Saturday, February 25, 2012

Too much information...?

I came across this review on Amazon while looking for enamel paints for a DIY project.  Feel free to read it in its entirety for the full effect, or your could skip to the highlighted sections.

"I have used Testor's enamel paints, for the past ten years, for painting inscriptions and for painting miniatures. I do my paintings on compact discs and on cassette tapes. For these efforts, I use the smallest brush available from the local art store.

Here are some inscriptions that I painted directly on my compact disc:

1. Mozart K513, 2. Schubert Schwager Kronos, 3. Au Privave Sonny Stitt, 4. Ronnettes Be My Baby, 5. Temptations My Girl, 6. Laika and the Cosmonauts.

One might wonder why I put such a hodge-podge of recordings on one disc. The answer is that these are digital recordings of my parakeet chirping to these particular compositions. In other words, after three months of experimentation, I discovered that my parakeet responds most vigorously to these particular compositions. Now regarding the Testor's enamel paints, I painted all of these inscriptions using cursive writing.


For each word, I used multiple layers of paint, for example, a blue undercoat of writing, with a narrower violet top coat of writing. (Of course, you need to wait a couple of days before playing the compact disc in the player, otherwise you will risk ruining the player.)

On my compact discs, as well as on my Maxell UDXLII cassettes, I also frequently paint paisley designs with the Testor's enamel paints. My paisley designs involve multiple layers, often four overlapping layers of enamel paint. I like to build up the layers so they have a 3-dimensional effect to the touch. On one particular composition of bluegrass music, I painted a fiddle. The fiddle was made of multiple layers. With the Testor's enamel paint, it is easy to mix together the colors to get exactly the desired tints and hues. The colors also can be easily used to paint a graded effect, as in the wooden parts of the bluegrass fiddle. Most of my recordings contain music by Brahms, Schumann, Jennifer Higdon, Aaron Kernis, Bartok, and Prokofiev (not parakeet chirps!). One word of caution -- once you open a jar of Testor's enamel paint, and use the jar on three or four occasions, the remaining paint in the jar will harden on its own within a couple of months."





Is it me or is it strangely humorous and endearing, if not a bit sad?

3 comments:

  1. All of the above. This person paints the CDs on which she (he?) has recorded the parakeet chirping? And we're wondering about compulsively arranging dishes?? OY.

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  2. Craziness. And cassettes?!? Who uses cassettes? I am totally forwarding this to Aaron Kernis, one of the composers named. He will get a really good laugh!

    And arranging dishes in a pleasing way is NOT A COMPULSION. ;-)

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  3. Parakeets, painted fiddles on CDs with little tiny brushes. I wonder what his/her cabinet looks like.

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