In the spring of 2013, I bought a house for $10,000. Foreclosed. Leaking. Full of rot. You can imagine it caused many adventures. You’ve already heard some of them. But today I have the story of a single wall. A simple wall, that’s it. Not even a particularly large or long wall. Not a fancy wall. Not a complicated wall. Not even a particularly attractive wall. Not a special wall in any way. Just a wall that it took four years of hard work to find amid all the bizarrities of the home I dubbed Ye Olde Wreck. Here is…
Category: Arts and Aesthetics
All things creative. All things beautiful, profound, and moving.
Since I haven’t done any icons to show you lately, reader T.L. sent me these. Other than her shockingly poor trigger discipline, I might like these Marys: T.L. says the second one is from a movie called Deadly Code, which is about entire ethnic groups exiled by the Soviet Union, whose members were driven to become gangsters. I don’t know the film, but some of its lines are pretty intriguing. Grandfather Kuzya: [leading ceremony] By our ancestors, free hunters, and warriors, by the great Northern Forests, by the river Lena … we pray to you. Blessed Mary, Mother of God,…
Writer Annie Dillard described the wonder and strangeness of a total solar eclipse. Even scientists express awe as they examine data. I’ll be outside the totality zone for this month’s nation-covering eclipse. Everyone says that even near totality (which I’ll see) is a million miles from the true magic. Until you’ve watched the sun completely disappear by day, leaving only a glowing corona, you don’t know the glory of an eclipse, so they tell us. Where will you be on August 21? Anybody traveling to get a better view?
Can we forget all the seriousness and strife for a moment and have some partying dogs? These are studies for a larger piece I may or may not do. There may be drinking, carousing, and disembowling of stuffed toys. There will probably not be poker playing.
Do you ever put off — and work up a big dread for — something that turns out to be simple, even pleasant? I’ve been doing that for the last 10 days with my venture into egg-tempera painting. Not venturing. I had an excuse, if that counts for anything. The powdered pigments arrived the day The Wandering Monk and I started on the last (knock wood) really grueling project. I wanted to wait to give full attention to paint making. I did mix up rabbit-skin glue and French chalk and prepared a gesso board, a process that took a few…
I gather from the lack of response when I mentioned the show that few around here are devotees of Downton Abbey, the great Masterpiece series that ran for six big-hit years before its creators decided gracefully to bow out. In a way I’m not surprised at the lack of a Living Freedom Downton Abbey Rah Rah Fan Club. Outwardly Downton has nothing to do with freedom. It’s also a kitchen-and-drawing-room drama, offputting for you, my largely male readership. So I’m not saying everyone should just rush right out and binge-stream Downton Abbey until they’ve gained 50 pounds from all the…
The Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project, Phase II, commenced yesterday. Somehow I wasn’t expecting The Wandering Monk to need to tear off all the siding off the east wall on that part of the house. Good thing he did, though, as it was the classic good news/bad news case. The siding came off completely intact and both it and the upper walls were in fine shape. A pleasant surprise. The lower walls suffered rot, of course (no surprise at all). And we found termites. But we found them in a place it would have been surprising not to find…