Every year though, I like to buy a little monster head in a box, a sculpture by David Pound. He makes little heads out of Polymer Clay and found objects, and mounts them in wooden boxes. I love his work. By Sunday, I was afraid his selection would be thinned out too much, so I decided to ride down on the DART train after work and pick one up Friday evening, when the festival first opened.
I made it down there and walked back and forth along the long line of booths about three times before I saw his booth. For some reason, every year I have trouble finding it, although it’s pretty much in the same place.
David Pound’s booth of little monster heads in wooden boxes at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival always draws a crowd.
At any rate, his work was as great as ever. As I looked over the selection, people kept coming in and exclaiming how cool the little monsters were and how imaginative everything was. It was very hard for me to make up my mind -there was the guy with the mouse in his mouth, the alien with cat shoulder blades for ears, or the guy with mole hands sticking out the top of his head.
While I was looking a young girl with bright purple hair that was walking around with her parents bought a yellow head. I told her, “That’s the one I was going to get.”
“Really?”
“No, I’m just teasing.”
Actually, hers was the last one I would have bought. It looked cool, but didn’t have a real face. I decided to buy one that had a wry expression, and picked out one called Fracture Zone.
I hope you like him.
Fracture Zone
The heads I bought in previous years:
Persuation
Burrow
Earrings I had David Pound make for Candy for Mother’s Day last year.
“I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may then arise, revealing to my charmed sight what may not bless my waking eyes.”
― Anne Brontë, Best Poems of the Brontë Sisters
I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in
—-Bob Seger, Night Moves
Well, there’s a lion… and a tree, and desert plants, and a stylized rose and a burning dove with a key on a rope and an arm and an eye and…. plenty to go around.
When I was a little kid, I had a paint-by-number kit… you know, one of those bilious hunks of cheap canvas board with numbered areas printed in blue ink that corresponded with little plastic tubs of oil paint. Now, I imagine they come with some sort of water-based acrylic – safer and easier for children – but this one had real slow-drying artists’ oil paint.
I might have been six years old… maybe seven. Fifty years ago.
I sat at the kitchen table, wielding the cheap brush that came with the kit, carefully cleaning it after each color and moving across the canvas matching the numbers with the proper paint. It amazed me… that I could create an actual work of art (unfortunately, my skills have advanced little since).
It didn’t seem too hard to me to make the leap beyond the preprinted canvas – surely it wouldn’t be that hard to do yourself. I was a little kid, what did I know? Nothing about composition, blending… and nothing about mixing colors.
What I especially remember is the sky above the sailboat. The scene had the boat fighting against a headwind on a dramatic tumbling, mostly overcast day – with the heavens filled with irregular patches of brown, beige, gray, and a little blue peeking through here and there. It was beautiful to me.
Now, whenever I have a sky like that… like this, my subconscious conjures up the by-the-mumbers painting of the sailboat from the distant cobwebby recesses of the past. Before I realize what I am thinking about, weather like this, fills my nose with the unmistakable odor of linseed oil and turpentine. Only then do I pause, look up, and remember the sailboat.
“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“A flower blossoms for its own joy.”
― Oscar Wilde
“There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate.
The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”
And the white rose weeps, “She is late;”
The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;”
And the lily whispers, “I wait.”
She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.”
― Alfred Tennyson
It was odd walking around the Arboretum – I kept expecting to see the Chihuly Glass and it isn’t there any more. The gorgeous colors of Dallas Blooms made up for the absence of the sculptures.
“I stopped in front of a florist’s window. Behind me, the screeching and throbbing boulevard vanished. Gone, too, were the voices of newspaper vendors selling their daily poisoned flowers. Facing me, behind the glass curtain, a fairyland. Shining, plump carnations, with the pink voluptuousness of women about to reach maturity, poised for the first step of a sprightly dance; shamelessly lascivious gladioli; virginal branches of white lilac; roses lost in pure meditation, undecided between the metaphysical white and the unreal yellow of a sky after the rain.”
― Emil Dorian, Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944
“hark, now hear the sailors cry,
smell the sea, and feel the sky
let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic…”
― Van Morrison
“Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick
It was time for another Setlist on the Green in Klyde Warren Park – I had been to the first and second ones last season, and the one last week was rained out (though the weather didn’t seem so bad to me). I really have enjoyed these, so I rode the DART train downtown after work and bought myself a sushi roll from a food truck, a beer from the beer trailer, and sat down with my camera down front, ready to rock.
What’s cool about the Setlist on the Green is that, with six different folks playing only a half hour each, you get a variety of styles and attitudes – and if there is one that does not fit your fancy, well, wait a minute and there will be another one. The park is a unique gorgeous urban setting, – even if the stage area and the restaurant site next door seems to be in a perpetual state of construction.
TreyChick at Setlist on the Green
The festivities started with TreyChick (Trey Pendergrass and Natalie Young) who brought a nice sense of humor to their performance. They also were the first band I’ve ever seen using iPads for setlist and lyric sheets. I made a note of one of their lyrics – “I”m not good enough to love you, only good enough to fix your car.” I know that feeling.
Then Luna Matto, Johnny Beuford, and Becky Middleton (from Ishi) did their sets – and they were really cool. As each performer performed and the evening went on, the sun setting, the clouds skidding by overhead between the skyscrapers like oil paints smeared on the sky, behind the stage the distant cars on the busy road shooting down into the buried highway under the park, the crowd slowly growing… it was a great time.
The crowd slowly grows in Klyde Warren Park.
But, I have to admit, almost everyone, me included, were there to hear the last performer, Home by Hovercraft.
First of all… what a damn cool name for a band. I remember, back in the early days of the world (1981) sitting down with another music fanboy and systematically deciding on the best band names. We even made a bracket and voted and such. In the end, he had Talking Heads as the best band name – and I agreed, though I thought The Teardrop Explodes was a hair better. This was thirty years before I had heard of Home by Hovercraft… which would give those titans of the time a run for the money.
Second, there is a lot of buzz about this band and I wanted to see them in the worst way. When the news of something hot and new reaches me, the least cool and hip person on the planet, you know it must be worthwhile.
Home by Hovercraft is greatness. The first thing that strikes you is the instrumentation. The lead singer plays a tarnished euphonium when he isn’t singing. The backup singer (his wife) plays keyboards plus there’s another singer with a mandolin or harmonica. Tonight they added a cello player. There’s a drummer on a kit, but he is assisted in the rhythm section by an Irish Dancer (the lead singer’s sister), stomping out beats on a hunk of basketball court hardwood. When she isn’t dancing, she plays a small glockenspiel.
Home by Hovercraft
Lead Singer with Euphonium
Drums and Mandolin
Irish Dancing Rhythm Section
Keyboards
Home by Hovercraft
Despite the odd instruments, this isn’t a novelty band. They are very tight and extremely talented. The vocals are strong and unique.
I have no idea what genre their music falls into (other than that awful moniker, “indie,” which means nothing)… I guess it can be best described as sounding like Home by Hovercraft.
Home by Hovercraft has a strong theatrical background which comes through on stage – they are very entertaining and confident up there. They have done a musical On the Eve which will be produced by Theater Three later on this year. I have got to see that. I think a lot of the music on their album Are We Chameleons? (I downloaded it from Amazon) is from the musical.
Our government, I am more and more convinced, has degenerated into a mechanism whose most palpable effect (not its purpose, of course) is to irritate citizens by wasting their time and requiring their collusion in an endless bureaucratic paper chase.
My Tech Top 10
An interesting list – Actually, I only agree with one of his choices. Bet you can guess which one.
The only way to drop into Rio. I’m glad I was able to watch this on youtube – now I don’t have to do it myself.
The entire process seems to have started in 1923, when a biologist named Walter Finkler reported that he had managed to successfully transplant the heads of insects. He’d been working with water boatmen, meal worms, and common butterflies – both in adult and grub form. The transplantation process was not complex. He’d grab two insects, cut off their heads with sharp scissors, and switch them. The fluid that the insects themselves leaked cemented the new heads in place. After a little time — a 1923 article says a few weeks — the insects were healed up and doing whatever their new heads told them to do. Finkler claimed that the heads of female insects on male bodies continued female behavior, and the head of one species of butterfly kept the habits of its own species, even when its body belonged to a different species.
Bill Chance 