Hmm...street style blog action:35 minutes wait 4 Bus. Next time take a cab, stupid. Arrogant bastard not everybody can afford a cab. Poverty is not stupid, arrogance is.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Chicago-style Blog
Hmm...street style blog action:35 minutes wait 4 Bus. Next time take a cab, stupid. Arrogant bastard not everybody can afford a cab. Poverty is not stupid, arrogance is.
Cormac McCarthy Week..etc
Last night got together with a few pals from an online book club. We are all in Chicago to see a play written by a writer we all enjoy and admire, Cormac McCarthy. We went out for pizza, hey, it's Chicago after all.
Rick
Wes
Marc and Deana.
Rick and Sue.
Susan and Wes.
Today Wes and I went to the Chicago Institute of Art.
Look, people lining up to see art. And what art there was, I had no idea of the huge Impressionist collection,. Amazing. Van Gogh's famous self portrait and his bedroom. And then there was Edward Hopper's Nighthawks...which seemed so perfect for two McCarthy fans to thrill over. I had chills down my back looking at it. The Hopper is twice the size I thought it would be.
Where do two bookworms go when hanging out like tourists?
No kidding, the public library! Good times!
Rick
Wes
Marc and Deana.
Rick and Sue.
Susan and Wes.
Today Wes and I went to the Chicago Institute of Art.
Look, people lining up to see art. And what art there was, I had no idea of the huge Impressionist collection,. Amazing. Van Gogh's famous self portrait and his bedroom. And then there was Edward Hopper's Nighthawks...which seemed so perfect for two McCarthy fans to thrill over. I had chills down my back looking at it. The Hopper is twice the size I thought it would be.
Where do two bookworms go when hanging out like tourists?
No kidding, the public library! Good times!
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Having Shoe Fun
I got some shoes on sale the other day, so yesterday while I was working on my Guy Kawasaki portrait, I taped off the top of my shoes and went to town. Like painting a car.
And then this showed up in a google search about my blog...
"Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? Blogger · Send As SMS · Get your own blog · Flag Blog · Next blog ..." The italics is what I copied and pasted...and all I could find...it showed up in someones google search for my blog (in my tracker record I noticed this...) Funny stuff.
And then this showed up in a google search about my blog...
"Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? Blogger · Send As SMS · Get your own blog · Flag Blog · Next blog ..." The italics is what I copied and pasted...and all I could find...it showed up in someones google search for my blog (in my tracker record I noticed this...) Funny stuff.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Military Intelligence
Luck has nothing to do with Lucky the blog reviewer giving my blog a big thumbs down. I actually signed up and invited Lucky to review my blog. And it was a lot of fun! I recommend it to lots of bloggers and I hope I turn someone onto his super fun-spirited past time. Lucky began a blog while deployed in Iraq. It seems he has met tons of great people and his intentions and purpose for his blog naturally transformed and he ended up reviewing blogs as a hobby. I think he could probably charge money for the service!
He did not enjoy visiting my blog, he gave me one hump out of a five hump rating system, and I think I'm lucky I got the one hump, heh heh. But it was a really fun excercise and I say take it on. I knew right away I was asking for trouble. I grew up on army bases and waiting for him to review my blog triggered feelings of waiting for my dad to finish reviewing my homework. If you've ever read The Great Santini by Pat Conroy, you might get a feel for the dread of citicism being a flaky artist in a military family. There were a couple of us signed up to "Get Humped" and supporting each other waiting to find out how badly asskicked we would get in blogland.
I think my parents were at the end of an era when it was hip to be into one's culture and follow the art scene. No body does that any more. My parents get credit for this, they loved art and exposed my sister and I to all kinds of shows from Egyptian art to Colour Field paintings. They also exposed us to other cultures, religions, styles of living and gender equality. Considering my father, and his father, were conservative military men, I think this is remarkable and defines the kind of tolerance and enthusiasm that is lost in most childrens education today. Popular music and movies and tv are the major sources of art for kids. When I was growing up, it was the same but also included studying poetry, art and dance. That was a standard approach, everybody had to take art in school.
Lucky begins my review...
I am not an art critic. I know very little about, and therefore have very little appreciation for, classic art. I've been to some of the most amazing museums in the world, all over Europe and the Pacific, and I still don't know the difference between good and bad art. So, you can imagine my apprehension when I figured out that I was reviewing the website of an artist.
It's heartbreaking to me the desert that is art programs for kids. Art shouldn't be scary. Art shouldn't make a Major in the U.S. military apprehensive. This is a crime in our school systems...and continues a theme I have discussed here at this blog...that political intellectual mobsters have stolen art from the public. Art has been smuggled by universities and hidden in ugly architecture mimicking armouries.
Although I am going to continue my blog the way it is now, as a research journal for scripts and a photo diary for family and friends...I loved getting humped, even a shitty hump. I think Lucky is one cool dude, and I even hope he might get a little taste of Candy and come back for a visit now and then. He is my target audience. And it hurts me to fail at exciting someone into the world of universal mythology and stories, of art, and throwing out notes questioning "Is this the only way to get by on earth?" I had hoped that producing a chronicle of paintings as they were made and the items and content would showcase how anyone can make art, and that art is a narrative for each other. A form of storytelling. Quick, simple, emotional. And for the masses. My parents and teachers knew that it wasn't about whether art was "good art or bad art" it was about storytelling. A painting talks to us whether it is good or bad, or we like it or hate it. Is it sucessful in it's impact on us? Is it pretty? What does it mean? What does it make me think about? Is it saying something about the human condition? What is reality? Why are we here? What is love, truth, humour? Who are you? Oh well, back to the drawing board...
More from "Getting Humped"
Her artwork is interesting--the only problem I had with it is that it just suddenly pops up in her first month, with no background as to why she's posting those pictures or who made the paintings (it becomes obvious later). She now takes some great photos--not so at the beginning. She has a post that she is discussing a television show and lo and behold--she includes a picture of her TV. Once she figures out how to take pictures though, it quickly goes into photo overload--with dozens of photos posted over the course of a few weeks. Getting an account like Flickr to showcase her photos would make it a much more readable blog, while not losing the most valuable part of her site--the photos she takes.
CONVERSATION: While she gets a good amount of comments (5-10 per post) a large number of those comments are her own replies, reducing that number down to 2-5 per post.
OVERALL: For people interested in art this might be a good blog to see other's work. If you have time to read all the long posts, it also might be worth a read--just not for me.
He did not enjoy visiting my blog, he gave me one hump out of a five hump rating system, and I think I'm lucky I got the one hump, heh heh. But it was a really fun excercise and I say take it on. I knew right away I was asking for trouble. I grew up on army bases and waiting for him to review my blog triggered feelings of waiting for my dad to finish reviewing my homework. If you've ever read The Great Santini by Pat Conroy, you might get a feel for the dread of citicism being a flaky artist in a military family. There were a couple of us signed up to "Get Humped" and supporting each other waiting to find out how badly asskicked we would get in blogland.
I think my parents were at the end of an era when it was hip to be into one's culture and follow the art scene. No body does that any more. My parents get credit for this, they loved art and exposed my sister and I to all kinds of shows from Egyptian art to Colour Field paintings. They also exposed us to other cultures, religions, styles of living and gender equality. Considering my father, and his father, were conservative military men, I think this is remarkable and defines the kind of tolerance and enthusiasm that is lost in most childrens education today. Popular music and movies and tv are the major sources of art for kids. When I was growing up, it was the same but also included studying poetry, art and dance. That was a standard approach, everybody had to take art in school.
Lucky begins my review...
I am not an art critic. I know very little about, and therefore have very little appreciation for, classic art. I've been to some of the most amazing museums in the world, all over Europe and the Pacific, and I still don't know the difference between good and bad art. So, you can imagine my apprehension when I figured out that I was reviewing the website of an artist.
It's heartbreaking to me the desert that is art programs for kids. Art shouldn't be scary. Art shouldn't make a Major in the U.S. military apprehensive. This is a crime in our school systems...and continues a theme I have discussed here at this blog...that political intellectual mobsters have stolen art from the public. Art has been smuggled by universities and hidden in ugly architecture mimicking armouries.
Although I am going to continue my blog the way it is now, as a research journal for scripts and a photo diary for family and friends...I loved getting humped, even a shitty hump. I think Lucky is one cool dude, and I even hope he might get a little taste of Candy and come back for a visit now and then. He is my target audience. And it hurts me to fail at exciting someone into the world of universal mythology and stories, of art, and throwing out notes questioning "Is this the only way to get by on earth?" I had hoped that producing a chronicle of paintings as they were made and the items and content would showcase how anyone can make art, and that art is a narrative for each other. A form of storytelling. Quick, simple, emotional. And for the masses. My parents and teachers knew that it wasn't about whether art was "good art or bad art" it was about storytelling. A painting talks to us whether it is good or bad, or we like it or hate it. Is it sucessful in it's impact on us? Is it pretty? What does it mean? What does it make me think about? Is it saying something about the human condition? What is reality? Why are we here? What is love, truth, humour? Who are you? Oh well, back to the drawing board...
More from "Getting Humped"
Her artwork is interesting--the only problem I had with it is that it just suddenly pops up in her first month, with no background as to why she's posting those pictures or who made the paintings (it becomes obvious later). She now takes some great photos--not so at the beginning. She has a post that she is discussing a television show and lo and behold--she includes a picture of her TV. Once she figures out how to take pictures though, it quickly goes into photo overload--with dozens of photos posted over the course of a few weeks. Getting an account like Flickr to showcase her photos would make it a much more readable blog, while not losing the most valuable part of her site--the photos she takes.
CONVERSATION: While she gets a good amount of comments (5-10 per post) a large number of those comments are her own replies, reducing that number down to 2-5 per post.
OVERALL: For people interested in art this might be a good blog to see other's work. If you have time to read all the long posts, it also might be worth a read--just not for me.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Cormac McCarthy Week
This week at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago a play opens , The Sunset Limited, that has been written by one of my favourite writers, Cormac McCarthy. I've read some his novels a couple of times, and Blood Meridian I have read 12 times. I have participated in an online book club focused on McCarthy for almost ten years and it has been an amazing source of reading material, wit and philosophical challenges. This week I am going to meet a couple of fellow participants in person for the first time. I am pretty excited to put names and faces together. So in celebration, here are a few quotes from some of Cormac McCarthy's work.
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."Blood Meridian
"The truth about the world he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, the mind itself being but a fact among others." Blood Meridian
"He fell asleep with his hands palm up before him like some dozing penitent. When he woke it was still dark. The fire had died to a few low flames seething over the coals. He took off his hat and fanned the fire with it and coaxed it back and fed the wood he'd gathered. He looked for the horse but could not see it. The coyotes were still calling all along the stone ramparts of the Pilares and it was graying faintly in the east. He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."
--Cormac McCarthy, *The Crossing* (1994), pp. 126-27.
"He said:People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake." No Country For Old Men.
"What gradually became apparent to me was that language was a thing corrupted by its own successes. What had begun as a system for identifying and ordering the phenomena of the world had become a system for replacing those phenomena. For replacing the world.... Language usurps things. That's what it does. More and more I began to understand that we were not living in the world as given.... More and more language seemed to me to be an aberration by which we had come to lose the world. Everything that is named is set at one remove from itself. Nomenclature is the very soul of secondhandness. We endow things with names and then carry the names away with us. But the name is not the thing and we experience nothing."
-- Cormac McCarthy, “Whales and Men” (57-9)
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."Blood Meridian
"The truth about the world he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, the mind itself being but a fact among others." Blood Meridian
"He fell asleep with his hands palm up before him like some dozing penitent. When he woke it was still dark. The fire had died to a few low flames seething over the coals. He took off his hat and fanned the fire with it and coaxed it back and fed the wood he'd gathered. He looked for the horse but could not see it. The coyotes were still calling all along the stone ramparts of the Pilares and it was graying faintly in the east. He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."
--Cormac McCarthy, *The Crossing* (1994), pp. 126-27.
"He said:People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake." No Country For Old Men.
"What gradually became apparent to me was that language was a thing corrupted by its own successes. What had begun as a system for identifying and ordering the phenomena of the world had become a system for replacing those phenomena. For replacing the world.... Language usurps things. That's what it does. More and more I began to understand that we were not living in the world as given.... More and more language seemed to me to be an aberration by which we had come to lose the world. Everything that is named is set at one remove from itself. Nomenclature is the very soul of secondhandness. We endow things with names and then carry the names away with us. But the name is not the thing and we experience nothing."
-- Cormac McCarthy, “Whales and Men” (57-9)
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