Table of Contents: > A Commonplace Book
Thou shalt not show the law defeated, or the inside of a thigh, or lace lingerie, or a dead man, or narcotics, or drinking, or an exposed bosom, gambling, a pointing vicodin to buy gun, or a tommy gun. — This 1940’s photo stacks all ten cardinal sins forbidden at the time by movie studio self-censorship regulations into a ziggurat of sin. Aces.
Illustrations from Draw 50 Airplanes, Aircraft, and Spacecraft, by Lee J Ames, published by Doubleday in 1977. If I remember correctly, besides following the steps accurately, a successful drawing required that you loudly mimic the sounds of the craft as you drew it.
This swatch of an old ad is a poem for the eye. The different inflections of voice in each typeface and the elegant cascade from one line to the next give it a wonderfully nuanced read. I love the way the human touch of the girl is offset by the right angles of her gesture. It’s composed perfectly, like an expert round of Jenga – completely stable but full of tensions and cross balances. Good show, little layout, good show!
Master illustrator Frank Frazetta’s stationary design for addlepatted sun children Bo and John Derek’s movie production company, Svengali. I was going to leave the commentary at that, but I was riding my bike this afternoon, and the Walkman offered up Sheena, by Trader Horne, a long forgotten British psych-folk outfit. Hardly a stanza had passed when I realized the song was a tone poem to the idea of Bo Derek. I share it here, below, for your pleasure:
Sheena, Trader Horn:
NOTHING VENTURED
Nothing exists as a block
and cannot be parceled up.
So if nothing is ventured
it’s not just talk;
it’s the big wager
Don’t you wonder
how people think
the banks of space
and time don’t matter?
How they’ll drain
the big tanks down to
slime and salamanders
and want thanks?
REPULSIVE THEORY
Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it’s got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I’m convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.
Kay Ryan’s poems are a public service. They burrow into the overlooked and taken-for-granted and uncover something intrinsic and valuable. Her contribution lies in recovering buy vicodin on silk road insight trapped in cliches and bromides. Her poems pause to illuminate the darkness just before dawn, linger over the texture of the fabric of life, and note the passing of water under the bridge. In Nothing Ventured she detects the weight and scale of nothing itself, and marvels at how casually we gamble it away. She is also a consummate observer of the whirring gizmos of existence. Indeed, “little has been made of the soft skirting action of magnets reversed.” By the end of Repulsive Theory, the lovingly rendered “pillowy principle of repulsion” is invested with a precise and staggering physical and poetic power, doodling the edges of continents, “unpressing us against each other, lending the necessary never to never-ending.” Now our Poet Laureate, all her books are endlessly rewarding, and while some are rare, Niagara River, Elephant Rocks and Say Uncle are easily found. A great overview can be found here. (Image: Roy Lictenstein, Magnifying Glass, 1963)
This is a crop of a photo of Lena Söderberg, the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy. In 1973, engineers at the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute used it as a test image in their research. The data they collected from the image, specifically the red, green, blue color channel data, have become the standard benchmark for image compression quality ever since. That research also built the foundation for the image compression algorithms used in JPG and MP3s. It adds, I think, a nice resonance to know that the quality of much of what we listen to and see online is tuned to this fetching image. (two great geeky observations and articles on Lena here and here)
6th floor of the Walter on North 5th street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn around 1999, digital
We bargain in good faith, those of us who will read anything, hoping at least to complicate ourselves, at most to save our souls… we put up with a lot and forgive even more… in return for vitality, spontaneity, and the occasional hot flash, we pretend not to notice what’s skin-deep, addlepated, nasty, brutish, and short.
– John Leonard, review of ” The Diviners” by Rick Moody
New York Times, February 9, 2006
So, here, below, please find a recreated, reposted version of the first in the For Your Pleasure series, from 2008.
It was originally posted at my old ad agency’s then-obligatory “weblog.” That post, along with this, marked the beginning of a good four/five years of committed blogging and writing. I set things up over here at shepelavy.com shortly after, and, well, here we are, still transmitting in the wilderness.
Looking back I can see why I wanted to commemorate that year in music. So much boss tunage! Stew’s remarkable musical Passing Strange opened on Broadway that year. Embedded deep in its soulful heart was “Arlington Hill” – a gorgeous benediction to ardent, addled, questing oddballs everywhere – “Yes, suddenly there is a meaning… and everything’s alright”
It was a banner year for swinging psych — I had finally tracked down the erotically volcanic “Mundo Colorido” by Brazilian jazz chanteuse Vanusa; gotten turned onto the Cambodian rock melange of Dengue Fever; lost it for the hi-gloss epic 60’s revivalism of the Last Shadow Puppets.
Neon Neon remains an enduring one-off treasure – the gonzo synth soaked tribute to the life of 80’s avatar John Delorean.
There were comebacks & old head hits galore: Stereolab and REM released their most vital work in years; the long abandoned second album by Sandy Denny’s Fotheringay was finally, lovingly cobbled together; a delightful egghead pop record by Byrne/Eno; and the Psychedelic Furs played one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, playing with genuine punk passion to a small motley crowd in a now shuttered, forgotten West Philly niteclub.
Can’t remember where I happened upon the spellbinding, spooky spoken-word charms of Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia – as evocative, singular, wordy and weird as their name. The apocalyptic synth-punk of Lost Sounds sizzled and Amanda Palmer’s barrelhouse melodramas were still well inside their sell-by freshness date.
And, as welcome and pleasant then, as now, and ever, ladies and gentlemen — the seasonal zephyr we like to call the Sea and Cake.
Total time: 53 minutes. Download the comp here. Thanks for listening. Cheers.