Last suppers

The subject of a death row inmate's last meal has been dealt with by a number of artists. Julie Green's Delft blue ceramic take on the idea, spotlighted in this week's New York Times, caught my eye...

The last meal served to John Wayne Gacy, as imaged in an essay in the Mail Online

I think part of what interests me about this work its potential to revitalize the idea of the still life in some way...it still contains the moralizing overtones of traditional Dutch still life painting, but with a decidedly modern, documentary spin...more on that later (perhaps).

It's not okay to use the word 'cultureverse'...

...but I still really was interested in a story on today's Morning Edition from Neda Ulaby called In a Fragmented Cultureverse, Can Pop References Still Pop?

If you have a chance, give it a listen - some of the interesting ideas that came up include

• The 20% rule
• The degree to which increasing tribalization of cultural reference makes as all like immigrants
• A comedian saying "I assume everyone has seen Fargo"

More soon - I hope...but enjoy for now...

The beauty of code

Picked this up from Artsjournal.com today...loving it the expression of boredom with the cliches of 'new media'...

Stop whatever you are doing...

...and go to Soundcloud to listen to the Portland Cello Project performing Beck's Song Reader.

What are you doing still here - go! NOW!

If you require some kind of hype, read the LA Times Pop & Hiss on this monumental achievement...

You can almost smell the stale beer...

Make sure you stop at the New York Times for The Party is Not Over...it's pretty awesome.

Seeing the light, then losing sight of it

Greatly enjoyed Jim Shepard's essay on Flannery O'Connor on the Atlantic website...Shepard names something that has always bugged me about the idea of epiphanies in literature - that they don't last. He writes:

Writers talk a lot about epiphanies—what O'Connor, in her Catholic tradition, called "grace"—in short stories. But I think we're tyrannized by a misunderstanding of Joyce's notion of the epiphany. That stories should toodle on their little track toward a moment where the characters understand something they didn't understand before—and, at that moment, they're transformed into better people.

[...]

This kind of conversion notion is based on a very comforting idea—that if only we had sufficient information, we wouldn't act badly. And that's one of the great things about what The Misfit tells the Grandmother in the line I like so much. He's not saying that a near-death experience would have turned her into a good woman. He's saying it would take somebody threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.

In other words, these conversion experiences don't stick—or they don't stick for very long. Human beings have to be re-educated over and over and over again as we swim upstream against our own irrationalities.

I have to admit I've had more earth-shattering epiphanies than I can actually recall...too many moments in which everything seems to make sense, only to get swallowed in the fog of living again a few hours or - if I'm lucky - days later. I've tried to write them down, draw them when they are of that nature, but even then, I too often end up looking back at my notes and wondering what on earth I was seeing in that state of enlightenment.

Images of creativity

Today, I'm thinking about people making things...

Mother Nature forging a baby. Note the unfinished infants at the bottom left...

I've always been really interested in the image of God as an architect...

Studio wall

Having trouble getting images on my webpage's sketchbook, so I wanted to share this here....still sorting out the studio to some extent, but getting work done a little at a time...these are transcriptions of passages from the readings I assigned my students this fall, or things I found while I was researching the Intro to Visual Studies class.

Yet more graphic violence...

Some time ago, I notices that hazard signs had become more specific about the consequences of misuse or ignoring warnings...I wonder if this is response to some kind of lull brought on by less explicit signs. Here are a few examples of rather specific hazard signs...

More graphic violence

from the Retronaut...do they have a category for gruesome deaths?

Today's news - Kraftwerk Victorious

Could the Economist have found a more dire photo? Oh right, this is Kraftwerk,,,

So it seems that the German courts have gone where few dare tread and ruled on a case that involves sampling and appropriation. According to a December 18  post on the Economist's website:

Like all of these sorts of things, the narrative is tricky. It seems that in a 1977 song, Kraftwerk created a sound in a song called Metall Auf Metall that caught the ears of producers Moses Pelham and Martin Haas, who used it in a 19997 song called Nur Mir. This being the latter quarter of the 20th century, Kraftwerk sued. The case has been working its way through the German courts for a dozen years, and finally the German Supreme Court ruled in favor of Kraftwerk, saying (in the words of the Economist):

The question at the heart of the case is how far sampling the work of other artists—a mainstay of modern hip-hop and techno—is permissible when creating new music. The answer given by the Supreme Court is that it is only permissible if the same effect could not have been produced by the new artist himself. After various demonstrations by expert witnesses, crashing metal on metal and using instruments such as a 1996 Akai Sampler, it was shown that an imitation of the sound-bite would have been possible in 1997.

So, if I understand this correctly, the decision has to do with what is technologically possible, not what the use of another recording might mean. This a bit of a bummer for those of us who are hoping for a more open culture and less choking control on those things that are already in the world.

One remediates (my new word for using another's images, words or sound in another work) often because one wants to be in conversation with the original work - not just because it sounds cool. The whole point is for readers, viewers, or listeners to recognize other's voices as an integral part of making your own voice. We are, all of us, patched together from borrowed pieces of codes, little snippets of other's identities that surface from time to time. Trying to control that is like trying to stop the tide from coming in...it's not a question of what a machine can do, but what a person needs to do something...

Writing makes worlds

Super interested in Joshua Foer's New Yorker article on article on Ithkuil inventer John Quijada. Like all New Yorker articles, it's a two day investment for me these days, but found a lot to groove on in the first section, which gave an overview of invented languages and seemed like a complement to Joanna Drucker's Alphabetic Labyrinth, which I have been struggling with for about a month. Most interesting me - because it connects up to some work that's going on in the studio - is the reference to ideas put forward by Descartes and Leibnitz (which I am still trying to wrap my head around) that suggest numbers may be a more precise mens of constructing written language than phonetically-driven formula we use. 

The use of numbers to replace words may have first come to my attention with the CD 10-codes of the 1970s (I remember a plastic trash bag you were supposed to hang in the car that I insisted on memorizing because it had a list of these codes...and it should be immediately obvious that we had no CB radio in the family). But I remember Target getting some bad press for selling shirts that were emblazoned with an 88 some years back, and then I started to realize that written language might work a few different ways...

Anyway, looking forward to finishing this, and I'd be happy to hear from anyone who is a native Esperanto speaker or has other language issues to share...

Imagery

Loving the song Dumb Ways to Die, I was amused to find this image in a collection called 30 Ways to Die by Electrocution

New work

I often put images of things one the studio desktop on the sketchbook page of my website...and I'm nto sure why I am using this instead...but I am.

The book factory has had a slow start this year. I think it's the chaos of the new studio. But I am working...

small books getting done...

I have also been working on some new paintings...I hope to have some images of them to post soon, but here is a small piece I made for a fundraiser that I think might suggest where things are going...

We/You/I See...gouache on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Sing along

KCRW playing a cover of this song with Aimee Mann...which is nice, but this is such a pleasure as is...

Changing direction

Bridget Riley, Squares in Motion, 1961

I have decided to close my Facebook account for the time being. I have noticed a number of things that bother me about interacting with Facebook that I want time to sort out. I will miss the easy connection to family and friends that the application provides, but I will try to keep up through letters, email and phone calls.

Another thing I will miss is just sharing interesting news reports and images that come across my field of vision, so I will use this forum for re-posting them.

Here's an interesting story from the Pacific Standard that reports that we respond to visible stimuli - starkly contrasting patterns shown to test subjects led to more decisive behaviors. I expect I will be painting my office a number of shades of grey...

Some disasters...

from "The Day After Tomorrow"

from the same film...New York really gets it in these films...

last one...

from the 2007 film "Flood"

and another 'Flood' image

London deluged in 'Flood'...nothing for Philly...

:-)

"When an interviewer asked Nabokov how he ranked himself among great writers, [...] the writer replied, ''I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.''

TYPOGRAPHIC MILESTONES; Happy Birthday :-) to You: A Smiley Face Turns 20

By Katie Hafner

New York Times September 19, 2002

Class prep

...thought I would show a video of Marshall McLuhan to my Visual Studies class today (after all, the medium is the...well, you know the rest...)

This one didn't make the cut, but it sure is good...

Acceptance Speech Word Clouds