Friendship with translucent berries

Life is just a bowl of cherries, or else it's the pits.  Friendship, though, is the berries. 

Berries - That which is attractive or pleasing; similar to bee's knees, As in "It's the berries."

My friend in the winter of her life gives me such a Christmas gift.  I can glimpse into her heart while we laugh together about the Seussian bugs on life's surface.  I am awed by her humor, curiosity, graciousness, generosity, and serenity.  I am honored that she peruses my 365 photos and comments about her favorites.  She views my photos on her son's old laptop and types her comments.  That keyboard is missing its "W".  She is unflustered and innovative finding words to write and search without that letter.  Together we Google a tree with blue, football-shaped berries.  Southern black-ha?  Black-da?  Southern black haw.

Odd words come to mind looking through my berry photos over 2010:

frosted subtle  
  strength endurance
beauty berries
 glow rich mature seasoned

Disney  aerial weightless dance

How do we work around the knowledge of our own mortality? How do we get past the missing key? I pray at the end of my life I will still be Googling, consulting my American Heritage dictionary, and thumbing my field guides.

permeable translucent
papery radiant fragile crawling laughing

All is calm
All is bright
Be here now

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Adding the sound effects

Seven a.m. yesterday, I was already sitting on the floor building Super Octons with a four year old. It was school conference day, and I was the distraction while his mom and dad met with the director.


I was building a flux capacitor transmogrifier. He was building an x wing fighter from the Clone Wars, but it wasn't quite done. He hadn't put on the "pews". What are the "pews?" I should have known! The pews are the part of the airship that shoot out "pew-pew, pew-pews" when it gets near another airship.

I love the translucent plastic Super Octons from the late Eighties, but they are getting brittle. Galt Toys has newer versions, probably safer from product liability lawsuits, but not quite as gorgeous. You have to add your own pews.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Plexiglas party for three

Although trivia means unimportant, trifling things or details, especially obscure and useless knowledge, it's origin has been a signpost in my life since my Greco-Roman class back at old East High. Trivia derives from Latin for the meeting of three roads, from tri- "three" + via "road." The idea is that things at the crossroads are insignificant, ordinary, and/or vulgar.

When three ideas or events converge, it often means inspiration is waiting for me to take notice:

• I picked up a large quantity of clear and light blue plastic boxes at the most recent W.A.S.T.E. recyclables giveaway for art teachers organized by Raytheon and Alcatel-Lucent. I need to use them for an art project pronto, as they are taking up a corner of my room.


• La Scala commissioned an opera based on Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and the NPR reported, "the drama won't be over till the polar bear sings." Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli says, "It will be about the tragedy of our present situation ... It is a great challenge, of course, to write an opera on such an unusual subject. It is certainly not the story of Romeo and Juliet."


• Al Peppard wrote in a society piece for the Dallas Morning News about a party, " To complete the transparency theme, a Plexiglas bridge spanned the [Olympic size] pool where belly dancers ... performed for the crowd."

Pondering the set design possibilities for a global warming opera reminded me of the dreadful clear acrylic stairs used in the Dallas Opera's 2003 production of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades . Très Target!

So could the polar bears sing and swim in an Olympic size pool with Al Gore on the Plexiglas bridge? Has there ever been an opera production with synchronized swimming? Could my students build a bridge sculpture out of all the plastic boxes? Maybe we should stick with crystal palaces. And no, we won't be making clothespin belly dancers! I will be repeating some of the transparency drawing and painting project from 2006. We may have to read some of Daniel Pinkwater's books about Larry the polar bear who likes blueberry muffins. Think cool for summer school!

If you can't wait for the La Scala premiere, there's a fun parody of "An Inconvenient" opera at http://www.ecorazzi.com/2008/06/07/video-preview-of-an-inconvenient-truth-the-opera/.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

WWMD?

What would Moira do? For over thirty years Moira has been a mental mentor when I get dressed. Moira didn't really plan to act to act in this capacity. Moira's main problem was a failure to plan ahead. This is a cautionary tale worthy of Aesop, or at least Maurice Sendak.

My part-time job in high school was working in the hospital kitchen slicing jello into cubes, making nutritious blender snacks, ladling cream of wheat, wrapping silverware in napkins, and ensuring patients received the meals ordered by their doctors. I excelled at putting exactly six vanilla wafers, three Lorna Doones, or five saltines into a wax paper bag. True, there was a good deal of flirtation with the high school guys on the dishwashing crew, but it was very educational. Except for starting work at six a.m. and wearing those cheapy white uniforms, the job was a lot of fun.

Students from the university served their dietician internships in the hospital kitchen. They were putting all that college theory into a practical framework, and we high school kids were delighted to provide them real life professional management learning opportunities. So it is a nice balance that Moira gave us real life wardrobe planning learning opportunities.

At six or six-thirty on weekend mornings when Moira arrived to direct our breakfast shift endeavors, she often had to wear her white uniform over a lacy black bra. Oops. This would inspire the dishwashers' derisive comments about where Moira had been overnight that she would forget to wear a white bra. We were all learning that professional authority is difficult to maintain under such wardrobe malfunction conditions. This is an important real-life business place lesson.

At that point, I weighed about 95 pounds, and wore a size 29 white cotton training bra under my white uniform. Moira's wardrobe mistakes generated much more interest. Whoa! What weapons of male distraction!

Moira is on my mind because I am printing photos on translucent vellum paper for my collages. It's a peek-a-boo world, so plan your weekend wardrobe accordingly!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Transparency

Most of the students finished their mixed media drawings of their transparent constructions. This one is especially successful in showing both the transparency and the structure. The artist is in first grade.

Lava Lanch

Yes, it rhymes with "branch". The elementary art kids had a grand time making transparent constructions today with an assortment of clear and tinted plastic boxes. They added other metallic, reflecting, and see-through items to create intriguing and nearly-neon designs.



The first Dallas Opera my son and I attended was Tchaikovsky's "The Queen of Spades" in 2003. The set included a clear plexiglass staircase that looked like it came from Target's bath decor and toothbrush-holder department. The student constructions today were more interesting:

"It goes up and up and then it's like a waterfall!"

"There's a coffin on the next shelf."

"It's a runway for models at a fashion show!"

"No, it's a Lava Lanch!"



I didn't know whether to launch lava projectiles with a medieval catapult, or lunch on magma salad sandwiches on mica. Heaven knows, I've eaten some school cafeteria lunches that sat in my gut like psychedelic warmed wax blobs. During the ensuing debate the kids agreed that "lava lamp" was an incorrect pronunciation. "Lava lanch" was the correct term! I'm picking my battles on this controversy.

After building transparent/reflecting constructions, the kids started drawings of their own sculptures. How do we describe transparency? I'm including some of the works-in-progress:







Maybe Cinderella lanched her celebrity career with glass slippers.

Transparent Society

Seems like just yesterday I was writing about glass houses and privacy. Well, maybe just last weekend! Now the President has announced that we live in a "transparent society". Maybe there's no point to either drapes or vertical blinds in the impending condo-pocalypse.

My day began with transparent glass, and will probably end the same way. No, I haven't been out on the street picking up the shards of broken auto windshields for mosaics. Haven't done that since my oldest finished his mosaic of the Alamo for middle school Texas History class ten years ago.

The right way to begin a day is with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice at the Frontier Restaurant in Albuquerque, but that wasn't the start for this day. I was actually reading about Dale Chihuly suing two former glass-blowers from his studio. He accuses them of imitating his glass designs inspired by the sea. Timothy Egan, writing for the New York Times, reports:

The glass blowers say that Mr. Chihuly is trying to control entire forms, shapes and colors and that his brand does not extend to ancient and evolving techniques derived from the natural world... Andrew Page, editor of Glass: The Urban Glass Art Quarterly, which is published in New York, said that Mr. Chihuly deserved a high place in the pantheon of glass artists, but that the suit could hurt his reputation by igniting countercharges and opening a window into how a celebrity artist works on a mass scale. "I think Dale Chihuly is a pure original," Mr. Page said. "He has a tremendous sense of color and composition. And he has done a tremendous amount for the field. But this lawsuit may have been the worst thing he could have done."

Egan reports that Chihuly, Inc. has ninety-three employees, and that Dale Chihuly has not actually blown glass himself for twenty-seven years. "Still, Mr. Chihuly said, he works with sketches, faxes and through exhortation. Nothing with his name on it ever came from anyone but himself, he said." I don't know how many employees another famous glass artist had. Louis Comfort Tiffany is the subject of the current exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Together with his studios of artists, glassmakers, stonemasons, mosaicists, modelers, metalworkers, wood-carvers, potters, and textileworkers, Tiffany heralded in America the notion of continuity of design, orchestrating pattern, texture, color, and light to produce a single aesthetic expression.

The Tiffany exhibit is much more varied than I expected. The DMA has done a nice job of arranging it with lots of room for visitors to move around the display cases. Changed viewpoints let light reveal new aspects of each piece. It didn't take long for me to overcome my notion of Tiffany as lamps over pool tables in rec rooms of the Seventies. I was particularly impressed with the natural forms in the glass and ceramic pieces--lily pad, milkweed pod, morning glory, pansies, ferns, shells, and seaweed. Tiffany was combining a reverence, or at least an appreciation, of the natural world with numerous chemical processes to create his signature effects. I wouldn't want to sit on the chairs he designed, but his fireplace screens and stair balustrades are very groovy.



Many of my favorites in the Tiffany show were inspired by the sea. The same sea that inspired Chihuly. Nature's influences are beyond counting. We artists must bring our own ideas and skills to a project. I am fond of the Chihuly works at the DMA and at the Joslyn in Omaha even though I know they were created by a studio of craftspersons. A Metropolitan Museum online source is useful for learning about Louis Comfort Tiffany:

Tiffany combined his talents as a colorist, naturalist, and designer with the technology that he had developed for his windows to produce blown glass with surfaces, hues, and forms that were totally new. After manipulating the varicolored glass, the final form was often fumed with metallic oxides to achieve rainbow iridescence.

I get bogged down wondering if Jacqueline du Pre performing Elgar's composition is an artist interpreting an artist, or the musical equivalent of a glass-blower working from sketches, faxes and exhortations. Is the actor an artist, or only the playwright's gaffer?

Thank heaven and His Vader Darthness Dick Cheney that real life is such a dewy iridescent spectrum. Bush's label, "transparent society", doesn't refer to the Saran Wrap over the rainbow marshmallow Jello salad at a church social. "Transparent Society" refers to the choice between privacy and freedom created by new technology. The NSA wants to know if you happen to call Domino's for a sausage/green pepper/black olive. Bushie's lips were moving today, so it's a safe bet varicolored glass, smoke, and mirrors were used to create a utopian over-the-rainbow bubble over our critical thinking skills. I'm sure this administration will see a clear explanation for Haditha:

President Bush reiterated his pledge today that the results of the inquiries would be disclosed. "One of the things that happens in a transparent society like ours is that there will be a full a complete investigation," he said. "The world will see the full and complete investigation."

Ah, yes. That would be opening a window into how a celebrity con artist works on a mass scale.