Posted tagged ‘Photogene App’
Very Tired (with elephant)
June 22, 2011Memorized poetry poem
June 18, 2011
New experiment today: seeing if I can write a poem on the iPad! (And on the train.)
I love writing poetry by hand. But it is interesting to stretch one’s brain, and, frankly, it’s always terrific to write in a way that does not require transcription.
So here’s my attempt. What I was thinking of was another current interest–memorizing poetry. Followers of this blog know that I was very impressed by memory techniques outlined in Joshua Foer’s recent book Moonwalking With Einstein. My own memorization efforts have slackened recently, but the way in which the memorized poems have stayed with me has been kind of interesting. See below.
The Bits I’ve Got By Heart
In my head the women come and go
talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time, time for
the lines to formulate in the brain,
and when they are formulated, to drop like gentle rain
from a heaven that’s not quite consciousness;
to break, but soft, into a waking dream,
to be each morning morning’s minion,
as my head turns from the pillow,
plucking, before day is quite begun,
the golden apples from what might otherwise be
a simple rag and bone shop–too bland for foul,
scuttled by ragged part-my-hair-behind prosaicness.
Instead, those half-remembered verses,
gleaned from a teeming brain,
roll up into one ball all I ken
of poets’ strength
and sweetness, and the
dancer, who is part dance,
pirouettes, keeping time
with a beat that echoes
on the inside.
A Morning’s Lark in Downtown NYC
June 14, 2011
Back in New York City, and woke in the early morning (4:30?) to the sound of a song bird. I don’t know if it was truly a lark, but I’m going to say lark because when my mind thinks of birds singing early in the morning, my mind says lark.
Amazing. There it was. Bird song. Trilling, lilting, sliding up and down a piccolo scale, unperturbed by the undercurrent roar of airconditioning units, so much more Debussy than Broadway.
When I actually got up, more toward 7, it was gone. City sounds taking over. Cars. Voices. Forklifts.
Where had the bird gone? How did it happen to be here ? (I thought larks were in meadows, praries. If they came into a city at all, that city was Verona.)
Speaking of Verona, are there two?
Outside the Train Window. App-loaded. Mini How-to With Elephant.
June 11, 2011
Followers of this blog know that I’ve become a little “App-happy” since getting an iPad 2 earlier this year. I openly disclose that a part of my obsession may arise from being an Apple stockholder: I am anxious to believe in the company’s products just so I don’t have to make any decisions about selling the stock.
In my defense, the “Apps” that have been of particular interest to me of late are not Apple products, but they do give the iPad a lot of possibilities.
The picture above was a photograph taken from the MetroNorth train going up the Hudson. Admittedly, the camera on the iPad 2 is not great. It’s even worse when used on a moving train, and worse still when used by me. (I’m still not exactly clear where the lens of the camera is located.) Plus the screen is so glossy and my eyes are so bad I can’t always see the image I am shooting. In this case, I didn’t even try. I just stuck the iPad over my head so that I had a hope of not filming the window frame.
Then I took that image, transferred it to the Brushes App, a finger painting app, and for lack of a better idea, drew an elephant in it. That’s the first picture below. (I was proud of myself for using the eraser function on the app, to make it look like the boat and oar were slightly underwater.)
THEN, I moved the painted photograph to the Photogene App to try some of the Photogene filters. Mixtures of finger painting and photograph often have a weird Roger Rabbit aspect especially with an unskilled artist (like myself). But the beauty of the Photogene filters are that you can stylize the entire piece so that the differences between the photo and the finger-painting diminish. The second one below was done with the “Posterize” filter.
Yes, a bit hackneyed. Still, cool!
Sounds of Stillness (Summer begins in downtown NYC)
June 2, 2011
Full summer here now. I wake up to a kind of thick stillness in the air and somehow, clearly perceptible in that stillness and yet not really disturbing it, is the sound of a lawn mower.
It all seems absolutely, perfectly, summery.
And then, I think, lawn mower? You’re in New York City!
Okay, there are parks down here. There is even a little parkish-sort of area (with tress photographed above) just outside my window.
Still, probably not a lawn mower.
A weed whacker?
(I swear it’s not just a truck idling.)
And now (I’m listening harder), I suppose it could be some kind of construction somewhere. The WTC site a couple of blocks away is the obvious choice.
But I kind of hate to think that I am confusing the sounds of the upcoming Freedom Tower with a lawn mower.
So, let’s just say that full summer is here now; that I wake up to a warm, thick stillness in the air that somehow overbalances a bunch of city sounds in a way that seems completely unlike the see-saw of stillness/sound in Winter, Spring, Fall. (When, by the way, I usually have my bedroom window closed.)
Hmmm…….
Let’s just say that I wake up and it’s really warm out.
(Above is same photo/drawing “posterized” with Photogene app.)
Last Tango In Buenos Aires? (With Elephants)
May 21, 2011
“Warhorse” with Brushes (App)
May 7, 2011
I had the good fortune to see Warhorse last night, a play that shows a slice of the horrors of World War I through the story of a horse and his boy. Based upon the children’s book by Michael Marpurga, as adapted by Nick Stafford, the play is, well, very sentimental in the manner of almost all art that focuses upon the bonds between humans and animals, playing powerfully upon the heart and tear ducts. The emotional force of the story is compounded by the horror of the truth of World War I, the devastation of both the humans and animals caught in its web. (The program notes that 8 million horses died in World War I, as armies learned that a calvary was no match for machine guns, barbed war, tanks.)
One wishes, at times during the performance, that some of the sentiment–the “Lassie” elements of the story–were toned down. Even so, the production is extraordinary–genius found in life-sized puppets–horses, animated by three handlers at a time, whose ghostly and yet matter-of-fact arms and legs and wonderfully subtle but emotive faces spirit the horses across the stage, whinnying, snuffling, hoofing, rearing, stomping, fly-whisking, trotting, being ridden, being shot at, screaming, dying. One loses all consciousness of the puppeteers; one falls in love with the horses.
The lighting, set, costumes, all production values, are fantastic, bringing a sense of a no man’s land (no horse’s land either) palpably to the stage.
More Blurred Thoughts on bin Laden, May 5th, New York’s Day
May 5, 2011
I spoke to my mother in Florida today, May 5th, who asked me if we were all super-happy now, we New Yorkers. (My mom watches a lot of TV.)
New Yorkers are never super happy. (We don’t all wear black just because it doesn’t show dirt.)
But some of us do seem to be happier than usual; according to the media, many of us are absolutely euphoric about the killing of bin Laden; for the last few days I’ve been wondering why I’m not one of this group.
(Please don’t misunderstand me. I am glad the U.S. has accomplished its mission. Still, I don’t find that bin Laden’s death brings the satisfaction that the media has been touting.)
One reason, previously mentioned, is a general pacifism. I could manage violence in self-defense, and certainly in defense of others, but I feel uncomfortable with an “eye for an eye” ideal of justice, even in the case of horrific villains. It seems to me that one must be careful not to lower one’s self to activities that are in any way similar to those that one deplores.
But one reason for my sense of anti-climax may be the way the 9/11 attack was originally handled. At the start, President Bush characterized the attack as an act of war rather than as a crime. (I remember that moment in his speech with great intensity, sitting on my coach, in the haze of smoke and dust that overtook downtown Manhattan, weeping. Afterwards, cooking impossible, we went to eat in an Indian restaurant I’d never been to before or since. Like many Indian restaurants in New York, it was actually a Bangladeshi restaurant, and I wondered what the waiters were thinking, serving those small metal dishes of currified sauces, war in Asia in the making. It was a surreal time in the City.)
If an action is characterized as an act of war, if it is used as the justification for war (two wars), it’s a bit difficult to turn it back into a crime again, something solved by a successful manhunt.
Would that it could be so.
Thinking About Different Things…errr…the Same Things
May 3, 2011
Reporters, yesterday, described “relief” as the primary emotion experienced by those interviewed at the World Trade Center site about the capture and killing of bin Laden. I live right next to the World Trade Center site, and a part of me does feel a kind of relief over these events. There’s another part of me, however, that can only put the words “relief” and “the face of terrorism” into a single sentence if I also add in the phrase “just not think about it.” Example: ‘the only way I can feel relief in the face of terrorism is to just not think about it.”
The fact is that if you live down here, and pass the site every day, you really do have to make an effort to banish past and possibly future events from your mind and to just go on with your daily activities.
In my case, these activities have lately involved goofing around on the iPad or iPhone, especially with the great painting app “Brushes”, and more recently with the photo app, “Photogene.” Above is a painting of lilacs that I made with the Brushes App using a real photograph as a visual model. I then deleted the photograph (it had been a separate “layer” in the painting), and saved my own painting as a photo. That’s what’s above.
I then pulled the painting/photo up on Photogene, which offers a bunch of cool filters to adjust it. Below is the same painting, filtered as a “comic.”
Not perhaps a great art, but a great way of occupying the mind.
P.S. – These pictures got cropped a bit weirdly in the upload to WordPress! One of the hazards of working digitally.
IPad Art, Brushes App, Photogene, Lots of Options – Elephant/Pony Show
May 1, 2011
If you like to play at art-making, as I do, the iPad offers lots and lots of ways of wasting time.
There are many art apps. The one I know is the Brushes App (also used with great success by David Hockney.) My lack of knowledge of all the intricacies of the App also requires me to combine it with a great photo App called Photogene, which includes editing, framing, and filtering tools.
One of the big keys to using the Brushes App is the use of layers, which allows you to change backgrounds and foregrounds and details. The iPad Brushes App allows for at least six of these; they can be deleted, added, put in front or behind one another, allowing for a lot of change and adaptation.
Photogene has these wonderful filters which allow you to completely change the highlighting and coloring of a drawing.
At any rate, some variations below:
ManicDDaily 
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