If you still have no gift for Mommy, you may use this virtual one. It's courtesy of Anarchic_Universe® on behalf of Mommy. Just a click away. Please click. G'ahead. Print one or more; as long as you 'fess up where these roses come from; that's alright.
Today is a good day!
Good day t'all. Seemingly back to normal, SAMOHI PTSA announces a grand meeting with the architect in charge of the ch-ch-ch-changes. Two buildings will be demolished and rebuilt; there'll be underground parking built. Ah! Sex in he bathrooms will be cleaner. Click for UCLA report. They're already installing waterless urinals. However, wash your hands, boys and girls! Click for Anarchic_Universe report. I'll be opening our network's del.icio.us links.
I'll leave here a video sent to me thru YouTube. It's a psychedelic take on snakes. I know,I know, click for Craig and Ewan McGreggor, made with the use of fractals. Later, for real, and fer shure, click for Moon Unit Zappa. I'll be back later.
Yesterday I posted a simple list of materials needed for this do-it-yourself Mother's Day gift.
It is here, at a click away
It's very fortunate Xadai, the owner of Lombaxomba, posted a whole bunch of links on writing. Some are in today's list of del.cio.us links. Let's go to the how-tos of this project.
• on your computer, write one of those cutsie adorable letters to your Mom. If you cannot write it, think of all the good stuff your mother did and why they are important. My Mother gave me love for books, for example.
• after writing from the heart, go to a drawing software and make a portrait of Mommy at her best.
• cut and paste the writing and the drawing onto one document.
• print it on acid-free paper, best possible printer. Acid-free paper lasts without fading away.
• glue your paper onto the paperboard. If you know how to glue using an open paper clip and glue, all power to you.
• decorate your project with glitter stickers. Hearts and stars forever.
• finally, insert it all in the cheap-o frame. Voilà!
This is a Mother's Day homemade project my fourth grade class made in 1997. We used the very simple Bilingual Writing Center® software and Kid Pix® in one of its earlier versions. Now you can make your own.
Materials needed:
• self-adhesive stars and heart stickers.
• one piece of 8 1/2" x 11" hard tagboard paper, any color.
• writing software
• drawing software
• good quality printing paper
• good quality glue
• cheap frame
Tomorrow, how-tos.
in fact, I learned this technique to teach it to children in the days a double-edge razor was okay for kids to have. It's Crayola®, covered with ink of China, I think that is its name in English. After dry, we can scrape it or draw on top of the dried paper. I wasn't on drugs at all. As the cartoon John Lennon says in "The Yellow Submarine" film,
"It's all in the mind, you know?"
For more on Os Mutantes psychedelic rock and news click here and add the site to your bookmarks. Keeping my mind busy at the sound of "I'm Fixing a Hole."
Our son, the (spoiles rotten) apple of our eyes, not quite, really, discovered this feature of the Mac, an application called Photo Booth. It's in Leopard.
Mine didn't work, but it seems there is a blog using my photos in a not nice way, in Ireland. Tut-tut, please stop.
If you click on this photo you can see it in bigger sizes and leave a comment for GHR. He will be happy, I can assure you that.
This is nite-nite tme for me, after a long day going places with my husband.
We had to take care of business. For some reason Detroit came to my mind. Oh, the primaries, Hillary and Obama. I can't wait for this first turn to be over.
This photo has copyrihgt. NO reproductions etc. without the explicit authorization of its author.©
GHR can be found at Flickr and at his desk, surfing the Net for his homework. Otherwise, creating music with his piano or sax. GHR has his own blog, Mind My Generation.
I haven't had time to read about Hillary's mudslinging Obama. Tomorrow is another day. I'll survive without reading about more dirt. See you!
Beautiful sunsets are the norm in Santa Monica. The brown layer close to the ocean tells us about pollution. Holding a glass of virgin Bloody Mary, who cares? Some guacamole to help other Mexican finger foods makes us a bit wistful as the sun sinks deep behind the Palisades, a pallid copycat of the mountains we could see in Ipanema.
It's low tide now. There is a melancholy pervading the ambiance of happy hour artificial cackle. Tomorrow may be one more day to kill. One more afternoon spent on a lazy hotel rooftop. There is something morbid about the beauty of sunsets.
Anisio Medeiros was my professor at Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, FAU-UFRJ. He taught at the Escola de Belas Artes, too. A set designer, costume designer, art director and architect from Piauí, a state ridiculed before Acre took its place as motif of scorn, Anisio was a genius ahead of his time. And because I loved all films in which he worked, and heard viva voce his stories on how the set was designed (or improvised) or how the costumes were created from scratch, I dedicate this gathering of souvenirs to him.
Bye Bye Brasil has been released here, with subtitles, not bad of a subtitling job, on DVD. Read the NY Times review by Vincent Canby at a click on Bye Bye Brasil above. The film is by Cacá Diegues, who belonged to Cinema Novo and made a cool transition to a Tropicalist æsthetic code in Bye Bye Brasil. Caravana Rolidei is a poor circus on wheels trio, then a quintet. The Rolidei is a phonetic version of Holiday. They seek towns where TV (Globo) hasn't arrived yet, the hypnotic power of a TV set worshiped up in the main square of little towns.
The æsthetic motif of the costumes is great. A hairdo that twinkles with Xmas lights, the clothes of the poor, of the Native-Brazilians, all of it is political in a subtle way, sending us to the days when the Redeemer(coup d'état 64-85) built pharaonic roads, gold was found in the Amazon, but I am moving to the set design. Oh, well. The choices of places in Brazil is perfect: the riverbank town, the palm trees by the ocean, the burned and had Amazon (in 1980!) and Brasília, the destination of poor migrants straight into favelas.
I don't want to spoil the film for you. All I want you to know is this is genius if you are interested in Brazil or Brasil. Cacá Diegues bittersweet good-bye to a Brasil that becomes a Brazil and a Caravana Rolidei that becomes a Caravana Rolidey, with a y, letter inexistent in Portuguese, sum up the Tropicalist message: we devour the foreign products but spit out something different, the message of cultural cannibalism that knows no boundaries. Click here for a great article on this film.
None of what you see in this film and in so many other ones would have been possible without Anisio Medeiros. I was a poor draftsperson with a pencil. He made me the model for our B&W classes. Scorning the Oiticica which follows anyone in the Oiticica family, he would announce to all,
"We can't start the class without Tina Harris."
I remembered him due to my cybertroubles with passwords and nicknames. He would tap the floor with one foot, impatiently, while I finally arrived, late as usual, holding a cigarette, ready for my modeling time. The best souvenirs I have of Anisio Medeiros are of his sharing with us how he designed scenes improvising, as in Macunaíma, where foam was modeled to look like meats in a gigantic black bean casserole. Others are catty gossip which dies with him and us, his fave students. Finally, I did learn a lot of tricks in color techniques, from the precise names of colors to how to obtain them. Watercolor is about transparency, pastels are about several layers over each one of them. It is impossible to replicate our color sessions. I cannot fathom students sitting under a freeway in a dangerous area of downtown in order to capture how luminous a poor area can look. Or on the streets of downtown Rio anywhere nowadays.
I take my hat off to Anisio Medeiros, thank my schoolmate who refreshed some memories of him this morning and encourage you to watch this and all other films he participated in. A fine art director, genius in improvising, with peculiarities that make him a star in an era of constellation of architects teaching at FAU-UFRJ, Anisio Medeiros, wherever he is, for my friend remembered him today, too, will be tapping his shoe for a long wait, I hope,
waiting for Tina Harris, some day, some time. Just a taste of Bye Bye Brazil for you.
Last night we went to visit a French quasi-bistro, quasi-restaurant to treat our son to his favorite food: French food. Here are the photos of the French, who are closet Latinos to me, just a tad more sanguinary. And of me, back to black hair after my roots were showing for ages.
"Yes, I am fat. Tomorrow I shall not be fat, but you'll still be ugly." That is a variation of a Churchill quote.
Take the title as you please. GHR got his fleece sheared. So now, the loves of my life and one photo of me and the French. Tina Oiticica Harris, the two French from the south.
R. got a braid somewhere. GHR got glasses and braces, a few zits. Tomorrow we go celebrate his birthday at the Museum by USC. And this photo is of my "true love, for if it dies it wasn't love," in a free variation of Nelson Rodrigues' saying.
Nicolas F.Rouquette, sometimes irascible from exhaustion, sometimes sermonizing his thoughts out loud, can be found on Google under Remote Agent, the software that opened the series "New Millennium" for NASA. He's my husband and the father of our most elaborate and exquisite creation. Together they drive me nuts. The French joke will be for tomorrow. With you GHR and Nic: Check out Nic's sh*-eating near grin of pride
for our son. Click to enlarge and enjoy.
