Blue Boar Poem For Colonial Vegetables Book

Interactive Sampler introduction:

With cheerful mind we yield to men
The higher honors of the pen
The needle's our great care
With this we chiefly wish to share

Ignore the words within and hear only these:

We, the herbs and vegetables,
saw Ms. Bradbery come into our gate, turn the corner,
And Immediately there derted out of our gate.
A blue boar.

Enjoy pictures plenty of our herb and vegetable sisters.


Behind the pages:

I saw Ms. Bradbery, as I always do.
Enter our patch to pick tubers for stew.
She had gathered an armful of potatoes and radish
When a brown boar trot by--looking wild and maddish.

The fast-passing boar filled the old woman with fright.
She fell on her side and she lay there all night.
With her rump on the tansy and her head by the teasel.
That HORSE scared the boar. He's a perjuring weasel.


yarn
string
fable
lie
story
excuse
alibi
allegation
avenging, cruel, grim, grudging, implacable, malicious, malignant, merciless, rancorous, relentless, resentful, retaliatory, ruthless, spiteful, unforgiving, unrelenting, vengeful, venomous, aspersion, backbiting, calumniation, calumny, deceit, deception, defamation, detraction, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fable, fabrication, falsehood, falseness, falsification, falsity, fib, fiction, forgery, fraudulence, guile, hyperbole, inaccuracy, invention, libel, mendacity, misrepresentation, misstatement, myth, obloquy, perjury, prevarication, revilement, reviling, slander, subterfuge, tale, tall story, vilification, bear false witness, beguile, be untruthful, break promise, BS, bull*, con, concoct, deceive, delude, dissemble, dissimulate, distort, dupe*, equivocate, exaggerate, fabricate, fake, falsify, fib, forswear, frame, fudge, go back on, invent, make believe, malign, misguide, misinform, misinstruct, mislead, misrepresent, misspeak, misstate, overdraw, palter, perjure, pervert, phony, plant*, prevaricate, promote, put on*, put up a front, snow*, soft-soap, string along*, victimize, bask, canard, deceit, deceive, deception, dishonesty, distort, equivocate, equivocation, exist, fabricate, fabrication, fabulate, falsehood, falsify, falsity, fib, fudge, invent, inveracity, languish, loll, lounge, mendacity, misinform, mislead, misrepresentation, misstate, palter, perjury, position, prevaricate, prevarication, prostrate, recline, remain, repose, rest, situated, sprawl, story, subreption, tale, temporize, tergiversate, untruth

See The Moon

It has 2 eyes.
A nose.
And a mouth.
See the moon.

Alvini was in Alfred this week at part of the Gertz Lecture series, discussing Mayan time.

In his lunchtime seminar, he was discussing lunar eclipses, and their reoccurrance on a 173.5 day cycle. This number is somewhere between 5 and 6 months, closer to 6. So, eclipses occur something like this:

6moonsE6moonsE6moonsE6moonsE6moonsE5moonsE
6moonsE6moonsE6moonsE6moonsE6moons6moonsE5moonsE
6moonsE6moonsE6moonsE6moonsE6moons6moonsE6moonsE5moonsE



The Mayans had calculated whole number cycles based on cycles of the body and the heavens. Their calendar was based on the period of human gestation, about 260 days. The cycle of the planet venus is 584 days before it comes back around to the same aspect.

173.5 is to 260 as 3 is to 2, making the gestation:eclipse ratio a 3:2 ratio.

Alvini challenged us to coordinate a series of numbers which are important in contemporary culture to important dates in the past and future and to each other, to the level of perfection and accuracy which the Maya mathematicians and astronomers achieved.

I am particularly interested in the eclipse cycle because my grandfather was very engaged with the moon and referenced it constantly, and was always in tune with lunar eclipses, always ready with his hand-built telescope. One of his paintings, which I feature in "And This, Of Course, Is The Earth Down Here", is of a lunar eclipse. And then he died on a full moon. That was nothing less than perfectly poetic. I am working on a single-channel piece in After Effects which continues some of the imagery and ideas explored in "And This, Of Course, Is The Earth Down Here". This second piece is titled "And This, Of Course, Is The Moon Up Here." I want to bring in ideas of remembered and imagined science, remembered and imagined stories of place, and remembered and imagined histories.

I watched a movie two weeks ago which was about a moon mission by America in the 1960s on which they found a tattered British flag. It turned out that a trio of Brits had successfully voyaged to the moon in the late Victorian era. A mad scientist had built a solution which, when painted on a surface, made any object defy gravity. He used a whole lot of it to paint a homemade spaceship on which he traveled to the moon with a male companion whose lover, (clad in a lovely Victorian waist-flattering dress) jumped onto the ship as it was rising out of the garage. According to this film, the moon, at least in the Victorian era, was inhabited by ground-dwelling moon people, and giant killer caterpillars.

Eclipses. Waiting for the eclipse.

ReCapping Beijing

I was just looking back on some pictures from the Dashanzi International Artist Exhibition and posted the highlights.

Blue Boar and Colonial Vegetables and Herbs

I am re-working the "Mis Bradbery" from last fall which appeared as a 3-channel animation. It is an installation which I am building in my studio piece-by-piece, and letting it take shape and change form as I add and subtract elements. I want to explore alternative modular projection spaces. This boar with be smoothed and finished with a chalky-white plaster foam-coat mixture. I will sand it an project an image of a woman morphing into a boar. The colonial vegetables will become a garden around the boar, maybe stitched into upright four-sided, stuffed rectangles which can also be projected on from above.

Burke and Betty

I bear an uncanny resemblance to my grandmother. I love the picture of my dad working on his science project. He did such a good job that he got an "F" because his teacher accused him of having his parents do the work.

Burke

Burke Bradbury Jr. died today, October 14, 2008 at 7:45am. He was a very very special soul. May he rest in peace.