:::this is the way the world ends:::

Category: Art (Page 1 of 7)

J.E. may be the only one who appreciates this

I was reading Atlas Obscura this afternoon, and they talked about a beautiful clock in Glastonbury. A deeply embedded memory of this surfaced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKUgctRBn54

It was 25 years ago, around this time that I first saw that clock. 25 years ago, exactly, I was in Norwich packing up to start my Navy Dumb training. Now to get some Toasted Tea biscuits for Jerod.

Background Enrichment

Carmen with Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna

The Metropolitan Opera is offering free streams of their past performances. I have the luxury of two monitors at home, so I leave the performance up in a browser window and listen/watch throughout the day while I work in the primary screen. The process is a little more osmosis than active engagement, but by the end, I feel like I got 80% out of it as I would watching the first time.

One tip, I also pull up the synopsis of what happens in the opera in Wikipedia and it increases my understanding of the work immensely.

Opera sets seem to be a whole different type of stagecraft. All are spartan in some manner, “pointing” their construction to the performers. I watched the entirety of Carmen and they employed a complicated mechanism of rotating sets. The design and way the performers used this to dramatic effect was top-notch.

This week is Wagner week, and here is the schedule for The Metropolitan Opera.

Comics, Take 2

Garfield, I haven’t come back to in appreciation yet.  I still think it’s pretty juvenile.  While I hope my kids find it and love it like I did, I also hope they outgrow it 😉

This and tomorrow’s entry do something to Garfield that makes it interesting, much more interesting than it would be on its own.

I present: Garfield as Garfield.

Garfield

 

Peanuts Without the Last Frame

I’ve had three phases of my life in relationship to Peanuts.

  1. Elementary School Years, I checked out as many Peanuts books as possible and devoured them
  2. Adolescence and Early Adulthood, I didn’t really get the Peanuts and thought they were childish artifact
  3. Adulthood, I have a new appreciation for the Peanuts

One thing that has helped my appreciation of comic strips are projects like this, and I’ve got a few more to share in the upcoming days.

Peanuts-Missing-Last-Frame

This Hit Me of Late

One_More_Step,_Mr__Hands

In the Attic by Seamus Heaney

1.

Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the crosstrees

Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him

But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out

Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals—

And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead

Appears to rise again . . . “But he was dead enough,”

The story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

2.

A birch tree planted twenty years ago

Comes between the Irish Sea and me

At the attic skylight, a man marooned

In his own loft, a boy

Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,

Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,

Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most

Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

3.

Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma

Of hallway linoleum, Grandfather now appears

Above me just back from the matinée,

His voice awaver like the draft-prone screen

They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier.

“And Isaac Hands,” he asks, “was Isaac in it?”

His memory of the name awaver, too,

His mistake perpetual, once and for all,

Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

4.

As I age and blank on names,

As my uncertainty on stairs

Is more and more the light-headedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,

As the memorable bottoms out

Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still

That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt

As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

Let’s Evoke, Not Provoke

As I’ve been sharing things on the blog, I’ve wondered why I’ve kept things unserious after all the pressures, concerns, and nightmares of the past week.  Perhaps I need a place for respite from the typical news flow across the internet.  I felt I’ve needed evocation, rather than provocation.

Here’s a series of photos that evokes something inextricably Kansas out of me, and thought I’d share.

s_n20_75759100

 

Just Because I Love It

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

244-IR-Vortex.jpg

On the Subject of 2012…

Another link I found in early 2013, was a series of videos an auteur named Matt Shapiro has put together for the last seven years called The Cinescape.  It’s pretty amazing craftsmanship, and even though none of the films he spliced together are original works, the way he did it is.  It’s masterful and brings to mind how movies, even in their most mundane form, can be filled with wonderful images and themes.  Sometimes I feel as if there’s a boredom of abundance.  There’s just so much high-quality filmmaking these days, that even the worst of the Hollywood dreck can be filled with amazing facets.

The Cinescape above also reminds me of how movies feature variations on a theme, and that the tropes can get tedious after a while.  So, there’s a sense of wonder and disappointment as I flip through all seven of these and start to see some of the tricks filmmakers use to emotionally and visually connect.

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