Archive for September, 2009
Mind The Gap…
What with everything else I’ve been doing lately, I find that I have to push myself to shoot the daily photo. I’m still carrying my camera around, but it hasn’t been as natural for me to haul it out. I need to remind myself. But the interesting thing is that forcing myself to look for pictures, makes me wake up from the plodding, somnambulism that can come over me in the course of the day: the sense that I’ve seen everything from every angle already, so I don’t have to look.
For example, I was nearing my home last night when I realized I hadn’t shot anything, so I pulled my camera out of my bag and turned back to scan the view across Flatbush Avenue. Is this such a fantastic picture? I don’t really think so, but that act made me come alert, and really look at my surroundings.
When people talk about the sacred aspect of art, I usually cringe and reach for my gameboy. But there is something that that connects creativity and ritual, and it’s that they are both ways of focusing attention in the present, and reconnecting to the importance of our existence in a particular time.
And now a shout to the hive mind: This is the new welcome page for my website. See how it does that mouseover thing with the pictures? In order to get it to do that I got lazy and used a page I found online to generate the code (a java script, and of course now I can’t find the site again). And now I’d like to get rid of those white bands between the pictures, but I’m stumped as to how to do it. My image borders seem to be set to 0, but still no difference. Got any ideas?
Tags: brooklyn, daily photo, making art, notes on practice, websiteRelated posts
You do me better than me…
It was a big long slog today but I’m proud to announce the debut of something that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years:
Every month I’m going to post instructions for making a piece. And if anybody does it and sends me a picture, I’ll post those in an ongoing gallery. So now is your chance to make your own Blake collection.
I’m a bit chuffed that I’ve finally gathered the various skills and resources to make this a reality, given how long it’s been on my mind. It’s one of my little bits toward making the whole art thing more democratic.
Tags: biy, making art, websiteRelated posts
They cleaned my clock…
Despite wining a few hands, I got my ass handed to me today at the poker table. We don’t play high stakes but I ended the day down thirteen bucks on a table with a ten dollar buy-in. Of course the real point is companionship and being around hot folks smoking cigars, so it was worth drubbing to get that. And the pressure of hosting at my hovel made me bear down and get more cleaning done. I wish I could reconcile myself to the fact that my house keeping style is episodic. Things will slide for a while (a long while) and then I’ll get back to pulling it together. Over the years, things have gotten cleaner and more organized on the whole. That’s hard to see in the short run however, and when there’s a specific part that is getting on my nerves and I can’t take action on it, it feels excruciating.
The weekends of solitude are good for getting me going: after a couple of days I seem to gather momentum and take on projects in a way that I can’t when I’m coming and going. This weekend I did a couple of things I’ve been contemplating for months and months.
Right now I’d love to watch “The Eyes of Laura Mars”. Sad thing is, I think I own it on dvd, but I couldn’t tell you where it is exactly. That’s the signal that I’ve got a lot more work to do.
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Like I don’t have enough to waste my time with…
I left before the jump and Big Link Friday….
Jeff offered me a ticket to go and see the new Tosca at the Met. I caught most of the “controversial” moments that led to the opening night crowd booing the director, but was nodding out despite the lovely, stirring singing and so I made my exit at the second intermission. The production? There were definitely weird bits, but it was a pretty run of the mill “updating” in opera sense: sets were pared back and symbolic rather than illusionistic costumes the same, and there seemed to be little faith in a line of the libretto or the presence of a singer being able to tell us about the character or even hold our attention by just, you know, singing. So everyone has to act out their emotions which might be OK if it wasn’t also coupled with a strange directorial idea that people should wander back and forth across the stage at all times. Nobody seemed to have a direct idea of why they were going to a particular spot on stage or why they should stay there once they got there (unless they got killed. Then they stayed put). The parts that freaked out the Met’s audience? A guy embraces a statue of the virgin. The same guy has three chicks at his house and fondles them a bit (not even second base here). Pretty thin broth, if you ask me especially after seeing things like this, but maybe people are hungry for something to angry about.
One other little oddity about the performance: the singer playing (or the player singing?) Scarpia (statue groper), was suffering from a cold. Before the first curtain someone came out from the wings and asked us to indulge the iffy performance he anticipated giving. Then at the second curtain the same guy came out and announced that while the same person would be providing the action of the character, a second singer would be providing the voice. No understudies for the role? It was a system that actually worked fine, with the relief baritone discreetly placed stage right at a music stand. Of course this is what happens with puppet opera, which leads me to think, why not spare opera singers the trouble of having to trundle all over the stage, wrangle horses and jump off of parapets, swim in chilly polluted German Rivers, or descend into hell entirely? They could sit snugly in the pit with the rest of the orchestra, and stunt people could engage in all the arduous action, or have chimps do it. Everyone likes that, except Peta, and I’m pretty sure they already hate opera.
Instead of worrying about fictional villains engaging in mild petting, or elephants having to do eight shows weekly, maybe we should think back to a time when people were worried about Big jerks from outside of our solar system having non-consensual tentacle sex with Gaia. That’s a link to Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, one of my other new loves. I’m finding that now that I check in with feedly so much, I’ve got a window onto all of these other amazing caches of drawing and design. I’m going to try to take some time on Fridays to point you towards them.
Like today I stumbled across this:
Which is part of a flickr set of book covers by Romek Marber. A great use of two color printing. I’m easily seduced by this sort of design. Here’s an article on his role in the redesign of Penguin’s line of paperbacks in the early Sixties.
Just typing the word “controversy” above made me unable to proceed further without listening to some early Prince. The world was better when everything was purple.
At some point the Term “Bag Lady” morphed into “Homeless Person” (“Bag Man” never had the same traction as a catchphrase, maybe because of its previous meaning as the guy who carries the loot in a heist. “Squeegee Man”, however, had the same sort of life) but if the term hadn’t fallen out of fashion the bag ladies’ union might have been interested in this invention. Insane unitasker? or ergonomic gift to the disadvantaged?
Speaking of street life: tomorrow is the Vendy Awards out in Flushing, but don’t bother going because they’re sold out. I’ll be interested to see if my current local fave The Biryani Cart can capture their second consecutive win (you can tell their energy is being put into street cooking and not web design).
Maybe you’re feeling angry and anxious and want to put hurt on somebody in general. Don’t do it! Most people don’t deserve a sock on the kisser. Except for the few that do, and I’ve found that looking over those few getting their just desserts is enough to tide me over until I calm down again so you might want to bookmark Hitler getting punched for your bit of vicarious violence.
And that’s enough for now.
Tags: big link friday, comics, daily photo, design, friends, links, music, new york in black and white, new york life, operaRelated posts
I’m a simple guy…
Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make me happy. Today I heard from Lo about the feasibility of turning a drawing I had made into a patch, and it made me almost giddy. Any time I’ve designed a t-shirt , or gotten something back from the printer it has seemed the same way: somehow more real than something that i made start to finish. You’d think over time the thrill would have worn off, but I’m still as excited as when we would get the comics we had drawn back from the offset place back in high school. That little bit of it being out of my hands is enough to transport me.
Tags: daily photo, happiness, making things
