The Wonders of the Digital Age

 I am 77 ½. The wonders of the digital age didn't hit me until I was in my 30's, when I bought a used Apple C computer, unlike my children who for all intents and purposes have never lived without a computer.

Two events in the past two days have made me feel ancient and, well, unnecessary.

The buttons on top are NOT easy
to see. Trust me.

For a wonderful price last Christmas COSTCO had two Sonos SL1 speakers for sale at essentially half price. I bought them because Geek friends go into rapture talking about their sound. At about the same time I got rid of my Spectrum Wi-Fi and went to T-Mobile's 5G Wi-Fi network. Oddly, even at my advanced age, it went smoothly except for  my Amazon Alexa that would never connect. Since I am a Mac man through and through, I got rid of Alexa.

Setting up the Sonos speakers was difficult as well. I did all the App on my phone said to do and they would not connect. Why they use Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth and connect as easily as my $39.00 Anker speakers do, I will never understand.

Then a day or so later I discovered a symbol on my phone that showed the Sonos speakers. So I could play music on my Homepods in the bedroom and the Sonos in the living room at the same time, or so I thought.

Reading in the living room a few weeks ago I realized that only one Sonos speaker was playing. With the light on, showing it was on, the second one didn't play a single note. A neighbor came over to use a printer on Father's Day and when he was done I asked if he was familiar with Sonos speakers. He was. So I asked if he could get the "dead" one to work. On my iPhone he pulled up the App and, just like me, was unable to make it connect.

He called another Geek friend and the friend told him what to do. Nothing. Then he was told to unplug the unit, hold down a button on the top, plug the power back in and let it go through a series of flashing lights.

Again nothing.

Then when my friend said there was an infinity button on the back on top the on/off switch, the friend who was researching Sonos online said, unplug the unit, hold the infinity button down and plug in the power. After a series of flashing yellow, green and white lights a new page showed up on the phone. It guided him to ask where is the speaker, do you want to pair "both" speakers, etc. Replying affirmative to all inquiries there were more flashing lights and suddenly Vivaldi was playing on BOTH speakers.

Now tell me, how is one to know? THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE SONOS INSTRUCTIONS THAT SAID THIS IS WHAT YOU DO!

When I was in my 20's, even into my 50"s I could set up a sound system. I had a Harmon Karden receiver, a fancy turntable, huge speakers and was able to add cassette players and even a multiple CD player to my receiver with no fuss. Now I can't even connect speakers that play music off my phone.

I just got off the phone with tech support at CVS.com. They are giving me a very hard time for me making sure I can get the meds I need. In the store,  or holding forever on the phone to talk to them they urge you do do everything online. I have never been able to connect and today, after 45 minutes talking to the CVS tech guy I still cannot get online. I was given a case number and told that someone will contact me IN 2 TO 5 DAYS to get this matter resolved. I almost forgot, I was locked out of my system, the same system that doesn't work because I tried to many times to get into it. Is this CATCH-22 or what?

So, I now can either wait on the phone forever, leave a call back number they never return or get in the car and do battle at the counter behind 10 -15 people waiting in line. The other day we waited 15 minutes in line as all their cashiers tore the place apart, resembling a scene from a Keystone Cops comedy, trying to find a customers prescription. They finally had to fill it again because what ever system they use doesn't work. Rather than serve others in line as they made a search we all waited.

There is even a line now for those ordering meds and refills online. I've noticed there is never anyone  in that line. I wonder if they are as shut out of the system as I am. The  only reason I go to CVS is because that is where my medical provider makes us go. No one here, doctors and patients, likes CVS.

Have we become too dependent on computers? I might venture a guess that Southwest Airlines passengers during Christmas thought so. When a system goes down, as it does more and more often, the world, literally, shuts down. We have nowhere to turn to and everyone has forgotten how to do things the old way, you know with pencil and paper!

I watched Apples latest WWDC conference and I already dread iOS 17, the new iPhone operating system. It can do all kinds of whiz bang things, things I do not want and will probably hide the things I now use on a daily basis. Who demands this stuff? What ever happened to user friendly? All I can say to any senior is befriend a late teen or 20+ year old. Let them set up your equipment for you! Otherwise you will be wandering the wilderness without a digital clue!!!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

 Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

The GOLDEN GIRLS Revisited

 One of the perks to being retired is that you have the time to do things you didn't when you were younger and working. I have been haunting the Palm Springs Library's vast DVD selection and watching many of the shows shown here on PBS but were created for England's BBC. I find that many of their shows are vastly superior to what is produced here. I highly recommend FOYLE''S WAR and GEORGE GENTLY.

However, pursuing the stacks a week ago I happened upon Season One of THE GOLDEN GIRLS, a show I often missed. It came on TV in September of 1985. I had a daughter born in July of 1985 and a hell on wheels son of 4 at the time. I didn't see many of the shows even though it had a seven year run and won many, many deserved awards.

While the show is now 38 years old I first noticed that clips of funny scenes from GIRLS have been shown on Facebook, scenes so funny you got a good belly laugh now, all these years later.

So, I picked up Season One and was prepared to be disappointed. While some shows, like I LOVE LUCY have stood the tests of time, many others haven't. What is more important, having no commercials to break up the story line, you get a very different perspective on a show's flow.

I remember the first time I watched a season of EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND sans commercials and realized the mother really was a pain in the ass. She meddled in everything, coddling her sons more like a wife than mother.  Deborah was right.

But I digress. Watching GIRLS I realized that this was the first time on public television that women were allowed to express their feelings regarding sex ... sexual feelings they have, sexual feelings towards men and voice that they don't always (the toilet repair episode) need a man to get something done. That was heady stuff back then and paved the way for shows like SEX IN THE CITY. All these years later this is heady stuff today! Witness how men are telling women how they should control their bodies!!! I think we thought we were past all that. Apparently not.

Each of the characters in their own way voiced their feelings. Sex starved Blanche, played by Rue
McClanahan, now a widow whom all felt would like take on the fleet during fleet week in Florida and not the least shamed to admit it as a Southern Belle. Dorothy, the amazing Bea Arther, whose husband left her for a stewardess the age of their daughter still willing to date and find a man who treats her with respect. Ditsy Rose played by funny funny Betty White whose memories of St. Olaf drives everyone crazy.While she still adores her deceased husband's memory, she too is willing to date men. And the character Sophie, the Italian mother of Dorothy is both pithy, summing up all their travails, even she gets her chances to date as well. No other show even came close to this in 1985.

It also shows us that while times change, things also remain the same. That women today are still battling many of these same issues all these years later shows that vigilance of past successes is never as secure as we may think. The battles women had in the 60's, 70's and 80's for work, sports, careers, sexual freedom, even military careers, were all the children of mother's who during the war years provided the backbone work force of the US Arsenal that won World War II. While many look fondly at the 50's as the Golden Age, there were many women who did not. They were still feeding on the freedom they had and proved they could do just about anything a man could do.

GOLDEN GIRLS fed on that line of reasoning in a comedic way that still had a heart of steel beneath. They were not afraid to address the concerns of these women,  women everywhere, and while we laughed they often had a point. For me, as a man, I only truly see the point now.

I urge you to watch these shows, again if need be! As for me, I plan on getting Season 2 the next time I'm at the library! I find that I still have much to learn.

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

 Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

TALKING TO STRANGERS: Unburdening Our Regrets

A few weeks ago I finally picked up and read Malcolm Gladwell's book TALKING TO STRANGERS. Like his other books such as BLINK that talks about how we make decisions often in the blink of an eye or OUTLIERS that discusses if you put 10,000 hours into something you become a master. Master? Yes, a Mozart or Bill Gates. I entered the world of a trifecta of strangers in books and movies and the nightly news that seem to only talk to strangers. 

 Gladwell's books seem simplistic until you scratch a bit below the surface. STRANGERS attempts to address how we talk to each other, friend or foe and create a society that we try to live in, lies and all. I might add that today, as opposed to my youth, we both DON'T talk to each other today OR listen! In fact, that we won't talk to each other directly, face to face could be the biggest problem this nation faces. The book makes you think and I think hopes that before your open your mouth, consider carefully what you are about to say! 

Then the other day I watched, over two days, the Japanese film DRIVE MY CAR. Directed by Ryûsake Hanaguchi it won an Oscar for Best International Film in 2022. A long 3 hour movie (best watched over two days as I did) it tells the story of an actor/director who loses his wife at a young age to a cerebral hemorrhage. He feels guilt because he never knew what she wanted to talk to him about before she dies. A year later he is hired to direct UNCLE VANYA at a theatre in Hiroshima and is told that he is not allowed to drive but must allow a driver to drive his car. For car buffs this is a cherry red Saab Turbo  in mint condition. Hesitant, he allows the young woman to drive him after a trial run. Things get iffy when the young man Kafuku saw having sex with his wife applies for the play. While a young actor he is given the part of Vanya much to his surprise. Kafuku never lets on he knows the young man's past history. However, the young man in an aside after a dinner, beats up a man taking photos of him and during the dress rehearsal is arrested for the man's death. Confronted by the committee on continuing the play with Kafuku as Vanya, who knows all the lines, or his refusal to act and shutting down the play he pleads to think about it. 

He gets in the car and orders the driver to take him where she grew up. Then secrets are revealed. He tells her of his day spent not going home even though he knew his wife wanted to talk to him and when he arrives finds her almost dead. If he had returned earlier he might have saved her. The driver, on her part, tells of her childhood, being raised by a single abusive mother whom she let die when their home was buried in an avalanche. Going to the house he sees the destruction and feels her hurt and anguish on full display. They both grieve for what was never done.

Then my book club picked Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize book of short stories, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES. Reading the chapter with the books title it tells the story of an American, East Indian heritage family on a trip to India. They hire a driver to take them to a famous temple a few hours away and while they go they begin to talk. The driver, who gives tours only on weekends, has a week job his wife calls "medical assistant" but in reality is a translator to a doctor whose patients often speak different Indian dialects. The American wife, who appears either unhappy or bored becomes interested. The driver, Mr. Kapasi. takes an interest in her and has hopes to remaining in contact even giving her his address. This hope is soon shattered when at a last stop, before reaching their hotel, the wife reveals to Kapasi as they watch husband and children walk away that she has a terrible secret, even worse than not loving either husband or children. One of the children is not even her husband's but the child of her husbands best friend who spent a night visiting them. Kapasi is taken aback and asks if this was so secret and no one else knows why she is telling him? "Because you are an interpreter!" she says." The reader and Kapasi both wonder, interpreter of what? What advise could we give? In despair, he has none.

I found this an interesting dilemma. Why would I find three items that discuss the same thing? It certainly isn't a design of finding out why we tell secrets. I do know however, that many of us do. Who hasn't on a train, plane or bus told another things you would never tell your partner, spouse, friend or parent? There is a kind of anonymous pleasure in revealing something, taking it off your chest. Clearly the wife in INTERPRETER feels that the burden of her eight year old secret is relieved when she passes the burden on to another.

Is that why we do it? By giving a secret away we relieve ourselves of it's burden? It reminds me of the scapegoat where ancient Hebrews would pin secrets on a sheep or goat and drive into the wilderness. The animal was thought to take away all the guilt and shame of the past year. I wonder if the secrets we reveal have any impact on those we give it to? Clearly in these stories it did. And, I get the feeling it relieved them of their guilt! However, while you feel relieved, do we pass it on? What do you think?

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

 

Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

Thank you for visiting my store! Please be sure to visit on a regular basis or contact me at KrugsStudio.etsy.com. New birdhouses, craft items, photography and canvas paintings are added all the time. Please tell your friends, artists or anyone who appreciates local handcrafted items about my store.

If you have the time and are interested about how art and design affect our lives, PLEASE check out my blog, KrugsStudio.blogspot.com. I discuss how art and design effects our lives, often in more ways than we can ever imagine. It covers a wide range of topics, not just art but does look at design and how we design our lives each and every day. Comments and ideas for future articles are always welcome. 

Reflections On The Academy Awards

 Shortly before this year's Academy Awards an OP-ED piece appeared in the Los Angeles Tims that caught my eye. It asked the question, "Are Too Many Oscar pics too moody for you?" Clearly she had not seen an Ingmar Bergman movie.

In the piece Virginia Heffernan discusses the fact that even in color many of the nominees looked drained. Here is the article:

But after the Oscars, and I didn't see them all, I did reflect on them. American movies for the past few decades have been little more than rehashes of an original premise that goes on year after year. ROCKY morphs into ROCKY 51,  where they battle each other in wheel chairs? STAR WARS 235 where the great grandchildren of Hans Solo fight the grandchildren of Darth Vader. You get the picture. This leads me to the discussion of this years nominees:

1.  TOP GUN:MAVERICK. This one WAS a stretch. Twenty years later, really? For an action film it was heart pounding but, and it is a BIG but, we've seen it all before.

2. WOMEN TALKING was truly an original, gem as it may be. Mennonite Women in Bolivia were given cow tranquilizer then raped by their men. After the mens arrest the woman have to decide whether to leave or not. As I watched I could not help but think of men in this country attempting to control the bodies of women. There is a line from THE KING AND I where the king says, " it's alright for the bee to fly from flower to flower but NOT flower from bee to bee."

3. EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE is a fantasy and reality for the 1,000's of immigrants that come to this country. I have Chinese friends and hear and watch their struggles to make sense of what happens to them. It was a brilliant ploy to focus on the IRS and the dehumanizing processes it uses. Trump paid $750 in  taxes the year I paid over $8,000. I'm a year older and certainly a great deal poorer. No matter what was said Michele Yo and Jamie Lee Curtis deserved their Oscars for playing the every woman to the Tramp's everyman.

4. THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN was certainly one of the grimmest movies I have ever seen. That a friendship could go so horribly wrong and take the twists and turns to its bitter end ... well, it's not a world or friendship that I would want to have. To me it made no sense, yet it certainly was original and not American.

5. TÁR tells a sad disintegration of a brilliant female conductor who thought too highly of herself as she explored the music she so deeply admired. I didn't feel she was so evil as obviously others in her medium thought. I felt the young man who cared less for Bach and was into "modern"  music still had a lot to learn. But, as in every generation, the young have no time for the past. And I question if that is why societies around the world are in the moral morass they are in as they forget the past only to have to rediscover it again.

6. I didn't see ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT as I had read the book and seen an earlier movie. While well intended to remind us about the evils of war  (from the previews) an even gorier version was made to remind us of this fact. Nightly news reports of Ukraine bring this fact home to us every day.

7. AVATAR I also didn't see. I didn't much care for the original and didn't plan on spending 3+ hours more seeing its sequel, another sequel years away from the original. 

I also didn't see THE FABELMAN'S, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS or ELVIS. The first two weren't shown locally here long, if ever, and I grew up with Elvis and have spent an entire day at Graceland seeing everything you could ever want to see. Biopics tend to gloss over the less desirable aspects of the person and blow-up the known. As a Boomer Baby, almost, I will never forget his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show where they would not show him below the waist!

I love movie's and have built up my own DVD collection because you always CAN'T see it on Netflix or Prime. I had a wild hair to see CHARADE recently with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It was a $5.00 rental on Prime. Five dollars for a 60 year old movie? A few days later I was Big Lots and looking through their DVD items found the movie for $3.00. Not only did I get it cheaper, it is now mine to watch whenever I please!

I was lucky that my parents loved movies. Every Friday or Saturday from the second grade on we would go. I saw NIGHT TO REMEMBER and cried when the Titanic went down, saw all the Esther Williams swimming fantasies, SINGING IN THE RAIN and in the 8th grade saw PSYCHO a movie I couldn't get through again until last year when terrified of the shower scene, wrapped in a blanket like a mummy, I sat through the movie. I still remembered the college guys behind me screaming like girls!

Movie's can be a significant force in our lives. It can show the best and the worst of humanity. It can uplift like the recent RRR or it can bring us down as SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. As a movie lover, I may not and should not agree with say Rotten Tomatoes. I have found what the "critics" like or dislike is often at odds with the general audience and myself. A case in point was the movie DROP DEAD FRED. It was considered a terrible movie by Siscal and Ebert.  Desperate for something to watch something when my kids were small, I was shocked to discover I could identify with Phoebe because in many ways I had a mom like that as well. While I never had an imaginary friend like Fred I did have an imaginary world like Jack Lemon's DAD who escaped to his imaginary world to escape his harpy wife.

We all have movies we love and those we avoid. In a testing, it was discovered it only took a few first bars of movie themes for the listener to identify the movie. Movies can be an escape or they can reflect our lives and often solutions and pitfalls to our own daily lives. Yet the past few years have been staggeringly sterile, a collection of Marvel or super hero tales with no end. That's why I enjoy both the Palm Springs Movie Festival and Cinema Diverse where films from all over the world are shown and we get a glimpse of other cultures and ideas. Often a foreign film will be made in America but rarely with the same impact as the original because it has to  be morally correct. THE LAST TANGO IN PARIS  was a perfect example. A widower meets a man in Paris after the death of his wife and they become lovers. Too scandalous for Americans, the male lover becomes (to me just as scandalous) an underage female and it went on to titillate Americans the way LOLITA had. 

Finally, I would like to remind you that movies and the world's they create are still "designed." Once watching the extras on the movie MONSTERS INC. they showed all the errors and problems with the software to create their "monsters." It was at the moment I realized just how much a movie, a cartoon takes at least 5 years to make, is created, designed if you will. 

In this vain I urge you to look for original movies and don't accept more of the same old thing!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

 

Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

Finding Other Media

Here is the map to Welburn! It took us hours to 
get there. I have since learned to order online.
Shipping is cheap and it comes quickly!

 A few years ago a friend and I made the trek to Welburn Gourd Farm in San Diego Country. And what a trek it was too. As we wound down a narrow twisting road after exiting the I-15 near Fallbrook, CA, with NO phone signal, we struggled to find the place. In awe that there were so many homes, I wondered, who would live where there was no cell phone signal? They had power and land lines and, maybe, that is all they wanted.

Finally we found it, parked the car and wandered in. I I have never seen so many gourds in my life. Big, small, tiny some already to use, others needing some TLC (actually, a LOT of TLC to get them burnished enough to paint)and others ready to use!

We went in the store to find amazing examples of gourds transformed into works of art using electric tools to create on the gourd surfaces visions of indescribable beauty, some using the natural color and others using a kind of colored dyes I was not familiar with.

Truly, I had never seen anything like this before.
They even had gourd already to paint AND with 
holes already drilled for a birdhouse!

We loaded up and over the next year or so my friend turned two gourds into amazingly real looking, if not LARGE apples, and then using his ethnic Chinese heritage created two amazing gourds using dragon motifs. They were, even if painted, works of art and are proudly displayed in his home.

I was more reluctant not really knowing what to do with them. I purchased gourds already emptied of their seeds and drilled for use as a birdhouse with hanging cords. It was only when an ETSY customer asked if I could create a "Day of the Dead" birdhouse for a Christmas present that I tackled a gourd. I could help others but found it hard to  help myself.

I sketched out a birdhouse plan, got it approved and created it. I covered the entire birdhouse gourd in orange paint and then using an undercoat of cream acrylic paint that would opaquely cover the paint that would allow for the eventual design. It was an approach I HAD to use with both black and the traditional dark maroon of molas.

This was a trick I had learned with painting other dark birdhouses. If you want to use most reds, yellows and other transparent colors, you need to put down a very light, opaque paint and then paint over that. In this case just about the entire birdhouse had to be double painted. Many yellows needed a third coat. I finished it, the customer was happy and that was that.

Recently as I continue my Mola inspired journey of paintings, wooden birdhouses, tissue boxes, etc., I looked at my vast collection of things ready to paint and grabbed a gourd. Already smooth, drilled with a hole and complete with hanging cord, I spray painted the entire gourd with a flat black enamel. Having tried the enamel on a scrap overpainted with acrylic paint that worked fine, I sketched the design on the gourd of three desert parrots, something I had seen at the Tuscan Outdoor museum and added desert flowers that are abundant in the spring.

Example of white undercoat

 Then came the holidays and I created first one and then three more painted designs on canvas for a holiday card, one for myself and then another for a non-profit in town. That took hours and days to do. 

Then came an opportunity to submit a painting to the Desert Art Center in Palm Spring's February show and the birdhouse was put away again. The painting and the hours it took took precedence but also added one very important lesson. I had been using a regular black lead pencil to put down my designs and squinted and hunted for them when laying down the first white or cream undercoat. I realized there are white lead pencils and why wasn't I using them. Painting done I found and ordered a few on Amazon so that when I returned to the yet unfinished birdhouse and it's design I finished it with a white lead pencil. Since traditionally Mola's use a black or deep maroon base cloth, I wanted to be true to the design. Later I discovered that newer Mola's used a brighter and much more varied base color ... red, blue, orange, green, and egg yolk yellows. However, dark backgrounds make the sliver of bright colors pop and I was ALL for that!

 

After trying several smaller Mola type paintings including one for a local non-profit, I painted the painting below to enter in a local art showing at the Palm Springs Desert Art Center. While very colorful it really was a bit more than I think the locals were prepared for!

 That led me to finish the long ago started birdhouse of another Welburn gourd painted black and with the start of a, well frankly, who know what. Borrowing parrots I had tried before I envisioned three desert parrots in a wild spring bloom similar to something I had seen at the Tuscan Outdoor Museum. I started in black leaded pencil but finished with the newly arrived white Amazon pencils. Because of the parrots and flowers top and bottom and in-between the parrots I had to paint every line like shown above and then add colors. The more transparent the paint (that's you yellow) it might take up to three coats! But the result was more than I ever imagined!

Desert Parrot Birdhouse

Since the gourd already was drilled with a hole and included a jute cord on top to hang it all I had to do was drill a hole and cut a round piece of wood to make a perch.  Of course this is not the way most gourds are used, at least from Welburn. They have samples and wonderful photos of their gourds transformed in to sculptured works of art on par with examples I saw in markets in China. 

The beauty with natural items is they are already somewhat ready for a life outdoors. With a wooden birdhouse you have a whole bunch of pieces that are either glued or nailed together each one of which can fail no matter how well they are cared for. A gourd might loose it's decoration but unless allowed to sit on the ground un-protected will last for years. To preserve it if it is decorated just apply a fresh coat of an outdoor acrylic varnish and it will return to it original beauty!

An example of the varieties of gourds available!

 If you are interested in trying a new type of surface media, here is the information to contact Welburn:

Welburn Gourd Farm

40635 De Luz Road

Fallbrook, CA 

Open Wed. - Sat. 10:00 am to 3:00 pm

www.welburngouardfarm.com

There may be similar places like this where you live                                                                                                but I think you will be satisfied with both the quality and the prices! Please forward the information to me. I am always looking for something new to try!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

 Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!

Revisiting The Movie NETWORK In The Era of Fox News

I recently had a nagging desire to watch the movie NETWORK, a wonderful work of movie fiction origninally released in 1975 that won multiple academy awards in 1976. The movie tells of a failing newcaster's descent into madness. In fact, the term, "I'm mad as hell and can't take it anymore" is the notable comment in this madness. It's a comment that during the Corvid pandemic makes as much sense today as it did then during our first gasoline crisis in the mid '70'. The best actor award went to Peter Finch, playing Howard Beale, as a newscaster who is fired as his ratings are falling. Finch was given his award after his death. 

Beale was considered a mandarin of news casting. However, as his ratings fell, his fourth place network decided they needed "younger" blood, and Beale who had become a childless widower, took to drinking and became less and less a presence. At the news of his dismissal, two weeks hence, he goes on the evening news and states "next Tuesday I will commit suicide right here on the news." As you can imagine the ratings go up and everyone wants to see the "suicide." Sensing rising fortunes, the network instead decides to keep him on and as he rants and raves, ratings climb higher and higher. 

I believe this sinister movie, a movie that should be shown again today, has three parts. It portrays corporate greed, making money at any price, secondly, creating social tensions and finally capitalism run amok. The fact that Rupert Murdock, who founded FOX News in 1986, used, I believe, Paddy Chayefsky's tongue-in-checck script as a blueprint has been noted by Chayefsky as well. 

FOX News was the highest rated free network in the 18-49 demographic from 2004-2012 and again in 2020. Millions tune in to watch Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others espose their fictions and blatant untruths nightly. It was a faithful news outlet for former President Trump and is for his minions today.

Faye Dunaway's character, Diana, as VP of programing wants control of news. She is fended off by Max (William Holden), the current News VP who has been told he has the back of the network President. However, the CBC Holding company that now owns the network, one among many, wants it to grow so it can sell it to an even wealthier owner in the middle east. This of course is a reflection for oil crisis in 1975 when the Saudi's were in ascendence and petro dollars ruled the day.

Beale is given his own news spot and news has becomes a circus sideshow along with a soothsayer and other silly segments of the "news hour." Beale is given to his madness and often collapses in a faint after his latest "vision."

This plays well, until it doesn't. When he urges his followers who are "mad as hell and won't take it anymore"to turn their TV's OFF, he is summoned by Arthur Jensen (Warren Beatty) the CEO to a special boardroom for a "discussion." Sitting at one end of a loooong table, ala Putin and Macron is their recent discussions over the Ukraine war, Beatty gives the performance of a lifetime! Roaring out to Beale:

    "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature Mr. Beale...that is the atomic and subatomic 

    and galactic structure of thing's today! And, YOU WILL ATONE!"

Beale atones but soon looses his edge and ratings drop. Since Jensen forbids his removal from the stage others conspire to get rid of him before profits drop! Their solution is to kill him ... on the air by hiring a radical group they have given voice to (today's Hannity, Ingrahm and Carlson?) who assassinate Beale live as he's broadcasting on the air.

When I saw this 47 years ago, I thought it was a funny but cynical look at TV broadcasting. The broadcasters of the day were generally respected and Walter Cronkite was the first newscaster to admit we had lost the Viet Nam war. This was all before much cable, the Internet, even cell phones. Those all arrived later. News was generally on the three networks and available in the daily newspapers, and on radio of the day. In a word, NETWORK was a work of comedy.

Secondly, NETWORK is about the social tensions of the day, tensions that still remain today. Max fell in love with Diana leaving his wife of 25 years. Ultimately he realizes Diana has no capacity for love and that his wife, who truly does love him, has been shattered forever. Corporate greed has, if nothing else, become even more predatory and we are yet unable to staunch it's march. American companies had begun their forward march to foreign locales using the term Global Economy as their crutch. The only people who profited were the CEO's and management. No one was asking for cheaper prices. Manufacturing moved notably to China where labor costs were lower and America's millions lost their middle class, blue collar jobs in the search for cheaper labor. In my outdoor manufacturing days, I noted that when Brown-Jordan, a high end outdoor casual furniture maker, moved to Mexico, their prices in fact went up, not down and the quality suffered. 

And finally it shows Capitalism run amok. In order to make more and more money, more value, a newer generation driven by none other than greed, attacks an older generation that wanted order, dignity and responsibility first, before profits. I am not so naive not to understand to succeed AND survive you need profits but to attain them at all costs, well, that was not the way I, and for the most part, we were raised. In my generation, a house was your home, not a profit center as Millennials and such believe. Here, the newer generation IS clamoring for more and more profits. They can see only one way out ... eliminating Beale in the most sensational way possible, as assassination on the air. Ratings are ALL!

And isn't that what we are seeing today? While we are not seeing literal murders, FOX leads the pack in dissemination of false news, even as they claim it's not. They all force us to ask Socrates' eternal question - "What is truth?" We ask today, what is news and "false" news?

NETWORK forces us to consider many factors in how we allow information to enter our lives. TV hasn't quite the impact it once had. Today, social media governs our lives and allows anyone to express what they think and feel. In a sense we are all Howard Beals and are mad as hell and can't and won't take it anymore. However this freedom also demands the question, Can we have too much freedom? Can we allow an 18 year-old with a grudge, real or imagined, to buy an assault rifle and murder 19 10-year-olds and their teachers without any accountability? Can we allow hate speech to spread that has consequences be allowed to flourish without any consequences? I think not. For a jolly good time watch NETWORK and see what it asks you about reality. I think you'll be glad you did.

If You DON'T LOOK UP It Still Comes Down

Every now and then there comes a movie that is a reflection of the times, you know, how we are living now. The first such movie that I can recall was the movie NETWORK. It's the story of a fictional network that predicted the creation and rise of Fox News almost to a tee. It recounts the unhinging of a popular news anchor who utters the famous, "I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore!" He passed away before the film's release but still won best actor for this film.

The screen play, written by Paddy Chayefsky, was a tongue-in-cheek comment on how he felt broadcast news, especially, was going in 1976. He later commented on watching Fox he never thought TV would head in the direction it did. I wonder, what does he think now especially since Fox News is far more entertainment than news fact.

Another movie that comes to mind, to me, the perfect ending for a dreadful century, was AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999). It tells the tale of a middle class suburban man dealing with a mid-life crisis as the world he knows (as the rest of us discovered) crumbles. Forced out of his job during the "re-structuring" American companies forced on their workers as they moved manufacturing offshore, he reverts back into adolescent behavior that leads to an untimely end. 

Netflix's newest and at the moment most popular film is their very own DON'T LOOK UP, a sweeping commentary on our lives today where reality TV and life have become so blurred you don't know which is which. It features an amazing cast: Meryl Streep, Leonard DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Ariana Grande and many others.  While billed as a comedy it is essentially a disaster movie made funny as it parodies events happening in this country today. 

The comet's path

While looking at the stars a student working on her Ph.D (Lawrence) discovers a huge comet heading our way. She takes her finding to her teacher (DiCaprio) who brings the coordinates to his class and they work out the trajectory. Suddenly he realizes the comet will be a direct hit on earth and the massive size of the comet is a life ending event when it hits earth.

They hurry to tell NASA and others in the government about the impending disaster ... 6 months and 14 days away ... and that's when the comedy begins. 

You may ask, "How can a disaster movie be funny?" Trust me, once you realize that this is a parody of our polarized times it makes perfect sense. Streep, who plays the President, is outrageous, not unlike recent events here. Her chief of staff, her son, Jonah Hill, is as clueless about the real world as a recent president's own sons. He dismisses University of Michigan people and wants to check with Harvard, Yale and such.

To cap it off, despite the military's of the world sending rockets and a retired space shuttle to strike the comet in an attempt to deflect it's course, that too is deflected because a crazy billionaire thinks that it can be mined for the trillions of dollars of rare and valuable metals it holds. I mean if you have a billion, why not two ... right?

I've read the critics comments and wonder, do they really understand the message? Did they with the other two movies mentioned? Are critics and today's "influencers" so wrapped up in themselves (yes) that they can't see the forest for the trees? To me this movie speaks volumes about how shallow our times have become. You will believe a quack of any stripe over the reality of scientific data.

The closing scenes say it all. The president leads rally's nationwide with the slogan "Don't Look Up" as if what you might see is true until finally someone does look up and as they do, the reality of what is going to happen becomes real.

When it becomes apparent that they are, in fact, doomed the billionaire hustles off to his interstellar spaceship, President in tow, where after 22,000 + years in space they find and land on an inhabitable planet. 

While our president does get her just reward, so do the citizens of earth. There is no happy ending, there is just ... an ending. All we can hope and pray is that we, in our stupidity, don't do something that will end this very same way.

Thank you for reading my blog! Please be sure to visit on a regular basis or contact me at KrugsStudio@gmail.com. New blogs are added all the time. In conjunction  with my store I feel that “design” is an important part of our lives. Everything we use or live by was designed by someone. Please tell your friends, artists or anyone who appreciates design about my blog.

Please be sure to visit my store, KrugsStudio.etsy.com on a regular basis. New birdhouses, craft items, photography and canvas paintings are added all the time. Please tell your friends, artists or anyone who appreciates local handcrafted items about my store.

OWN or GIFT an original work of art this year!

The Challenge of the NEW!

This was a long way from designing birdhouses yet fun to do in many "new" ways!

Last year,  when I asked my daughter what she would like for Christmas for herself, husband and my granddaughter she thought awhile and then said, I would like you to create a Hanukkah Village for us to put on our mantle. While my daughter is a born and raised United Methodist, he husband is Jewish and I knew they were combining faith traditions as they raise their daughter, my granddaughter.

She sent me a photo of the houses she wanted to use, (left) three different sizes of paper mache houses that had removable roofs. The Hanukkah tradition is for each day the candle burns, 8 days in all, there is a small gift for a child each day. With these, they could put a gift inside. I loved the idea but the challenge was that Hanukkah was less than a month away!

I hurried over to the craft store to get two sets of the houses and thought I would use a wooden birdhouse (that really didn't look like a birdhouse) and use a wooden tree I decorated with snowmen skiing down a hillside to a frozen pond for the seventh and eighth pieces. There was room in the birdhouse to hide something and a space in front of the snowman tree.

The challenge? How to design each one so they were unique and yet festive enough for the Holiday Season.

A birdhouse converted to a synagogue

I first tackled the wooden birdhouse that I made into a synagogue. I found some Hanukkah decorations and used them on the birdhouse keeping the synagogue as simple as I could. It turned out to be a kind of Spanish style synagogue but with a few simple additions it was passable.

It was fun and that made me learn to use my scroll saw because the next item was a big, formal house with columns! I added lintels, feet became attic windows and of course you needed holiday decorations. 

I had amassed a collection of items and for the first time I found that I was able to use them to embellish the items with more than just with paint. My two story houses with removable roofs were put to the test.

A little adobe house with removable roof

What was so fun was that I got to do all kinds of detail work with a variety of objects that I found new uses for. I had never done anything quite like this and found that I would spend just about all night working on these fragile houses creating a kind of village from as you can see above, from nothing!

The challenge was to decide HOW to decorate each piece. The Hanukkah tree was already done and the synagogue was finished but now what? I two two large houses to do, two mid sized and two small houses left. I wanted each one to be different but how?

I was given free reign on how I wanted to decorate them and I didn't want them to all be too formal. I next tackled one of the small houses and converted it into a Southwest adobe style with visible wooden beams coming through the walls, front and back, Southwest colors and details complete with cactuses. It was fun. I did the other small house more in the Spanish Territorial style you would see in New Mexico!

The two midsized houses were a challenge. I finally decided to paint one in the Pennsylvania Dutch / Bavarian style with dark walls and hearts and flowers similar to what I had seen in Bavaria on several trips. It was dark yet remained colorful with large red hearts and tulips adorning front and back. Adding a tree also added a German feel.

The second large house I decided to decorate in my wildly colorful "crazy-quilt" design incorporating both Hanukkah and Christmas elements. While I am not all that familiar with Jewish traditions some decorations at the craft store helped. Here I used Christmas colors and each base color had it's own design. The rub was that I used Christmas and Hanukkah wrap instead of fabric prints. It was a challenge with an amazing amount of detailing required.

The last mid-sized house I made blue with snowflake patterns with a small birdhouse decorating the front. You "know" I had to get a birdhouse in somewhere. As you can see from the photo at the top the village is quite colorful and was a hit at my daughters house.

Packing them all in a box was yet another challenge. The miracle was that they managed to arrive with little damage despite the damage to the box. Pieces that fell off were easily glued back on and it was unique as displayed on their fireplace mantle.

Sometimes you need a little, in this case a huge shove, to use your talents in new ways. This would be a wonderful gift for family, friends or yourself, something unique that you created! With tender loving care, this would be a decoration that could be used for years and handed down to the next generation. Who doesn't have Christmas things from years and generations past? 

With the holidays just around the corner I hope that I have inspired my readers to attempt the same thing!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

 

Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

Vincent van Gogh: A Journey

Out of the blue one day recently I got an email from Taschen Books about a sale they were having. Luckily for them, they featured a photo of a book about Vincent van Gogh they were having a sale on. Even at $50.00 it seemed a bargain as it would include ALL of his works, sketches, pen and inks and every painting he ever made. Of course, I bought it.

When it arrived I realized that it was huge. Over 750 pages not including index and oversized pages. As I started to read it though, I was struck by facts that I did not know and I already had a number of books about him, including his letters. I glanced through the letters but never sat down to read them.

I knew he was the second son born with the name Vincent but did not know he was born on the same day as his brother's stillborn death. There was a small cemetery in front of the vicarage house he grew up in and each day he could see his name sake's headstone.

His was a tortured journey that we have all heard about. But seeing all, not some of his paintings showed his slow but steady development as an artist. None of his work in Holland and with the miners in Belgium showed the brilliance that was to come. The authors of this book call his THE POTATO EATERS his first masterpiece but also note that it is a set piece, each face has been posed and that it was not truly an actual scene. Yet, in its own way, captured the essence of their lives.

My introduction to Vincent was as a 5th-6th Grader taking art classes at the Portland Art Museum. My

Blossoms: Almond Tree In Bloom

father was naturally gifted and watching my doodles decided that I needed some training. For some reason the van Gogh collection was at the museum on a world tour as they were building a new museum dedicated to his art in Amsterdamn. So every Saturday I would walk past this vast collection as I went to art class. Often I would have to wait for my father who was the manager of the Schick Electric Shaver Shop in Portland, OR. He had to work half day Saturday's. I would wander the gallery and look at each painting. My favorite of all was Blossoms: Almond Tree in Bloom. When I finally saw the "second" new museum I was surprised to find this image prominently displayed on everything ... scarves, notebooks, coffee cups. It was like visiting a long lost friend. Then when my friend in lockdown in China showed me a picture he hung from his purchases in Shenzhen, China, I was stunned to see it was a faithful copy of BLOSSOMS he bought there. Our tastes were more alike than I realized.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a show a few years back on Expressionism. The first painting you saw, one the curator worked five years to get and use, was a van Gogh painting. She felt that he represented the beginning of a movement of artists who went beyond the Impressionists and created what was called Expressionism. She had a point.

It is clear that when Vincent went to Paris his painting palette changed but his style became more forceful, more distinct. Yes, he dallied with Signac and Seurat's Pointillism, and some of Cezanne's increasing abstract's. He was enamored with Japanese wood block prints, even organizing a show of them, but all in all he was faithful to his own style. There was no one painting as he did.

The world's second most recognized painting, behind Leonardo's MONA LISA,  is Vincent's STARRY NIGHT that now resides at MOMA in New York City. While I think it belongs in Amsterdam, we are lucky that we need only go to New York City to see one of man's most recognizable masterpieces. I read somewhere that astronomers say he even has the stars right the night it was painted. The painting is not huge, like say Seurat's SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE GRAND JATTE, but to stand in front of it you find yourself drawn into the swirls, even floating above the town in blue and yellow splendor.

THE RED VINEYARD by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent is famous for only selling one of his 1,000 plus drawing, etchings and paintings. THE RED VINEYARD was sold for 5 Francs that he soon gave away. He was aware that in death his paintings could become more valuable. Millet, an early mentor, had died and he watched his paintings that could be purchased for a pittance suddenly fetch amazing sums. Dependent on Theo, his art dealing brother who financed his career from his own income and from the inheritance he received from his father who cut Vincent completely out of the will, van Gogh wrote and talked about the fame of artists after they died.

He was forever grateful to Theo who in fact had most of the paintings stored in a warehouse and would now and then enter them into show competitions. The first two paintings that were ever shown were THE POTATO EATERS and IRISES that is now in the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

IRISES by Vincent van Gogh

I have a funny story about that painting and was surprised to learn it was one of the first paintings he would show to the world. The Getty bought the IRISES for $56 million long before the Getty Center was built. It was, at the time the most any painting had ever fetched at an auction. The now Getty Villa in Malibu was the first museum built with Getty's oil money. His house was torn down and an accurate copy of a Roman villa, patterned after a real villa in Herculeum was built. It caused a storm when it opened but was soon accepted for what it was.

 My family and I went out to see IRISES but we could not locate it anywhere. It was the first such painting the Getty had ever bought and looking back, there was really no room to hang it in. Finally giving up my kids found the new media room with Wi-Fi and 20-30 computers all hooked up. My 10 or so year old son immediately latched on to one and my daughter and I looked around the room. I spotted a painting at the end of the room almost in total darkness and walking towards it realized here was the van Gogh. The woman in charge came up and asked me if I knew what it was. Speechless I just nodded. Getting closer she turned on the lights and I probably gasped. Looking at it I said, "I certainly have a better place to hang it than here!" "Where?," she asked. "My living room over my fireplace." After a good laugh she explained the dilemma they were having on hanging it. It was then and remains today one of my favorite paintings.

Vincent knew many of what are now famous Impressioinists of the day and lived for a short time with Gauguin. They were too different in style and temperament. He learned from and somewhat copied all their styles yet never let his own go. He was aware of own style and was liked by his fellow painters.

The mental breakdowns hit him hard and yet during his time in St. Remy and outside of Paris, in Arles, where he died, he produced some of his greatest masterpieces. Painting usually outdoors there is an amazing video on YouTube where they have found bugs, always a constant threat, buried deep in his paint. After he came back to the north of Paris, just before he died, he painted 80 paintings in 60 days. Many are considered some of his finest masterpieces.

WHEAT FIELD WITH CROWS by Vincent van Gogh

While we may never know for sure, many believe this was his last painting. To me it represents a direction that he was moving, moving to abstract expressionism something that he didn't understand and yet moved towards it with each painting. While there is no doubt there was an element of insanity in his death, his new doctor in Arles, Paul Gachet was experienced with patients like Vincent. That he didn't see anything alarming in the behavior just before the fatal shot on July 27, 1890, something happened to put that bullet in his stomach, and his refusal of medical care that led to his death two days later.

Van Gogh was commercially unsuccessful during his lifetime, and he was considered a madman and he and many others considered himself a failure. He only became famous after his suicide, something that he felt would happen and soon was seen as a misunderstood genius in the public imagination. His reputation grew in the early 20th century as elements of his style came to be incorporated by the Fauves and German Expressionists. Germany  missed the Impressionist period completely and quickly artists changed from the salon style painting favored in France as well as Germany to a vibrant form of Expressionism. The German art world moved from staid Dresden to growing, libertine capital Berlin and it was there that Vincent's art was shown, admired and started a movement.

There Vincent first attained widespread critical and commercial success over the ensuing decades, and is remembered as an important but tragic painter whose troubled personality typifies the romantic ideal of the tortured artist. Today, Van Gogh's works are among the world's most expensive paintings to have ever sold, and his legacy is honoured by a museum in his name, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It holds the world's largest collection of his paintings and drawings.

Is every derided, ridiculed, criticized artist another genius? We can never know. But, unless we try and continue to improve our craft we may never know with our own art. If you were, even today, to compare Vincent's work to what the French, the British and German Salons were exhibiting, they would probably be considered the scribblings of children. Some today might make the same comparison. Does the majority of the art world we see them that way today? No.They are visions of the world without restraint and for many, that is enough!

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!

 

Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!