Currently Listening: The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys (Traffic, 1971)

 

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My Super-Talented Family Members: JoAnna Lombardi (Painter)

Stevie

Happy Sunday, dear fine readers. I was thinking. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by incredibly talented artists. And I haven't really written about them! What, why not! So today I'm going to dedicate a little time to doing just that. First up—my mom, JoAnna Lombardi.

My beautiful and talented mom started painting in her forties. First watercolors, then oils. Lots of blues and R&B musicians—she painted Stevie, Jimi, Billie Holiday, and commissioned by me, Boy George. 

Now she's in her seventies! And still beautiful and talented. She took a hiatus from painting for, I think, 12 years or so? My brother and his lovely wife started a family, and my mom was preoccupied with the kids. Her painting studio got turned into an awesome playroom. I don't get to visit often, but I drove down once when Fernando Fox ("Nando") was little. We played ALL DAY in that playroom. I had a blast. He's beautiful. He's growing up so fast, and now there's a baby brother too ("Gusto" Fox).

So the kids are getting big, and my mom has a new studio space, and she's back to painting every day. Her style has evolved into something even more poignant and charged. Her paintings are wonderful. Visit her website.

joannalombardiart.com

By the way, I finished her new website last week. It took me weeks, because of typing with one hand, getting tired easily, and some degree of brain fog. That website would have taken me a single afternoon 15 years ago. Twenty-five  years ago I made her first website, too. I wrote her bio back then. I'll probably write a shorter one (as is the way these days) but here's the old one. Heh. Hub still had it in Dropbox!

 “Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel” advises Ben Shahn in The Shape of Content (January 1972). 

It took years for JoAnna Lombardi, a forty-something wife and mother of two grown children, to get to a place in her life where she allowed such unfettered self-expression. From a tentative beginning in 1998, when she took a watercolor class as a last-ditch diversion during an extremely stressful time in her life, she’s now painting every day. What started as a side interest developed into such a cathartic personal experience that it became a minor obsession. “I don’t only want to paint,” she says. “I have to paint.”

JoAnna grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.  The New Haven of the fifties and sixties was a churning microcosm of blue-collar chaos, a mix of every possible ethnic group. JoAnna’s family lived meagerly on a crowded street of multi-family homes bursting with two or three generations.  With her mentally ill father in the hospital for what would be the rest of his life, her mother worked outside the home, leaving the kids with distracted, busy aunts or their angry, abusive grandmother. It wasn’t until later, as a teenager caught up in the “free love” candor of the sixties, that JoAnna understood the degree to which the people who were supposed to instill a value system had misguided her. In what should have been a colorful and beautiful neighborhood for a child to grow up, a suspicious and emotionally stingy family culture created a fear and distrust of outsiders, and a virtual moratorium on any kind of personal expression. 

“Nobody seemed to ever have an original thought,” she recalls.  Like Bluebeard’s wife, JoAnna’s curiosity was too much. As a young adult she opened the forbidden door to the music, art, and culture of all different ethnic groups. To the horror of her ethnocentric family, she learned to cook fabulous Spanish dishes, worshiped Motown and New Orleans R&B musicians, and decorated her house in African, Haitian, and Jamaican sculpture and furnishings. 

JoAnna’s watercolors give away the simplest of creative impulses: she loves the purity of human beings, and she wants to paint them at their most savage, most tender, most vulnerable. Though her collection includes the expected landscapes and flowers found in the portfolio of any emerging artist, JoAnna would rather hide those under the bed—she is compelled to share her more personal, emotionally-charged subjects. These include urban street scenes (“Street” series), jamming jazz and blues musicians (“Song” series), and horrific glimpses into human suffering (“World” series). She’s also given to total flights of fancy wherein she gets lost in a candy-colored fantasy world of strangely plumed birds and phantom beasts.

The immediately human subject matter is the first thing noticed about JoAnna’s watercolors. The next thing noticed is the colors themselves. Electric pinks and purples, lusty reds and violent yellows spark and pop from the paper.  JoAnna mixes paints with the abandon of a child just discovering the miracle of color, and in this, her fourth year painting, she’s learning to trust the drama of “pure” color. The juxtaposition of her raw human themes with bold color technique delivers the meaning of the painting straight to the heart of the viewer.  From the pink flushed cheeks of a nervous gospel singer to the black, gleaming eyes of an angry old woman, subject matter and color come together to convey pure human sensibilities, whether it be comic, dramatic, or introspective. 

For the “Song Series,” JoAnna’s main inspirations are the works of world-renowned photographers such as Francis Wolf, Bob Willoughby, and Terry Cryer. “The intent isn’t to rival the original,” she explains. “I could never do that, that isn’t art. It’s just that most of the classic musicians in those photographs are dead. I can’t take photos of them myself. I’m using the photo as a base to work from, but I infuse it with color and my own interpretation of emotion. These musicians are important to me, they mean a lot in what they play and sing. I want to help the dead to sing again.”∎

JoAnna Lombardi and pup (2025)

 

 

 

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I Googled Myself (Yes, Again) And This Is What I Found This Time

Mark Daniel Korvin

Now here's the thing. I don't do this for any kind of ostentatious putting-on of airs. I'm not vain at all. Just the opposite. You can ask my psychiatrist. Or my therapist. 

No, I am occasionally Googling myself to see if Google has had any sweet sweet mercy on #Blogger and indexed our #blogs at all. Because we would really like Google to index our blogs. Lack of blog indexing is a frequent topic of discussion in certain web forums. Also Reddit.

It's so frustrating, you guys. I've been blogging for 25+ years. I write about a variety of topics from a Gen X point of view. Women's issues. Immigration. Equality. Civil rights. Race relations. LGBTQIA issues. Donald Fucking Trump. Class warfare. Nazis. Guns. God. Depression. Anxiety. Music. Local music. Movies, especially horror movies. Comedy. Shopping. Thrifting. Cooking. Writing. I don't use AI. I have no dead links. I signed on with a marketing company for a few years so I had a kind of crash course in SEO: keywords, titles, headers and other things you're supposed to do to drive traffic to your blog. I like to think I'm a good writer--I've done it professionally, and people tend to tell me my stuff is enjoyable. But no matter what I try (Google Search Console, Site Mapping, Index Requests, etc) I can't seem to get past this indexing issue. SO. FRUSTRATING.

Well. Anyway. I Googled "Diary of a Low Budget Superhero" this time--last time I Googled my handle "SuperLowBudge."  Know what I found? I found that the #Google #AI robot is writing about me in the past tense. Should I be worried or…I mean...did I die? Then why am I so tired.

Mind you, this doesn't mean Google is indexing the Blog. 

Well. Anyway. Here's what the robot says.

And it invites you to "Deep Dive" on that:

Apparently I’m “self-deprecating, raw, and fragmented.” Great. Just what I was going for, all these years of blogging. Yep. Fragmented. 

Well. That tracks.💔

 

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Currently Listening: SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE (Stevie Wonder)(1976)

Songs in the Key of Life was one of my favorite records practically my whole life. From the age of 7 I'd say. 

My parents have great taste in music. 

My favorite is Side Four--it's a double album. 

    Isn't She Lovely
    Joy Inside My Tears
    Black Man
    Ngiculela - Es Una Historia I Am Singing
    If It's Magic
    As
    Another Star 

I want "If It's Magic" played at my funeral.

Damn, Stevie.

  

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There Goes Pinterest I Guess (It's Getting Bogged Down With AI Slop)

Photo Credit: Freepik 

Not that I've been on it much lately, so me deleting my account won't mean anything to Pinterest. I created my Pinterest account when we first moved from Comm Ave to Lower Allston, as a kind of Look Book for home decor ideas.I also had some pins of 19th Century dinner rings--I had one once and thought I'd get another some day. But now it seems Pinterest is already chock-a-block with AI slop. Why? What are they thinking? That was a purpose-built site for people to share and pin ideas...WITH REAL PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE. It's like the old Second Life now,  just fucking around building a virtual world that's not real. Fantasy world. That's supposed to be a positive feature? AI slop has made Pinterest pretty much useless. They claim you can toggle off the AI setting, but doesn't that leave you relying on users to tag it as AI? Yeah. No thanks. Buh-bye.

Facebook (3:40pm January 9)

Facebook is next, not that I’m on it much anymore. It's so grim over there, you guys. They have nudes now--just dicks and vajay-jay all up on my page in the middle of the day. Plus Trumpers spouting their disgusting lies freely and without consequence. And  Suckerburg was just in front of an audience saying what a great thing AI is going to do for Facebook this year. I'm not even going to include the video. It's gross. I've already seen AI on Facebook--Reba McEntire crying at Dolly Parton's deathbed. Paul McCartney crying at Phil Collins' deathbed. Bette Midler crying at Diane Keaton's funeral. Lots of crying. It's so obviously AI, but apparently people are believing it's real.

AI replacing writers?

AI replacing actors?

AI replacing musicians?

AI replacing programmers?

AI replacing Human Resources? 

Isn't this kind of a dangerous path we're on?  

 

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...Because, That's Why (Regarding The Absence Of Politcal Posts This Time Around)

"But you used to write about politics..."

Yeah. At one time I did, yeah. Here in Blogger, back to 2012. You can find all those passionate, researched entries by searching on "politics" in the search field. In my Diaryland blog, I have essays from the 2000, 2004 and 2008 elections--that is to say, from the Hanging Chad to the Provisional Ballot to (sweet relief) YES WE CAN! I don't have any entries from 2020 to July 2025, when I just didn't have the mental fortitude for writing.

I can't do it anymore. I don't have the best mental health, for one thing, and while I am better than I was ten years ago, I have to take care of my mental health every single day. Every. Day. Plus I had a stroke, most likely caused by high blood pressure, so focusing on this stuff is the last thing I need right now. I learned to walk and talk again, but don't have use of my right hand. And thirdly, and I cannot stress this enough, I have said all I have to say on the matter. Y'all know how I feel about it. All of it. Women's issues. Immigration. Equality. Civil rights. Race relations. LGBTQIA issues. Donald Fucking Trump. Class warfare. Nazis. Guns. God.

I already said it. I've been saying it for years. Blue in the face, and all that.

You guys, I am just so tired.

But I realized last night that plenty of others still have fight left in them, to call out the fascists in power and their acolytes, and I can just amplify their voices on Diary of a Low Budget Superhero. I've been capturing headlines and so forth in the Photos in my phone all this time, so first I'll post those here. I thought about posting these screenshots one-by-one, but decided against it for the sake of my Followers that get an email every time I post a new entry. After this entry, we'll see. Blessed be.

________________________________________________

Get all that? Okay. So here's what's happened so far. It's been 342 days.

 

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I Signed Up For Fucking Instagram (I Regret It Already)

View this profile on Instagram

Michelle DiPoala (@superlowbudge) • Instagram photos and videos

So you guys. I tried for an hour to log into Instagram on my iPhone. I can log in with the browser on laptop and iPhone, but not the app. After changing the password twice (because “incorrect password” was the error message), I tried Instagram Help, I Googled for answers, I watched YouTube videos, I tried everything suggested by everyone. Reinstall the app, restart the phone, clear the cache, etc.
Then I checked Reddit. Reddit always knows and…

Instagram screenshot of other suckers

 

Oh. Well that’s just great. The screenshot shows the first few Redditors with this same issue—I stopped counting at 25 posts. Nobody commenting had any solution.

Especially the guy saying the only solution is to buy a different phone. Excuse me?

Thing is, I just signed up for Instagram tonight, it’s a brand new account. The only reason I signed up is because a person I want to contact only lists Instagram for a contact!! And the only reason I downloaded the app is because I wanted to add my blog website in my profile—which you can ONLY do on the app! You literally cannot add a website on the web. What the hell kinda feature is that!

I am holding back on some choice words for Meta right now. All these people who can’t log in to the app for all these months and Meta can’t figure it out?! Just…SOL for us then? 

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