Back to the Drawing Board

Finally decided to try a bigger landscape, rather than a close-up kind of thing I’ve been doing. The photo I have of this place was taken in the early spring and I thought I would try to make a snow scene of it, since I had done a smaller version of it in snow for a tentative book my sister and I were going to do based on one of her songs. (Which I think we should still do, by the way.) Problem is, it looks like a damn Christmas card. But at least I tore myself away from the IPad and got back to reality for a while. I had fun with it, while listening to the BBC. One of today’s programs on was a series of David Sedaris monologues. He is one of the funniest people writing theses days. I love his family pieces.

Did not watch the so-called debate the other night. I was watching an old TV programs station – one of those sub-channels called ME TV, and enjoyed a Mary Tyler Moore show. During the commercials I flipped to the debate and heard Mitt nattering away, and the next time I flipped back, he was nattering away at the exact same thing. Two or three times the same thing happened. What few glimpses of the president I caught, he was looking rather bemused, and seemed to be watching Mitt’s mouth moving and mentally shrugging. Since I have a firm distrust of people who voted G.W. Bush in for a second term, I find it a bit frightening to think that these same people could be gulled into voting for the invisible man Romney. Who is he, anyway?

And we have another damn month of this to go.

Sally just brought over a couple of good books, so I shall bury myself in them and ignore all the political hullabaloo I’m voting for President Obama and that’s all there is to it.

Oh, I am going to have a piece in a New York gallery. Along with 60 or so other people who participated in a very clever coloring book exercise, our work will be at the ABC No Rio gallery on Nov. 2, in a preview of what the creator of the project hopes will be a longer exhibit later. All sorts of professional and non professional artists chose a masterpiece picture form a coloring book and made it their own in very interesting and colorful ways. If you're going to be in New York around that time, check it out. As you can see, it is not exactly the Met, but much more fun.

 

IPad Addiction

I now have KNOWLEDGE right in my hands. No need to trudge across the room to access my Desk top to find the name of the actor who just waked across the screen. I reach down for the IPad, click into IMDB and there is the name my ancient brain hasan't been able to extract from the huge data base of trivia which used to lodge there. Who won the Oscar for best actress in 1963? Google knows, and so do I, in the wink of an eyelash. Handy for those nasty Friday and Saturday cross word puzzles, especially when it comes to sports (although John is handy for that) or rap or rock music titles and names. Is that cheating: Don't know, don't care.
I am also neglecting the real painting for the virtual stuff. It's like finger paining and there are all sorts of clever variations one can do with a little click here and a little click there. I am not by any means skilled at this and may never be, but it is fun. I still have a couple of Amish scenes to do with real paint, but I seem to have found it easier to just fool around with the digital, virtual junk painting at this point.
"The Master still looms large as a topic of discussion. John discovered a blogger with an interpretation that makes a lot sense. His analogy of the relationship between the two main characters equates it to that between a dog and his master, with Phoenix's character the dog, of course, and Hoffman's as - ta ta - the master. It certainly works well on many levels. If it weren't such a difficult film to watch, I would see it again and find infinite parallels. As much as I did not like it, I have certainly done a lot of thinking about it. It's that kind of film.
Here's a digital image made while watching "Dancing With the Stars,' a guilty pleasure. How 'bout that Apollo One dude?

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.

Summer's End

August is winding down. What few neighborhood children there are here have gone back school. The university students are back, which makes the local merchants happy, especially the bar owners. The mornings are crisp, the skies are that August blue, and we actually had a very nice, rainy day at the beginning of the week. The tomato plants are full of green tomatoes which had better hurry up and start turning red before the first frost hits.

I have become slightly addicted to the IPad, finding it ever so handy to look up things with on the spot, so to speak. Say I’m watching a movie and I wonder who that actor is. Instead of getting up and going to the laptop. I just reach down by my throne, pick it up and zoom to IMDB and there it is. I have downloaded “Ulysses” to read. One of those books one is supposed to have read before one turns 85, and have at least started it. Who knows if I shall actually make my way through Joyce’s arcane allusions and ya hadda be there jokes and puns? This is not an annotated version. We’ll see.

Still painting but I am running out of photographs to paint from. I have a lot of them, but not all are suitable subjects. I haven’t tried any landscapes yet. Probably should. The local library has pout out a call for local artists for a new gallery they have started. It’s basically a wall under the stairs, but I think I’ll check it out.

Here are the latest, hot off the palette.

 

Painting and IPad

 

Still at it, painting away in Amish country. The house above is in Geauga County, on Bundysburg Road.  I love that name. I wonder if there is a Bundysburg somewhere up there. There is one part of that road that provides a stunning view in the fall. It is on a hill and through a gap I the trees you can see in the distance a group of farms below. I may try a picture of that, since I have a number of photos I have taken over the years.

The yellow barn is in Stark County, just before you get to Holmes County. I have always liked that barn. I don’t think it is an Amish farm any more, but is definitely an Amish barn. The front part of the little shed next to it has that yellow brick that is common down in Holmes County.

Besides painting I have been playing with my IPad. With Sally’s help I have downloaded a couple of interesting free apps. I’m waiting for a clear night so I can use the one which shows you what you’re looking at in the night sky. The night of the Persiaed showers was too cloudy to see anything, which is not unusual around here, not that I would have needed the app to see that. I Miss the starry skies of my youth, before we lit up the darkness and created light pollution….at least here in Northeastern Ohio.

I’ve used the IPad to watch a couple of movies on YouTube. One night I watched “Death in Venice,” featuring music from Mahler’s 5^th symphony, that beautiful Adagio movement. I used to do my Tai Chi set to that. As long as I was in the Mahler mood, I watched a zany bio flick about Mahler by Ken Russell. Totally surrealistic, with the beautiful Michael Powell (he also played Jesus Christ in another movie) as Gustav. Fine music along with the craziness’ of Russell’s interpretation of Mahler’s life.

I am not doing this on the IPad. With one finger typing it would take me all night. But I do enjoy wasting time with it. Oh, I did Facetime with my German daughter the other day. Great fun. John said we should put in at the table and have her join us for Sunday dinner.