Mixed Media…thingy….

My first fling with assemblage art didn’t quite work out, I think because I didn’t have a clear starting point. So I just stared at small unrelated bits and moved them around and then they continued to be small unrelated bits. Whatever internal alchemy turns them into related bits did not happen. There are people who can turn dross into gold–I can apparently turn dross into eggplants, but only if I’ve got a blueprint to work with.

So this time I went into it with a teeny image, and started creating a weird kind of frame around it, and somehow or other, the result was the Amazing Penelope and her Perilous Frog.

I kinda want to do another couple of these, sort of 3-D advertisements for a sideshow of questionable freakishness. (Step right up, folks, and SEE Lydia and her Astonishing TRAINED ZUCCHINI!)

Also, as I was driving home yesterday, I passed a homemade sign that said "BONSAI SALE." Sure enough, when I crested the hill, there was a van parked by the side of the road with a small rack of bonsai trees, being dealt out of the truck in much the same way that one might pass somebody selling rugs or fresh produce or seafood of questionable refrigeration.

Perhaps there had always been traveling bonsai salesmen–hard, road-weary men, dragging into truck stops in the small hours of the morning, buying No-Doz and cigarettes and Miracle-Gro before setting out again, chasing the elusive dream of a fortune shaped from tiny trees–perhaps you are all aware of them already and Bruce Springsteen has done songs about it and I am the last person on earth to hear of them, the way I was apparently the last person to hear about butt falsies and labia dye, but it certainly struck me as peculiar, and of course before long, I was writing the ad copy for Honest Bob’s Used Bonsai Emporium (The only thing smaller than our trees is our prices!) which is how I keep myself amused on the drive home.

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