Like Riding a Bicycle · 16 days ago by Julie
It’s not just my painting that’s out of my conscious control. When I compose music, which I do now and again, the result is different according to which instrument I’m using.
Sometimes I sing while kayaking. The results are rhythmic chants, swaying and swinging like the motion of the paddle, usually rather chipper and upbeat.
Sometimes I sit at Pt Hammond and play the recorder. The resulting compositions are jigs or reels in a minor or modal key. They’re more interesting than playable.
Sometimes I sit at the piano in the house. These pieces are straightforward, slightly melancholy.
And when I compose with the fiddle, the results are danceable.
I think my body memory is at play here. It sees no need to consult my conscious mind, which is ponderous and analytical and only gets in the way.
How this relates to the similar situation with my painting is not clear to me.
Neither Dignity nor Sense · 17 days ago by Julie
I’ve been preparing for a show in June. This involves a lot of paintings of trees and rocks, which I enjoy doing. Even more time is spent on framing and infrastructure, and there’s some considerable time spent organizing my records (still haven’t found a perfect system, but it’s getting closer).
I keep getting surprised, though, by what I paint. There’s the pieces I plan and execute, more or less, according to plan. They’re satisfying, for the most part, as I’m incrementally solving the problems that I’ve set myself.
They’re not the problem (if problem is the word I want, which it isn’t). It’s the pieces I come up with when I let off the tight clamp on my productivity. Pam asked me to make some smaller pieces recently. Instead of working from photos, I thought, “How hard can it be?” and just started in.
Of the four pieces I did last week, I have a quillback rockfish on a bed of intricately knotted kelp, a doug-fir with a snake wound around it, a sirin, or woman-headed bird, and a small forest of bare orange-branched trees. And, after trying to repair a rather boring canvas depicting a rock, I also have a dense thicket of trolls.
This is not the kind of art that I expected to make. It’s not how I see the world, it’s not where I want to go in oils (though I’m interested in illuminated manuscripts, where it would indeed go nicely).
My creativity has colonized me without my consent, without regard for my plans or for my dignity.
Six Steps to Zero · 28 days ago by Julie
“Six steps to zero” is the phrase we use around here to capture the ponderousness of getting stuff done.
This morning I awoke, started the laundry, washed six loads of dishes and oiled the cedar slab that serves as our kitchen counter, and went into the studio to move preparations for my show in June one step further along.
Last week I gave a thin coat of Dammar varnish to ten of the paintings, just about all that could be dried flat. The plan today? To varnish ten more.
1. In order to do that, I had to move the ten almost-dry paintings somewhere else. But where? Aha, I thought. Into cardboard apple boxes, separated by more cardboard to allow them to continue drying. Every apple box in the studio, however, is full.
2. But, there are two apple boxes in the laundry room. One is full of clothes hangars. Now that the weather is good enough to dry clothes outdoors, I can move the hangars to the laundry line outside and free the box. Also hang up the wet laundry, which is now ready.
3. The second box, oddly enough, had been used to store apples from our orchard. Now that it’s April, most of them have been eaten and half the remainder have rotten spots. So, I separated them out and went outside to throw them into the sheep pasture.
4. On the way back, I noticed that all the apple trees are beginning to flower, and that all of them have between one and twenty newly hatched masses of tent caterpillars. Removing young tent caterpillars is easy, although so disgusting that it is easy to “forget” to do it. Knowing that, I decided to remove a good percentage of them at once, at least the ones on my direct path back in through the front door. So, I stood in the sunlight, scooping masses of webbing and ten thousand tiny larvae off the trees and onto the grass, with LoRENzo the cat twining around my ankles helpfully. (This is not an exaggeration. I figure each egg mass accounted for at least 100 larvae, and each tree had on average 10 bunches of new hatchlings, and I worked on about ten trees. In the image you can see the egg capsule under the webbing below the caterpillars, and the dots of excrement that indicate that in the short day that they have been alive, they have already been chewing at my tree.)
5. After washing my hands (ugh), I found a bowl to put the remaining apples in and thus freed up the second apple box from the laundry room.
6. Then I painted two sides of each box lid or bottom with housepaint, letting them dry on the balcony while stacking the almost-dry newly varnished paintings near my workspace. Painting the boxes is not strictly necessary, but I do try to keep from looking as scattered and mismatched as I actually am when interfacing with strangers. Using neutral looking boxes instead of scrounged looking boxes is a tiny step in that direction. Perhaps some day I’ll build wooden boxes, but wood adds so much weight that maybe not.
7. Next, I’ll give the varnished paintings hangars and title the ones that are not yet titled and update their index cards and set them aside until I can paint the other half of the boxes which will hold them.
And then, I will be able to varnish the next set of paintings.
I Can't Explain it · 72 days ago by Julie
So, I’m packing for my trip to visit Camilla in Scotland. Then, inexplicably, I find myself outside with a hammer, trying to take apart one of my old cameras.
“Why are you doing that?” asked Bob.
“Well, I’m trying to fix it,” I said. I thought that was funny. Bob was worried.
“But why?” he asked again.
“I want the lens,” I said, improvising cleverly.
“Oh, you want it so you can make a camera obscura?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, seizing upon the idea. “Yes, I do.”
Maybe I will.
Why I Won't Learn Japanese · 86 days ago by Julie
Because it’s too hard.
Here is a Bing translation of something a friend wrote in Japanese:
I both have sense to travel the world with a different time has visited you three years annually two major important locations visited here, big trees before the breaths, until the calm sea, where with that in mind you want partaking force feel and has always gotten power in connecting people live in serenity now, deep sky looked at so far, while living in civilization alive in each location thickens again one step, at the same time deep and I received Japan and now their friends.I think I’m deeply touched, but I could be wrong about that.
Reply to "The Jersy Game" in the Jan 2 New Yorker · 112 days ago by Julie
Danglin’ Don, a junior at Our Lady of Painful Salvation and Number 8 on his team, trotted onto the field, pumping his right fist as he came. Even before the game started, under his helmet he was sweating and, due to practice scrimmage injuries to his acromioclavicular (shoulder) joint, his left arm hung just a tad unnaturally.
The cheers didn’t die as his teammates joined him. If anything, they rose in volume. “Go-nads! Which team is baddest? We’re the go-naddest!” Danglin’s parents and eight siblings, dressed rather cornily to look like the team mascot, waved giant foam gonads and shouted themselves hoarse. “We’ve been pumpin’ for Danglin’ since he was four,” says his father Bob Finchley, a torts lawyer who practices in Manhattan. “Reading aloud from Procopius, Adelard of Bath, all of the Italian theologians.”
“By the time he was seven,” says his mother Eileen, also a torts lawyer, “he’d memorized the Song of Roland in the original Old French, and we knew we had somebody special.”
The road to stardom was not an easy one. Plagued by a series of injuries that would have felled a lesser competitor (Danglin’s pinkies have been broken a total of seven times apiece, he’s pulled his right hip flexors countless times, and, according to Dr. Adamantine, the team physician, “he will never again be able to use his patellas as God intended them to be used”), Danglin’ has rebounded with amazing speed and determination every time. “He just don’t know what the word “quit” means,” says Coach Toedle. “He’s a phenomenon!”
But it’s not just Danglin’s natural abilities that make the Gonads the top-ranked team in the MHL. “Total” Toedle begins training scrimmages in late August, despite the risk of heat prostration and concussion. “If they want to be champions,” he says, “they got to act like champions.”
With full-face reciting sessions, Gregorian marathons, and even the controversial lute strumming scrimmages (banned in every other state except Texas), Toedle has built team spirit as well as endurance and versatility. “We’re unstoppable!” he has said, more than once.
Today was no exception. The Erections, a team out of Kansas City from Upper St. Dick Preparatory School, and the top-seeded in the Midwestern Division, was already off their feed due to the exceptionally hostile reception they had been given at the airport. Looking a little droopy, the Erections walked on-field to boos and catcalls.
After the usual cheerleader-led yells (this time in an obscure version of Welch Gaelic), the first quarter began with a rapid-fire exchange of Dominican prayers, a series of ontological arguments for the existence of God, and all the usual high-energy in-your-face early-game events. Suddenly, in a prepared move that drew gasps from the crowd, Danglin’ Don surged into the lead with a ringing rendition of a piyyut from one of the early Italian paytanim, Shephatiah. As the Hebrew prayer rang out, it was already clear that the Erections were completely unprepared. “They don’t warm up right, they don’t score,” said Toedle, shrugging his shoulders as two of the away team’s members were carried off in stretchers. Cries of “Foul!” were booed down, and, after that early drubbing, the Erections finished the game with a limp 3 – 88, and a very expensive medical bill indeed.
After the game, we were finally able to interview Danglin’ Dan himself. Flushed with success, he snapped his fingers and bounced on his toes as he threw mock punches at us. “Yup, yup, yup,” he said. “I’m going to get a free ride in college. I’ve totally been offered a bunch of scholarships to a bunch of places. Places that I can’t tell you about yet.”
“Don’t you think it’s unethical to go to college not intending to study at all?” we asked, somewhat timidly.
“Hey,” said Danglin’, “Get real. College is about making your way in the world. I continue my ace performance in college, I get recruited by the major Medieval History League teams, and boom! I’m set for life.”
One only hopes that injuries don’t nip this ambitious young man’s plans in the bud, so to speak.
Tip of the Iceberg · 159 days ago by Julie
It was a cold blustery Sunday. In the afternoon, I took Java to the beach on the North side, hoping for some wave drama. It was indeed dramatic, with brilliantly lit whitecaps, the taste of spray in my nose, a wind that burrowed through the knit in my jacket, and the roar of water and thump of driftwood hitting the pebbles.
After a bit of romping around together, Java and I went our separate ways, she to rush madly about, and me to sit on a damp hummock that was somewhat sheltered from the direct wind and write a fiddle tune.
Some days, composing is easy, other days, well, it’s fun even if it isn’t effective. So, after having fun, I noticed that the sun was orange and setting at the northernmost tip of an island off to the west. Time to go home. I gave a violent shudder, zipped my jacket up to my chin, put my gloves back on, and called the dog.
I spent a half-hour wandering around in the mossy dunes behind the berm, looking for the damn dog, calling and calling (no point in whistling in a wind like that).
I was struck by how foreign my own voice sounded. Earlier, in the solitary zone of musicianship, how I looked and how I sounded was of no interest at all. My consciousness was of my interior life, and of the exterior life around me, and they were one. The shell of my body, which divides one from the other, vanished from importance.
Walking home (BTW, I did find the dog, quite close by to where I had been musicking, but with her head in a bush and understandably unable to hear my call), I thought about the memorial for my mother-in-law which is coming up.
She had a strong personality, impacting each of us in different but very distinctive and compelling ways. Perhaps if we compared notes, we might come up with a convincing description of her personality, a way that she “was.”
I wonder, though, how she experienced herself? Did she have many moments like the one I just experienced, where subject and object merged and she did not think of herself as self? Does what we will remember at the memorial service represent only the tip of the iceberg (rhetorical question – the answer is “yes”)? And how did the bulk of the iceberg feel to her? Who was she?
Who are you?
Mischief · 176 days ago by Julie
We were at the old age home. “Hey,” said Petunia. “What about if we move all the name plaques and the wreaths and stuff one door down? We could really confuse the oldsters that way, couldn’t we?”
“But what would we do with the person whose room is on the very end?” I asked.
“No problem. Put that set of nametags and wreaths and stuff on the next floor down. We could re-paint the numbers in the elevator, too. Move all the floors one floor up.”
“It might work,” I said, considering it carefully. “But, we’d have to move all the paintings on the walls one room over as well.”
“Just stop,” said Bob, his face red. “You have no right to mess with these people. They are old. They have had a hard life, some of them. Leave them in peace.”
All right, then.
Windy · 184 days ago by Julie
“Man, it was so windy out,” said Yvette, coming in from outside and slamming the door behind her, “it was so windy that I almost didn’t need toilet paper.”
Take a Deep Breath · 187 days ago by Julie
I asked Bob if he would consider wearing long pants when he goes out on the boat. “Maybe you’re getting so staggering-around cold because you’re not wearing enough clothing.”
“I’m sympathetic to the idea of keeping warm,” he said. “I agree with that part. But wearing pants is just mythology. Look at the Tierra del Fuegans.”
“You mean you think you would be warmer if you took your shorts off, instead of switching them out to long pants?”
“When they get wet, long pants wick your body heat away.”
I started laughing.
“Think about it. Take a deep breath,” he said.
So, I’m thinking about it.