, and another disappointment as was “There Will Be Blood.”  It’s doing well at the box office, and I am glad that I saw it. The hype is all about Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who is good, but Joaquin Phoenix is the real star, doing in incredible turn as a mentally wounded WWII vet. Everything about his performance is so real that it seems as if the director went to a VA hospital and asked for a recent casualty of war veteran to play the part.   His face, his body language is all twisted in mental and physical pain.  I had to wonder how he managed to do that without its affecting him. The problem with the film is that it plays as if Anderson shot 100 hours and edited it down to 2.5 hours and lost some cohesiveness. He stated out with a splash with “Boogie Nights,” which was dark, and then “Magnolia,” which was darker, and then “There will be Blood.” Which was dark and violent and now this one, in which almost everyone in it is a nut case and it’s hard to care about anyone. No one changes, nothing gets resolved. It’s the kind of movie that, if you go in feeling good, you come out depressed and anxious, and if you go  in feeling not too good, you’ll come out feeling much worse. And I came out feeling terribly worried about Joaquin Phoenix. And noticing that Phillip Seymour Hoffma still has those grimy, black rimmed fingernails. What’s wrong with this man? (I can't get the l ink thing to work, so I wrote about his fingernails in January, 20009,so  you can check it out.)

Oh, I got the link to work!

Random Stuff

 

My laptop has been neglected ion favor of the IPad toy. Last week I watched all the episodes of “Doc Martin,” which our PBS channels had not been carrying. I loved it. However, on looking at the next week’s TV guide which our paper carries, I see that it is starting on 45/49, our local PBS station. I don’t need to watch it again. Set in Cornwall, where I have not been, it was a treat to see. It is fairly typical of those kinds of British TV series: a small village full of stereotyped characters, some quirky, some weird and many annoying. It was the lead actor whom I most enjoyed, playing a hemophobic (the sight and smell of blood gives him panic attacks) doctor who did not suffer fools gladly. Downright refreshingly rude, he is.

When I wasn’t watching that, I did some more painting. I still haven’t heard anything from the library about getting into the gallery/wall there. We’ll see.

Went up to the beautiful apple orchard in Hiram on Saturday. They’re having a pick your own thing going on until the middle of October. We didn’t do that, but did take a hay ride into the middle of the orchard. The wagon was full of people who were doing their own apple picking, everyone smiling and enjoying the gorgeous blue sky day. We bought a quarter peck of a variety of cooking and eating apples.

I have a brief rant about freedom of speech. Whatever happened to “I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”? (I’ve probably messed up the elegant original statement, but the gist is there.) A friend of mine who is a brilliant writer, whose work appears frequently online (Common Dreams), happens to be disappointed with the president’s use of drones, among other things, and stated so in one of her columns, which is published in the local paper. She was soon after called by the local chairperson of the Obama campaign and told that she would not be welcome to work on the campaign. Since my friend plans to support and vote for the president, she was pretty ticked off at the chairperson’s assumption that one cannot be critical and still work for a candidate. Beware of True Believers. Don’t express an opinion that is less than totally positive. We have come to punish those who do not toe the line. Any time anyone says anything that we do not agree with she/he must be silenced.

There is a big difference between hate speech and the expression of an opinion with which we disagree. It’s getting ridiculous and this attitude simply shuts a lot of people down…but not my friend, who will continue to call ‘em as she sees ‘em.

 

So here's my presaonl gallery.

The Sunday Visitor

This will probably wear off after a while, but I find Facetime quite fun. I accidentally called Emily this morning. I had noticed that there was a little red number on the Facetime icon on my IPad desktop. I remembered that Emily had told me she tried to Facetime me from Fauborg, so I wanted to see if she had been able to leave a message. I kept clicking on her  name in red on the contact list and hearing the phone ring, but thought she was calling me, even though it was not my ring. The message at the bottom of the screen only had an “End call” notice. After a while I realized that I was calling her, and that she was not available, so I hit the end call thing. A few minutes later my Facetime thing rang and I answered it and Emily was wondering why I had called her. I explained and the, as I brushed an English muffin crumb off the screen, she disappeared. I finally got her back, once I figured out how to actually on purpose make a call.

I had been about to fix breakfast, so when John came down to talk with her I went out o the kitchen. John decided that she should join us for breakfast, which she did, although we could only show her the delicious hash brown potatoes I made. At her hone, behind her in the kitchen, Chris was preparing dinner, where we could see him chopping things. He was making vegetarian goulash, with tofu. Emily said it was going to be delicious, but we didn’t get to see it finished. We chatted during breakfast, as you can see.

We’ve invited her for Thanksgiving dinner, too.

So I am having fun with this gadget, but I must steel myself to leave it and do something useful now and again.