Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Monday, April 2, 2012
Friend
How much would it take to begin to make a former friend a restored friend, a false friend a true friend, a word here and a word there, an apology here, an apology there, and explanation or two. I've got my word.
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Arts In You
Walk on. Walk on. Nothin' ever stays wrong that long
Reba McIntire
********************
Hello Jen
********************
The creative act should be a joyous one whether you're designing a tea cup or a temple. A person can sit feeling that their life is in shambles, take a pencil and make a few marks on a piece of paper, even if it's just a doodle, and things immediately start to get better. Maybe the improvement is barely noticeable but if the creative process picks up it will have a measurable effect.
Maybe drawing and painting isn't the right road for the pursuit of your particular form of jollity. Try writing. Put down on paper just how miserable you feel and then try to make it humorous.
No? OK, then try one of the other forms of creativity. Don't just nest in front of the TV and hope the distraction will make you feel better. It will, temporarily. But when the soporific horror story of personally uninvolved pursuit of justice wears off you will still be miserable. The endless playing of games is just as hypnotic as TV and robs us of many hours of life.
Art is a mixture of physical activity, imagination and discovery. As an actor it was always a pleasure to find the mental imagery that described the goal or desire that took me through a scene. It was graphic and interesting.
Dip the brush in blue paint and put it on the canvas. The color announces itself in graphic terms and asks to be spread around in your life and connected with others. There may end up being no blue at all in your picture, but that is a matter of discovery.
I'm a terrible typist. I make so many mistakes it takes me twice as long to write something as it should. Even so the process of writing is a pleasure for me, and often a necessity. I enjoy putting the words on the page because I know the words are there. When my life is miserable the words can say what my silent screams can't. I often wonder if my writing is important enough. Is it a tea cup or a temple? In the theatre there's a saying: There are no bit parts, only bit players. Miles Davis said that there are no wrong notes. And Reba McIntire says "Nothin' stays wrong that long." If you set out to design a temple and it comes out a tea cup, so what? You might start out with a tea cup some day and come up with a temple.
As human beings we have been given imagination, creativity, the ability to see, hear and think, to articulate what we think, to discover and design. It's an insult to life if we don't.
I miss the theatre very much and the people in it. I miss art class. I miss playing in an orchestra. But I can write and paint. I have a new home and a new life. Creativity lives here. Joy will follow.
DB - The Vagabond
Never Give Up
**********************
Reba McIntire
********************
Hello Jen
********************
The creative act should be a joyous one whether you're designing a tea cup or a temple. A person can sit feeling that their life is in shambles, take a pencil and make a few marks on a piece of paper, even if it's just a doodle, and things immediately start to get better. Maybe the improvement is barely noticeable but if the creative process picks up it will have a measurable effect.
Maybe drawing and painting isn't the right road for the pursuit of your particular form of jollity. Try writing. Put down on paper just how miserable you feel and then try to make it humorous.
No? OK, then try one of the other forms of creativity. Don't just nest in front of the TV and hope the distraction will make you feel better. It will, temporarily. But when the soporific horror story of personally uninvolved pursuit of justice wears off you will still be miserable. The endless playing of games is just as hypnotic as TV and robs us of many hours of life.
Art is a mixture of physical activity, imagination and discovery. As an actor it was always a pleasure to find the mental imagery that described the goal or desire that took me through a scene. It was graphic and interesting.
Dip the brush in blue paint and put it on the canvas. The color announces itself in graphic terms and asks to be spread around in your life and connected with others. There may end up being no blue at all in your picture, but that is a matter of discovery.
I'm a terrible typist. I make so many mistakes it takes me twice as long to write something as it should. Even so the process of writing is a pleasure for me, and often a necessity. I enjoy putting the words on the page because I know the words are there. When my life is miserable the words can say what my silent screams can't. I often wonder if my writing is important enough. Is it a tea cup or a temple? In the theatre there's a saying: There are no bit parts, only bit players. Miles Davis said that there are no wrong notes. And Reba McIntire says "Nothin' stays wrong that long." If you set out to design a temple and it comes out a tea cup, so what? You might start out with a tea cup some day and come up with a temple.
As human beings we have been given imagination, creativity, the ability to see, hear and think, to articulate what we think, to discover and design. It's an insult to life if we don't.
I miss the theatre very much and the people in it. I miss art class. I miss playing in an orchestra. But I can write and paint. I have a new home and a new life. Creativity lives here. Joy will follow.
DB - The Vagabond
Never Give Up
**********************
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Ghost Stories
Wilderness is not for sale.
Nick Rahall
**************
You probably aren't aware that you are surrounded by ghosts, are you? I don't mean the specter of some ancient personage who keeps appearing and disappearing or the creature in the white sheet that floats through the garden at night.
Wilderness is what it's name implies: wildness. Nature in it's intricacy and inexhaustible variety of design creates what to the human eye seems to be chaos. Scientists tell us that nature never repeats itself, no two butterfly wings are alike, no two snowflakes. I don't know how scientists can know that but I'll take their world for it.
Somewhere I have a quote which describes making a neighborhood as bull dozing down all the trees, building a street and then naming it after the trees: Oak Street, Maple Way, Elm Lane, for example. And yet if that neighborhood was completely abandoned and no one ever set up residence there again, nature would eventually reclaim it, the buildings would eventually collapse, the street would be broken and the oak trees would grow again. The seeds of the life that nature had designed for the place are still in the ground and those seeds are what determine what grows there. Those seeds and roots are the real life of the place. The oaks, maples and elms never left. You may say you have a nice two bedroom house with grassy front lawn, but Nature quietly and patiently says "No, that's where the pumpkin patch is."
An artist chooses colors from a vast spectrum of them and every color is there whether it appears on the canvas or not. If you mix all the colors you get a dark substance, indiscriminate and wild. A writer has a choice of words but his entire language is automatically implied in the words he didn't choose. There is a vast number of musical tones, many of them beyond the ability of the human ear. If they are all sounded together there is a kind of static sound called "white noise."
If you look and listen carefully you can see the implied colors and hear the accompanying tones. As you walk down your street stop at a tree, one that has been there since before your neighborhood was made, and know that it's brothers and sisters are but ghosts in the ground waiting to reappear.
DB = The Vagabond
*******************
May today be a good day
A beautiful day in every way.
*******************
SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)
Summer is around the corner.
In your opinion what is the most amazing thing that could happen during this decade? Make it as outrageous as you want but keep it within the realm of what you consider a possibility.
15 responses so far.
Answers will be published the first day of Summer.
Thank you.
dbdacoba@aol.com
DB - The Vagabond
Nick Rahall
**************
You probably aren't aware that you are surrounded by ghosts, are you? I don't mean the specter of some ancient personage who keeps appearing and disappearing or the creature in the white sheet that floats through the garden at night.
Wilderness is what it's name implies: wildness. Nature in it's intricacy and inexhaustible variety of design creates what to the human eye seems to be chaos. Scientists tell us that nature never repeats itself, no two butterfly wings are alike, no two snowflakes. I don't know how scientists can know that but I'll take their world for it.
Somewhere I have a quote which describes making a neighborhood as bull dozing down all the trees, building a street and then naming it after the trees: Oak Street, Maple Way, Elm Lane, for example. And yet if that neighborhood was completely abandoned and no one ever set up residence there again, nature would eventually reclaim it, the buildings would eventually collapse, the street would be broken and the oak trees would grow again. The seeds of the life that nature had designed for the place are still in the ground and those seeds are what determine what grows there. Those seeds and roots are the real life of the place. The oaks, maples and elms never left. You may say you have a nice two bedroom house with grassy front lawn, but Nature quietly and patiently says "No, that's where the pumpkin patch is."
An artist chooses colors from a vast spectrum of them and every color is there whether it appears on the canvas or not. If you mix all the colors you get a dark substance, indiscriminate and wild. A writer has a choice of words but his entire language is automatically implied in the words he didn't choose. There is a vast number of musical tones, many of them beyond the ability of the human ear. If they are all sounded together there is a kind of static sound called "white noise."
If you look and listen carefully you can see the implied colors and hear the accompanying tones. As you walk down your street stop at a tree, one that has been there since before your neighborhood was made, and know that it's brothers and sisters are but ghosts in the ground waiting to reappear.
DB = The Vagabond
*******************
May today be a good day
A beautiful day in every way.
*******************
SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)
Summer is around the corner.
In your opinion what is the most amazing thing that could happen during this decade? Make it as outrageous as you want but keep it within the realm of what you consider a possibility.
15 responses so far.
Answers will be published the first day of Summer.
Thank you.
dbdacoba@aol.com
DB - The Vagabond
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Right Response 12/28/08
Love and trust in the space between what's said and what's heard in our life can make all the difference in the world.
Fred Rogers
*************************
When I was studying my craft I had to take up the issue of speech and found it much more complicated than I at first thought.
Writing is tricky because the writer has to carefully choose the right words so as not to be misunderstood.
As an actor I was responsible for speaking the playwright's carefully chosen words.
But in conversation we choose our own words, and we have to do it so that we are not misunderstood. Every word exists in time and has certain qualities of which we are usually not aware. It's a sound that has an attack, a timbre, a duration, a stress, a finish and a relationship to the words around it. Those are a set of dynamics that apply to every spoken word and they will determine what the word conveys and how it will be interpreted. Think of how many different ways you can say "I want to go with you."
Then there's a statement made up of words. That goes through at least 5 stages: intention, invention, articulation, reception, interpretation. And all of that takes place, at lightning speed, before the person you're talking to responds, In other words, you have a thought, you decide how you're going to express that thought, you speak it, a person hears it and then interprets what you said according to their own mental and emotional state. That sounds like a very complicated procedure just to say "Good morning" and it is. But in most conversation it all takes place automatically and unconsciously. It's when we have something we feel is important to say like "I want to go with you." that we become more aware of the process. Or at least we should.
Think how much trouble, perhaps even wars, might have been prevented if someone had been more careful about how he said something, or, as Fred Rogers suggests, someone would have been willing to interpret what was said to him in a kindlier manner.
DB Vagabond Journeys
Fred Rogers
*************************
When I was studying my craft I had to take up the issue of speech and found it much more complicated than I at first thought.
Writing is tricky because the writer has to carefully choose the right words so as not to be misunderstood.
As an actor I was responsible for speaking the playwright's carefully chosen words.
But in conversation we choose our own words, and we have to do it so that we are not misunderstood. Every word exists in time and has certain qualities of which we are usually not aware. It's a sound that has an attack, a timbre, a duration, a stress, a finish and a relationship to the words around it. Those are a set of dynamics that apply to every spoken word and they will determine what the word conveys and how it will be interpreted. Think of how many different ways you can say "I want to go with you."
Then there's a statement made up of words. That goes through at least 5 stages: intention, invention, articulation, reception, interpretation. And all of that takes place, at lightning speed, before the person you're talking to responds, In other words, you have a thought, you decide how you're going to express that thought, you speak it, a person hears it and then interprets what you said according to their own mental and emotional state. That sounds like a very complicated procedure just to say "Good morning" and it is. But in most conversation it all takes place automatically and unconsciously. It's when we have something we feel is important to say like "I want to go with you." that we become more aware of the process. Or at least we should.
Think how much trouble, perhaps even wars, might have been prevented if someone had been more careful about how he said something, or, as Fred Rogers suggests, someone would have been willing to interpret what was said to him in a kindlier manner.
DB Vagabond Journeys
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