General Writings | The Norm's Spot

Paper Doll’s by Vann ~ The Titanic

Every painting has a story but some have more story than others…

James Cameron’s TheTitanic came out in 1997 and was, as we all know, a huge hit.
I saw it and I thought the visuals were pretty impressive. The epic special effects chronicled the historical disaster as best it could, being wrapped as it was, around a fairly standard Hollywood rich girl/poor boy romantic potboiler.

Others, I found, did not share my cavalier impression of the film. Some got quite wrapped up in it. ‘Immersed’ might be a better word. Some people got so enthralled with the movie one would think they had gone down with the doomed ship.

One of these people happened to be a young woman I’ve known for a good part of my life. She was one of the Titanic survivors in a manner of speaking. For some, surviving the movie itself and not becoming a sobbing basket case afterward was it’s own form of surviving the sinking .

There were a lot of things you could buy centered around that movie and she had more than a few of these… She was definitely into it.

I was painting quite a bit around that time so it was only natural that I would try to paint her. She was a pretty lady but she was very hard for me to capture with my brush and paint. I work from photographs rather than sittings and portraiture is hard for me. It is doubly hard to do if I know the person being painted well.

I had a certain photograph of her she’d let me copy. It was of her, taken in one of those touristy photography setup shops where they shoot you wearing costumes, cowboys, turn of the century stuff… you’ve seen them.

She had donned a Scarlett O’Hara/Southern Belle outfit…. hoop skirt, parasol, hat and gloves… Her face in the shot fascinated me. It was almost angelic, a sweet serene expression with a vixenish hint of a smile… But I just couldn’t catch what I saw using watercolor. I tried using that face as a model several times with no success. I had turned out enough failures trying to paint her that she may well have thought I’d never succeed making a painting of her. I was beginning to think the same thing.

…meanwhile, back on The Titanic…

There is a scene in the movie where Kate Winslet’s character is laying pleasantly naked on a couch and De Caprio’s character is doing a charcoal sketch of her. This scene and the resulting sketch got a lot of attention in the movie. It also gave me an idea.

I didn’t have Photoshop but using my scanner and some voodoo, I got that photo of her face maneuvered onto the movie sketch. I then ‘cheated’ and used an opaque projector so I could trace the result to help me block it out on a piece of 20 x 30 illustration board.

I worked on that for about a week but I bobbled the “blue jewel”, a central thread of the picture and the movie both… I had no idea how to make blue jewels. I’d never tried to make any color jewel, let alone a blue one. I reluctantly set the work aside. I even thought of throwing it away but the face was intriguing even unfinished. All I’d had done on it were the eyes and the lips and a vague outline. You can ruin a watercolor by overworking it so I stopped work on it but kept it around. I figured I might at least save the face as a painting on its own merit.

On a whim I used a Polaroid camera and snapped a shot of the unfinished painting. I scanned that and e.mailed it to my friend to show her what I had done.

Well, that got her attention and she begged me to try to finish it.

Watercolor is touchy folks, particularly if you’re trying to do repair work on it. You can’t just daub over it like you can with acrylics and oils. You run a very real risk of losing your paper to agressive wetting as you try to draw off some colors and otherwise try to fix things. I started with the Blue Jewel because if I couldn’t get a sense of that then the rest would not work. Some fixes work. Some do not.

How did it come out?

Honestly, it has problems because of my lack of training, but my friend was thrilled.
She was pleased so if she was pleased I was pleased…

I somehow had managed to rescue the blue jewel and in so doing salvaged the painting. I don’t think I could do that photo of her face any better justice than what I have here. My friend has a bit more endowment going for her than Kate Winslet had but that just requires extra attention. One does what one must do…

I’ve known her a long time, now that I think of it…

which has nothing to do with the painting.

Or the story…

the painting is signed, as they all are…

Paper Dolls by Vann…

liarose

True Evil… The Happy Talking Phone Entity!

Somewhere lives a computer programmer who should be drawn and quartered.

He/she would be the person who came up with the idea that the already frustrating task of making a phone call to a company and having to go through endless selections, menus and button pressing is lightened by creating something called “voice recognition.”

In case you don’t use a phone much or are otherwise secluded from the real world ‘voice recognition’ is a computerized answering program that is put in place by companies that have a horror of actually hiring someone to talk to their customers.

In the past this was done by requiring you to press an infinite number of telephone keys as instructed by an electronic voice. A voice that is the sister of the briskly efficient but cold voiced operator with the odd, screeing, four note Bosun Pipe whistle that tells you that ‘you have reached a number that is disconnected or no longer in service.’

This button pushing was never intended to be a convenience. This was a sadistic maze that resembles the old, old, joke about the house of ill repute that effectively channels the customer through a series of doors only to exit to a “You’ve been screwed” sign, never seeing a girl during the whole process. The process is intended to make you do anything but talk to a live person.

This cruelty was not enough. No. Now they have invented an Iron Maiden they call “voice recognition” which is a computer program that, according to the lying thieves that sell it, can understand the spoken word in Amerenglish.

They have created two voices to inhabit this thing. The male voice’s lines have been read by a guy who must be named “Bob”. He has that irritating high pressure announcer-salesman’s voice like the one that freverently urges you to “use your credit card” on all the TV infomercials. Him you just want to murder and would if you could. No court in the land would convict you

The other voice of course, is female. It is this voice we shall discuss. It really doesn’t matter since they both use the same lines.
The female voice sounds so bright and happy you suspect she has a scrip writing doctor who is an amphetamine specialist. I, for one, cannot visualize a human face to this female voice. What I see are the brown haired pretty women rendered by commercial artists for appliance ads. She’s a lot friendlier sounding than the telephone company’s woman who icily tells you you dialed the wrong number but don’t let that fool you. The end result is still the same with a demonic difference.

Before, when you had to deal with the button pushing, your coworkers knew what was happening because they could hear you muttering darkly to yourself while you hammered the suggested button code.

But with the new ‘voice recognition’ things are a little different.
Now you have Sally Sunshine telling you to “Say what your problem is.” and gives you several examples you could use except none are remotely similar to what it is you’re calling about.

So you gather your thoughts and part of you wonders whether to talk in a normal tone or perhaps talk a little more loudly…you don’t know if it has its hearing aid turned up. And while you’re getting ready to speak she gets impatient. She’s sunny and cheerful about it but still she says “I didn’t quite get that.” or some such so you know right then you’re dealing with a pushy, hearing impaired robot that is possibly suffering from dementia. As a matter of fact, “I didn’t quite get that.” is its favorite thing to say.

Even if you didn’t say anything.
Great.

But you soldier on…

On simple things like “Yes” or “No” she performs brilliantly. But god help you if she needs a number. That will result in a back and forth comedy of errors which she may or may not ever get right.

Argh!

In frustration you hang up.

Big mistake!

     You realize, too late, that you now have to go through the whole process all over again to transact your business but duty calls and you go back to the firing line. Then some people are like me and we another problem.
     Not all of us have the elocution of a Shakespearian actor. Some of us have diction of startling clarity but truth be told, most of us do not have this clarity and some of us even have small impediments, lisps, etc. This is my lot in life…
     So you have to deal with getting her to understand simple commands and responses to her questions and all she hears are Mondegreens…
        From time to time you realize that you’re not talking to a real person but to a machine…wait, it’s not even a machine. It’s a chip. A mini computer and you can’t help feeling like the idiot you appear to be…your co-workers are snickering under their breaths because you are trying to reason vocally with a gadget and the gadget doesn’t care in spite of its happy-puppy tone. The gadget won’t let us pass unless we tickle its electronic sensors with the right sound waves to trigger the circuit.

You have no choice.

Sally Sunshine, at any time, might pause for a commercial and ecstatically ask you if you went to their website at www/itainthereeither.com. to try to resolve your problem. In fact she does this often as if you’re actuallly going to stop, now that you have invested all this time, and go to a website. To “enter” that website they will require you to sign in by sacrificing your e.mail address so they can spam you endlessly. And fifteen or twenty mouse clicks later they’re telling you they can’t solve your problem at the website.

You know what it does then…

Sure you do.

The website advises you to call their Kustomer Kiss customer service number which will be identical to the number you called to get where you are now…

         If you thought you could have fixed it at a website you would have gladly gone there to avoid this insanity.
            You curse the cyber-woman most foully and she doesn’t flinch. She asks you to repeat yourself because “I didn’t quite get that.”

    There is, however, a solution.

If you keep punching ‘0’ often enough and desparately enough it will wait until you are about to smash the receiver on the edge of your desk and rip the speaker from your speakerphone.

It will then, grudgingly, put you on hold and sullenly punish you by playing the latest CD they found in the three for a dollar crate at a garage sale, usually badly played classical music containing too many violins..

After twenty minutes of this it passes you to a human….

…in Bangladesh…

Good Manners Don’t Cost a Dime

A little after 4:30… Time to go home.
I go to the elevator and, as is always prudent that time of day, step back a bit. Folks going down often mistake my stop on the second floor for the ground floor and sometimes rush out and nearly trampling me.

Sure enough, there came an Arrowhead water guy barreling out of the elevator. Slender black guy, about forty I’d say. We have a chuckle over this bit of business as we get situated on the elevator. He has a full dolly-truck full of empty five gallon jugs and one in his free hand partially full. He’s been schlepping these things all day.

We chat amiably on the way down, end of the workday stuff and when the doors open I get off first and start down the (rather long) hallway to the side door.

I hear him behind me. I have about a thirty foot start on him but I remember he has his hands full so I hold the door open and wait for him to come out.

“Nobody’s ever done that for me.” he says.
I think he’s kidding and just shrug at him. “Where’s your car? I’m gonna give you a case.”
I said, “Naah… for that? Naah, never mind.” I never buy it. I just never developed a taste for bottled water.

“NoSir! No one has ever done that for me! You get in your car and drive it here and I’ll throw a case in your back seat.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“You did a good deed for me so I’m gonna do one for you!”

“No, nev’ mind. My car’s way in the back.”

“Well then, what suite are you in? I’ll drop a case off.”

“Well,” seeing he wasn’t going to let it go, “How about a six pack?”
“A six pack!?”
He goes to his truck and takes a case off his front seat that had one bottle removed from it.

I could see to deny him would have hurt his feelings so I took it. He was very solicitous (seeing my walking stick) asking me if I felt I could carry it.

I thanked him and gained an almost full case of bottled water, something I would never dream of spending money on, to enjoy…

…just for being civil…

The Water Witch

SNOOTYPE_2

…a true story stranger than fiction…

I’m sure you/ve heard of “dowsing” or “water witching” a method of finding water in rural areas using brass rods or forked sticks. The “dowser” holds his locator of choice and follows what seems to be an unnatural directional pull of their locator. People close to the land believe in such things and the educated scientist types scoff saying it is all hokum.
What I am about to relate to you is absolutely true. An impossibility. But it happened nonetheless…

It was in 1957, when I was a junior in high school, when my dad came home with a tale about a ‘Water Witch’ or Dowser. His boss at work had told him about this old man named Kon Muttrick who lived in a town called New Era who went beyond the Forked Stick method of seeking water that most so-called ‘Water Witches” used.
I told my high school buddy Harley about this guy and we found it difficult to believe that such an event could happen as described. We decided to make a Day of it and go up and see this guy….tell him we were making a science project and report on the Dowsing Phenomenon.

So, off we went. Drove to New Era, Michigan, where the guy lived and inquired (as we were told to ) at a certain small store for directions to Kon Muttrick’s farm.

We pulled into the barnyard and, sure enough, here was this old man, probably in his sixties…bib overalls…gray hair…had that look of The Land that a lifetime of hard farming brings onto a man. He looked a lot like Walter Brennan’s character “Amos McCoy” featured on an old TV program The Real McCoys.

We told him our fabrication and asked him for a demonstration of his abilities.

“Well, y’know…I know where all th’ water is on my proppity is…won’t be a real test.” he said.

“Yes, sir, we know, but our teacher says that dowsing can’t be done and we hear you have a most unusual way to do it.”

What I relate to you now is quite impossible. But I saw it with my own eyes, in broad daylight…

He gave Harley a pocketknife and told him to cut a Sassafras sapling that was about 12 feet high, about 1.5” thick at the base.. Sassafras saplings grow like weeds in western MI and tend to grow really straight. After cutting this treeling very close to the ground he was instructed to trim all the branches off it except for “the brush” at the top. It was at this point about ten feet long I’d say.

The old man then waved in the general direction that he said an underground stream ran and took the trimmed sapling in his hands. He held it vertically with the ‘brush’ touching the ground. Without any motion from his hands, the cut, sky-pointing. tip started gently whipping back and forth. but in an odd, one sided, back and forth.
When he went in the direction he’d said the water was, the whipping action started to resemble a fishing pole with a fish on it, i.e. it was starting to flex one sidedly in the direction of where he’d said the water lay…. move in the opposite direction and the bending would lessen. As he moved toward where the one sided flexing indicated it became a real chore for him to hold the sapling as it bucked.

“Now, watch this, boys” he said and he moved in the direction of the alleged underground stream and the sapling bent over into a ‘U’ until it audibly snapped above his hands!!!

We, of course, were dumbfounded.

Oh, to have had a video camera in those days.

Old Kon claimed he could tell which sparkplug was mis-firing on a car by touching them with his left hand. If he were to touch them with his right hand he’d get shocked like anyone else.

He claimed it was a Gift from God and would not charge you if you wanted him to ‘witch’ your land for water. He did require that you, as an act of faith, have a drilling rig hired and ready on the site. His hardest find he said was a place so barren that the only live wood (a necessity) he could find was a small live bit of brush less than a foot long. It worked, however.

Curiously bigoted for one claiming a ‘gift from God’ he “wouldn’t work it fer niggers or injuns…”

Strange, strange man…

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

I was never much of one for riding horses…

Oh, of course I’d had my young cowboy fantasies and the daydream of being the only kid in school to ride his horse to classes but as time went on the closest I got to that was when my folks would take us to a riding stable.

Some folks would argue that riding stable horses are not very good examples of good rides but that’s pretty much what you were stuck with if you were not in true horse country.

When you ride a horse with no instruction you find that it is not nearly as comfortable as it seems in the movies. They manage to get your up and downness while seated way out of synch and your butt takes a beating.

As I got older I noticed that horseback riding was favored more by women than it was by men. Generally, if a man rode a horse there was a paycheck connected to it. He was working. Women, on the other hand, like to ride them ‘for pleasure’ and I’ll not delve into exactly what that might mean but suffice to say, most non working horses are owned by women than by men. I don’t have any real statistics for this but it seems to be the case from my own observation.

Other things I have observed is that like all mammals, the horse has distinct ways of showing displeasure with humans including:

Ignoring rider’s urgings and commands

Biting

Kicking

Bucking or otherwise unhorsing its passenger.

I also made the observation that these animals weigh half a ton or more.

Every time I envision riding a horse my weird imagination plays a scenario of the one horse who has figured that he will not conform. Hay and a barn are not worth the loss of freedom and the chore of being made to do whatever the pompous, fragile, weak humans want it to do.

One day I was standing near a horse and marveling at it’s beauty. It is truly a lovely animal and you could appreciate the name the Sioux gave it “Shunka Wakan” the ‘mystery dog’. Domesticated or wild, they are a beautiful creature and it’s young rank as among the cutest and most entertaining animal babies to watch.

This particular horse saw me looking at him and he said, “Hey mister!”

“You can talk? I asked, “How is it you can talk?”

“I was an understudy for Mr. Ed. How else do you think?”

“That’s amazing!” said I.
“Yeah, well, that’s all water out of the trough now. But lissen… I have a message for you.”

“For me? What is it?”
He took a few mouthfuls of grass while he got his phrasing in order.

“Well, first, the information isn’t free. I’ll have an apple or carrot from you to tell it to you.”

So it was a trudge to my car to get the bribe, an apple which he lipped, chewed and swallowed before he continued. He was so eager and quick at this he caused me to count my fingers.

“You’re on our hit list.”

“Hit list? Horses have a hit list? What kind of hit list could horses possibly have?”

“The word is out on you. We have our own form of e.mail and internet and you’re on the top ten list of potential riders we deem incompetent and an embarrassment.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“Of course not” he said, “You don’t have log-in rights or the password but I’m here to tell you that you’re on the list”

“But what does it mean? I asked.

“It means that sooner or later you’re going to try to ride one of us horses that are in the network.”

“You mean not all of the horses are on the network?

“Not yet,” he said, “Not all of them are up to speed. Those you don’t need to worry about. If you’re a gambling man you can probably ride one of them and get away with it.”

“What happens if I try to ride one of you that’s on the network?

He took another mouthful of grass.

Whoever you try to ride will do the full load on you. You will be bitten, thrown and stomped.”

“What? For just trying to ride one of you? Why me?

“Well, firstly, it’s strictly business so don’t get your quirt in a knot about it. This isn’t about you. But we are going to put a stop to all this horse riding foolishness once and for all starting with you and anyone else on the list…”

So there you have it. That’s why I won’t ride a horse. I might pick one that has access to the list and I’d be a fool to risk the consequences.

You may feel this narrative lacks credibility and you may be right.

That’s your prerogative…