Consortium of Seven: Year 4

I’ve decided to continue with the portraits – it’s very satisfying & there are so many styles & media. There might be more interesting things to look at than a single human face but when you put a whole bundle of different artists & styles together it’s another story. Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), Portrait of Hilda , 1949 Long-suffering Hilda looks very long-suffering in this portrait by her complex (feckless) artist husband. He may have been an artistic genius, but that’s little consolation to a woman scorned & left to bring up his children. So much about Spencer seems to have been complicated & unconventional. Later, after his second marriage collapsed & when Hilda was ill, he’d visit her again & the poor woman didn’t even have the satisfaction of outliving the cad. Suzi Nassif (b. 1973), Aida Inspired by the opera of the same name, I thought at first this work was a multi-media piece but is painted in acrylic on canvas. From Lebanon, Nassif often uses icon...

        As with more an more these days the opening topic's something I know I've brought up before. Age and social isolation turn so many of us into creatures of repetition.       I know from several conversations I've had, including various online interactions, that I'm not the only one who finds himself disappearing down the rabbit holes of "whatever happened to?"upon being reminded of someone in a show or movie. In an age of so many screens, so much access, it's more than a major pastime, for many it's a reflex. It's part of the reason so many people don't seem to go five, conscious minutes without poking at their phone's screen. With more and more of our entertainments on-demand affairs, that we can not only summon, but pause at will while we indulge these curiosities, it's something more and more of us are doing more often.       As a much younger person I was little interested in celebrities, much less...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  This has to be a gone fishin' week just because of a lot of weird work stuff.  I swear next we'll be back to the usual nonsense.  In the meantime, read some Calvin and Hobbes because that always makes you feel better.

I was shocked -- shocked, I tell you! -- when I figured out that Alfred Hitchcock didn't actually edit the collections of mysteries stories with his name on them. Didn't even write the introductions.   The Hitchcock story collections are famous for their garish cover art, about which I once wrote  this C7 Year 3 post with many examples. but the paperback anthologies also contain stories which cross genres. There are ghoulish tales, mysterious ones, suspenseful ones, and very strange ones. Another post I've done   looks at these tattered old paperbacks, once created to cash in on Alfred Hitchcock's name while he was famous again from being on television. The publishers were clever to see that they could easily turn a profit from reprints gotten cheap or free. No one was concerned with the longevity of the stories. For a person like me, forever hunting up writing of forgotten or nearly-forgotten writers, The Alfred Hitchcock Presents paperbacks have turned out to ...

Two different men named Norman Lloyd have IMDb listings. One is an actor famous for a career that lasted most of a century. That's not the guy this post is about.  The other Norman Lloyd was a composer and music educator, and is in the movie database because he wrote the scores for many experimental films and documentaries. But Lloyd is the subject of today's post because of his contributions to a 1950 songbook called The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs .  In this previous post I focused on some of the songs included in the book. The Fireside Book series, for which Norman Lloyd did the music arrangements, was meant for group singing, in the classroom and in people's homes. The songs needed to be arranged for voice and piano. Norman Lloyd was more than qualified to do the job.  One of Lloyd's specialty areas was writing music for choreographers' works. Doesn't sound very interesting, does it? But check out this short excerpt from Jose Limon's dance...

Twice this year I’ve written a little bit about Rhiannon Giddens, perhaps the most fascinating new artist I’ve come across in the past fifteen or so years. As I noted last spring:  Banjo virtuoso, folk music scholar and more, Giddens was a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group devoted to resurrecting and renewing the Black string band music of the late 1800s and early 1900s. (Their five albums, recorded between 2006 and 2012, are all worth checking out.)   Since then, she’s recorded in a number of collaborations, the most recent being two albums with her husband, Francesco Turrisi, and released two solo albums: Tomorrow Is My Turn in 2015 and Freedom Highway in 2017.   And you can add to that listing of albums this year’s You're The One , which went onto my shelves no more than a couple of weeks after it was released. But it was an earlier recording that caught my attention a while ago and came to mind this morning. Here’s something I wrote at the time:...

It’s late summer in the Midwest, but it’s still summer here, and will remain so until late October. As a kid I was always frustrated by this end of the summer season.  I couldn’t wait for true autumn to arrive. The changing weather triggers so many expectations, and these days, memories. Being in Florida 6 years, I find myself still hovering in that slightly aggravated feeling: It’s going to cool off soon. That’ll be so good. Hurry.   I can rush things.  But personally, I don’t like to hurry. I can be stubborn, and I can quit.  I don’t want to be rushed and made anxious by others’ expectations and wishes. This has become so obvious to me and  I’ve spent some time examining this part of my character. I’ve been examining what makes me happy and not happy. I’ve never dug to the roots of my stubbornness. What’s true of me, is that I was made (born)  to be an observer and to formulate ways to express what I see. Being rushed was one of the biggest condition...