Sorry to be a bit late on this posting.
I was laid up early this month with a flu like bug (nasal
congestion,chills, aches, fever, general over all blah). Much better
now though.
Then a few weekends ago my computer
which I got about 7 and half years ago began having issues. It was
clear it was time for a new computer. So I got a new desktop unit
(already have the monitor,etc) so I have been spending the past week
discovering the byzantine software known as Windows 10.
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here when I say this is the most Rube Goldbergish bit of software that Microsoft has yet come up with. The initial booting up and configuring took so long I nearly lapsed into a coma waiting.
Then the grueling process of creating a
password and pin number. Seriously? A pin number? Well…..ok. Then a
whole series of options that Microsoft recommended but for which I
mostly had no use for. Each time I deselected the option, the font
would change to a red color and plaintively warn me of the dire
consequences of not keeping that option.
Window 10: But if you dont use this,
you won’t be able to use thus and so for this and that.
Me: I don’t even have a this and
that,so why would I want to do thus and so?
And so forth. A trial copy of Office
365 proved so cumbersome to try and activate, that I found myself
saying Many Bad Words, which would have sent my late mother running
for the Lifebuoy soap. I finally gave up in disgust and downloaded
Open Office instead. I was intending to do that anyway but Microsoft
induced me to do it a lot faster.
So my spare time is being spent on a learning curve fit for Albert Einstein. The folks at Microsoft would do well to take a page from Henry David Thoreau: “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!!!!”
In a previous posting I described one of the most basic tools of a beginning artist, the drawing pencil. Whether graphite or charcoal, the drawing pencil is the best way to begin sketching images of people and/or their surroundings. Along with pencils also come erasers and blenders. While we tend to associate erasers with eliminating mistakes, they can also serve as useful tools for enhancing your work.
The erasers most everyone is familiar with is the rubber eraser.
I still have fond memories as a child of getting the first eraser of the school year along with new pencils and a ruler. Originally made of rubber, modern ‘rubber’ erasers are now made of a synthetic substitute. These types of erasers can be used in drawing but they tend to leave ‘crumbs’ behind which have the potential to mar your art work.
A better eraser is the vinyl eraser.
Because plastic erasers are harder, they are less likely to leave crumbs when used. It’s important to go easy with these types of erasers as they can damage paper. But the plus side is that you can even erase ink with them.
My personal favorite is the kneadable eraser.
Similar in feel to Silly Putty, the kneadable eraser can be molded into a variety of shapes, depending on what you are erasing. It leaves no crumbs but absorbs graphite and charcoal so will turn a very dark color after you have used it on a lot of drawings. It may harden up when left sitting for a long while, but will soften back up when you work it around in your hands.
These are used to spread graphite and/or charcoal on the paper to achieve a smoother effect. You can use your fingertip or a q-tip but the blenders are more precise and less messy. Chamois cloth, which is a soft piece of leather, can also be used as a blender as well for larger areas.
All of the above tools are not to eliminate mistakes made but to enhance your artwork. A good example of this can be found on this tutorial which give instructions on how to draw realistic clouds.
Buy a couple pads of sketch paper and draw, blend, erase and smudge to your heart’s content.
I recently finished reading a non-fiction book titled The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly. She begins her work with an observation about traditional non-literate cultures. While preparing to do research for a natural history book about animal behavior and indigenous stories, she became aware of the vast amount of memorized information possessed by native Australians. Their capacity to recall detailed knowledge about local animals including not just their identification but their behavior, favored living areas, and value to the local humans far dwarfed any knowledge she was able to get out of a book. Coupled with plant lore, the lay of the land, locations of vital watering holes, beliefs, customs, even genealogies, it was clear indigenous Australians must have some way of recalling and preserving this information without the advantage of books.
What they use are songlines, sung narratives tied to physical locations, weaving back and forth across the landscape, with rituals being performed at specific locations using dancing and singing to encode the information associated with that area and make it more memorable. Dr Kelly noted that the songlines were used in a fashion similar to that of the memory palaces used by ancient Greek orators to memorize their speeches.
This in turn led her to wonder if other early cultures also used similar methods to preserve oral wisdom. Could the ancient ruins of Stonehenge, the Carnac Megaliths, the Nasca Lines or even the giant stone heads on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) actually be complex memory spaces used by the peoples who built them? Her subsequent book The Memory Code explores this possibility, carefully examining the archeological evidence of the various sites. Her work is by far the most lucid explanation of why these impressive sites exist and why Neolithic people spent so much time and effort constructing them.
Forget space aliens or refugees from non-existent Atlantis, the reality behind these impressive works is much more mundane and yet at the same time more marvelous. The idea that early people were unsophisticated savages is blown out of the water by the revelation that they in fact possessed a rich body of knowledge which they had built up over thousands maybe even tens of thousands of years. Megalithic monuments like Stonehenge were raised as a way to organize this vast body of wisdom and create memory spaces to preserve this knowledge with as much fidelity as possible.
The ruins of Gobekli Tepe, thought by some to be the world’s first temple, date back to 11,000 years ago. Its elegant design with numerous carvings show that people of the time were already well practiced at creating memory spaces. Dr. Kelly speculates that Gobekli was built as the first large scale memory space. But it is more likely there were earlier ones, either not yet identified or perhaps plowed under by the last incursion of glaciers.
Dr. Kelly points out that many people holding onto their traditions still used memory spaces well within historical times and in some instances even today. The Songlines of the Australians, kivas used by Pueblo people, lukasa memory boards used by the Luba people in central Africa, and the Inkan khipu used by the Inkan Empire all show how widespread the practice is, even in the face of the literacy we take for granted.
Singing and dancing were critical ingredients in the creation of many memory spaces. Recent archeological work at British and European megaliths show signs of large ditches where Dr. Kelly speculates that ceremonies were conducted, taking advantage of the unusual acoustics the ditch would create. Music is as old as the human species itself and possibly even older. Some tantalizing evidence seems to suggest it served as a social glue that bonded human groups together, and ensured their survival even during the hardest times.
Coupled with the need to preserve knowledge, music and dancing became literally hard-wired into our brains. Is it any wonder teenagers insist on listening to music while they do homework? Is it really any surprise our brains are so vulnerable to earworms?
The Memory Code is well worth a read on a snowy winter evening for delving into these mysteries and coming away with a heightened respect for our far from simple ancestors.
I have a fondness for vintage art work and own several clip art books from Dover Publications with a wide assortment of illustrations. They range from elegant to comical, all with their own special charm.
The above illustration is from one of the clip art books. I like to call it the amazing levitating mop for if you look closely, you will see the maid is not really holding onto it.
Recently on the blog site Ecosophia, the writer John Michael Greer complained about busybodies of every sort and put out a call to have the Order of Anti-Poke Noses revived. Apparently there actually was such an organization and one of its calling cards is shown above with a delightful vintage image of a ghastly harridan poking a long proboscis over a fence and sticking it into the business of a quietly courting couple.
Off and on over the years I also collected vintage postcards and advertising cards such as the following.
Balsam’s Hair Tonic promised you would not only gain a youthful appearance if you made use of their product but a happy family life as well.
The reverse of the card (a bit hard to read because it is shopworn) extols its virtues and also advertises an accompanying health tonic that will cure insomnia, dyspepsia, rheumatism, malaria (!), jaundice and a host of other ailments, all for a buck fifty. What a deal!
This is a postcard which doubles as a fortune telling card for single ladies. With lots of green color and four leaf clover images, how can you go wrong finding out who your future hubby might be? (Notice it assumes he will be a gentleman, though some of the choices of Circle III seem to be more for working class fellows.) Fortunately no one ever made use of it so it now occupies my collection.
I’m guessing this postcard falls under the humorous category, though the humor seems a bit dated to me, not surprising since it’s from the early twentieth century.
What lies behind the appeal of vintage images like these, or any vintage item for that matter? One line of thought seems to be that while some of it may be the inexpensiveness of second hand items, there may also be a psychological basis for it as well. It allows us to mentally connect with the past and serve as a source of comfort in unstable times. While I can’t say that is the reason I enjoy these images, they do harken back to a simpler time when things seemed a bit saner and much more human.
The little sketch I recently made of a ‘dippy hippie’ may not be quite vintage but does make me nostalgic for times now long gone. Will such times ever come again? I think so. Especially if you are willing make an effort to make it happen.
Several months ago we were treated to what had to be one of the more bizarre publicity stunts I’ve seen in a while. Elon Musk, business magnate (think billionaire) and owner of Tesla Inc launched his enormous new rocket, the Falcon Heavy as part of his recent endeavor for SpaceX, a company he created, to usher in the future among the stars (Mars in particular) that we’ve all been dreaming of.
As the payload for the test launch of this mammoth creation, Elon placed a cherry-red Tesla roadster complete with a space-suited mannequin at the wheel inside the capsule of the payload rocket and blasted it off to a presumed rendezvous with the planet Mars (or at least show he could get it out that far). Pundits lost no time in speculating whether this was a legitimate scientific effort or just a weird art statement by Mr. Musk.
Elon is of an older world outlook which envisions a Star Trekky universe where humanity zooms about the cosmos pursuing whatever destiny has in store for us. Part of this vision includes human colonies on Mars. He’s already stated we should have had a moon base by now and has begun calling for one (I’m guessing he’s going to offer his services in its construction.)
There are some significant problems with the blithe assumption that it is somehow predestined that humanity will launch itself from Earth as easily as it did from the sea shores where it launched its ocean borne vessels. As some of you have already noticed, the promise of flying cars, floating cities, faithful robot servants and other Jetson-like gimmicks have not quite come to fruition despite after fifty years of promises.
Money is a big factor. It just costs a hellacious amount of money to finance any of these amazing creations. The second law of thermodynamics puts more than a few constraints on our ability to even produce these visions of the future. But the modern day fascination with the concept of progress blinds us to the reasons many of us are still chugging along in a gas powered auto instead of flitting about high above in our flying cars. Tom Wessels in his book The Myth of Progress, discusses the numerous problems with this world view and why it is having a devastating impact on the environment and on ourselves.
Planting a working colony on Mars is fraught with issues. Since Mars has a very thin atmosphere, there’s nothing to shield against dangerous radiation both solar and cosmic so initially the colonies would have to be underground. To understand how problematic that is, we only need to take a look at the science outposts located in Antarctica.
Here is about the closest we can get on Earth to the situation on Mars. Even with breathable air and water fresh enough to drink (once you melt it first), life at the bottom of the world is grueling. Since Antarctica is not the balmiest place, everything must be brought in; food, medicine, equipment etc. Brutal weather conditions can keep researchers trapped at the stations for weeks, even months and cabin fever can produce strange mental symptoms.
Alcoholism and drug use is not unusual as a means of combatting boredom but it’s not the sort of thing you want to see on a bright shiny space colony. If you have a medical issue, you are really in a pickle. A few years back the news reported the frightening ordeal of a doctor stationed in Antarctica who discovered she had breast cancer and had to self-treat her condition before it became possible to airlift her out. Space enthusiasts might make the case that the Martian colony will be well supplied with all the necessaries of life. But how long will that take? Will such a colony ever really be self-sufficient? What happens if there’s a war back on Earth and the supply lines get cut off?
I am all in favor of space exploration while it’s still feasible to do so. But we need to be realistic. We’re not gods and must perpetually struggle with the physical restraints that the universe imposes on us. Robot proxies in the forms of Pioneer, Voyager, Cassini and others have given us marvelous pictures of what lies out there and will continue to do so without putting human life and sanity at risk. Mars may be a fascinating place to visit but nobody really wants to live there. As the character Dorothy Gale said at the ending of the Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home!”
