Is this really another Bob post?

Yeah, I guess it is. This is what Bob would look like if you could buy him on a t-shirt. I had a Rumayla Elmo mug for a little while, but that would be infringing on Elmo's rights. In fact, I can't place any Blue Collar Muppets on a t-shirt and feel good about it.

--gh

Sorry, one more

Okay, I was told that Bob is now an obsession. This might be my last one for a while. I loved going to the planetarium and having the constellations pointed out with the obligatory lines connecting random stars.




This was fun to work on, however. I used real stars for my area for last night. I used a great interface called Your Sky that allowed me to remove all the words, planets, numbers, etc. It took 1/2 a minute to put the background stars on (and make them somewhat transparent).

If you work in a planetarium, feel free to use this. Just flash it up their on the ceiling and give a long speech about Bob watching over our night skies. The last time I went to a planetarium, I knew more than the intern giving the presentation. He couldn't answer two questions, but I helped him. Astronomy is something I know very little about.

Time to get back to music, or raster art.

--gh

Don't get excited, it is a derivation...

Sorry about just a variation on previous theme. However, when Tyler saw the happy Bob picture, he said the background looked like Teletubby-Land. He pleaded with me to add rabbits and tubbies.




The sun is a self portrait.


--gh

Arthur

Aaaaaaaaay, it's the Fonz...


Somehow I don't feel like signing stuff like this. It doesn't feel like art, (if you can call my other stuff art.

I was in the fourth grade when I heard someone say that Fonzi wasn't cool. TV culture had taught me that he was, and I never questioned it. But the kid saying this was Ricky Farley, and that kid was so cool I didn't want to question it.

Other things that I remember about him:

• He was thin, but he told me that he gained weight in the summer because he just sat around watching televsion. Gym. class made him thinner. I thought this was strange since my brother and I had an aversion to too much television in the summer (we probably made up for it in the fall, though).
  
• Ricky Farley was the first kid that I ever heard admitting to smoking marijuana. He joked about hearing his mom come up the stairs and him putting a joint out and waving the smoke around with his arms just before she came in his room. I knew what the stuff smelled like because of the freaks and hippies in the woods behind our house ...oh, and we found a bong once the summer before. I remember thinking that his mother must have been dumb.
  
• Ricky Farley had a parakeet called "John Bird," a play on the "Waltons" character brilliantly played by the genius Richard Thomas. He said it knew about 10-15 things to say. I had parakeets and never got them to talk, they are dumber than parrots. Later, I named my next parakeet John Bird and followed his suggestion to train it with a tape recorder. It never worked, but my sister still makes fun of me about that recording.
  
• Years later, I saw him leave a guitar at the music shop to be fixed. If I remember correctly, the guitar was a semi-hollow body, like maybe a 1972 tele-copy. The knobs were crushed into the body, and the bridge was messed up. As soon as he left the store, the guy behind the counter began swearing to himself about the shape of the guitar. Ricky was only a year older than me, but I remember thinking that guy was still cool because he could destroy a guitar like that and not seem to care.

I never got over feeling that this guy was too cool. Only now I have to re-think much of these early thoughts and re-evaluate them. Today, Ricky is probably working for Anderson Consulting (now called Accenture, I think).

--gh

EXHONERATED, lol

This was a lot better in my mind. The pop-star vectorized nicely (from some photo I found on the web). His fingers look strange, but he really was holding up two fingers in the original photo.




I actually spelled "exonerated" with an extra "h" in it the first time. That's something that that would have been impossible to fix in the cheesy drawing packages I was using before. It's just as well because I noticed that I cropped the left hand side too much.

I wish there was a way to send this to Mr. Jackson. BTW, I was pulling for him the whole time. I think I said somewhere on this blog that he was innocent, and being exploited. I was too lazy to find that, though. I know he is weird, but that only makes him a target. Sort of like Rumsfeld...

I had the hardest time getting his color right. I was using a color palette called "Skins Tones" and they didn't seem to have the right one.

--gh

Welcome to Bob!

This is just my way of saying that I have finally secured a copy of Adobe Illustrator.


Before you jump all over the composition of this work (I know the cloud cuts across his neck line...), I just want you to know that I was just messing around with two pictures, and just threw them together before uploading it.

I drew the background using regular tools (ellipses, beziers, fancy line art for the sun rays). Bob is a vectorized copy of a photo I came across. After I figured out how to do it, this only took about 12 minutes. Illustrator CS2 finds areas that you could paint automatically, even closing any gaps that you made.

So, now I will stretch my creativity with vector art (in addition to arranging/composing music, raster art, and writing). I wish I could write poetry, or good song lyrics. (I would settle for the ability to write an opera libretto.) But my song lyrics sound like Fruit Loops, and my poetry is worse.

I cannot take credit for the description of music sounding like fruit loops... that came from a high school friend, Rexroad, describing the music of Richard Busby. I doubt either of those two really even remember each other.

Getting back to my creativity, I am not trying to say that I am really that good at it. My writing is full of split infinitives, and too many ellipses... Also, my art is derivative and does not have a cohesive style (unless you count PoMo). Okay, I will defend my ability to transcribe and arrange music. Below is a segment of Mozart's Requiem, transcribed for Flute and Guitar. Amy and I played through this, and it seemed more than workable. Of course, where would we ever really play this. (Now booking funerals!) Notice the left-hand fingering on measure 3, that was tricky! (If you want to play it, you will have to drop the low string to D.)




And here is pretty much the same area in an MP3 file:


Mozart was a genius.

If you want to sing along:

  LATIN            
"Lacrimosa dies illa,
 qua resurget ex favilla
 judicandus homo reus"         


ENGLISH
"That tearful day,
when from the ashes shall rise again
sinful man to be judged."

--gh

Ancient Composition

To make up for the last post, here is a little composition that I worked up recently. If you can believe it, I "wrote" this haunting tune and nonsensical lyrics when I was 3 or 4 years old. I remember sitting in the back of the car, or under my bed, singing this song over, and over, and over again. Next to the repeat sign, I think I should write "repeat ad nauseum" because I would sing it for 10-20 minutes sometimes. It drove everyone crazy, I think. Sometimes, someone would prompt me to sing it, and everyone else would protest. Click on the image below to enlarge the song.




I have a .mid file, in case you can't read music:

There are a few strange things about this song. First, it is just so sad; and yet the words are silly. I thought about adding an interesting base line or something, but I left it as a dirge. Also, I wanted it to be as close to how I would have sung it as a kid.

Another thing that is strange is that the first four measures are in the key of Gm (two flats), but the last four measures are actually in five flats (Bb-minor). Instead of getting fancy and doing a key change in the middle of an eight-measure composition, I just handled this as accidentals. This is how I sang it, first half in Gm, second half up a minor third, and then I would repeat - going back down to where I was. That is more haunting than the actual melody, I think. Anything that I write now is not near as complicated like this.

As for the words, your guess is as good as mine. Sure, someone could psychoanalyze this into a young child not in control of his surroundings or something. But honestly, I just came up with the words to match the melody. However, I firmed up the lyrics fairly quickly and did not waiver from them. The only clue that I can give you is that I liked pigs when I was little. And maybe that is just about as deep as the words really are. As for the title, maybe I picked it up from dialog in "I Love Lucy" or something...

--gh

brown smear part dieux

Okay, I have been a bit absent of late. A few days after I complained about Richard Gere's "brown smear" on his shoulder, I had some problems of my own.

Anyhow, after some interesting procedures and tests, it appears that there is nothing really wrong with me ...for the moment. Apparently, the doctor just wants me to wait until I start bleeding again. I think we should look into finding an internist, rather than a family practictioner.

...but, I think I have shared too much already.