Revisiting a childhood activity.

This week was busy with an assortment of things, including a professional organization mixer on Tuesday, which happened to be Cinco de Mayo.  So the food was a taco bar (tasty, but not worth photographing) and we made paper flowers to contribute to an artist's work:

I made this type of flower as a child, and it was very quick to remember how.  Of course the artist showed people how to do it, had the pieces of paper precut (you can see a pile of deep blue at the top of the lower photograph), and even some of the flowers ready to fluff.  I did several from start to finish, and we look forward to the finished image.

Most of my yarning this week was making Warm Up, America! pieces, using up leftovers of acrylic, because any pattern I wanted to do needed more focus than I could manage.

Three in various garter stitch patterns, lower right is crocheted.

Currently OTN is one from their 30th Anniversary Pattern Bundle, a block in bamboo stitch which I hadn't heard of before and looked intriguing.  I have some speckled yarn that I wanted to work into a pattern stitch, and so far it's going well.  I'll probably take it and some other balls of yarn on my business travel this week, something easy that doesn't need much focus.

I also had my book club at the library on Wednesday, and errands plus all the trip laundry, and time with my mother after being away for a week.  Today is Mother's Day and my brother and his wife and I went to my mother's house for brunch.  Going out on Mother's Day is too crowded and noisy for us.

This weekend I started a more complicated item, the "Winter Sapphire" pattern using yarn that I purchased in Iceland.  Because the yarn is a bit "sticky" I realized I will need to pull from the outside, so went on a hunt for one of my Lemonwood mini-minders.  I think it's not officially the two-ball size, but it works for me:

One more week.

I realized that I have one more week of my no-knitting-for-Lent restriction.  So far I have finished five scarves (one was a UFO), one hat, and the test sweater.  This is the last item I expect to make before Easter next Sunday:

I started after the weekly KnitTalk Zoom call
and got this far.  The starting always goes quickly.

It's the Lotus Blossom Shawl and mostly a simple crochet but there are some tricky bits.  I am not using the yarn called for (although I have it) because I've been wanting something to make with this yarn.  It will likely go to my grandmother for her birthday.

Speaking of which, as I said in the last post I visited my grandmother, who is definitely frailer in body and mind.  Some due to age, and some due to isolation, we are certain.  I brought some of her favourite foods every day and didn't get photos of her with all of them, just the KFC and pizza:

   

I introduced her to YouTube, so we spent much of the visit viewing The Three Tenors and opera and classical music flashmobs:

Watching her favourite, Luciano Pavarotti,
sing "Che gelida manina".

We joined my Sunday night virtual knitting group from KnitTalk:

We also had Zoom calls with most of the family, and she got to meet my brother's new(ish) dog.

My trip home was rescheduled a bit due to bad weather but I made it mostly smoothly and a day earlier than originally planned.  When I listened to the storm in my area the next night I was very glad to be neither flying nor driving in it!

Then it was busy at work, and through the weekend, and it seemed that every time the weather looked good enough to go for a walk, by the time I got my shoes on it was raining again.  Oh, well.

When I fly I wear a N95 or KN95 mask, and since they are plain I draw on them or write a quote.  Often it is from somebody whose birthdate is the day of my trip:

This one is from Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). The full quote is "I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist". She was a Mexican-British artist and writer who mostly lived in Mexico after her father disowned her when she announced she didn't want to be a proper debutante but decided to move to France with Max Ernst.

My life is neither that interesting nor that dramatic.

Setting a Record and Cooking Maple-Beans

Hello!  Today, just because we could, we had snow:

 

 

My neighbor's forsythia is sad that it's snowing.

Apparently it set a new record for snowfall of this date.  The previous record was 1.7" (4.5cm) and today we received 2.4" (6cm).

When I heard that we had a winter storm warning for today, I decided to make baked beans, using the mix I'd used before but following their recipe, scaled both for size of household and remaining beans.  I put a cup of the beans to soak overnight:

In a bowl, covered with about one inch
of water.  At right, after overnight soaking.

 

 I put them into my crockpot to cook.  They are really a pretty assortment of beans!

The original package (from Sweet Wind Farm, a local place, but you can order online) came with seasoning and maple syrup.  Scaling to the quantity of beans, I added a half-cup of maple syrup, and half the seasoning, plus a bay leaf.

Then I added water to cover and let it cook on high, which gave it a steady simmer, until the beans were done.  Unfortunately they lost some of the pretty colours while cooking: 

Although I like the taste of bay, a whole leaf was a bit too much for this quantity, but overall the beans are very tasty.  I made rice to go under it, and it's a solid meal.  I did add a couple pickles on the side for some contrast.  They are not blue; that's my grandmother's shawl, sitting next to my bowl.

The bowl is one of a set I got at the SouperBowl in Madison the year I lived there.  You could buy a ticket for a bowl and soup, or you could buy just a bowl.  They also had tables of extra items, including a set of these bowls, which I bought and have used very happily.

I have one portion of rice and probably two portions of beans left, which will be meals in the next couple of days.

In other news, I finished the sweater and scarf, which finishes my committed items for Mittens for Akkol.  When marking them on the spreadsheet I realized that I have some yarn I'd overdyed that will work for thick socks for one of the extra grads, so I wound it and cast on for those.  I'm also working on the border of my grandmother's shawl.  Pictures to follow once ends are run in.  Next Saturday I'll go to the post office, and hopefully mail everything.

Tonight is the weekly KnitTalk meeting, and earlier the local paper artists group met.  It's not as much fun to meet remotely, but I like how much more convenient it is for me time-wise and geographically.

How my resolutions did in January

Of the three resolutions I posted for 2014, one needs to wait for warmer weather, not to mention more time, so I am reporting on the other two.  I haven't updated the blog since early January, but I did three updates then, so while I am not doing as well as I would like for the second resolution I will consider it met.  I should have done an update later in the month, if only to miss on having to do so many catching up now.

The harder one is the first resolution, to do a new thing that isn't a variation on an old thing.  For January I am counting the "Get a Clue!" tour of the Mark Twain House & Museum, because I've never done a proper tour of the house, and I've never done a mystery tour like that.  My partner and I didn't win, technically, since she was sure the culprit was a different character (it came down on our chart to two, and she picked) but we had a lot of fun.

I did some new things that were variations on old ones, and a lot of fun too:

1. Dancing at the Creative Cocktail Hour at Real Art Ways.  I've gone dancing before - for several years was notorious at Chicago-area cons for wearing out a series of partners, since I love dancing and have good stamina - and I've been to CCH before, but never dancing there.  A large part of that is that I am shy about going out on a dance floor solo, although I am willing to stay there if my partner dances off.  The nice thing about RAW is that nobody cares if you dance solo, or in a pair, or a group, and the gender makeups of any of them.
2. Taking a class from Franklin Habit at Vogue Knitting Live! in New York.  Again, done plenty of classes at fiber conferences, but never that one and never from Franklin.  It was on tessellations and a lot of fun, and I got a bonus because in the "work on this for a while" part of the class Franklin discussed something he figured out about charting a different technique, and all of a sudden the penny dropped and I figured out why I couldn't get that technique when I'd tried it before.  I had felt very stupid about it but Franklin's mind works the way mine does on this topic and now it makes sense!  I am going to tell him so when I sent a picture of the piece I am knitting from my classwork.

Also in the variation-on-themes items, I have joined the Make Hartford makerspace and participated in an event there other than the Grand Opening; and I am now the "Leader of Logistics and Exchequery" for Welcome to Bohemia! shows (and related ones such as last weekend's Studio N111 fundraiser), which mostly means I make sure the stuff needed onsite is ready to go, especially at the front desk, and run the door; and keep track of things so the artsy people can have fun.

Stuff like this:

Picking the Winners, Inimitably Randomly

As I posted the other day, my friend Jim asked me to draw the winners for a contest he was holding.  All you had to do was post a review of his book on Amazon, and link back to it in a comment to the intro post for the contest.
 
The cutoff was "midnight Sunday" which I read as the one between Sunday and Monday, and Jim meant as the one between Saturday and Sunday.  No great trauma, except that there was a list of persons who wanted to find out if they had won or not.  And I ended up spending much of Monday helping a friend with a massive baking exercise and got home too tired to look at the names.  Had I thought about it in advance, I would have printed the list onto slips of paper and had one of my friend's children (conveniently she has only two) pick each of the winners.
 
Failing that, this is the method I used:

• There are ten persons who met the criteria for the drawing.
• My favourite numbers between one and ten are three and nine.
• I decided that the winners would be at positions three and nine on the list.
• I decided that since the list could be different if done chronologically or alphabetically, I'd look at both versions and see if there were any overlaps.
• Jim ran the lists for me, partly as a reminder that I needed to get the drawings done.
• One of the positions had the same person on both lists, so I decided that position would get the leatherbound version = TanteLiz at number nine.
• Since position number three had different persons, I thought that if one is already getting a book, I would designate the other as the winner of the cloth-covered edition.
• Jim told me that neither of these reviewers is getting a book.
• I flipped a coin (specifically, a ten-cent coin from New Zealand), and CJ wins.

 

In case someone wonders, heads=CJ and tails=Lloyd, based upon earlier-in-the-alphabet associating.  Since the New Zealand 10-Cent coin could be seen to have a head on both sides, the obverse (with Queen Elizabeth) was deemed "heads" and the reverse (with a mask) was deemed "tails".

I tried to take a picture of the coin after flipping, but my camera washed it out.

Why use that coin specifically?  It's in my coinpurse as a memento of a trip to New Zealand that Jim and I (and a busload of choiristers and family) were on a couple of years ago, so it seemed appropriate to use that one.

Why such a complicated process?  Well, because I'm me.  To me, this is a fun sort of randomization that is harder to challenge (in my mind) than picking a slip of paper out of a hat, because there are so many elements that add to the randomness.  What if there wasn't a name at the same position on both lists? Or if there was the same name in both places?  Or the same names exchanging places depending upon how the list sorted?   What if I didn't have two favourite numbers between one and ten?  And so forth.

Probably part of this is because I am a STEM person = Science Technology Engineering & Math.  My skills are being organized, logical, and so forth.  So what looks like a Rube Goldberg way to accomplish the simple selection of a winner from a list, makes perfect sense to me.

Pop-Up Purchases

I went to a pop-up market this evening.  Now that the show has opened and we are not rehearsing every night, I can get out occasionally.  There are free jazz concerts in Bushnell Park (with perfect weather for it tonight), and since there are two sets I could opt to hear one, then go to the market.

These are essentially temporary flea markets, and while the Hartford Denim Company has a large enough indoor space to host one, this one was outside.  And unfortunately, a number of the merchants packed up before I could circle back and shop, due to lack of light, including one who does fun ornaments that have reflective eyes, or spots, depending upon the item.  I've purchased from him at a popup market in the past and thought about getting something this time, but he was gone by the time I circled back.  I did manage to purchase a few items, and chat a bit with some of the vendors as well.

First purchases were at the Vintanthromobile.  There were many tempting items but also a crowd, so I picked items I was sure would fit and I could integrate into my wardrobe:

I was very happy to find the shawl - I have wanted one of them for some time!  Yes, even with all the shawls I make (I had one with me tonight, in case it got cool), I covet ones I cannot make!  At right is a flirty skirt, yellow is not a colour of which I am fond, but with the orange flowers and trumpet styling, it's very cute.  The bag - well, of course I bought one.  This is like a basket with straps, and came in handy as I shopped more.

While I was paying, the owner saw the shawl I'd brought with me in case of chill (and never needed) and asked me about it, and whether I make things for sale.  No, I told her; for fun and gifts and the occasional commission, but I am afraid that if I set up a business, I'd promptly not have time to make enough items.

I love woven blankets like the one on the right:

I have purchased many over the years at various mercados in Texas, and this one is so soft I could not resist!  It's light enough to be a perfect summer blanket.  The vendor seems to specialize in vintage camping items, or maybe it was just the setup tonight.  The dress on the left is a vintage Hawai'ian dress, which I could tell by not just the fabric but the styling.  A key item is the sleeve:

That particular overlapping-petal style is typically Polynesian, and not found on similar garments that are made for mainland crowds.  Although I've always thought of these as something for older women, they are VERY comfortable to wear around the house, especially when it's warm.

There were food vendors, both the prepared kind (if you wanted to arrive hungry, or got hungry in the course of the evening) and farmstand:

Yes, I am part of a CSA, but some items we haven't gotten yet - or I ate what we did get, and the next delivery is on Thursday.  From one vendor came the potatoes (red and purple), onions, and one cucumber.  The bigger cucumber (which reminds me of the ones that grew in the little plot under our one window air conditioner, and so were constantly watered by the drip, when I lived in San Antonio as a child) and the cherry tomatoes (I seem to need more than my CSA is likely to give me because the tomato tarts I made for the green room at Sunday's show were very popular, especially the vegan one - I need to make at least two of those this week!) came from another vendor.  They are also the source of the bread.  Because of the heat I wasn't baking my own, but I didn't get any at the farmer's market on Sunday.  My starter is sulking from being banished to the back of the refrigerator and slow to slough off the hibernation.  So I was happy to buy a loaf, and can report it is very nice bread.

These went into the little inside pocket of my own bag, not with the others in the basket-bag:

The unmatched fused-glass earrings are more likely to be pins for me.  I love the one with the polka dots!  OK, I love polka dots.  Since I don't have pierced ears, I need to convert them to other uses, or to clips, and I just like the idea of using the one on the left as a lapel pin.

The other is a pendant from a glassblower who had many interesting items; I almost bought a spiderweblike suncatcher to hang in one of my office windows.  But that pendant attracted my eye because the inclusions look so much like lithops, which I like.

I browsed items from a third vendor, whose items come recommended, but all the rings I liked are too big for my fingers.  Ah, well, I was running out of cash.  I did get a bumper sticker from Hartford Prints! on the way to my car, but I won't put it on until daylight.  And I need to work up a cord to go with the pendant.

So glad to have had tonight off!

I went to an art museum and a fight almost broke out.......

I know I have been neglecting the blog.  Work is busy; I keep thinking I’ll write about something but want to add photos, and the photos aren’t ready, so I don’t add anything.  I should just write once a week and hope for the best.  In the meantime, I had posted on Facebook that I went to a movie lecture at a local art museum, and a fight almost broke out during the post-film discussion, which caused one of my regular correspondents to ask “So, what was this about a fight almost breaking out?”  After all, art museum patrons, especially when we’re talking about Renaissance art, tend to be a more genteel set.

I sent an explanation to him, and he suggested it was sufficiently well-written to post.  I thought it might be a way to reinvigorate the blog, and made a few additions to set the scene a bit more.  Otherwise, this is much as I sent it to him:

The Wadsworth Atheneum recently opened an exhibit about the painter Michaelangelo Caravaggio and his effect on contemporaries and later painters, called “Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy.”  It’s compelling and I encourage you to go see it.  As always, in conjunction with such exhibits they are offering a number of special lectures and related events, including a showing of the Derek Jarman movie "Caravaggio" with introduction and discussion by Ronald Gregg, Senior Lecturer and Programming Director of Film Studies at Yale University.  The professor is gay and from his resume is clearly into LBGT studies.  But not offensively so, and he spoke very well about Jarman and how he made the movie and some of the facts behind it, such as the very low budget and how Jarman cast the film based upon an existing painting of Caravaggio and the people in Caravaggio’s own paintings for a realistic effect, yet incorporated anomalies such as a typewriter, motorcycle, and pocket calculator.  Then we saw the film, and a lot of people left without waiting for the discussion.

If you have not seen the movie, do not expect a biopic along the lines of “Pollock” or “The Agony and the Ecstasy.”  This film very much reflects Jarman's aesthetic, with much a fabrication because there isn't much known about the painter.  Not a linear telling, it is in many ways as much about Jarman as it is about Caravaggio.  As I described it to my friend, the movie is “very sexual, both homo and hetero, back and forth in time, and clearly the imagery was based upon Caravaggio's paintings, including most of the ones in the current special exhibit in the museum.”

The first person to say anything was a youngish man with dark curly hair who looked as if he could have been one of Caravaggio’s models.  He didn’t wait for the formal discussion to start, but stood up as the professor was walking to the front of the stage.  He was very passionate about how horrible and "disgusting!" he thought the movie was, loudly stating that it didn't represent Caravaggio at all, there was too much sex, and Jarman should never win an award, and how dare anybody pay him to make the movie, it was a waste of time and should be investigated!  [Nevermind that Jarman died in the 1990's and made the movie in England, so investigating the NEA or other groups wouldn't do anything.]  He was quite agitated and rushed out in quite a state, not staying for any response, but an older lady stood up and shouted after him that she thought it was a good film and he was very rude, at which the young man paused in the doorway to shout that she was wrong, it was NOT art, it was a waste of time and film and money and a horrible slur on a great artist!

So we were in a bit of an uproar, which didn't settle down when another, older man kept arguing that the depiction of Caravaggio's death was all wrong, at which the professor pointed out that we don't know for sure as even the few facts known about Caravaggio’s life aren’t always clear, and the man argued that we do know, and the professor tried to get back on track with the discussion by suggesting that the man knew more about Caravaggio but the professor was there to talk about Jarman and cinema, and we were off again.

It did calm down a bit as people said they saw the echoes of Caravaggio's work very clearly throughout the film, not just in the reproductions of his paintings.  But it was still more exciting than normal and I think the film curator cut things off earlier than usual.

I never did get to talk about the way Jarman used light in the film, which is one of the things we'd been told to look for and I found very interesting and effective in a number of key scenes.  Oh, well!

I will be going with one of my alumni groups on a guided tour of the exhibit in mid-May, and look forward to seeing the artwork again, having seen the film.  I agree with the person who said that a number of the scenes appear to be staged to echo Caravaggio’s work, especially in the way people would stare into the camera, or were framed against or dressed in or holding objects used in the paintings.  Having heard the professor discuss chiaroscuro, I am looking forward to studying that in Caravaggio’s work, and the paintings of those he influenced.

And I’m going to attend some of the Wadsworth’s other special events for the exhibit, we’ll have to see whether the painter and his work continue to stir such emotions in the audience!

Copyright Law - 225 Years On

Good or bad, American copyright law turned 225 years old today.  Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution includes the sentence that "The Congress shall have Power" ... "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" - words that were submitted to the delegates for their consideration on September 5, 1787.

There are many people who think that this clause needs to be stricken.  Many people who feel that this right is used to coerce money from people and limit creativity.  And as an attorney who focuses in non-patent intellectual property law, I could be accused of being one of these, on behalf of my clients.

However - the origin of the statute was to protect the rights of artists.  This is the part that so many people forget.  If you are a creator, this langauge was written to prevent others from stealing your livelihood.  If you are an artist, or a writer, or a musician, or one of the many other creative types whose works are protected by the Copyright Act, you understand what I am talking about.

At the time the Constitution was written, there was no protection for creative persons in the Colonies.  Only those in Mother England could protect and defend their creative works.  For authors, artists, and others in what would become the United States of America, there was no protection - and so it was authors and musicians who fought for the U.S. Copyright law.  Today many of the cases we hear about in the courts feature people who are suing because they believe that someone else has misused their creative work - photograph, music - for monetary gain.

The greater danger to artists, however, is not people who don't misuse their work for monetary gain - it is people who take their works without paying at all.  Recently, an intern on NPR's All Songs Considered wrote an article in which she admitted that most of her music library comes from stealing.  She doesn't pay for music, she swaps tracks with friends or copied albums from the physical discs at her college radio station's library.

Other people copy patterns, recipes, articles, or even whole books and share them.  I was appalled at one of my first knitting guild meetings after I moved to Dallas when one of the members - without a single word from anybody - handed out copies of a pattern from a recent magazine because she thought that people would enjoy making it.

Whenever this type of activity occurs, the person making the copy prevents the creator of that work - the songwriter, the musician, the designer, the writer - from receiving a royalty.  Royalties are how these people are compensated for their efforts.  It is the same as someone eating a meal and not paying the tab, or walking out of a store with a coat for s/he they didn't pay.  It is as if they said "I really like your work, so I am going to take it and not pay you."  Don't you think it should be the other way around?  Shouldn't we say "I really like your stuff and I'll be happy to pay you for it"?

As one author that I enjoy said it:

The same applies to any creative person.  When you respect their copyright, you help these people make a living doing something they love:  Music.  Writing.  Painting.  Sculpture.  Choreography.  Graphic Design.  Pattern Design.  Making movies.  Photography.

Respect their copyrights.  Help the artists survive.  Help them make a living doing what they love to do.  Buy their works - don't steal them.


______________________________________________________________________________
I haven't mentioned plagiarism, although with the starrt of the school year we start a new season, because the problem with plagiarism is not just stealing the writing, but taking credit for someone else's work.  Although money may not be involved, academic accomplishment is.  An author recently posted an article telling other authors what to do if they find out that someone has plagiarized their work.  Students increasingly think nothing of plagiarizing someone else's writing and taking credit for it, even when they face expulsion.  Give credit where it's due.

Things I did this past weekend

I have a friend who does "Movie Mondays" on her blog, and since I saw two movies (planned three, missed one because I got out of work too late) I thought about writing about it, then I realized I did some more interesting things this weekend, so here it is. A post without an agenda, for the most part. And not many pictures!

The movie I missed was "The General," which was being shown with piano accompaniment. I love classic movies, I like silent films, and it's fun to see them with live music. I've gone to "Metropolis" at Real Art Ways twice, where they have The Alloy Orchestra offering music and it's fascinating and fun.

Saturday started out semi-routine with physical therapy (usually I do yoga, but not until the knee improves) and then my Torah class, after which I went to Cinema Classics for "Strangers on a Train." I hadn't seen it before and it was typical fast-moving, tense Hitchcock. We all liked it. I couldn't go for lunch with the others afterwards because I had to get to the office and see how things were going on the deal we're trying to close - and which should at this stage be in proofreading, but of course, it's not........

Saturday night I went to SWAN DAY CT, which is a celebration of women artists. It was great, crowded, noisy, supportive.........I bought some jewelry, clothes, and artwork. I'm taking the picture to my office, it's bright and will add some colour to the dull walls. A friend was showing her photography and I told her I want to buy two prints for my office also. She didn't believe me, it's the first time she's shown her work, but I'm serious!

Sunday morning, I slept in. :) Then I worked in my stash storage, having decided it was high time to have another round of sales on eBay. Every time I mention this I get a suggestion from someone that I should use space bags and other things for added storage, but my idea is to weed out items that I am very sure I will not use, and send them to people who want to use them.

Another movie followed: "Jews and Baseball." OK, I am a baseball nut. I freely admit it! I played as a kid (who didn't?) and follow my beloved Cubbies through everything. They had two cinemas showing the movie (it's part of a film festival) and both were PACKED. Fun!

Afterwards, home, and back on the computer for work. Watched some of my usual Sunday night TV shows - "Chopped All-Stars" especially. Was very happy that the hot Aarón Sánchez won his round. But I am torn between him and Nate Appleman for the ultimate winner. I'll have to tune in next week - hopefully I'll be back in time from the foodie adventure my friend Judy has scheduled.