Our Sweeter Keep
A momentary perch upon which to light. A reflecting glass as such for my thoughts and expression.
About Me
- antaresrichard
- Fairfield , California, United States
- An artist-go-lucky go-lightly, native San Franciscan, eupraxsophist plus pacifist, and a twin to boot am I.
Pages
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Ending Out the Year
There Was a Time...
...I was so into...
Look Magazine Special Edition (1967) |
See what I mean...
That's my twin sister in the foreground and me behind her with the magazine she is calling to the camera's attention. Holy cow, it only cost $1.00 back then for the special edition. I liked that 'Look' so much, I had a back copy of the "Flying Saucers" issue up until 2021.
Sunday, December 29, 2024
Saturday, December 28, 2024
'An Acrylic Digital Picture Frame is Worth...' (A follow-up)
For my Christmas gift this year, my twin sister Georgene got me an acrylic digital picture frame (just like the above title and description on the box both say). Neat! I next created a video to be displayed, and set it to the short piano piece entitled 'Miss Clare Remembers' from Enya's 1988 'Watermark' album. For the visual, I chose the 1985 poem I just recently posted twelve days ago.
Here is the simple video I assembled:
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
According to A.I....
Presenting: me!
For reference, below is a photo of me from 2017. The above image more closely resembles my younger self than it does my present day portrait on which it was actually based. Flattery will get you anywhere.
Monday, December 23, 2024
‘Apparition: I Trouble the Moonlight’
I trouble the moonlight,
“Come, shadow me a spell.
In thy gray light,
It may be that I shall see her.”
A shimmer of luminescence, I know,
As long ago's go.
Patrolling the Earth...
Still, I wonder:
Clothed in the pallor
Thy albedo accords,
Who is the haunt,
With this spectre,
A ghost?
-antaresrichard-
Sunday, December 22, 2024
The Greater Half of My Life.
This is it.
I seem to passing one milestone after another lately. In a little over a month from now, I will be observing yet another golden anniversary. However, I just recently passed a milestone I almost overlooked. Had a thought not occurred to me forty years ago, none of these other landmarks would I have reached.
"If I die now, the improbable will become impossible."
On the fourth of December 1984, defeated in love, and distressed at my employment prospects (I had gotten myself fired a year and a day earlier) I took a lethal overdose of sleeping pills and was waiting for the effect to set in.
It wasn't immediate as I had imagined.
That's when the aforementioned thought I hadn't considered, with respect to unrequited love, crossed my mind.
Needless to say the suicide attempt was aborted as I walked myself over to San Francisco General Hospital (which was just across the street) for emergency treatment.
I have now lived more decades since that moment of crisis than I had leading up to it. This then is the greater half..
As for my troth and my chances...
At present, my hope is still improbable and one day, it will be rendered impossible, but I will let life do the final turning of the page and closing of the book. It will not be my own hand, for all hope requires is but the barest improbability to persist.
Dying only cements ill fate - forever.
Monday, December 16, 2024
'This Then the Notion'
This then the notion I confess,
A pure devotion have no less:
What lips to lips in soft caress,
Address in kind, I too profess,
And offer mine up to thy "bess",
To that which grants sweet Heaven, yes!
I penned this way back in 1985, but somehow forgot to include it in my little blog.
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
BAMPFA...
...with Birdie or, as she is better known on social media, Birdie Roy (Trish Keefer). To celebrate her birthday, I was asked to treat her to the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), which I did, and happily so.
Photo by Trish Keefer, who herself was actually in a James Bond flick, Vic! |
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Thirty-three+ Years in the Failing Part 2
Continued from Part 1...
Running off the temporary splice, all appears to be okay. The flow of electricity has been constant since the patch was installed. Till the field crews show up this will have to suffice.
Then around 2pm I lose power at the laptop. Strange, three quarters of the house is down but the kitchen and livingroom remain supplied'. Yvette and I summon PG&E again.
Joe returns at 2:30. The underground line to 1379 Northwood Drive (our nextdoor neighbor) is out, but the temporary splice is still drawing limited energy for 1385 (our residence). Alfred Pulonco, our neighbor, now totally without electricity, has also contacted PG&E.
Joe decides to leave the splice in place so that 1385 will not be completely in the dark. He does show me the master power switch used to shut the meter down should any major disruption occur. A second step-up in the case will bring the crews tonight.
4:30pm sees Joe depart and 4:55pm has Ken of JB's High Voltage arrive. He's here to mark the street and to assure Yvette and I of the ETA of the crews (both contactors to PG&E). They are about an hour to an hour and a half away and enroute from their prior job.
Ken takes off at six.
Minutes later, a lone, non-company truck drives up and is joined by a public works vehicle from the City of Fairfield. The two occupants meet at the junction box across the street and after a little discussion the public worker leaves. The time is 6:15pm
7:15pm: At long last, the field crew arrives to join that lone occupant of the truck. Holy moly, they are many! There must be no less than five possibly six big work trucks, representing JB's High Voltage, Inc. and Henkels & McCoy West LLC. The vehicles disgorge around ten crewmembers. (One even brings his five children with him!)
That mystery man? It turns out, he's the onsite representative from PG&E, He spoke little and smelled a great deal of cigarettes (though I never saw him light up once the entire night). Hmm.
The crew gets to work, locating the trouble almost immediately. It's under a tiny rose bush in our front yard and near to the side fence and mailboxes shared by our neighbor and we. Placing the dug up plant in a wheel barrel, the workers use high pressure water nozzles to spray open a four foot hole in the dirt which they suction using a high power vacuum aboard their big bruiser of a truck.
I mingle among the workers with their permission taking photos and videos of the absorbing field repair.
Dominic of Henkels & McCoy West (he's the one who brought his kids with him) uses my camera to take a close-up for me of the particular damage the crews hove found.
He explains the "burnout" they uncovered. It was all due to a bad splice the construction people made when they hooked up both 1379 and 1385 Northwood Drive to the main, PG&E underground, electrical line some thirty-three or more years ago! The resultant short, decades later, took out twelve to eighteen inches of electrical line. Gone completely was the section!
Whoever the developer hired back in the nineties to do the hook-up, has, according to Dominic, so far resulted in forty or so such burnouts in the Cordelia Hills home development of which we are a part. it's almost endemic to our community. Luckily for us, the neither the front tree or the the fence was the cause for the burnout. Though early on they were both under suspicion, neither will be impacted.
by 9:15 pm the personnel expertly replace and hook the cables, fully restoring electric power to both homes. "Lovingly" they replant the tiny bush and with that, all is done.
The only snag to occur at all was a tree limb that snapped across the street having accidentally latched onto one of the departing trucks. The branch had to be sawed off and discarded.
Photos and videos:
The crews acted like the job was one big get-together! |
About twelve to eighteen inches of braided wire are completely gone! Photo courtesy of Dominic |
A souvenir clip of one of the burnt-out electrical lines. |
It only two the crew two brief hours to do the entire job and restore Christmas cheer. |
The following day, Joe came out once more to close out the work order the crews, the PG&E guy, or PG&E itself, forgot.
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Thirty-three+ Years in the Failing Part 1
I will try to keep this concise.
Around three in the morning, Yvette awakens to the sound of the office cam security trying to boot. When she turns on the room lights, she discovers they are flickering. Thinking it a momentary issue, she returns back to bed and sleep.
At 5:55am I awake and think to use my iPad tablet. It cannot get internet. I go to the living room and find Alexa constantly cycling. When I turn on the lights, they are at reduced power and flickering. The kitchen refrigerator is turning on and off. I check the household electrical panel but the circuit breakers seem perfectly fine.
At 6;25am I put in a call to PG&E. They remotely test the meter and though there is power to to the vicinity, my meter is dead.
Joe arrives at 7:25am. I note to him that though our outside meter appears off, the next door neighbor's meter shows no such sign. Indeed, Joe finds our address receiving barely any juice and ratchets up the case calling in for a repair crew as he suspects a damaged underground line leading anywhere from the PG&E junction box across the street to our house. Other properties seem unaffected.
Finishing his paperwork, Joe leaves at 9:30am.
Yvette is well up by now.
10:20am sees the arrival of Jerry. As the field crews are currently tackling other emergencies, Jerry decides to place a temporary splice from the nextdoor meter to ours so that we will have a steady current. I text our neighbor to apprise him.
Temporary power is restored by 10:58am and Jerry leaves with our thanks in tow.
End of Part 1
The PG&E splice up close. |
Friday, November 29, 2024
Thirty-three Analemmas Later
In 1991, before the start of the Fall semester, I drew up a proposal for my year-long student project: to trace out the sun's analemma by following the shadows cast upon the SFAI student quad. Although Paul Kos, my teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, very much liked the idea I proffered, he proposed another project of his own: to learn Spanish together with him. My idea was quashed as we set out to learn Spanish after hours, and I never did get to perform the analemma.
Here below is that very artpiece submission I put forward to Paul.*
As I was coming up with the idea, I thought surely the notion of recording the shadow must have occurred to others, but I never saw such a timelapse captured.
It would be that way for a great while.
Finally, in 2024, nearly thirty-three years later, someone, a certain Nick Wright of Falcon, Colorado took note of his driveway shadow as taken by his security camera. Voila! On November 29th, 2024 NASA's APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) posted Wright's inverted "Driveway Analemma" on their YouTube Channel.
Again, the decades long wait is not to suggest that no one else had ever thought to document the aforementioned shadows before me or since. I merely say, that in my case, it took that long at last see it so recorded by another.
*ADDENDUM: Just to make the original 1991 proposal a little easier to visually follow, I added in some shading. Here it is with the building shadows in place.
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Finality
My final view from the San Francisco residence, high on a hill, of Karl-Heinz Teuber, who at eighty seven, departed this life just ten days ago. It is hard at the moment to think him really gone, and not merely abroad.
The northwest view from apartment 507, The Crestview, 1980 Washington Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 |
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Karl, a Life
This is a re-edit of the very last montage I made for Karl, celebrating his life. That was in 2020. With a new beginning and conclusion to the video to mark the sad occasion of his passing, I share this work anew. Karl's large life was a colorful one, and I am truly grieved, along with others, to see him go. His friends were many.
As always the music of Mozart was Karl's mainstay.
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Karl-Heinz Teuber (February 2, 1937 ~ November 14, 2024)
In memory of Karl-Heinz Teuber (Tuesday, February 2, 1937 ~ Thursday, November 14, 2024) seen here, in his film debut, playing the wig salesperson opposite Tom Hulce’s Mozart in the iconic “three heads” scene* from ‘Amadeus’ (1984).
Interestingly, on set Karl in his true capacity, was in fact, the assistant hair and makeup person for the production (his “bending hair” helping to snag the Academy Award-sweeping feature yet another win). This bit part, apropos to Karl’s then profession, was director Milo’s Forman’s onscreen reward to Karl for all his intensive labor.
Having earned it, Karl could rightly take pride, ‘Amadeus’arguably being the quintessential exploit crowning his stellar career.** The role was an honor.
And for nearly four decades, this notable person was also an intimate acquaintance of mine till we eventually went our separate ways. Nevertheless, I am profoundly surprised and sadden by the news of my former friend’s unfortunate and untimely demise .
That said, he has at last attained his one, driving desire and become, in effect, a star - a luminary now solely comprised of light, shadow, and sound, removed and remote, forever reaching down to us from the past - the final, heavenly curtain having lowered on his person, his vocation, and calling.
Karl was eighty seven.
Rest in Peace.
*Scene 44
**Karl often use to speak of ‘Amadeus’ “living on” for him long after he was gone, taking comfort in that knowledge and prospect. His would be a celluloid immortality, Karl assured himself.
That there now exists, only the celluloid memory, I for one, find it bitter at best; a cold comfort and solace alas.
Monday, November 11, 2024
Ever
This sentiment I like.
Guest Antoinette Lee's concluding remark from Olayemi Olurin's 'Olay and Friends'.
Saturday, November 2, 2024
In These Very Trying Times (update)
With only three to go until the 2024 Presidential Election as of this post, and the grave, growing concerns of a distinct way to yet "game the system" and steal the vote, I decided to update my graphic. Though the whole world is in turmoil, there is a mounting constitutional concern over the immediate future of the United States.
The drama may not end until the crucial date of December 11th, as spelled out by yesterday's news interview of The Nation's Justice Correspondent, Elie Mystal by Amy Goodman of 'Democracy Now!' It all has to do with former president Donald Trump, and the "little secret" he has with the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, likely forcing the Twelfth Amendment to come into play. Through a deliberate series of delays in certifying the vote, Trump and Johnson can subvert the Electoral College's process calling on a “contingent election” by the house, to snatch the election from Vice President Kamala Harris’ grasp via the said amendment should she “win”.
To quote Mystal: "We in a constitutional crisis now, bro!"
For details, follow the link below:
ADDENDUM
It is now post election, Trump has won the presidency, the senate, and I believe the house. The court is already stacked as the country shifts hard to the right. Fewer people overall voted, with a decline on both sides. However, the number of disaffected voters was by far higher on the Democratic side. The tunnel we’s about to enter… well, it’s quite possible I ain’t gonna live long to see light at the other side. That’s depressing. Still, like I just heard Antoinette Lee state on ‘Olay and Friends’ YouTube cast, defiant in the face of racism and the coming fascist state, “If you’re gonna shoot me… I ain’t gonna be on my knees - ever.”
Fall Back
Just a little visual reminder I created for Facebook regarding tonight's upcoming time change. The clip is from the Marx Brothers' 'A Night at the Opera' (1935), the conclusion of the famous "stateroom scene". The unsuspecting actress is of course, Margaret Dumont.
;-)
Thursday, October 31, 2024
In These Very Trying Times
"Wringing your hands won't help!" blurted the less than sympathetic listener to my friend's troubled concerns about our darkening geopolitical circumstances. Obviously - oblivious to real point at hand (no pun intended).
Anyway, with the nail-biting, presidential election just days away, that got me thinking and my creative juices flowing. With a twisted touch of wit, here was my comeback.
It won't help, but what the hey, it can't hurt!
;-)
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Comet C-2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan - ATLAS)
Saturday, October 5, 2024
"Frost!!"
I thought to backdate this post. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't go back any further than January 1st, 1970, and this picture was taken well before then.
Sunday, January 21st, 1962, Genie, my twin, awakens everyone in the house, excitedly yelling "Frost! Frost!"
She had never seen actual snow.
Yet there it was, everywhere on the roofs, the parked cars, and hospital grounds across the street. In San Francisco, at the Eastern edge of the Inner Mission District, this was an extreme rarity! Indeed, one can go decades without sight of a single falling flake.* Therefore, the white phenomena just wasn't in our childhood lexicon, though we had already known of it through popular media and the personal accounts of others.
San Francisco General Hospital, Sunday, January 21, 1962 |
Most of the fall had melted by the mid to late morning, but not before we could gather enough of the material to mold and make a modest snowman.
However, my biggest unfamiliarity was in how to put together a snowball. Packing one too tight, I unintentionally turned the innocent projectile into an ice-ball, beaning of my middle sister upside her head! Angie could have murdered me!
The sunny afternoon later saw nary a trace left of the night's snowfall. Thankfully, our dad had slide film available and at the ready to record the exceptional event.
Above Photos Credit: Manuel Rubio Sanchez (our dad)
*Speaking of decades, Sunday, December 11, 1932: nineteen years before our family took up residence at 988 Potrero Avenue, and thirty years before our frosty encounter, it had last snowed on Potrero and 22nd!
Snowman at Potrero Avenue and 22nd Street (1932) |
Wednesday, February 13, 1991, 2PM: I stepped out of 988 onto Potrero, only to be struck in the face by a gentle snowflake drifting down from a passing cloud, the other flakes melting upon contact with the sun-warmed sidewalk.
Now, I could have gone back into the house, to get my camera from upstairs, but that would have prevented my seeing the remaining snowflakes wafting down from the aforementioned cloud which was almost past, and taking the time to retrieve my equipment would have definitely caused me to miss the soon arriving, crosstown bus and the start of my next class at the San Francisco Art Institute!
I chose enjoy the moment on my way to the bus stop.
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
40
On this day, forty years ago, this person entered my life. Thirty seven years later, our friendship parted ways. That's me directly behind Karl-Heinz Teuber with the chalk and film slate in hand. Dan Gleich on sound, and Georgia Packard, assisting Emiko Omori (not seen) at the camera, are the other two crew members visible in the photo.
The reason why I am intently watching the performance is to keep an eye on the Canon NF1 Karl holds in his hand. It belongs to me. Karl is using the motor drive which deliberately stops after firing thirty six shots and has to be reset.When it does, that's when I step into the shot. Mine was the only "dummy" professional grade camera on set, available for prop use.
The film is director Issam B. Makdissy's independent feature entitled 'A Hard Act to Follow' (screenplay by Terry Eubanks-Makdissy) released six years later in 1990. Karl has a bit part in the film playing a studio portrait photographer. His was the very first scene of the production shoot, though the above photo is of the retake, filmed half a year later, in January of 1985. The character of a publicist was dropped, requiring a reshoot of all the scenes formerly involving them.
As for Karl, he was at the height of his career, his last role playing the wig salesperson in the memorable, “three heads” scene opposite Tom Hulce in ‘Amadeus’ (1984)! We would remain friends for almost four decades until our lives eventually went their separate ways.
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Nine 26
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to LEE PAIGE! ;-)
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
'A Passing Glance'
Alone,
Silent in the shadows,
You danced,
Unawares,
That one,
Only time.
Then froze,
Averse to,
Plain sight.
As for me?
Perchance,
My gaze askance...
I was the dark,
Having glimpsed,
The divine.
-antaresrichard-
While this short poem expresses the essence of the one and only time you permitted yourself to dance - before my passing shadow cut it short - it does not cover all the nuances of that brief instance, nor can it. Indeed, many unnamed factors figured into our chance encounter. Chiefly however, it was your trying to become invisible that struck me, whereas, I… always was - even to this day.