Ang kang Tatay

Magnet #1153 - Van Gogh's First Steps After Millet

So apparently, Van Gogh used to recreate Jean-Francois Millet's artwork in his own voice - something like 21 paintings, during his asylum time at Saint-Rémy. This painting, First Steps, After Millet is hanging in the Met - and here's Millet's original crayon on paper for comparison.

I do love this painting, because it's a supercute image of a child's first steps - especially if you see that the child is headed straight for the father's arms across the way.

Ya'll have heard it before - despite the fact that I don't want one, I'm a baby whisperer. For the most part, babies love me. I maintain it's because they see themselves in my chubby face.

It's been a fun year and a half, because two of my good friends had little girls, born 10 months apart. It's actually one of the advantages to being down here in NC this year, because I get to see both girls more often, and get to see them grow up, close up. Or, almost, anyway.

Last week, my BFF asked me to come sit for a bit with her daughter, who was supposedly just gonna sleep the whole time. It's possible that my BFF needs to read my blog more often, because I could swear I've done a blogpost about not allowing me near babies trying to sleep.

Here's why:

I learned that night that my threshold for leaving crying babies in their cribs is just about 10 minutes. What's worse? That baby totally knew I was putty in her hands, which is why she spent the next hour in my arms.

Couldn't help it. And she didn't sleep, either. She didn't cry at all, even as I spent most of that hour humming and singing the same Filipino lullaby over and over again.

It was like a magic lullaby, which totally kept her quiet the whole time! It's below, the lullaby that Tatay, quite possibly the original baby whisperer, always used to sing to us when we were little:

Ang kang Tatay
nga mga saging
nan gatumba kay gihangin

Ug wala pa unta hagagina
ang kang Tatay nga mga saging
dili matumba.*

Who knew? Filipino lullabies work on white babies!



*Translation:
My dad's bananas
have fallen because of the wind.

If it weren't for the wind,
my dad's bananas wouldn't have fallen.

(Yeah, I laughed at that, too.)

Bow ties are cool

Magnet #991 - Bow Ties Are Cool

I grew up at an ad agency where my C-suite made bow ties cool. I miss those guys. And, really, guys who know how to rock the bow tie.

Luckily, I've got Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor to fill in the gap, and it was probably this running line that won me over.

I've been saving this Cafe Press magnet for a couple of weeks, because Doctor Who Series 5 (or 31-ish, if you're really counting) comes out on DVD today. I'm excited, Best Buy's already told me it's waiting for me, so in about 12 hours, I'll have it in my hot little hands. (I'm actually more excited that the BBC DVD boxset prices were inexplicably a little more affordable for this season, but with a $20 BB certificate? Score!)

Won't lie, David Tennant will always be my doctor, no matter who the "girl who screams a bit" is by his side. And, I was a little nervous (and possibly psychic, with that Van Gogh magnet) about the new guy. But, after Matt Smith's first episode, I was kinda sold - his madcap Doctor was a little scary, but his performances with both Amelia and Amy Pond were just terrific. Plus, love her or hate her, Amy's a pretty great companion for this iteration of the Doctor.

Of course, (shout-out to @goddesspharo...and her glorious picspams) it helps that Karen Gillan's hair is just about the prettiest on television. (What? A shallow hair comment shouldn't come as a surprise from the girl who wanted to be a blonde Farrah Fawcett when she was five.)

Seriously, I do enjoy a good Eleven and Amy Pond story. And, between Van Gogh and the Weeping Angels two-parter, with a dash of River Song and even some James Corden, we had some really good episodes this season. Which is great, because those balanced out my two non-faves, Vampires in Venice (because ya'll know besides Vampire Diaries and of course, old-school WB, I hate vampires) and Victory of the Daleks (because ya'll know I hate Daleks - Oh. The. Horror.).

I'll also miss my ever-charming David Tennant Video Diaries, for sure, but maybe Matt's will make up for them? Maybe?

Anyway, if you haven't checked out the Doctor in any of his iterations, I don't know who you are, try the BBC official site...but for a much more fun dive into the Doctor's universe, drop by Blogtor Who, always ready with a good review, a laugh, and a fun time. /that's what she said!

What you don't know, will hurt you

Magnet #940 - Bearden Quote

I've never seen an episode of Hoarders - I don't even know what channel it's on. Just the commercials scare the bejeepers out of me. How do people live with all that stuff?

Then it struck me a bit dumbfounded this weekend that I might have the makings of a hoarder. No, no, stop backing away. I said makings of.

I'm a Taurus, I'm supposed to like having stuff. The mere possession of stuff makes me happy.

For example, if I notice I'm missing something from my wardrobe, next thing I know, I have 10 pairs of capris. It's not like I buy in bulk or anything, it just sticks in my head that I don't have something, and I keep picking up the same thing.

If you go even further back to my high school days, that old Loveswept series I worked on? Close to a thousand books in the series...my bookcase in my old room at home is missing maybe 200 of them.

It's scary how many possessions people own. During the last few days, I've been doing a giant clear-out of my apartment, getting rid of clothes (8 giant bags!), books (remind me to quit my paperbackswap account!) and in general, just getting rid of clutter.

And I have a ton of it. All in a very small, supertiny NYC studio.

Tell me. Why do I need my old dayplanners? From 1999? Even if it is the Van Gogh calendar my boss brought back from the Van Gogh museum, I shouldn't need to keep it. Right? (Dudes, that one, I totally am.) Ok, other example - does one need 15 scrunchies? Wrapped around an empty Rave hairspray aerosol can from the early 1990s? (Those totally went, so no one ask me for one when you come to visit. IJS.)

Already, I feel a ton better from getting rid of all the useless crap in my apartment. After all, you can't take it with you when you go.

Anyway, I figured this Bearden magnet was apropos to the occasion, as I try and figure out the stuff I really need, the stuff I really don't, and the stuff I really just like to own.

Just don't touch my magnets, and we're good.

eta:
Hey. How about I have a magnet with quote from a guy who has a den for bears? C'mon, that's awesome!

Paint your palette blue and gray

Magnet #932 - Van Gogh's Starry Night

If you've never seen Van Gogh's Starry Night, get thee to the MoMA asap. It's lovely, this magnet doesn't really do it justice.

Anyway, I love the swirliness of the sky, it almost feels like it's moving above the sleepy village below. Apparently, there are also somber overtones to the piece - those trees in the foreground, jabbing the skies and interrupting the movement of the stars, are actually cypresses, which are usually found in cemeteries.

Hmph. Sometimes, I hate learning too much about the painting. I really kinda just liked it because of its deep blue color palette.

I also love that it's the same painting they used in Doctor Who, when Vincent, Amy and the Doctor were laying down in a field, while Vincent explained how the skies looked to him. (I tried to find that exact link to that scene, but as with most BBC properties, the only scenes I can find are in those tribute videos using Don Maclean's Starry, Starry Night, so here's one that starts with the swirligig.)

The other reason I'm using it for today, is because the skies theme reminded me that the September 11th "Tribute in Light" is up and running in full force, and if you haven't seen those either, get here now.

As someone Tweeted, it's easily one of the most breathtaking things to see around this time of year.

Ain't that America

Magnet #907 – Van Gogh’s House at Auvers

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before how much I love traveling by train. If I can get there by train, rather than fly, I’ll do it.

Part of it, is that it’s cheaper to fly, given that I can get to the train station for the price of a subway ride (vs. a $20-40 cab), and, on top of that, I don’t get charged for my luggage.

But, that’s not even the real reason.

Train travel feels like I’m going somewhere, like I’m really traveling to get there. You don’t feel that when you’re flying, because half the time you’re lost in the puffy clouds, then you descend and you’re in another place. With roadtrips (which I also love), you’re concerned with rest- and gas-stops and attractions along the way.

But train travel, whether it’s Europe or America, you get to watch the countryside go by. And if you’re travelling Amtrak’s 79/80 Carolinian up and down the eastern seaboard, particularly in the summer, it’s amazing.

When you pass the big cities, you’re seeing the poorest neighborhoods fly by, and you can see where the phrase “wrong side of the tracks” originated. The way is littered with dilapidated clapboard houses, the empty industrial wastelands, tags on every surface you can see, and abandoned cars by the roadsides.

When you pass the small towns, you see history. If the train still stops there, you can see the bustling city and school centers close by. But, where the trains have abandoned their stations, you can see the remnants of the former centers of town, with beat-up brick buildings and empty cafes, and blocks of storefronts not touched since the middle of last century.

But, in between big and small America, oh, in between, it’s simply gorgeous. I love passing the forests of green, with canopies and carpets so thick that that surely no humans have ever lived there. They leave you staring into the woods, going for a glimpse of animals…ok, fine, yes, I look for bears. Always. I can't stop myself, either, from scouring practically every lake, river and swamp that we pass, just hoping to catch a bear in its tracks.

But, I think my favorite is seeing the farms in the windows – the tractors and irrigation machines in the fields, giant bales of hay, the dusty service roads lining the hundreds of acres of lush tobacco, tall corn, what I think is soy, and sometimes even cotton. It truly gives you hope for the future of the American agricultural industry, kinda like those Borden commercials, where those farmers are friends of Bessie.

The 95/85 corridor doesn't necessarily match the countryside commune shown here in this Van Gogh magnet, but at the risk of sounding jingoistic, if that corridor ain't America, I dunno what is.

Always somewhere between living and dying

Magnet #894 - Van Gogh's Sunflowers

Vincent and the Doctor is one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who - ever, where Eleven and Amy go back to visit Van Gogh. Loved that. And one of my favorites scenes is here, when they wake Vincent up out of one of his paintings, and he peers out his window at Amy sitting among the sunflowers, and Amy learns that he doesn't really have a thing for sunflowers.

Several canvases seem to say the opposite, for Van Gogh painted at least a dozen still lifes of sunflowers in every stage. From gorgeous full blooms to dying blossoms strewn on the ground, it was clear he had some sort of affinity for them.

The backstory being that people aren't really that sure if he loved the flowers themselves, or if he just painted them to please his buddy Paul Gauguin. Or, if he painted them because at the time, yellow paint was a new set of hues that they came out with and he loved experimenting with those shades and the joyfulness of the color.

At any rate, he considered the sunflowers his flower to paint.

And now, of course, now I feel the need to run over to the Met to check out their batch of sunflowers.

Van Gogh was one of our answers to one of the clues during last Saturday's Watson Adventures' Murder at the Met scavenger hunt. I've done the same hunt before, but with a different set of clues. Hard! I dunno if you guys have ever done one, but I love them.

For two hours, you think of nothing but getting to the next clue by solving the one you're working on, and getting lost in the details and figuring out red herrings, and not really seeing the art in front of you. Mind you, I'm not always so good with figuring out those clues, but I'm really good at getting you where you need to go when it comes to getting around the Met. Well, unless you're looking for cups from the first millennia in two different rooms. And you lose 20 minutes because of it. Oops.

For me, though, the best part about that scavenger hunt was that it brought me to rooms I'd never been to before - I can't wait to get back there to explore them...and those sunflowers.

Brace yourself, Vinnie

Magnet #834 - Self-portrait with a Straw Hat

If you're on the U.S. Doctor Who viewing schedule. Stop reading now.

Van Gogh, one of the greatest painters that ever lived. He painted like twenty self-portraits, using himself as a sitter, not being able to pay others to sit for him. This one's over at the Met.

Picked it for today, because the Doctor takes Amy Pond on the best adventure ever, first, to a retrospective of Van Gogh's work at the Musee d'Orsay (one of my most favorite museums ever), and then back in time to meet the grand master himself.

No real spoilers here. Suffice to say that this one's probably in my top Doctor Who episodes ever - joining the ranks of the Doctor's visits with Queen Victoria, Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. Sigh. Clearly, I'm a sucker for the Earth historicals.

In fact, I'll wager a guess that my blogger friend, GoldenGait might even come out of hiding and do an episode review/recap - I totally thought of her when I wondered how the BBC production folks produced all the Van Goghs. Did they just photo-reproduce them on to canvas? Did they hire artists to reproduce them?

I guess I should watch the Doctor Who Confidential to find out. Maybe they'll explain why not Claude Monet instead. My guess is that Vinnie's personal problems were likely the key to that puzzle, given how the BBC plugged their helpline at the end of the episode.

Anyway, be on the lookout for this episode and the fantabulous paintings, coming up in like a month or so here in the U.S.

So. Darn. Good!

"Terrible passions of humanity"

Magnet #793 - Van Gogh's Night Cafe

I love when my magnets tell a story, or have a story themselves. This Van Gogh is at the Yale University Art Gallery, where I picked up this magnet.

Such an awesome painting - I just love looking at it. It's a little painful on the eyes because of the bright yellows and the reds, combined with the greens - Van Gogh said he was trying to show the "terrible passions of humanity" through those colors. In truth, it's a sad little painting - it's supposed to be this place where people are socializing and having fun...and yet, everyone looks sad and miserable, in their own space.

People love the painting for the perspective of it, that it draws you in so well, so much so, that you're staring right at the door in the back, wondering what's going on over there. I just love that Van Gogh stayed up for 3 nights in a row in 1888, trying to capture this scene, of a cafe that was open all night in Arles, France. It's arguably one of his most famous paintings. I don't honestly know that to be true, because I do feel like there are several others that more people recognize. Still, I do like it. And, I also like that his pal Gauguin, also painted the same cafe, but from a totally different perspective. Ya'll know how I love that all those guys hung out.

Anyway, I just found out tonight that it's been at the heart of some controversy over the last year - by the early 1900s, the painting was sold into a Russian collection, and with all the government upheaval, it then became something like a ward of the state...the state which sold the painting on the open market in the 1930s, as a way to raise money for the government. A wealthy New Yorker bought it, and upon his death, gave it to his alma mater, Yale, where it's been ever since.

But, the kicker is that a descendant of the original Russian owner was like, dudes, that's my painting, and the government had no right to sell it, and therefore it was his. And, of course, Yale countersued for their rights, and they won.

So, there it sits, on a huge giant wall at this quiet museum. I do find this kind of ironic, there's something really funny about the hottentotty of Yale and all its visitors, staring at the night cafe full of drunk degenerates and prostitutes.

Nothin' scarier than a blank canvas

Magnet #622 - Van Gogh quote

People think that Mad Men's Don Draper is a creative genius. And, honestly, he probably is, with his incredible knack for being able to create something from nothing, and making clients think it's exactly what they asked for. Which is like a metastatement for his sad life, I suppose.

Don, in his dapper suits and Dapper Dan coif, always makes his Creative Director job look easy.

But it's not.

Playing Cosgrove's account manager to Don's creative director, I've sat in several creative development meetings in the last couple of days, and I honestly don't know how the Creatives do it.

From a naming assignment to not one, but two television spots, from a couple of print ads to a social responsibility newsletter, from designing a logo to finding images for a set of data reference cards - I've watched all our creative teams confront that blank canvas, and make something from nothing.

And then try to sell it in - to our internal clients, as well as the real clients.

I couldn't do it.

Give me my pretty colored spreadsheets with useless timelines that no one will meet, my estimating forms with the too high costs that no one will pay for, my letters of engagement with the horrid redlining of details that no one but Contracts cares about, my PPTs with all the jargon that no one outside the industry understands, and my myriad emails prodding people to do what the client wants them to do.

Yep. I'll take all of the above. Except the blank canvas. Don Draper can have that.

If I can have Don Draper, of course.

The measure of a chair

Magnet #431 - Van Gogh's Chair and Pipe

Ok, so for as long as I've had this magnet from the London's National Gallery, I thought it was really just an inset/cutaway of the chair in Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.

I loved that painting, because it was on the cover of a desk calendar from the Van Gogh Museum that my first boss at this company gave me. I remember, because it was the best desk calendar I've ever had design-wise, and I've spent the last 11 years trying to find that exact calendar layout. No, I'm not even joking.

Turns out, this chair, is actually Van Gogh's Chair and Pipe. (Seriously, there was some major magnifying of both paintings on my part to verify. Heh.) It's kinda cool on its own, I guess - especially now that I know that Van Gogh painted it as a companion piece to a chair that he painted for Gauguin, as a representation of the vast difference between the two men - as artists, and I'd bet, as men.

It's odd thinking about a chair being the measure of a man. I mean, these days people sit in myriad chairs all over the place - at home, at work, commuting, etc.

But, if I were to think about what my favorite chair would be, it'd be a big, soft ploppable number, where you can burrow down into it and stay for hours and hours. And it'd be blue. With blankets. And have a tv with cable, an overflowing DVR, and DVD player in front of it and maybe the remotes, some chips and chocolate beside me.

None of this straight-backed, woven seat crap. Heh, sorry Van Gogh. Nice painting, though.

Here's something else superodd. I just randomly picked this magnet for today. It wasn't until I started to write that line about my first boss here that I realized - today's my 11th anniversary at the same company. Huh. Odd that I should be thinking about that, on today of all days.