Stand Guard

She had the face of an angel.

Carefully folded in the right rear pocket of her jeans, she'd cut it from the Seraph Anadial the night he came for her youngest son.

She was not surprised when it was an angel who came for the boy. She knew something would eventually. It was why she kept such careful watch over him, why she had the long were-bone knife in the first place, despite the small fortune it had cost.

Her family had a long history with the malakhim, tracing back even before her ancestors had joined their fragmented community of Ethiopian Jews. For as long as she could remember one of the highest holy days of the year for her family was the celebration of child slaughter at angelic hands: it wasn't the passing over of their own which bought the Israelites their freedom, but the spilled blood of Egypt's first born. It made a certain sense they would be the first to come after hers.

Lambs blood was one of many tools she used to try and keep her son safe against a poisoned fate, luckily it wasn't the only one.

She had the angel's wings as well, but they didn't travel as well.

Slipping Out of Tune

I tweak my main playlist just a bit every few weeks, but it tends to truly molt and renew only once a year or so, and that time of sonic renewel is upon me. Even so, these songs have been good to me, and as I let most of them go (except for Fenne Lily. She's not going anywhere), I wanted to put a marker in the etheric ground for all the time we spent together.

Fenne Lily - What's Good, Car Park, & really the whole album On Hold

Lady Gaga - The Cure

Tow'rs - Going

Grizfolk (feat. James N. Commons) - In My Arms

Birdy - Wild Horses, Deep End & Lifted

Kodaline - Talk

Sweet Talk Radio - Dotted Lines

Kathleen Edwards - A Soft Place to Land

Silver Trees feat. Bailey Jehl - Paper Hearts

Oh Wonder - Bigger Than Love

Gordi feat. S. Carey - I'm Done

Lord Huron - The Night We Met

Ingrid Michaelson - My Darling

LEON - I Believe in Us

Bishop Briggs - Dream

Ryan McMullan - Ghosts

Anna Nalick - All Through the Night

The Goo Goo Dolls - Use Me

Checking for angels.

Anxious About The Unbroken

The rollout has gone shockingly well, and here at the end of the week all the key bugs have been squashed and several small feature requests have already been implemented.

What's been most surprising is how anxious the process has made me, even as it's gone so well: the self inflicted level of hypervigilance to the flow of the office, and the stress over getting the bugs worked out as quickly as possible, even when they aren't major, or function imparing. Both my mood and energy have been shot at the end of every day this week.

On the one hand, I'm thrilled with how undisasterous the week's been, but on the other, I'm disappointed in how easy it still is for anxiety to become such a powerful effector on me.

I need to be spending at least as much time on continuing to unravel my mind as I do on improving my coding skills.

Horn Tooted

Newest employee started today. I spent almost zero time with her, but she interviewed well last week, and everyone seemed happy as far as first days go, so I remain hopeful.

For me, today was all about rolling out our new platform for documenting patient visits.

All the piecemeal work I've done for the last two years, learning Swift and writing helper apps for the docter and staff to speed up and improve the quality of data capture, have been brought together into a unified program with enough headroom for the next two years of planned evolution (which means I'll likely have to rewrite it all in six months).

I spent a fairly anxious Sunday squashing last minute bugs, but I was shocked by how painless it was going live today. There was only one minor missing feature, which I've already added, and a couple of cosmetic requests I'll take care of towmorrow.

Still have a long way to go as a programmer, but today was a milestone in that journey, as well as a significant step forward for the clinic.

All The Windows

Standing quietly, alone, on a Saturday afternoon, taking in as much as I can all at once. The paintings become windows, and I'm looking out onto a strange, beautiful world.

Smiling widely, I go looking for the door.

Entanglement

Breath tangled
like legs and fingers;
Light shone out
in the gentle dark
of a slivered moon:
All they were racing
to the transmit of pulse,
the bright mesh of joy.

What Was Seen

The Art of Lee Cunningham: A Retrospective

Visual arts, like performance arts, are another thing I’m coming to later in life and finding a passion and joy I wish I had developed earlier.

The most fascinating experience of art, for me, has been learning to intentionally observe the way my brain processes abstract representation into more concrete forms and story. Taking complex ideas and feelings and finding ways to successfully communicate them to an observer with colors and shapes and juxtapositions which shouldn’t reasonably be expected to mean anything is like magic: the special ways our minds work, the pattern recognition and associative linking, allowing art to have greater meaning than an obvious, concrete representation.

Magnifying my wonder of this feat is how it happens across the gap of time and space, from one mind to another, using a common visual language and mental function so a fluent artist can expect to communicate in their medium as effectively, if not more, than if telling the story of their work directly to the audience with words. Admittedly there will be cultural and experiential gaps and differences, but even so, the effectiveness of the mechanism fascinates me.

I’m finding the exposure to an artist’s language, both within a single work and across multiple pieces, like learning to read. Beyond the obvious shapes and schemes of a work, the way she uses shapes and colors, style and themes, dissonance and subtlety to communicate more than just the obvious subject of the work, to communicate meta-narratives and evoke emotions greater than those involving any single piece.

I found myself moving back and forth with Cunningham’s pieces, discovering themes and shared symbology, as well as an evolution of the stories she was telling and the way she was telling them. This was particularly effective due to the volume and variation of the works currently showing: the general paintings which spanned from the early seventies to her passing in 2010, the completely abstract works of her Duke Ellington series, and the sculptures and masks made from found objects.

Outside of the differences in style and language of her ‘regular’ paintings, the Ellington series and the sculptures were almost in a different language, yet shared a stylistic accent with her other works. Looking beyond the differences to identify the similarities was its own joy and I look forward to doing more of it over my remaining visits.

The work I found most intriguing was a series of three paintings titled “Woman Ascending to Heaven”. All three are of a woman sitting in the cradle of an upward facing crescent moon.

In the first, done in 1970, the woman is in muted colors, similar to other works from this period, and reminds me of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress. It seems a simple piece of a woman resting.

The second, done in 1976, has the figure with a more abstracted face, her dress threadbare, disappearing, a shoe print on her middle, a face looking up at her from below. Her breasts have been highlighted with red circles and her pose seems more focused. She sits still on her crescent moon, but the background's changed a bit, giving a sense of her being boxed in.

The final piece, done in 1986, is transformed dramatically from the first. Her features are sharper, breasts and teeth more prominent, bits of her skeleton visible supporting a more muscular frame. The palate is brighter, the background moved to space, perhaps.

Moving from one piece to another, noting the differences in setting and the changes in the character. The first character, not necessarily at peace, but presented more quietly, the final one appearing like an angry, empowered alien, alone in the cold void. For me it was impossible not to wonder and speculate as to what the artist is trying to communicate, both with the individual pieces as well as their progression. Six years after the first painting, her perspective on the character and the setting had changed, and ten years after that it had changed even more dramatically. Was the story of how her subject would change in the artists mind from the beginning? If so, how did that story evolve from it’s start to it’s end sixteen years later? If not, what thoughts, feelings, events did she experience prompting her to revisit the subject in the way she did at these intervals? How much of the artist was represented in the subject? Her own experiences and changes? Do those questions even matter?

And there’s the magic. That I can experience all these feeling and questions without having anything but reflected light caught on my retinas. I will never know what Ms. Cunningham wanted me to feel or think with this or any of her other works, but through her art she has reached across nearly half a century to create a pattern of thoughts and feelings which have entranced my mind and challenged my understanding.

Tip Toe

"Most times," he told her, "you have to sneak up on magic, approaching it so quietly from the most oblique of angles, catching it for that brief moment unawares before it slips off again behind the gray and mundane."