Category: art

An Unexpected Convergence of the Universe

Had a weird day yesterday.

Well, most of my days are weird. Yesterday was especially so.

I was working in the studio and painting up a storm. Since The Good Man was out and about, I took the opportunity to turn on the oldies country station I like. 104.7 out of Albuquerque does an internet stream.

It’s a great station for classic country stuff. I try to spare The Good Man from my country music as much as I can. All for the sake of the marriage and things like that….

So as I painted, on the radio came Merle Haggard, and George Strait, a little Ray Price and even a stab at some Garth Brooks (the old stuff).

Well, it didn’t take but a minute, and I was vacuumed up into the Wayback Machine. I found myself struggling with heart pangs that were hard to ignore.

It doesn’t help that I’m also reading a Max Evan’s book right now. In it, he describes horses and New Mexico plains and mountains…

Well, it’s more than a girl can take.

I tried to fight off the homesick but it started to hurt deep inside.

So I called up my best friend.

“You either gotta come get me out of this wayback machine or you gotta get in here with me,” I left on her voicemail.

She called back quick. “Open the hatch, I’m coming in!” she said.

So being the kind of friend that you keep around for some twenty plus years, she talked me down and reminded me that I’m just a couple weeks from actually *being* in New Mexico again. So could I just hold out a bit?

Feeling a lot better, I hung up the phone and turned off the radio.

Then the Good Man came home and all was right in my world again.

About an hour later, I heard my iPhone buzz.

I picked it up to see that my old boss from Sandia Labs was pinging me. She is a dear friend and the best boss I’ve ever had. She told me that she and her boss (who was my first manager at Sandia and is also a good friend and a fine Aggie alum) were having drinks while out on a business trip.
Their conversation had turned to stories about, well, me.

She was recounting a few of them via text messages (we had a lot of fun back in those days…the mid-90’s) and she said, “That was the best time I’ve ever had at work. We should never have let you go to the Bay Area.”

And damnit all if that sharp pang didn’t come right back to my heart.

Now I keep in touch with my former amazing Boss Lady, but we haven’t spoken a lot in the past year (other than to congratulate her on a recent marriage).

Sort of out of nowhere, on a day when I’m homesick anyway, there she was relating stories of a great time in my life back when I lived in Albuquerque.

And I seized up a little.

It was weird how all these events came together on one day.

So I talked it over with The Good Man. I told him I’m afraid of forgetting who I am and where I come from. He suggested that just that fear alone may keep it from being so.

He asked, “Do you want to move back?”

And I said, “No, because I think I’d yearn for San Francisco if I left!”

Over the weekend, we went to see a theater show, “The Tosca Project,” that was so San Francisco and the heart of North Beach that I love profoundly, that it was moving and deeply gratifying to my soul.

The thought of being far away from the soul of that City is a sad thought.

Sometimes I’m a girl caught between all the Karens that make up who I am.

I don’t have any answers. I figure I’m just going to have a very high electrical bill this month, what with all this constant use of the Wayback Machine (it’s not Energy Star rated…..)

Insomnia, Plaything of the Creative Mind

Yeah, so I’m pretty much not sleeping these days.

Can’t say I have a lot of worries on my mind keeping me up. All the standard stuff, nothing especially taxing.

Yesterday, I was firmly awake by 5:30am, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll get up and get on the day.

I rose with a vigor unusual for one who hasn’t had much sleep. Ok, I did take on a bit of caffeine, and that probably helped, but man oh manischewitz, I was full of energy and had a wonderfully creative day.

I was in the flow. It’s rather addictive, actually, being in the creative flow.

I got a lot of the To Do’s done and even many of the I’d Like To Do’s made progress.

Good stuff. I felt pleasantly tired by the end of the day. Like I’d put in a good, valuable day’s work.

So I dropped off to sleep.

Then, at 4:01 this morning (I know cuz I checked the clock) I was awake again.

I had an idea!

And at 4:01 in the morning, it seemed like a super duper blog idea!

Oh yeah, I was fairly salivating to get the blog post written about this idea. It would be funny! Witty! And maybe even a bit touching!

So I *had* to jot it down, quickly opening notes on the iPhone and tapping out the idea.

Yes! I couldn’t go back to sleep I was so excited about the idea! I’d get up right away with the alarm and do some Google work to support the idea!

It was going to rock!

Hooray me!

Yeah. This is how lack of sleep and middle of the night ideas can fool you.

My fabulous 4:01 am idea was: “The Least Favorite Color of Crayon”

Yeah. Woo!

It was going to be an indictment of people who gaze on less vibrant colors and don’t give them a chance in the sixty-four count universe.

I was sure the least favorite crayon color would be black. This focus on the color black is likely due to the canvas I’m currently crafting. It has a deep black background and I’m totally into it. So maybe my brain is processing the color…or something.

Except, it turns out that the least favorite crayon color is *not* black, it’s white. Which makes sense because kids most often use crayons on a sheet of white paper, and so then what is the use?

And while this makes for an interesting bit of trivia, it does not, however, make for a scintillating blog post.

By the way, the favorite crayon colors are red and blue. So now you know. Drop that one at a cocktail party.

Also found as part of my Google research:

Behold, Crayola’s Thirteen Retired Colors. I grieve for them all. Alas poor raw umber, I hardly knew you…….

Image from Wikipedia and used under a Creative Commons License

On Rules and Flouting the Rules

There is a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama that goes like this:

“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”

I generally agree with this sentiment. I’ve seen it applied beautifully to music and painting, and I personally break the principle rule of photography with gusto every chance I get.

The one area that I get a little persnickety about breaking the rules is the discipline of spelling and grammar.

In this area, I get out my schoolmarm glasses and become VERY strict.

I believe that both effective communication and indeed, the very fabric of the English language, depends on proper grammar and spelling.

Despite, of course, the daily assault on the English language lobbed by the texting/twittering/facebooking phenomenon.

I recently read the bestselling book, “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” by Aimee Bender.

It’s a sad, melancholy tale of a young girl who can taste the emotions of the person who prepared the food she eats. It’s an odd and slightly surreal book that delves deeply into the secrets and strange predilections of the family at the center of the story.

But as I dived into the book, I was brought up short right away by the complete lack of quotation marks to designate dialogue.

You know, dialogue is bit tough to follow when there are no quotation marks. Indeed Ms. Bender didn’t even follow standard dialogue format as often the sentences spoken between characters overlapped in a single paragraph.

I found it maddening and it made my progress through the book slow and rather difficult. I often had to re-read pages to be sure I knew what was going on.

I did get through the book, however, because Ms. Bender is a teller of beautiful stories.

There is a book that also eschewed quotation marks that I tried to read ten or twelve years ago that didn’t fare as well. In fact, I got a third of the way through the infernal book then got up the moment I’d had enough, got in my car, went to the library and dropped the blasted book into the donation slot. Literally. I got so mad I hesitated not a moment before I ejected the book from my home.

That book is one you might know, “All The Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy. Mr. McCarthy may be an award-winning author, but he’s no favorite of mine.

Mr. McCarthy’s style on display in his recent spate of bestselling books may be something of a driver to this now popular style of throwing out useful punctuation marks.

To be blunt, I blame McCarthy for the trend.

However, my blame may be poorly placed.

Recently The Good Man and I watched a documentary called “It/ll Be Better Tomorrow” about the author Hubert Selby Jr. Known best for his books “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and “Requiem for a Dream,” over his career, Mr. Selby also flagrantly violated the rules of punctuation, most notably his apostrophes are replaced with slashes. So she’ll becomes she/ll.

However, at least he’s consistent in his use, and there is some sort of mark designating what’s (or what/s) going on, so I can at least follow along.

Not so with ol’ Cormac.

It seems I’m not the only one who has noticed this literary shift.

In an October 2008 essay in the Wall Street Journal, author Lionel Shriver also notes the lack of quotation marks, quoting material from McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” by way of example, but McCarthy is far from the only author out there employing this device.

To me, it feels indulgent on the part of the writer to expect that their readers will simply figure it out for themselves.

I think Mr. Shriver sums it up quite nicely at the end of his essay:

“When dialogue makes no sound, the only character who really gets to talk is the writer.”

And the thing is, as a writer, I’ve always thought my job was to get out of the way.

Ah well, as NewMexiKen and I discussed in the comments section of this post, art can be a tricky thing to define. The rules go all slidey* when we talk about what is or isn’t acceptable in creating works of art.

That means I get to keep my punctuation marks and while others can set theirs free.
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Oh…and then there is the inappropriate use of quotation marks. That’s a whole other discussion.

*Also there is my personal habit of making up words. Ah well, back to throwing stones at my own glass house…

So…I’m curious about your opinion

I know, I know. I’m usually the opinionated one here.

But I have a photography related question and I know that my readers are both smart and savvy. And many of you have an aesthetic that is not to be beat!

So I’ll cut right to the heart of the matter.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at websites where amateurs with varying degrees of talent and experience post their photos.

There are some amazingly gifted photographers out there.

And…there are some amazingly gifted photoshoppers out there.

I tend to wince a little when I see photos that are lovely but are WAY post processed. It seems to be “the thing” these days to massively post process photos. So much so that I think we as photographers are losing the skill of setting up the shot on the camera.

When I mention this to fellow student photographers, everyone looks at me with a condescending smile, as though I’m the Village Idiot.

I don’t mind doing a little touch up work, a little color correction, things like that.

But the full scale photoshopping…well. I don’t know, it’s a thing for me.

But I sort of digress.

There is one particular photo treatment that bugs me. And yet intrigues me.

It is basically a photo in black and white where one color is pulled out.

Here, better to show you what I mean. This is my first attempt. I did this photo using the Colorsplash app on my iPhone and touched it up a bit using Photoshop Elements.

It’s not the finest example of the technique, but you’ll get what I mean.

Behold, my bowl of oranges, moments before they were juiced. Delicious!

I’ve seen some really well done versions of this technique, and it can create quite an emotion.

But I can’t help looking at a black and white with one color photo, especially my own, and thinking it is something akin to the old fashioned photo-in-a-brandy-snifter as far as classy effects.

Then again…it creates laser focus to one part of the photograph which can make all the difference in the viewing experience.

Perhaps I tend to lean a little too much toward conventional.

So I’m curious if I should spend some more time perfecting this effect in Photoshop (and thus may learn to love it more) or if I should move on to other lessons?

Thoughts on both sides of the argument are really, really helpful. Feel free to Google “black and white photo with one color” to look at other examples before you render a decision.

Just curious. All thoughts are useful!

Thanks in advance!

And now for something completely different…

So lately I’ve been impossibly busy with work, life and all the joy that long summer days bring to my easily distracted brain.

As such, I’ve had the attention span of a gnat and have been really running to catch up on my blog.

In reading over posts from the past couple weeks, I feel like I’m starting to be derivative of my self.

And, well, that’s ass.

I had a long talk with The Good Man about maybe taking a break from blogging, or quitting entirely.

In fact, I considered it seriously.

But then again…I’m up to 939 posts over three years, and there is a part inside of me that *really* wants to top 1,000 posts on this blog.

So I dug deep inside and asked myself if I wanted to stop blogging.

The answer was clear. No. I don’t want to stop.

I love blogging and it’s done amazing things for my writing and editing skills on the fly.

And so….

I’m going to keep on keeping on here on the blog. But to keep things interesting, I’m going to try something different this week.

I shall dub the week of June 21 through June 25 as Flash Fiction and Fables Week.

On Monday through Thursday, my blog posts will consist of a no more than 1,000 word fiction story or essay, thus the very definition of Flash Fiction.

As the impetus for each day’s story, I will visit a random word generator and use the first word that is presented as the foundation for the story.

I will have to keep an eye on myself for no cheating! No hitting refresh until I get a word I like.

I have no idea what the stories will be about as this is all a fluid process.

I hope you are willing to come along on this ride, as it will be harder than it looks, I can assure you. This is really a task in pushing The Muse to produce. And sometimes she doesn’t like that.

Here’s a representative sample of her cranky face.

Four days writing a totally new Flash Fiction story each day may be tough to accomplish. We’ll see.

And then Friday will be a special day. On Friday I’m going to present a “Fable Friday” selection. This is a story I’ve taken from one of a couple books I have of fables and folklore. I will read the story aloud complete with funny voices, if necessary, and will also post a link to a scan of the story if you’d rather read it yourself.

This was inspired by a great night at a friend’s house reading fables and folklore aloud. It was a fun and touching night and I’m experimenting with making this a regular item on the Oh Fair New Mexico blog.

After my week of Flash Fiction and Folklore ends, I will likely go back to my regularly scheduled stream-of-mind posts that I’ve done for the past three years, hopefully with a renewed sense of creativity and verve.

Verve…what a great word.

Anyhow, do join me and give feedback on the stories if the spirit moves you.

Personally I’m both excited and scared about the week, but I’m also raring to go!

Wheeeee!!