Dennis Hollingsworth

Ahora

I didn't have any accomodations set for my arrival into Berlin's Tegel airport. There wasn't a natural situation in terms of the ability to crash out on a friend's couch and I don't like the remote internet reservation thing (can't explain why). I kind of liked dropping into a city and figuring out how I'll pass the evening. Once, I made my way into Milan after Verona and the evening prior to my flight was spent in artful contortions on the airport seating. Last night, I opted for a cheap hotel off Friedrichstrasse and the carpets freaked me out. The last time I stayed at a place with similar floor coverings, I fought off fungus for weeks afterward. So I left after a night and I was prepared to sleep on Tegel's seating. But after assessing how this evening is going to unwind, I dumped my alternative strategies (a pensioine for 15 euros a night, another Russian place for 80, and a last ditch at a Ramada for what would be probably more) and I chose to stay at athe Mercure Hotel, just around the corner of Andr?'s new gallery (one block away from CheckPoint Charlie).

A universal law of nature: you get what you pay for.

I'd like to expound languidly with florid prose about this particular ahora post but my internet time is tight (they make you pay by the hour... it should be free worldwide).

Here is the most important news:

1. I had a wonderful time at Tanya's place, the show was a success and now I should refrain from an unseemly exhuberance. It was all good, very good. I met some excellent people, I had very good/deep/funny/informative conversations. I saw some fabulous places/things. I have observations. I will certainly tell you much more about that (with pics) once I return to my own ADSL connection at home in Tossa.

2. Andr?'s new Berlin space rocks.

More to come.

Ahora

Flying in from Barcelona was easy, especially since Nacho gave me ride from Tossa. It's a nice change, seeing the Dutch landscape again, after an intense Catalan summer. Tanya is being very hospitable, dinner was Indonesian (again, good to eat after a summer of paella). I've had tours of the gallery and Haarlem (by bike), muy bien. I'll show you all a few pics of some of the work on her walls in a coming post, good stuff.

Here, a view down the street for Haarlemesque context.

Right now, I'm debating whether I should scoot into Amsterdam, stroll through Haarlem or hit the sack 'cause I'm feeling pretty tired.

Wuh.

Ahora

Admin/TEST

(This post is a testing ground for HTML stuff. Text here is plucked at near random from my sticky notes, a veritable Sargasso sea of drifting ideas.)

Judges have to be impartial
artists have to be free

***
is criticism about being... critical?

In what sense?

when people talk about being critical, the word is usually first understood a negative event

overcritical
hypercritical

criticism in an educational context

so things have changed in the artworld and criticism seems to be the missing link

so what?

are things worse for it all?

can't we get comfortable without a dominant Story of Art?

or maybe the story of art needs to be reset

it might be that a system that resists the right answer, or a particular story of art, will not be able to change, it being in a totality of itself

the problem is on another level, a critical overhaul of the past 40 years, we have to attempt to assess who we've become, before we will know where we are going

there is a lack of imagination


***
Blogs and intrinsic value
they are free to all
and therefore, no marketplace?

Or maybe it is a marketplace where it is not money that is transacted but time, eyeballs?
(then it is attention that gets to be the dominant criteria therefore Damian Hurst)

But it's that an artist has a voice whereas before, no.
And the artist is more autonomous

A blog is another artform.
Why not?
Maybe because it's free, it doesn't exist in the commercial/critical realm.

Money doesn't transact. Or does it?

Or at least time is... transacting, that is.
And everybody knows time is money.

So then instead of something gratis, a blog does exist in a commercial sense, albeit below the threshhold of "awareness" in our art world?

The art world we know of is not the only art world.... are there many artworlds? Or if there is a multiplicity of artworlds, each coming to fruition like bubbles in boiling water?

Sometimes I read of other bloggers who wished the artworld at large would take blogs seriously

Isay so what if they don't? We have virtual galleries, virtual communities, virtual publications, virtual transactons, the web is easy, democratic, nearly free...

It's a wrench thrown into the machine of artist/gallery/critic/curator/collector or instead of a wrrench, is the friut of the internet a turbocharger instead?

(movie: Jacob's Ladder" If you resist it, it is a devil... if you accept it, it is an angel)
***
The Greeks

As goods flowed into and out of the Athenian harbor...

Athen's first great artisitic legacy, the vase

Potttery wasn't a big deal artistically, what was inside the pots was worth more than the pots themselves

If you were a potter, I wouldn't say you were th scum of the earth...

It had always been simple in design , ,,... designs based on
They began to develope a whole new style of painting
freshness and naturalism
motivated not by producing great art for eternity
but of outdoing each other
Eu-blah blah dees, son of blah blah
I'll bet you frodious couldn't have managed it....
***

1st image:

2nd image:

Announcement

Dennis Hollingsworth

August 25th - September 18, 2005

Opening reception: Thursday August 25, 5-7:30 pm

Galerie Tanya Rumpff
Spaarnwouderstraat 74 NL 2011 AE Haarlem
Tel +31 (0)23 5359565
Fax +31 (0)23 5354075
Mobile: +31 (0)6 5115629
www.galerietanyarumpff.nl

Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 5 p.m..
Sunday 1- 5 p.m.

Saturnalia

Sorry to hit and run, but I felt it best to at least note a couple of interesting rabbit holes via Iconoduel here and here. The second involves a run-around-the-tree about beauty provoked by a Danto claim to a lack of consequence of it in art. Click all the links. Modern Kicks hammers what I consider to be the central question:

Just What is Beauty, Actually?

While I'm no philosopher, I had a somewhat technical question: where is this beauty that Danto is talking about? My understanding is that Kant, whom he discusses at length, argued that beauty was something that happened within us, it was a judgement we made. When we say, "the flowers are beautiful" we are not predicating a quality of a group of objects so much as saying they cause us to feel a certain way. For other writers, beauty is a predicate, which raises the question of to what in the object it adheres, or what gives rise to it. Danto sideskips the issue while by turns blending and comparing the different ideas.

Modern Kicks' JL arrested me with this, the very painting which started me on my path as an artist:

Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children may be called many things, but to say it is beautiful is perverse. It simply is not. It is a great work of art, powerful, perhaps sublime, surely horrifying, and done with a great deal of skill and understanding; but beauty is neither its aim nor accomplishment.

Without figuring out what we mean when we talk about beauty, it's an open question as to why the sublime can't be a form of beauty in itself. I thought that the story of Modern Art was the story of how the terms of beauty shifted around group to group, movement to movement, time to time. You win wars by redefining the battlefields. (Hmmm, the artworld as a theatre of war. Hmmmm.)

As for Goya's Saturn... there's a beauty in the courage to depict the extremities of inhumanity, isn't there? Can we call that sublimnity? My response last May upon seeing this painting again was how roughly it was painted. Not-Beauty. He painted, especially in the Black Paintings, a shadowed universe with figures coming out into shafts of light, a terrible place where humans turn into monsters. But then Goya always had a rough attitude when his brush touched canvas, even when he was young. It was when he no longer needed the trappings of courtly grace that his rough touch matched the terror in the streets.

UPDATE: Comments from Brent Hallard below the fold...

Brent writes:

Hey Dennis,

you uncoiling again through that gigantic blog of life?
anyway hope your show goes good, real good.
Stopped by your blog this morning, saw the hit and run on beauty and over coffee punched this out as effected effects. So I send this back to you.
You out boating again today? What a life! Reminds me of home. In a sense that's what drove me from it, but reading your posts I do have that memory.
Me, today I'm taking young 4y.o. Josh to the park to catch tombo.

If Beauty is the arrangement (of everything) then beauty is not alone. It permeates everything. Beauty is on the monopoly board, forensics under the figure names. Beauty chases tan bodies, unsigned laments back to the sun, to the author. Beauty cracks the case of the murder next door. Beauty is an origami crane both formed and unformed--a pack of colored paper hanging off the wire in the local super. Beauty is all potential, all isles, all the shopping trolleys and all its pushers.
There is no missing link to Beauty as all links are beauty. We don't go to it we're in it. I guess because we're kind of small and beauty is kind of big from that perspective you could say that beauty is the potential to grasp the vastness of it, the arrangement. Too, the other way as we are kind of big and sort of clumsy and beauty something so fine when we hold our breath we get something of it.

Everything exists for a reason and that reason is beauty: And what reason is beauty other than the potential to find reason, to extend reason, to loose reason.

Horror is not beautiful, though it is an arrangement. When we have a good picture of this arrangement we can see beauty. We can also see that horror is not beautiful.

Cajas Fuerte

I've waited for this day for a while now, the time when the paintings are off to the show. But still, I'm not feeling too comfortable.

The shippers arrived yesterday and after much hoopla. They aborted the pick up because the streets are closed to commercial trucks in the afternoon. I said that we could use my cart to roll them across town, I said that I've done it before. But he wouldn't go for it: "Jueves en la ma?ana." . I couldn't believe it. We're so close. "?Estamos aqui ahora!", my body language with arms outstretched in the classic "Aw, c'mon" posture. The guy, Jaime was his name, wouldn't budge.

"Vale, vale, vale, conoces." I wanted to say "fine, it's your call.". I'm not sure what actually came across. (Shrug) I've heard that one must be shameless when trying to learn another language. So be it.

So I was surprised to get the call at eight the next morning from another guy from the shipping company. Juan. Younger and much more can-do. He parked at the beach and we rolled the crates to the truck, a little parade. The only thing that was tough about it was that I was up until almost four that morning.

Less than four hours of sleep.... more than usual.

The other day, I was happy to see Kiko's eyes all sleepy and glazed over. Finally, this Spanaird/Catalan is running out of party gas. After I finished the last painting, I lost my license to hoard huge blocks of time in the studio. Kiko and the three or four or five families who have been flocking together are already hard charging into the August summer vacation. The general attitude is more like college spring break, on steroids. "Dennis, we must snorkel for mejillones tomorrow because if we don't, the summer will be over and we won't be able to do this until next year!" The good life as vigorous leisure is crystalized in toasts over drinks and this measure of the good life is taken in the highest count possible.

The general schedule goes like this: The night ends tight around five am. Towards the end of the night, promises are made for when to rendezvous at Bar Josep. Nine thirty. Later, ten thirty. Later, eleven. No, ten thirty. Breakfast and coffee and the entourage arrives, straggling. We troop out to Kiko's Quicksilver boat stored on the beach and unwrap it and roll it into the surf. We have this routine down pat now, we motor out to Xerlo's party speed boat, process in and unhook Xerlo's and hook up Kiko's boat to the buoy in its' place.

Boating, boating, boating, boating, boating, boating, boating, boating*.

Boating, boating, boating, boating, boating, boating, boating.

Then, we moor Xerlo's craft and leave it in good ship shape as we transfer back to Kiko's rubber Quicksilver craft back to the beach, in which it too is stowed away properly. Right about this moment, the time is around seven or eight in the evening. At these lattitudes, the sun hangs in the sky very late into the night. A quick clean up under the open beach showers and we saunter back for a pit stop at Bar Josep for a cortado where plans are made for the evening.

Rest if you can, but get cleaned up because Kiko's call will ring in around ten if dinner is in the plan, or eleven if not. Another rendezvous at Bar Josep and from there, a daisy chain of bars in Tossa. By the third bar, I'm patting around for my rip chord but Kiko has perfected his technique: "Just one more drink, Dennis." Ok, Kiko. "Dennis, let's go to this other bar and then we will call it a night." Fine, Kiko. "Let me buy you one more drink." ?Como no? "We have to go to this other bar, Dennis!" Well... by this time, the fifth hour is approaching and the sky begins to lighten up a little. And usually by then, we will have a commitment for a rendezvous around ten-ish for another high sea adventure.

You can work up an appetite tooling up the Costa Brava, checking out grottos, getting gas at the various ports and generallycarving arcs into the Mediterranean. There's a little restaurant that you can only get to from the sea. It's called Calla Bona. It's run by a cantankerous Catalana and her family. Paella, cava, salads, bread. A good lunch by the sea.

Of course, all of this is happening while I still have work to do. It's like having final exams as your fellow students are raging on into Spring Break. It may not be as obvious as a studio of blank canvas, but as the paintings are drying, there's important stuff to do to prep the paintings for shipment.

The other day, I had an appointment for a studio visit in the evening with Mirenxtu and Miguel, the proprietors of my gallery in Barcelona. Kiko called closer to ten in the morning, he'll be at Bar Josep, we are going to go out on Xerlo's boat with his son Oriole and his girlfriend Maria. Cool, I'd like to get to know Oriole better. So we got out to sea, boating, boating, boating, boating and the hunger sets in and we decide to cruise to the port of Blanes to the south for a bite to eat. It's three-ish, four in the afternoon and a question mark mentally appears on my appointment rendezvous for the evening. Kiko is good to bear my commitment in mind but a just-in-time regime is in effect.

We find a place to moor the boat and Xerlo realizes that he has no shirt to wear to the restaurant. The establishment is cool about it and Xerlo makes a funny by tying a scarf around his neck. He's the lion of the pride, his piso is filled with women and his son. He's the capit?n and designated alpha male, and therefore he has the huevos to flirt with his feminine side. The act is exploited for every ounce of its' comic effect. More paella, cava, beers, tossts, brindis, chin chin, a clink of the glasses and a firm look in the eyes. This is the good life. These moments are golden.

I wasn't wearing my watch but I figured that it was approaching six. Kiko reassures me that we will get back before eight. I mentally rehearsed the shower and studio prep I'll have to do before I receive my guests. As we got out onto open sea, the conn is handed over to Kiko's daughter Nerea. She kept pushing the throttle up a little more, a little more. Good, Nerea. We're on a mission now, we've got to get back.

I still understand only a fraction of what's said in Castellano/Catalan and therefore I missed how we decided to stop for a swim along the way. Fine, I massage my appointment back into the corner of my mind and I reach for the camera to document the swim. It was a fine moment indeed. Skylarking and horseplay and shouts out of "?Ole!" and "?Guapa!" and teasing all around. This is how you enjoy life, Dennis. Of course. But it was all the better to get back with a half an hour margin to prepare for my next appointment, another important part of my life.

So with all this, you might see how relieved I was to see Kiko's eyes glaze over from exhaustion. I wasn't the only one who had to recharge their batteries. And even in this state, Kiko was generous enough to help me install my paintings into the crates. The day was fun, punctuated with cortados and questions as to the meanings in the work. We established a system and a rhythm and everything was smooth.

Alberto dropped by to say hello that evening. He will be going to art school in a town called Olot nearby this Fall. He's full of questions and I'm happy to share what I know with him. I told him that art school may not be worth it even in the best art schools, but that an acculturation into the interior dialog of the art world is important. What's more important is to find your curiosity and make it vivid. I advised him to get to Berlin or London or New York or LA. It was good that he could see the crating process, a sign of a larger art world beyond Catalunya.

Still, I won't be comfortable until the work arrives in Haarlem safely. Everybody is telling me that these crates are strong... and maybe the ones we build back in the states are meant to withstand gorilla shippers across country, I'm still uncertain. Did I drive in enough screws? Was it alright that Ramon didn't use glue to assemble them? Should I have used more than eight screws to fix each of the paintings to the supports? Is the blocking method sufficient to keep the paintings from ripping apart inside the crate due to acceleration forces along the way?

I won't rest fully until the paintings arrive safely.

UPDATE:

Check this out.

*These pics feature my cousin Patricia and her boyfriend Franz.

Phantom Class

I marvel at this:

Here's the offer: The Phantom Professor's Online Writing Workshop. Open admission. Free tuition.

Using all the exercises, reading lists, quizzes and other tricks I have developed during 15 years of teaching, I will offer you, the blogistas, the benefit of my experience and expertise. I will also incorporate new things I learned at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Workshop, the most creative and inspiring haven for writers in America. You can find most of what we'll read on the Internet or in a library, so you don't even have to buy books. (Though some of them you will want to own.)

If you need help getting that novel or screenplay started, this four-month workshop will kickstart you into a creative mode that will get that sucker under way. If you're interested in journalism, here's where you can start. If you have just never felt confident putting words on paper, step right up. You don't have to be college age. My techniques work whether you're 12 or 92.

The best parts of the university world are beginning to float free.

Yes.

SenseMaking

This one's for Bernice, a little frozen phantasmagoria for you:

Over the past decade, the business market has seen extraordinary advances in data mining, information visualization, and many other tools for "sensemaking," a broad-brush term that covers all the ways people bring meaning to the huge volumes of data that flood the modern world.

Admin/MailCall/Tots*

The Comments are still out of commission for the meantime, that's alright by me. I don't miss the insidiously neccessary despamming chores. People chime in via email (the address is to your left in the margin), and that's been working out fine.

The comment function will be restored soon enough, reliant as I am for the help of a good friend for this fix. I told him no worries, to do it as his own pace, and I meant it.

Tranquilo, hombre. No pasa nada.

In terms of blogging, this is an ideal blogger's summer vacation -not having to clean spam drek every day.

***
I hope you don't mind the use of the boilerplate, it's extremely useful and it leads to themed posts. While providing a thematic stability, provides as well a radical flexibility (the Ahoras, the Zardoz's and the Yes's, for example).

I'm having fun.

Now, for the Mail Call:

Artist Claire Covey writes in:

Hi, I love your work and have been a fan for awhile. I just saw your posting
about Mullers article from a few years ago and was wondering if you knew
where I could read the whole article.

By the way, if you can, you may want to clean off all the porno posts that
now follow your original Feb 13 post at
http://www.dennishollingsworth.us/archives/000214.html

Best,

Claire Corey

I'll have to dig around for the article, everything is flying around like Dorothy's house at the moment.

About the comment spam ("porno posts"): they're nasty, aren't they? I've got to take some time to go though each post and remove each one. Assuming that it would take a second to click through each spam (estimating a small figure of 300 actual comments to subtract from the overall figure) and approximately thirty seconds to cycle through each archived post, at 773 entries would result in a little less than eleven hours or roughly, a hard day's work. A day of clicking like a monkey... no, a chicken pecking for corn. (Monkeys would tear up the house first)

I don't like feeling like a chicken pecking for corn. Or fleas.

But I guess I'll have to do it someday. Buh.

But what's nice is that I can click back into Clair's email address and find her website. It was a nice surprise to find great stuff:

She's just had a show in Amsterdam, maybe I can find her gallery there and see what I can. A nice adventure.

Here's the first paragraph of her review from a 2004 show at Ten in One Gallery:

Since 1995, Claire Corey has been composing her paintings on a computer. Once the image has been improvised on-screen, Corey has it printed onto a small canvas in colored inks. She then decides whether to have the painting executed in a larger format. Surprisingly, the work has its own brand of immediacy, thanks to the hint of a weave visible in the canvas and the slight physicality of the inks. Visually, the works resemble infinitely lapidary Color Field paintings.

What I like beyond the Lasker/Herzog "Frozen Spontenaeity" of her work is that her once remove into the computer gives her a scalar freedom that I wish I had. I'd like to dig further into her site to find out how she breeds the slap happy (A term I use to describe my work too -in self deprecation and a frank acknowledgement of the visual dynamics although comically implied-, so I mean it as a compliment). I look forward to meeting her when I get to NYC this Fall.

***

Artist Greg Card is generous to give a thumbs up on the recent "Red" and "Yellow" (not the ultimate names of the paintings):

Kudos on your recent "yellow" and the "red", their visual sense is accute>>>

and got me to thinking about some things of mine from the early 70's, here's an example:

"Who's Question " 1971
cast resin and fiberglass
95 x 48 inches

Reeling in the years, I thought of all that happened in the art world since the beginning of the seventies and I asked him if it was Joan Mitchell that he was looking at...

most likely I was paying little attention to anyone in particular, maybe Larry Poons or Ron Davis.

Mitchell never got much of my attention, she always seemed too indirect or maybe that should be overworked, I always had a feeling of frustration looking at her efforts>>>

Thanks, greg.

Now, I get to relook at Mitchell's paintings, looking for Greg's critical eye.

***

A blast from my past: Old friend Chuck Crawford writes in, it seems he found the blog. He sends me some pics:

Chuck and I went to undergraduate school together and afterwards we co-edited a 'zine called "Church of Architecture". He's in San Diego now, together with several other friends there (most from our school days in San Luis Obispo): Robin Brisebois, Jim Brown, Jim Gates, Ted Smith and Kathy McCormick from "Smith and Others". I hope to blog more about them soon, a very rich vien to mine there.

The great thing about this web is how people can reconnect.

***

Someone new writes in, Bernice Yan:

Hey. I was reading your blog entry on May 18, 2005 about the Joan Didion's quote in The White Album, and I was wondering if you could further explain "We live in phantasmagoria but we move through it by freezing it... then breaking it... so that we may freeze it again in another way." because I'm not quite getting it. Please email me back. Thank you.

Thanks for asking and thus sending me back into the archives (to be chilled by finding mistakes... wuh. I don't know how I mixed Danto into the whole post except that somehow I feel that Kuspit and Danto are similar creatures in the art world).

When I used to teach figure drawing (not too much of it, maybe four classes in all back in the day), I used to try to get the students to realize the infinity of sensations as they gaze upon the model, and how they had the task of matching this infinite sea of sensations with the finite world of charcol-meets-paper. Their choices governed how much their minds and then other minds registered their marks and associated their marks with the object of their sensations. More over, the marks selected would convey their own mindset, their relation to this object in the world.

In one exercise, I would set up a still life with a cubic form at the top of the pile and look for how many students would draw the aspect they couldn't see (the top of the cube). this is classical Betty Edwards' "Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain" stuff, good for training students to take responsibility for what they see... or don't see.

My point here: we usually see the world in cartoons, assumptions and old figures drawn when we first "drew the world" as we grow into the world. Much of this is practical. It's a tough task to see the world as an infinitude of sensations (maybe we never do it), and living in an unfilitered phantasmogoria might be impossible. In order to move through the world we have to figure it out, but these figures we draw are ultimately cartoons, caricatures of what is really there (there was a BBC show about the Brain last year, good stuff, basic contemporary brain research... that show highlighted how the brain is wired to see via caricatures). Important cartoons, critical tools, life and death issues, indispensable. Ultimately, cartoons.

The trick to to break the old version and form a new one. As time changes, society changes and since social structures form around system sustaining sets of cartoons, we have a natural resistance to altering the staus quo. But all staus quos ultimately live a lie as they violate the modern "To be modern is to reconcile the life one lives with the things one makes." (my definition).

Break the old version, form a new one. Do it again. Do it again. That's how we grow, that's how we move through the world.

Suppleness.

Does any of this make sense to you, Bernice?

***

*"Tots" is Catalan for "All" or "Todo" in Castellano

Sol Solet

The locals sing a children's song here. It starts like this:

Catalan

Sol solet
Vinem a veure
Vinem a veure
Sol solet
Vinem a veure
Que tinc fred

Phonetic

Sol solet
Bingem a veroore
Bingem a veroore
Sol solet
Bingem a veroore
Ka-ting freth...

Castellano

Sol soleto
Ven a verme
Ven a verme
Sol soleto
Ven a verme
Que tengo frio...

English

A little sun
Comes to see me
Comes to see me
A little sun
Comes to see me
Because I was cold...

Funny, That.

I arrived home from a day trip to Barcelona (to buy materials to paint a final painting here before I take off to Los Angeles) and I got home and flipped open the laptop to read this news on Drudge:

Europe's big cities feel the heat of climate change: WWF
Wed Aug 10, 8:10 PM ET

GENEVA (AFP) - Summer temperatures have risen sharply in most west European capital cities over the past 30 years, adding to evidence of the accelerating impact of climate change, the environmental group WWF said.

That's funny. I had to put a sweater (actually a heavy long sleeve pullover) on this evening (9pm). Thunder showers, the thermometer reads 22?C.

Ahora

Yes

Yellow

I took a few days to take a hard look at this one. I had landed in a slightly different place than what I had planned and the issue was whether I would accept where I had landed or should I take a hard line and hammer head myself into my presupposition. When it is obvious, it's obvious... and sometimes like this one, the issue is whether one should go with the break. There's a potter's term for this... does anyone recall it out there in blogland?

A closer look here.

And closer still here.

More to say about this one later.

Ahora

ROFLOLOLOL

I don't know anything about "The Worst Bulletin Board Ever" or who "Randy, the Supreme Arbiter" is, but as "bakerjw, Aspiring Eddie" wrote: "Your wit cannot be surpassed my friend. This is undoubtedly destined to be a classic.". He's exactly right.

Brilliant stuff!

Here it is in it's entirety:

If World War Two had been an online Real Ttime Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this.

*Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.*
*Eisenhower has joined the game.*
*paTTon has joined the game.*
*Churchill has joined the game.*
*benny-tow has joined the game.*
*T0J0 has joined the game.*
*Roosevelt has joined the game.*
*Stalin has joined the game.*
*deGaulle has joined the game.*
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0JO: lol
Roosevelt: o this fockin sucks i got a depression!
benny-tow: haha america sux
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]; sure whatever
Stalin: cool
deGaulle: **** Hitler rushed some1 help
Hitler[AoE]: lol byebye frenchy
Roosevelt: i dont got **** to help, sry
Churchill: wtf the luftwaffle is attacking me
Roosevelt: get antiair guns
Churchill: i cant afford them
benny-tow: u n00bs know what team talk is?
paTTon: stfu
Roosevelt: o yah hit the navajo button guys
deGaulle: eisenhower ur worthless come help me quick
Eisenhower: i cant do **** til rosevelt gives me an army
paTTon: yah hurry the fock up
Churchill: d00d im gettin pounded
deGaulle: this is fockin weak u guys suck
*deGaulle has left the game.*
Roosevelt: im gonna attack the axis k?
benny-tow: with what? ur wheelchair?
benny-tow: lol did u mess up ur legs AND ur head?
Hitler[AoE]: ROFLMAO
T0J0: lol o no america im comin 4 u
Roosevelt: wtf! thats bullsh1t u fags im gunna kick ur asses
T0JO: not without ur harbors u wont! lol
Roosevelt: u little biotch ill get u
Hitler[AoE]: wtf
Hitler[AoE]: america hax, u had depression and now u got a huge fockin army
Hitler[AoE]: thats bullsh1t u hacker
Churchill: lol no more france for u hitler
Hitler[AoE]: tojo help me!
T0J0: wtf u want me to do, im on the other side of the world retard
Hitler[AoE]: fine ill clear you a path
Stalin: WTF u arsshoel! WE HAD A FoCKIN TRUCE
Hitler[AoE]: i changed my mind lol
benny-tow: haha
benny-tow: hey ur losing ur guys in africa im gonna need help in italy soon sum1
T0J0: o **** i cant help u i got my hands full
Hitler[AoE]: im 2 busy 2 help
Roosevelt: yah thats right ***** im comin for ya
Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL
benny-tow: hahahh oh sh1t help
Hitler: o man ur focked
paTTon: oh what now biotch
Roosevelt: whos the cripple now lol
*benny-tow has been eliminated.*
benny-tow: lame
Roosevelt: gj patton
paTTon: thnx
Hitler[AoE]: WTF eisenhower hax hes killing all my sh1t
Hitler[AoE]: quit u hacker so u dont ruin my record
Eisenhower: Nuts!
benny~tow: wtf that mean?
Eisenhower: meant to say nutsack lol finger slipped
paTTon: coming to get u hitler u paper hanging hun cocksocker
Stalin: rofl
T0J0: HAHAHHAA
Hitler[AoE]: u guys are fockin gay
Hitler[AoE]: ur never getting in my city
*Hitler[AoE] has been eliminated.*
benny~tow: OMG u noob you killed yourself
Eisenhower: ROFLOLOLOL
Stalin: OMG LMAO!
Hitler[AoE]: WTF i didnt click there omg this game blows
*Hitler[AoE] has left the game*
paTTon: hahahhah
T0J0: WTF my teammates are n00bs
benny~tow: shut up noob
Roosevelt: haha wut a moron
paTTon: wtf am i gunna do now?
Eisenhower: yah me too
T0J0: why dont u attack me o thats right u dont got no ships lololol
Eisenhower: fock u
paTTon: lemme go thru ur base commie
Stalin: go to hell lol
paTTon: fock this sh1t im goin afk
Eisenhower: yah this is gay
*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Hitler[AoE]: wtf?
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*
*The Allied team has won the game!*
Eisenhower: awesome!
Churchill: gg noobs no re
T0J0: thats bull**** u fockin suck
*T0J0 has left the game.*
*Eisenhower has left the game.*
Stalin: next game im not going to be on ur team, u guys didnt help me for ****
Churchill: wutever, we didnt need ur help neway dumbarss
tru_m4n: l8r all
benny~tow: bye
Churchill: l8r
Stalin: fock u all
tru_m4n: shut up commie lol
*tru_m4n has left the game.*
benny~tow: lololol u commie
Churchill: ROFL
Churchill: bye commie
*Churchill has left the game.*
*benny~tow has left the game.*
Stalin: i hate u all fags
*Stalin has left the game.*
paTTon: lol no1 is left
paTTon: weeeee i got a jeep
*paTTon has been eliminated.*
paTTon: o sh1t!
*paTTon has left the game.*

Boy, I sure miss CyberLan right now.

There's Many a Slip

Betwixt the Cup and the Lip.

Perhaps I've slipped into the expanded field?

Admin

The Comments are still out of commission for the meantime, that's alright by me. I don't miss the insidiously neccessary despamming chores. People chime in via email (the address is to your left in the margin), and that's been working out fine.

The comment function will be restored soon enough, reliant as I am for the help of a good friend for this fix. I told him no worries, to do it as his own pace, and I meant it.

Tranquilo, hombre. No pasa nada.

In terms of blogging, this is an ideal blogger's summer vacation -not having to clean spam drek every day.

Life

Life

Life

Rest In Peace

Steven Vincent.
Courageous, he was:

"But you can only experience fear for so long; eventually, you want to fight back. How dare these bearded maniacs threaten all that we value and hold dear! My country was at war, and I wanted to participate in the conflict ? as a patriot, and as someone seeking a way to strike back against the terrorists. But when the United States. invaded Afghanistan, I dithered, unsure of how to make the transition from art journalism to combat journalism. At the same time, though, I felt the pressure of events ? history was in the making, huge forces were locked in life and death issues that would change the course of the world. Who wouldn?t want to be part of that? When my artist friend Steve Mumford left New York for Iraq in April 2003, I knew I had to either act on my ?moral fervor? or regret my timidity for the rest of my life. Fortunately I acted, traveling to Iraq in the fall of 2003, and the winter-spring of 2004."

A moving tribute here..

This, a tip of a huge blog-topic-iceberg, a continental sized berg, a violent wormhole into another universe (Theo Van Gogh for example) this world wide civil war and all that this implies.

Huge. Another life almost.

Dither indeed...

Blue

I'd love to tell you all about this one...

But I've got a painting to do.

I've got ideas.

Time is short.

The hammer's back.

And the safety's off.

I'm ready to rock.

Gotta go.

More hablaba laters.

Red

I rigged up (the term "Jerry-Rig", is that the father of "McGyver"?) some lighting, but I still get too much glare from above. So I had to tilt up my camera, inducing a parallax.

Dang.

Closer in. The camera just can't capture this.

My camera.

Me.

Mea Culpa.

Wuh.

I'm just Sayin'

I don't have a lot of time for explicatin', moving through the rapids of my calendar as I am...

But while it's nice to watch the Space Shuttle live online, I can't help but think that while they are busy sawing off a little piece of foam, the freak out sweat-the-load levels going on there remind me of the (fortunately) hapless Richard Ried -the terrorist shoe bomber- and how afterward all the airport screeners had everyone doff our shoes at the gate. We tend to move as a society in such a blinkered manner...

In other words, why can't we imagineer our problem solving to anticipate various outcomes instead of anticipating only what had already just happened? We keep living in the recent past, even as we all hurtle into our asymptotic future.

Am I making sense here, people? Maybe not, but this level of clarity in this little rant is the best I can do on the fly!

Moving on...

My bigger point is: maybe it's time to shelve this space shuttle episode and...

...move on...

...to...

IT'S TIME TO BUILD THE SPACE ELEVATOR, PEOPLE!

HELL YEA!

(Artwork image taken from LiftPort.com.)

Here's a snippet from an article in Space.com:

Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up the Earth-to-space cable, experiencing no large launch forces, slowly climbing from one atmosphere to a vacuum.

Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids and beyond - they are routinely accessible via the space elevator. And for all its promise and grandeur, this mega-project is made practical by the tiniest of technologies - carbon nanotubes.

Lots of good information at LiftPort.com:

The proposed Space Elevator bears very little resemblance to the space elevators of science fiction. Rather than a cable as big around as a sequoia, it will be about the size of a sheet of paper. Rather than huge trains running up and down on magnetic tracks, climbers the size of a dump truck will grip the ribbon between two rollers and pull themselves up. Rather than a captured asteroid as a counterweight, it will use the left-over construction equipment.

For more links:

Check out this site, Blaise Gassend's super geek treatment (remember, the geeks brought us the internet among other things). Be sure to click around, there's a lot of basic homework done there.

Check out the Wikipedia page for the basic concept. (Image source). Pretty good stuff.

Here's the space elevator blog.

***

From one end of the scale to the other....

It's all about the nanotechnology, yo:

Nanotechnology has been harnessed to kill cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. The technique works by inserting microscopic synthetic rods called carbon nanotubules into cancer cells.

When the rods are exposed to near-infra red light from a laser they heat up, killing the cell, while cells without rods are left unscathed.

UPDATE:
I informed liftport.com that I was using their image, and they send their blessings:

Thanks for your support, the blog looks great. I don't know if you knew, but that's the image that's going to be on the front cover of our book coming out in September.

Take care,
Michael J. Laine, Liftoport.com

***

I second Michael's reply. Thanks for caring and for blogging.

Every expression of support for the space elevator concept, and Liftport in particular, means a great deal.

Ad astra.

--
Brian Dunbar
System Administrator
Liftport

Heads up!

Mon Capit

Xerlo's new boat is better than the last one in that it is faster and cuts into the water more deeply. We didn't bounce around like before, therefore it is more stable in rougher seas.

The difference was phenomenal. The other one was a boat, this one is a ship.

We (Maite, Xerlo's wife; Kiko and his daughter Nerea; and Mannix (Joan, but they nicknamed him Mnx -pronounced "Mannix" -pics under the fold, I'm using pop up enlargements for the first time) embarked on our first trip in Xerlo's crucero. We went North to the port of San Felieu to refuel and take on fresh water.

A fast trip, really.

?Super Guay! (That means "way cool" in Catalunya)

Joyously

I recieved a good review recently from Aaron and Sharon's new baby girl, Joy.

?Muchicimos gracias, cari?a!

?Que guay!

Ahora

Finally, I have this painting in hand.

I had thought from time to time that it might have been a lost cause.

Par for the course.

I don't think that a painting should necessarily proceed in a glory of vision and control, leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop, gliding the first touch to the last... although I have had the rare fortune to come near this splendid feeling once or twice (...although I can't really remember when and which right now, maybe this is a fabricated memory!).

What is more normal for me is an alternating cycle of percieved success and failure, with the better experiences (in painting) coming from one or more transits through the apparently unsuccessful moments. A rescue by a subsequent turn.

My language might sound technical here. Please bear with me.

The feeling of dread and nausea is not uncommon in my studio. And when the good turn comes, the feeliing of release and relief and acomplishment washes over me. It's incredible. I marvel that perhaps some of the best painting comes from and through the worst.

Perhaps this stems from my emphasis on grace (I'm searching for the words to describe this idea/experience), or the distinction I hold between the good or bad touch of paint to canvas, or the reference I make to alla prima technique (Impressionist roots I think... an association not yet thoroughly researched) where failure (another term needing qualification some day) is simultaneously courted and immediately cut out, edited. Indeed, edits by turns.

Hazards navigated.

***

I left off the blogposts for the past few days in order to apply myself to the work in the studio. Priorities. Even though a couple of days had been cut with social events (the other, I will blog shortly: an outing on Xerlo's new boat). My "life is short" policy is definitely a balancing act, hazardous (that word again) though it is.

How could it be any other way?