December 18, 2017
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Three Billboards is a film by Martin McDonagh and starring Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell. It is an outstanding film. I like it for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which are the great performances. As well, the characters are complex and contradictory.

The story is of a woman whose daughter has been raped and murdered  several months earlier. She has heard nothing from the police and decides to rent 3 billboards on a disused road outside of town, which read: Raped While Dying… And Still No Arrests?… How Come, Chief Willoughby? The officer on the case is a brutal racist. The police chief is dying of cancer. Mildred, played by Frances McDormand, wants justice and believes the billboards will keep the police focused on the case.

The troubling themes of the film are offset by a peculiar, painfully dark humour throughout. The screenplay is beautifully written.

Don’t miss this movie.

December 17, 2017
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Bluegrass Boys

Shields Landon “S.L.” Jones (1901-1997) was from West Virginia. He worked for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for 45 years. After the death of his wife in 1967, he took up whittling figures and drawing as a hobby in his retirement. He also played the fiddle. “A person has to have some work to do, so I carve some and play the fiddle.”

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This drawing hangs on a wall a few feet away from me. It features two bluegrass players – a banjo player and a fiddler. Although the banjo appears to be an open-back model rather than a resonator, I’d say these fellows are bluegrass rather than old time players. I say this because they’re dressed up in matching outfits, a common malady among bluegrass musicians. If they were old time players, I’d expect them to be wearing something more along the line of a seed company baseball cap.

December 16, 2017
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Charley Kinney goes Fishing

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The other day I posted a pic of a painting of a yellow cat by Charley Kinney. Here’s another of his works, this one a fishing scene. You can see there are two people fishing. One is about to hook a lunker of a creature, and the other a little wee fish. Kinney used the same technique as in the cat painting, leaving a dark painted frame around the image.

This painting hangs on a bookshelf behind where we make our mosaics. I snapped a photo at an angle because the painting has glass over it and it was difficult to get rid of the glare. Still, you get a good idea of what Mr. Kinney was up to. This painting makes me laugh every time I look at it. Just like the yellow cat, the giant fish has a goofy tongue.

Who would have guessed that after studying art and artists from around the globe, this subsistence farmer’s paintings would one day rank among my favourites.

 

December 15, 2017
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Special Sauce

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Here’s a blast from the past, one of a group of paintings I made after a couple fly fishing trips to Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Yellowstone I made with my friend East Texas Red, back in the early 90s. I think this one is from 1992. It’s called Special Sauce, it’s acrylic on canvas and it’s about 54 inches square. Anyone who has spent any time out that way will know what the title refers to. The photo looks a little more intense than the actual painting, which is just a wee bit paler. Blame the lazy photographer (me…I snapped the shot with my phone)

There are two paintings from this time I’ve never exhibited, this one, which is hanging down in my little basement studio and one other which I have upstairs in a bedroom we’ve converted to painting storage. One larger painting called Shack Nasty, which was also inspired by those fly fishing trips, has a good home. Two others – both exhibited in the c.1996 exhibition – Getting the Fuck out of Dodge and Beef Trout Karaoke, were destroyed several years ago.

I don’t know why this painting didn’t wind up in an exhibition at the time. As it turns out it’s one of those pictures that continues to resonate with me, even after all these years. I’d love to find this one a home one day, but in the meantime, I’m enjoying it down in the studio. I hope you enjoy it too.

Filed under: Art
December 15, 2017
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Charley Kinney’s cat

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I love Charley Kinney’s paintings. They’re expressive and bold, and some of them, like this cat, strike me as very funny. Kinney often set the image within some kind of painted framing device. All the ones I”ve seen are on paper, but I read that in the 70s he painted on window shades. This yellow cat painting hangs in our dining room.

Mr. Kinney lived from 1906-1991. A subsistence farmer, he lived off the land in NE Kentucky his whole life. He made paintings and puppets and he was also a musician. Charley Kinney made hundreds of paintings between 1970 and 1990. His brother Noah made wood sculptures, and the two of them often played music together

I found a video on YouTube featuring the Kinney brothers playing music. Charley also operates his home-made puppets.

We enjoy the the powerful and direct expression of many so-called folk or outsider artists. Charley Kinney didn’t go to art school. No need. His paintings drew from his life experience and his imagination (he also painted supernatural creatures).

Filed under: Art
December 13, 2017
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Teaching tool for Go openings

The folks at Deep Mind are at it again. Recently they turned their attention to chess and came up with an AI which very quickly beat up on the previously best chess computers. Now they’ve come up with a Go teaching tool, focusing on the opening.

Former pro and YouTube content creator Haijin Lee has posted an excellent brief video on her channel introducing the tool.

Deep Mind has provided win-rates for various moves in common openings based on AlphaGo evaluation. It’s a fascinating tool, but it isn’t clear to me yet how valuable it is going to be for weakling amateurs like me. After all, I’m capable of screwing up a promising game with just a few remarkably bad moves anywhere through the middle game, and I can lose considerable ground in the endgame to a stronger player.

I’m not saying having a strong opening is not important. Of course it is, but there are so many aspects to the game – building, reducing, invading, fighting, life & death, direction of play, maintaining sente and so on. Still, improving opening play has to be a good thing and at some point along the way I’m going to play around with the tool and see if I can improve in that area.

Just out of curiosity – are there any go players reading this blog? Have you been following the work Deep Mind has been doing with AI development?

Filed under: Go
December 11, 2017
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Bread

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After reading Sourdough by Robin Sloan, I felt compelled to bake some bread. I don’t have a sourdough monster going right now – I plan to start one in January after our vacation. However, I’m not against bread made with commercial yeast, and sometimes  you just have to use what you have on-hand.

I made it in my trusty Dutch oven as I often do. This method keeps moisture in the baking environment and helps develop a really nice crust. It’s cooling now. I’ll slice into it after Tuffy P gets home from work.

December 11, 2017
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Sourdough by Robin Sloan

Over the weekend, I gobbled up Robin Sloan’s new novel, Sourdough. The narrator is a woman who creates program code for robot arms. She orders soup and sandwiches daily from a restaurant with no address, and when the owners, who come from an exotic and fictional homeland, have to leave the United States due to expired visas, they give her an unusual gift – their very special sourdough starter.

Although our narrator, Lois Clary, has zero baking or cooking experience, she does the only reasonable thing. She learns to bake bread. Adventures ensue, and we have a novel – a charming and delightful novel.

The book brings to mind my own experience capturing a sourdough starter (or monster as I called it), a number of years ago. It made the tastiest bread. I kept it in a jar on top of the fridge and I would feed it every day or two. For the year or so I kept the monster going, I made quite a bit of bread. All those folks out there avoiding gluten would be horrified, I’m sure.

One day, something changed and my normally mild-mannered monster went rogue. It expanded up and out the holes in the lid of the jar, across the top of the fridge, down the side and halfway across the kitchen floor, when I walked in and destroyed it before it ate the house.

I suppose the novel is having some fun at the expense of foody-nerds in the SF area of California. Lois gets involved with an experimental market and becomes immersed in a delightfully obsessive food sub-culture. The book is a page-turner, and it’s funny and thoroughly enjoyable to read.

I suspect it’s impossible to read this book without wanting to first eat some seriously good bread, then hunker down and bake your own. I’m thinking that when we return from Vietnam in January, I might just capture a new monster and work on making a really great loaf.

December 8, 2017
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Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

I just finished reading Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill. It hardly needs a revue, as it’s this year’s Giller Prize winner. I loved this book. It messes with the reader throughout, but that’s OK. It’s vexing and clever and it’s a page-turner.

What is real? We want to trust the narrator, right? But what if the narrator is living in an imaginary world, suffering from a “wiring problem”? Or what if the narrator is another person’s doppelganger, some kind of para-normal phenomenon, or a product of somebody else’s imagination and life experience? Bellevue Square is an unstable platform. You think you have a handle on it but you don’t.

Is it a book about mental illness?…a book about doppelgangers?….a book about the nature of reality and perception? I guess it’s all of these things. Much of the book is set in Kensington Market here in Toronto, a place I know well. In the little park known as Belleview Square, you’re apt to meet all manner of outsiders, out-patients, drug dealers, drug takers, performers, artists, and misfits of all shapes and sizes. What a perfect setting for this novel.

Bellevue Square starts as if it is a conventional mystery thriller-type book but that goes off the rails fairly quickly. Don’t worry about it. Just dive right in and roll with it. You’ll be fine….maybe.

Highly recommended.