But I think the most likely reason of all was that his heart was two sizes too small.

I heard an item on NPR this morning about "new" atheism, one that evangelizes for its cause, focusing on hatred and contempt, casting all religion as dangerous and ignorance.

They interviewed a man who'd posted a photograph of a communion host impaled on a rusty nail on his blog. He laughed, saying, "People got very angry. I don't know why."

I thought, yet you do. Because it Means Something. Otherwise you would not have done it in the first place.

I was surprised how deeply upsetting the story was to me. It quite literally gave me a sick feeling in my stomach that I couldn't shake for the rest of the day. I understand wary questions and even cynicism, but I don't understand circumventing the natural act of discussion by objecting in such a mean-spirited way.

It seems to me that at a most basic level, religion emphasizes the importance of symbols and ritual on the soul. The importance of CULTIVATING the soul. The focus on the spirit, as well as the mind and body. So what I take home from this story is: it's weird that people don't want others to do that. I know religion gets big and messy and fundamentalists really ruin it for everyone, but I have poked around quite a bit and have yet to find a religion with central tenants of nastiness and cruelty to others.

And atheist fundamentalism is still fundamentalism.

And within that I suppose there is also the problem of respect for others. I would not dream of tearing the pages from the Sikh holy book, just as I would not dream of trampling my neighbor's flower garden. It worries me that other people don't see things that way, regardless of opinion on higher powers.

It's the intolerance I find so distasteful, and I realized this morning that I was thinking to myself, I am intolerant of intolerance, which I realized is completely unsound. How does that make me different, in a big cosmic sense, than the people inventing Blasphemy Day? I don't think it does. And if I am going to claim to be at peace with everything in this world -- really at peace -- then I'm going to have to come to terms with this somehow.

Which is why I am here, in this image, as both the accepting loving heart and the frozen heart of the intolerant bigot. Because until I can work this out -- this intolerance problem -- I'm just as bad.

Babel Tower

Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is the state of academia as a microcosm for the state of culture at large. A big part of whats going on is the explosion of possible material to be studied. There has been an exponential curve of works published and research done and keeping up with it has been a rise in the complexity and extension of bibliographies and works cited portions of works published.
What his means is that it becomes a bigger and bigger task to figure out just what is going on with a given work. If I were a monk in the middle ages, academia consisted of Aristotle and commentaries on Aristotle, and later, Plato and commentaries on Plato. I am over-simplifying some, but not much. The entire compendium of Greek literature prior to Plato (that survived and was available to study) as well as everything in Latin from the same period (again, that survived and was available) was possible to consume (via reading) over the course of a lifetime. It was in fact possible to read everything that there was to talk about. And if you kept up with what was being published, you could probably ready every academic work that was making the rounds. It helped that only a tiny percentage of the population was involved in the academic structure (which was pretty much just the monasteries) and a even smaller portion of those folks were actually bothering to create new works. And again, over-simplifying for sure, but you can still go about reading every Greek tragedy and comedy and if you are serious about it, it shouldn't take you more than a year to get through all of them (the list really isn't all that long).
In any case (as what I'm saying above is a sort of idealization/exaggeration) the real point is that whatever the case was then, with the Renaissance you get a much bigger community producing a lot more material in every branch of culture. Mostly just because there were more people involved. And as populations expand, so do the numbers of painters, sculptors, playwrights, musicians, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, biologists, physicists, geologists, astronomers, architects, politicians, historians, and on and on, and this in turn gives rise to The Academic, whose job it is is to make sense of all of this outpouring of culture in one field or another, to organize and arrange it so that it can be taught. Canons are developed. This critical and meta-historical process in turn gives rise to new sciences, sociology, anthropology and psychology that had no place in the old system but grow up out of the academic world, parasitic of the critical and meta-historical work being done, these new sciences are studies of the movement of symbols, abstracting completely from anything encountered directly in the world.
Many of these fields begin to turn their interest both inward, onto themselves, and laterally, onto the other fields. Of course while all of them could never have been completely disentangled, this concentrated effort to put the tools of one field to use on another makes the tangles themselves apparent.
Somewhere along the line (a while back I suppose) the printing press gets set up all over the place, and the libraries explode. The cost to produce a record of a work drops considerably, and so copies and copies and copies are made. Transfer of information is facilitated, and recursion is encouraged.
The turn inward, the use of tools on the tools themselves, the recursive mode, produces strange effects. It starts small of course. Shakespeare has plays-within-plays. There are countless portraits of portrait painters. Philosophy questions its own questioning. This reaches a sort of fevered pitch near the end of the 19th century, as the recursive understanding that each academic field has of itself begins to look like the picture of the world is complete, or at least completable.
But no system with a causal connection to a system which it models can ever fully predict the behavior of the system modeled without infinite fractal recursion, which is impossible to produce via causation (I won't preclude entirely the possibility of such recursion just happening, but even to speculate there is to take a trip to crazy town).

Translation: just when you think you've got everything figured out, it explodes.

And so it did: the 20th century opens with a bang, or two, and a great mirror is held up: humanity gazes itself in the eye, and is both horrified and amazed. Electronic communication begins. Bright minds see already the potential of electronic storage and movement of information. The potential for broadcast. The potential for automation. The potential for abuse, and the potential for use.
Just as the printing press made production of copies cheaper, typewriters and fax machines and telephones and television and photography and on and on and on; the means of production and storage of information explode right along with the atom bomb.

And so does the academic/cultural world: the explosion of media is an explosion of possibility. There are new ways to create works, and so there are new ways to analyze, synthesize, critique, lampoon, parody, reference, allude to, echo.
Where it was once the case that allusions were a witty aside, meant to be caught by nearly all of the audience due to a shared culture (everybody's read or seen the main works of Shakespeare, etc) they become a game of reference and obscurity. We enter the post-modern period with a series of works that are announced as half-finished, but never to be completed. Contemporaries critique their mentors alongside the ancients, and alongside those other contemporaries also critiquing either the mentors or the ancients. The reaction to a given work overwhelms the work itself. Duchamp places a urinal in an art show and starts a revolution. Heidegger publishes the first half of the first half of Being & Time and then promptly abandons the project to go into poetry and stand up comedy. Wittgenstein publishes a single work as his PhD thesis, then goes into hiding to teach math to elementary school students, returns to academia to mount assaults on his previous work and dies without finishing anything else. His students publish his notes and errata. Freud inspires legions of academics of one sort or another to either worship or assault, and the quasi-religious cult of psychoanalysis becomes entangled with every academic field: it proposes to explain and undermine them all. The art world becomes ever increasingly self involved, each work reacting against other works: not, perhaps, in the mind of the artists themselves who remain for the most part inscrutable, but in the eyes of the increasingly impossible to follow world of art criticism, which goes to great lengths to legitimate itself by being increasingly convoluted, technical, and obscure.
Derrida publishes Glas, a work reacting to Hegel and conceived in such a way as to avoid being an antithesis or synthesis to any Hegelian thesis. Deleuze and Guattari engage in Chaosophy and Misosphy, building off of Deleuze's career of imaginary history of philosophy and Guattari's activism, born of the rebellions of May of '68. More television programs are produced than could be watched in a lifetime. More films are produced than could be watched in a lifetime. More books are published ever year, every month, every day, than could be read in a lifetime.

The internet is born.

[If you're keeping score, I'm not keeping things in strict chronological order, the point is the state we're in much more than just how we got here.]

Globalism and global culture rise as the boundaries between physical locations melt from the heat of information flowing freely through time and space.

More information is produced and recorded at least semi-permanently every hour than could be consumed by any individual in their lifetime.

The fields of research expand at exponential rates not completely understood by anyone involved in fueling the growth.

The cost of creating new work drops close to zero.

More than half of the world's considerable population come into possession of a cell phone (4 billion of them and counting).

Following a given academic work requires not just participating in the field from which it is grown, but being a member of the generation from which it is produced, and a follower of the movement it takes part in.

McSweeney's publishes All Known Metal Bands, a 300 page list of band names, with no further information or comment. It gets rave reviews, and sells like crazy. Many bookstore employees write recommendations for it and give it prominent shelf space.

Livejournal. Myspace. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter.

The Daily show is taken more seriously than most main stream televised news, paper newspapers decline, but internet based news and NPR thrive.

This is white noise, culturally. Every frequency sounded to the limit. No chorus. Constant change. United by a single language, English, the world is divided by a lexicon that includes over 1,000,000 living words. And far more dead ones. [Most living languages have vocabularies in the 100,000 range or less, though these are statistics I've seen in places and may not be entirely accurate, but the point remains.] A greater and greater percentage of our memory is taken up by advertisements, logos, catchphrases, and jingles designed to stick to the human mind like glue. Memeology is all the rage, as we watch ideas wage war on one another for possession of the most sought after real estate in a world where every inc of solid ground is owned by someone: the inside of your skull.

This is bad. This is good.
There is more culture now than there has ever been. You could do nothing but watch opera from now until you die, and you would never have to watch the same opera twice. The fields of cultural research are vast. The amount of raw inspiration, if sunrises and sunsets and clouds and bees and dandelions and raindrops and snowflakes and beaches and the moon's phases and the stars and all the rest of the world that has always been there and just can't be forgotten about wasn't enough for you, is functionally infinite.

But then we can't go about talking about it like we used to. We can't rely on allusion and reference to get us by. A 20 page bibliography is cute, but it's a wall that won't be broken all that often.

We have to find ways of communicating simply and directly.

We must look to each other as human beings, and speak and write and create and move in ways that are not echos for the sake of showing that we are part of a clique that has consumed some common culture, but instead echos for the sake of communicating what is beautiful or haunting or joyful or terrifying or moving in whatever way of what we are echoing.

We must learn to echo what is meaningful.

For too long it has been enough to echo in such a way that it was possible to find the source of your echo. To hunt down the original (or better, to remember) to understand what was meant by the particular reference or allusion.
"To be or not to be"
"I think therefore I am"
"The Eternal Return"
"I'm MELTING"
But such echoing can no longer take the place of meaningful communication, for the rising tide of cultural creation has made it insane to think that any serious number of humans will have read all of the same books that you have.

This is a cultural Babel Tower: we have the potential to continue to create and imagine and play with more freedom and crazier toys than anyone ever before. But if we don't stop playing like we have for the last few millennia, we're not going to be able to communicate at all, and down the tower will fall.

But really: it's as easy as taking responsibility for what you do. If you're going to echo, echo in your own voice. Stop mimicking and start doing. Authenticity is the only way out. It's that or cultural solipsism from here.

I think we can do it.

I think we should try.

And now for something completely legitimate

I've been getting into Micheal Palin's travel documentaries lately, for one because I'm a sucker for BBC documentaries, and also because I'm a sucker for Micheal Palin, being the Python freak that I am.

As often happens these days, I was looking up the series I'm in the middle of (Pole to Pole) on wikipedia for any extra information they might have. A garden path of digression led me to other post-python stuff, one of them being the 30th anniversary special that I'd only barely heard of, featuring Eddie Izzard playing the parts Eric Idle was too indignant to come play himself. And I thought, that's weird. Because I own essentially everything they've ever done, but I've never seen that.

I did another thing that has become pretty common: I went over to youtube to see if some lonely soul had uploaded the thing, or clips.

And let me say: I know this is piracy. I know it's wrong and scary for television like napster was scary for musicians. But I also know youtube has made it possible for me to watch all of the UK version of Whose Line Is It Anyway, which to my knowledge is not available on DVD in the states, certainly not through netflix or my library.

Let me also say that were I in the position to BUY the stuff I would do it in a heartbeat, because at this point I've watched series 5-10 of WLIIA several times over. I am an Extreme Dork when it comes to stuff. I want the funny, and I want ALL of it. But I am not in such position, because I am a broke self-employed illustrator. So what to do?

The Pythons themselves decided to approach the problem in this way:



Which I think is pretty brilliant, along similar lines as the various bands putting their albums up on their own websites, avoiding the labels. I don't know that it will give them any revenue, but I know that once I've seen something enough that I want to see it at weird hours when I can't get internet at my apartment, it's nice to have a hard copy. And hopefully other people will thinks so to.

So hey. Never seen any Monty Python? Maybe you should.

Sort of way off topic

So:
Back in elementary school I went through D.A.R.E. and got told over and over how drugs are bad and scary and they'll ruin your life and you should take the drugs the doctor gives you because he's just trying to help but you can't take drugs your friends give you because they're already agents of satan and if you do what your friends do then you'll end up a crazy hobo and probably die in a gutter somewhere cold and alone because nobody loves someone who takes drugs that the doctor didn't instruct them to take.

One of the core messages of the anti-drug movement is that winners don't do drugs. They'd have some kid involved in extreme sports or an olympian or a movie star or a scientist come on and say, 'I do great things, and I don't do drugs, because if I did, I couldn't do great things. Be like me, Don't do drugs! Or you'll FAIL!' and it seemed plausible enough.

But every day that message looks more and more insane. First comes the long list of artists and authors and politicians and athletes and philosophers and whoever else that were alcoholics. There are bunches of them, just droves. It's not everybody, sure, but it's damned near impossible to find anybody that doesn't at least like a beer every now and then, or a glass of wine with dinner or whatever. And you know, alcohol: it's a drug. It's legal, sure, so it's different than a lot of drugs, and it causes various problems (we all know an alchie or two, and we know the drinking and driving statistics), but mostly, it's a drug just like any other drug. It is a chemical substance diluted into water and then flavored up in one way or another. It is socially acceptable in some situations and not in others. But first and foremost it is a drug among drugs.

And so is caffeine. And so is nicotine. And so is advil, though people get pretty suspicious pretty quick if you take advil for fun. And goodness gracious you could write a damned encyclopedia of all of the various successful folks and what chemicals they used to regulate themselves and stimulate themselves and relax or excite or whatever else they were doing. And that's even if you just stick to the legal ones.

But now, on the eve of our third (at least that I know about) druggie president in a row (I know Jimmy Carter smoked pot on the roof with Willy Nelson, but I don't know about Regan or Bush 1) and the winningest ever olympic swimmer turning out to be a pot head, not to mention the supposed scandal that some gawdaful number of professional baseball players [*shock!*] failed drug tests over the years, and the continual rotation of various celebrities in and out of rehab for whatever the hell they're doing, and I'm beginning to feel like maybe, just maybe, those D.A.R.E. folks didn't know for a second what the hell they were talking about.

But they've done their damage and we've got our prohibition and we all treat each other like children that can't control themselves and we won't take an ounce of responsibility for anything we do because if I'm not choosing the chemicals that go into me (I'M ADDICTED! SOCIETY MADE ME! I WANTED TO BE COOOOL) then I can always blame them for whatever shit I've gotten myself into and I won't have to actually face up to the fact that maybe I'm just another asshole that doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

In the meantime I'm going to fear my fellow citizens because who knows what sort of shit they've been putting in their mouths and their noses and their veins and wherever else. They're all almost certainly crazed out of their mind either by the drugs they're on or by their uncontrollable need for more drugs. And if I get between them and their substance there's no telling what they might do.

gah. This stuff has bothered me since highschool, long before I got a taste of anything that altered states in any way that was un-kosher and it only bothers me more now that I know that addiction is conquerable and intoxication can be loads of fun. I'm sick of repression. In all its various forms. I don't think that letting people be grownups wil mean the end of society. Lets punish people when they do things that are actually harmful to themselves or others, rather than punishing them for doing things that we think might lead some of them to maybe do something bad to somebody someday. Because if grownups can't take care of themselves, there arn't any super-humans to do it for them. And pretending to be a super human is not cool. You get to decide what's good for you. And you are allowed to make mistakes. It's cool. You can change. You can experiment. Not everything you do has to become a permanent part of who you are. For real.

I'm not even going to go into all of the problems that having a police state and creating black markets and empowering criminals can cause. I think it should all be clear enough if we take a moment to think about it:
If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
If sodomy is outlawed, only outlaws will have sodomy.
If birth control is outlawed, only outlaws will have birth control.
If drugs are outlawed, only outlaws will have drugs.
If X is outlawed, people will find a way to have it.
When someone commits a crime (a real crime, like hurting someone, or stealing a car, or arson) we can find them and let them know in one way or another that what they did was wrong and hurt people.
But when what a person is or does is a crime, loving the sinner is not compatible with hating the sin. When you think that black people are black because Cain killed Abel (which some people do, I'm not just making that up), it causes certain sorts of stress with inter-racial relations. When people are evil for eating some sort of food or doing some sort of dance or whatever, telling them that they can't do that and that they need to stop or we're putting them in a little box, it just doesn't say I Love You like... I don't know, NOT hating them does.

I feel like the propaganda machine (see also: the media) is kind of finally starting to come around to this crazy liberal view of freedom as actually involving some freedoms, and maybe people will warm up to the idea, but I just feel like there never was a war to be fought. Humans: they like stuff. Sometimes too much. But usually they'll figure that out. Especially if you talk to them and treat them like Humans and let them know that, hey, maybe you like that thing too much. People have gotta be allowed to make a mistake here and there without fear of punishment for it. Mistakes punish people enough by being mistakes. We don't need to add injury to insult. I've learned you can only learn the hard way. But that doesn't mean we need to keep people from learning.

Coping with the blizzard of inches

Yesterday we hiked over to the Rocking Frog, because I was going a little insane from news feeds, the snow, the radio and the general immobilization of the city. On the way we saw the 15 bus stuck on 25th.



It was taking up the entire right lane, just hanging out with its hazards blinking. We sat by the window so we could keep an eye on it.



We were there for about two hours, drinking tea and having soup and stewing over What Next. For the entire two hours people kept coming up to the bus doors and peering inside, waving to the driver (who remained in the bus at his seat the entire time) and generally looking like they wanted to board a broken bus.

The bus was stuck in fairly busy area; at 25th Belmont becomes a one way street and people need to move over to Morrison in order to continue west. About every 8 minutes or so a cars would come shimmying around the bus so that they could continue on to Morrison bridge. Some trucks and lighter things had considerable difficulty doing this, and needed a few attempts. All the while, the bus did not move.

As we were leaving we saw another bus creeping along towards Stuck Bus. It had passed 26th already, and was not small enough to continue on Belmont into oncoming traffic, so we weren't sure what it was going to do. It slowed, stopped. The driver got out to go talk to the other driver. Five minutes later, the driver came back and inexplicably proceeded to attempt a climb of 25th. To pass Stuck Bus the way the other cars had been. About 20 seconds after it had begun, Second Bus became stuck like Stuck Bus, although it had the courtesy to slide further backwards, thereby blocking thoroughfare for all vehicles.

Snow: 2
City Buses: 0

This is what we thought of

What now

People ask me what I'm doing, since I don't have a job.

I'm doing the dishes I haven't got to all week.



I'm listening to the rain as I write emails to my loved ones and sit with my cat.



But mostly I am painting and drawing.

Artistic Differences

Good things came out of my job. Despite everything.

I learned very small yet helpful tricks. The easiest way to remove seeds from a lemon slice. Being unsure instead of not knowing. The beauty of setting active screen corners on a Mac.

I re-learned how important it is to remember the people behind the curtain. The people pulling strings, making calls, cutting paper, scrubbing crevices, moving furniture, picking a single paperclip off the floor; working elbow deep in filth to make something (or someone) appear wonderful. And how important it is, when confronted with something perfect, to remember all the chaos it must have taken to make that perfection possible. And I was reminded that this is the wrong kind of simplicity.

I learned that I have a much higher tolerance for indignation than I'd previously thought, and that probably I could do just about anything. There was a moment yesterday when I felt I could walk out into a street, stretch out my hand, and actually stop a train if I'd been asked to.I am both validated and unsettled by this.

I learned the small tragedy of doing a good job without knowing it.

One of my exit-interview questions asked if there was something that could have been done to make me stay. It was scripted, but the question had been asked to me in earnest earlier that week. Things had been offered to me. No one begged, but in hindsight I did have a lot of power. I have learned that I don't want that kind of power. I don't want to bend things to fit me, I never want to scream, cause a scene, I never want to force people to look behind the curtain. I want them to have the humanity to do it on their own. When they don't it makes me sad. Not angry. Not self-righteous. Just quiet and subdued.

I see. I say to myself.

I have been reminded of class. Both sorts: "class" in the caste-system sense and in the behavioral sense. I am reminded to my dismay that both are real, alive and well. And they are certainly not the same.

I struggle with feeling epic.

I know I'm supposed to feel epic, but I just don't. For now we could blame it on the tired, the mental fatigue, the sore back and the blisters and the relief that I'm done. My mind wanting only to be right here, focusing only on the simplest things. The correct kind of simple.

The Voice

Spike really likes singing.

He hasn't shown a particular dislike to any music I've played, but he will curl up with his eyes and ears heavy with contentment when I play, say, "It's a Big World". The soundtrack to "Once" is having a similar effect.

He likes acoustic guitar and simple voices. He likes clear harmonies -- thirds, not seconds. He particularly likes live singing. Mom's old songs as I sing them when I do dishes sometimes in the late evening. I sing Mom's songs and I sing what I know of Grandpa's songs and then I switch to God's songs -- hymns I've known since before I could read from when I would sit under folding tables during choir practice -- and now I sing "It's a Big World" and whatever that first song is. It's nice to have an actual being to ask.

Are you a beach? Are you the sand? Are you the wave that washes up upon the land?

He also has been enjoying the audiobooks at night. During the Drawing Hour I sit and listen to 90ish minutes of "The Hummingbird's Daughter," (which is read by the author and very good -- it helps to have someone who knows how to pronounce the Spanish and say it as it should be said,) and he will lay on the bed or sit with me sometimes on the stool and listen.

Something must resonate in the voice, in a cross-species sort of way. There is something about hearing auralizations that is somehow correct. At first I thought that it may just be that his first house had far more ruckus than he gets here, but it isn't just noise. He doesn't really respond to movies -- pictures or scripted words set to music. But bare-voiced singing and talking in long unbroken strips seem to captivate him in a very interesting way. So there must be something there. Something deep and True.

And all this is really interesting, since figures in my art have suddenly started to have things to say.





Pieces always SAY something. But the literal world bubble has been a relatively new development. Which sort of will culminate in the silent shout piece I am trying to work out. The unsayable murk and colorful mess of how I've been feeling.

Someone else

I kind of feel like I've been saying this stuff for a while now.
But apparently so has Kevin Kelly.
And I read WIRED and he edits it so maybe that has something to do with it and maybe not.
But either way, the guy knows what's up.

And he's worth a look:

Draw every day

Part of going it alone -- that is, trying to do this without the benefits of a design degree and professors stroking my hair and calling me their precious savant -- is reading stuff in magazines and trying to figure out ways to actually do this. There's the complicated number-crunching aspects which I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of, there's the self-promotion and the dogged perseverance that goes alone with that, and there's the simple How In The World Can I Do This, No One Ever Looks At My Stuff, Oh What's The Point anguish you have to conquer. You'd think when your soul is naturally rejuvenated and revved up by drawing in the first place this would never come up, but you'd be surprised. Thankfully there are places you can go when your brain is completely bare. One of them is the art museum of course, and you can also sit outside and force yourself to do something. But when nothing feels right, there's always the periodicals section at the library.

I've been reading HOW, ID, and print off and on for years now. It started with a bored evening at Barns and Noble when I was in high school. I forget exactly why I had been poking around in the art&design magazines, but probably Lori had something to do with it -- she had to do with SO MUCH in those days. She had been talking up International Artist, which sometimes had some good stuff so presumably I started there. But then I picked up How's design annual (2003) which featured a teal illustration from Anja Kroencke on the cover. It wasn't something I would do, particularly, but was inspiring to me in a completely new way. New parts of my brain opened up to this image. I looked at it and thought, that's a really good use of a magazine cover. So much better than the gaudy fashion magazine stuff, yet it recalls it somehow (it was just a lone female figure in the center with words all around her). I logged the color away to use later on in something (prismacolor-ly speaking: parrot blue softly under aquamarine, light aqua and maaybe a hint of deco blue. Maybe). I noted how the shirt was striped yet there was no actual outline, remembering what I was learning from Hen at the time in Drawing 3 at school. Negative space. Though later I would realize this is also something the cubists were into: defining a shape by other shapes. The figure took up most of the page yet the face was not visible, which was counter to what Lori had been telling kids who drew Warner Brothers cartoons from her stash of cards in the tackle box. Start with the head -- people will notice is you cut off the head, but they won't notice if you cut off the feat.

When I looked inside at the work from the various firms from that year my mind simply boiled over.

I still have that magazine, although now the pages are ragged and feature gaps where I have taken things out for reference or collage. The cover is scarcely attached. But I like to remembered where it started, too. Up until that point, my design world had essentially consisted of the Allergic Child books and vague ideas about doing that forever. Nebulous ideas outline in a Black 0.3mm Zig Millennium inkpen. But this broke the art world wide open. New words like self-promotion and corporate identity. New concepts like art-inspiration.

This is effectively when I left the world of fashion magazines behind forever. I never read them for myself, necessarily, but something within the colors and shapes triggered something helpful deep in my mind that got my sketchbook out when I was running a little dry. The discovery of actual creative publications got me actually painting and thinking in utterly new ways. And there's no need to stop at the big official publications -- once you're in the section it's easy to spill over to the "culture" category and pick things up like Swindle and Anthem, the latter where I found my boy Jim Houser and the former featured him in an article not long after.

Back in July I was at the library, doing just this, and I came across an article in How by a certain Danny Gregory. He said many things in the article, but it boiled down to: draw every day.

Draw anything. Draw a bagel. Draw your lunch. Draw your hands. Draw your sofa. Draw the people waiting outside for the bus. Draw a book. Draw a tree. Draw that weird feeling you have. Draw an egg. Draw anything, but for heaven's sakes draw. Draw every single day.

I try and do this anyway but making it a point, it's an unwavering assignment, intrigued me. Okay, I thought. Let's draw every day. That afternoon I came home and drew part of my workstation:



I haven't been posting accordingly, but I have been trying to make sure I draw every day, even if it's just scribbles out in front of the library on my lunch hour. Work has been very difficult for me for the past week or so -- so much so I haven't wanted to post about it.



Before last week though, the streets had a lot to say.









Slowly but surely the scribbles begin to have more of a life, angles come easier to me, and the rest of the day feels nicer knowing I've spent some time doing what it is I really want to be doing. There's no greater motive here -- I don't usually use this time to sketch out something for a big final project -- it's simply the pleasure of drawing.

Rekindling the fire within is what this is.

Quitting

So this past Friday I quit my job. Many people were surprised that I showed up for my last day. Some people were surprised that I would show up for work in general. It was pretty clear I did not enjoy my employment. The thing was, I didn't mind the specifics of the thing all that much. The people were nice, the job was easy, we had air conditioning. Customers were almost always a bundle of insane nerves, but they were mostly willing to work with me and make things run smoothly. I mean, I was basically walking them through something that would just as easily have been done with a form online. So I was just the input devise. The keyboard. A keyboard with a voice maybe, but not much more than that. But I did hate my job.
I hated that it turned people into keyboards. I hated that there are people that have been there for seven years. I hated that the economics of the situation demanded that the time employees spent working was more valuable than employees were paid. I hated that this is the modern world. I hated the system I was a part of. I hate AT&T. I hated helping people to feel entitled. I hated the needless team building for a job that is performed without any kind of teamwork whatsoever.
I was supposed to hate these things. The hate was built into the situation. It was the lens through which the job was shown.
They don't do that on purpose. I know that. But the situation slowly reveals itself as more and more ludicrous and less and less worthwhile. There was no reason for this job to exist. The customers don't want it to exist. The company doesn't want it to exist.The employees only want it to exist so that they can pay rent. It is a job that wants to disappear. It wants to be automated. It wants to be an online form. We're just not there yet. But the needlessness of it shows through. There's just so little positive about it.
The thing is, I helped people as much as I could, because I still thought of them as people. And I didn't want to do anything crazy on the last day, because I knew who would have to clean up after me.
I was just glad to be done.
And I still am.

Insurance is a racket. Sometimes. It's gambling against yourself. And so you only win by losing. And otherwise the house makes bank. Insurance should not be for-profit. Ever. The end.
I understand that it makes sense to pool our resources together in case something bad happens. I just don't think anyone deserves to be made fabulously wealthy by the process. It takes people to run it. And they need to make a living. But it should not be publicly traded (Asurion is owned by CNA which is owned by Loews, which is sort of a super-corporation that is owned mostly by one guy, Bob Tisch, and then by his three sons (from what I can tell). It's stock symbol is the single letter L and it is traded on the NYSE). Its goal should not be profit. It is a public good, where we get together and say to ourselves, 'hey, it costs a lot to pay for medical bills, but I don't have them all that often. Also getting in a car crash is expensive, and while I hope to not have one, I don't even think I could pay for one at all if it happened. How about we all put a little bit of money in a box and then if something happens to one of us, we'll be able to pay for it?" On that level it makes a ton of sense. But as soon as there is a house making money on the deal, it's Vegas without any of the fun. For the people betting. For the house it's just as much fun. With a good understanding of statistics, some good starting capital, and creatively written contracts, a person can make some serious bank in the insurance biz. Especially since it makes so much sense to people. But basically the insurance companies rob people blind, and do it with a smile. And make billions of dollars sitting back and watching the money roll in and trickle out. Without doing anything really useful. Because if it's automated, if there's no one at the top collecting, if it's not trying to squeeze every dime out of people that it can, it's easy. We do the same thing as the insurance companies do, but without trying to turn a profit by doing it. And it helps us out when we need it.
Ah but that would be socialism.
Like the roads.
Or the schools.
Or the MILITARY. (This one drives me bonkers. That it's the one thing the most Ayn Randian of capitalists will be all for socializing and keeping socialized. It's the one they won't let go of. And it's the first one I'd want dismantled.)
Or the libraries.
Or the parks.
Or just about anything in this country. Half of the corporations are socialized with goverment subsidies anyway. So lets drop the sheen of capitalism guys. And stop robbing each other blind. Maybe that would be nice?
At least with insurance. And banks.
Let's start with those.
I think it would be a good start.
And hey, making health insurance not-for-profit and state run has worked in places, and we're looking at doing that here.
I'm just saying let's apply that logic to all insurance. I think that would be just dandy.

In any case. I am no longer part of that business. And hopefully never will be again.

Moving

Hey internet,
I've been really distracted lately, because I am moving from Colorado to Oregon, and I just bought a car, and I just found a place to rent, and I have been cleaning and packing and quitting my job and feeling anxious and exhausted and just not quite right, but also excited as all hell, and the skies have been lovely and I've had some good times and I don't have to work for a few weeks which is just fantastic.

I have read some books:
I read DFW's Infinite Jest, which is like watching an explosion in reverse motion slowing down and slowing down as it goes. It's maybe a little self indulgent, but it is nothing short of incredible. If you have a month or so with absolutely nothing to do, like if you're trapped in a hospital bed or something, or if you want to just amble through a book over the course of a few years (which is also a enjoyable way to read it, I hear), it's a good one to pick up. Mr. Wallace does his research, and it shows. And I agree with Dave Egger's introduction to my edition: as much of a mountain as this book is to climb, it is friendly in its own way, the language itself flowing easily over you. This is not Finnegan's Wake by any means. It's not even House of Leaves. It's just big mostly. And fairly convoluted. There's a lot going on in a very short amount of (chronological) time, considering the size of the thing. And it's kind of always just on the verge of chaos, with only a few little bursts of outright madness, and even those seem to happen in a kind of slow-mo ballet of discord sort of way. Nothing rushes by. We take our time with details. And there are a lot of them. Details. So many. Minutia of every stripe and color. It makes me want there to be a "Making Of" feature to watch (or read) after I'm through with it. To see the sorts of planning and structuring that went into it. To see more deleted scenes (it has a few that sort of are. Deleted scenes. They show up as footnotes here and there. Not quite the novel proper, but a sort of side quest for the inquisitive.) and casting and whatever else. It would be fun I think. It also has an infectious language; I find myself wanting to say 'howling fantods' and any time anyone uses the word 'chortle' in the future I'm going to at least think, if not say, 'Chortles. Chortles are good. We like chortles.' The book is absolutely fascinating in all sorts of ways, and it's the sort of thing you have to see to believe. Gold Star for Mr. Wallace. Recommended.
I read Homer's two books. The first one is a bit overblown. Anything that involves Achilles directly is wonderful, he is by far the most interesting character, and the chapter about his shield is fantastic. But overall it got tiring just hearing who killed who for pages and pages with nothing much else going on. The gods have some fun scenes, but mostly in the service of getting us to yet longer lists of the newly dead.
The Odyssey on the other hand is fantastic. Odysseus is no Superman, and while he is bigger and stronger and smarter than your average Greek, he gets his share of knocks on the head before making it home. He is not a modern hero. Those who have committed crimes against him are killed without mercy even though they beg forgiveness and promise to repay the debt tenfold. These days if a villain begs forgiveness and the hero kills him anyway, something twisted is going on. We can only have that happen if we do not believe that the villain is really sorry, and only if they've done some pretty terrible stuff. These guys thought Odysseus was dead. So they were trying to marry his wife. Who let them live in his/her house and eat his/her livestock. (Sidenote: it'd be crazy for the Greeks to think of any of it as belonging to the wife, but really. She was there for 20 years on her own. It's her stuff.) And refused to either kick them out or marry them. So she was just as much to blame as any of them were. And as soon as people realized that Odysseus was alive they realized that they had made a mistake. And it was an understandable mistake, the man had been gone 20 years. Plenty of time to declare him deceased. So when he showed up they apologized and said they'd make it up to them. And he said, "Nope, I'm gonna kill every last one of you." And so he did. Our present morality makes Odysseus into a monster. So that's interesting. The other really interesting thing is that The Odyssey has an addressee. The Loyal Swineherd, a servant of Odysseus, is referred to by the poet in the second person. You. In the Odyssey, 'You' is the loyal swineherd. That was something I didn't know before reading it. And so the direct address coupled with the swineherd's story of remaining loyal to his long gone lord and being rewarded for welcoming in a broken stranger (the lord in disguise) and taking care of him and praying for the unlikely return of the lord just sent my brain spiraling into new-testament land, thinking about waiting for the second coming and all that, and I may have just been being crazy but it started to seem like the second coming of Jesus stuff is some kind of metaphorical projection of Odysseus onto Jesus and it started seeming like that made the horrific violence of Revelations make more sense, but then I had to go and start thinking about Jung and whether this sort of thing is just archetypal symbols in the collective unconscious or if I'm just way out of my depth and need to come back to land.
So then I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, to kind of come back to earth a bit. Because of juxtaposition I found it paralleling Infinite Jest in a number of ways. They are both books that happen in the wake of a suicide, with main characters that are precarious, gifted, substance abusing adolescents and a mood that is both happy and sad at the same time. It may just be that the list of leitmotifs in Infinite Jest is big enough to include just about anything, but The Perks felt like a book written in a sub-set of Infinite Jest themes. It was no where near as encompassing. But it was beautiful. I did have a Bad Ending! reaction, but I guess that happens sometimes. Can't win every time.
I don't think I've mentioned Chip Kidd's The Learners on here, or Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. Both of those were pretty great. Chip Kidd is just wonderful. Awesome guy. I want to have pizza and a soda with him. Siddhartha was a bit unbalanced, but the parts that were spot on were spot on, and it had a nice arc to it. Overall a good time.

So that's sort of where I've been.
More on various other things soon.
There's more cleaning and packing to do.
Have a nice weekend Internet.
Be sure and enjoy whats left of the Olympics.
I'll be back real soon.

from "Oh the Places You'll Go", by Dr. Suess

And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...



...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.


NO!
That's not for you!

Somehow you'll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You'll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.

Musings from Ireland

I forgot to mention that we also grabbed some sheep's wool from our walk on the shores of Dingle today. There were lots of sheep around, as I think I mentioned, and almost at every barbed wire fence or at every blackberry patch or thistle, you'd see tufts of wool. Sometimes it would be tiny amounts, and sometimes it would be great clumps swaying in the breeze. We grabbed some of that too, and I put it in my pocket with all the stones. So, while I do have two really awesome scarves and a hat (a checkered cap) and a Guinness shirt, I also have stones and sheep's wool from the shores of Ireland itself, which to me is much more meaningful. And photographs. And a brain full of images that I wasn't quick enough to take pictures of.

That's the other trouble with rushing around the pace we are. Even when we are not getting around under our own power, when we are being whisked off by a bus driver or something (which we are about 80% of our time here) we are seeing things so quickly. They rush past the window too soon. By the time I see it and say, oh! that's really strange/interesting/beautiful/something I'd like to paint/something that makes me laugh or would make Anthony laugh, it's gone. The things I did catch from the buses or even while on foot is a miracle that I got them, since sometimes even the time it takes to get the camera ready (turned on and un-lens-capped, if its out, and dug out of the bag, turned on and un-lens-capped if its stowed away) seems too long. There are things -- like graffiti, facial expressions, the man reading his newspaper with a magnifying glass in the bus station this morning, the wooden fish peddler stand, the cattle blocking our exit today on the shore -- that I couldn't take a photo of for whatever reason, which is fine but also not fine at the same time. I need to list these all in one massive notepad, and paint/draw them when I get home. Or as time goes on. I should any way, but it is easier to do so when one has a snapshot for reference. You always worry that the quality of your memory won't do the actual moment justice, that you won't quite ever capture the way that light was shining through the wineglass, or the way the moon looked from the window of the airplane as it shone out over the Atlantic ocean, or the precise color of the sunlight passing through the underside of those leaves.

But I suppose photos don't really do that either. We get stuck in this trap of thinking that they do, but everyone knows that even the most expensive lens with the sharpest focus taken with the greatest care will still never do it justice. Not like being there on that cliff, in that airplane, underneath that tree. And really every artist knows this -- when you draw, paint, or write about something though people may look at it and say oh wow you got it, that nails the idea right on the head, you know in your heart that you haven't quite got there. It was more. It was richer, sharper, more intense than this pale replication ever could hope to be. But you relent that this will suffice, that this gesture, thumbnail sketch, is enough to get you back to the way you felt at that time, and that maybe it will nudge someone in that direction. Maybe it will inspire them to experience whatever it was for themselves. Maybe. And if not, at least you have a tangible memory of it, here in this notebook. At least it can be something beautiful/strange/thought provoking for someone else to look at. The moment-of-inspiration, the thing that struck you silent, the thing that you experienced that touched you in a more profound way than something else, can begin to stand on it's own, take on its own life as it moves in its own direction. And this is very good.

The Future is Everything

So here's sort of a weird little brainstorm:
We've had lot's and lots of visions of the future. Some of them seem to be coming ever closer to the truth. 1984 anyone? Brave New World? Fahrenheit 451?
But then also, The World of Tomorrow. (Check about 1:20 in to see some now from the past)

My crazy thought was this: As theres more and more of us, and things change faster and faster, more and more predictions about the future will be true, because more and more will be going on.

Eventually what you get is everytime now. Not quite everytime here and now, unless here is all of earth, but the basic idea is that everything thats been going on is still going on somewhere (travel out from urban centers and you travel back in time, back to the pre-civilized if you know the right direction to go...) and eventually, everything that we thought would be happening in the future will all being going on somewhere at the same time.

[The hyperbole is a bit much, 'everything' is aways an insane word to use. But you get my point.]

So, if globalization is about anywhere being everywhere (or is it everywhere being anywhere?), the next century might be about anytime being everytime (or the other way around if you prefer).

It's a crazy train we're riding, but it's neat!

Adventure Sunday

I'm listening to The Splendid Table, and they just recommended a coffee shop in Portland. That is less than a mile from my house. Oh hell yes.

One of my favorite things about this place is the food. I can't afford to eat out like I want to every day, but that still means I am cooking with ingredients that are top-notch. Oregonians like their cows, chickens and pigs happy, because happy animals make tasty meat. The vegans and vegetarians like happy veggies and fruits so that those creations will also be in peak flavor. Between the numerous farmer's markets and small grocery co-ops in the area, it is almost harder to get something factory-grown and pesticide-ridden than it is to get the real stuff.

And when that isn't enough, there are opportunities to go get it yourself.

BUT FIRST

I was going to save this until you got here, but it's too neat so I'm afraid I'll have to spoil it. There's this fancy food place on the corner of Hawthorne and something here that is way too expensive for me to eat there. But! On the weekends, they open a waffle window out the back.



I had a blueberry number with a lime curd on top. It was divine.



SECOND

Drove on some new bridges to get to the farm, to pick some strawberries.





See those people? Waaay over there? That was the first patch. Farmer Don himself told me that those were a treasure hunt, but there would be more further out, which is where I was headed.



On the way there. Isn't it nice and farmy? Different plots lay fallow and have things that will ripen later in the season, so there isn't a real map of where you're going, you just kind of have to follow where the other people are. It should go without saying (except apparently it doesn't) that they do not use any pesticides, no sprays, nothing. Just the bugs, dirt, and food.



This makes it look slightly better than it was -- many of these berries were white on the back side. It's still very early in the season (cold weather has pushed the ripeness back) so as you can see there are plenty of berries to come. Kind of slim pickings, especially if you wanted them ripe ripe, like I did. But! I didn't mind! I squatted up and down those little rows for a long time.

Towards the edge of the patch, there was a small flock of some gorgeous little birds, that turned out to be waxwings. (Really, this time.)



Of course, there were farm-like animals too.



Near the chicken hutch, I also so some small grey rats rooting around in the hay, which made me weirdly excited. There were two pigs in the barn, and between there somewhere there was a mop-haired kid who was talking to me about the chickens, pigs, and so on. I walked on to try and find the turtle pond, and instead found the bee houses.



I didn't get this close, this was using my zoom. There were tons of little Richards, buzzing around and pollinating the little blossoms on the strawberry plants. They were good at sharing -- they would skip a plant and then come back to it if you were there.

On my way back, there was one that hitched a ride on the windshield wiper.



Not sure what she was on about, maybe she wanted to warm up? She rode all the way over the bridge, and then hopped off as soon as I turned west.

THIRD

Oh. It was just too pretty to go back after that -- it was only noonish, and there was only 76 miles separating me from some seaside towns and turn upon turn of highway.



I didn't actually make it to the sea, I spent too much time ogling the river. I turned off at Astoria and poked around their Sunday Market. It was a bit cold anyway, and I was getting sleepy. I found a coffee and got back to the helm. It was mostly the driving for me, today. The driving and the strawberries.

Open Mic

Did I mention I've been here officially for a week?

I don't mean gone from there, but I mean living here, in this apartment. One week as of yesterday. I celebrated by moping. But also by pulling on a poly shirt and heading out to open mic at Muddy Water.



I thought I misheard the name, but no. Apparently Dingo Dizmal is a local street performer/persona. He also hosts the open mic every Thursday (And Sunday?) and has unfortunate familiar hair. And a fabulous hat.

The first full act I saw was S.T. Hines. Not as in 'saint,' but as in [ehs-ti]. (I know because I wrote it down, and because this had to be sorted out in order to be announced properly.)



This guy was awesome. He played in both normal and DADGAD and did some really interesting stuff. Upbeat stuff, then kind of lilting cowboyish stuff, and could project his voice well.



Next up was a rather portly gent, tweed suit and a fedora, walking around and encouraging people to sing along with him as he belted out Irish folk songs. This was a heartwrencher for me, since this is the kind of thing Grandpa would do in his younger days, but it was also really great and a nice change from the shy person on the stool hiding behind a guitar. During his last song a couple I had been admiring got up and began dancing:



(Huzzah for dancing.)



Two more players after that, also good but mumbly and less distinct. I left not long after.

The walk home still felt like early night, with a deep blue sky instead of the black one would expect at 9o'clock at night on the other side of the Rockies. The moon -- dark bits and all -- was intense and the clouds actually looked purple. The kind you would paint and no one would believe.

Give me sight beyond sight

I just can't condense it into narrative right now.




(This was a baby squirrel, NAPPING in the tree. I FUCKING LOVE BEING ALIVE!!)










(The sign reads: join us for OBAMA SUNDAYS 10% of sales donated to Obama campaign.)

Humoring the uninitiated

This afternoon I shooed Mom away so I could unpack for a little while, and so I could remember that I live in Portland, not in Anywhere.

Today we spent much of the day in Anywhere. And that's okay -- we did need some kind of boring things and I am unsure as yet where I could get them within walking distance from my place. But Target soon blossomed into a cruise down to Clackamas for a tour of corporate strip mall paradise. Again, this was reassuring to Mom, who can now sit and home and think "ah yes, this is good, she does live in civilization after all." And it left me thinking, I will probably never come down here.

Don't get me wrong. I like Noodles, Panera, California Pizza Kitchen and the rest of it. My best work shirts come from Express, and I do like to swing through stores like Forever 21 every now and then just to see what they have. But these places are everywhere. I did not move to the independent business capital of the Northwest to buy corporate. Oh no.

"You mean to tell me you want to sit down and order food you've never tasted before?"
Well, yes, that was exactly what we wanted. Other people did it all the time and most of them had lived to talk about it.

It ended tonight with a meal at Hometown Buffet of all places. I understand the benefit for a family of three with very different eating habits, but I think it was a little too close to the school cafeteria vibe for me to truly enjoy it. Things were tasty, but things on a warming tray under a snot guard was not exactly inviting. There were even more attractive buffet-style options we passed on the way there -- Sweet Tomatoes, notably. But no, we needed to have a place crawling with overweight seniors.

I shouldn't complain. I received a lot of goods that I could not have bought for myself in a while, and we are going to make a big grocery run tomorrow. And in the middle of the day I got to go to the farmers market and buy milk in a glass bottle, and I have begun the grueling yet exciting task of unpacking everything. And truly letting it sink in that I am here, and here to stay. There is some sort of thing going down under the Burnside bridge this Saturday, which I will attend as Mom and Cameron will be on their way home by that point. And then I get to start the slow, languid introduction to all the record stores, clothing boutiques, coffee shops and antique malls I've been driving past all day long. There's an Indian place over there. And a Thai restaurant. I haven't been to the bakery yet. Oh yes.

And now, some pictures. Here's the view from the door as you come in.



And from the other direction



Where I was when you called