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I am back from the bosky hills and verdant dells of West Virginia and SE Ohio and I have a lot of new ideas and stories to share. Thanks Mom and Dad for the lovely visit and all of your kindness. Also, I want to thank Dan Claymore who did a superb job in my absence. Dan understood the purpose of Ferrebeekeeper and matched the tone beautifully (although that Japanese fishmarket made me anxious for the oceans and our flatfish friends). Because of his excellent work, I realize I should take more vacations. Dan also confided in me that he found the project intimidating because of the perspicacity of the polymath readers…so, as always, thank YOU!
When I travel, I carry a little book and a tin of pens and colored pencils (my tin is shaped like a sarcophagus and is interesting in its own right, but more about that later). I like to quickly draw little colored sketches of what pops into my head or what is in front of me. Sometimes there are realistic. Sometimes they are utterly fanciful. They are sometimes silly and occasionally sad. I have dozens of volumes of New York drawings, but I figured I should share all the little sketches I made on my trip (unfortunately nobody posed for me–so there are no portraits). Keep in mind that these are sketches–so they are quick and imperfect. For example, I drew the one at the top in the car as my family and I went to a wedding in the central mountains of West Virginia, and half way through I realized I didn’t have a dark gray pencil. Roads are hard for me too (as are straight lines in the moving car). Maybe this says something about the unnatural yet astonishing nature of our highway infrastructure.
In the car, I also drew this humorous drawing of a gnome kingdom. My mother was describing a nuclear weapons facility somewhere which she visited during her Pentagon career, and I apparently misheard the name. This delightful misunderstanding engendered a whole didactic gnome world. Fribble Fribble!
This drawing is the corner of the yard at home with autumn cornfields beyond. Vinnie the barncat is sneaking onto the right corner, catty-corner from the old Amish farmstead. I wish I could have captured Vinnie better, but Rory the obstreperous adolescent poodle chased him off, before I could catch a better likeness.
No Ferrebeekeeper sketch collection would be complete without a magical flounder. This one apparently has a direct connection to the underworld. More about that in later posts.
Speaking of the underworld, here is a little drawing of the world beneath the topsoil. There is a lungfish, a brumating turtle, a mole, a mummy, and an ant colony, but beneath these ordinary items is a whole gnome kingdom. Don’t worry! I don’t believe in gnomes. Their tireless tiny civilization really represents bacteria to me…oh and humans civilization too (artistic allegory is more of an art than a science). This macro/micro dichotomy is captured by the shoes of a full sized (albeit anachronistic) human at the top left.
This is a quick impression of a sunset which was SO beautiful. If only I could truly have captured more of its sublime luminescent color….
This is my parents’ pond, which I love more than I can tell you. Unfortunately a big drip came out of my dip pen and made the ducks look monstrous. There is a hint of autumn orange in the trees. This is another one that frustrates me, because reality was so pretty.
I watched the second half of a documentary about the circus on PBS. It seems like the circus was more important and central to our nation than I knew (although I should have guessed based on current politics). I represented the performers as abstract shapes, but the overall composition bears a debt to Cimabue and his Byzantine predecessors.
Finally here is a picture from the tarmac of John Glenn airport in Columbus. Naturally the plane moved away as soon as things began to get good. By the way I really enjoyed my flight and I am always surprised that people are so angry about flying. For the price of a moderately fancy dinner, we can rocket across the continent above the clouds at hundred miles an hour. We travel like the gods of Greek mythology except people serve us coffee and ginger cookies and, best of all we can truly see the earth from a towering perspective–which is the subject of my last picture which I scrawled as we looped back across Long island west to LaGuardia (I’m glad I am not an air traffic controller). Sadly this picture did not capture the beauty and complexity of Long Island Sound, and Queens (nor even the lovely billowing cumulus clouds) but at least it made me stare raptly out the window at the ineffable but disturbing beauty of the strange concrete ecosystem we are building.
Let me know what you think of my little sketches and, now that summer vacation is out of the way, get ready for some October horror and Halloween fun! Oh! Also get ready for Dan Claymore’s book about a human gumshoe in the dark robot future. It will be out before you know it, and it is going to be amazing!
Hello, fellow fans of Ferrebeekeeper. My name is Daniel Claymore and I’ll be your guest blog-post-thing person while Ferrebeekeeper Prime is away taking a much needed vacation. As you might imagine, this is a great honor. As you might also imagine, it is quite daunting, too. With that in mind, I’d like to begin simply.
One of the themes of the week that Beekeeper Prime and I discussed was the vanishing relationship between art and science. Or rather, the perceived kinship between art and science, or lack thereof. That got me thinking about highly technical art forms, which lead me to thinking about movies. And when I think about movies, I usually wind up thinking about Akira Kurosawa.
His film career is among the most famous and celebrated in human history, so I won’t describe it here. What is less well-known, however, is that Akira Kurosawa was also a wonderful fine artist. I’d like to share with you some of his impressive work.
A piece from RAN.
Trained as a young man in illustration and calligraphy, Kurosawa had every intention of becoming a painter. Indeed, he succeeded as a working painter for several years before finally burning out from the relentless grind of uncertainty and impoverishment. It was only by sheer chance (or inescapable destiny) that he found his way into the nascent Japanese film industry, working his way up from assistant director, to writer, to editor, to director, and finally to world class master. But he always retained a painter’s eye. And a painter’s brushes, canvases, papers, pens and whatever else he needed, because the guy sure produced a lot of work…
Another conceptual design from RAN. He was in his 70s when he did this. And when he actually made the film…one can only hope for genes as good.
This one makes me dizzy. Not for a film, or never REALLY for a film. Just his state of mind at the time.
There are many more examples you can find online, as well as some excellent books, and I encourage you to explore the subject. Akira Kurosawa had a fascinating and dramatic life, with all the quite tragedy and stunning beauty one finds in his films. As the week progresses there will be trips to stranger places and weirder things, but for now please enjoy these vibrant, moving artworks from a true 20th century polymath.
Please forgive any technical issues. BeeKeeper Prime often mentions his frustration with WordPress and boy, oh boy, he ain’t kidding.
It is the first day of October, which means you need to start getting ready for Halloween horror coming to Ferrebeekeeper at the end of the month! Every year we have done a special theme week to highlight the monsters lurking in the many shadows of existence. As all of you know, there is darkness out there: it lurks just beneath our appetites, our skin, our mortal lives…Ye! there is a ghastly void beneath the pretty autumn flowers themselves! As a teaser of things to come later this month, I am doubling back to an earlier post which had one of my drawings in it.
The drawing was hard to see in that post (because WordPress seemingly no longer blows images up to true size if you click on them) however it took me an enormous amount of time and it looks very ghastly and disconcerting in the real world. It is another one of my allegorical flounder drawings, but this one concerns the hunger, carnage, and obliteration which, alas, seem to be ineluctable features of all systems involving living things…perhaps of all systems, full stop.
There is a story I imagined while drawing this: what if you were wandering through the barrowlands of Europe when you found an ancient flatfish made of hammered gold? You would grab the treasure and begin to carry it off, however closer examination might give you pause, for, graven into the solid gold, are vile butchers, sorcerers, monsters, and dark gods. Assembled on the surface of the piece are a monster andrewsarchus, an underworld goddess leaping out of a well with entrails in her hand, cannibals, and a parasitic tapeworm thing. All of these frightful entities are gathered around an evil sentient tree with hanged men it its boughs, and the entire tableau is on the back of a terrible moaning flatfish which seems almost to writhe in your hand. When you look up at the sky the night is descending on the wold. The megaliths take on a sinister new aspect and the very stars seem inimical. it is all too easy to imagine the black holes eating away the center of each galaxy. With dawning fear you realize you need to put this unearthly artifact right back where you found it.
Like a lot of people, I have a dayjob which does not necessarily play to my greatest strengths. That is good on normal days: when I get out of the office I am ready to write about Goths in space or technicolor trees and then sculpt representations of meaningful tricolor flatfish. It is less good on days when the sink is hopelessly clogged at home and there are administrative chores related to technical or monetary aspects of life which must be addressed. Then the whole day becomes pointless dirty drudgery with no respite. All of which is to say, i ran out of time to write about science and art, so I am going to show some flounder drawings which i made on the train. Above is a very colorful flounder with a dinosaur, a hotdog, a walking alien machine, and a strange angel. I would have loved it so much as a child. As an adult though, I like the elongated walrus best.
The second small flounder is a more traditional flounder living in the ocean with a dancing prawn and a pale squid (the little mollusk must be frightened). Although this drawing lacks some of the more fantastical and surreal elements which stand out in other works from this series, its high contrast white on black linework does make it pop out. We’ll return to regular programming tomorrow. Wish me luck fixing my sink!
Here is a link to a project by my long-time friend Josh Hoisington. Josh has been working in the music industry for years and he has always been on the edge of blowing up (in the sense of succeeding enormously, not of exploding: although sometimes it is hard to tell the difference with popular musicians). His newest musical project takes on the task of the English metaphysical poets: to explore our relationship with God and morality through the intensely personal language of romance and the sensual and trancelike electronic music of dance clubs (this is not as quixotic a task as it may sound…just ask the Sufis who believe that dreamlike music, otherworldly dancing, and exploration of our relationship with Allah all go together like a single calligraphic symbol).
The refrain “My dialogue may not with God, but it’s with myself…” certainly reflects a theme which Ferrebeekeeper has been meaning to return to: that deities are the ultimate metaphor for self. Let me know your impressions and I will pass them on the musicians.
Every night, in my dreams, I watch the world die. After a long absence, I have returned to find that the life-giving systems which recycle waste back into useable nutrients have failed. My friends are dead, reduced to grotesque rotting skeletons and mouldering lumps, except for a few last survivors who are barely hanging on to an attenuated half-life of hunger and shallow comatose breaths. I desperately rush to help: I turn on machines to clean away the toxic miasma. I ply the dying victims with food and oxygen… but the microbial ecosystems upon which everything depend are mortally degraded. My last friends are too far gone, and they expire painfully while I watch powerless. What is left is dead world of complete desolation. The precious seed of life has failed and I know that I am the author of this annihilation.
This is all true. I have such dreams all the time and they torment me more than you can know. My art and writing—my entire life quest flows from these nightly horrors. Worst of all, these dreams are based on true experiences from my childhood which color every news article I read. Every opinion I hear about humankind, the world, and the fate of all living things is overshadowed by these prophetic nightmares. However, before you call the men with big white nets, there is a critical twist which I must share with you. In these dreams, everyone is a fish and the world is an aquarium.
Here is what happened. When I was a child, I wanted to be an ichthyologist. I took all of my allowance money and holiday presents and saved to build miniature worlds of wonder like the ones I saw in hobbyist magazines. I read up on each fish species—what they ate and how they lived and what their natural habitat was like. I learned about nematodes and frozen brine shrimp and undergravel filters to help nitrifying bacteria flourish.
Back then I had a tropical South America tank of beautiful fish from the Amazon—little tetras like colored gems, adorable armored catfish with big kindly cartoon eyes, angelfish with fins like a bride’s veil, a knife fish named Ripley who was like a black electrical ghost. I had a tank of Tanganyika cichlids from East Africa (near humankind’s first home). They lurked in volcanic rocks and I could see their huge mouths (for safely rearing their young) frowning from the crevices. At the apex of my involvement with the hobby, I even had a marine tank filled with fluorescent damselfish, shrimp like rainbows, and a clever triggerfish which was busy excavating a private lair into a hunk of red tube coral. It was magical! The miniature worlds I built were incredible. I even had a classical tank of google-eyed goldfish with multicolored pebbles and a porcelain mermaid in the center.
But each of these little glass paradises failed and died. Sometimes they were destroyed slowly by unknown bacterial mishaps which caused the ammonia or nitrogen cycle to shift off-kilter. Sometimes a heater would go out or get flipped to maximum setting and thermal shock would kill my poor pets. The Tanganyika cichlids got stressed out over territory and ate each other whole with their big mouths (just like NY real-estate developers!). Other times the apocalypse was swift: algal blooms or invasive fungi or diseases which I unknowingly brought from the pet store would ravage the tank. Once, the glass of my Amazon-basin aquarium shattered while we were out shopping. My family returned to find the ceilings dripping water. The dying angelfish were lying gasping on the wet pebbles at the bottom of the empty tank. It was horrible. Even the goldfish ultimately died. A weird dropsy caused their gleaming orange bodies to bulge out and pop apart. I love animals and some of the fish had real personality and emotions (in addition to being beautiful) but, despite tremendous heartfelt effort, my stewardship killed them all.
And these experiences haunt me at night. My dreams used to involve a few aquariums which I would try to save…but as I have grown up, the dreams have grown up too. Now sometimes the setting will be a sere coastline which seems uninhabited at first, until I realize the landscape itself is made of giant earth colored fish which are slowly dying. Lately the dreams have moved into the forest where the trees are made of deadwood and the boulders are the hulks of once-living things. As adulthood corrodes away my figurative dreams of success, strength, love, and meaning, my literal nighttime dreams grow bigger and worse. In dreams, I have walked through cities of contagion, plague, and starvation. At night I have sailed a junk across an ink black ocean with nothing in it but slips of charred paper and plastic bags floating like ghosts.
This is why zoos and aquariums (the big public ones) fascinate me. Surely teams of professionals with hundred million dollar endowments can surely keep our animal friends alive! Except…they can’t always. Even with all of the best veterinarians, ecologists, and biologists, working night and day, things still go wrong in weird unexpected ways (by the way, this somewhat pitiless assessment doesn’t mean I stand against zoos: I see them as a combination of ambassador, laboratory, and Noah’s ark). My first job was as an intern at a synthetic ecosystem designed by the world’s foremost designer of synthetic ecosystems…and it was a beautiful study in gradual failure and unexpected interactions. Ecology is complicated and we don’t understand it very well
We are living through one of the great meltdowns which periodically occur throughout Life’s 4.5 billion year history [eds. note: if religious people can capitalize genitive pronouns for God, then Ferrebeekeeper can capitalize a word which we are using to betoken all of the living things from Earth throughout all of time]. It doesn’t take a geologist’s comprehension of the End-Permian mass extinction to imagine ourselves as a toxic black smear in a rock column of the future. I know from reading eschatology that I am not the only person who is tormented by dreams of Armageddon.
At the same time humankind is ballooning in number and appetite, we are also learning at an exponential rate. My experiences with little terrariums and fishtanks does not need to foreshadow the fate of orcas, vinegar scorpions, honeybees, banana trees…and humans. We can use our hard-won knowledge to keep the world’s precious living things alive! We can even carry the sacred seed of life into the heavens. Space would be a better place for us anyway—a place where we can truly spread our wings and grow exponentially towards godhood. It is what we have always wanted…and it is tantalizingly close.
One of my favorite poems has what might be my favorite quotation in English “Learn from your dreams what you lack.” I HAVE learned that…and now I am telling you too. We lack a comprehensive understanding of ecology and the life sciences. We lack the political cohesion and organizational skills to make effective use of what we already know. Those things are not outside of our grasp. Most of the smartest and hardest-working people here spend their lives ripping people off with complicated financial products and elaborate tech products (which are really only online rolodexes or digital catalogs or what-have-you). What a waste! The bankers could throw away their nasty spreadsheets, the doctors could stop filling out pointless insurance forms, the engineers could stop making wireless blenders and cryptocurrency. We could all start building space cities NOW..this very day (although the first generation of those cities are going to have some troubles with the synthetic oceans). The possibilities are endless! Our knowledge and imagination can take us to where we have always dreamed of being. Our failure to be smart, brave, and creative will take us all to one of my dead festering nightmares.
Those fish should not have died in vain. We should not die in vain either. Let’s build a future worth having.
It is my birthday this week and, to celebrate, I wanted to share some special posts with you. Unfortunately my schedule is not obliging to help me finish the larger philosophical piece I have been writing, so instead I am going to share a sculpture which I just finished (I was going to save it for later, but, sigh, life is short so let’s look at it now) . This is “Neapolitan Flounder” a sculpture made of wood, bone, and plastic toys. It is one of the extensive flatfish series of artworks which I have been working on, however, unlike the drawings which take a more expansive view of ecology and human history, “Neapolitan Flatfish” examines the prevailing ethos of the time which is to capture people’s money by providing them with exactly what they want (in this case the empty calories of airy frozen confections). Of course these aren’t actually delicious soft serve ice cream cones, they are really plastic junk from the dollar store. Yet given my unhappy history with making plastic toys, and given the ever growing burden of plastic detritus building up in the wild places of Planet Earth, perhaps the message becomes even more germane. The flounder is a predator and a prey animal–the “middle class of the ocean” although serious overfishing is leading to a precipitous decline of populations around the world (which matters little to Treasury Secretary Wilbur Ross, who would not be unhappy if everything and everyone died five minutes after he concludes his own earthly existence as a master of crooked insider deals). Ahem…anyway, sometimes it is a bit unclear who is fishing and who is being fished, but what could be more delightful than the unexpected charm of three different flavors (and different colors) which compliment each other perfectly being placed next to each other in one simple Rothko-like package? Please ignore the bone hook and the glittering blue predatory eyes and get ready for some birthday fun here at Ferrebeekeeper.
Also, don’t forget to ask the Great Flounder some of your own questions.
Today’s post features a true oddball in the world of royal headpieces. This strange yet compelling crown is “the diadem of the stars.” It was made in 1863 for Maria Pia of Savoy, wife of King Luís I of Portugal. Although the piece was made in the mid-19th century its minimalist lines and weird geometric pentagons have a distinctly modern appearance.
I love space art (a category which I will reluctantly go ahead and put this crown under), but I am not sure I care for the diadem’s look in comparison with more traditional arch-and-cross type crowns. The white. pink, and yellow diamonds do make me yearn for the stars though (a feeling which I wish more of us would embrace) so maybe the Queen Consort was onto something.
For many years I studied at the Art Students League of New York, a storied yet inexpensive atelier-style art school/collective which accounts about half to ¾ of all eminent American artists as members, pupils, or instructors at one point or another. I would work all day as a stupid flunky at a bank and then go to the League and paint for three and a half hours every night. At the Art Students League, one could find every sort of artist from around the world, from international art superstars to first time hobbyists. I mostly studied with the great portrait painter Ron Scherr who drew young luminaries of contemporary realism to him like a man casting loafs of bread in Union Square park draws pigeons. There were many gifted Scherr students whose works and careers I need to highlight, but arguably the most gifted draftsperson was my friend Mark Kevin Gonzales, a chess player who grew up in Brooklyn (the rest of us just moved here to make it in the arts) and went to the famous Brooklyn Technical high School.
Since Mark is a native New Yorker, his artwork highlights life in the city, and these particular artworks highlight the animal life of the city, our famous rock pigeons (Columba livia) which throng the city’s parks and statues. Indeed they are famous urbanites around the world. The watercolor painting at the top highlights Mark’s mastery of form shading and color. The pigeon has been rendered in swift staccato strokes of watercolor (a famously unforgiving media) yet because of his masterful brushwork, the piece has an illusion of three dimensional form and conveys the impression of details which aren’t actually there. A master’s secret is that if you can get the first few lines exactly right, you don’t have to agonize over a bunch of fussy little lines (but…oh let’s not talk about the years and years of practice necessary to get those big flat shapes to come out exactly right with the flick of a wrist). The pigeons feathers seem to glisten with shimmering iridescence which is upon close inspection revealed to be a simple wash of viridian. Its lively eye and cocked head makes the viewer think that the bird is observing the observer from beyond this little square of paper. I suspect the bird really was observing Mark closely in whatever park he painted this (the poor pigeon probably though he was being sized up by a big weird cat as Mark crouched at his traveling easel).
The second painting is even more of a quick sketch…but it is also more of a celebration (and a political piece). This pigeon is strutting his stuff as joyous 4th of July fireworks go off in the background. Notice how the pyrotechnics have colored the urban bird red white and blue. Rock Pigeons are not originally from the new world (neither are Mark’s black and Philippine ancestors, come to think of it) but they have moved here to New York and lived here successfully for generations and they have a greater claim to being native New Yorkers than just about anybody. It is good to see the patriotic national colors fitted out for an existence which is completely urbanized and it is so good to see some of Mark’s playful small works (he usually works in exquisitely rendered large format portrait painting). You should check out his amazing work in Drawing Magazine or at his website, or just take a gander at his astonishingly lovely drawings and paintings on Instagram…Oh and tell him what a gifted artist he is: he certainly already knows, but it is always still good to hear.
We think of the statues of Ancient Greece as glistening white marble, yet they were beautifully painted in a rainbow of colors to imitate life. So too, the poetry of the ancient Greek world was meant to be performed to music…maybe Sappho and Pindar had more in common with the Beatles, Slim Shady, and Bob Dylan than we think (although I, for one, will never accept that bad Nobel prize). Unfortunately, the music of the ancient classical world has always been elusive. We know how deeply the ancients praised its lyrical form and its emotional depth. We even have extensive descriptions and directions of musical pieces, complete with comprehensive explanations of tones, scales, and meter. In a few cases we have the notes themselves, there are extant scores for tunes which show each noise to be made in the fashion of modern music (albeit with a different notation). Yet these aids have never been good enough to make musical recreations which were compelling. The oddball classicists who tried to perform the songs from the ages of Athens and Alexander, succeeded only in making discordant and unpleasant harmonies. Either the musical archaeologists were doing it wrong, or worse, the ancient world had a tin ear (and the sweeping rhythm of the poetry and art makes this seem unlikely).
A new project has come together to try another stab at ancient Greek music. The researchers and musicians based the heart of their work around recently discovered auloi which were found in superb condition. The aulos was the “twin flute” of antiquity—actually a double reed instrument something like a twin oboe. The aulos was the instrument of shepherds, slaves, and entertainers (as opposed to the expensive lyre which was the instrument of aristocrats, academicians, and such). Although i have never heard it, the aulos is important to me because of the story of Apollo and Marsyas, a myth which is very dear to me (and instantly familiar to all artists who hear the story).
Using these ancient auloi, musical scholars and musicians have exhaustively reviewed the ancient notes and commentary. They have poured effort into understanding weird ancient musical terms like “mode, enharmonic, diesis.” They read the poetry and they practiced…and, yes, they invented and guessed and made things up with their imaginations (which surely is the greatest magic of art, anyway). I will let you read about their amazing methodologies on your own, but the upshot is you can listen to a closer (?) approximation of ancient Greek music.
[Imagine that Youtube clip was playing here: I would update my wordpress plan to make this possible, but it would cost $48, which would cause me to go bankrupt]
I am not sure I am fully convinced. In my head, the aulos sounds more like a cross between a nightingale, an oboe, and a small shepherd’s bagpipe—sad and haunting and sweet with a faint hint of something crass. In this clip it sounds like a vuvuzela making love to a giant hornet. However, who am I to judge? My ideas of musical beauty may have been forever compromised by the peerless euphony of 19th century music. Maybe the clip is closer to the historical truth than I would like to imagine. Whatever the case, the new ancient songs are still worth listening to—they are alien, yet familiar, and not without a certain majestic ceremonial quality. And, best of all, the scholarship, the research, and the musical craftsmanship provides us with another step closer to recreating the ancient melodies that haunt us in poems and in dark myths.
