"[Bob] Ross’s hair, a holdover from the free-love era, wasn’t naturally curly—he had it permed every few months, a process that he called having his 'springs tightened.'"

"As a nature-loving aesthete, he didn’t seem to have much mind for business matters, which, for better or worse, he left up to the Kowalskis. The documentary treats him as a spiritual healer, somewhere in the family of the Dalai Lama, but it’s more accurate to place him alongside Julia Child, Richard Simmons, and other lovable oddballs who found a niche in mass media and burrowed their way into popular culture.”

From "What’s Revealed in 'Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed'/A new Netflix documentary explores the fraught legacy of Bob Ross and his happy little trees" (The New Yorker).

I watched a bit of the documentary, but I turned it off. The "true crime" style is ludicrous. The lurid "Betrayal & Greed" just refers to marketing the Bob Ross brand after his death. 

Do I need to know about "the Kowalskis"? I think not. But here's a quote from Annette Kowalski describing Bob Ross's technique — not painting technique, but his speaking-while-painting technique — “He pretends like he’s talking to one woman in bed. He practiced. He was trying to be a little sexy.”

Bob Ross, resurrected to paint a Mountain Dew ad, is welcome even as it obstructs the "Repo Man" clip I wanted to find.

For once, I am not annoyed — I am the opposite of annoyed — by the ad YouTube served up in front of the video I wanted to watch: 

 

Well, that's just great. Good to know the beloved dead man is refreshed. 

There is a Bible verse about tending to the thirst of a dead man: "And he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.'" 

Yet no one pictures Bob Ross in hell. It is more likely that you would picture him in a Heaven that resembles his paintings, and I'm sure that picture has abundant water features, with painterly tree reflections. Still, you weren't picturing Paradise with soda, were you? Maybe you were! There's that song about Paradise with cigarette trees and a soda water fountain.

Now to the serious business of this post, the "Repo Man" clip: 

"Bob Ross was wrong. Everybody can't paint.... I just want people to know that none of the trees in my paintings are happy. They're very unhappy...."

 

I'm excited about this because I loved John Lurie's old show, "Fishing With John."

There is a mountain.

 

Donovan's "There Is a Mountain" came up in my shuffled songs as I was running the other day, and I'd been thinking about it for a while. At the Genius annotation of the lyrics: 

“There Is A Mountain” by Donovan was released as a single in 1967. The lyrics reference a saying by Qingyuan Weixin. Here translated by D. T. Suzuki: "Before I had studied Chan (Zen) for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers."

Searching for the song this morning, Google gave me that Donovan clip — I love his shirt — and Bob Ross — just threw in Bob Ross like that. He's got a mountain too. A steep mountain. Okay. 

How to dress for the museum....

I like all these get-ups (but only the figure on the left in the third picture).

You're at the museum. People are in visual mode, paying attention. It's a good time to wear something to be looked at — something to charm and amuse.

Feel free to use this post as an open thread.

"He got this bright idea that he could save money on haircuts. So he let his hair grow, he got a perm, and decided he would never need a haircut again."

"Before he could change it back, though, the perm became his company's logo — Ross hated it. 'He could never, ever, ever change his hair, and he was so mad about that... He got tired of that curly hair.'"

The truth about Bob Ross.

"Bob used to lay in bed at night, he told me, he rehearsed every word," Kowalski says. "He knew exactly what he was going to say on every one of those programs."

Like this famous phrase: "You know without question that we don't make mistakes here. We just have happy accidents."

"Now that we know the basic probabilities of individual tags... how often do a deciduous tree and a coniferous tree appear in the same painting?"

"We know that 57 percent of paintings contain a deciduous tree and 53 percent of paintings contain a coniferous tree. According to our data set, 20 percent of paintings contain at least one of each.... We know that 44 percent of Ross’s paintings contain clouds, 9 percent contain the beach and 7 percent contain both the clouds and the beach. We can use this information to figure out two things..."

So here's FiveThirtyEight endeavoring, as promised, to help us understand things through statistical analysis, and I can use this "A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross" to figure out 2 things: 1. Calmly coasting cozily with expertise applied where it doesn't really matter can provide observers with relaxing comfortable lightweight pleasure, and 2. It doesn't really matter whether I'm talking, as I blog comfortably, cozily, floatingly, about Bob Ross or FiveThirtyEight.

"Give it a little touch, a little push/Make love to the canvas."

"There are no limits here... this is your world... you're the Creator..."

It's the 70th birthday of the late Bob Ross... which I noticed because Google has a doodle about it.

"This guy is the Bob Ross of brick laying."

"They do not show us his face, because he is all of us on the inside."

"It's oddly mesmerizing to watch a pro at work. (In this case, masonry blocks.)"

Old TV show that painting made me think about.

Remember the Bob Ross "Joy of Painting" show? How fascinatingly soothing and absurd it was! Why was that show on PBS?! Did people actually try to paint along with him? Apparently so. If they did, the better ones probably produced something like that painting discovered in Mt. Horeb.