RIP Lyle Mays. How often have the notes from your keyboards filled my heart and mind? Here is Lyle with Pat Metheny, playing one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard, "Letter from Home." Please take 2 minutes to listen to this. It will melt away anything that is troubling you.
Last night I made a few acrylic poured paintings. It's mostly fun and takes very little artistic ability. The patterns develop as you cause the paint to slide around the canvas by slanting the canvas after you pour your own customized concoction of paint (and Floetrol, water and a few drops of silicon) out of a cup. And then you get to stand back and watch more patterns and "cells" emerge on their own. If you are interested in trying this, just Google acrylic pour painting and you'll find numerous tutorials/demos.
On FB, a friend commented: "An uncanny resemblance to some rocks I've seen some guy posting lately."
My response: There is a parallel to rock tumbling. Very little need for talent, yet sometimes stunning results. These activities are both fun and relaxing and they work well as a counter-balance to the intense abstract time-driven work I do as an attorney. Or maybe I'm simply regressing to my childhood . .
I wore two hats today at a presentation by two of my friends, Dan Rubright and Leslie Peters. I was already planning to attend the “The Hidden Jazz of Groups” presented in the Cortex District of St. Louis. Dan asked me whether I could also shoot some photos of the presentation, which sounded like fun.
Dan and Leslie, who are married to each other, have combined their skillsets into a way that celebrates both individual differences and the magic of collaboration. Dan, who is both an exquisite musician and an educator, began the session by giving his insight into the process of creating jazz, and then moved on to discuss the wide variety of creating and combining sounds to create music. Leslie, an author and speaker on group dynamics, then joined in. It was a smart and unintimidating way to broach the topic of efficient group dynamics. These are a few of my photos from the presentation.
If you click on the video, you'll hear Dan’s impromptu performance of some of his music. His style is truly his own. I’m always delighted by the amount of music he can coax out of a single guitar.
OK. In THEORY, anyone can clip a macro lens onto their phone and take cool photos. Sasi Kumar, a 20-year old man from India has made high art using only these simple tools. Apparently, he has an uncanny ability to hold his phone still while triggering the shutter. And he has lots of patience, enabling him to get the money shot. It is a delight to look at his work.
This morning I pretended I lived in a world without any plants. I pretended I was an inventor.
My first client asked me to invent something she called “plants.” She was entirely concerned with function, not aesthetics. She had some very demanding requirements. Each of these living things would be rooted to one position for their entire lives. They would not be able to move. I said, “Oh, like sponges . . . ” She corrected me: “No, sponges are animals like you!” She handed me information showing how plants differ from animals, though there are many similarities too, since all plants and all animals have common eukaryote ancestors.
At first, I was relieved that my task was to design only plants, not animals, because this would save me a lot of work. There will be no need to design locomotion, vision, migration or hunting behaviors. There would not be a need for any sort of biologically expensive brain that would offer neural plasticity, the ability for an individual plants to learn. A bit more thinking made me realize that this was going to be incredibly difficult. How does one design the ability for organisms to survive day to day when they are stuck in one place? The more I thought about this project, the more daunting it seemed. [More . . . ]