Back In The Day...

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Harvest 51 by Steve Warbasse

Harvest 51 from Steve Warbasse on Vimeo.

Harvest 51 is a documentary made by my friend Steve Warbasse. I've known Steve for about ten years, through an online bookclub, and he always surprises me with his experience and talent. This film features his parents last harvest on their famly farm. It is 20 minutes long but I hope visitors will take the time to watch...it's a part of our community we often forget about...Thanks Steve!

" What Global Warming? It's Freezing Here." Dylan

We got a bunch of magazines from a friend for our collages...and I've been catching up on the ones I haven't read. I posted something about Bob Dylan's SUV ad last year and found this story about the idea in Rolling Stone Nov. 2007.

Bob Dylan's New Ride: How Dylan ended up in Cadillac's new Escalade commercial.

Bob Dylan is driving an Escalade down a dusty desert highway. He stops at a crossroads, steps out and contemplates his options. In a voiceover, the singer aks,s "What's life without the occasional detour?" The question, from a new Cadillac commercial, is an appropriate one for Dylan, whose recent detours have included an appearance on Dharma and Greg and an ad for Victoria's Secret. "What is it specifically that appeals to Bob about these thngs is unknown, " says a source close to Dylan. "He has a history of saying yes to things you wouldn't expect."

The Cadilllac ad, which also promotes Dylan's XM show Theme Time Radio Home, came about when Dylan began putting together the October 24th episode, which had a Cadillac theme-and includes songs like Dizzy Gillespie's "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac." XM suggested Cadillac sponsor the show, and Dylan (who has owned several Caddies over the years) agreed. "It hearkens back to classic radio, where it was always "Buick presents the blah-blah show." says the Dylan source. "It immediately appealed to Bob." When Cadillac's ad agency, Modernista, heard Dylan was also willing to appear in a TV ad, it constructed a simple script. Dylan had requirements: he wouldn't speak on camera, he would wear his own clothes, and he didn't want his music to be used. The agency considered using Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" before settling on the atmospheric 1999 track "Held" by Smog.

The spot was shot on a broiling day in the California desert. "It's a 120 degrees, and he's wearing black pants, black coat, a hat, gloves, and he wasn't sweating at all." says scriptwriter Dave Weist. "And he wanted no air conditioning. As soon as the doors would open, the whole crew would basically just fall out. He would just kind of casually walk out like 'Hey, what's the problem, man'?"


Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode.

Held by Smog.

#1 Rolling Stone
#2 Rolling Stone

A little prayer for Jennifer Hudson

Very sad news, Jennifer Hudson's family in Chicago, her mother and brother, have been killed.

"I seek in painting" Cezanne

An interesting article on young "geniuses" versus "late bloomers" is in The New Yorker

Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”
But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,” Galenson writes in “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” and he goes on:

The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: “I seek in painting.”

Galenson’s idea that creativity can be divided into these types—conceptual and experimental—has a number of important implications. For example, we sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. They don’t realize they’re good at something until they’re fifty, so of course they achieve late in life. But that’s not quite right. Cézanne was painting almost as early as Picasso was. We also sometimes think of them as artists who are discovered late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. In both cases, the assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market failure. What Galenson’s argument suggests is something else—that late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.

All these qualities of his inner vision were continually hampered and obstructed by Cézanne’s incapacity to give sufficient verisimilitude to the personae of his drama,” the great English art critic Roger Fry wrote of the early Cézanne. “With all his rare endowments, he happened to lack the comparatively common gift of illustration, the gift that any draughtsman for the illustrated papers learns in a school of commercial art; whereas, to realize such visions as Cézanne’s required this gift in high degree.” In other words, the young Cézanne couldn’t draw.

But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.

Gal Pal Day!!!

I am so excited. A friend has rented a car and we are doing a make over of her apartment!

She's coming to pick me up today...use the computer...we need to print out maps...hello! Girls! And so I've got some cheese and crackers, some coffee and ...in Vegas my sis Tiff Stagg and I went grocery and booze shopping for our rooms. By the time everyone left Vegas Stagg and I had adopted massive amounts of food, chips, crackers, cookies, champagne, vodka, bottle of wine, Mikes hard lemonade, beer. All Canadian travelling supplies for hotel hosting. So...we managed to drink all the left over booze and most of the food. I had bought an outrageous sized container of yogurt ( a lot of people don't know I am addicted to yogurt...plain with maple syrup). I mean massive...about a gallon of yogurt, organic no bad hormones...it was heavenly...we bought a cooler too...and I ate all the yogurt! I came back to the room one morning(I was in casino having coffee and playing "Wizard of Oz" slot machine) around 9 a.m. to find Stagg in his robe with a bottle of wine between his legs trying to open it with his keys. We drank everything except the Oldcastle beer. (we cleaned up the Heinekens).


Anyways...I am posting a picture of my sister's "cookie spoons". We never landed up eating them and I packed them in my suitcase. So sorry The Underground Baker you didn't get to eat them...but they will make a perfect snack to serve by this hostess today.

I hardly ever get girl time or know many chicks around here...so I am so excited for tday. We are going to take stuff to recycling and donations...she also has a pile of magazines (which we use for collage) and then we are off to Ikea, Lowes, Pottery Barn and BEYOND! I am all decked out with intense red lipstick, in a purple Hard Rock velvet embossed t-shirt and have some sneakers (we might have some heavy lifting) and Stella McCartney jeans which make my ass look great. I am so looking forwaard to this, I have to try not to be needy when she gets here. By needy I mean showing her all my scrapbooks, the art stored under the bed and my aromatherapy collection. (It's her birthday in a couple of days so in the picture above is a little "something something" for her with a Patti Smith postcard from Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)...I'm totally gonna scare her aren't I heh heh...

Okay, so here is a close up of the "cookie spoons". They are shortbread shaped like a spoon and then dipped in chocolate. a dippers delight with a dark chocolate coating no artificail preservatives free of trans fat and hydrogenate oils YUM...guilt free treats! We just need to remember to save one for Stagg!

Off to shopping therapy....

Hero

Check out the percussion and lyrics on this one by NAS (ft. Keri HIlson)

My lawyers only see the Billboard charts as winning
Forgetting - Nas the only true rebel since the beginning
Still in musical prison, in jail for the flow
Try telling Bob Dylan, Bruce, or Billy Joel
They can't sing what's in their soul
So untitled it is
I never change nothin'
But people remember this
If Nas can't say it, think about these talented kids
With new ideas being told what they can and can't spit
I can't sit and watch it
So, shit, I'ma drop it
Like it or not
You ain't gotta cop it
I'm a hustler in the studio
Cups of Don Julio
No matter what the CD called
I'm unbeatable, y'all