Acrylic on canvas, 16" x 12"

I mean, it still works, and it still delivers text and images, but its organization and its presentation are dull and hard to navigate by modern standards. I also have not yet added a "buy-over-internet" feature which I have acquired from Google Check-out. I am waiting for some divine revelation from above to descend on me and turn the old Pyracantha website into a beautiful, easy-to-visit, well-designed website which is not dependent on Flash or other bandwidth-eating gimmicks.

I am not a web designer. If I were, I would have already re-designed the site. I kind of know what I want but do not have the technical expertise. My Webmistress, on whose kindness and generosity and skill this whole site depends, is not a professional web designer either, and is too busy with a major day job to spend the time it needs.

Therefore I call upon the few remaining Electron readers to suggest where I might go to find a good design resource for the re-modeling of the Pyracantha site. That would include this Electron weblog as well. I need to create easily accessible art galleries and more showplaces for my art. There needs to be online ordering so people from all over the world can buy prints. I get many inquiries about buying prints, but have not been able to do the transactions either because the inquirers are not in the USA, or because no one under 40 uses ordinary old paper checks any more. I found that last bit out to my surprise when I asked someone why I was losing so many customers when I asked them to send me a check.

See how much the world has changed since 1998? I am perhaps the only person left who does not have a cellphone stuck to their ear all the time, nor do I have a PDA or a Blackberry. (If you don't know what a PDA or a Blackberry is, you are even worse off than I am.) I refuse to succumb to technophobia. If I can't find a web design resource, I will have to somehow acquire enough webskill to do it myself. If I could learn algebra and trigonometry and first year calculus, I could probably learn web work. But there is always the matter of time, priorities, and time management, which is increasingly becoming a pressing issue for me. I could use a lot of help on that, too.

After months of admiring this art, and knowing just how much work goes into it, I mentally stepped back and wondered to myself. I had never conceived how much of this material there was. I never knew how many artists, many of them spectacularly good, worked in this medium and industry all over the world, from China and Korea all the way through Eastern and Western Europe, and all over North America, including many immigrant artists who have come over to the USA to find their fortune.

And then I wondered why all this effort, all this talent, all the toil of thousands and thousands of international artists with amazing technology in their hands, was spent in the name of ….entertainment. Mere entertainment: video games, comic-book and fantasy movies, science fiction and fantasy illustrations, role-playing games, anime and manga cartoons, much of which will be obsolete in a few months. So much work, so little ….substance.

I was raised in a world of cultural Puritanism. In the "modernist" world of high art and classical music, I was instilled with an Augustinian revulsion for "entertainment." Art was for serious purposes. It was either for religious worship, as with Bach's great choral works, or it was nationalistic, such as the music of Dvorak or Verdi, situating the listeners in a proud cultural heritage. Or, in more modern times, art and music were instruments of forcible enlightenment, shocking the listeners and viewers into what should be a higher moral and spiritual state, whether political or personal. It was anything but entertainment.

Entertainment has the connotation of frivolity. You go to the movies not to be given moral and spiritual uplift, but to be swept away for a few hours into the world of Tolkien or Star Wars or Fred Astaire. You don't learn how to be a better human being by playing "Grand Theft Auto 4." A cultural puritan wants art to somehow mold the listener or viewer or reader into a better person. This is not (generally) what entertainment does.

In ages past, it was the Churches that hired the artists to convey morality and splendor. That was where the money was. And now, of course, entertainment is where the money is, which is why there are thousands of these artists striving to get the bucks working there. The default job for "serious" artists is not working for a game company (horrors!) but teaching in a university, college, or even a high school, where there is still a sense of didactic moralism in academic art. (For instance, the heavy-handed social messages in many of the "installations" that populate modern galleries.) In my younger days I remember musicians looking down at even famous American composers like Copland and Bernstein, because they dared to write music for movies or Broadway. That is, popular entertainment. And yet, some of Prokofiev's greatest works were written for films, such as Alexander Nevsky. Is that piece redeemed by the wartime nationalism that helped the Russians resist the German invasion?

The times, obviously, are very different now. There are far more cultural "niches" (borrowing from the language of ecology) for artists nowadays. Postmodernists will say that the old divisions of high moralist art versus low entertainment art no longer exist. And yet it still haunts someone like me, old enough to have grown up under the shadow of the Puritan regime.

Now Sam is graduating this weekend from Saint John's College in Annapolis. I am so proud of him! I wish him the best as he moves on to the next phase in his life.

A very good friend who has benefited from acupuncture recommended me to her acupuncturist. The practitioner is an American, who learned the technique (or art, perhaps) in the USA, from Chinese teachers. It took a while to arrange an appointment, but finally we settled on a time.

The initial appointment took more than two hours! Conventional doctor's visits are a hurried fifteen minutes. The acupuncturist took a very thorough medical history, interviewing me about things which conventional doctors would not have asked. She said that these details were important in Chinese medicine. She also looked closely at my tongue, saying that internal conditions (according to the Chinese system) were reflected on the tongue. After examining me, she said that my situation was very common, even "textbook" familiar, and easily treated with acupuncture.

She had me lie down on a nicely cushioned bed, in a peaceful environment with soft music playing, scented potpourri, and translucent curtains drawn over the bright window. The needles are sterile, very thin and are one-use only. She found the places on me, swabbed them with alcohol, and popped in the needles. Most of the points were not painful, no more than a slight pinprick, though one or two were a bit sharper. Those subsided in a minute or so, and didn't hurt during the treatment. I lay quietly on the bed for about fifteen or twenty minutes while the needles did their work. The acupuncturist left me alone but came in to check on me halfway through the session.

When it was done she pulled out all the needles and I sat up and put my clothes on. I felt refreshed and relaxed, without the thought that I had been pricked by needles. We made another appointment for about a week later. I was told not to expect instant results, but I did feel "cooler" and less stressed. I still got hot flashes, though, and even with acupuncture they may never go away altogether. But I am willing to keep on with this, even if modern science, which thinks it always knows better, doesn't quite know how it works.

I unpacked the slides from their hiding place, where I had kept them for decades. The slides are 35 millimeter half-frame exposures. They were taken on a camera called the Olympus Pen, which my folks had given me a year or so earlier. This little camera lasted me until the late seventies, when it finally wore out. So I have boxes and boxes of tiny slides, including my Camp Idlepines pictures.

My scanner didn't like the half-frame film size. It is set to recognize full-frame 35mm slides or negatives, as they are set in a plastic grid on the scanning plate. So in order to get good scans of the 35mm films, I had to do them one by one, patiently adjusting the machine's scan "window" to cover each one. The slides were also very dusty, and even blowing air and a clean paintbrush didn't get all the dust off. Fortunately, dust specks and discoloration can now be removed through the technological marvel of Photoshop.

When I started scanning these pictures, I realized that the film had faded. This was to be expected, even if it were not exposed to light. The reds and the yellows in the color balance had faded, leaving an intense bluish cast to all the pictures. So not only did I have to work on editing out the dust specks, I had to restore the "natural" color to all these old films, using the built-in adjustments provided by Photoshop. I adjusted color balance, brightness and contrast, lightness and sharpness. I added color to some faded photos, using "transparent" overlays of digital tint. Some of the photos needed very special treatment to bring out any image at all. At the age of 11, I just wasn't that good a photographer, and some of the pictures were very underexposed. I could see, though, that these nearly black slides had a recognizable image buried in the darkness.

I devised a crude but effective way to retrieve the color images from my very underexposed dark slides. I mounted the slide in a black paper "mask" and held it up to a very bright light. Then when I had the image in view, I took my digital camera, set to "close range," and photographed the slide with the bright light (my studio table light) shining through it. Then I worked on the digital photo, bringing out as much detail and color as possible. They weren't ever going to be great photographs, but at least a face and a figure is clearly visible in these images, finally, after more than forty years.

The blue-ness remains, however. Some of this is true-to-life. I remember being enthralled by the intense, brilliant blue of the sky over this part of New Hampshire, far from polluting cities. Some of the images are just pictures of sky and leaves, and I remember taking them just to document how bright the greens and blue were. I loved the forest, and I remember spending as much time alone among the trees as possible. I took many pictures of dappled sunlight among dark green leaves, though some of these photographs are not easily recovered. The reflecting surface of the lake, where the camp had its waterfront, was often a brilliant blue as well. I hated swimming, but I loved boating, and I found pictures of the beautiful aluminum canoes I had learned to paddle.

Another series of photos I retrieved were of a day spent climbing Mount Chocorua, a 3500-foot peak in the White Mountains, noted for its rocky bald summit. Here we are climbing up the trail toward the top.

I clearly remember this hike, which I enjoyed, and I brought my Olympus Pen with me. It was a perfect day, and the blueness of the view from the top of the mountain has not faded at all.

Since I just spent a peaceful, outdoor weekend in another beautiful location, my mind is still out there with the trees and the birds. Maybe someday I'll see skies this blue again.

I also had time to sit and draw some of the old nineteenth-century buildings on the retreat center grounds. The "Old Farm House" is a historic building that is locally famous and I spent a very pleasant time on the site doing its portrait. This is not the place where I spent the retreat, that is a much more modern building elsewhere. My drawing is in ink and greyscale markers, about 7" x 10".

If I wanted to use calculus I could claim that even though I am placed on a sphere with a curved surface, that point of perpendicularity (or a tangent, horizontally) is a moment of flatness. Gravity points down to a derivative that is a tiny piece of flat earth. Disregard those hills and valleys, the Earth is flat, at least where gravity puts its point.

Trigonometry places its measurements in a "unit circle," a universal circle whose radius is always ONE. If Earth is a unit circle, a perfect section of a sphere, does that mean that Earth is a unity? Utopians wish for Just One Earth where everyone lives in "harmony," a Pythagorean dream. But the measurement of radians insists that all circle circumferences and the angles that sector them are all some measure of Pi. Everywhere a circle goes, there goes Pi. Is it possible to have a circle whose circumference is a rational number? Perhaps it isn't. Earth will always be irrational, and its numbers will never end.

"Earth Unit Circle," acrylic on black-coated thick paper. 10" x 10"

"Parabolic Weave," 10" x 8". Colored pencil and acrylic paint on thick orange paper.

The Berkeley scientists were able to retrieve ten seconds of a recording from 1860, where a woman sings a line of an old French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune." I remember this song from my own youth, when along with a little group of neighborhood kids, we learned basic French from a private teacher who held classes in her own home. It surfaces in French and other European music, quoted humorously in Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals," and referenced in a stranger way (though without the tune) by Belgian poet Albert Giraud, and then by Arnold Schoenberg in his setting (in 1912) of Giraud's "Pierrot Lunaire."

The recovered recording from 1860 is hardly high fidelity. In fact, without a lot of processing by audio experts, it would barely be audible at all. It only lasts ten seconds or so, with the voice hardly distinguishable from the noise. The female voice, warbling due to the unsteady speed of the turning phonautograph, sings her "Au Clair de la Lune" line without time or inflection, as if the inventor had asked his sound model to sing the notes slowly and deliberately so that they would register on his rotating medium. The instrument itself, as depicted in the picture in the article, has wonderful nineteenth century design elements in its stand, created in an era when scientific and technological equipment still had space for ornamentation. It reminds me very much of the current pop postmodernist aesthetic known as "steampunk," in which Victorian design, fashions, and old technologies are adapted into a modern technological alternate world. In a steampunk conception, we would be reading this on an "electric intelligence lantern" and typing our messages on a keyboard that looked like this.

The ghost-like, heavily distorted voice coming to us from distant 1860 also recalls another current design trend, sometimes called "deconstructed," "distressed," or "grunge," where an otherwise clear source is deliberately degraded and made to look very old or damaged by disaster or vandalism. In graphics, there are endless amounts of auxiliary programming for Photoshop to create effects like this. Deconstruction works for sound as well, and the ambient and experimental composers whose works I listen to, often work over sounds this way. Perhaps some ambient composer will ask someone to sing a simple song line into his phonautograph, and process it through his electrical intelligence engine so that it can reverse time back to an 1860 that never was.