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Gimme a “G-R-I-T-T-E”!

Touch-ups are expected in pictorials these days.  Covering freckles and imperfections, lengthening limbs (true!), that sort of thing.  Oh, yeah, and breaking the laws of physics.

As discussed previously, I don’t usually go for blondes that much.  But Jessica Trainham of the Atlanta Falcons cheerleaders is a cutie.  She’s there on the right:

For, um, academic interest, study that image for a moment.  Here’s a close-up:

What the heck?  What’s going on with the arm and the pom-pom?  Cerna’s arm appears to be entering Trainham’s abdomen, but then — what — making a 90° turn at her pelvis to hold a frilly pom-pom in front of Trainham’s naughty bits?  Frustrated art student, maybe, with a hankering for this?

OK, I’ve emailed 90 of you readers, but for the others, I thought I’d post here, and start following it up with anonymized comments from people.  I’m asking for feedback on the logo for my new company, “Clan Mackay Enterprises”, that I actually did myself (rathern than pay Ashley to do it), in some incompetent sense of the word.  Here’s the logo:

Feel free to post responses or, if you got the email, feel free respond to it and talk about other stuff, too (like the divorce).  I’ll post comments as I receive them, unless you ask that they not be published, even without your name attached.

My e-friend (and erstwhile contract artist) Ashley has a new line of hand-sewn adoptable critters.  Throw out your Beanie Babies!  These are the real deal.  Hand-sewn, with one eye on a green planet (most are made from recycled materials), one eye on serious art (the designs are highly competent), and the third eye (don’t ask) on whimsy (one-eyed chocolate-brown plush bunnies, anyone?), these adoptable creatures need your home.  They’re stuffed with poly-fill so they’re soft and resilient.

I held off posting until I could secure adoption rights for the mammoth.  I may be commissioning a penguin.  Or five.

Seriously, check them out.  Here’s a link:

High-quality Pigment Ink Stamp Pads, $3 each + reasonable shipping, while they last.  (No commercial interest in this recommendation.)

How it is possible for anyone to be so talented is entirely beyond my comprehension.  At left is my concept sketch, at right is the final rendering by the artist I contracted:

I’ve contracted an artist for a small logo job.  I got several responses, and wanted to thank them by posting them here:

http://www.whitneystudios.org
http://www.jendiamond.com/web
http://soulstarisborn.deviantart.com/gallery/
http://www.barneda.com/
http://www.coroflot.com/abimage

And last but not least, the one I hired: http://www.justatoilet.com/portfolio

Chain Link 3.  Reading bottom-up, right?

Jenn (hi Jenn!) bought my a wonderful gift for my birthday last month, tickets to Cirque du Soleil’s touring production of Corteo.  All in all, very impressive.

The premise, charmingly, is an aged man’s funeral procession, which continually is interrupted by surreal and mirthful memories and visitations.  The funeral procession keeps transforming into a happy marching tune, and everything is accompanied by wonderful levity, including (no pun intended) the scene with the “angels” in which he learns to fly.

It maybe succeeds too well.  At a minimum of twice during the performance, a man announces that the levity has to stop, as this is a funeral procession.  The levity does not stop for long, but both times I was startled.  The tone was such that I was continually forgetting that this was supposed to be funereal.

For aficionados, are Allegria, Quidam, and Corteo a cycle of birth, marriage, and death?  In Japan, they toured them as “The Shinto One”, “The Christian One”, and “The Buddhist One”, I think.  Don’t worry, they wrote it in katakana.

OK, to some of you the preceding was Very Funny®.  For the rest of you, moving on…

The least impressive parts are the bits where I the interactions of Stone Age physiology, 18th century physics and engineering, and 21st century materials are supposed to impress us.  (A 1cm braided steel cable and tackle of pulleys is enough to support a lightweight woman?  Say it isn’t so!  Modern elastics have very high restoring forces?  Gol-darnit!  The mass of a lightweight man accelerated at 1G is not enough to simultaneously rip out over 100,000 hairs?  OK.  Ouch.  But OK.)

The materials technology did allow some extremely impressive moments, though.  2m rings of gossamer metal (titanium?) were rolled onstage.  I thought they were just pretty props, until people spread-eagled themselves within and rode them around the stage.  I’ve seen the double-ring hoops with the inset handles for more than twenty years, but the single, thin rings are more impressive, largely because the operator has to adjust his grip when inverted, so that his knuckles are not crushed (he hand-plants at those times.)  There were some very talented gymnasts, but then the “ringer” (with a smug expression) came on and did more impressive maneuvers one-handed.  I was really impressed, but I have no real gauge.  Was this 1⁄3 again as difficult?  Thirty times as difficult?  I have no way to judge.

Someone closer to bisexuality would probably have enjoyed the whole show slightly more.  Personally, I don’t find the male gymnast’s body nearly as attractive as the female dancer’s.  Pleasantly, in the other most impressive moment, chandeliers were lowered so they were slightly above stage.  I again thought these were visual stage pieces, until female dancers climbed aboard and used them for incredibly impressive contortions and poses.  Impressive, and erotic.  My mind kept flitting to sexual positions, in an unending chain of “Oh, that’s possible?  Hmmm.  Yikes, they can do that?  Wow.  Holy cow, how does she hold that position?”

I’m curious as to the availability of acrobats.  The intersection of the people who want to be in a circus and who can suspend themselves by any single muscle in their body (tongues, maybe?) has to be vanishingly small.  One begins to understand the history of acrobatic families: early conditioning, combined with some fairly fierce Darwinian selection (Whoops, I guess we don’t have to waste any more training on Jimmy!)

Other impressive moments abounded, including stunts with see-saws, elastics, parallel bars, and trapezes.  I was most impressed with the synchronized events, in which mistakes of timing of less than 100ms would have resulted in mid-air collision.

Something that failed to impress me was the tightrope act.  Now, I’m all for tethering performers.  Watching an athlete plummet to her death can really ruin an evening.  But to be impressive, you need to have a slightly slack line.  The tightrope artist was tethered by a taut line that seemed to be entirely supporting her weight, which would appear to reduce her act to a problem of posture.  For instance, at one point, one foot slipped off the inclined tightrope she was walking.  I don’t know if this was planned or not (I think not, and three viewings would provide strong circumstantial evidence) but they covered it masterfully: she hammed up the slip, making it appear dramatic, and the band had a ready musical sting for emphasis.  But she ended up horizontally cantilevered off the rope, and she didn’t fall at all.  I estimate that to maintain the position without a cable suspending her, she would have had to be exerting a force with her left foot equivalent to that imposed by a foot that weighed half a ton.  It seems daft to think the cable was taut for only this moment.  If I were rigging the show, and it was staged, I’d have it taut the rest of the time, and slack at the moment of the slip.

The humor was vaudevillian, which is not really my scene, but the audience seemed really to enjoy it.  I have to take issue with one aspect, though.  Some humor was driven by juxtaposing someone four-sigma larger than average with someone four-sigma smaller than average onstage (a giant and a … well, that’s been covered), and having them both play the fool.  I don’t find any inherent humor or pathos in this juxtaposition, not like the humor and pathos in having, say, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton share a debate stage.  I would have thought that in moving beyond exploitation of animals, they would also have moved beyond sideshows.  But in a sense, they just moved the sideshows onstage.

The giant, it should be said, did play a water harp (a rather naïve one, played by two performers and capable of just four simultaneous notes; I’ve seen one arranged such that one performer can simultaneously be playing a melody line and a series of chords.)  And one of the “little people” was able to achieve something immensely impressive: she was tethered to five enormous helium weather balloons, such that she was neutrally buoyant at the stage’s altitude.  She “crowd surfed” on point — slight motions of the hands of the audience propelled her about the tent.  I was entranced.

The Big Top was arranged such that there was no bad seat in the house and, excepting the extremely uncomfortable plastic chairs and the two young women seated next to us who reeked of marijuana, the performance was extremely, extremely enjoyable.  Thank you Jenn, so much, for such a fantastic night out.

I took my dad to the Tool concert at the new Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on 10 December (yesterday, technically, but just a few hours ago).  Here are some thoughts.

The Nokia Theater is great.  Really, really great.  Great acoustics.  Acoustics so good, with such a lack of echo, that you could whisper on stage and be heard by screaming fans.  If you cranked the volume up to the level of a jet engine, your audience’s ears would bleed.

Actually, that last bit’s not hypothetical.  This was the loudest concert I’ve attended in more than a decade.  The theme seems to be quieter and quieter metal concerts, but Maynard seems not to have gotten the memo.  The problem was, soundboard mixing was poor enough, and his tenor high enough, that earplugs would entirely squelch his vocals.  So I went au naturel, auditorily.  And I’m still paying for it.  And checking for blood.

I wondered how song-y this concert would be, and how ambient.  Final total?  30 to 40 percent songs, 70 to 60 percent ambient.  It could be worse.  And by “worse” I mean more ambient.  And I want to elaborate on that.

First, a quote from the much-loathed (by me) Stephen Thomas Erlewine.  In typically dismissive fashion, he once wrote:

Tool’s greatest breakthrough was to introduce dark, vaguely underground metal to the preening pretentiousness of art rock. Or maybe it was introducing the self-absorbed pretension of art rock to the wearing grind of post-thrash metal — the order really doesn’t matter.  Though Metallica wrote their multi-sectioned, layered songs as if they were composers, they kept their musical attack ferociously at street level.  Tool didn’t.  They embraced the artsy, faux-bohemian preoccupations of Jane’s Addiction while they simultaneously paid musical homage to the dark, relentlessly bleak visions of grindcore, death metal, and thrash.

Blah blah blah, reviewer shit.  But while being one of the worst (in terms of composition) things Erlewine has ever penned, it’s probably one of the best in terms of perception.  Just strip out the pejorative adjectives and you’re left with something close to the truth: Tool successfully merged the artsy with thrash in a way that no one else I know of ever really did.

And they didn’t stagnate.  Maybe if they had released an album a year, one could see a continuous arc.  But they released an album every five years, and it seemed highly syncopated.  When Undertow came out, it was at the furthest-bleak end of my listening spectrum, but I knew I had found something special.  It was dark, moody, self-confident, catchy, and relentlessly honest.  I yearned for the second album.

The second album didn’t disappoint.  Ænima upped the ante everywhere.  It was bleaker, moodier, more self-assured, possessed of more irresistible stuff than their first album.

I almost lost them at Lateralus.  That’s a challenging listen, in the way late Radiohead is challenging.  They start to embrace an anti-song aesthetic, which means each time you crack the album it has to be in album-sized bites, which takes commitment.  Nonetheless, I worked on it, and it paid off.

Then last year came 10,000 Days.  Am I about to give Tool too much credit?  Perhaps.  If an unknown band released 10,000 Days as their first record, I’d probably call it pretentious shit and move on.  But not only had Tool really advanced on each previous incarnation, they were getting better faster than my ears were.  In that time I went from appreciating Vs. and Beethoven to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Chopin.  And their swing was wider.  So I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  While Ænima is my favorite Tool album, I’m pretty confident it won’t always be.  More preening does not necessarily equal more good, but again, they’ve earned their stripes, and they are not just any other band.  They’re probably smarter than I am.

But that leaves me in a weird quandary.  I’m not sure I really liked the concert.  It seemed indulgent and almost didactic.  This is probably just me.  If you disagree with me, you probably have much higher standards and perception.  Or much lower.  I’ll let you decide which.

I was second-row behind the faux-pit.  I was going to mention this earlier, but it didn’t seem to flow anywhere better than it does right here (poorly), so I thought I’d go ahead and just say it.  This would be fine, except that I bought the tickets on the aftermarket, and paid through the eyeballs for them.  Was it twice as good as third-row Dream Theater?  I don’t think so.  I’d probably be more able to give a more fair assessment of the concert if I had bought them for face value.

So, Tool.  It was ambient.  And the highlight was the portion where they brought a second drum set onstage.  The bass and guitar held down a pattern.  The band’s drummer played a complex drum solo in a different time signature.  And the second drummer — now my music terminology leaves me — harmonized?  Complemented?  Somethinged the other two time signatures.  There were three time signatures going on simultaneously, and I’m pretty sure they were relatively prime.

To assure myself it was not junk, I put on a baseline CD on the way home.  The first one I happened upon was by the band Soil.

Do you know Soil?  You’re not missing a lot in the way of innovation.  You might be missing some in the way of listenability.  They’re not so much Pantera-lite as Pantera-not.  In another decade, they’d probably sound just like whomever was current whom they idolized.  It would be unfair and cruel to call them The Lovin’ Spoonful to The Doors.  They’re more like The Animals to The Beatles.  Not quite early Aerosmith to Led Zeppelin.  They’re competent but not special, is what I’m trying to say.  I put on the record and compared.  And Soil would start song after song, establish a riff, and then leave it unexplored.  Everything felt half-assed and unfinished.  My mental guitar would jump to the variations, the shifts in time signature, that I expected to hear.  When my mind does that with Tool, I’m surprised, because my ideas aren’t as good as theirs.  With Soil, I just get silence.  They end their songs at 3.5 minutes apiece.  That reassured me.  As long as I can keep this concert experience relatively unfiltered, maybe I’ll be able to enjoy it five or ten years.  Or maybe I’ll find a bootleg.

Oh, right, Surprise Guest (I wrote this post after I wrote its title, which is atypical.)  I was with my dad, and he has a cane, so we took the elevator.  And I stood next to Tom Morello.  I waved to him (later I would regret I didn’t shake his hand.)  As we exited the elevator, I pointed.  “That’s Tom Morello.”  My dad didn’t respond.  “The best guitarist in the world.”  He raised his eyebrows.  “Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave.”

“Oh, then I’ve heard him too!” he said.  “And he knew you recognized him.”

That alone was worth a good fifty bucks of the ticket price.

It’s now 11 December.  My birthday.  Hooray!  I’m enough of a math geek to never think of it as anything other than “one day older”, but enough of an American to think “yea, presents!”  So I’m going to go to sleep, and awake to the bizarre importance and attention we give to people on the anniversary of their births.

“Mesmerizing” is how my brother described it.  I wish I knew more adjectives.  That hardly does it justice.

Two YouTube links in one day?  Shenanigans!  OK, just ignore the last one if you have to, and go watch this one.

3FLM?  Qu’est que c’est?

I’m trying to be a myth.  Give us cash!

No, it’s Three-Favorite-Living Meme.  And, everybody up!  It’s audience participation time.  Subscribe!  One point for answering an existing category, one point for proposing a new category, and an extra point for doing the two simultaneously.  And eat one hat for every mistake you realize you made.

Example: Three-Favorite-Living Directors:

1. Danny Boyle
2. David Fincher
3. Quentin Tarantino

3FL Novelists:

1. David Mitchell
2. Neal Stephenson
3. David Foster Wallace

3FL Film Actors (male)

1. Robert DeNiro
2. Ralph Fiennes
3. Edward Norton

3FL Comedians:

1. Craig Ferguson
2. Eddie Izzard
3. Graham Norton

3FL Guitarists:

1. Jerry Cantrell
2. Tom Morello
3. John Petrucci

15 points to me.  On to you!

I took a profoundly bad Philosophy of Art class at University.  I can elaborate.  But not now.

Anyway, my thesis was that art is process, not product.  If you end up with an object or a text at the end, that’s fine, and people can inspect it, but the art part is done with when the product is generated.  Paint a picture and burn it: you’ve accomplished an artistic endeavor.

My professor hated this argument.  As a powerful counterexample, he brought in a matted and framed piece, in oils on fabric.  It was beautiful.  He challenged me whether this was art.  I immediately assented.  Then, as his devastating blow, he explained (I wrote exclaimed, which works, too) that this was a rag for cleaning brushes that he had fished out of the art department’s trashcan.  Tada, found art.

No, I countered, you have found beauty.  The “art” is fishing it out of the trashcan and framing it!

Anyway, that annoyed him.  But, so, long story, there is no found art.  But found beauty?  I’d stare at this picture I took today in a gallery for hours:

The Salaryman