Category: art

Possessive Punctuation

On Monday of this week, I set out to write a post, but seriously lacked for any good ideas.

I seem to be going through the Mohave Desert of good ideas lately, and it’s killing me. I think I abused The Muse mightily back in June when I did four different entries for the county fair, and she’s pouting now. Seriously pouting.

So I decided to rely on my tried and true Muse busting trick of going to the random word website, laying down the rule that I must use the first word that shows, and then just writing.

The word I got was: apostrophe

Well. It’s Wednesday and I still got nothing to write about the word apostrophe. I’ve been Googling the word trying to come up with good ideas, but nothing really sparks my interest.

I mean, c’mon: “apostrophe…from the Greek apostrophos (prosoidia) (the accent of) turning away”

Um. Ok.

And then the grammar pages discussing how the apostrophe is either used to denote a missing letter, as in can’t, or to denote a possessive, i.e. Karen’s blog.

And a dissertation on how the apostrophe and the single quote are two TOTALLY different things (even though they look exactly alike).

Yawn.

I mean really, random word generator? Apostrophe? If you had to give me a punctuation word, why not something with flair, like Ampersand? Or as mudane as Comma, but at least I could wax on for a thousand words about my own personal, overuse, of, the, comma.

But nooooooo. You had to drop apostrophe on my already massively blocked self.

Damn you aposotrophe for making my already stifled Muse even stiflier!

Tis simply a writer’s dilemma. (<--Huh? Huh? Did you see what I did there?)








Cartoon from What The Duck.


Spurned

Back in 2006 when I met the product called Sirius, I was enchanted. It was a whole new way of listening to radio. Fewer commercials, more choices, and lots of stations that let me listen to whatever I wanted to whenever I wanted to.

For several years, we were together, and musically I was very happy.

Over time, the renewal price of my Sirius subscription started going up and the quality of the programing starting going down. During the time I took a sabbatical from work, I looked for every possible way to cut costs.

So I broke up with Sirius.

Sirius had a hard time with the end of our relationship. Sirius didn’t really want to let me go. Sirius still calls, email and snail mails me several times a week.

Bright yellow envelopes in my mailbox shout “We want you back!”

No, honestly, they actually say that. It’s weird. Soon Sirius will start writing me bad poetry.

Well I’ve been back on the job for a while now and while I *could* sign up again with Sirius, I just don’t want to. I’m over Sirius.

The trouble is, there hasn’t been a respectable suitor to take its place. I listen to some form of music in my office while I work all day (we’re talking a good eight to ten hours a day of music) and I have tried just about every local radio station I can get. They all suck.

So I did what I usually do. I whined to The Good Man.

Who replied, “Have you tried Pandora?”

Why no…I hadn’t.

So I downloaded the free application to my iPhone and started listening.

Last week I finally dug down into the instructions and figured out how to not just listen to the stations already set up, but instead program my own station.

Oh my. I’m in love.

Deep love.

I am all about Pandora, now. ALL. ABOUT. PANDORA.

Sorry Sirius. You can’t have me back. I’m with Pandora now.

And I like it.





** By the way, I wasn’t paid for this, I just wanted to talk about my feelings.**

Guest Blogging

Hi! Today we’re going to mix it up a bit. You’ll find my Friday post over on a wonderful blog called Into The Bardo.

This blog is a collaborative effort of three friends who all face serious health conditions. They created this blog to provide a forum to explore a variety of topics with talent, humor and verve. Post authors include the three main editors, their family and friends and include a number of notable poets and writers.

I was honored to be asked to contribute an essay for their “Perspectives on Cancer” series. I wrote a piece about my paternal grandmother.

Writing this essay has proven to be a magical experience for me. I’m very close to an Aunt on my dad’s side, and I sent her an early editorial layout of the piece as I very much wanted her approval before publishing. She not only approved, but sent it out to many of my cousins, some of whom I’ve only met once or twice.

I’m getting email from around the world to discuss this piece and our grandparents and the connection to my extensive family has touched me very deeply.

So please, give me a click today and go read my piece:

The Divining Trunk

Thanks much, and happy weekend to us all!



That’s my grandma and me in 1976.

Photo from the family archives and Copyright Karen Fayeth, 2011


Gimme Some Weird, People

Today I’m going to lean heavy on my New Mexico readers, or travelers to and fans of New Mexico.

Been feeling a little homesick, so I took to Google for searches about New Mexico.

Of course there are all the sites dedicated to the aliens, the cattle mutilations, La Llorona and the chupacabra.

And I find a LOT of sites that want to tell me how weird my homestate is.

Weird huh. Is it?

Hmmmm. I don’t think it’s weird at all.

I came across a list of “New Mexico Attractions and Oddities” and went through the list.

Honestly, is it just because I’m from there? I didn’t find many of these things to be odd at all.

Examples:

The Chevy on a stick in ABQ. Ok, ok, I remember when that was first going up and there was a hubbub, but hardly what I’d called genuinely weird.

And the big green dinosaur, also is ABQ.

But are these really all that weird? Or just…um…bad taste?

Speaking of bad taste, how about the scrap metal roadrunner in Alamogordo or the recycled roadrunner in Las Cruces…or the auto parts dinosaur, also in Alamogordo. Not art, but not weird.

Or how about the big metal glasses in Taos. I mean, it’s Taos fer chrissakes. The whole town is a half bubble off level.

Then there’s the “mysterious/religious” stuff like all the spontaneous healing at Santuario de Chimayo with the crutches left behind, the shrine at the top of Mount Cristo Rey or the image of Magdalena in the side of the hill in Magdalena (outside of Socorro).

All sort of your garden variety stuff, filed under “mystical.” But weird? Nah.

And of course there’s all of the natural formations: Camel Rock, Shiprock, and the Kneeling Nun to name a few. All fascinating works of geology, but hardly weird.

The rock formation that gives you the thumbs up going into Laughlin, NV and flips you off on the way out is WAY more weird than any of that. **

And remember when the Burning of Zozobra used to be kind of weird before those frapping Burning Man people went mainstream? Now everyone just thinks New Mexico ripped off the idea (we were burning Old Man Gloom first, you damn hippies!)

I dunno, maybe it’s just the desert heat that leads people to believe that the good people and place of New Mexico are weird. I suppose to someone who has never seen such wide-open spaces and deep blues skies, it could all be a little scary.

But weird? Pfffft. No way. I live near San Francisco. Now that’s weird.

Blame The Good Man for this post topic. We got into a conversation about why New Mexico put “USA” on their license plates (a vague attempt to get around “One of our Fifty is Missing” troubles, I think).

The conversation drifted into new slogans to add to the plate as we bandied them back and forth.

The winner being: “New Mexico…you don’t know who we are and we don’t like you anyway.”

They can take their “weird” and go jump in a lake.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

If any of ya’ll New Mexicans know of something really weird I’ve overlooked, let me know. I’m open to suggestions.







New Mexico sign image Copyright 2007, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the terms of the Creative Commons license found in the right hand column of this page.

** Nevada rock formation images from Life is a Road Trip.


Another Hard Lesson For a Hardheaded Girl

I’ve heard over and over how “if it looks easy, it was probably hard to accomplish.” This applies to music, painting, writing, and pretty much all of the arts.

The answer, then, is always practice. And then practice. And then practice some more.

I recently procured a light tent and have been learning how to shoot stock images. It’s a great outlet for photography and occasionally, if you build up a good inventory, you can make a couple extra bucks at it.

So I thought I’d try my hand. I did my first submission of ten to the online stock photo company I’d chosen, and all but one were summarily rejected.

I was told that most “were not commercial”…meaning I’d submitted arty stuff and not “hey that would look good on a brochure” stuff.

Ok. This calls for expanding my horizons a bit. A streeeeetch to my current knowledge.

So I’ve been practicing. And struggling.

I have spoken with a professional photographer who has a lot of success with both stock and not-stock work. She gave me great information and feedback.

She advised that making the move to add “commercial” to your “arty” repertoire is a tough one.

I had no idea how just how tough.

I keep looking at this photo and sighing. Occasionally I whimper. (I suggest clicking the photo to see the big size. In the small form to fit this blog post it’s hard to see details):



I took the better part of a hundred photos of ding-dang tomatoes in just three different poses. I fiddled with light. Lenses. Exposure. All of it. From the piles of photos from that shoot, this is one of the better shots.

And it still sucks.

The stems are out of focus (c’mon Fayeth, that’s photography 101!). The colors are muddy (gah!) and the depth of field isn’t quite right as you can still kind of see the corners of the light tent. And the way the lights are configured, it looks like each little tomato has two little eyes (this was not easily corrected by Photoshop. I tried.). GAAAAH!

So frustrating.

Turns out it takes a lot of effort to make a “simple photo of tomatoes” look like it was just simply snapped off the camera and ready to go.

What does this all mean? Well…back to the light tent I go with a new bowl of tomatoes from the back yard.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

And then practice some more.

I think the edges of my personal creative envelope are starting to ache a bit.