Your seasonal song of the day.

Dear Radio-listeners,







Your song for today.

There is nothing

500

Dear Days,

To celebrate this 500th day of roller skating, let's have a few notable 500s:  A band, a song, and a sweet, sweet ride.  Or, maybe order one of these 500s.  You will want these chords, too, so you can play along on the guitar.

Another 500, and another.  Let's see, that makes 3000, I think.  That will be December 24, 2027. See you then!

Subverted expectations.

Dear Sparkles,

I really admire the various juxtapositions represented in Kathleen Ryan's work: small things made big, ephemeral things made fixed, moldy made semi-precious.  I also like the notion that beadwork is kinda crafty and a little bit womenswork-ish, and that she has taken it to such a large scale.  What is not to like about this bedazzled, half-rotted lemon sculpture?   Doesn't it send you running out to your studio to glue some little things onto substrates?  It does me, and I have a lot of glitter that I think I have been ignoring too long now, fearing that glitter might be a bit too girly or tacky for the (ha!) 'high' art things I have been mucking around with.  Yes, I think it is time to experiment with putting on some glitz. 

Onwards, then, to our project for today: to make a little something inspired by Kathleen Ryan's work!











Want to see more?   An article, and a gallery link.

To redeem the work of fools.

Dear People,

Do you remember a tv show called Square Pegs?  I bet you do; there a was a girl on it, a "Soc" is probably what the word for her type was, and she used to say:  "People, it behooves me..." to give you the song of the day.

It also behooves me to tell you a little more about Choir!Choir!Choir! because it is right up my alley as a "musical project."  The choristers are not trained and practiced in the usual way- they are rather, people, who show up to sing.  Can you think of anything nicer than that?  I know I can't.

A night photograph.

Dear Shutterbugs,

I saw an inspiring movie about a photographer recently; it was all about stuff, and you know how I adore stuff, and as a corollary, I adore considering the meaning of the stuff we save, and the relationship between the things, the stuff, and the meaning of the stories that reside in the objects.

Consider, please, a glass duck shaped ashtray.  It's big, it's heavy, and it has a little mate, a smaller duck.  Consider also that the smokers who owned these items have departed this plane, and now there are just the ashtrays and no ashes.  Why keep these items?  Right now, I'd say, keep them because they telescope time and space.  One sees these ducks, and one sees a ghost of the table they sat on in the house of the smokers.  Mind you, I never saw them use these ducks to hold ashes; for ashes, they used a finny little sandbag thing, with a concave brass dish with a wavy brass strip attached.*

Which is another ghost image that lives with the ducks, the sandbag ashtray.  The little memory landscape map that these ducks reveal can grow and grow.  You step outside, beyond the table the ducks are on: the sky down there is so white, high, and un-blue.  It is nearly always warm and damp, and there are stringy, ungainly cacti clambering along a painted wall, and they bloom sometimes at night; huge, creamy, fragile trumpets of deliriously fine fragrance.  There are bricks, and a kind of feeling of scuffling along the grit of them near to the cacti.  There is a lot of light coming from the window, too, because now it is night.  It's all there, and how can this be kept with the ducks?  How can it remain in the ducks?  It cannot.  The ducks will go on perhaps, to tell a totally different tale, to people that I will never meet.

And that is the kind of story that stuff is telling all the time.












* A little like this one:

A sing along.

Dear Radio Dodo Fans,

Here is your song of the day.  My DJ played it for me, and so I wanted to send it along a little further.
Play it loud and maybe sing along in a parking lot.