What Is Art?

Radha's Graduation

After a 3-year course in film/video technique,my daughter Radha has graduated with a 1st-class degree. Here she is looking contented with the outcome


















Of course, in her father's mind, she will always look like:

Dennis Potter's Summation

Dennis Potter, best known to most as the writer of The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven, learned of his impending death from cancer a few months ahead, and in the short time left managed to complete his final series of television plays, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus. What he says in this remarkable interview from that time will certainly resonate with anyone with the slightest interest in writing, television, and of course Life and Death. Witty, courageous, and in no way heavy, it is extraordinarily intelligent, wise and prescient. Among his observations:

• How the vivid awareness of his own mortality sharpens his sense of beauty
• How religion is the wound and not the bandage
• How the English character was in the mid-20th century
• How it's easier to pull a gun than a cigarette from ones pocket in America
• How his relation with his father (long deceased) continues to improve. (cf. Atonement)
• Why Rupert Murdoch is the one man he would shoot, given the chance.
• Why people in his plays suddenly burst into lip-synched song (How life is like karaoke)

.and much more...

It's in 6 ten minute sections, and it's well worth your giving your attention to the last hour of this brilliant writer's public discourse.

Fiddling with the keyboard

At a recent small musical gathering, a friend recorded some of my piano improvising, unbeknownst to me. Here are a couple of tracks (full of mistakes) which came out sort of OK...please make allowances for the fact that I never had piano lessons...

It needs some bass boost, and perhaps a bit of treble boost.

Any Comments would be appreciated..

RISING HIGHEST (DJ CHRIS Mix)

If you like Old School trance, here's a mix of my favourite tracks from the classic Rising High label, known for its quality once described as "astral melancholy"

Neologism Contest

Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

• Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
• Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
• Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
• Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
• Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
• Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
• Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.
• Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
• Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
• Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
• Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
• Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
• Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's winners:

• Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
• Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very,very high.
• Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
• Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
• Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
• Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
• Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? and then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
• Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
• Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
• Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
• Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
• Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

Iren Lovasz

There are several women I've fallen in love with through their voices alone, mainly:

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
Maria Callas
Emma Kirkby
Sheila Chandra (and a host of unnamed Indian female singers...)

and now Iren Lovasz
Listen to this song:
http://tinyurl.com/ey3j8

I don't understand a word of it, but I can tell she's telling it like it is. Brings tears to my eyes, but not of sadness, but more like relief at hearing the voice of my own anima

Rudhyar says tone is the carrier wave of psychic energy. In this song I hear the kind of acceptance and compassion that I wish Callas had eventually attained...


her complete album Rosebuds in a Stone Yard (streaming)
http://tinyurl.com/b2njm
A wide range of tones, from the innocently girlish to the slavically assertive...

Paleopoetics

Another poem I recently uncovered from my writings in my late teens. By this time I was a convinced agnostic (oxymoron?), and, judging from the content of this poem, influenced by W.H. Auden's masterpiece "Musee des Beaux Arts"

ON A CRUCIFIXION EVENING

On a crucifixion evening
come drift with me,
expecting every moment a cataclysmic roar
as the veil of the temple is rent in twain,
awaiting terror on each symbolic face
as the saints arise that have slept.

But in the meantime
come over here and watch
this dog die whining in the Via Dolorosa.
The last man home to supper from the darkening hill
(weeping for the shadows in the soul of Man
and the Pilate in himself) kicked in his rage
too hard the outlined ribs, which broken now
glide unacknowledged through his prophet dreams
and welcome him with laughter to the destined throng.

Look now behind you--
far beyond Calvary,
untouched by thorns, that sliver of moon
drops behind palms that fringe a silver pool,
and the nightingale sleeps in echoes of song.

Nothing much happening
in Jerusalem tonight.
My apologies; I was led to expect...
Well, let us go home. It's disappointing to hear
no tumult in temple or graveyard, to know
the cats of the fountain will scratch for garbage
though lions await their martyred meals.

I suppose you realise
what this means?
The leaves that shade the courtyard of Joan's flames
will grow despite her burning. Blossoms there
will welcome spring without remorse,
though we be images of a god.

In view of this
let us alter our report
about tonight, and continue to shape
impassive Nature partner to our dustborn tears,
recounting each disaster in that human key
that makes it more important than the loneliness
in the arid searching eye of the last mastodon.

But you know, somehow
I can't help feeling
the sun was blazing when Adam fell,
and that his hasty departure by the eastern gates
caused little consternation in the garden.

-CMC-

Blind Man

I recently came across a few poems I wrote ages ago, when I was about 19. Somehow I still like them, despite the fact that the influence of Dylan Thomas is overwhelmingly obvious. Here's one of them, which makes much of the insight common in Thomas's work that the end of things is implicit in their beginning.

BLIND MAN

This was my apocalypse,
The sharp light cracking on the eastern front
No more, the black dew frozen to my eyes,
Cut down my stature of senses.
Dark of my mother and the coffin womb
Flood again with crushing of the light.
.
In my dust-limbed anger of rough eclipse,
Marooned on four senses I dying hunt
The slipping Phoenix in his blazing lies;
I mold this terror to the first defenses,
The barrier circling this burrow tomb,
Caught in the budding flesh a hollow night.
.
And now below the sliding of the seas
I hear the soft dark mourning of the whale,
The moan of foaming salmon streaking home to die,
The curving dolphin in its grief.
The diving rain pins laughter to the oak --
I hear it choking in the summer's fist.
.
I feel the fury in the acorn freeze,
And under searing sun the rushing hail;
I breathe the scent of dying roses in July
And taste the bitter dew that drowns the morning leaf.
The autumn snaps again the stem that Eden broke,
And yearly shrouds the child the first moon kissed.
.
-C.M.C.-

The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard

Choice phrases from:


Tom Reynolds's


"I Hate Myself and Want To Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard"

"...Sam Stone is basically a composite for Hollywood's ideal Vietnam veteran: an hallucinating psycho with a Fu Manchu moustache who goes barking mad every time a Doors song comes on the radio..."

"...the "quantum tragedy paradigm": the shorter the time two people spent together as a couple, the more overwrought the song is that describes their break-up...."

"...NEIL and Babs phoned in this turgid song with all the energy of a ping-pong match played in zero gravity..."

"...teenage car-crash songs of the early 1960s, where adolescents get incinerated in fiery auto wrecks due to their altruism and stunning lack of common sense...."

"...Had Dion been around during D-Day, the Allies could have dropped her off at Omaha Beach with a PA system and have her sing All By Myself until the German infantry bayoneted themselves..."

"...the band lumbers back and forth between two menacing chords like Frankenstein's monster deciding which villager to pummel,..."

"...NASHVILLE may have a rich heritage of depressing music but this hemlock-gulping country weeper will force listeners to throw themselves into a vat of possum poo...."

"...The Wall, the one album you can never listen to in its entirety unless you own a bong the size of a mop...."

"...most punk music sounds like screaming winos crammed inside a runaway shopping cart..."

"...The Downward Spiral, the perfect album to crank while you're tossing live hamsters into a blender...."

"...Wagner's Ring cycle without the funny hats; the equivalent of an opera company pelting you with copies of Anne Rice novels. You're completely drained when it's over and desperately in need of a shower to rinse off the raven droppings...."

READ THE ARTICLE

Modern Mind

Borges Parody

The Zahir and I In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah ordered thrown into the sea; in the prisons of Mahdi, in 1892, a small sailor’s compass wrapped in a shred of cloth from a turban and touched by Rudolf Karl von Slatin; in the synagogue in Córdoba it was, according to Zotenberg, a vein in the marble of one of the synagogue’s twelve hundred pillars; in the ghetto in Tetuán, it was the bottom of a well. By sometime around 1949, the Zahir turned up in Buenos Aires; it had become a common twenty-centavo coin, issued in 1929, into which a penknife or a razor had scratched the letters N T and the number 2. Today, in New York and London and San Juan, Puerto Rico and a little town in Maryland, the Zahir is a blind poet named Jorge Luis Borges. Today is the thirteenth of December, 1999; in the summer of 1993 the Zahir came into my hands. I am not the man I was then, but I am still able to recall, and perhaps recount, what happened. I am still, albeit only partially, Andrew Hurley, just as there was a part of Hermann Sörgel (that case reported on at length in the newspapers some years back) that remained Hermann Sörgel even while another, ineluctable part of him was William Shakespeare. Like Sörgel, when I wake up in the morning I do not always know which of the two of us, Borges or I, is speaking the words that I delude myself I speak into the mirror. I do not know, in fact, which of the two of us is speaking these lines now. Soon, we are to enter a new millennium, and for some, the zeros of the calendars will cipher forth the possibility that lies in blankness; for me, and for many others, I know that even when all else is new, our fate, like the fate of poor Edwin Williamson in that madhouse in Edinburgh, is to go on being, albeit still only partially, and as though with the accoutrements of an actor, Borges. Each man’s story of the fatal contact is different, but what happened to me is this: In the course of a translator’s life, he may handle (or sometimes even manhandle) dozens of authors, scores of texts, never thinking that they may pose great peril to his mental health, his sleep, his very sanity. Unassuming, mute, the words on the page do not, despite some mad author’s fevered dream after a night of wine and oysters, mix and mingle when the book is closed, do not rearrange themselves into unreadable and untranslatable lines such as O time thy pyramids or axaxaxas mlö (which can only be pronounced as the author’s cruel, mocking laughter) that the translator must translate in the morning. No, for most lifetimes, the words are gentle beasts of burden that come when beckoned to the yoke. Not so the fatal Borges. I recall (though I have no right to speak that sacred verb – only one man on earth did, and that man is dead) that my wife and I had rented an apartment in Austin Texas, where the fatal Borges had spent several months in 1961 or thereabouts and again, diabolically, sometime later: the myth of the eternal return, of cyclical paths in time and space, embodied. Had I only known. . . . We were sitting at the table after dinner. We had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go about translating some word or other (cleave, I believe it was, or perhaps fuga) into Lunfardo or, mutatis mutandis, early twentieth-century Liverpudlian, discussing how one might show one’s erudition while preserving the translator’s mask of invisibility. We discovered (late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about translations, for they multiply the number of books. That was when my wife remembered a saying attributed to one of the heresiarchs of translation theory, Walter Benjamin. It was an astonishing claim, though literarily unremarkable, and she remembered it like this: A translation issues not so much from the life of an original as from its afterlife, and the translation of an important work of world literature marks its stage of continued life. A theory of cannibals, I remarked. Or of vampires, she darkly suggested. I ignored the shiver that passed through my weary body; the effect of the hour and indigestion, I thought. (It had been my night to cook.) But in fact it was the beginning of a fever. Then the thought struck me that there is no fiction that is not the symbol of all the fictions that shine down through history and fable, and that Borges’ fictions might stand for them all: the stories of Scheherazade, staving off death when the morning comes; the story of the dreamers of Ephesus; the madman who dreams a land peopled by giants and splendid maidens with names like Dulcinea; the blind poet and his hero’s quest across oceans only to return, old and tired and beggared, home again; the rigorously concentric hells of Dante Alighieri and John Barth; the novels of the mysterious genius Herbert Quain, with their “regressive and ramifying” plots; the unperformed plays of the eccentric Jaromir Hladik who composed while standing erect before the firing squad, as a way of preparing himself for the reviewers’ reception of his works; the infinite detective tales of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen and all the others with their mysterious murders in the beginning, their long muddled middles, and the satisfying or unsatisfying solution to the crimes at the end; the tragically unfinished novels by Pierre Menard, local colorist manqué; science fiction’s tales of parallel worlds, of a king’s coin of a single side, of books made of the infinite grains of sand, of the nightmare worlds for translators in which people write in languages that consist of nothing but verbs or nothing but adjectives or nothing but nouns with the vowels removed, like Arabic. But I was overcome with weariness, and so I went to bed. Or rather, we went to bed – the three of us: my wife, Borges, and I. For from that day forth, he haunted me. The next day, I decided I’d been drunk. That damned Sangre de Toro, I told myself, for I was but a freelancer and could afford no better. And yet the mysterious fever persisted, through days clouded by the mists that rose from intricate labyrinths of stone and brick and incorporeal metaphysics and through nights peopled by the minotaurs and kings and lions that inhabited them. For whole months I searched, fruitlessly, for a suitable English word for the Spanish adjective atroz. It was a meta-quest, I realized later, a metaphor for my own condition. Sometimes I would go out for a walk, to clear my mind, and find myself hours later in the reference room of the library, browsing almost blindly through the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or searching for the call numbers of the collected works of Sir Thomas Browne. (I was also obsessed with Urne Buriall.) Finally, my wife greeted me at the door one day with shock and consternation in her eyes; a bloody flourish marked my forehead, and I could not tell her, did not know, whether it was the mark of a casement window I had brushed on the way up the stairs or of the sword wielded by one of the characters in one of Borges’ convoluted tales of courage and betrayal. She rushed me to a clinic on the south side of Austin, where my clothes were stripped from me, my head was shaved, I was strapped with metal bands to a table and blinded and dizzied with bright lights, my heart and lungs were listened to, and a man in a surgical mask stuck a needle in my arm. I awoke nauseated and bandaged. My wife smiled bravely, telling me that I was going to be all right, that they would soon “get rid of this virus in your brain.” Still, for days I hovered between life and death. The fever wore me away, and illustrations from The Book of Imaginary Beings wallpapered my nightmares. When, on the seventh night, I began hallucinating, the doctors tried reading Zola to me; realizing it, too, was a translation, and thus could only aggravate my symptoms, they soon stopped, bringing in the new Tom Wolfe book to try to exorcise the demon. One morning they even tried Stephen Hawking, but it hurt too much when I laughed. At last, either by force of the strong doses of reading from a parallel world or because my constitution had adapted to the possession, I was judged fit to return home. My wife, ever solicitous, asked me if I wanted to stop at Starbuck’s. It had been weeks since I’d had a decent cup of coffee; the hospital served only Sanka. The caffeine, you know. . . , they said. But when I told her I’d just brew up some mate when we got home, she broke down and cried. The details of the months that I, or we, have lived since that fateful fall of 1993 – for I cannot bring myself to call it a fortunate fall, or a happy one – have faded into inconsequence. One day has followed another, one week another, and the years have passed uneventfully, at least outwardly. Inwardly, I continue to be multitudes; I feel, pullulating inside me, the characters of Borges’ fables, feel the knotted labyrinths of their lives, or perhaps plots. Some days I am almost myself; some days I am the other, or yet another. I shall never forget the day I tried to cash a check and realized that I’d signed it “Emma Zunz.” Tomorrow, I feel, I shall be Juan Muraña; the day after, the dread redeemer Lazarus Morel. I have become a serial-personality murderer – tradutore, tradittore is nothing in comparison to that. My wife, my faithful wife, who has walked with me through the red labyrinth of London and, like Ulrikke, slogged with me through the snow outside York and shuffled through the infinite libraries in Buffalo, has filed papers for divorce. Soon, she will leave me to the other and I shall be alone yet infinitely accompanied, as I am now. Soon, forgetting her manners, she will be able to say I told you so – Borges is fated to continue, through translations, and in me, into the new millennium and beyond; Borges’ influence is fated to go on working its dark power on a new generation of readers and writers. No longer shall it be only Calvino and Burgess and Barth and Rushdie and Auster and Robert Coover and Luisa Valenzuela and Alicia Borinsky and those others who carry Borges’ dark fire into the future, but he shall have passed, through the forking paths of multiple paternity, into those writers’ offspring as well, and the offspring of those offspring, ad infinitum. Soon, the entire world will be Borges, yet soon, none of us will know that, for we too will be Borges. Contact with Borges, the habit of Borges, will have disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Borges’ rigor, humanity will have forgotten, and will continue to forget, the messiness of the world and most other literature. Already Borges’ (conjectural) language has filtered into our schools; already the teaching of Borges’ harmonious biography (filled with moving episodes) has obliterated the biographies of Washington, Lincoln, Henry James that governed my own childhood; already, no one may have a cocktail conversation in which they are not reminded of a witty saying by the master. A scattered dynasty of recluses, the translators of Jorge Luis Borges in prose, poetry, and fiction, in every language in which books may be sold in sufficient numbers to justify the printing costs, has changed the face of the earth – and their dark work continues. If my projections are correct, a hundred years from now someone will discover the three new volumes of the Second Collected Works of Borges – and it will be called simply “the Encyclopedia.” Once just a single man who broke with tradition to forge another, he has now become the multiple precursor of yet further traditions of literature, new figurations of time and space and lives and stories. Once merely peripheral, merely Argentine, Borges now spreads through imaginations as a quarter is passed from hand to hand through an entire population, leaving its germs wherever it goes, or like that twenty-centavo piece that infected Borges himself in Buenos Aires in 1949, and he has become the new Zahir, and our fate, once we are touched by him, is nevermore to be able to escape him. Meantime, I am at work on a new vorticist translation of the works of Ana Lydia Lope de Vega. Andrew Hurley is Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. He has recently provided new translations of Borges’ entire fictional works for the Viking book Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions.

Brand New

12 NEW CLONES

I've added 12 new images to the WHEN CLONING GOES BAD Gallery on EarthlingZ.

SEE GALLERY

Lawn Furniture for Literalists

"How much oxygen did your furniture produce today? In our version of the future, the things we loaf about on indoors will be as beneficial as the stuff that grows out back. In the meantime, sculpt lawn furniture from the lawn itself. Unlike your standard-issue sofa, this lush greenery is totally organic, requires no synthetic finishes, and can be brought to life, Golem-style, from salvaged dirt. St. Augustine tiles create a seamless, living upholstery, or try wheatgrass for a durable alternative. Ask your nursery about planting tips unique to your sod. Note: Couch may require mowing..."

FULL INSTRUCTIONS

CINE-CLICHES

The Alternate Reality of the Movies

Selected from Roger Ebert's GLOSSARY

1. LAWS of CARTOON THERMODYNAMICS 2. The Law of Asynchronous Sleep 3. Prison Dossier Rule 4. Bartlett's Law 5. Lukewarm Latte Rule 6. Morse Code Rules I & II 7. The Law of Economy of Characters 8. Scenic Route Rule 9. Candles at Wholesale Rule 10. "Tell Me Where You Are And I'll Come And Get You." 11. Pets for the Ethical Treatment of Actors 12. Self-Ringing Steel 13. The 'What About Bob?' Rule 14. Airline Flight Rules 15. Alan Alda Rule 16. Ali MacGraw's Disease 17. All-Seeing Camera 18. Always Use the Valet Parkers 19. Angel Limited-Involvement Rule 20. Anti-Anti-Auto Theft Device 21. Archivist Killer Syndrome 22. As Long As You're Up, Get Me a 2 x 4 23. Auto Autopilot Exemption 24. Automatic Bike Bell 25. Auto Death Knell 26. Automatic Customer Bell 27. Automatic Miss Syndrome 28. Automatic Vest Display 29. Backlit Horizon Phenomenon 30. Barber's Itch Rule 31. Bathroom Rule 32. Because It's Called Sound Effects Rule 33. Big Wet Dog Shakedown 34. Big Wheel Keeps on Turnin' 35. Bilingual Nazi Officer Rule 36. Bloody Fingertip Rule 37. Bloody Steak Rule 38. Breaking Bad News 39. Bullitt Legacy Rule 40. C.P.S Rule 41. Ca-Chuck! Rule 42. Cartop Chases 43. Centered Passenger Rule 44. Checkmate Reflex 45. Chinese Chase Rule 46. Cinematic Ear Drum Phenomenon 47. Dead Man Dancing 48. Cooperative Shooter Rule 49. Contents May Have Shifted Rule 50. Complimentary Dirt Rule 51. Collapsing Staircase 52. Coincidental Lighting 53. Computer Operation by Frenetic Typing 54. Clothes Make the Impostor

55. Climbing Villain Syndrome 56. Cliffhanger Lunge 57. Florence Nightingale Clause 58. Fireball Law of Physics 59. Female Voice Of Destruction 60. Feedback Rule 61. Falling Death Scream Rule 62. Fallacy of the Snarling Beast 63. Fallacy of the Beeping Radar 64. Eyewitness As Prime Suspect 65. Excedrin Toothache No. 1 66. Evil Corporation Rule 67. Eventually Suspicious Unsuspecting Suspect 68. Ethnic Defaults 69. Emergency Tour Guide 70. Economy Class Crashes 71. Dramatic Desk Sweep 72. Dr. Exposition, I Presume 73. Don't Leave Home Without It 74. Doggone It Rule 75. Dispose of carefully 76. Disconnection 77. Disbelief of Suspension 78. Disappearing pedestrian phenomenon 79. Disappearing Nude 80. Deserting Before Dessert 81. Delta H Of Crania 82. Frank Lloyd Sandcastle Syndrome 83. Friendless Orphan Rule 84. Friendly Neighborhood Skies Syndrome 85. Fruit Cart Scene 86. Generic Drinker Syndrome 87. Glowing Dashboard Phenomenon 88. Grace Under Fire Principle 89. Grandstand Play 90. Grenade Chooses Sides 91. Heads Up Rule 92. Hollywood Peace Sign 93. Home Room Syndrome 94. Hot Dog Rule 95. Human Antennas 96. Hungry Harry Rule 97. Hunter's Walk 98. I've got it on tape! 99. Ihnatko's Law Of Voice Recognition 100. Illuminated Hello Rule 101. Instant Wardrobe Rule 102. Jukebox Saturday Night Fights 103. Last Cell Syndrome 104. Law Of Poignant Remnants 105. Law Of Relative Walking Speeds 106. Leaky Specimen Tank Phenomenon 107. Left Behind Rule 108. Let Your Fingers Do the Ripping

109. Listen! It Still Works 110. Locked in Low 111. Lucky Pedestrians 112. Ma Bell, Phone Home 113. Magic Shave 114. More Time to Die 115. Niner Rule 116. Neon Rule 117. Non-Answering Pet 118. Obligatory Nightgown Rule 119. Phantom Photographer 120. Pocket Full of Rye 121. Post-Apocalyptic Mechanical Darwinism 122. Premature Tuneout Rule 123. Relevant Telephone Syndrome 124. Rover, Dead Rover Rule 125. Rule of Loose 6's and 9's 126. Screech In Time 127. Self-Help Lane 128. Self-Orchestrating Piano 129. Send In The Clones 130. Senseless, Self-Destructing Gizmos 131. Silent Death Rule 132. Skills by Osmosis 133. Slam, Bam, Thank You, Continuity Man! 134. Sliding Heroine Scale 135. Smudge-Proof Screen Kiss 136. Solo Cardboard Box Rule 137. Space Alien Rule 138. Sparks and Steam Factory 139. Stealth Helicopters 140. Strafing panic syndrome 141. The 8-mm. Omen 142. The Answering Machine Pickup Rule 143. The Aquariumcam 144. The Cigarette Fling 145. The Dorm Hall Pay Phone Exception 146. The Healing Bathtub 147. The L-Shaped Groom 148. The Mummy's Other Curse 149. The Other Weather Channel 150. The Silent Battlefield 151. Third-Person Memory Phenomenon 152. Three-Bill, No Change, Five-Second Rule 153. Throw 'em Back Syndrome 154. Time Waits For No Director 155. Two Taps Means Go Rule 156. Unheld Peace Rule 157. Upper Shelf Rule 158. Viewable Remains Regulation 159. Visiting Hours Factor 160. Watch Your Step Rule 161. What Sort of Oysters? Rule 162. Wrong Twin Maxim 163. X-Ray Driver

When Cloning Goes Bad

Artists unknown. If anyone can identify the creator(s) of these, please let me know so I can credit him/her/them...



VIEW SLIDE SHOW

A Budding Talent

At only 23 years old, Aya Kato seems set to develop into an extraordinary illustrator. Her style is clearly influenced by Aubrey Beardsley, with definite overtones of Yoshitoshi and perhaps Hans Bellmer, but her own imagination shines through Check out her work

Fusion Anomaly's Music Node

Lots of great stuff. Many excellent images also...

GO THERE>>

SteamPunk by Roger Wood

This man's work is so wonderful that I have made a slideshow gallery of it.

Roger Wood creates with time in mind. Yet even though the clock can be a consistent element of his work, it’s often secondary to its creation. Whether it’s a curious timepiece or a unique assemblage, Wood thrives on working with an immeasurable array of findings from the tarnished and forgotten to the odd or intriquing. He is a devoted collector of usual and unusual objects with one thing in common, a history.

The source of his inspiration lies in the hundreds of curiously labelled drawers and boxes brimming with artifacts of all description that line the shelves of his Toronto studio. Wood orchestrates an arrangement from his myriad of treasures until the precise moment that it feels right. Then he quickly glues them all down so they can’t escape.

Playful, wondrous timepieces emerge that take flight on cherubic wings, float and sway on fine wires, or appear frozen mid-explosion with flying springs and cogs that bounce at the touch.

This definitive merging of objects and ideas has brought Wood much critical acclaim across Canada. Shows at galleries, museums and awards at several exhibitions are ongoing testaments to his freedom of imagination. Just as his single signature feather at the tip of the second hand quivers magically through time, Roger Wood's creations continue to fascinate.

Recently, klockwerks was featured on the popular HGTV television show, Craft Scape. Click here to view the show.