I Used To Think My Right Hand Was Uglier Than My Left (The art of Ken Nordine)

Jun13

I discovered Ken Nordine I don’t know how long ago. But he’s addicting. You see, he’s not exactly a poet and much more than a musician. He’s a bard working in the realm of jazz. Yet even that doesn’t do him justice. Well here, take a listen.

Yes, listen. His voice is so soothing, you forget that he’s taking you down a surreal path into the ridiculous and poignant. Most of these (can I really call them songs?) come from a series of albums titled Word Jazz that came out in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This first song/story, titled “Magenta,” comes from an album I don’t have, yet I love the animation that has been attached to it.

This next listen, “My Baby,” is just plain silly. Many of his song/stories are structured in this way. A sort of confessional as he tells you his secret. He speaks to you as if you’re in the room with him. Look for the twist at the end.

This is one of my all time favorites. It’s called “I Used To Think My Right Hand Was Uglier Than My Left.” Now that’s a title for you. Who wouldn’t be drawn to that?

“Down the Drain” embodies a serene feeling I get when I take a bath. Maybe you get it too. Although I don’t know if my mind travels to all the places Ken’s does.

“The Sound Museum” is just what is sounds like, a museum of modern sound “paintings”. Bizarre, I know, but Ken Nordine pulls it off. Take a listen.

At this point you might be wondering why you recognize his voice. Ken Nordine has such a deep and captivating voice, that he’s done many voice overs and commercials. He was even the coach for Linda Blair in the Exorcist.

When you have a chance, pick up one of his albums, sit back, and let his voice carry you into new realms of thought.

Tim Kane

Magical Realism: The Forgotten Genre

May20

Many readers know about fantasy fiction. Paranormal and supernatural tales are burning up the charts. Few people realize that there is a sister genre, nestled in the cracks of literature: Magical Realism.

Step into the Way-Back-Machine with me to my middle school. There, my Spanish teacher, a burly Brazilian bodybuilder, introduced me to the genre. It was no mistake, as the concept was born in Latin America. The concept of these stories is a perfectly normal, rational world, but with one magical element.

In magical realisms, the common and mundane are transformed into the amazing and unreal. It’s a genre of surprises. Time is fluid, pulling the reader into the unusual.

Need some examples? How about Like Water for Chocolate? The novel by Laura Esquivel shows the domestic life of women in a small town. Yet the protagonist, Tita, can’t achieve happiness because of her mother. She imbues her emotions into the food she makes. Those that partake of her delicacies, enact those emotions for her. For example, Tita suffers from forbidden love, and she infuses this emotion into a wedding cake. The guests to eat the cake, all suffer from severe longing.

Here’s a clip from Tita’s magical meal.

Another perfect example is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1912). Here an office worker awakes one day to discover that he’s been transformed into a cockroach. His family must then deal with his new insect form.

A comic adaptation of Metamorphosis that I adore.

Many movies also fall into the magical realism arena, such as: Being John Malkovich, Big Fish, Black Swan, City of Angels, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

Many fantasy writers scoff at the idea that this is a unique genre, saying that magical realism is simply another name for fantasy fiction.

Gene Wolfe stated, “magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish,” and Terry Pratchett said magic realism “is like a polite way of saying you write fantasy.” Yet there are differences. Most notably the use of

antinomy, or the simultaneous presence of two conflicting codes. When you read fantasy, there’s an internal logic, rules, to the universe. In magical realism key events have no logical explanation. Why can Tita infuse food with emotion? There is no reason. She just can.

It’s this element that so fascinates me. In a world where every motivation needs to be explained and teased apart, it’s a relief to say it happened just because. Magical realism includes events that don’t fit into any world, anywhere.

Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian writer, uses of magical realism to blend reality and fantasy so that the reader can’t tell the difference. In his story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, an angel falls to the Earth because of a violent rainstorm. The reality of the situation is never doubted. Although the angel is a magical being, he is treated in a realistic way. Here’s the start to the story.

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale For Children

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away and sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

For the full text, visit here.

Make it Habit. Make it Happen. (Adventures in Success)

May3

Who says self-help needs to be serious? When you’re Will Powers, you can spout affirmations and amuse at the same time. Take a gander at a few of the nuggets that will transform you into a better person.

You are an important person. a rare individual. a unique creature. there has never been anyone just like you and never will be. you have talents and abilities no one else has. in some ways you’re superior to any other living person. the power to do anything you can imagine is within you when you discover your real self by practicing a few simple laws of success.

Curious? This song (as well as the Will Powers persona) is the brainchild of New York photographer Lynn Goldsmith. In 1983 she released an album titled “Dancing for Mental Health” with the lead song being “Adventures in Success.” The song doled out psychological advice using Lynn’s electronically tweaked voice. The goal was to make her sound androgynous. Everything was set to electronic dance music.

“I used a vo-coder to be Will. The point was to make my voice sound as if I could be either male or female – where will comes from is for both sexes,” she says. “It’s the one and only comedy self help dance record made by someone who is living proof that where there is Will, there’s a way….. take from it as you Will.”

Now, ready yourself for the full experience:

When Lynn wasn’t expounding on the virtues of self-love, she was a damn good photog. She snapped shots of everyone from the Beatles to Michael Jackson.

Ozzy Osborne

Michael Jackson

Gene Simmons from Kiss

I will always cherish the advice of Will Powers. He/she always cheers me up when the song pops up on my iPod. Under the Will Powers persona, she could give Stuart Smalley a run for his money:

Tim Kane

Genetically Engineered Animals for the Future

Apr19

Scientists will always tinker. While they mostly seek to improve the world, some scientists stray into Frankenstein category. Now that the genome has been hacked open, also sorts of possibilities pop up, from the useful to the ridiculous.

Say you often can’t find your cat when she wanders around the house at night. Problem solved. Get a glow in the dark cat.

Yes, it’s true. South Korean scientists meshed a cat’s DNA with a red fluorescent protein. Why did they want glowing kitties? Just because.

Although some of the genetic engineering works around possibility for science’s sake. Not everyone needs a glowing cat. But what about a dinosaur? Look at a modified Umbuku Lizard.

Those wings aren’t glued on. They were dormant in the lizard’s genes. A little tinkering brought them out. Scientists believe that this lizard is a descendent of the Pterodactyl, which lost its ability to fly some millions of years ago. To date only 6 of these flying Umbuku have been produced and they are kept seperate from the natural Umbuku due the risk of cross breeding.

Some genetic tinkering can produce results we can all use. Consider the fact that nearly all paper comes from wood pulp. However, you have to kill the tree to make the paper. What if you didn’t? Trees produce leaves every season. A Swiss-based company saw the possibilities. They engineered a tree whose leaves look like sheets of paper. That’s right. Just pluck a sheet and get writing. Bonus, the tree lives.

Up to this point, scientists have combined like items (plant with plant or animal with animal). Here comes the fern spider.

This is one of the first animal/plant hybrids. The Italian Wolf spider (Lycosa tarantula) was crossed with a ponga fern (Cyathea dealbata) to test the survival rates of creatures with camouflage.

Finally, this tinkering can be simply for the purpose of beauty.

The Japanese company, Suntory, managed to create a blue rose called “Applause.” Blue roses don’t exist in nature. Many horticulturalists strive for this coveted goal. The company mixed rose genes (Old Garden ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’) with a delphinidin-producing gene from a pansy.

The future certainly looks strange. I don’t know how I’ll use my glowing cat, but at least I can pull a sheet of paper from my tree. Alas, if only it grew money.

Tim Kane

Evolution Gone Awry (The Disturbing Art of Patricia Piccinini)

Apr17

If you’ve never seen Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures, then you have missed out on a whole world of weirdness. Take a look at the photo below from “The Fitzroy Series” (2012). Look at the mix of an actual environment and the sculpted creatures. The boy sleeping in the bed? He’s probably a sculpture too.

She uses a combination of silicone, fibreglass and human hair to create her sculptures. Often she pairs her bizarre beings with imagined future beings.

She also offers a series of sculptures that cause the viewer to question whether this is a creature that once lived or possibly a result of laboratory tinkering. Take a look at “Offering” (2009). Is this a dog? Perhaps a werewolf cub? It certainly evokes a warm babyish feeling.

Now take a look at “Newborn” (2010). Perhaps this is the offering grown a little larger?

This little guy looks comforting yet disturbing at the same time. Are those arms? Fingers? Tentacles? I’m not sure. Does it have a trunk?

In her series “Aloft” (2010) she shows an ominous nest dangling above viewers’s heads.

From the second story, viewers can see inside the nest. Note that the boy didn’t craw in there. He’s sculpted.

Yes, disturbing is this artist’s middle name. I don’t know what worries me more, the giant larval creatures or the kid about to tumble to the floor.

Finally, look at one of her most recent projects “Welcome Guest” (2011). Here we have more full grown creature paired with a child.

As always in Piccinini’s sculptures, the children look happy and calm when faced with the bizarre or unusual. This piece makes me wonder what the welcome guest evolved from. Those claws are disturbing.

To see more of Piccinini’s sculptures, visit her website.

Tim Kane