an object of art

“Every child in Alice’s class poured his or her whole heart into the Get Well cards, and each was an object of art. One card showed a brilliant ball of gold glitter, which represented the gasoline fire at the Gregg’s home. The gold ball was connected by a long streak of silver glitter to the tiny stick figure of a little girl. This was the artist trying to put out the fire with a stream from a garden hose. The caption said, Get Well Soon, Glenn Gregg.”

—Lewis Nordan, from Wolf Whistle, 1993.

a Negro cabin

“There was nobody in the shop for a haircut this time of night, just Rage Gage, the barber, and a few friends, blues singers.

The light from the front window was yellow, and although it broke up a corner of darkness and the rain with its small strength, it seemed to turn to water and to run and fade like cheap dye, once it left the window.

The house was not a real barber shop, not originally, though it had been fixed up nice. It was only a Negro cabin with a barber pole out in front of it.”

—Lewis Nordan, from Wolf Whistle, 1993.

Dance Studio Wulff

—poster design by Max Bill, 1931. Avant-Garde Graphics: 1918?1934, 2004.

a rainbow effect

“The most noticeable difference between graphics of the period between the two world wars and today is the absence of full colour in the former, although colour photography was pioneered in Russia well before the First World War. Few of the works in this book are in more than three colours; many are printed only in black and red. For a full-colour effect, designers were ingenious in overprinting two or three colours, and they exploited a traditional printing technique that spread ink of varying colours across the printing press rollers to give a rainbow effect.”

—Richard Hollis, from Art + Technology = Design, an essay in the wonderful (if you like this kind of thing) Avant-Garde Graphics: 1918?1934, 2004.

the ziggurats

“Ten thousand years ago men were building round huts with red clay plaster at Tell Mureybit on the upper Euphrates River. About 7500 B.C. they took to building larger houses with neat square corners. . . . High in the hills between [the rivers Tigris and Euphrates] lies the site of Cayonu, where varied types of building were put up around 7000 B.C. Some have long parallel rooms on level dirt floors. Solid floors distinguish two larger structures; one is paved with flat flagstones as long as five feet, while the other has a striking orange-red floor with a mosaic of four kinds of limestone, all carefully polished. . . . Here, perhaps, we sense the inspiration for many great buildings of antiquity.

Five thousand years later these village cults had developed into the state-run religion of Sumer, first of civilizations. The house-size holy places had grown outward and upward to become the ziggurats, as low supporting platforms had been rebuilt time after time atop their predecessors. The shrine became the high holy of holies, enclosed within its own precinct in the heart of a walled city—the new way in which men had chosen to live.”

—Norman Hammond, from his introduction to Builders of the Ancient World: Marvels of Engineering, a National Geographic Society book, 1986.

the phi phenomenon

“A subject is seated in a darkened room and two spots of light are flashed off and on alternately. When the interval between flashes is more than 0.2 sec, the subject sees two flashing lights; but when the interval is less than 0.2 sec the subject sees one light in continuous motion. . . . This phenomenon underlies our experience of movies, which are actually a rapidly displayed series of still photographs. . . . Apparent motion is an experience that emerges from simple sensations but cannot plausibly be reduced to them. It is, in short, a perceptual whole (Gestalt, in German), given immediately to consciousness and deserving direct study. The Gestal psychologists advocated a holistic psychology based on the mind’s perception of complete forms.

This experimental demonstration (called the phi phenomenon), which shows that conscious experience is not usefully reducible to bundles of discrete sensations, was the starting point of the Gestalt movement.”

—Thomas Hardy Leahey, from A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought, second edition, 1987.

do you consider these lyrics?

“I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it?s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?

Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I’ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.

I’m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics.”

—Author Unknown. Found this on the flipside of the first page of a clipped copy of the David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker, April 10, 2006. Pretty funny, huh?

Mrs. Peacock

“The first two times my parents left for vacation, my sisters and I escorted them to the door and said that we would miss them terribly. It was just an act, designed to make us look sensitive and English, but on this occasion we meant it. ‘Oh, stop being such babies,’ our mother said. ‘It’s only a week.’ Then she gave Mrs. Peacock the look meaning, ‘Kids. What are you doing to do?’

There was a corresponding look that translated to ‘You tell me,’ but Mrs. Peacock didn’t need it, for she know exactly what she was going to do—enslave us. An hour after my parents left, she was lying face down on their bed, dressed in nothing but her slip. Like her skin, it was the color of Vaseline, an un-color really, that looked even worse with yellow hair. Add to this her great bare legs, which were dimpled at the inner knee, and streaked all over with angry purple veins.?

—David Sedaris, from The Understudy: The Week of Mrs. Peacock. The New Yorker, April 10, 2006.

perfect pitch.

When you throw a banjo into a dumpster and it hits an accordion.

—attributed to Willie Nelson by Little Jimmy K. (Jim, did I get this right?)

saddlebag full of harmonicas

“A skinny yellow dog dragged a saddlebag full of harmonicas down the street in its teeth.”

—Lewis Nordan, from Wolf Whistle, 1993. Thank you Jimmy K, for the tip. I’m diggin? this crazy novel!