Consortium of Seven: Year 4

  We are in the flip side of autumn.   The oaks, poplars and maples offer stark, bare branches instead of the brown, gold and red glory they gave us just scant weeks ago. Dusk comes to us earlier and earlier each day (and will take an astounding jump in doing so a week from now when the time changes). There is more than a chill in the air in the mornings; it’s simply cold. Not as cold as it will be in another seven weeks, or even four, but it is cold.   I have written more words than I can ever recall about autumn and its bittersweet joys, especially the autumn when I was twenty-two. I once wrote in a piece, “As is the case for any man who cherishes a time long gone, I will insist for the rest of my life that during the autumn of 1975, the sun shone brighter, the golden leaves stayed on the trees longer, the laughter was louder, the girls were prettier and the music was better. ”   And I added, “About that last, there is no question.”   Yet, great music notwithstanding, that au

Our Sunday contributor has a couple of family events this weekend (one sad, one happy) so she's arranged for us to return to a lovely photo blog from Year 2 of the group blog. Little green porch way, way up. I'm leaving tomorrow and I will truly miss this beautiful city. It's such a pleasure to experience the beauty, to enjoy the city's cultural and gustatory offerings. A beautiful view around nearly every corner. I wish I could have seen more friends, this trip, but time was tight. Here are some shots from my camera roll...hope you enjoy. yes, I'll take it  A view of Saints Peter and Paul church Swanning about Lafayette Park Very cool former police station on the park grounds The hippie treatment  Prettiness Yes, I'll take it Transgender memorial park Little Benton Park West plant exchange Greenhouse

“The successful painter is continually painting still life.” (Charles Webster Hawthorne) “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance.”  (Aristotle) “While drawing, I discover what I really want to say.” (Dario Fo) “Art is a harmony parallel with nature.” (Paul Cézanne) These quotes, however different in tone & idea are all true in their way & could apply to various arts. I’m not going to expand on what I think they mean – they’re pretty clear - or how they apply to the art of the still life itself, but I thought we’d start this week with a few quotes to remind us of the importance of the genre. Although there was a time when life or figure drawing was considered the epitome of high art, it’s becoming problematic. Tastes change, ideas move on & we don’t see the human form in the same way as our forebears. Or the human in question is problematic. Or the artist has become problematic because of what they did to the subject

        A week where either my "senior moments" were running riot or I was the unwitting foil in an episode of Bewitched, the gaslight's been cranked to full. (Work's been wearing me down, and a few other factors chimed in as an enthusiastic peanut gallery.)       Consequently, I've been running light on video viewing in favor of getting sleep when I could this week.       The final episode of the Steve Carell-starring The Patient released on Hulu this week, wrapping that drama with thoughtful weight. A self-contained, ten-episode miniseries, just understand going in that it's not a comedy. While I've seen Carell in many popular items that I didn't really care for, I enjoyed him much more here as a quiet, steady psychologist trying to navigate an unusual, dire and desperate situation.       I've so far only gotten through the first three of the eight tales in Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix; I talked about them

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I'm sorry I'm late this week but quite frankly work and also having our backyard get completely revamped with a patio and plants and sod has been a whole thing this week.   But hey, I do have a couple of new finds this week! _______________________________________ Ben Wheatley is a pretty singular British director.  His movies can be odd and weird (but he can also do comedy; I think Free Fire  is an excellent action comedy).  I've still somehow never seen A Field In England , his take on the English Civil War of the 17th century.  So I was happy to run across this, a surprisingly special-feature-packed disc for it.  The English Civil War is an interesting little religious conflict over how the country (and the occupied other countries like Ireland and Scotland) should be governed and this looks like Wheatley is doing an odd take on it where the word psychedelic keeps getting tossed around in reviews. A Field In England  is streaming in a weird hu

Disclaimer:  I am a friend of Thom and was given a free copy of this book so as to review i       As with many modern readers, I have my little circle of Facebook book groups and writer groups. This helps me find new reads and writers. That's how I stumbled on Horror Book. My friend Thom said he had a new book dropping, and I jumped at the chance to boost my friend. I got the book in January, and I put in cue to be read as soon as I finished what was  currently in progress. Life happened. I couldn't read for a while. Finally, they did it. I made myself a nice cup of really hot tea and settled in for a read.  I counted the number of short stories and got out my dice (d10+d4). This allowed me to read the stories in a random order. Each short is preceded by a paragraph giving some background or inspiration for it and its originally intended home.  I found this really helpful in changing mental gears, as each story is vastly different from the last. Some of the stories are graphi

  Last week, I showed you Heritage Songster , which I'd borrowed at the library. Readers liked having some YouTube videos of familiar songs they could sing to, so I'll do a few more in this series of posts. My favorite ver sion of "Froggy Went A-Courtin'," with lively guitar which moves the tune right along.    "Loch Lomond" is one of those songs that you may think you understand, but you well may not. It has a jaunty tune, but a sad story to tell. They lyrics are the  dialogue between two Scottish prisoners of war. One will return to Scotland in body, the other in spirit, taking "the low road." Singing this old song with feeling may give you something you didn't have before.     And here's the last song for this week. You may not know the words to "The Ash Grove," but I bet you're familiar with the melody. A nice autumnal feel for this last week of October.  Next week:  More from the Songster !

  Sometimes, just to remind me of tunes I might have set aside in my memory, I look at a Billboard Top Ten from fifty or sixty years ago. Sometimes I split the difference and look at stuff from fifty-five years ago. The tunes from any one of those long-ago years are usually all familiar and likely spark memories.   So, let’s see. If we go with fifty years ago, we get to October of 1972, when Top 40 was becoming less important to me than album rock, a process triggered by my hanging around the student radio station at St. Cloud State. The FM station had cast off its classical programming the previous spring in favor of the progressive format offered by numerous commercial stations around the country: album tracks – often played back-to-back – offered by disk jockeys who talked in conversational tones (as opposed to the rapid-fire Wolfman Jack-style patter heard on many Top 40 stations).   So, instead of digging into the Billboard Hot 100, let’s instead take a look at the top of th

Little Rylee has her hoodie on upside down and can’t figure out the zipper. I lift it over her head and we get it sorted out. “No wonder”, she says. It is a hoodie from the office, size XS, and two sizes too small. The school has extra clothes for any child who needs them, thankfully, but the sizes can be a problem. Rylee can calculate a sum quickly, can’t pronounce her r’s yet, and her handwriting looks like spilled rice, barely there.Her  brown eyes shimmer when she raises her hand, and what she wants to share is usually about something good that is going to happen to her. Unless it’s math, then she is completely on topic. She holds your gaze with her sweet trembling eyes. She helps all the other students with math. She once told me another student had broken her heart with mean words. Can a kid be a saint?  Her house is not far from school, and there is always a car or two with the hood up, parked in the yard. She has lots of cousins and a trampoline. She brought a dollar to school

Glancing back, I was quite surprised I hadn’t featured hands as a stand-alone subject in the arty blog already (I’m still not convinced). Hand images in art have made it in now & then, including Henry Moore’s quite recently, but they surely deserve an entry of their own. There’s a rich seam of hands in art. They’ve appeared in cave paintings, ancient & Medieval art; they’ve been stylised, flattened & foreshortened. & now they’re being blogged. Fear not though, I’ll avoid the ubiquitous likes of Michelangelo, Dürer or Leonardo this time.  I’m in awe of anyone that can successfully draw or paint hands believably. I’ve tried various methods to improve my own hand drawing techniques, including online courses specific to the task, but the results are very hit or miss. Nine times out of ten, I’ll make them look like a pile of sausages or find a way to miss them out altogether. & please don’t ask me to put in accurate detail. Yet, I can’t resist including them. They’re an