She loves me, she loves me not....

When I had the epiphany I call 'the sadness of aging' I was 19 years old and it was 11 o'clock in the morning.

Death of a Pushbike

Okay, sorry I've been away so long. I've spent a month making an 'artists' book.

Ahh, before I get jumped on..... that doesn't mean that I'm claiming to be an artist. It just means that I am making a book in the style of an artist's book. They are quite fashionable here. I can tell that because my local art shop no longer sells much art stuff like paints etc. It sells craft things. And all really, really, really really expensive. So expensive that us poor people can no longer afford to be painters - so it's lucky they don't sell paint.

See, it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Now of course the book is fantastic. As you no doubt guessed from the above image, it's a rewrite of the Hansel and Gretel story from a feminist perspective with particular emphasis on diverse destinies and the intimate relationship of the the melodious noise the witch makes (as she is being burnt to death) to the alto tenor solos heard in many Post Modernist operas....

Before I started this 'artist's' book, I realised I didn't have a clue what I was doing, so I spent several minutes on an intensive internet search of book making methods. After much aaghing and ooohing and bottom scratching I decided to go with the Japanese Folding style book (JSFB). 

Now why a JFSB? 

Well, to my simple mind it looks easy. No fancy doody Coopernook stitches, no expensive book braces, no arithmetical challenges trying to work out how many folios of  blindfolded flour pages I would need for a 17 and a half  tonne tome. All I needed was a realy, really, really, really long piece of paper.

Well, the best laid plans of men and mice doth go astray.

Now if you don't know Japanes Folding books they are one step removed from scrolls. The difference being is that the JSFB is not rolled, but folded like an accordion. 

The book is about 5o pages long (not bad for four weeks work) and each page is landscaped A4 at 297mm long. So that means, from beginning to end, the book is approximately 15 metres long.

15 Meters? That's where the fun starts. 

Now the last time I played with glue and bits of paper I was about six and young enough to make the discovery that glue tasted pretty good. Apart from that, I recall that I was master of the wrinkle stick, the bubble grab, and the 'oh my thumb's stuck to the back of my ear' move..

Now a lot more than forty years later I have rediscovered that, although I can no longer lick the glue off my toes, I am still am a crappy "gluer."

Ahh, but why am I telling you this? It's because I have this theory that I need to put stuff in the blank black spaces between images.

But the really interesting part about making this book is this: You see,  I have discovered that only people who live in really long houses will be able to read it.

Okay, enough rambling.

About this image? 

Okay. To be truthful it's Giselda. You know, that  girl who was imprisoned in the tower and forced by an old witch named Mary to spin gold into straw. 

In this image Giselda has discovered that, by deconstructing her brother's push-bike and adding the pedals to the Spinning wheel, she can do the job in half the time.

 The raven's are, of course the witches pets, left there to spy on the girl's technique. 

Soon, courtesy of her push-bike pedal discovery (PBD), she will soon be replaced by machines and lose her job. She will then be given in wedlock to the first woodsman who wanders by. The woodman will feel sorry for her because of her left eye traumatic cataract, and the really bad scar she has at the base of her neck. They will have eighteen children, all of which will eventually become associated, in some way or the other, with various medical professions.

:) :)

Thank you so much  for looking at my work. Recently I had the honour of having some work posted, along with the wonderful image maker  Ces, on Illustration Poetry. 

One of the images from my artist's book is there.

Thanks Mita, you rock :)

The 1876 Christmas Day ‘O'Shannessy’s Wake Speech’: Cultivate or Perish.

“Cultivate or perish!”

      With those resounding words Abe Leprachaun, clay pipe clenched firmly between his teeth, began his famous 1876 Christmas Day ‘O'Shannessy’s Wake Speech’.
      The rest, as we all know, is history.
      But what most of us don't know is, that two weeks later, on the 16th March, in a totally unrelated incident, the infamous Great Irish Potato Chip Plague began in a small fish and chip shop in the South of France.
      Spread quickly by word of mouth, the Great Irish Potato Chip Plague (THGICP) effected all the nations of the world, ravaging fish and chip shops from Argentina to Alaska, from Tobruk to Tasmania, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan.
     An unmitigated disaster, not only did THGICP callously shrivel potato chips into small black soggy things, it increased their calories by 15 percent.
     Result?
     Millions of fat bottomed potato chip addicts waddling the streets of Cairo, London and Paris, searching hopelessly for some way to hide their newly aquired "assets".
     Over the next ten years many cures were tried - among them the ‘bum girdle’, the ‘cross dresser’ and the “mooch cradle” .
     All failed.
    Then, in January 1877, a hitherto unknown doctor named Dr Iva Turnipass appeared. And with him, an extraordinary invention, an invention that would, not only shave millions of tons of cellulite from bottoms all over the world, but also result in a miraculous cure for facial cracks, ugliness , chin hair, love handles, intumescence, loftiness, magniloquence, meretriciousness, orotundity, ostentation - and unsightly ‘snow-flake’ dandruff.
    This invention, of course, was known as (cont: page 87)

 
 

Authors' Note:

Is it safe  to stick out my nose out yet? :)

Of course, being a night loving Marsupial, I read the Illustration Friday prompt as "Cultivated" not 'Cultivate'. And so my little St. Patrick's Day Leprechaun chaps are highly cultivated in appearence, with their fancy pipes, flash clothes - and really silly beards.

And thankyou to all those visitors, old and new, who commented on my last two posts. I'm looking forward to visiting your blogs in the next few days.

As an aside, I noticed that both Shirley and Amalia are donating their amazing work or parts thereof to help the victims of the Japanese Tsunami. So please check out their sites if y ou get a chance.

You might also like to check this piece by The Labrat, who is a great artist but very slack.

Thank you very much for looking at this.

The Last Ball of Red Wool - Revisited.

I once wrote a very bad book called The Last Animator.

The book was about a chap (our hero) who was locked in a cell with a fellow named Newton. Newton had this habit of banging his head against the cell bars incessantly - and when I say incessantly I mean incessantly.

 Day in, day out. Minute after minute, hour after hour. Incessantly he banged his head. Adfinitum. Circum maximus nauseum, bigtimeus.

Eventually our hero, whose one heroic quality was that he could make wonderous fantasical animations with his mind, was driven mad by the constant 'boink, boink, boinking' of Newton's skull against the iron bars.

It was a sad book. A bit like 'War and Peace' meets 'Dr Zeus'. 

Sad or not, I'm sure it might have been a best seller had any of the fifty six publishers I sent it too been intelligent enough to have to published. It was a cutting edge novel that would have sent people to the shrinks in droves. The novel would have boosted the  global economy like a ripe progesterone inflated hen sitting on a small New Zealand geyser - and we would not have had the stockmarket crashes of 1987, 1991 and 2006.

But all jokes aside, writing  that book for me was either cauterizing, cathartic or cathetizing - depending on your viewpoint.

But one thing the book was most defintely not - was a 'coif'.

Now 'coif' is an interesting word.

"Coif' may sound familiar because it sounds like "coiffer' - like in hairdresser - partic. usage:  "to be coiffed" per example: "I was coiffed nicely at the ball by Roger de Vanderbongl".

As you can see it's sort of French, and oddly enough is the thing that circa 1066 the Norman's put on their heads before doing their 'thing' at the Battle of Hastings. Consequently it was usually made of chain mail. Along with their hauberk and chausses, the coif was 'de rigger' in medieval combat.

But how does that fit in with my novel?

Well it fits in in all three ways!

Obviously a coif in itself, being a prophylactic device ( prophylactic def:  acting to defend against or prevent something)  was a type of anti-cauterising object - in that it negated the need to be cauterised because if you were lucky you didn't get any head cuts.

Also in it's way it was cathartic, because it helped heal old emotional wounds, expecially if you were the Duke William  of Normandy whose feelings had been hurt by the nasty English who didn't want to give him their throne.

As for 'catheterizing"? (def: to introduce a catheter into a body cavity.) For that we must turn to the English side. So in King Harold's (the English King's) case, you can say he was cathetrized orbitally with a Norman arrow. The Normans were the 'catheterizes", King Harold was the 'catheteree" and, finally, the arrow was the 'cathetererer". And in a way Harold was also cauterized.

Consequently, it all fits together. Catheter, cauterise and catharsis - especially if you know anything about the Battle of Hastings.

 If you know nothing about it, well you probably think I am raving on.

Now, while we are on the subject, another thing a 'coif' is not is a 'sweater."

So, though the Illustration Friday prompt this week is "Sweater' and though these dwarves appear to be knitting sweaters, they should in fact be disqualified because they are merely knitting 'coifs".

I guess the caption is something like:

"It was a bad night, the night of the fifteenth, when Gerald Drawblehood, Captain of the Dwarven Knitting Association (Men's Division) announced to his half brother Cedric, that they were down to their last ball of red wool."

Thank you for looking. I will come visiting tomorrow promise. As soon as I have seen my shrink. :_

Happy Tuesday. Err I mean Wednesday. And I apologise to all those people who have visited to see this post already, to find it vanished. :(


Oh and check this site out! http://martavicente-dibujos-pinturas-objetos.blogspot.com/


Which I found through Don Roberto's blog.

Sweet Surrender: Tim Buckley

Note: I hope I don't offend anyone with this post, cultural conventions being what they are, so different in every country.

When I was a kid we used to watch a TV show called The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

It was a cool show about a bunch of US Calvary soldiers led by the handsome Leutenant Rip Masters. Naturally the US Calvary Soldiers spent all their time fighting "Red Injuns" with the help of an alsation dog named, yes you guessed it - "Rin-Tin-Tin."

Like all good TV shows of that period (Book Him Dano! or Smith You've Done it Again etc) it had a catchcry. The catch-cry, which came from the show's little boy star (Rusty), was: "Go get him Rinnie!".
At the time Rinnie was usually catching a bank robber - or a "nasty Injun" - cause in those days all Native Americans were called "Injuns", and all "Injuns" seemed to be "bad uns"- and all bank robbers were caught by little boys with dogs.

Of course the big irony is that the Injuns, who had names like "Black Cloud", "Chief Running Horse", "Chief Red Eagle",  were often played by 'white men' - white men with fat paunches, white skin and white stripes painted on their faces. In fact, to be perfectly honest, now I read the names of indigenous Native American characters, they sound like heroes - which of course they were in real life.

You might be interested to know that the boy who played Rusty, was also in the movie Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye. He later went on to be a very good carpenter. (Out of interest, you can see Rusty in the very first image of this post - the nancy boy one one over on the far right, with his left arm docked below the elbow - minor drop saw injury).

Travel forwards in time, to a few years later in 'real life', when I've hung up my pop guns and I'm a bit older, about seventeen, and Rinnie has gone the way of all good children's soaps - and along into the vacuum (along with the Doors, Deep Purple, Stones) drifts a singer named Tim Buckley.

Buckley was rumoured by his record company to have a four octave voice. With this four octave voice, he sang such groovy songs as "Get on Top Of Me Woman" and ... err..... other seedy songs that currently escape what remains of my little grey cells.

Suprisngly Buckley's songs were often about sex and/or  drugs. Suffice it to say, they weren't the kind of songs you wanted your teenage daughter singing. Suffice it to also say that lots of teenage girls did sing the songs.

Not that I was a teenage girl, but I sang them as well - often when under the influence of non alcoholic apple cider. I sang them yes - but sadly for my neighbours not with the same elastic elan as Buckley - because I am unique in the world in that I have a 'no' octave voice.

Anyway, Buckley (like his son Jeff) died young - which is very sad. He was 28. He died from a drug overdose.

Why am I telling you this?

So you know he is a great singer. All great singers, by definition, die young. Of course some really bad singers, or even good singers with bad haircuts (eg I'm leaving on a jet plane John Denver) die young. So it's not a mutually exclusive club - by any means.

In his Album "Greetings from LA"  Buckley had a song called "Sweet Surrender" - which is what I thought of when I saw his weeks Illustration Friday prompt.

I always thought that "Sweet Surrender"  was about surrendering yourself to earthly pleasures - but in retrospect, on a wider scale, now I have studied poetry at uni for a while and can write 2000 word essays about absolutely nothing at all, I can see that "Sweet Surrender" has several  different layers of meaning.

Just like this post.

For example, if you observe the previous picture I have zoomed in on the face. And in the next pic, I have changed the viewpoint. Apparently you have to do that for picture books, to keep the kids interested. Not that this is a kid's book. Far from it. It's not even a kid's post. Though there are kids in the images.

In fact, I was going to give you the lyrics to Sweet Surrender, but on re-reading them nearly 40 years later they seem so trite - especially  when dissassociated from the voice.  I guess it just shows that it's all in the delivery.

Ahh shucks. I can't resist. Here's a few.

So this flim-flam lover boy

Found him a flamingo.

And his flamingo

Showed him how to tango.

And when they tangoed

It'd send their heart's a â˜flutter.

Teased him 'till he'd stutter.

Made him so young and tender.

Sweet to surrender

And so sweet surrender.

In sweet surrender.

Ahh, sweet surrender to love.

So you see, the song isn't just about little boys playing cowboys. It's also about flimflams (whatever they are), flamingoes, spanish dancing, cardiac murmers, speech defects, cooking steak, lolly addiction - and, above all, romance.

So with the word 'romance' I have to leave you... but before I do one l ast picture. I have been practicing my negative space. It's something that I am bad at - like being silent.

thanks so much for reading. :)

If your eyeballs aren't worn out you can read about Tim Buckley here.  There's a pic of him on that web page and you'll see that, as well as being a fine singer, he had cool side levers.

By the way, please click the pictures in this post to m ake them bigger. :)

Illustration Friday: Paisley

Paisley: An Ancient Swirling Pattern from a Town With Celibate Brythonic Origins?
Or a Green Summer Leafy Vegetable?

from our National Geographic Consultant, George Carrey-Urdu in Urkanistan

Well, for a start, why celibate?

 Hmm --- my personal feeling is that paisley (the design) is what people who are inordinately attractive to the opposite sex wear, to ameliorate the possibility of them reproducing.

That is, to me a 'paisley' design on any item of clothing - especially if it has the colour green, or red, or yellow, or blue - is the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac. Unless of course, you were into "gamete fusion" in the swinging sixties - then paisley is 'hot' - especially when combined with LSD, mari-juana and BEX.

Meanwhile, back in the swinging 400's (AD) in Britain just south of
the Firth of Forth, apppeared a group of languages called the
"Brythonic languages" - which eventually evolved into the Welsh,
Cornish, Breton, and Cumbric dialects.

"So," you ask, "what's that have to do with Pailsey?"

Well, it just so happens that Pailsey means paddock in the Brythonic lingo.

So if someone comes up to you and asks you in Brythonic, "Where are my cows? (Tá áit mo bha?). A great answer would be "In the Paisley." (sa Pailsey) - assuming the cows were actually in the "Pailsey'.

"Okay, okay, but what's this have to do with 'pailsey' design?"

Well, if you've researched this weeks illustration prompt as I have, the first thing you would have googled is 'paisley' (well I actually googled 'parsley' because of my dislexia -which made me was very confused for a while).

If so, you probably already know that the paisley design originally came from Titszxatasgan in Persia where it was known as "mankolam". For some reason, historical design kind of people think paisley designs from Titszxatasgan resemble a mango.

Consequently they relate the paisley pattern to Hinduism (the Kalasha – coconut circled by mango leaves on a pot - is one of the ten most important symbols in Hinduism.) Wow, what a jump in thinking.

To me, as a post modern abstract expressionist, I find paisley designs look like, not so much a bunch of mangoes, but a bunch of dried eggplants that have been flattened by a bulldozer then ornamented with a pattern of flowers sprinkled artfully over the remains, the whole lot being coloured in Neo Magic Textas by a colour blind chrom-satyriasis, (from the Greek σατυρίασις, from σάτυρος - meaning an unatural excess of colour-lust).

Leaving the Hindus aside and fast forwarding to the 17th century,
when the East India Company bought paisley and other Indian
patterns into Europe. There they became so popular that the poor starving Capatalistic East India Company was unable to import enough to meet the demand.

Hence, on 7th May 1640, smart locals in Marseilles hopped on the 'paisley' bandwagon and began to mass-produce the patterns via early textile printing processes. England, then Holland, soon followed (in England it was the House of Lords attempt in population control by way of introducing the "anti-aphrodisiac paisley pattern for poor people act" - AAPPFPPA for short).

So, in keeping with the AAPPFPPA, exactly 100 hundred years later, on 2nd March 1859, the overpopulated Scots stepped into the 'paisley scene.".
Not content to just let their men wear dresses or get slaughtered by the
English at  Battle of Culloden, the Scots actually volunteered to make
cloth in paisley design.

Hence, in honour of their sacrifice, the sleepy town of  "Swamp-ben-loch" in Scotland was renamed "Pailsey', after Sir Ian Pailsey, who invented the washing machine - and hence made washing garmets like Paisley less of a nightmare for the modern child less woman......

And so history was rewritten on my blog.

Tommorrow I'll tell you how, on the 12th March 1964, the world famous "Chinese Gosberry" was grabbed by three wily New Zealanders, who after a remarkable marketing strategy which lasted fourteen days and fourteen nights,  released it back into the world as --- "The Kiwi."

Stay tuned, and thank you for looking. Sorry about the formatting.