Archive for October, 2011

NaNoWriMo is Upon Us


2011
10.21

Ten days from now, National Novel Writing Month begins. For anyone who has ever made the statement, “I’ll write a novel someday”, well, November is the month to write that some day novel. I have enlisted the utterly obscure, eccentric, music archeologist, Dr. Ephriam Bowen to write with me this year. He will have to find his way from a secretive excavation site in Central America to make meetings here in the states, but he has generously committed to do so. This shy, pith-helmet adorned fossil has much to say and I look forward to hearing his story. The following is just a glimpse of what the novel will reveal:

EB Note Top“I have been too busy and too excited to journal this week. We have discovered additional evidence of the reverence that the Uxmalico community placed on music. As hundreds of years of burial fill and dust were painstaking shaved from the base of a test pit, just a fraction of an inch at a time, a large ceramic shard overcame its shyness to bring smiles and cheers to the whole team. Wind of Macaw GlyphStaring up from centuries of silence appeared a glyph bearing the classic image of a Macaw playing a horn flanked by a graphical symbol reserved for identifying brightness of gods. On the horn is a simple arc and half-moon that can be translated breath or wind. A tiny inscription near the base of the horn is not completely discernible, but may be significant upon closer exam.

Surely it is mere coincidence that a calm day was interrupted by a gentle breeze and the flutter of wings as we gathered around the excavation’s prize. But I cannot help but to interpret this finding as another indication that music played a part in the mysticism of this culture. The scribe who painted this glyph has not been identified and the crudeness of the style may be an indication of youth, inexperience, or perhaps a caste who was not considered worthy of contributing to the permanent record. We continue to excavate and will expand the tests to the edge of a square depression that borders the hostile overgrowth.”
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Wealth & Poverty – Reflection


2011
10.12

 - Weath & PovertyI was 15 years old when I first traveled to Central and South America. The experience broadened my horizons more than any single event in my entire pre-college experience. There were 100 of us..Boy Scouts selected from every state to represent the US at the First Pan American Boy Scout Jamboree hosted in Rio de Janerio. Our travels took us to some beautiful places and that included impressive places in and around Caracas, Venezuela.

I remember being escorted to La Rinconada horse track. It was fairly new at the time and perfectly manicured…an absolute garden of color surrounded by pristine architecture. Just beyond the beauty of the track were brown, boulder-covered mountainsides that seemed to have an odd texture peeking through gray-blue clouds that hung close to the ground. The reality of what I was seeing, however, was not a natural rock formation covered in fog, but shacks of poverty-stricken people built one on top of another, visible through the smoke of cooking fires, as far as I could see across the valley and leading down to the edge of the city’s high-rise buildings. Obviously, it made an impression on me.

This project is a reflection of that experience. The 15 tall bottles assembled in some fashion will create the silhouette of a city skyline. The skyline provides a background canvas for a subtle, second, textured skyline that terminates in a clutter of smaller houses and shacks protruding slightly from the base of each bottle. The bottles can be rotated in any number of arrangements and the basic result is the same. The power and wealth of the skylines will always dominate the poverty of the slums in their shadows.

With the amount of masking an multiple layers of sprayed glazes I anticipate doing, it will be another month before this project is ready to show. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep some progress images coming.