G is for Gauchos in the Garden of Forking Paths

Starting with a few images from my Picture Collection research for the letter G, including:

The Queen at the Rock of Gibraltar

An Athanasius Kircher Giant

I put them together adding some grass, creating a miniature Matto Grosso in the foreground replacing Queen Elizabeth...

That grass reminded me of Gauchos, and of Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths".  You can get a brief sense of his text from my own sampled cut-up version (another miniature):

    I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

    A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

    Ts'ui Pen must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.


    In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.


    I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

And so,  in my Garden,  a fractured chorus line of 1940s gauchos joined the last renaissance man's seventeenth century giant to frolic on the grass in the shadow of Gibraltar...

Satisfy Me, Baby

After a long period of radio silence while I was working on other projects, I'm back here blogging.

As the old song says, I'd like
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me baby

So, in the interest of more action and satisfactioning for me, I've made a couple new sketches.


One for the letter I (follow link and scroll down to see the materials I pulled the collage elements from):

And another for the letter K, "Knights tend their knitting in Krygystan":

Enjoy!

Nurse on the Run

This sketch for the letter N (incorporating a bird hunter from Nigeria, two images of Niagara Falls, Mike's Newsstand, and a Nurse on the run) reminds me an oft-quoted remark from a Sri Lankan monk who now lives in West Virginia:

"Somewhere in this process you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you just never noticed. "
-Henepola Gunaratana 

A nice thing to remember in this heat wave...

Nurse Nancy Beats the Heat, plus Nigeria and Niagara

I am afraid I've been enjoying summer too much to make may posts lately, and  now have a backlog of material from the letter N.

So, without further ado, I'm going to upload a few scans from the picture collection's wonderful treasure trove of images of nurses, starting with a historical potpourri:

13th Century Nursing Sister

16th Century nurse, pictured in a 1959-60 Abbott Labs publication

1910 graduating class of African American nurses

Gibson girl nurse from the  early 1900s

1950s nursing uniforms

1960s nursing uniforms

1981 nurse on strike

Some of my favorite images of nurses are from the covers of romance novels:

 You can tell by the size that I'm partial to Hootenanny Nurse. But not all nurses were looking for romance...

Thinking that perhaps the guy above needs to be rolled over Niagara Falls, I looked at images of that quintessential American landmark next.

As usual, I'm a sucker for the 19th Century images. In the heat wave oppressing most of the U.S., a dip in the falls sounds pretty appealing.

Once I started traveling, I wanted to go further afield, and a few images from Nigeria caught my eye.

Despite the objectifying gaze of this 1938 photo, the strength and beauty of its subject are palpable.

1938 image of bird hunter

The Oni of Ife, 1959

1996 celebration of Kwaghir by the Tiv in Gboko

2007 Photo by Pieter Hugo of A Hyena Master

These photos made me want to find out more about  Calabar, a city in South-Eastern Nigeria, which has been a center for trade since at least the 16th century. I also wanted to learn more about the Tiv, who celebrate Kwaghir with traditional puppet shows and storytelling in their capital, Gboko, which is in North Central Nigeria.  A long time ago, my dad had mentioned The Oni of Ife to me, he is the spiritual leader of Nigeria's Yoruba people and the current Oni, who prefers the spelling Ooni, has his own site.

How will Nurses, Nigeria, Niagara, Newstands and Noise come together? Tune in soon for a few ideas.

Noise Annoys (and Delights)

Maybe it's because it's the dog days of summer, but I'm wading slowly through the letter N. I've found a bevy of nurses and other N images to add to last week's NEWSSTANDS, but I've been slow in scanning them.


But the folder I wasn't expecting to find is the folder for NOISE. It's not really something you can SEE, is it?


My father's birthday is coming up soon, and he was a guy who loved noise. In fact, I still have a few mix tapes he gave me. There was a little box to check on some tapes that said "noise reduction." On one tape, my dad scrawled in "HELL NO!!!!!" next to that box. He liked it loud, and you can read about it in a collection of his work, Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer, which comes out in paperback in September. So in honor of my dad's birthday, I'm going to just load up a few pictures of NOISE, transcendent and annoying here.

Strangely enough, I found an image in this file made by my father's friend David Katzenstein in this folder. It even, inexplicably, had a stamp on it from Tangier, a city they visited together:

 



This is one of a large group of images about the experience of noises that might make you plug your ears:

There are also a couple of images paired with text about Moms who can't hear themselves think or get their babes to sleep. As a person who's experienced both ends of this, I couldn't resist them:

Cue the Buzzcocks singing," Pretty girls! Pretty boys! have you ever heard your mommy say, 'Noise annoys.'"


There are couple of images about things that block or prevent noise:

 
But I really love the methods and machines for measuring noise:

labeled as "Noise Analyzer"

This last one is one of my favorites, especially since I've been feeling recently that my mission in life is to make remedial music films for visual people (a.k.a.sonically challenged people like myself).I AM a Synthane Noisometer.

Maybe.

Hopefully I'll get the professional help I need at this year's Flaherty Seminar, appropriately titled "Sonic Truth."

N is for Newstands: Young Women Going Places & Keeping up with the Times

I've begun looking for images in the letter N, and the first folder I looked at was Newsstands. This young woman was really going places in the 1950s... of course. Nearly twenty years later, the New Yorker ran a cartoon that implied she might have added Ms. Magazine to her newsstand wish list.

Somehow the idea of newsstands takes me back to Alexander Mackendrick's brilliant New York newsworld noir, The Sweet Smell of Success. The film stars Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster (as J.J. Hunsecker, a gossip columnist cookie full of arsenic)."The cat's in the bag," Curtis' character says, "and the bag's in the river." It's all shot in the most beautiful black and white, as if it had been drenched in the newspaper ink that fills J.J. Hunsecker's veins.

Naturally, I found a few older images that evoked that newsprint world, though neither was from New York.

Paris, 1951

Texas, 1920s

And then were a few that surprised me. A beautiful pink newsstand from Ireland, a color newsstand from Fortune Magazine 1948 that looks shockingly contemporary, a  San Francisco Chinatown stand, and Mike's of Harlem - a piece of folk art where you can buy candy or news.

But the image that surprised me the most was another woman at a newsstand, a woman minding her own stall on the street.

This, in turn, reminded me of Hilary Mantel's beautiful 1992 novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. It was the first book which made the characters of Danton, Robespierre, and the fascinating Camille Desmoulins. Both Mantel's book and this image are reminders of how long our world has been defined by media. Harking back to the first image in this entry, this "marchande de journaux" seems to be both definitively "going somewhere" and simultaneously "keeping up with the times." Both of these images of women - as news consumer and news purveyor remind me of a snatch of a poem from the collection Ghost in a Red Hat by Rosanna Warren; a poem that I read earlier this week:

...the mystery was,

not that she walked there, ten

years after her death,

but that she vanished,and let 

twilight take her place  --

I love to see these women emerge "walking" or sitting - in some cases centuries after their deaths - from folders in the Picture Collection. 

Warren wrote the poem for her mother, and one image of an ancient mother has been haunting me. 

She's not as old as the goddess from Chauvet Cave that Werner Herzog captures in The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but she is described as 5,000 year old tomb statue in the 1960 Columbia Record Distributors booklet her image comes from, which somehow found its way to the MUSIC - ANCIENT EGYPTIAN  folder, part of the amazing archive of the letter M....