by Spookygonk

Migraines That Erase Color

Chronic pain has its own devastating side effects, even in the absence of medication. Sufferers of migraine headaches sometimes report a phenomenon that amounts to color-blindness. Jeff of the Omegaword blog explains that chronic pain has a peculiar way of removing color from the world. He poetically describes his experience of a reality in which all color has been erased by bursts of red:

"Red has never been my favorite color. Bolts of hot pain sear the world, leaving me colorblind but for the shards that stay behind — jagged red reminders of pain past, and pain yet to come. Through the window, beyond the mute interplay of light and shadow on a white kitchen wall, bare branches against a pale sky remind me that it's all in my head. What color are light waves, anyway?"

A new study of synesthesia confirms Jeff's observation that the color of the world is all in one's head. Cretian van Campen, author of The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science (2007), explains: "A mysterious aspect of color is that it is created in the brain and seen to exist in the physical environment. But the physical environment contains only light waves and is in fact colorless. The colors are inside our brains, not outside."

Color palettes sometimes testify to hues that have been displaced or erased by profound circumstances. For example, COLOURlover Codename Gimmick envisions the frosty onset of winter as a time when "frequencies from red to yellow have been silenced." His "Frost-Over" palette celebrates red and yellow through their striking absence.

With the palette "Another Migraine?" COLOURlover Stefan depicts a reality reduced to lavender, punctuated by an occasional throb of neon yellow.

COLOURlover Manekineko envisions a world so desaturated that only dull grays remain.

Migraine-inspired palettes from the COLOURlovers library testify to the phenomenon that chronic pain can distort or dampen one's experience of color. Luckily, some artists seem able to retain a keen color sensibility even within the confines of a migraine headache.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

---

Gia writes:

Interesting. Migraines are just the opposite to me.  Imagine the brightest yellow, neon +++++, electrified, magnified, and shot directly to your brain.  Behind the eyes, a violent pink, raw, bleeding and sore.  Add some touches of green—outer space green.  Glowing and undulating, slowly creeping over the entire length of your body, quieting your every cell.

Yeah.

That's close.

A saint made of plasticine and a light bulb, by Ukrainian artist Eugene Rudyy.

Without the actual use of color or light, the English composer Arthur Bliss wrote ‘A Colour Symphony’ having four movements. Here Bliss sought to convey the musical and emotional impression of four colors.

‘I. Purple: The Colour of Amethysts, Pageantry, Royalty and Death.

II. Red: The Colour of Rubies, Wine, Revelry, Furnaces, Courage and Magic.

III. Blue: The Colour of Sapphires, Deep Water, Skies, Loyalty, and Melancholy.

IV. Green: The Colour of Emeralds, Hope, Youth, Joy, Spring and Victory.’

The symphony was written in 1922, first presented in Gloucester Cathedral, and revised by the composer in 1932.
—Tom Douglas Jones, The Art of Light and Color, 1972.

While searching online for the key to eternal happiness, I encountered these two photos.  It would seem that true happiness requires the help of a good dentist and optometrist.


Via Benettontalk.com

Piecing together the secret of the rosary . . .


 

Santa Luiza the Pious
Patron of Religious Atheists.

Santa Luiza teaches that humanity invented God, and that God is very, very real. Santa Luiza shelters her flock of unbelievers with a canopy of sacred art, symbols, stories, and histories. The photograph depicts Santa Luiza in her incarnation as the only atheist attending a Catholic wedding. The color palette "Saint of the Atheist" was created in her honor.



(Thanks to Luiza de Camargo!)

Oh if you ain't got the do re mi, folks,
If you ain't got the do re mi,
Why, you'd better go back to beautiful Texas,
Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
—Woody Guthrie, "Do Re Mi," a Dust Bowl ballad of the 1930s

A collaged story we assembled for a singular Jan and henceforth dedicate to all the Jans of the world. Click on the thumbnails below to view an enlarged version in a new window.

Page 1	Page 2: doorway	Page 3
Page 4: bat	Page 5: rat and top hat	Page 6: black eel
Page 7: fish eye	Page 8: teeth	Page 9: tongue
Page 10: eye	Page 11: ear

Some folks say that once in a while you’ll find a coral snake in there, he glistening magic in his yellow and vermillion stripes, lying there near your foot like a thing bewitched, the fatal spell of his fangs in his wonderful color: cute thing, pretty little yellow and vermillion snake. Those rattlers in the swamps are of wonderful coloration: white, black, yellow, orange, red, blue, in great diamonds. Not like desert rattlers, dry, dusty in color, but moist in color, refulgent in color.
—Julian Lee Rayford, Cottonmouth, 1941.

I dreamed I was named honorary president of the Semicolon Appreciation Society.

Information Prose :: A Manifesto in 47 Points :: Version 1.0

by Jeremy P. Bushnell, jeremy@invisible-city.com

9. You can learn a lot about a person from a mixtape.

10. When at someone’s house for the first time, you tend to look at their bookshelves.

11. Fiction which builds characters without taking this into account has its head in the sand.

12. The primary goal of the information prose writer is to document the contemporary mind and environment in a way that takes the contemporary importance of media and information seriously.

13. Many contemporary fiction writers are afraid or otherwise unwilling to do this. I submit as evidence the large numbers of contemporary novels set in environments which lack informational richness: rural areas, the past, "magical realism" worlds.

14. Information prose does not attempt to depict a simplified version of the world. Information prose attempts to contain as much of the complexity of the world as possible.

15. "Do you understand how tremendously dense? A minute in a room, together." — Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

16. A fictional American present in which no one watches TV, listens to the radio, or checks their e-mail is sentimental and false.

17. Information prose writers should not aim to write work which is timeless. The value of documentary work never lies in its timelessness.

18. When writing about characters who inhabit dense fields of information (both remembered and newly-experienced), the value of quoting, sampling, and appropriation rapidly becomes apparent.

19. Creative work utilizing techniques of appropriation has been produced with regularity for nearly a hundred years now, in all forms of media. Information prose writers should no longer need to defend these techniques against charges of novelty.

20. A partial primer, organized in a rough chronology: the Comte de Lauteamont’s Maldoror, Dada collages, Tristan Tzara’s cut-up poems, William S. Burroughs’ cut-up and fold-in novels, Robert Rauschenberg’s media silkscreens, Bern Porter’s found poems, Situationist detournement projects, the poetry of John Ashbery, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, the novels of Kathy Acker, the albums of Public Enemy and Negativland, and the films of Craig Baldwin.

21. All evidence indicates that much of this work is of lasting merit.

22. All evidence indicates that these techniques of appropriation are exactly the ones necessary to create a recognizable picture of the contemporary present.

23. "As artists, our work involves displacing and displaying bites of publicly available, publicly influential material because it peppers our personal environment and affects our consciousness. In our society, the media which surrounds us is as available, and as valid a subject for art, as nature itself." —Negativland’s Tenets of Free Appropriation

24. Information prose writers should not be afraid to plagiarize. It is not their duty to write citations. Our memories and experiences do not usually come attended by complete bibliographies.

25. Information prose writers should not overlook the technique of the fragment. Our experience of the textuality of the surrounding world is largely fragmentary; information prose should strive to reflect that.

(to be continued)
_____

Piecing together the secret of a rainbow in the heart . . .


 

The whole room blazed with light — and not with light alone but with a thousand colours, with all the glories of some painted window; and upon the walls of his room and on the familiar furniture, the glow flamed back and seemed to flow again to its source, the little wooden box. For there upon a bed of soft wool lay the most splendid jewel, — a jewel such as Dyson had never dreamed of, and within it shone the blue of far skies, and the green of the sea by the shore, and the red of the ruby, and the deep violet rays, and in the middle of all it seemed aflame as if a fountain of fire rose up, and fell, and rose again with sparks like stars for drops.
—Arthur Machen, "The Inmost Light," found in the collection Masterpieces of Mystery, 1921.

by franz66

Test Your Color Memory

Is it possible to accurately remember a given color? Rochester Institute of Technology Professor Mark Fairchild says "no"! Surprisingly, the brain is poorly equipped to remember colors. At best, Dr. Fairchild notes, "we can remember only general categories of color represented by significant color names. That's why there are so many sophisticated ways to name, organize, and measure color."

Here's a way to test your own color memory. Close your eyes and imagine a red stop sign at a traffic intersection. It's a color that drivers see every day in the European Union, United States, and many other places. Then open your eyes and see if you can identify the official stop sign color from amongst the following imposters:












Answer: According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the official stop sign color is HEX: #B01C2E, RGB: 176, 28, 46, Pantone® 187. It is the last color in our lineup. Did you guess correctly?

Here's a second try, with fewer options. Close your eyes and imagine the giant yellow "M" of the McDonald's® franchise. It's an eye-catching yellow known the world over. Then open your eyes and see if you can identify the official McDonald's® yellow from amongst the following imposters:





Answer: According to the McDonald's® Global Logo and Trademark Standards Reference Guide, the official yellow is HEX: #FCC917, RGB: 252, 201, 23, Pantone® 123. It is the first color in our lineup. Did you guess correctly?

You can explore Dr. Fairchild's research on color perception and imaging at his website.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

"Leisure time is a gigantic smoke screen."
—Jenny Holzer

Nonexistence contains existence. Love / encloses beauty. Brown flint and gray steel have orange candlelight in them. Inside / fear, safety. In the black pupil of the eye, many brilliancies.
—Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273), from Paradox. The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, translated by Coleman Barks, 2001.

Jonathan responds with a dialog between a Zen master and his disciple:

Disciple: Does the cold flint contain the warm flame, Master?
Master: Tiny, sleeping monks with disposable lighters.

Piecing together the secret of prosperity . . .


 

In this diagram of human development, the pictures of the fetus at four and six weeks (top left and middle) bear a striking resemblance to Mayan hieroglyphics.  The top right picture, of the fetus at two months, bears an uncanny resemblance to an Olmec head statue.

King Death was a rare old fellow! / He sate where no sun could shine; / And he lifted his hand so yellow, / And poured out his coal- black wine / Hurrah! for the coal- black wine!
—Thomas Morton, The School of Reform; or, How to Rule a Husband, A Comedy in Five Acts, 1805. As quoted in Artist of Wonderland: the Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel by Frank Morris, 2005.

Around the pale- blue dome of the heavens a few pearl- colored clouds hung motionless, as though the wind had been withdrawn to other skies. Not a crimson leaf floated downward through the soft, silvery light that filled the atmosphere and created the sense of lonely, unimaginable spaces. This light overhung the far- rolling landscape of field and meadow and wood, crowning with faint radiance the remoter low- swelling hill- tops and deepening into dreamy half- shadows on their eastern slopes. Nearer, it fell in a white flake on an unstirred sheet of water which lay along the edge of a mass of sombre- hued woodland, and nearer still it touched to spring- like brilliancy a level, green meadow on the hither edge of the water, where a group of Durham cattle stood with reversed flanks near the gleaming trunks of some leafless sycamores. Still nearer, it caught the top of the brown foliage of a little bent oak- tree and burned it into a silvery flame. It lit on the back and the wings of a crow flying heavily in the path of its rays, and made his blackness as white as the breast of a swan. In the immediate foreground, it sparkled in minute gleams along the stalks of the coarse, dead weeds that fell away from the legs and the flanks of a white horse, and slanted across the face of the rider and through the ends of his gray hair, which straggled from beneath his soft black hat.
—James Lane Allen, "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky," originally published in The Century Magazine, April 1888.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Artist Jaime Pitarch discovered the secret of focusing one's Third Eye:

A hairdresser's apocalypse:
The curled will end not with bangs but a wimple.

"The rock incubates a void."  A bit of wisdom from a peppermint tin of mailart by Geof Huth and endwar.

Piecing together the secret of power . . .


 

The Unicorn of 4th Street.

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt writes:

Big diamonds, big blue diamonds, how they sparkle / But what can they do to warm your soul? / When you’re lonesome in the moonlight, and need some lovin’ / Big diamonds, big blue diamonds, are so cold.
—Earl J. Carson, "Big Blue Diamonds," first recorded by Little Willie John in 1962.

Today's Question:

Did the Beatles cross the Atlantic for an appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964?

With hindpsych, the answer is "yes"!  In our Tarot spread, the card on the left is the Knight of Pentacles.  A hard worker who is dedicated to his chosen course, this knight symbolizes the Beatles.  The knight is face to face with the center card, the Page of Cups.  The Page of Cups is a symbol of an outpouring of emotions and a new love affair.  The page represents America's reception of the Beatles.  Note that behind the page is a body of water, symbolic of the Atlantic Ocean.  The final card in our spread is the Ten of Pentacles.  This is a symbol of affluence—supreme business success, long-term abundance, and all-around good fortune.  Note that the knight begins with a single coin and ends with a tenfold bounty.  We can say with confidence that the Beatles cross the Atlantic for an appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964, and that it is a pivotal moment in their career.  We can now move on.

by mybloodyself

Inventing New Colors

Is it humanly possible to invent a new color? Rochester Institute of Technology Professor Mark Fairchild says "yes"! In fact, he suggests that all observant people invent new colors at various times of their lives. Dr. Fairchild explains: "As a color scientist, I think of colors as perceptions, that is things that we see. Of course those perceptions are not just caused by our brain (except when we are dreaming); they are caused by how our eyes and brain respond to the world around us. For color it is the light and objects that we are responding to. Most people would take this question to mean 'has anyone invented a light or object of a new color?' Personally, I have not, but I have invented new ways to understand and describe how we perceive and produce colors in places like the movies. Other people certainly have invented new materials that produce colors that people couldn't make before. Things like new paints, new inks, new kinds of televisions. That has happened often through the history of science. But, if we come back to color being a perception, then it is even easier to say that we invent new colors. I think we all do it quite often if we pay attention to the world around us. Have you ever had a time when you looked at something and it seemed like a totally new experience? Maybe a special rainbow, or a peculiar bird, or a strange way the light bounces around your room? If you have noticed a new experience like that, then I think you could say you have invented a new color. That is because color is truly a perception that is unique to you and any new color experiences could be considered 'inventions.' I like to just think of them as interesting parts of our world that make it fun to study science; in my case color science."

You can explore Dr. Fairchild's research on color perception and imaging at his website.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

"An Abecedary" by Paul Dean:

Are maps poems?

The Making Maps blog highlights these symbols for nautical dangers and their poetic descriptions.

How many ways can one get tossed aside?  John Walkenbach checked Google and discovered the following:

• Tossed aside like a 7th grade boyfriend
• Like a forgotten dream
• Like a worn-out pair of boots
• Like a rag doll
• Like a useless bag of linseed
• Like a dog after his job was done
• Like a soiled tissue
• Like a dirty mop
• Like a master artist's sketch
• Like a broken appliance
• Like a taco wrapper
• Like a child's doll
• Like a piece of trash
• Like a wad of yesterday's news
• Like a used play thing
• Like a spent cigarette
• Like a sack of pork chops
• Like a Big Mac box
• Like a fat pedestrian
• Like a fad
• Like a goddamn rubber glove
• Like a moldy beanbag chair
• Like a dirty napkin

(Via J-Walk Blog.  Linked illustrations courtesy of Abecedarian.)

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I saw / Was the sun through yellow curtains, and a rainbow on the wall / Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you, crimson crystal beads to beckon

Oh, won't you stay / We'll put on the day / There's a sun show every second
—Joni Mitchell, "Chelsea Morning," 1969.

Piecing together the secret of the phoenix . . .


 

Earth–Moon–Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon)

Earth-Moon-Earth "is a form of radio transmission whereby messages are sent in morse–code from earth, reflected from the surface of the moon, and then received back on earth. The moon reflects only part of the information back – some is absorbed in its shadows, 'lost' in its craters.  Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata has been translated into morse-code and sent to the moon via E.M.E.  Returning to earth 'fragmented' by the moon’s surface, it has been re-translated into a new score, the gaps and absences becoming intervals and rests."

View the sent score and the crater-filled score received back, and hear excerpts of the score here.

If a cartoonist goes back to the drawing board, where does a satirist go?  Back to the irony board.

Bluebird blue as the sky- blue heart / Of my girl whose heart is the sky
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), "A Bird is Singing," from The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Donald Revell, 2004.

Did you hear about the Zen Nudist Monastery?  They meditate on volleyball.

I sometimes dream of reading a book.  It's a poetic, insightful, vastly important work.  As I continue reading, I begin to become lucid.  At first, I think myself capable of remembering this dreambook upon waking.  I vow to memorize the words and transcribe them.  Then, as consciousness slowly refracts the light of the dreamtime, my comprehension of the text begins to slip away.  Sentences that made perfect sense moments ago now seem cryptic or utterly indecipherable.  Finally, I realize I've lost all grasp of this vital dreambook's meaning, and I reluctantly open my eyes.  Elusive though it may be, I've never given up on one day remembering the dreambook or, perhaps more extraordinarily, stumbling upon it in waking life.  I'm gratified (though admittedly astonished) to report that, in a roundabout fashion too complex to detail here, I have finally located a physical copy of the dreambook.  It will come as no surprise that the author is an avant-garde artist and a literary savant who possesses a direct line to the unconscious mind.  J. Karl Bogartte's prose is so imbued with dream logic that the conscious mind is initially mystified, then simply enchanted and drawn into a vision.  The reason the physical copy is decipherable by the conscious eye is simple: physical pages don't tend to display the volatile calligraphy of dreambooks.  In the physical copy, we can read the same sentence twice and nothing will have changed (save our appreciation of the text's resonance).  If you've ever regretted forgetting what you're certain was a marvelous dream, it may be time to (re)discover the work of J. Karl Bogartte.

Piecing together the secret of the philosophers . . .


 

We entered the room, and my eyes fell at once on the picture. I looked at it for a long time. It was a pile of mangoes, bananas, oranges, and I know not what. . . . The colours were so strange that words can hardly tell what a troubling emotion they gave. There were sombre blues, opaque like a delicately carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre that suggested the palpitation of mysterious life; there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual passion that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the berries of holly — one thought of Christmas in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the pleasure of children — and yet by some magic softened till they had the swooning tenderness of a dove’s breast; there were deep yellows that died with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook. . . . They belonged to a Polynesian garden of the Hesperides.
—W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919, a novel inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin.

by InfectedProject

Heterochromia: Eyes of Different Colors

Heterochromia is an eye condition in which each iris is a different color. It occurs when an iris has either excess or deficient pigmentation. The condition is hereditary, but it can also manifest after an injury or disease. Because the effect is rather striking, some people without the condition use differently colored contact lenses to simulate heterochromia. Famous people with the condition include English singer/songwriter David Bowie, American actor Christopher Walken, English actress Jane Seymour, American baseball pitcher Max Scherzer, Israeli basketball coach Oded Kattash, American actress Kate Bosworth, American singer Tim McIlrath, American actor Dan Aykroyd, and the Greek king Alexander the Great.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

Since the other sign said Walk, running appeared to be the only remaining option. —Eileen Birin, Chalkboard Dust

The direction you don't go is the direction that the sign says DON'T WALK. —Tom Spanbauer, In the City of Shy Hunters

The moon goes up like a pregnant lady leaning backwards to walk. —Betsy Sholl, Changing Faces

Did you hear about the scandal at the Ephemera society?  Apparently, their journal is printed on acid-free paper.  No doubt there'll be a high turnover on their board of directors ... again.

(Note to the Ephemera Society: just kidding!)

O Paris / The yellow dies from red to green / Paris Vancouver Hyéres Maintenon New York and the Antilles / The window opens like an orange / Comely fruit of light
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), "The Windows," translated from the French by Donald Revell, 2004.

Piecing together the secret of the philosopher's stone . . .


 

How is a university unlike a military academy?

A university has more majors (and even some double majors, not to mention majorettes).

When the landlord told the fashion model to vacate, she merely stared at him.
When he told her to get moving, she walked away, pivoted, then came right back.
When he said she was thick-headed, she was offended, but for the wrong reason.

Piecing together the secret of the pharaoh . . .


 

Information Prose :: A Manifesto in 47 Points :: Version 1.0

by Jeremy P. Bushnell, jeremy@invisible-city.com

1. Human beings are thinking creatures. In order to write about human beings in a complete fashion, one needs to write about how human beings think.

2. The ability of language-based stories to depict thought is precisely what keeps them competitive in a world flooded with stories. Image-based stories— movies, television programs —can depict how people act in ways that are seductive and successful, but very few possess an aesthetic mechanism complex enough to reliably depict the nuances of human thought.

3. Human thought reacts to its environment. Writing accurately about the way people think therefore involves writing accurately about the environment in which people live.

4. Human beings live surrounded by information. To write completely about human beings therefore means taking on the duty of writing about information.

5. The human mind references its own memory banks incessantly. Writing that seeks to document the human mind will reflect this.

6. The literary device of the extended flashback is not an illustration of the way we actually experience memory. We live in a perpetual wash of microflashbacks.

7. The memory stores remembered experience in the form of a collage of information drawn from hundreds of thousand of sources. Many of these sources are media sources. Many of our stored experiences are experiences of watching, reading, or listening to media, in either a primary or a supplementary capacity.

8. Media matters to people. It contributes to how we define and understand ourselves.

(to be continued)

From the atlas of humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt:


Little-known fact #1: The total number of soldiers who died on the American side during the Revolution was "no more than the population of a small town in Ohio or Nebraska" (Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution, 2002, p. 89).

Little-known fact #2: "For every NYU kid [who has trouble adjusting to adult life], there's another student from a small town in Nebraska who goes to college in a small town in Ohio in hopes of fitting in" (Spiny, commenting on this blog posting.)

Meanwhile, Columbiana claims the distinction of being "the Biggest Little Town in Ohio," but not necessarily in Nebraska.

In winter in Tangier, the rain often ends late in the afternoon: when it does, the dark blue clouds split open to spill out a pinkish beige on to the previously white walls of the Casbah, the shadows turning cool green in contrast. Loti was correct in describing Tangier as the white city. But its whiteness is that of a canvas waiting to receive colour — blue, pink, and green — that nature provides.
—John Elderfield, 1990.

by Jon Hanson

Parrotfish: Colorful and Helpful

The key to saving the Caribbean's coral reefs could be the vividly colored parrotfish, according to the journal Nature. Reef ecosystems are increasingly strangled by encroaching seaweed, fertilized by agricultural runoff. However, parrotfish graze on seaweed, using parrot-like beaks. Since sea urchin numbers have dwindled in the Caribbean, parrotfish are the primary grazers. Scientists now believe that protecting the fish could help strangled reefs to recover. Parrotfish need protection because they are a sought-after delicacy in Caribbean culture and are easily caught in fish traps.

Parrotfish are as colorful as macaws. In fact, they are so variably colored that they are often mistaken for different species. Male and female parrotfish sport different colors. Females tend to feature browns, greens, silvers, and grays, while males have more vibrant colors such as pink, aqua, orange, yellow, red, and electric blue. However, in the Mediterranean, the coloration is reversed, with females sporting vivid hues and males drab ones.

To learn more about the role of parrotfish in coral reef ecosystems, see the BBC News report.

 

by richard ling.

 

by Sam and Ian.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]