Dennis Hollingsworth

Tricky Laptoppery

For the past several days, I?ve had trouble getting connected wirelessly or otherwise with my laptop. One moment I was doing fine and in the next, my connection dropped out. I?m not able to simply plug in a ADSL line into the machine and get a connection either... which was a strange problem before I was able to scan and use the various wifi signals around me.

Not having a high speed (or any speed) internet connection is mighty unsatisfying. I?ll be writhing about, trying to figure it all out.

-Stephanie has arrived safe and sound. We?ve been on a train of fun and have-to-do?s since she came in: dinners with family and friends, boating of course (thanks to Xerlo) and a paella at Calabona (pics have been shot, more to come), and today, a trip into Barcelona so she could shop the stores and I could buy the last critical item to prepare the canvas stretched panels (gallons of Golden? matt medium).

-The paint has arrived and Ramon will deliver the last bits of wood and panel to stiffen the larger panels tomorrow. I?ll be rolling on the medium and after three or foour coats and a couple of days, I can start to wrangle with the paintings that will head toward the show in Barcelona, which is set to open either the 26th or 27th of September.

-I?ve been wrapping my head around a few items stored now in my iTunes.

I?m starting to connect the dots between the "Bad at Sports" podcasts featureing Lane Relyea and Michele Grabner, and the 16 cd set of Dennis Prager?s "The Case for Judaism".

(!)

Yes, I believe there are dots there to connect. Interesting and difficult stuff. Forms and voids of one and the other seem to interlock. If you care to follow along, download the podcasts and order the Prager lectures (I find them to be wonderful and challenging). -Sorry not to be able to give you all the links,

I'm hacking away at a primitive machine in a local intenet cafe. Google will help you get there.

More to come, G-d willing.

-Young Alberto has committed himself to showing and selling art in the Plaza de Espa?a here in Tossa. Nervous and headstrong, he asked my council and my advice was that since he was going to do it anyway, he should find something wonderful about it and do it well... in a way that would make sense to a rather particular artworld, the one indicated in this weblog.

(I maintain that there are many artworlds, to each their own... but there is a group that is clustered or centered on the idea of art in the western modern (whats a better way tio identify it?)... our emergent, free, global world where the story of art has been cascading in a historical fugue, of the stories of Oedipal dissent that have been told to us in the dark slide shows of art history class and the stories we retell and tacitly concede to each other over time.)

At any rate, Alberto has hoisted himself up on the stage: he has made himself known to my community in ChinaTown Los Angeles, and especially here in Tossa/Barcelona, and especially here in Tossa where people in general don't know the artworld described above and are trigger happy to have the lad pegged on the lower rungs. Now, he?s got to shine. The big question: how does he wrangle with the deadly kitch of tourist art-for-sale and simultaneously publicly develop (he will be painting in public) his own (private?) language as a painter?

Alberto: "Dennis, do you think these drawings of Tossa will sell?"
Dennis: "No one knows what will sell, Alberto."

My advice: do it all, do everything you can think of, do anything that you think is interesting, draw the typical tourist views (if you have to, yet an open question) and find something interesting in the approach, make it your own. Find that which is intrinsically interesting to you and make it extrinsic to others. Consider every part of this experience an artworld utterance (from the set up and display as installation to your research and image/information gathering). Seriously take on the role as witness or ambassador or "son of Tossa" in your relation to the tourists who approach you, show them an aspect of this little pueblo that the other hack artisans can?t or won?t show, in other words invest yourself deeply and dive deep and show us all something only you can see of this place in this time.

Dennis: "You love Tossa, Alberto. Show them what that looks like."

Go, Alberto.

-Stay tuned!