At the Frick

The fingers curl in delicate gesture, keeping a secret. A gold chain necklace hangs out of view.  A  sleeve has textured embroidery on the cuff. The girl gazes serenely.  How different these details are from  other portraits of Rembrandt.  








Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669), Girl at a Window, 1645

 What are the glass objects just near the maid's hands?  The mistress seems dressed to go out, yet she is also engaged in some household business, something looking like the settling of the accounts.  The maid has just brought in a fresh receipt, or invoice.  A question remains unanswered.





 Johannes Vermeer
Mistress and Maid, 1666-1667

 The velvet's black shadowy plush invites you to touch it.  The green, black, brown, and red contrast, drawing attention to the saint's face with his pursuit of rigor and truth and justice. 








Sir Thomas More, 1527 
Hans Holbein the Younger 

 Again, such expert use of color contrasts.
And such piggy little eyes. How could anyone trust a man with a face like this? 









Thomas Cromwell, 1532
Hans Holbein the Younger

Paul Taylor, March 12, 2010

Dance has no words.  The dancers move to express themselves.
Here are some of the verbs that might describe Paul Taylor's choreography.

 Leap
 Explode
 Jump
 Crawl
 Fold
 Sigh
 Turn
 Revolve
 Sashay
 Puzzle
 Think
 Decide
 Seduce
 Repel
 Bomb
 Primp
 Slink
 Twist
 Reconnoiter
 Consider
 Cross
 Examine
 Point
 Hide
 Slither
 Somersault
 Backwards Somersault
 Rise
 Propel
 Wave Good-Bye

Since this is his 80th birthday year, there is a feeling of celebration and holding dear the great creative energy we have grown to count on year after year.  When he came out to take his customary bow, Paul Taylor looked a little bit shorter than last year.  Long may he live. 

Syzygy

 



Brief Encounters

 

Spindrift

Ghost Writer

Like another thriller, Rebecca, The Ghost Writer features a protagonist whose name the audience never learns.  Hired by a recently disgraced ex-prime minister modeled on Tony Blair, Ewan McGregor's character is referred to simply as the ghost.  He   walks into a position vacated by a man who died by his own hand or was it something more sinister? Things are not what they seem in this movie.

First, there is the prime minister's wife who seems to hold quite a bit of decision making power.  She sulks about the personal assistant's relationship with Blair, I mean Lang, which seems to be very personal indeed.

There are clever cuts that lead the viewer to think just a bit ahead of the Ghost, who becomes more and more sympathetic as he seems to be the only honest person in the movie, honest to the point of carelessness.  This puts him in danger and lets Polanski demonstrate his finesse for filming paranoia, and McGregor's ability with a clean line like "I'm in trouble."  

What a relief to be in the hands of an expert filmmaker like Polanski who is adept at telling a tricky story without an excess of explosions or noise. 

Marie Ponsot workshop at Poets House, February 27 and 28

Marie Ponsot

Day one.  

We write "running dragons" with each other.  This is a form Ponsot learned in Beijing.

Alternating stanzas of three lines, then two lines.

Choose one word in the last line of the previous stanza to repeat in the first line of the following stanza.  Begin poem with a location, or non-human subject.  Continue to write stanzas without a person in mind or implied, until after at least three stanzas.  Once you do introduce a person, you finish poem with the same number of stanzas you wrote before the person appears.  The last stanza introduces the idea of spring, either explicitly or implied.

Here is mine.

Day after day of rain. The mushrooms bloomed.

Nearby, the Indian pipes had penetrated

the leafy carpet from last year's autumn.

Their vertical stems formed a carpet

over the moss.  Is this what they mean

by a fairy ring?  Is this what they mean

by enchantment, the nodding white heads

attached to vertical white stems.

Impossible to think they're attached

to the seeds buried since spring.

Some things Ponsot said that resonated:

It is essential to be able to write about the non-human. 

Competition and testing are not intellectually respectable.

Learn something by heart every day.

People like to create.

In a crowded life, try Running Dragons (or Dragons Running, the phrase works either way.)

Your world of language is inside somewhere -- you need to get access to it.  Write ten minutes every day.

William Blake said "Without contraries there can be no progression."

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."  (from Proverbs from Hell)

(We wrote revisions and takeoffs of these proverbs as an exercise)

Ponsot's mother was a teacher.  Good teachers assign work they cannot fail at.  

The challenge of writing is working from the inner life to the spoken life to the written life.

Question:  What do you think of self publishing?

Answer: It is important to show your work and have someone show you theirs.  

Practice re-writing which is elemental not remedial.  Once in a while you get it first crack.  Mostly it takes handling, like a potter with clay.  Take it into yourself and see if you can say it differently.  Rewriting can be productive.  Go to the strength, or to the bad knot, and unfurl it.  Say it in other words.

Day Two

What is the mystery that makes a poem hit you forcibly in the diaphragm?  Here is a poem that does that.

From Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun,

Nor the furious winter's rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must

As chimney sweepers come to dust.

Everyone wrote what they thought was meant by truth for the poet.

Another useful technique for poets is to widen the range from the constant I voice to include another person's point of view, either in a dramatic monologue, or as a dialogue, like Stevie Smith's.

Stevie Smith's "The Sea widow"

How fares it with you, Mrs. Cooper, My bride?

Long are the years since you lay by my side.

Do you wish I was back? Do you speak of me, dearest?

I wish you were back for me to hold nearest.

Who then lies nearer, Mrs. Cooper my bride?

A black man comes in with the evening tide.

What is his name? Tell me! How does he dare?

He comes uninvited.  His name is Despair.

----------

Marie Ponsot is a wise woman, a great teacher, and an inspiring poet.  I felt that I was learning even when she wasn't saying anything.   

Snow Day

 

Snow day

See slide show for more images of Friday, February 26

when all teachers and students had the day off.

Reading today at Cornelia Street Cafe

 

6 PM

Cornelia Street Cafe

A Single Man

A Single Man contains one glorious performance, and too many dream-like images of a naked man submersed in water. 

I think my favorite scene occurs when Colin Firth's character comes upon a dog, the same breed as the ones he lost when his lover died suddenly in a car accident, wiping out in an instant not just his love, but his whole family and history for 16 years.

He pets the dog lavishly through the car door window while its owner looks on, at first indulgently, then warily as Firth burrows his nose into the animal's neck and mutters, "They smell of lavender and soap," as if taking a hit of a drug he once depended on.  And much as I resented the slow speed of the film and its pretentious lingering on superficial details, I confess that I have gone back in my mind's eye to the scene in the apartment when the two men sat happily together, reading, listening to music, discussing their dogs and silly neighbors.

Avatar

What it made me think of --

--all of those movies like Hombre where the infiltrator takes on the values of the alien society
--Gunga Din, the noble savage dying nobly
--how much better a filmmaker Miyazaki is, and his delicious visual palate when the subject is the beauty and vulnerability of the earth
--cowboys and Indians and how great a director was John Ford
--every ordinary war movie and some really good ones that have this one beat (Das Boot, Galipoli, Empire of the Sun, Casablanca)
--Apocalypse Now (Duvall coming in to beat down the savages)
--Alien with Sigourney Weaver holding her own among the testosterone
--Titanic, and other disaster movies on an epic scale (the big tree standing in for the big boat)
--adolescent boys' fantasies and little boys' miniature soldier sets and GI Joe
--Star Wars and  the disappointment of watching a conventional war movie.

What I really like about movies is the human part, and how good acting can tell a story simply.  But first you have to suspend your disbelief and see the characters and situations as believable.  These characters were wooden, reciting familiar lines ("They are fighting modern warfare with bows and arrows!").  While watching what I was most aware of was how expensive and long the movie was.  

I guess that  James Cameron wanted to do what  Kevin Costner did in Dances with Wolves.  Okay.  So that is why the movie feels so flimsy and so expensive at the same time.

Crazy Heart

Jeff Bridges has played a character sort of like this before, in the Fabulous Baker Boys.  In the earlier movie, his bad boy piano player worked  those sad piano bars in the lounges of second rate hotels.  In
Crazy Heart, when he works in seedy little joints to sing his country music, it doesn't seem as depressing.  It seems authentic.  The Baker Boys didn't have to sing, just play, the old standards.  Bad Blake, his character in Crazy Heart, wrote all his songs of heartache that he is still living through.

The movie centers on a broken down 57 year old talented drunk named Bad Blake and whether he can get his act together before it is too late.  He had had success on the road with another musician, Tommy Sweet (played by Colin Farrell who strangely is not given top billing even though he is an important part of the plot, and has some of the most satisfying musical scenes with Bridges), who is now more successful than he is, and younger, and better looking, etc. causing all sorts of resentment and wounded pride.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Jean, a journalist who enters his life when Blake is working a small club in Santa Fe and she approaches him for an interview.  The softening of Blake's crusty character brings some tender moments to the movie, with Gyllenhaal and her slow flirtatious smile that fills in for a host of emotions.  She is an attractive person to watch, with great physical appeal, and when she gets mad, as she must in this film, she is very fine.  

I loved the way the two men sounded when they were singing, and I loved the way Robert Duvall can act circles around anybody just by standing still.  In this movie, he gets to sing a little too.  And it is a beautiful thing.

The good thing about losing your memory

forgotten science is discovery regained

I just learned something new

or did I learn it before and now can claim

it as my own again

Where do the old memories go

Are they washed away like silt down the river

Or do they vanish in a cloud

Carried away on the breeze

My mother wants to know

what I’ve been up to.

I consider my report:

writing is so boring.

Theatre lacks a frame of reference.

So I say at first nothing special,

just taming lions,

flying solo across the Atlantic,

writing my acceptance speech

for the Nobel Laureate,

learning to juggle with knives

translating simultaneously

for the peace negotiations in the Middle East…

the list is so long she grows bored

and says she has something on the stove.

The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke is a brilliant filmmaker. The question is does he think that humans are without merit.  Everyone in this movie, especially the children, is abused, humiliated, and mistrusted.  After two hours, I grew allergic to the point of view.  Yet the suspense and adept storytelling kept me in my seat.

The story begins in doubt with the narrator saying he is not sure if what he remembers is exactly true, but it begins with a vicious prank that lands the small village doctor  in the hospital with serious injuries for several months.  In his absence, the local midwife who helps him in his office takes care of his two children.  The younger child, a boy of around five, asks the older sister about death, and there is one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie,  a frank exchange between children about death.  In the beginning of the twentieth century death was more present to children than it is now.  The children in the movie are perfectly cast and acted.  In fact everyone thanks to the black and white photography looks stark and from a distant time and authentic.

The first act of malice, the injuring of the doctor (and murder of his horse) is quickly followed by another suspicious calamity, the death of a farm hand.  That incident leads to another act of cruelty, which leads to more, and pretty soon children are found strung up upside down and beaten with mysterious vaguely religious messages next to them.  Can this really be the way the world works?  

The hyperrealism of Haneke is what gives his work an edge that I find disturbing.  He seems to be showing how no one is above suspicion, that all humans are capable of doing evil to each other.

I acknowledge the mastery of his art, but I resist the notion that humans are innately evil and find his sour world view dispiriting. 

Up In the Air

This movie feels very up to date.  Perhaps it will seem dated in ten minutes.  But for now, watching people not of the company fire people in the company and then leave the cast off with a slick pamphlet to get on with their lives -- yes that is how it feels things are done now.

The whole cast is perfectly selected.  The beautiful mature woman who can match the gamesmanship of the man's need to be first in number of credit cards, she is perfect.  The young woman who threatens to replace Bingham not just with her younger less expensive self but with a whole system that does not require flying, she is perfect.  Callow, shallow, all surface.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham who fires people for a living.  And he lives for the loyalty rewards that frequent flying affords.  Are frequent flier miles really the only place where loyalty is still a value that is honored with rewards? 

Fifteen minutes into the movie, I was aware of how much I was enjoying it.  It is rare to see a movie where everything is done right, from the opening credits, to the opening scene with snappy dialogue, to the introduction of important cast members who act flawlessly and wear their clothes as if they really were their clothes.  The music, the sets, the production, I can't think of another recent American movie that clicks this way.  What a promising career Jason Reitman is having.

Precious

A movie based on the novel, Push, by Sapphire

Reasons to go:
Gabourey Sidibe
Mariah Carey
Lenny Kravitz
Monique
Sapphire

Cymbeline

I was lucky enough to see the  Fiasco Theatre's production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline.   Six talented actors perform the roles of 24 characters in a small  black box theater, with several boxes and one sturdy trunk as props and set pieces. Besides the voice work of reciting Shakespeare's poetry as if it were natural speech, each actor at the drop of a hat also sings either alone or together in a beautiful blend of voices.  The cast is also called on to play musical instruments, including but not limited to guitar, banjo, french horn, and lots of different kinds of drums. 

The pace is amazing.  Scenes blend into one another  quickly and organically, and people move locations the only indication that we are elsewhere the placement of the all important trunk.  At one point the actor Ben Steinfeld performing the role of Iacomo in the act of sneaking out of a lady's bedroom must crawl out the trap door of the valiant trunk and just as he was about to deliver a line, a siren from the street blared. Instead of trying to speak his lines over the trumpeting noise, he paused, and in his eyes let the audience know that he was now hearing what we were hearing as an audience, not as an actor in a play, and when the siren stopped, he picked up his lines again and resumed, but with just the tiniest acknowledgment in his eyes that we knew what he was doing.  All the time he was waiting for the noise to stop, he was acting, though, in character as the scoundrel trying to win a bet about a woman's fidelity.

It is a pleasure to watch such a capable cast perform a complicated play with the utmost clarity and simplicity and style.  This company is truly wonderful.  Every time they sang together as an ensemble I felt deeply happy.  I hope that I get to see them again soon.  It is a shame it was such a short run again-- they deserve a much bigger audience.

Poetry Reading November 15

Went to a poetry reading in honor of Home Planet News
Donald Lev residing
summoning the spirit of his late great wife
Enid Dame

there was a water main break on Carmine Street
in front of the Greenwich Village Cafe
Flashing lights and jackhammers
People read regardless
an indomitable group of poets
shouting out their words
as the street caved in
and was opened up and scooped out
Waiters brought caskets of water in clear plastic
buckets for what? toilets to be flushed?
It wasn't clear
Every time the door opened
the noise increased tenfold
On this balmy November night
we closed up the windows tight
so that the words could be heard

La Danse

La Danse dir Frederick Wiseman, 2009

Today at the Film Forum theater  crowds of people came  to see this movie.  All three screenings were sold out.   Perhaps  it is to have the rare chance to see the documentary master Frederick Wiseman's  movie  on the big screen or perhaps it is because the footage of the ballet is so extraordinarily faithful to the intention of the company.

Wiseman's opening shots establish location in as rhythmic and rigorous a beat as the dancers at the barre. Wiseman locates us first underground, in the bowels of the Paris Opera building, then in the hallways, then up the steps, and so on until at one point we get to see a beekeeper on the roof harvesting honey.  Who knew the bees we had heard were in decline were thriving on the rooftops of Paris?

Wiseman slowly leads us into the workings of the ballet company considered one of the greatest in the world. But first we get to know the building where they work and the city where the building is.  I don’t know why he needs so many shots of the city of Paris even though I too love Paris and think it is one of the most successful examples of a metropolis that knows how to preserve its very heart, beautiful, built to human scale, architecture.

But we really want to see the dancers learning how to dance the dances that we see when they are perfected.  Isn’t that why we came? And to see the woman spray painting the worn out toe shoes so that they look new?    And the man applying glue with the precision of an aeronautical engineer so that the sequin will stay just so.  We want to see the rows of costumes rolled in, each one tagged with the dancer’s name.  We want to see the handicraft of preparing the tutus, and the mounds of tulle before they become costumes, and the make up and the wigs.  There is so much  individual labor that goes into such the jewel- like work art of  ballet.  So many unknown people, like the woman dying the dress.  These are the behind the scenes images that stay with me.  That and the painstaking one on one tutorials that convey the steps of the choreography from a dance master to his dancer.  The individuals who make the dance possible are not just the choreographers and the dancers but the painters keeping the walls of the studios fresh.  Even though the movie is called La Danse, to me the movie is  an ode to labor.

35 Rhums

The movie unfolds with the slow pace of real life and the risk of boring its audience.  We watch real trains in real time come and go through the suburbs with nothing visually arresting to keep our attention, just the usual jumble of wires and train tracks and cereal box buildings.

The main character, a middle aged single father named Lionel (like the train set), lives with his beautiful young adult daughter who attends university in Paris.  Lionel says little, but his still face expresses his concern for his daughter's future, I think.   Their relationship is so loving and intimate that you wonder if they are sleeping together, but no, it's just the tension that builds as they determine what  they should do for each other to set each other free.

There is one scene that finally reveals how the reticent man is feeling.  Denis, the director, clearly loves the way this beautiful actor looks, getting in and out of his bathrobe.  And so do other women who cotton to him even when there is evidently nothing tying him down to any of them.    He has come to the restaurant with his daughter and a friend, and then hits on the waitress who is younger and more beautiful than his friend.

As they dance,  you see how the father has desires just like any other man, and the audience intuits that he wants the daughter to experience and enjoy them too.

On the roof

Museum of the Chinese in America

The museum is as crowded as the neighborhood. Maya Lin's design lends elegance to its rooms which unfold one from the other, beginning with the early immigrant experience and its blatant racism and exclusion acts. On opposite walls you can read the achievements of individuals, like Ah Bing

who discovered how to hybridize the perfect cherry, and

Anna Mae Wong,

whose inroads into Hollywood were spoiled by her exploitation. You experience post WWII anti-Communist fifties by sitting on an old arm chair and watching a 1950s era tv show about the hounding of Chinese in Chinatowns (the authories assumed that they were Communists). Modern stars of contemporary culture include Steve Chen, the inventor of Youtube, Yo Yo Ma, and I.M. Pei.

One of my favorite discoveries was Dr. "Mom" Chung, the first Chinese American woman physician who served during the Second World War, and liked to dress as a man and dated among others Sophie Tucker.

I wish that I could process everything at once, but was overwhelmed by listening to overlapping audio and watching moving images from three different projectors. The print on the placards is tiny. I felt old and incapable of taking it in. Next time I will bring a magnifying glass.




At the end, in the Bloomberg Exhibit Hall was an ongoing loop of movies, called the Chinatown Film Project. I will have to go back and watch the ten short movies which progress in linear fashion, one at a time.

And the paintings by Yun-Fei Ji are marvelous. It is a pleasure to go into an open space and see paintings spread out at their ease.



The Scholar Flees in Horror by Yun-Fei Ji

Bright Star/directed Jane Campion

With a magnified needle piercing a piece of muslin.  we are instantly drawn into this sensuous movie.  I remember Campion's ability to startle all of my senses in The Piano, and with sudden twists of plot.  Here she is telling a story of love experienced by a great poet, John Keats.

I loved the clothes, the little girl with the cloud of red hair who played Fanny's little sister named Toots, the actor who played Browne, a perfect dog in the manger, the cat, the flowers, the butterflies, the way we get a taste of daily life in the early nineteenth century through the deliberate pacing of scenes, and finally I love the way the film sends you home to read Keats (or the letters of Fanny Brawne which prove that the film is very well sourced).

Saw a girl that looked like her

She had long blondish hair
She was tall and thin
She carried herself in a way that said
I don't care what you think but I know that I might be worth looking at
When she bumped into someone by accident she said Oops sorry
She was wearing boots
A pair of jeans with holes in them
She was eighteen

Vermeer's The Milkmaid

We went to see the Vermeers amid crowds of others. The Milkmaid truly was the glory of the exhibit, looking as if lit from just outside the window.

tango dancers

Julie and Julia

The movie shows how different, how much more solid, more soulful, and more generous, was Julia Child than Julie Powell.  Of course it is a tough comparison,  and I don't think Nora Ephron meant to belittle the more contemporary character (she is just one more cute slightly affectless girl like Meg Ryan played in Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail) who was a blogger in search of herself instead of a woman in search of a better way of eating.  But how much more universal a goal! How much more heartening a story!  Nora Ephron, make more movies about women like these!

After the movie credits roll, what we search for is a recipe by Julia, not the blog by Julie.

Alas for Julie.  Hurrah for Julia!

ponyo

ponyo

A girl goldfish sees a human boy and is smitten. Determined to become human herself, she flees the strict rules of her father and hundreds of look alike siblings*, and finds that she has the power within herself to not only become human, but much else. The beauty of Miyazaki's animation comes from the hand made color saturated pictures, and the humorous movements of the protagonists. Ponyo once she determines she needs feet to be human, starts out with three toes like a chicken, and later gets a full set of five which liberate her to jump on couches etc.

Miyazaki's subject is saving the earth from the wickedness of humans' carelessness and waste.

*

making creme brulee

The ingredients are sugar and cream, lots of egg yolks, vanilla (and I used cinnamon). Like all custards, there is a hot water bath which challenges your ability to carry a heavy pan half filled with water, with little cups full of eggy mixture to the oven without spilling any of the water.

I got the recipe from Epicurious which does not carry the classic recipe without lemon, or coffee, or chocolate, or whatnot. This is typical of epicurious. They specialize in the rather showy trendy food fads, forcing you to strip away things in order to get a basic recipe.

Still, there is nothing more comforting than custard with a crust of caramelized sugar on top.

how to make creme brulee



photo from Flickr at
anne&ming

September 5, 2009: Seasonal

Farmers Market, Tribeca

I love to buy fish at the greenmarket on Saturdays in Tribeca. There is always a line at Blue Moon fish because Alex Villani brings in such fresh spanish mackerel, scrod, scallops, you name it. Here you can see him talking at his stand which gives you an idea of his personality.



Alex Villani of Blue Moon

The apples are coming in after a few weeks of nectarines better than peaches. Honeycrisp is the name of an apple favored by my husband because they were discovered in his home state of Minnesota.



St. Luke's Garden was bathed in bright light today. After tanning on Elizabeth's bench, we looked at the flowers in blossom, and were struck by the bright pink flowers that look like lilacs in miniature but may be crape myrtle. It is tempting to go inside and visit the columbarium, but it is closed until services tomorrow.



photo by omoo

Why I Love Tennis

It's one on one, no teamwork required. Unlike beach volleyball or swimming
the women are able to show their curves without displaying so much flesh and you get to watch them move easily in their fitted outfits. It combines running and jumping and hitting
The Williams Sisters, one full of soul


the other fire and precision and competition


and of course there is Federer whose footwork
was compared with Fred Astaire's



It's the shock of Rafael Nadal's constantly picking at his underpants.



and Federer's mystique as the man who does not sweat, each attribute intimidating in its own way



but the love for the great competitors who can bring out the best in each other is very moving the longer the game lasts.

Roddick and Federer this year at Wimbledon.



Maria Sharapova and her sense of style and hauteur.
The way she lifts her nose as if she smells really good
when she makes a point.



(I do not like the loud noises she makes
when she hits the ball. Sounds like somebody having rough sex.)

Mostly I like the prospect of another Nadal Federer face-off, the most amazing event in sports I can remember. Like a perfect game in baseball. Rare and welcome.

Still Walking (Aruitemo Aruitemo) dir. Hirokazu Koreeda

Hirokazu Kore-Eda is a visual artist, but what stays with me are the beautiful lines he writes in his film about a wayward son who returns home to visit his aging parents one summer day with his wife and stepson. The movie is about living after the death of an important family member. The parents grow bitter, the siblings shift into their roles as not as good as might have been.

As all three generations of the family gather to honor the anniversary of the eldest son's death, the story unfolds with the humor and sorrow of a Chekhov play. Everyday actions, like preparing meals, are visually wonderful. You can almost smell the corn as the tempura is scooped out of the pan and into the eager mouths. The acting is flawless, particularly by Kirin Kiri who plays the mother, a woman who has mastered the art of spite.

Kore-eda is also the director of Afterlife, a sublime treatment of life after death.

A bat became fastened inside the piece of siding of the house.
His little hooked talon which attached to his wing could not free itself.
He struggled and flailed and could not fly away.
He began to gnaw at the wing to detach it.
Drops of blood fell on the side of the house.
My sister bought me a table to climb so that I could reach.
With a wedged stick the siding came free and the bat
fell downstairs to our neighbor's welcome mat.
He was exhausted and bloody. He
hopped along into the net. I freed him into the wood
pile. I wonder if he will live or not.
My sister wanted to put him out of his misery
as we used to say. (Drop a rock on him.)
He was suffering and squeaking but still alive,
last seen in the wood pile.

I have no idea what this is growing on the tree, but it looks like a random pattern of lichen or some kind of fungus. Anyway want to take a stab at identifying it?

Walmart Woman

They’re having a perfect woman sale
at the Walmart. She comes in a box
with movable parts
She doesn’t say much
Just yes and you’re right
when you pull the string
She looks good with her make up in place
and doesn’t grow old
She doesn’t make mistakes
or ever lose her temper

Go ahead
Take a ride to the Walmart
They’re selling perfect women there