Happy Earth Day 2024! I have few details to provide about the creator of this art. I paid for and downloaded it digitally from the Etsy account Unlimited Extra, where it’s listed as Earth Day 2024: Everyday, Protect Environment, Save The Planet.
Every day should be Earth Day for sure. I hope you find a way to honor and provide stewardship of our beautiful planet today. I’ll shoot and add photos to this post later to show a little of Nature’s beauty at Houndstooth Hall.
Growth returning after I pruned these a few months back.
Scenes from Debby’s work around Fairy Cottage.
Some of Tim’s plants in the Hall’s front beds.
Tom always prunes the lantana after it freezes, and this one is already flourishing.
And in the other bed, this one always blooms later and is starting that now.
A peek at the tops of the mimosa and magnolia trees from the back yard.
Today is World Art Day. As mentioned on the linked site, art may be visual, written, spoken or musical.
My love of visual arts skews toward paintings more than sculpture, but that could be more of a lack of education and exposure than anything else. This blog makes it clear I’m a music lover. I’m also a fan of performing arts (movies, theater, dance), but of course, my own favorite art is written, whether as fiction or poetry, thus my choice of a painting spotlighting books.
Some of my characters in the Neverending Saga are big readers; others aren’t. But they all love stories–telling, hearing, imagining them. It only came to me slowly why these novels would likely never be commercial–there is plot, with some storylines resolved quickly and others spanning decades, but really, the novels are stories about people who love to share stories with one another.
Happy April Fool’s Day, and happy birthday to our friend Geri! I hope her day is full of mischief and celebration, if those are what she seeks.
Are you in a foolish mood in honor of the date? Did you know that Mercury goes retrograde today? I hope that planet doesn’t toy with you.
Today, instead of shenanigans, I have the first section of the seventh book in the Neverending Saga to edit: around 82 pages, so that I can pass it to my two readers for comments and criticisms. Then I’ll shift from this brooding character’s point of view to a more lighthearted character–lighthearted FOR NOW. Can’t be fiction without conflict!
When Jim was here, we talked about the WHAM documentary that’s airing on Netflix. I haven’t seen it, though it’s one of the things I intend to watch.
Today’s song challenge is “a song you like by an artist no longer living.” It was a shock when George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016–too young at 53. In my music television watching heyday, a video with George Michael would stop me in my tracks. I’ve done a lot of research about the evolution of music videos from the 1960s forward (why else? for the Neverending Saga) though of course, they weren’t called “videos” then and were usually shot on 35mm film even after video tape came into existence and “music videos” became part of the common vernacular. George Michael’s videos were art, and I remember them well.
I also haven’t watched The Super Models on Apple TV+, but the holdup on that one for me is that it features the female models who were in George Michael’s “Freedom” video: Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington. However, Tatjana Patitz, born on this date, March 25, 1966, in Hamburg Germany, was also in the “Freedom” video, died last year in January, and isn’t part of the documentary. Because of the video, she became my favorite of the group, so I haven’t had the heart to watch it yet.
Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington, and Cindy CrawfordPhoto taken from this book I own.
Why doesn’t George Michael appear in the video? He told MTV, “I made decisions a couple years ago to change the way my career was going and my life was going by not appearing in the videos, by not being interviewed, by not doing press. Basically, letting my music kind of do what it’s going to do.”
We don’t see him, but his presence still dominates the video (also, probably a lot of people gasped when his leather jacket gets set on fire).
Today, March 18, is Global Recycling Day. The link gives a lot of information about the day and about recycling in general. This paragraph in particular stood out to me: Before throwing something in the trash or even in the recycling bin, first think of ways the item could be reused. Perhaps it would be a good idea to wash out a plastic carrier bag or a zipper closure bag and use it a few more times. Or maybe it would be possible to use those plastic containers from the grocery store in the kids’ lunch boxes. And also try using that piece of aluminum foil again. Anything that can be used just two times essentially cuts the waste of that product in half!
That made me feel a little bit better that all the things I reuse at Houndstooth Hall can actually be having an impact on reducing waste.
Today’s song challenge is “a song you know all the words to.” And while I sang one word of the lyrics wrong for many years, I finally allowed myself to be persuaded that Mary’s dress SWAYS instead of WAVES in Bruce Springsteen’s carpe diem song “Thunder Road.” (I still like the visual and implication of “waves” better than “sways,” and I still disagree that we can’t say fabric “waves,” since somewhere every day someone is listening to or singing our national anthem which asks the question, “…does that star spangled banner yet wave?” It does.)
Here’s an acoustic version of the song, because I have no idea which video on YouTube will eventually be pulled due to copyright. My blog has become littered with those over its twenty years–a different kind of waste.
I’m fascinated by Smith’s work that (I think) I found for the first time today. I connected with so many of his paintings and their titles. This one felt like the right match for today’s song challenge, “a song that you never get tired of.” For me, that song is Dennis Wilson’s “Forever,” from the Beach Boys’ Sunflower album in 1970. This was a lesser-known gem Beach Boys fans and followers loved for a long time. It found a new audience when it was sung by an actor on a popular TV show in the 1990s. While considered a sweet love song, there’s a sadness woven through it within the context of Dennis’s passionate, glorious, and tumultuous life and early death.
From my earliest years, I liked the Beatles, as I like many artists and bands, but because of Riley’s talent for playing their songs on guitar and piano/keyboards, I learned to love the Beatles. I could listen to him play either instrument for as long as he’d let me, or until my parents made him leave. =) (And with that memory, let me note that today is my late mother’s birthday, and Riley was one of the few boys I knew who she kept liking through the decades.)
No matter how many songs Riley played, there would always be one for me, every time, on guitar. Though in this photo, he’s performing on keyboards, my mind will always go to that one song, one guitar, one boy. Any time this song (and a few other songs special to both of us) comes up in my Instagram feed, whether or not those are accounts I follow, I think of it as a message and leave a four-character comment on the post that’s meant to convey, Yes, my friend, I’m thinking of you, too. Riley’s birthday is in four days. How I’d love to be able to say those words in person or even on the phone. I will never stop missing him or appreciating everything we did and said and felt and wrote and listened to in all those years of friendship. I will love him always.
Today’s challenge is “a song that reminds you of someone.”
Today’s art is the cover on a CD made for me in 2001.
Self Portrait
pen, ink, and glitter on paper, 2001
Timothy J. Lambert, USA
Timothy was still living in NYC then, and he sent the CD in the spring/early summer of 2001, when he already had his Keith Haring Radiant Baby tattoo and before he moved to Houston in October. Below are the works he recorded, introducing me to songs he knew I’d love, or already loved, or just needed to know existed. =)
1. Wicked Little Town, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
2. Here With Me, Dido
3. I’m Not In Love, Olive
4. Take Me Down, Boss Drum
5. Lover, Lover, Lover, Ian McCulloch
6. Within Your Reach, The Replacements
7. Born To Make You Happy, Britney Spears
8. Lady Bunny Speaks Out, Lady Bunny
9. America, Simon & Garfunkel
10. Jeannie’s Diner, Marilyn E. Whitelaw
11. Move On, Boss Drum
12. Special, Garbage
13. Nightingale, Sandra Bernhard
14. Sorcerer, Buckingham Nicks (1974)
15. Nomad (demo), Buckingham Nicks
16. Gold Dust Woman, Hole
17. Thank You, Dido
18. Origin of Love, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
In the late 1990s, Jim sent me a CD of songs he chose for me. It was in a jewel box, and I later made a cover for it with stickers when I put it in my CD case. His playlist was aimed at the California dreamin’ sensibilities and memories of adolescent/hippie Becky.
1. Wishin’ and Hopin’, Dusty Springfield
2. Age of Aquarius, The Fifth Dimension
3. Better Shop Around, Captain and Tennille’s version
4. I Think I Love You, The Partridge Family
5. Sharing the Night Together, Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show
6. Kodachrome, Paul Simon
7. California Girls, The Beach Boys
8. Your Mama Don’t Dance, Loggins and Messina
9. Little Willy, The Sweet
10. Mother and Child Reunion, Paul Simon
11. Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree, Tony Orlando and Dawn
12. Don’t Pull Your Love Out, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds
13. Temptation Eyes, The Grass Roots
14. Only 16, Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show
15. Cecilia, Simon & Garfunkel
16. Say A Little Prayer, Aretha Franklin
17. Midnight Confessions, The Grass Roots
18. I Am a Rock, Simon & Garfunkel
19. Wendy, The Beach Boys
20. California Dreaming, The Mamas & The Papas
I miss MIX TAPES! Now everybody just tells you to go look at their Spotify playlists. Not the same at all.
These CDs were part of my most recent writing playlist. No way am I choosing a song from one of their mixes, making it seem like I slighted the other. Instead, here’s a song from Wham! that gave Timothy, Jim, Timmy, and me the title of our third novel. I miss my writing partners!
Timmy, Timothy, me, and Jim back in the early part of the century?
