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inspired by myself when I was 15 years younger
Sunday, October 2 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
[REDACTED]
This afternoon I was listening to a couple crude "songs" I'd recorded on a four track more than 15 years ago. The most inspiring (and perhaps most poorly recorded) of these songs was called "Lemmings," and featured a great lyric repeated over and over: "Walking on zodiac, all of the animals, none of the animals speak." I found myself thinking that it wouldn't be a bad soundtrack for some sort of stop-action animation, perhaps intercut with other things. So I began working on a fairly large (at least by recent standards) painting measuring twenty inches by twenty inches. Using a ruler and a protractor, I divided it into twelve sectors radiating from the center of the canvas and then painted somewhat-distorted zodiac symbols in each of the trapezoidal sectors. As I worked, I stopped periodically to snap a picture using, qStopMotion, the free stop-action animation software I'd downloaded. It works pretty well, although it did crash once on me before I started working in earnest. (Stop motion software has to be reliable, or it's too depressing to use.)
Later I delivered Neville to Gretchen at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock and then of course went by the Tibetan Center thrift store on the way home. While I was there, I briefly considered buying what appeared to be a mostly-intact SnapCircuit learning kit (that place has the best toys) but then thought it would probably be best to let somebody buy it for their kid. Sure enough, a mom who was prattling endlessly with one of the female thrift store staffers about tiresome mom stuff came upon the SnapCircuit kit shortly after I'd looked. She loudly noted how expensive they are, and I verbally encouraged her from my unseen position one aisle over to get it. It was only $2, why not? I ended up buying a rechargeable-battery-powered air pump whose battery would prove incapable of holding a charge. I also got one of the arm-like desklamps for possible use as a webcam holder, for which my stop-action animation project had me feeling I had a need.
I drove out to 9W to get some galvanized steel fittings for use in attaching that arm solidly to something in the laboratory, and while I was there I impulsively purchased a high-capacity hand pump for use in quickly getting water out of the greenhouse sub-basement.
This evening Gretchen and had dinner at Rock da Casbah in Saugerties. As always, we had the "Hey Jude" pasta dish and had intermittent conversations with Judy, the woman who runs the place. She told us that there's a huge 3000-square-foot sub-basement under the restaurant that actually goes out under the street. It used to be speakeasy & brothel back during prohibition, and Judy has vague plans of perhaps renovating it and turning it into something. She also has plans of writing a memoir (with a view to perhaps laying the groundwork for a film) about her years spent as a successful call girl in Tokyo back in the early 1990s. And old man who lives a couple doors down came in for his nightcap (an eight-ounce glass of beer), and Gretchen got to talking with him and soon discovered that his daughter is perhaps the only vegan animal rights activist in Woodstock whom she does not know. Meanwhile Judy was giving me a guided tour of all the rock & roll photographs covering the restaurant's walls.
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