I am travelling to Georgia today for the funeral of my aunt, who was 90. My father’s sister, she is the last of the older generation. A true Southern lady, she had encyclopedic knowledge of our family. I can only hope that some of this is represented in the letters and photos that she left behind.
At this stage of life, I am continually reminded that there is no time to waste. Life is very short. Even a 90 year old woman had Things To Do, business to take care of. It was an insult and a blow that cancer has cut short this life.
The irony is that I’m sure people are going to say, “she lived a full life.” I might subtly correct them and say, “She was living a full life.”
I’m taking some truly mindless knitting, my laptop and my camera. Even in grief and familial duty, I must have access to outlets for creative expression.
Today is the first day of the major network TV season, marked last night by the (sycophantic) Emmys.
While I admire the accomplishments of people who are funny, awesome and talented, and have watched TV regularly since I was about five, I am dumping my cable box today.
Blasphemy! Anathema! It’s the FIRST day of the season!! Some shows have already premiered! House! Fringe! “You can’t live without them! You gotta have your stories!” says the little voice in my head.
Little voice in my head, there is Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, network websites… these TV moguls are not stupid. They can see that Web 2.0 (whatever that is today) has changed ‘appointment television.’ If you can time shift with TiVo, then why bother to catch the show as it airs, interrupted with all those pesky commercials? No, I’ll see it online, say the legions of folks who are challenging the paradigm and being much more selective in their viewing.
More power to you! More power to me! More time for me, that is. I have things to do, esp. between 7 and 10 pm.
And there is a huge backlog of paper-based entertainment systems that I need to catch up on. Gone are the days when the baby grabs the book, when the baby requires following around and monitoring to the point that keeping a train of thought is impossible.
Plus I plan to transition to some kind of computer-driven TV/viewing system. Apple TV isn’t there yet, but TVs are now available so you can plug a computer into them. So I’ll be migrating my tech in that direction. But not for several months. (Fiber optics is in the neighborhood, so I might try that for a while. But good god, I want to escape commercials! I want to watch the show, not the solipsistic stream of crap promoting other shows.)
As I listen to Jennifer Hudson sing “And I Am Telling You,” from Dream Girls, I am reminded of the Theory of Strawberry Flavoring in Media, posited by my dear friend Uncle Bellfoot, perhaps based on the wisdom of Frank Zappa.
This theory is based on the way artificial strawberry flavoring is made. A food company gets tons of strawberries and mashes them up, and feeds them to focus groups. Then they start adding chemicals and stuff together to taste just like strawberries. Focus groups come in and say, “oooh, that’s too tart, that’s too sweet, that’s yukky, that’s moldy.” More chemicals are added, things are removed and tasted again… and pretty soon, you have a strawberry-flavored syrup that is LEAST offensive to the MOST people. And that’s never been introduced to an actual strawberry. That, folks, is how television works too.
You get the least offensive, formulaic package that the suits think will be a HUGE hit. It has to play to a broad specturm of America (hence the term “broadcast”). Otherwise, there is no money in it. Actors cost too much. HBO figured this out a long time ago, and charges a premium for their superior programming. It’s good. (It’s also available on DVD because they can make money that way too.)
But it has to have mass appeal, just like strawberry flavoring. Even the sexiness is subject to this. There are good shows that flaunt the model, reinvent it - these shows are good. BUT THEY ARE STILL SURROUNDED with strawberry flavoring, in the form of endless promotion of other crappy shows and the advertisements that drives the machine. Yes, there are good things to watch, but how is the consumer taste driving the decision making of the producers? That’s an easy analysis.
Listening to Hudson, and watching her in that scene, belt out that amazing R&B ballad with such skill, verve and sheer energy calls to mind her appearance on American Idol. Keep in mind that this show requires the consensus/popularity vote - the strawberry syrup vote. Jennifer Hudson has talent, but perhaps she is not as popular as one of the other folks, with perhaps less verve and talent, but lots more popularity. Likeability. Can’t be too tart, too black, too pink, too big, too small, too toothy.
So, when I listen to Jennifer Hudson, I think that perhaps the best thing to happen to her is to get voted off. Ok, leave Idol, get some connections and experience, and go be Jennifer Hudson-flavored! Sassy, smouldering, grounded, regal and ocean-deep. Oscar winning virtuosity like that cannot be contained by the American Idol brand of strawberry syrup.
By dumping cable and network, I am skipping past the strawberry syrup and upping our intake of actual strawberries. And chocolate, jalapenos, pickles, mustard and all the other flavors the entertainment/creative world has to offer. Books, movies, selected shows (House, Lost, Heroes online), etc.
This all precludes the idea of “turning it off.” I am weak. I love my stories. I will be watching movies, you can be sure. But I’m making it harder to get my strawberry flavoring, and seeing if wasabi tamari suits me today. Or Dickens. Or painting while Coldplay or Mozart cycle somewhere on shuffle.
I’m sure I’ll be jonesing in two or three days, so stay tuned for my rationalizations, justifications and coping strategies.
First of all, I’m biased. I love Craig Ferguson. I don’t know who is behind his commentary, and I’m thinking it’s him, with approval from the producers (David Letterman’s company) and the network (who might think that no one is watching). But I would like to thank all of them for letting Craig do pieces like this.
The one he did about going down to be sworn in as a citizen was so good, I DVRd it for my son to watch the next day.
This piece is about voting, and he sums up a lot of what I believe. (However, I think he’s a little hard on Animal Planet.
Blogging has been difficult since returning from Africa. Family obligations, house cleaning and job hunting have taken precedence. However, I have to report on the painting class because so many interesting discoveries are being made.
First of all, if you are going to take a class, make sure it is in an environment that is completely comfortable to you. Check out the instructor and the studio where you will be working. This makes all the difference to me.
I’m taking a class at the community college, but it is a for-credit “concurrent” class. This means that I get a grade but I’m signed up for the non-degree seeking track. There are degree seekers, pre-four-year-college goers in our midst, and they must follow the curriculum objectives. This translates to mini-lectures and attention to serious, “real” design (color, line, composition, balance) as well as traditional techniques. It is not the place for someone who wants to learn how to paint “just like __________.” There are books and videos for that, and also specialty classes offered in other places.
The college classroom is a place I am very comfortable in, where I feel like I belong. I LOVE the studio where we are. It looks out onto the little pond in the middle of campus, there is tons of natural light and there are tons of resources including computers with Photoshop, an opaque projector and several mini-galleries of works in progress. For me, it oozes creativity, process and dialogue.
The students range from 19 to 75 (perhaps older, it’s hard to tell), and there are a number of accomplished retired folks who “have always wanted to paint.” A number of them (I think the unit of measure is “gaggle”) have signed up for the concurrent class for several semesters because it’s a great place to paint and mingle with other dabblers. They are a bit noisy, as gaggles usually are, but they bring their own coffee to share in the Mr. Coffee and someone brought donut holes yesterday. SCORE!
Where else can you get such a lively and interesting studio for about $25 a month?
The first class saw me shaking in my boots a little bit because after a brief intro, the younger instructor said, “we’re going to draw so take a lunch break, go to the store and get a sketch pad and charcoal.” I blanched. I did not sign up to draw, I signed up for painting. Valiantly, I ran to Michael’s and got the stuff, and went back and pretended to be happy about drawing the wine bottle, box and picture frame still life he had set up.
My perfectionism goes completely off the charts when it comes to drawing…. I am so unhappy with how I draw, what I draw and what it ends up looking like. So I kinda plotzed, and had to go stand in the hallway, where the other instructor was showing a Helen Van Wyk video. He talked me down a little, and said, that the course afforded one access to either instructor and either studio OR BOTH. Score. And also that the first day is when people usually say to themselves, “THIS ISN’T WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR.” Ha. Lolz.
He and I discussed painting, and in the course of that first day, I realized that I do have an aesthetic and a plan for how I want to proceed. I am not a complete and total amateur, having done photography for these past years and having quite an extensive art appreciation “vocabulary.”
I didn’t go back into the drawing session until they were done, and the instructor was doing a portrait painting demo. I realized that I needed to just slap paint on canvas and figure out what paint does and how to manipulate it. And so that’s what I’m doing, and it might take me 20 years to get it right (as long as I paint a lot). Later, my artsy sister-in-law saw my sketches and said, “ahem, you DO know how to draw, so maybe you just don’t like drawing?” Bingo.
I found a good place online to buy materials, and oils are about as cheap as acrylic these days (for the good acrylics - NOT craft paint). Blick Art Materials or Jerry’s Artarama are both good. Michael’s is a good “go-to” place for bits and pieces, but they, like Jo Ann Crafts, have a limited range of materials. And for what they charge for things like mineral spirits and linseed oil, I could take a family of four out to dinner (at my fave Mexican restaurant), so I got those things at the hardware store. I bought a tackle/tool box from Homeless Depot (I usually call it either that or Home Despot) to put everything in, and included Carmex, ibuprofin and masking tape in my tool kit. And now, it’s off to the races!
In upcoming entries, I will try to hit on some of the discoveries I’m making as I paint. But for now, one of the discoveries is I love it so much, that I don’t notice the pain in my legs and back until I have put away everything for the day. Then WHAMMO! I painted for about 10 hours yesterday, finished one little still life of some bell peppers (which is awesome in many ways and also sucks in many ways), but then the truck hit me. I had to take a hot bath and hit the sack by 10pm. Next time, focus on ergonomics as much as light and shadow.
ps I painted from a photo I’d taken, which made it so that I don’t REALLY have to draw. (Explanation of that later.)
