What’s Rob Ryan ordering?

When I first saw him on TV pacing along the sideline, I thought, now there’s someone who would look perfectly natural walking around with a go cup, which isn’t as easy as it used to be in New Orleans!  Rob Ryan, the current defensive coordinator for the New Orleans Saints, has attracted quite a bit of attention from people of all ages.

I’ve been running around with this image in my head for far too long. It’s time I let it fly away!  I should point out that I am now following @RobRyansHair1 and @RobsStomach1 on Twitter.

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Honey, you must have ordered a picture of Margarita

My Spanish is rusty. I still love listening to it and reading it, but nowadays, when I open my mouth, there’s no telling what’s going to come out. Tell you the truth, I guess that goes for English too!

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Evening with Parranderos Latin Combo (PLC)

Thought it would be fun to do a one, long, crooked line drawing, and then go back with just a little color. The subjects are the Parranderos Latin Combo, who performed last night at the Moberg Gallery in Des Moines, IA to raise additional money for their upcoming trip to record an album in San Juan, Puerto Rico with Grammy award winning producer, Ramon Martinez. My friend Fernando Aveiga, musician entrepreneur, animates this project in collaboration with a constellation of co-stars.

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…but the hallway is hell (Part II)

A few days ago I posted this core drawing for which I had a couple of other versions. I went with the theocentric version.  So I put them together in iMovie for the “hell” of it.

Might want to go “full screen” on this so the text doesn’t get chopped off.

Interlocution

The term “interview” suggests to me at least “seeing eye-to-eye.” It’s the “view” part of the word that does that for me. When Charlie Rose interviews guests, he looks at them, they look at him, and they talk to one another. They interact verbally. They up and interlocute. Rather than diagraming a sentence from one such interlocution, here I’m depicting a pause rectangularly.

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Leadership Strings Attached

Back in May of 2011 a colleague hosted a party in Clarinda, Iowa, which as I look back, was without a doubt the highlight of my Leadership Iowa experience, Class of 2010-11, Best Class Ever. I won’t name any names; folks’ll know who’s who, if there’s any knowing needed.  Suffice it to say that the host invited a couple of exceptional guitar players, and another classmate and I brought along our guitars. It was a real treat to play along with them; the rest is history as long as we’re talking about unrecorded history, those tunes went up into the nighttime sky like incense smoke never to be collected or confined.

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On a related and completely ironic note, what prompted me to drag out this fond memory, and I’ll include the photo below that helped refresh my memory, was an accidental discovery that had happened earlier this afternoon on my Roland GR-20/G&L S-500 guitar set up. I was using a midi connection, something I usually don’t do, and stumbled into a setting that enabled a visual display of the musical notation set in motion by the synthesized, guitar-driven signals.  I videotaped a snippet of that before it went up like incense smoke.

The photo:

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…but the hallway is hell

You’ve heard the expression, no door is ever closed without another one opening or the theocentric version, God doesn’t close a door without opening another one.  Several months ago I met a religious professional who told me a story about a critical time in his life, a transition, and how a colleague of his made use of the theocentric version of this expression adding a very interesting and compelling twist.  The colleague told him, you know that God doesn’t close one door without opening another one…but the hallway is hell.  I had never heard that extension; and I used to be a religious professional!  I found this newer and more complete version much more consoling and compelling.  This is how I envisioned it:

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Savasana

I go places during Savasana. Just today I took a spin around the block.

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I joke about yoga, but in the year and a half since I started practicing it, it has come to mean more to me than words can express. Learning how to listen to the stories that my own respiration is telling me is, I’m sorry, I can’t resist, breathtaking. There’s so much more to yoga that I don’t like talking about it at all.

When Ann turned me on to Fifty Three Paper, my first drawings were yoga related. Here are a couple of examples:

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I modified the following photo of one of my blocks and made a blank notecard of it. It was inspired by my first instructor, Paula at Shakti Yoga in Des Moines, where I’m a beginner-practitioner.  Namaste to my other instructors Marialyce and Joseph.

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The Virtual Two-Way Looking Glass: Marketing 101

Got a long way to go in so many ways, especially technique wise! Fortunately, it’s all practice…and, as others have pointed out, there are marketing opportunities all along the way, a new concept for me.  I’d been so focused on getting, renting, somehow finding a work space, a studio if you will, in which to sculpt, carve, or otherwise get muddy, that I was never getting around to doing or making anything! That’s a conundrum and a half! A wise acquaintance came along and suggested that I simply start drawing, illustrating in the meantime. Then, Ann turned me on to Fifty Three Paper, and I haven’t been the same since, literally. As I slowly move forward toward a studio and back to plastic or three-dimensional art, I’m learning new and related things thanks to this iPad drawing app.

There has been a fascinating, transformative, and genuinely ontological learning progression along this trajectory through the zone of proximal development (any Vygotsky fans out there?). As my focus morphed from finding the external space to locating and activating the internal space in which to express myself, I’ve noticed the beginnings of a parallel but counter shift from an internal to an external orientation that is opening me up to questions along the lines of ‘what might be of interest or usefulness to others?’  I’m calling this Marketing 101 for the time being. I’m starting to raise my periscope enough to consider who might be interested in what.

It’s a parallel and reflexive path, and it challenges my ethnographic vocation in more ways than one.  You have a role to play. Check back for further details.

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Princess 1396 No. 2 by Eberhard Faber

(Pardon the interruption, but since I posted this long ago, I’ve added a gallery on the right-hand side of this blog dedicated to the Princess No. 2 School Pencil. Please read on, oh, and welcome.)
In a short video posted today by the New York Times, 72-yr. old Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell says, “If you put the pencil into a drawer, and you will leave the room, and you will not come back, but your great grandchild will come back and find the pencil, the first stroke he writes, it doesn’t dry out, it lasts virtually forever.”

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Such is the uniqueness of this instrument, especially the Princess No. 2, which has tickled my fancy for decades.  Across the top of my home page is a photo of larger-than-life-sized Princess No. 2, which I carved out of poplar, engraved, painted, stained, and sealed back in the mid 1980s.

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I look forward to doing more sculpting and carving once I get my studio back up and running; stay tuned…

I’ve added a few thematically related drawings from that era, but first, check out that short video:

http://www.nytimes.com/video/business/international/100000002562643/penciling-in-the-future.html?emc=eta1

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Unfortunately, here’s what’s left of the Eberhard-Faber Princess No. 2 School Pencil.