About Viola Fair
Got My Mojo Workin' Muddy Waters 1963
Viola Fair is the name of a website near the Big Bang which the Hubble can't see that features a history of music and recording along with some ancient abandoned art and poetry. There are obviously no webmasters here. Though I prefer working on content to code, there may be no writers here either. Design is for tablets upward, not mobile devices. Compatibility with smartphones remains crude for quite some time. This website was otherwise begun in 2002 when I was a freelance back-of-book indexer, then became an experimental space to see what might happen. As I've found content alone to be a big enough task I neither advertise, affiliate, market nor sell anything on this website. Research, et al, permit no time for such, it makes for focused pages and I wouldn't make enough to bother anyway.
== Launch ==
The initial purpose of Viola Fair was to advertise
back-of-book indexing
services, a career of several brief years that disappeared. But to market
a book indexing gig required only five pages, hardly seeming worth the
investment of website editing software and learning to use it (Microsoft's
now long-since defunct FrontPage). So some
vanity
art,
literature and various other experiments were added.
This website features
what may be the first
roman numerals
charts on the internet, created since I couldn't find one online for
Shakespeare upon launch in June of 2002. By 2003 VF expanded into a
publishing industry and international art index, now long since gone. However,
late in 2004, about the time that blogging was emerging with note on the
internet, the website had to be abandoned. In mid-2005 the webmaster's computer
was destroyed, upon which additional software problems left the website in
ruination. Though in a state of rubble, VF was left online. Not until late 2010,
after six years of drifting unattended in internet space, was it possible to
readdress Viola Fair, at which time the site was redesigned bare bones. Even drop-down menus were removed in the
interest of simplicity since VF was only a personal tack wall, now with some
digital art, but no real intentions. The music histories hadn't yet been conceived
that I should know their
need, now core to the HMR Project
as of 2021.
== Art ==
Art (in some cases "art") accounts for only about 1% of website visitation. Largely
just online parking space for what little I could scavenge from art school decades
earlier, or
later experiments that didn't get too
far. Some real good, most meh, some awful. In four categories: 1. Conceptual
cartoons inspired by simple math
equations on scratch paper. 2. Fundamental art studies ranging from portraiture and the human figure in
various mediums (acrylics, oils, charcoal, conte, ink, pastel, pencil), to the
abstract, conceptual, expressionistic and illustrative, again in various
mediums. 3. Editorial ''Scratch'' ranging from humorous mental exercises to
fine, or clearly not so, abstract and conceptual paintings on notebook paper. 4. Pirate
conceptual digital art, which begins
with a digital image, either original or downloaded from the internet, that gets
rearranged with Picasa's retouching tool. Sometimes the original is left
unaltered enough to easily recognize it. Other times it gets deconstructed,
morphed and reconstructed to degree that it becomes an entirely other
representation. One could call them responses to the originals to various
measures. Albeit often a tongue-in-cheek indulgence, Pirate Art is one section
concerning which a seeming confluence between analogue and digital phenomena
occur.
== Music ==
The VF History of Music &
Modern Recording accounts for about 85% of website traffic. It's the project
that put others to abandonment years ago, having since become more a fair of
musical fare, though more in terms of
acquaintance than promotion. This project was begun in latter 2011 per wifi at truck stops. I was driving big trucks in
the States and Canada at the time. I spent the first couple years attempting to not work on it. Not having the time, I was just fiddling around. But I was done with
big trucks by 2013 when I began working on the histories full time. The whole
thing had been completed in draft in 2015, growing
from the medieval period to
musicians surfacing on vinyl by 1970.
I then spent the next five years through 2020 getting myself out of the
trouble I'd gotten myself into. This covers the Western hemisphere in ten books
on classical, black gospel, blues, country, folk, jazz, Latin recording, boogie
woogie, R&B-rock
and popular music including ragtime and film. I had thought to take the
history one more decade to 1980. But after working through a section in
seventies rock I figured that would require a couple of years too long to
complete in all genres, so I ceased at 1970. The VF History is
the condensed historically comparative Volume 1 which is notes for Volume 2 that
is the HMR Project begun in 2021.
History of Music & Modern Recording Project
Classical /
Modern Recording /
Topics /
Chronicle /
About.
== Poetry ==
Poetry (in some cases "poetry") accounts for only 12% of website use, especially the
sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, way beyond the sonnets of Shakespeare.
I gathered Millay together in 2002 upon noting the absence of just such
documentation on the internet (likely no more).
Shakespeare couldn't but join
her.
The Gypsy's Address at Something Strange is a
silly romping comedy by myself, a rhyming heroic romantic science fiction adventure
in big trucks,
written in 2006 at seventy miles per hour in a Pete 379. Really just a
Hollywood action film without much substance beyond humor or discipline such
as the use of meter and rhyme. Though
much I've written over the years, there's not much I care to publish since it
wasn't written to that purpose, being generally an examination of some kind
or other. All four books on the Something Strange page were written on the
road in big trucks, the latest in 2011. Of far greater interest to me in younger years had
been philosophy and psychoanalysis, more worthless preoccupations propelled
by a sense of responsibility. In or related to these were where I
found the great authors. To mention Shakespeare, Nietzsche or Derrida
isn't to define my own philosophy, politics or religion here. They lend
minimal example, however, of what I mean by monumental literature.
== Vaping ==
An instructional nonprofit section about making juice real cheap that
became too much a distraction to continue. Since juices are commonly marked
up at least a thousand percent above cost it seemed that instructions to
easily concoct them oneself would helpful. As for equipment, however, after ten years
I yet couldn't a manufacturer that
produced a solid enough product to stand behind, such as quality control
ignored throughout an industry seeming more about making money than vaping.
Which is fairly typical of an American enterprise. No one really cares about
how well they do a thing; they only want a lot of money in exchange for as
little as possible excepting promotion. For example, using Einstein in
advertising will always be more important than anything he ever did. Yeah, immigrate to America and get rich doing things the
way the gringos do. Thanks.
== Statistics ==
This section isn't updated because it's boring and I've forgotten why it's here: Viola Fair receives the majority of its website
traffic from America. Of remaining international traffic the major portion of page views
arrive, in descending order, from: France, Italy, Canada, Russia,
Great Britain, Germany, Japan and Ukraine. Per December 2014 twenty-five
percent of visitors used a Mac, up 8% from 2012.
Nigh thirteen percent are using a version of Linux, up 10% from 2012. As for
browsers, you will probably press F3, 'Find on Page',
every thirty seconds for the rest of your life. Mozilla's Firefox
and Microsoft's Internet Explorer are no longer the browsers of choice as they
were in 2012: Chrome per 2014 is at the head of the pack at 34% of browser use,
up 15% from 2012. Some version of Mozilla such as Firefox follows at
27%. Apple's Safari follows Mozilla at 19%, up from 9% in 2012, but back to
about 10% per latter 2016.
Use of Internet Explorer has dropped from over 30% to only 9% from 2012 to
latter 2014. The new Edge browser, however, has surpassed both Chrome and
Mozilla in usage per latter 2016, being 29% (with Internet Explorer) in
comparison to about 18% for both Chrome and Firefox. It would appear that MicroSoft has both
Chrome and Mozilla lagging no small distance behind in
the browser wars, with Edge alone now claiming just a touch more market. I
don't know about Edge, but Firefox cruises a full 15% faster for me than
Chrome on multiple computers in multiple scenarios (ethernet, wifi,
location). Chrome, however, is smoother, uses less memory and doesn't require
cache cleaning so much as Firefox. Opera hovers at about 3%
through the years.
'Viola Fair' is the name of a website rather than a person, excepting the
woman at Inspiration whose name I've imagined to be Viola Fair and on whose
back I am writing this.
Intellectual property in general, artistic or
literary, is copyright of this website, 'violafair.com', and its owner,
Larry Tipton, where not otherwise noted.
