Garish

Sometimes all the colors look right together.  

We were playing with Playdoh today, for what felt like 20 hours, when I noticed a patch that looked like a sunset.  I know if I try to put those colors together on my own, it will never look quite as perfect as our pretend Playdoh road for dinosaurs going to school.  But I will try.

Make Believe

Thinking of Georges Méliès because Google told me to.

Over the years, I have taken the equivalent of 3 years of French.  I never got very far.  Basic verbs and pronouns were enough of a challenge.  I could never pull off the accent.  My husband has an OK accent - about as good as my accent inside my head.  

I like to pretend I can understand some French in films but I really just enjoy reading subtitles.  So listening to the round, full accent in Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès is a treat. I can pretend I'm like the narrator, able to bust into French at the drop of a hat.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hvDt7fGtsk

Nothing Blue

I think of my newest project as an old project.  I worked on it off and on for 7 years.  It took a long time for me to realize what the pieces were and what they meant.  I thought there were pieces missing until just recently.

The narrative framework mirrors Chris Marker's Sans Soleil - a woman's voice reading a letter.  The references to Jupiter reflect my interest in The Toynbee Tiles's writings about the resurrecting the dead on Jupiter.  Nothing Blue is a transmission from a place of loneliness, a hopeful message in a bottle.  It is about leaving the sturdy framework of a lifelong relationship.  

Wanting the viewer to see Jupiter but only seeing blue reminds me of the opening sequence of Sans Soleil where Marker's narrator says:
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

 

Face on Mars is not about Mars

Fugue states fascinate me.  I pour over the details of people who flee their lives on foot, their identity forgotten.  What are you left with without a sense of self?  When you don't know your own birthday or location of your home, what remains? Is there a moment when the weight of self is set aside or falls away?  When you look in the mirror, do you recognize a face or is it just shadows and light?

But what is it about?

Hello Ted is written from the perspective of Ellen Tarmichael, a Chicago area woman who had gone out on two dates with Ted Kaczynski in 1978. 

It was a period when Kaczynski was trying to have a normal life.  He worked at a factory with his younger brother, David.  Ted and Ellen went on a date picking apples.  I don't know what they did on the second date, she didn't say.  She ended the relationship as she didn't feel like they had anything in common. 

She probably didn't realize that Ted had come out of the wilderness with the hope of having a relationship like this, to be normal.  I was interested in the idea of her finding out, after the fact, that she was the last straw.  

Back to Camp David

More from my cousin David Fair:
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. 

Read the entire quote here:
http://users.wfu.edu/breckers/howtoplayguitar.htm

This is bigger than an in tune or out of tune guitar, it is about the liberation of owning your own creative output.  If you evaluate your own creative output through the eyes of others, it is likely that will register yourself as a failure.  

Time and time again, I would encounter college juniors who had hit a wall.  Learning of the creative output of artists like Chris Burden, Cindy Sherman, Ai Weiwei or Maurizio Cattelan, students would shut down creatively.  They judged themselves against those great artists and found their own work lacking.  Often, I would they would veer off into extremely torturous, tedious work as a means of proving themselves worthy.  

But what if we turn the tables and assume we are right and our work is right.  What if you make artwork you want to see or write music you want to hear?  You could argue that you don't make work in a vacuum or to say you're only making work for yourself is to ignore the audience.  But what if what you make IS great and assume you are gathering gifts to share? 

What if we assume we are worthy take up the flag and run with it?  What a relief to let go of the burden of judging yourself?  

 

 

What I'm reading

I'm on my second book on Dyatlov's Pass.  It's a gory story with an odd framework.  I keep thinking about what would be enough to force people to cut their way out of a tent and run out onto a frozen mountain.  What is that scary?  

why this and not that

I was trying to explain a new project and could not really explain my interest in the visual material.  It is odd footage used in rotoscoping.  Sometimes it comes down to postures. The content isn't always important. The woman in green is up on her toes like a dog going after a squirrel.  That must mean something.

Statues

We are slowly scanning and printing out portraits using the Sense Scanner.  I don't have anything deep or meaningful to say about the process.  You have to go slowly and it doesn't seem to like the shadow under people's chins.  The faces don't always register a lot of detail but you can get the impression of a person from the shape of their head.  

I have been thinking about Ted.

Ted Kaczynski has been frozen in my mind.  I don't really like hearing stories about his life in prison or the letters he writes to this or that journalist. It took a bit for me to get over my sense of him as a symbolic figure and start watching Manhunt: Unabomber on Netflix.  All the profiling of language and the character development of the FBI agents is ok but not my cup of tea.  This past week I watched Season 1 Episode 6.  It was the best one could hope for - diving into the motivations and back story of Kaczynski.  His time at Harvard as a 16 year old, his struggles to fit in as a teen, his life in the cabin. 
http://www.tveskimo.com/2017/09/02/manhunt-unabomber-ted-recap-season-1-episode-6/

the book I want to read

I am as always, inspired by my cousin David.  A musician, writer, interior decorator and collector.  He has been publishing pages from scrap books he's made over the years.  In his words, he makes books with the pictures he wants to look at.  There's the lesson for the day: make art you want to look at not just the art you think people will like or want to show.