Places I have slept (a series of drawings) began August 3, 2003 ended November 21, 2003: Hayward Castro Valley San Lorenzo San Ramon Sacramento Carmichael San Jose Oakland Santa Cruz Monterey Pacific Grove San Simeon Calistoga Occidental Russian River Jenner Sea Ranch Garberville Gualala Yorkville, Anderson Valley (Sheep Dung Estates) One night B&B near Mendocino Olema Inverness Half Moon Bay Clear Lake Tahoe Northstar Reno Shasta Los Angeles Anaheim Hollywood Long Beach Pasadena San Diego San Bernadino Las Vegas Yosemite El Portal Tuolumne Meadows Death Valley Lone Pine Mono Lake June Lake Lake Isabella Bridgeport Hope Valley Crystal Bay, NV Tehachapi Victorville Needles Winton Modesto Twain Harte Shasta- II a whole bunch of little towns and campsites all over California McCloud River Camp Curry Barstow Mojave Verde Antique Santa Barbara Angel Island Steep Ravine Clear Lake 2 Mt. Lassen Big Sur more more more Seattle Portland Ashland Corvallis Victoria Minneapolis Carlsbad (CA & NM) Albuquerque Santa Fe Gallup San Antonio Lubbock, home of Buddy Holly and Aunt Evelyn Harlingen New Orleans Atlanta West Monroe, LA New York Kapaa a beach in San Felipe, Baja Mazatlan Puerto Vallarta Barra de Navidad London Sheffield Dover Rye Cambridge York Edinburgh Glasgow Cardiff Dublin Mullaghbawn Dromore West Clifden Galway Corofin Inisheer Quin Kildare Belfast Brussels Amsterdam Stockholm Oslo Copenhagen Bonn Munich Baumholder Hamburg Vienna Zurich Le Havre Rouen Paris Florence Padua Airplanes over the Atlantic & Pacific TWA United British Virgin People's Express Alaskan Mexicana Southwest

a place to work, nothing fancy a place to work, nothing fancy Print-Friendly Version Sunday, February 22, 2004 This weblog is no longer updated. Go to my home since Oct. 2003: http://chrisashley.net/weblog/ Tuolumne 20031117, from the drawing series Places I Have Slept After exactly three years a place to work, nothing fancy is now an archived weblog; while no longer updated, the entire past three years of daily posts are still available. This weblog was founded on February 21, 2001, and evolved from a place to write about education and technology to writing of a more personal nature, finally becoming a kind of art studio, gallery, and archive for HTML drawings. As of February 22, 2004 my work is now split between two weblogs. AtWork is a weblog dedicated, for the most part, to education, technology, and the UC Berkeley Interactive University Project. LookSee is a space for the continuing series of HTML drawings and art-related posts. Search this site: Or search for related sites and info: Say... Saturday, February 21, 2004 Friday, February 20, 2004 * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Thursday, February 19, 2004 Wednesday, February 18, 2004 Tuesday, February 17, 2004 Monday, February 16, 2004 Taming Dragon Lohan Taming Tiger Lohan * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Sunday, February 15, 2004 Long Eyebrow Lohan Doorman Lohan * Rothko multiforms, 1949, PaceWildenstein, NY, now. * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Saturday, February 14, 2004 Calico Bag Lohan Plantain Lohan * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Friday, February 13, 2004 Thinking Lohan Scratched Ear Lohan * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Thursday, February 12, 2004 Open Heart Lohan Raised Hand Lohan * * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Wednesday, February 11, 2004 Elephant Riding Lohan Laughing Lion Lohan * Chris Knipp pretty much speak for me in this well-written piece: The Case Against Bush. * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Tuesday, February 10, 2004 Meditating Lohan Oversea Lohan * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. On February 22 I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, LookSee. Monday, February 9, 2004 Raised Bowl Lohan Raised Pagoda Lohan * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, a (new) place to work, nothing fancy. * The drawing archive list has been updated: Drawings Series Short Story Drawing Series, July 2002, Compilation [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] 5 Drawings: Sea Ranch, August 2002 AFFABITS: alphabetdrawings, September 2002 Nine: writing & drawing, September 2002 Red I-IX (Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?) prayerflags: rockofages (edited compilation) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Sept-Oct, 2002 The Asian Influence In Drawing, drawings & text, October 2002 Every Sentence Makes A Difference; writing & drawing, November 2002 (also at Rudolf's Diner) People I have known, Nov-Dec 2002 Gallery views: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, Compilation of all XIV, Jan 2003 Hippie Dreams I-XII, Feb-Mar 2003 Mojave Drawings, March 2003 Regime Change, April 2003 Stacks & Clumps, June-July 2003 Stacks & Text, June 2003 Spring Drawings, April-May 2003 Crosses, April-May 2003 Places I Have Slept, August 3, 2003 - November 21, 2003 Nine Teachers, November, 2003, for Rudolf's Diner Smokey Robinson, Jackie Robinson, Jackie Wilson, Mookie Wilson, November, 2003 Hands, December, 2003 Mexico, December, 2003 - January 2004 Arhats (small versions), January, 2004 Arhats (large versions), January - February, 2004 An explanation: What's with the colored blocks? Sunday, February 8, 2004 Deer Sitting Lohan Happy Lohan * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, a (new) place to work, nothing fancy. Saturday, February 7, 2004 Cudapanthaka (Arhats) * This is the sixteenth and final Arhat drawing. I have compiled all 16 as a single entry. I have some more to say later about how these came about and the problems I set for myself in this series. * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, a (new) place to work, nothing fancy. Friday, February 6, 2004 Ajita (Arhats) * Link from Tom Moody: Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Dance Music. Fun, neat mapping, lotsa content. * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, a (new) place to work, nothing fancy. Thursday, February 5, 2004 Vanavasin (Arhats) * See list of Scholar's Box Project-related writing topics. * Countdown to three year anniversary of this weblog, and its change from active to archive: Feb. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. I'll be switching over to the workblog, AtWork, and the artblog, a (new) place to work, nothing fancy. Wednesday, February 4, 2004 Angaja (Arhats) Tuesday, February 3, 2004 Nagasena (Arhats) Monday, February 2, 2004 Rahula (Arhats) Sunday, February 1, 2004 Panthaka (Arhats) Saturday, January 31, 2004 Jivaka (Arhats) Friday, January 30, 2004 Vajraputra (Arhats) Thursday, January 29, 2004 Kalika (Arhats) * Lloyd has hit on something beautiful, poetic, and visually arresting with a couple of more recent photo postings [1] [2 (scroll down to A Scene Out of MYST)]: scale differences, juxtapositions of details or focused views with wide views, evocative texts. Nice. * I have a new weblog for work: AtWork. Any day now, I promise, I swear, this weblog will be frozen, and the drawings will move over to the newblog. * So much for shock and awe: Army May Keep Forces in Iraq Through '06. Wednesday, January 28, 2004 Bhadra (Arhats) * More dead soldiers. See the count- around 524. Tuesday, January 27, 2004 Nakula (Arhats) * Lloyd: beautiful pix and text, great display. * Where does a painting, and more specifically, an abstract painting, fall, when it's not just busy being itself, between metaphor and analogy? * Jerry Saltz on Arshile Gorky: I revere Gorky's work. Yet sadly, I know this is not his time. His forms look erotic to me, or otherworldly in very real ways. And his touch is scintillating. Yet to younger artists these days, Gorky comes off as relentlessly abstract, too rigorous, serious, pure and formal. Nowadays, his hard-won surfaces and meticulous shapes strike people as labored or too idealistic. His phantasmagoria comes off more platonic than it is. Sounds great to me. Guess I'm not a young artist anymore. Monday, January 26, 2004                                                                       m                                                                                                                                                 Subinda Sunday, January 25, 2004 Kanakabharadvaja Saturday, January 24, 2004 Kanakavatsa Friday, January 23, 2004 Pindolabharadvaja * Arts Research Center Annual Conference : When Is Art Research? February 6, 9am-5pm Geballe Room, Townsend Center for the Humanities, 220 Stephens Hall Free admission When the Arts Research Center was established at UC Berkeley in 2001, its stated goal was to "create a deeper appreciation within the academic community of art-making as a vital form of research that both interprets and re-imagines our world." This year's ARC conference will advance this mission by focusing on what research means to practicing artists. Some questions that may be addressed include: What constitutes research for the artist and what typical roles does it play in the finished product? What is the focus of the participating artists' inquiries/experiments/explorations? To what degree do they see what they're doing as contributing to an inquiry that others are also pursuing? Is their work "in conversation" with the work of others? To what degree do they find the term research useful or accurate in describing what they do? What are the term's limitations as applied to artists' work? For artists who operate within research universities, how does this environment and its definitions or expectations of research effect or modify their creative practice? Are there other "environmental" factors (for instance, the pressures of fundraising) that influence the role of research in an artist's work? Are there certain artistic media, techniques, or forms that are easier or more difficult to conceive as research? What is it about certain activities that makes them amenable to being perceived in this way? Visual Arts as Research, 11:15am Squeak Carnwath (panel chair), Professor in Residence, Art Practice, UC Berkeley Greg Niemeyer, Assistant Professor, Art Practice/New Media, UC Berkeley Anne Walsh, Assistant Professor, Art Practice, UC Berkeley John Zurier, painter Melissa Day, MFA candidate in Art Practice, UC Berkeley Thursday, January 22, 2004 [1] Angaja holds a fly whisk and incense bowl. [2] Ajita has the head covered and the hands in the meditation mudra. [3] Vanavasin with the mudra of explication and holding a fly whisk. [4] Kalika holds a gold earring in each hand. [5] Vajriputra with a fly whisk and hand gesture. [6] Bhadra performs the mudras of explication and meditation. [7] Kanakavatsa holds a jewel lasso in both hands. [8] Kanaka Bharadvaja has both hands in meditation. [9] Bakula holds a mongoose. [10] Rahula holds a jewelled tiara. [11] Chudapantaka has both hands in meditation. [12] Pindola Bharadvaja holds a book and begging bowl. [13] Pantaka holds a book and performs the mudra of explication. [14] Nagasena holds a vase and staff. [15] Gopaka holds a book. [16] Abheda holds a stupa. 16 Arhats Wednesday, January 21, 2004 [1] Angaja holds a fly whisk and incense bowl. [2] Ajita has the head covered and the hands in the meditation mudra. [3] Vanavasin with the mudra of explication and holding a fly whisk. [4] Kalika holds a gold earring in each hand. [5] Vajriputra with a fly whisk and hand gesture. [6] Bhadra performs the mudras of explication and meditation. [7] Kanakavatsa holds a jewel lasso in both hands. [8] Kanaka Bharadvaja has both hands in meditation. [9] Bakula holds a mongoose. [10] Rahula holds a jewelled tiara. [11] Chudapantaka has both hands in meditation. [12] Pindola Bharadvaja holds a book and begging bowl. 12/16 Arhats Tuesday, January 20, 2004 [1] Angaja holds a fly whisk and incense bowl. [2] Ajita has the head covered and the hands in the meditation mudra. [3] Vanavasin with the mudra of explication and holding a fly whisk. [4] Kalika holds a gold earring in each hand. [5] Vajriputra with a fly whisk and hand gesture. [6] Bhadra performs the mudras of explication and meditation. [7] Kanakavatsa holds a jewel lasso in both hands. [8] Kanaka Bharadvaja has both hands in meditation. 8/16 Arhats Monday, January 19, 2004 [1] Angaja holds a fly whisk and incense bowl. [2] Ajita has the head covered and the hands in the meditation mudra. [3] Vanavasin with the mudra of explication and holding a fly whisk. [4] Kalika holds a gold earring in each hand. 4/16 Arhats Sunday, January 18, 2004 Land From Water * Template (possible model for a themed collection or a simple learning object): People of Old Along the Silk Road Saturday, January 17, 2004 At The Docks Friday, January 16, 2004 Walking The Deck * I'd call this a must read- long but worth it: Creative Class War How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy. By Richard Florida Voters are seeing not just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs--everything from software coders to financial analysts for investment banks. These were supposed to be the "safe" jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered the children of blue-collar workers into college to avoid their parents' fate. But the loss of some of these jobs is only the most obvious--and not even the most worrying--aspect of a much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching more directly and successfully on what has been, for almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success -- the creative economy. Thursday, January 15, 2004 On Board At Sea * How could it be that as frequently as I got in to the Berkeley Art Museum (and admittedly, I hadn't been there for at least the past two months) I hadn't never run into Pepe, who works in the book store there a few hours a week? More to say later, I think: Helen Mirra. * Thinking about: wikilogs, Tinderbox. Wednesday, January 14, 2004 Navidad en el Pacífico cerca Baja California * I like this statement by Margie Livingston about "The Structure Paintings," January 8 - February 29, 2004 at Greg Kucera in Seattle: Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I developed a love of the out-of-doors that has become integral to my work. In graduate school, I came to understand how this affinity could be traced through my German heritage to Romanticism. But as I live in a time when the environment is threatened, my experience of nature includes a sense of loss. This sense of loss compels me to work from the landscape. Five years ago I started studying the structure of trees in my neighborhood. Transforming this experience into an abstract language is the basis of my current paintings. I’ve brought fragments of the landscape in to my studio — branches, leaves, twigs. I work from direct observation. I’ve slowed down the process of making — committing to each mark and its relationship to the whole before moving on to the next. I’m trying to make each daub of paint contain location, drawing, gravity, color, and light. These marks are fragments that reference the greater whole. I’m searching for a way to translate my experience of nature onto the canvas that exists outside of the Abstract Expressionist and Impressionist ways of seeing. To this end, I’m studying how each mark informs the rectangle, investigating perspective and geometry, as well as researching photography as a means to alter how I see. My work is a search for equivalencies and resonance. It tells the story of intense looking. My hope is to make work that is personal, connected to history, and yet, still relevant. - Margie Livingston - http://margie.net/ "I’ve slowed down the process of making — committing to each mark and its relationship to the whole before moving on to the next." "I’m trying to make each daub of paint contain location, drawing, gravity, color, and light." "These marks are fragments that reference the greater whole." "I’m searching for a way to translate my experience of nature onto the canvas..." "...I’m studying how each mark informs the rectangle, investigating perspective and geometry..." "My work is a search for equivalencies and resonance. It tells the story of intense looking." Tuesday, January 13, 2004 El Pacifico cerca Baja California * Nice grid of pictures by Lloyd. Monday, January 12, 2004 El Pacifico cerca Baja California * http://chefproject.org/ http://www.sakaiproject.org/ http://ets.berkeley.edu/etstandards/sakai/ Sunday, January 11, 2004 El Pacifico cerca Baja California *   Saturday, January 10, 2004 Departure, Bahia de Banderas, Puerta Vallarta, Jalisco, MX * I wasn't happy with 2004/01/07, so I redrew it. Friday, January 9, 2004 Bahia de Banderas, cerca Puerta Vallarta, Jalisco y Nayarit, MX Thursday, January 8, 2004 Las Islas Marietas, cerca Puerto Vallarta, MX Wednesday, January 7, 2004 Artesania Flores, Lazaro Cardenas, Puerto Vallarta, MX * Now and then an incidental reminder shocks me into the sudden deep recognition of the importance of Cezanne, in general, and specifically, to me. Today's reminder came via Terry Teachout. Cezanne, Paul The Garden at Les Lauves (large) c. 1906 Oil on canvas 65.4 x 80.9 cm (25 3/4 x 31 7/8 in.) The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. From this past Sunday's Washington Post: "The Garden at Les Lauves" (circa 1906) may be the last landscape painted by Paul Cezanne. Is it finished? Hard to say. Cezanne's brush strokes look like crude daubs -- until they lock together into one spacious whole. His hand was swift. You can almost watch him scribble (horizontally in the foreground, up and down in the middle ground, swirlingly in the sky). Somehow he gave the empty air a kind of inner skeleton. "Somehow he gave the empty air a kind of inner skeleton." Tuesday, January 6, 2004 Hotel Molina de Agua, Ignacio L. Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta, MX Monday, January 5, 2004 Huaracheria Fabiola, Ignacio L. Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta, MX Sunday, January 4, 2004 Noche Buena en Mazatlan Saturday, January 3, 2004 Noche Buena en Mazatlan Friday, January 2, 2004 Noche Buena en Mazatlan Thursday, January 1, 2004 Noche Buena en Mazatlan Wednesday, December 31, 2003 Noche Buena en Mazatlan Tuesday, December 30, 2003 Noche Buena en Mazatlan Monday, December 29, 2003 Noche Buena en Mazatlan Sunday, December 21, 2003 * Last post for a few days. * Matisse can seem so conservative: domestic interiors, nudes, landscapes, views out windows, portraits. But everytime I open my big Matisse MOMA cataloge I am totally and surprisingly enthralled with his forthright invention and unexpected invention, pictorial description that stays open and abstract, economy and luxury, heaviness and delicacy. One can look at his drawing, color, and brushstrokes, and there is just no second-guessing him- the work is original, and he made everything land in the right places, but there is no closure; the viewer makes the picture in real time. Saturday, December 20, 2003 * To read more closely in January- Heuristic Evaluation. * Yesterday, Friday midday, we signed final papers at the title company- we are now homeowners. A big step. A whole lot of huge numbers that don't quite seem real. No more looking, hunting, despairing. We're finished, for now. We will be paying for this place, allegedly, through the year 2034! Oy! Friday, December 19, 2003 Thursday, December 18, 2003 * Things to keep track of after Isaac and I talked with David Dunham from Regional Oral History Office today: Structured Text Working Group at UCOP. Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) at Digital Library Foundation * From the OAI-general mailing list: Budapest Open Access Initiative An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. * Stevan Harnad gives a good overview of the whys and hows of the Self Archiving Initiative. * Interesting reading Lloyd's review of LOTR3: ROTK, wherein he says Sam is such an important and meaningful character: So why is Sam emblematic? Where Frodo portrayed the single-mindedness of his cause and burden, Sam conveyed a broad range of emotions. In his character could be seen basic human virtues and flaws such as: anger, loyalty, fear, compassion, doubt, faith, jealousy and, of course, love. Interesting because on January 5, 2002 I wrote about LOTR1: What interested me most about the film were the relationships and the emotions and Sam's dedication to Frodo's adventure, er, quest, er, thing. The rest of it was sword fighting. * Just for fun: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Tuesday, December 16, 2003 *       Huh... Thomas Burke I Want You to Want Me 2003 acrylic on metal 24 in. x 120 in. Monday, December 15, 2003 Sunday, December 14, 2003 Saturday, December 13, 2003 Friday, December 12, 2003 Thursday, December 11, 2003 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 * My friend Nick Brown is now halfway through a three-year MFA program at Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He's left painting behind for walking- work focusing more on the land around Champaign County, mapping and documentation, history, and solo and guided walks. He has a new site for documenting this work, Walking In Place, and a new Moveable Type weblog. Walking and hiking long distances has always been important to Nick, whether solo or with others (for example, his two efforts at the Pacific Crest Trail while he was living in Oakland), and he has long wanted to connect this activity and his interests in ecology, permaculture, sustainable energy and agriculture to an art practice. Interesting to see what develops. How can walking be art? Or is walking part of or the art-making process? Is the process itself the art, like a performance? Does the process produce something else that is the art? Is the experience provided for others the art? Is the idea of the walk, the plans for it and the serendipity during it, or the final completion of the walk and what it became, is that the art? Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, both British artists, are know for their solo walks, and both produce art objects. Long produces site-based and gallery-based sculpture out of rocks, sticks, and mud. Fulton produces prints, photos, wall paintings, and documentation. Anthony Goldsworthy, whom many know through the film Rivers and Tides makes art on the land using what he finds there- he is still an object maker. Helen and Newton Harrison have made images, maps, documentation, and installation that adddress ecology and land reclamation. This list could go on to include many artists of greater and lesser renown working in and on the land, amking art about land, working on community projects, collaborations, land-use design, etc. I don't fully understand Nick's approach. I don't know his goals, thesis, or theory. I have a pretty good idea of what he's interested in, and how he wants to live his life, but I don't quite know where he stands right now art-wise. From what I can tell from looking at his site, and reading the quotes of authors he cites, it seems to me that he is immersing himself in the land, history, and demographics of thecounty where he now lives, not just to know about it, but by walking the actual terrain and distances, by putting his mind and body through the time it takes to do this, he wants to fully experience and know this place. What I wonder- how will his experience be an art that I as an audience can share? As an audience I am looking for the products- whether residue or by-products that are captured with some kind of intention, purpose, and craft- with which I can interact. Perhaps this will be the website, or radio broadcasts from the field he's thinking about. Maybe it will be the accumulation of maps, photos, and data. Maybe it will be some of the buildings he wants to make out of recycled materials. Not sure- I can't tell yet; perhaps, this will become clear as Nick continues the work. A couple of questions I don't know the answer to- is a person's life lived as art an art form that others can be involved in? When do a bunch of activities coalesce into something that is the art? * The SF Chronicle is amazing: Mark Rothko brought back from the dead to attend oh so important and glittering party of artworld denizens and socialites. Freaky! Frances Bowes loves a party, and who doesn't? She just likes to go farther than most to find her fun. She and husband John were in New York City for the Dia Art Foundation Gala, held at Dia: Chelsea. Big-time artists (Francesco Clemente, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra), big-time fashion designers (Helmut Lang, Zac Posen), and big-time movie producers (Robert Altman, Sofia Coppola) were among the guests. Art collector Frances, chair of the Dia board's events committee, had Paula Cooper (who put the first gallery in SoHo), Jamie Niven (son of late actor David Niven) and Stephen Graham (son of the late Washington Post editor Katharine Graham) at her table, among others. Big names in the Big Apple. What else did you expect? Here in town, Frances was set to celebrate an important birthday last night with a few hundred friends at a waterfront pier. Nobody of a certain age likes to go into details, so we won't say how old she is -- this time. Just wish her a happy one, will you? No, I don't read the social column. While flipping pages and scanning ol' Mark's name caught my eye. Tuesday, December 9, 2003 Monday, December 8, 2003 Sunday, December 7, 2003 * Read Jim@shed: leaves. Saturday, December 6, 2003 * Thank you, Lloyd. Some carefully framed pics are just the ticket. This is the time of year when one can look to Lloyd for reports from Maui about surfing and snorkeling, turtles, family and extended family, things green and vibrant and warm. And many thanks to others who wrote or sent good vibes: Isaac, Lynn, Catherine. Why does Lloyd think I might not see the pictures? After a day on the operating table, should I be too tired to check out a few weblogs? I'm up posting this near midnight because I'm a little wired. The surgery went fine, or so I think. I was at Alta Bates a long time; there at 7:30, wheeled out to the car at 3:30. Even minor surgery takes nearly a day's commitment, and the patient puts oneself in the hands of many others; all in all it was a pretty good experience, but also one of patience, vulnerability, and a reckoning with one's place in the world. The workings of a hospital are interesting. In the surgery unit one is like a product on an assembly line which for the most part works pretty smoothly. I was told by my doctor at the pre-op appointment that I'd be knocked out, but right before the procedure the anesthesiologist told me bedside that I could either be put to sleep or given a epidural- numbness from the hips down. I chose #2 because I'm a little creeped out by being put under, and I wanted to watch on the monitor, which was pretty cool. What I didn't expect was that I'd fall asleep in post-op, such a deep sleep that the nurses were surprised and kidded me a bit about it. Plus, for about two and a half hours I could not do anything much below the waist but wiggle my toes, which was interesting. That meant I had to stay in post-op probably at least an hour longer. So now I'm tired but wide awake, waiting for a vicodin to kick in now that my knee is really starting to hurt. At the moment this hurts more than I was expecting. I'm hoping I'll be able to sleep. * Another review at Artcritical of Thomas Nozkowki's latest, this time by Sherman Sam, who name-checks others who interest me: Richard Tuttle, Raoul de Keyser, Jonathan Lasker. New to me: Kultureflash. Friday, December 5, 2003 * I'm going to stop the Ruby's Escape drawings; they're not what I wanted and I don't know where to go next. When I'm like this, wondering about what next, I go back to doing simple drawings, sometimes iconic little things, just looking for an image, a motif or a line, a shape or a space, just looking for a launching point into something else. I don't know about your monitor, but on mine that blue surrounded by red just pops, even though it dramatically drops back behind the red. Drawing-wise the blue is the figure and the red is the ground, but spatially, forced by color, the red is the solid and the blue is a void. Thursday, December 4, 2003 * I'm not happy with the "Ruby's Escape" images of the past few days. They're not getting at whatever it is I have in mind or feel about a spirited young runaway dog coming into and enhancing our lives. The images feel like a throwback, or falling back, on earlier attempts to do a kind of line drawing in a medium that just doesn't lend itself to this. The one drawing that comes to mind that achieved this satisfactorily was made over a year ago in the series, "The Asian Influence in Drawing." The HTML and table complexity of this drawing is actually quite dense, and not something I'd be able to regularly sustain for a decent drawing each day over several days unless I didn't have other obligations such as, for example, a job. I think the regression in these drawings is related to: just completing a very long series, the end of which is kind of a letdown; my knee surgery on Friday; and the stress of buying a house. Still, it's important to keep doing one each day in order to work through these sketchier periods to something better. Wednesday, December 3, 2003 * Reading material: I repeat, the latest issue of Rudolf's Diner, the theme of which is Gratitude, December 2003, is now online. The December Interactive University News is out. Tuesday, December 2, 2003 Ruby's Escape II * Some people asked me, "What happened? Did Ruby escape?" No, I've just had this title in mind for awhile; what Ruby escaped from was a bad home situation into our lives, which of course, if I do say so myself, is an excellent situation. These drawings are about her leaving one place for another, for a better place. There's no narrative, and I don't know where these will go or how many there will be. * The drawings of last week, "Smokey, Jackie, Jackie, Mookie," culminated in a final set that evolved out of six iterations. Sometime back I had written down chains of names based on first and last names: Smokey Robinson's last name leads to Jackie Robinson, whose first name leads to Jackie Wilson, whose last name lead to Mookie Wilson. All of the names I did like this were of African Americans. I could've gone from, say, Jackie Wilson to Flip Wilson, or any other variation. I liked the symmetry of singer, baseball player, singer, baseball player. Also I like the sound in each name of the hard "k" and the ending "y" vowel. Originally the list was six or seven names, but I lost it, and just did these four. For a bunch of silly drawings based on blocks of color doing four of these drawings everyday, each an extension of the previous day's drawings, was pretty engaging and a little challenging. Monday, December 1, 2003 Ruby's Escape I * Blogzine Rudolf's Diner, December 2003, is out, in which I have a piece, Nine Teachers. * Two articles about education in the Sunday Chronicle: First, an article that is quite an indictment of the waste and misdirected use of technology in schools. I am in a postion where I ought to be arguing the other side. But I read the article and I don't feel like arguing with it- there is a lot here I agree with: Computer illogic / Despite great promise, technology is dumbing down the classroom by Todd Oppenheimer Second, an article that is of the type that shows up now and then from a teacher describing the conditions in which they work. It's a standard periodic approach, I think, and almost a cliche, which has nothing to do with how well this is written and the significant truths the author lays out: Why Johnny, Shakela and Jose can't read / Schools are rat traps, home is a rescue mission, funerals abound by Jean Baker Sunday, November 30, 2003 Part VI   Smokey Robinson Jackie Robinson Mookie Wilson Jackie Wilson * The drawings of last week, Smokey, Jackie, Jackie, Mookie, culminated in a final set that evolved out of six iterations. Sometime back I had written down chains of names based on first and last names: Smokey Robinson's last name leads to Jackie Robinson, whose first name leads to Jackie Wilson, whose last name lead to Mookie Wilson. All of the names I did like this were of African Americans. I could've gone from, say, Jackie Wilson to Flip Wilson, or any other variation. I liked the symmetry of singer, baseball player, singer, baseball player. Also I like the sound in each name of the hard "k" and the ending "y" vowel. Originally the list was six or seven names, but I lost it, and just did these four. For a bunch of silly drawings based on blocks of color doing four of these drawings everyday, each an extension of the previous day's drawings, was pretty engaging and a little challenging. Saturday, November 29, 2003 Part V   Smokey Robinson Jackie Robinson Mookie Wilson Jackie Wilson Friday, November 28, 2003 Part IV   Smokey Robinson Jackie Robinson Mookie Wilson Jackie Wilson * It isn't often that I'm going to highlight a comptemporary "realist" or "representational" painter, whatever that is anyway, which is a whole other discussion, but I have long like John Wesley's paintings, which are currently showing at Fredericks Freiser in NY. Thursday, November 27, 2003 Part III   Smokey Robinson Jackie Robinson Mookie Wilson Jackie Wilson Wednesday, November 26, 2003 Part II   Smokey Robinson Jackie Robinson Mookie Wilson Jackie Wilson * I made this collection, fully formatted, using the Scholar's Box, in about two minutes. Title: Asian Painting Saved: November 26, 2003 at 11:14:28 AM Title: Summer Trees Casting Shade 15 century A.D. 2000.7 Author: Tai Chin (Dai Jin) Type: Image Date: Publisher: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive ISBN: Identifier: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3489n5jp Notes: Other Sources: Small Image Large Image Title: Plum Tree and Ducks by a Stream early 13 century A.D. 2000.29 Author: Ma Yüan (Ma Yuan) Type: Image Date: Publisher: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive ISBN: Identifier: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0q2n976s Other Sources: Small Image Large Image Title: The Gathering in the Apricot Garden 1638 cm.67 Author: Ts'ui Tzu-chung (Cui Zizhong) Type: Image Date: Publisher: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive ISBN: Identifier: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft829005mq Other Sources: Small Image Title: The Temple at Mt. Chih-P'ing 1516 CM.102 Author: Wen Cheng-ming (Wen Zhengming) Type: Image Date: Publisher: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive ISBN: Identifier: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft987006f7 Other Sources: Small Image Large Image Title: Old Trees and Landscape (in the tradition of Miu Fu (15th c.)) mid 15 century A.D. 2002.2.6 Author: Unknown Type: Image Date: Publisher: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive ISBN: Identifier: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft800005jk Other Sources: Small Image Large Image Title: The Pleasures of Fishermen 15 - early 16 century A.D. CM.84 Author: Wu Wei Type: Image Date: Publisher: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive ISBN: Identifier: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft609nb0vz Other Sources: Small Image Tuesday, November 25, 2003 Part I   Smokey Robinson Jackie Robinson Mookie Wilson Jackie Wilson * Ana Finel Honigman on Howard Hodgkin at Artnet. Joe La Plac interviews Donald Baechler at Artnet. Monday, November 24, 2003 * My grandmother, my father's mother, was born in Texas in 1905, coming to California in the late '30's. My mother's parents, both born in the late 1890's and raised in Arkansas, came to California post-WW II. Both sets of grandparents retained a certain way of talking throughout their lives. In particular, my paternal grandmother used occasional language and phrasing that was passed down to us, sort of jumping over or through our father. For example, instead of saying "a few" she would often say "a couple or three." I still say this. When we'd go get hamburgers to bring back to her house after a Saturday of yard work for her she'd get the condiments out of the refrigerator in order to "doctor them up." She didn't say ice cream, usually, but instead, "Would you boys like some cream?" And whenever one of us was being difficult or disagreeable she would call us "contrary." "Don't be so contrary." "Now, you're just being contrary." My younger brother and I can crack each other up by using that word with a very slight twang in an affectionate way. I know I'm contrary. Often I'll say I don't like something, criticize it, dismiss it, and I immediately think after, "Well, do I really? Who do I think I am?" I rarely feel contrary when I've been positive, but I often feel contrary in conversation, as if it's my nature to go another way. Last Friday, on ending the series "Places I Have Slept" I wrote: I have seen many painting shows where a painter has a motif, a figure, or a layout, and each painting in that body of work is just a different set of colors. Imagine any one of my drawings repeated ten or twelve times where the only real problem from work to work is color. This works well for some people, but I seem to have a hard time doing this. I don't naturally repeat myself, but instead have to choose to constantly do so. Typically, I've got to at least do enough of a significant variation from work to work so that I have not only a color problem but also a drawing problem, a spatial problem, and a scale problem to work with. Knowing this aversion of mine to re-using a drawing or design, I decided to do just that for a couple or three days; the drawings on Saturday, Sunday, and today use the same structure. Only the color schemes change. In the end, it wasn't so bad. * Catherine mentions her "new employee orientation." Huh? Did I miss something? You already have a job in El Paso? * In CIRCA art magazine John Beagles write: In a recent article, Robert Johnston, a Glasgow-based artist and writer, criticised the pervasive evil of the 'good idea' in contemporary art. Recounting a unproductive exchange with a college tutor, where he had been informed that he needed a 'good idea' to ground his work, Johnston came to the conclusion that he "hated good ideas." His irritation and disillusionment with any art that can be reduced to a movie-pitch hook is interesting, timely and astute... For Johnston 'good idea' represents a constellation of insidious strands in contemporary art. The good idea propels the kind of art which, in its streamlining of artistic aspirations down to a single idea, frequently demonstrates as much depth as a puddle. Johnston's dissatisfaction - "if there's one thing I can't stand it's the kind of art whose whole raison d'être is the good idea" is understandable. In part I share it. Me too. * An interview with some pretty strong statements by painter Sean Scully. Sunday, November 23, 2003 Saturday, November 22, 2003 * I edited the statement I wrote yesterday at the end of the series, "Places I Have Slept." * Jim's second weblog, Shed, (his first is private) is about a month old and, previously private, suddenly public. Good stuff here, a very interesting project. Dig around a little, there are a few surprises. Be sure to read "When." Friday, November 21, 2003 Oakland * The Oakland HTML drawing is the last drawing in the series "Places I Have Slept," which began August 3, 2003. I saved Oakland for last since it's where I live and a town I like. The series includes 133 places (I know there are more places than this, but I can't remember or name them), and a drawing for each place. There are just a few instances where I posted two or three drawings on a single day, usually places that, in my mind, somehow, I associate together. All drawings start with a small table, say 18 x 16 cells, with each cell 20 x 20 pixels. Except for a few drawings most have a strict grid structure of 20 x 20 pixel units. In a few cases I varied row height or column width, but mostly I set out to do pretty straightforward drawings based on a gird of equal units. There is nothing fancy here: no tables inside tables, no non-standard table attributes, no layers, no style sheets. The tables are made with Dreamweaver. Each day I picked a place from the list, meditated on the place , even if briefly, by saying the name, or picturing myself there, or trying to get a feeling of being in a place and surrounded by it, and tried to begin with the image that popped into my head, at least as a starting place. Of course, images in my head are not as complete or as quick to make as by hand. What almost always happened is that the image changed a lot through the making as I added or deleted columns and rows and copied and pasted code from one area of the table to another. In some ways this is more like a collage process. During some periods I'd get in a groove, finding new effects, enjoying the space being created, fretting over too much illusion-like transparency or the hint of perspective. Each time during the process of making a drawing I'd think of a next step, and knowing that this next step might be a laborious thing to do, and thus undo if I didn't like it, I would copy the current state, paste it, and work on this copy. Sometimes I would have a page, then, with maybe a dozen drawings, each a previous state of the next. A drawing might go through a many changes during its making, and it's interesting to looking back through some and see the stages they went though; I have them all saved. Sometimes I would make a very complex image, going through eight or ten stages, only to feel that I wasn't getting what I wanted, and so set off rapidly in a completey different direction, making the final drawing in just a few mintues very quickly and very simply, as if I had to go through a very elaborate process to arrive at something direct, even minimal, with few shapes or colors. When I made the list and started this series I had no idea it would last this long. I thought I would do more multiple-drawing days, but obviously it didn't work out that way. I also began with the intention of all drawings being the same size and dimensions, but I quickly abandoned this as each place is quite different in my memory, and the associations of some were more fond or intense than others. Having them all be the same size or dimensions would have instead lead to a logo-like series, and clearly to me, as some places are more important than others, or feel different, then each drawing had to be somewhat unique. Also, some places are intimate, some big and open, or, instead, my associations with these places might be more intimate or maybe large and open. I have a general sense that urban places are intimate, and rural or more wild places are larger or more open. I have seen many painting shows where a painter has a motif, a figure, or a layout, and each painting in that body of work is just a different set of colors. Imagine any one of my drawings repeated ten or twelve times where the only real problem from work to work is color. This works well for some people, but I seem to have a hard time doing this. I don't naturally repeat myself, but instead have to choose to constantly do so. Typically, I've got to at least do enough of a significant variation from work to work so that I have not only a color problem but also a drawing problem, a spatial problem, and a scale problem to work with. I"ve enjoyed having a project with over three months with a daily predetermined subject; this has freed me each day to memory, imagining, invention, and discovery. * Nice David Cohen review of current shows by Howard Hodgkin and Thomas Nozkowski. The artist has a peculiar dead-pan touch... He is not a minimalist: on the contrary, there is enormous variety in the quality of marks he puts down; but nor is he an expressionist who invests textures or strokes with "personality." His colors are odd and interesting but never terribly pleasant. The ultimate irony of his diffident yet involved touch and his insignificant but insistent signs is that he is not an ironist, either. So what is Thomas Nozkowski? The answer, I think, is that he is a truly radical abstract artist. There is an incredible sensation in a Nozkowski exhibition that although each painting is unmistakably his from a mile away, no two paintings are really alike. The enigma is always self-contained: The eye is detained and engaged within the picture. Taking to heart Kant's definition of beauty as "purposiveness without purpose," Mr. Nozkowski has found a great means by which to keep himself-and us-busy. Thursday, November 20, 2003 Inisheer * More, in a way, tooting my own horn, or pointing at myself- Brent Hallard's comment at Tom Moody's weblog: Stuck in a hotel room, YEP. I feel pretty much the same way as you suggest. Chris's stuff and comparing Halley's cell, and the two environments is nice. Not be so fond of Halley's work--overly fussy looking always to be hunting out the now--tells me pretty square on they are not the now they earnestly want to spell, which would lead to a long story, so back to Chris. it's just a sheer blow away of creative persistence and joy opening a browser watching things go 'different' on a daily basis. I click every day or so and just enjoy. You could say, Chris Ashley has become a part of a daily healthy harmless ritual. In his comments I sense there is a feeling he wants something back from them--something concrete--but I suggest he settle for the ephemeral--something like fame. Thanks. Very much. And yes, I do want something, though I'm not sure it's something "back." It has something to do with the HTML drawings being a component of my overall arts project, but that other components of the project aren't going as well. That's all I'll say about it right now. See Brent Hallard's site. Wednesday, November 19, 2003 Mojave * I have linked to Tom Moody's weblog for a couple of months now, checking in every other day or so. He's an artist, writes about art, and in addition to digital art has interests in other media- film and music, gaming, for example. I find his comments incisive, interesting, and sometimes quite surprising. I dont' know how Tom discovered my weblog, but he made a very interesting comment about my table drawings way back in late August, extending the logic of Greenbergian flatness, color, and, well, thingness through the minimalists, Flavin, and Lewitt to using code to send instructions to the browser to create a particular display on a monitor. I thought this was an extremely interesting take on the HTML drawings, one I certainly hadn't formulated myself. Imagine my surprise when I looked at his weblog this morning and found more comments by Tom about my work. He really gets what I'm doing, I think, and I'm grateful, flattered, and reassured at the same time. He writes about a friend's reaction to the drawings: "I think on some level, though, my friend still thinks of Ashley's work as reproductions of paintings, and is critiquing them imagining them "in the flesh," with smooth surfaces and crisp-but-not-brittle edges like, say, Cary Smith's. But such paintings don't exist, it's all illumination in your browser. Somehow people with an eye for traditional abstraction are going to have to subtract out that extra step they're taking of imagining the reified image and just enjoy the fleeting thing they're seeing on the screen. This is true anti-materialist practice: what conceptualism promised thirty-five years ago but never delivered, at least in a visually compelling form." I have to admit to straddling this issue a bit myself. My own ambivalence- hope or denial about my own artwork- is betrayed by the series of imaginary gallery views I created from previous HTML drawings this past January. I've long called these drawings macquettes, as if they were models or sketches for things I would produce out of real materials. But I've also always known , and kind of denied, that my method is one where I find the image through it's making. I knew that as soon as I might attempt to translate one of these tables into, say, paint, that through it's making it would become something else entirely, not to mention the fact the mediums themselves- a computer monitor vs. a canvas- have nothing to do with each other. I think I'm learning to let go of hoping to pull these two things together, and instead thinking about what else I've learned that I can use- process, habits, subject matter, and some loose and general ideas about form, color, and space. But the fact remains, the HTML drawings are things in themselves. They are what they are. And I appreciate Tom's take on this. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one keeping score here- the list on the far left of this page, "Places I Have Slept," contains 133 names. There are two remaining: Inisheer and Oakland. That means this series, which began August 8, 2003, will end on Friday. What next? Oh, I'm sure I'll think of something. Tuesday, November 18, 2003 Camp Curry * Things: CHEF The Business Value of Web Standards New CDE Web Site Showcases “Center in a Box” Open-Source Content Management Solution Implementations of the IMS Learning Design Specification Educational Bloggers Network National Learning Infrastructure Initiative Monday, November 17, 2003 Tuolumne Sunday, November 16, 2003 Puerto Vallarta Saturday, November 15, 2003 Crystal Bay Friday, November 14, 2003 Mendocino Thursday, November 13, 2003 Lake Isabella Wednesday, November 12, 2003 TWA; United; British Virgin; People's Express; Alaskan Mexicana; Southwest Tuesday, November 11, 2003 Lassen * Didn't like the drawing for Santa Barbara I did yesterday, so re-did it. I only commented out yesterday's drawing, so it's really still "there." Monday, November 10, 2003 Santa Barbara Sunday, November 9, 2003 Clear Lake Saturday, November 8, 2003 Big Sur Friday, November 7, 2003 Angel Island Thursday, November 6, 2003 Steep Ravine * Raoul de Keyser at David Zwirner * Check out Chris Knipp's movie reviews. * Howard Hodgkin: Wednesday, November 5, 2003 Verde Antique Tuesday, November 4, 2003 Barstow Monday, November 3, 2003 Shasta Someow I managed to put Shasta on my list twice and did this drawing before realizing it. I'm going to let it stand and have two drawings for this big mountain. Sunday, November 2, 2003 San Ramon Saturday, November 1, 2003 Inverness * Chris Knipp: XXI. Fighting Lies with Truths - 10/29/03 he truth may be out there but it’s so well hidden the ordinary citizen has a hard time finding it. The US media is in the hands of a business oligarchy in bed with government regulators. The administration has a vested interest in propagating “lie after lie after lie after lie.” In the “Home of the Whopper” chapter of his new book, Dude, Where’s My Country? Michael Moore says, “Maybe the reason Bush is still here is that he proved the old adage that if you tell a lie long enough and often enough, sooner or later it becomes the truth.” Friday, October 31, 2003 Clifden Thursday, October 30, 2003 McCloud * Archiving the Avant-Garde: Preserving Digital / Media Art A Free Public/Professional Symposium Wednesday, November 12, 2003 PFA Theater, UC Berkeley Wednesday, October 29, 2003 Bridgeport Tuesday, October 28, 2003 Yorkville * As time goes by I remember more places where I've slept- see list at left- and have begun to expand the camping and airplane items. Monday, October 27, 2003 Gualala * PA Artist Entrepreneur: Resources for Emerging Pennsylvannia Artists Emerge Project is dedicated to providing resources that help emerging artists build careers within the professional art world. * Lynn used this graphic last March to talk about her own kneee ailments, which seem to have improved. My problem is a tear in the medial mensiscus, or the inside, and the solution increasingly appears to be for me to submit to arthroscopic surgery. Oh boy. Sunday, October 26, 2003 Pasadena * Vadim Katznelson at Roy Boyd, Chicago Saturday, October 25, 2003 Munich * Amazing new Amazon feature- you can now keyword search the contents of over 120,000 books, about 33 million pages. Friday, October 24, 2003 Hope Valley Thursday, October 23, 2003 Olema * Yet another excellent Baghdad Journal with drawings by Steve Mumford at Artnet. * Yes, Lloyd, I'm so glad you stopped by and caught me this morning- very nice to talk to you and catch up a bit, even if only barely. Knees, eyes, weblogging, and, of course, the ATDP AIC next summer. Lloyd, I'm going to remind you of the need to formally write about what you've been doing and the past several years and to document what happens next- it's important and valuable stuff, and it needs a light shone on it. Wednesday, October 22, 2003 Cambridge * SF Chronicle: New Web site for campus jobs Anastasia Hendrix Wednesday, October 22, 2003 Bay Area university officials have started a Web site that will make it easier for job seekers to apply for jobs at 18 campuses across Northern California. The site, http://www.bayareaherc.org, went online Tuesday and lists all the jobs available at community colleges, professional schools and universities -- so whether you're looking to be the president of Stanford University or a secretary at Heald College, all you have to do is point and click for more information. The idea was the brainchild of a group of academics at UC Santa Cruz who collaborated with their counterparts at other schools to create the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium. By pooling resources, the schools will be able to attract more qualified applicants than they could independently, said Scott Rappaport, a spokesman at UC Santa Cruz. The consortium estimates its campuses will hire as many as 20,000 new employees over the next five years and as many as 50,000 by 2013. "In addition to faculty and research positions that are typically associated with higher education, there are also positions for lawyers, nurses, mechanics, engineers, Web developers, accountants, psychologists, animal care specialists, medical assistants and many others that can all now be found at one centralized Web location,'' said HERC director Nancy Aebersold. * Sebastian Fiedler at Universität Augsburg im Deutschland is teaching a seminar called Personal Webpublishing Systeme und Weblogs im Kontext von Lernen, Lehren und Wissensmanagment, and among the readings are my two articles [1] [2] on weblogs written, it seems now, oh so long ago. The students are responding on their own weblogs and it's interesting to read analysis of the articles, and also interesting that the students are writing in a second language, English; I wish I could respond in German. Nikolaus Koberling Uta Leidenberger Axel Gerstenberger What amazes me is how these articles are still relevant introductions for lots of people. Two years isn't that long ago, but in the tech world it is generations, and yet weblogging is essentially still the same practice. This also makes me think that another article, a progress report maybe, about some of the interesting developments or detours that some have taken, would be worth writing. For example, the purpose of my weblog, as a work, display, and archive space is quite different that the journaling and writing focus of most other webloggers. Tuesday, October 21, 2003 June Lake Monday, October 20, 2003 Garberville Sunday, October 19, 2003 El Portal * I installed Moveable Type last night, monkeyed with it a bit today and tonight, and now it works: http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/. It wasn't too hard. Now I'm trying to figure out how to install Moin Moin for a wiki; at the moment, without a shell account, I'm stumped. Saturday, October 18, 2003 Kapaa * George Lawson has digital photos of six new paintings on his site. All of the paintings are called Sancai, a "Chinese name meaning "three glazes" of a low fired lead glaze based style of decorating earthenware pottery regardless of the actual number of colors of the item (source)." The paintings, in oil, have a dense interweaving of marks made with a spatula, and use the same three colors, a red, green, and cream, that are drawn from classic San C'ai glazes. In a new statement George writes: "Painting is anthropomorphic, corporeal aspect is endlessly fascinating to me, so I try to find ways to highlight the dependencies between painted images and the physical supports that generate those images... This focus on the concrete sounds complicated but in a way it's as simple as what a potter does glazing bisque ware. Take a thing, an object, and put physical color on it and two things happen to the object. First the perception of the thing itself changes, whether it's a clay pot or a shallow rectangular box of stretched linen. Now it looks different. Secondly, the function changes. The object now supports an image. Actually they support each other. In a kind of symbiosis with the image, the object, this thing the painting, becomes a vessel for containing all the associative content viewers bring to or pull out of the work. "What is so interesting to me about viewers' associations is that they are largely unpredictable, uncontrollable, and, assuming at least a modest sympathy for the work, completely valid. This realization has led me to try and anticipate or at least accommodate in principle the open array of different takes on my painting (or painting in general), by generating images that are open as well, open to the myriad ways viewers have of crafting their own experience in front of a painting. Color is open in this way and has always been important in my work. Lately I've been revisiting the open gestalt or figure/ground type drawing generated by gesture, as in classic abstract expressionism. I would differentiate my drawing approach from abstract expressionism though, stemming as it does from a conscious consideration for the type of symbiosis I've described above, between the painted mark and the physical fact of its support." The two figures at right are a pair of lokapala, or heavenly guardians, Tang Dynasty, c. 700-750, from the Dallas Museum of Art that George directed me to. These figures strike dramatic poses and have the three-colored glazing. Several things occur to me as worth keeping in mind when looking at George's painting: the density and alloverness of the glazes; the figure's posture of turning and strength; the sharp angles and fierceness; the ornamentation and wings on their helmets. The drawing in George's paintings share these characteristics, and allows a reading of several figures, or the extreme close-up of a single figure, that are reminescent of the lokapala figures. The raw linen is akin to the unglazed area of the ceramics. It's interesting that he talks in his statement about how the colored surface of an object changes the object, and that the object itself is a carrier of the color. The color and the carrier effect each other. With a little prompting from the idea of san c'ai glazes and the lokapala figures one can begin to find several and varied ways of experiencing the images in and on George's paintings. * Observant viewers may notice a structural similarity between today's drawing for Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii, and the drawing on October 15 for Belfast, Northern Ireland. The connection? Islands, water, wind, cultural insides and outsides. * Wow, the National Palace Museum of Taiwan web site is terrific: well designed, full of features, lots of great content.     Friday, October 17, 2003 Hamburg * I've had this domain for quite awhile: http://www.chrisashley.net/. I've just signed up for cornerhost.com, which will now handle this domain- 100mb, $10 a month. Raymond recommended this provider. It takes a day or two for DNS to be assigned, so for now the new place is http://chrisashley.net.mn.sabren.com/. I'm moving my portfolio at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~cashley/ over to the new place, and my goal in the not too distant future is to set up a weblog, possibly Moveable Type, and a Wiki. The Wiki will be a place to develop drawing and writing, the weblog will be a place to exhibit, publish, and archive, and the web site will be a revolving portfolio of finished work. I want to include HTML drawings, photos of analog paintings and drawings, installation and types of photos, and essays, reflections, and reviews. I've wanted to make this move for awhile, but quite recently and suddenly my process, the way the work breaks down, and the future I see ahead, gained new clarity, and it seemed the right time to do this. I want to take what I've been doing to a deeper, more active level. I think I'm slowly finding an intersection between the HTML drawings and stuff on paper, wood, canvas, etc., and that the non-digital work is going to really get going in the next several months. One challenge will be to fully archive this weblog as a static site so that it can be incorporated into the new place. * Lloyd, something I think will interest you and other bloggers taking pictures: see this photo and then follow the link to Alec Soth's site. In particular, check out the projects called "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and "Dog Days, Bogota." The photos are great, but I particularly like the project aspect of this work. * Athough I haven't written about it here, some of the people I work with know that last night I had an MRI on my left knee. The last four week's have not been great for me. A mild stomach thing turned into a killer cold, in the middle of which I woke up one morning, now over two weeks ago, to incredible, intense, hobbling, debilitating pain on the inside of my left knee. No-walkin' pain. Limpin'-along, twisted spine pain. Contorted face pain. The odd thing is that I cannot think of anything I had done in the days before that would cause this sudden pain. Of course, I thought it would just get better all by itself. I always get better. And the actual location of the pain wasn't new; for years I've had very mild flairs of discomfort and weakness in the same spot, usually while going up stairs. I attributed this to too much running on pavement and too many sprains playing the infield, up until my mid-thirties when my right foot let me know that it really did not care for the pounding, no matter how euphoric I found running around 3 1/4 miles around Lake Merrit in 18:30. I'm not lying. The fact that I really hate being in gyms and around people, preferring the freedom of the open road and the sound of birds, explains the (muffled cough!) pounds I have put on in the past eight years or so. Well, that and some laziness. But after a week of pain I finally gave in and went to the doctor, who referred me for x-rays and the orthopedist. The orthopedist said my x-rays were great- no breaks, no tumours. But the description and location of my pain indicates something else, like cartilage, and that doesn't show up on x-rays. It only took another week to get an MRI appointment, and now that I've had the MRI I have to wait another week to see the orthopedist. In the meantime I'm on 1800 mg of ibuprofen a day and am wearing a knee brace. Sometimes my knee feels fine and I take Ruby out for a walk. And then I realize how much the ibuprofen is masking the pain, and that I should keep my walking to a minimum. Alta Imaging on Telegraph does MRIs early in the morning and at night, not during the day. When I asked why over the phone while scheduling the appointment I was told it was because a radiologist had to be present. Hmm, what, are these radiologists just moonlighting from their real jobs, as golf pros? Whatever. But last night I did not have any encounter with a radiologist, just the technicians. The doctors where probably in the back room watching game 7 between NY and Boston. At 8:15 p.m. I was in the waiting room watching the bottom of the eighth with the security guard. Just before I came in NY had tied the game, 5-5, and this guy, a NY native, of course, was stoked and cocky. He was the kind of guy who narrated and commented on everything. "Oh, you didn't even see that pitch, didja." "Sure, you can bring in another pitcher, but it ain't going to do no good." "All right, here's Ruben, c'mon, Sierra gonna knock it out." The nurse came to get me, and I said, jokingly, "What, you can't take me at this crucial point in the game," and she and the guard and I watched the rest of the inning. Then she lead me into the big room. It was a huge room with a big machine, about seven feet high and wide, a couple of feet thick, beige. In the middle of the machine was a big round hole with a table that slid in and out. Gee, I thought that maybe for a little ol' knee they had a tiny little machine, but no way, this was the full treatment. I lay on the table and she handed me foam earplugs that she'd twirled in her fingers at the ends for easy inserting because the machine is going to be really loud, and after I put the earplugs in she decided it was time to tell me more and give me instructions. I could barely hear her, of course, but the gist of it was: don't move for twenty minutes. So I laid there with my eyes closed, breathing slowly and resting, taking time out to center myself and imagine how I'm going to find perfection in my life. I was alone, the noisy machine was actually kind of hypnotic, soothing, and the table slide back and forth a couple of times to capture different segments of my knee. After what I thought was ten minutes it was all over, but the clock had actually moved twenty minutes. Out to the lobby, where it was 11th inning and still tied, I waited for the pictures, which were soon ready- a thick stack in an envelope, quite heavy actually, that I bring to the doctor's next week. We'll use these to find out what is up, to see what's going on. To, most likely, ask some questions and advocate for myself. But I only want to hear something like, "It's nothing; your knee got mad at you for not doing yoga, or something. Relax, walk, and it'll take care of itself. You'll live to be 95, at least, and you'll be able to walk five miles a day, maybe more with good shoes. Just limber up." What I may actually hear, I'm afraid, is something much more than that, because the way I feel things twisting and bumping togther in my knee, I tell you, it's just not right. * Melissa Meyer: paintings at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NY. Thursday, October 16, 2003 Bonn Wednesday, October 15, 2003 Belfast Tuesday, October 14, 2003 Corofin * The list on the left side of this page includes every place I can remember having slept a night in my life, written in early August 2003. Over the last couple of months I've occasionally made some small adjustments, but the list hasn't changed much in size during this time, and I thought this project would be coming to an end in a couple of weeks. But yesterday I started thinking about and remembering a bunch of places I have slept but didn't remember. Now it looks like this little project is going to probably extend for about three weeks longer than I thought. It's neither good nor bad, it just is. Note that much of this is California. I also need to dig up some names of places that I can't recall. Garberville Gualala Anderson Valley- Sheep Dung Estates One night B&B near Mendocino three lakes, 395, south of Mono? South Tahoe, ski, cabin, Scandinavian motif- it starts with an S Tahoe City/Crystal Bay- Cathy's wedding, hotel El Portal Where in San Simeon Russian River Jenner Olema Inverness Pasadena Mullaghbawn, - we didn't actually stay in Crossmaglen, we stayed in Mullaghbawn; in Crossmaglen, Ann stepped out of the pub into the side road around 11:30 to get some fresh air where a group of British solders/Royal Ulster Constabulary- cops, police, call them whatever, these guys were dressed in full fatigues, helmets, automatic weapons, the works. As she opened the door and the light inside shown outside the group stopped and raised their rifles at her. Tuolumne Meadows Bridgeport Lone Pine- we were wandering around outside a rocky area of town when we saw a huge boulder move- it was a movie set, and they were shooting a Star Trek movie What is that town by the big resevoir on the way to Death valley, south of Yosemite, a small dusty town, near Pinnacles?, where we camped one night Monday, October 13, 2003 Vienna * Looks like Karin has a every-other-day rhythm going on her weblog. Nice. Sunday, October 12, 2003 Mullaghbawn Crossmaglen Saturday, October 11, 2003 Sea Ranch * I really hated the 20031006 drawing for Sacramento so I've changed it completely. I rarely go back to past drawings for changes like this, but the one that was there was a mess. I didn't erase the HTML, it's just commented out and can still be viewed by those that know how, as if anyone would want to. Friday, October 10, 2003 London * I didn't know this existed: Archives of American Art; Quick Reference to Oral History Interviews Thursday, October 9, 2003 Edinburgh * Stephen Westfall: Recent review at Art Critical Art in Context, recent images Lennong Weinberg, very recent images Aurobora Press, recent monotypes Essay on Stephen Westfall by Jerry Saltz at InLiquid. Jungle Press Bard College Wednesday, October 8, 2003 Calistoga * To look at/read later: Gunther Forg * Interview with teacher, curator, critic Dave Hickey in the Denver Post: Q: What gets left out of both of those scenarios (art writing) is the art itself, particularly the art object. A: Well, of course. Art objects are basically what interest me. My principle is always that people are (jerks) and ideas are smoke. Just give me an object any time. It (object-making) will become a discourse of enthusiasts. It will maintain in culture the kind of status that jazz has. I really think the world of object-making is receding into that kind of marginal status, which, in a sense, is OK for me. That's the status it had when I was a kid. I've talked with others about this recently. I believe the hand-made art object will attain a status of importance and rarity with specialized audiences, and while new media art will grow (video, installation, internet-based, digital images, etc.), and with it the audiences, new media art will be an art with a whole different experience and meaning from object art. New media art will be potentially more easily accessible, the boundaries blurring between the art and consumer media. And because much of this art is game and entertainment-based it is often a one-off experience. For me, good art is about repeated viewings. In the meantime object-based art will always require education, time, and the active engagement of the viewer, something many viewers just won't give readily to static objects. The issue of engagement for much new media art depends less on time and education, since so much now uses media familiar from the cradle: photographs, video, film language, narrative, popular themes, a stage set environment, lighting and sound from theater, etc. When I have referred in the past to my desire for a more elite art, I mean an art that demands of the viewer a non technology-mediated engagement, that uses the eye, that requires the time-based experience of seeing and knowledge that extends over years, even a lifetime, that requires education, reflection, repeated viewing. My feeling is that the more machines do for us the less grounded we are, and the less grounded we are, the less we see and feel. I am interested in an art of seeing and feeling, and the intellectual processing and cognition of the experience of seeing and feeling. I am interested in an art that doesn't come and go in and out of style in 3-5 year cycles, that doesn't require new machinery and upgrades, that stands still and looks back at me. A 3,000 pot needs a pedestal, and doesn't really need more than that except a little security; new media art has the issue of it's existence- a video on tape, transferred to DVD, that will need to adapt to future technologies just to experience it can still have value, but it is so far removed from my breath and blink that for me it is not a solid experience. Q: What are some of the ways that you see the art world has changed in the last 20 years? A: Art's just not that important or that fashionable anymore. It's not cool. Not only that, it's not intellectually serious. But art gets sold. I just talked to a friend of mine who came back from New York, and he said, 'I didn't see anything but C-prints (a type of color photograph).' They're all going to turn green, which makes them terrible collector objects. And they're all really boring. What do you do with an art world in which the normative work of art is a giant C-print of three Germans standing beside a mailbox. What's that? Stop it, please. This example sounds like a joke, however it is not an extreme exaggeration. * I have no faith in a political process, national or state-based, that is stuck in the machinery of the two-party system. This, to me, is a fault still with even well-intentioned movements like moveon.org. Our governments are in ruts, and the process is corrupt. I also have no faith anymore in an electorate that is impatient and can't follow rules, and sees issues as black and white. I am disillusioned by the superficiality of yesterday's election. I don't believe the media. I am disappointed with the cost of housing. I feel threatened by our health care system. I am bored with the forty hour work week. It's too crowded. I hate the sound of bass-heavy hip hop from cars on the street. My knee hurts. A really good organic tomato requires a down payment. Yakety yak yak yak, blah blah blah. Tuesday, October 7, 2003 Death Valley Monday, October 6, 2003 Sacramento * In the past two and a half weeks... Sunday, October 5, 2003 Carmichael Saturday, October 4, 2003 San Jose * Comments on Bach's Goldberg Variations (for RY). Friday, October 3, 2003 Victoria, B.C. * Steve Mumford has another installment of his Baghdad Journal with wash drawings at Artnet. * Lynn and Catherine are interested in some table drawings as designs for quilts. Lloyd was interested in one image in particular about a year ago to be used for a quilt. It's all fine with me. Patsy Krebs has made quilts similar to her paintings. A very popular show of quilts from Gee's Bend, AL was at the Whitney earlier this year (review w/images). A recent Matrix show at BAMPFA featured Anna Von Mertens, who "hand-dyes the fabric and hand-stitches the patterns of her sculptures, which take the form of nontraditional quilts." Thursday, October 2, 2003 Minneapolis * Just referencing an interview with artist Dan Walsh I want to read. * FBL-M December 8, 1919 - October 2, 2000 Wednesday, October 1, 2003 Amsterdam * Hey Lloyd, here's a list- Neil Young bootlegs: Neil Young - set lists June, 4th+5th 1970, CSNY, Fillmore East, NYC, 4 CD 12/05/70, Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1 CD 2/25/70, Music Hall, Cincinnati, Ohio w/ Crazy Horse, 2 CD (little blip on disk 2, track 7, but otherwise good) 2/27/71, Solo, London, 2 CD 1970-71 Tour Compilation, 3 CD 01/08/73, w/The Stray Gators, Detroit 2 CD, (Neil Young & The Stray Gators 01-08-1973 Cobo Hall, Detroit, Michigan Audience Source - Sound Quality: 9.0 out of 10 - Analog Master-CDR Two 74-minute discs Disc One: On The Way Home / Tell Me Why / LA / I Am A Child / Love In Mind / Sugar Mountain / Borrowed Tune // Out On The Weekend / Band Intro / Harvest / Heart Of Gold Disc Two: Intro / Times Fades Away / Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere / New Mama / Come Along And Say You Will / Alabama / Cinnamon Girl / Don't Be Denied / Lookout Joe / Last Dance // Are You Ready For The Country?) 1/15/73, w/ The Stray Gators, Toronto, 2 CD 11/5/73, w/ The Santa Monica Flyers, Rainbow Theatre, London, 2 CD 11/03/73, Manchester, England, 2 CD 5/16/74, Citizen Kane Jr. Blues, Live at the Bottom Line, NY, 1 CD 12/20/75, Cotati, 2 CD 3/31/76, w/Crazy Horse, Hammersmith Odeon, London, England, 2 CD 6/26/76, The Stills Young Band, Evening Coca-Nuts, Boston Garden, Boston, Massachusetts, 1 CD 11/21/76, Hurricane Over Boston, 2 CD 1976, Joel Bernstein Tape, same as "Acoustic Young", 1 CD (Campaigner The Old Laughing Lady Human Highway Tell Me Why After The Gold Rush Harvest Mr Soul Here We Are In the Years Journey Through The Past White Line Give Me Strength Don't Say You Win Mellow My Mind Too Far Gone The Needle And The Damage Done Pochahontas Roll Another Number The Losing End Love Is A Rose Sugar Mountain) 5/27/78, "Solo, Boarding House", San Francisco - CD, fifteen songs, aprox. 65 min, very good sound, art 10/23/78, Forum, LA, 2 CD "Chrome Dreams" 1 CD 10/3/80, Bread & Roses Benefit, 1 CD 8/14/82, 1982 Trans Tour, Warmup, The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, 2 CD, art 10/19/82, Berlin, 2 CD 1/5/83, Solo, Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz, 2 CD 020684, w/Crazy Horse, The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, 2 CD 09/25/84, Austin City Limits Boot, 2 CD (Terrific gig with great filler: Disk One: 1-13 University Texas at Austin, 9/25/84; Tracks 14-17 Auditorium Theater, 11/15/17, Late Show. Disk Two: Tracks 1-8 University Texas at Austin, 9/25/84; Track 9 Studio; Tracks 10-11 Farm Aid 3 Lincoln, NE, 9/19/77; Tracks 12-16 Farm Aid 1, Champaign, IL, 9/22/85) 1984 Comp, 3 CD 092085, w/International Harvesters, Houston, TX, 2 CD 08/26/87, w/Crazy Horse, Coliseum, New Haven, Connecticut, 2 CD 1987, European "Rusted Out Garage" Tour, 3 CD (Viglione comp) 02/21/89 Seattle, WA Restless/Lost Dogs/Buffalo Chips, 2 CD 12/10/89, Solo, Muziektheater Stopera, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 1989, NY & The Restless, "Eldorado" EP, 1 CD Dylan/Young, SF Bay Blues, 2 CD Dec 89/Jan 90, Acoustic in Paris, 1 CD 11/13/90, The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, California, 2 CD The Ranch Rehearsals (Ragged Glory rehearsals + bonus tracks), w/Crazy Horse, 1 CD 091292, Solo, Noblesville, IN, 2 CD 7/3/93, Torhout Festival, Torhout, Belgium w/ Booker T And The MG's, 2 CD 9/18/94, Mother Earth, w/Crazy Horse, Farm Aid Superdome, New Orleans, 1 CD (The tracklist does not match the actual reported setlist: Country Home, Down By The River, All Along The Watchtower, Farmer John, Change Your Mind, Harvest Moon, Old Man, Heart of Gold, Rockin' in the Free World, Mother Earth) 062495, Listen To This Eddie, with Pearl Jam, San Francisco, CA 2 CD <s>9/26/95, Neil Jam w/Pearl Jam, video CD, Dublin, 2 CD</s> (Unfortunately, I am unable to burn VCDs; this is listed here just for my records.) 3/21/96, Last Night with The Echoes, 2 CD 5/9/96, Neil Young & the Echoes (aka Crazy Horse), The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, CA, 2 CD, art 6/27/96, Roskilde, Denmark, 2 CD 07-19-1996, Phoenix Festival, Stratford upon Avon, England 05/19/97, Hippie Dream, w/Crazy Horse, The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, California, 1 CD 7/11/97, "Acoustic Afternoon", Mtn View, CA, 1 CD <s>Bridge Video CD, 2 CD </s>(Unfortunately, I am unable to burn VCDs; this is listed here just for my records.) 3/20/99, "Solo, Paramount Theatre", Oakland, CA- 22 songs, 2 CD, approx 120 min, excellent sound, art variation 3/22/99, "Solo, Wiltern Theatre", LA, CA - 21 songs, 2 CD, approx 120 min, excellent sound, art- front, back (Although this is a good recording the first approx. 90 seconds of Disk 2, "Distant Camera," is at very low volume. I am told this is in the source, and I haven't yet tracked down another recording.) 5/1/99, Chicago, 2 CD 5/29/99, Austin, 2 CD 1999 Solo Tour Comp, 5 CD, art 1/26/00, CSNY @ Kansas City, 3 CD 3/2000, CSNY @ Philadelphia, 3 CD, 2000, Ranted@Rust 1 CD 2001 Music in Head Tour Compilation, 3 CD 1/10/01, Warfield, SF, 2 CD 1/11/01, Warfield, SF, 2 CD 4/21/01, w/ Crazy Horse @ Scott Stadium, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, 6/15/01, Birmingham, UK, 2 CD 7/6/01, Hamburg, 2 CD 072101, w/Crazy Horse, Lucca, Italy, 3 CD 07/10/01, w/ Crazy Horse, Montreux Jazz Festival Montreux, Switzerland 2 CD 5/18/02, Rock Am Ring, 2 CD 04/22/03, Solo, Cirkus, Stockholm, 2 CD 042903, Solo, Congress Centrum, Hamburg, 3CD 043003, Solo, Tempodrom, Berlin, 2 CD 05/01/03, Solo, Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 2 CD 050803. Solo, Amsterdam, 2 CD 05/07/03, Solo, Lierderhalle, Stuttgart, 2 CD 06/09/03, w/Crazy Horse, St. Petersburg Times Forum, Tampa, FL, 2 CD 06/13/03, w/Crazy Horse, Bonaroo, KY, 2 CD 062603, w/Crazy Horse, Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York 070203, w/Crazy Horse, Tweeter Center at The Waterfront, Camden, New Jersey 2003 Greendale Solo Compilation, 5 CD Love Art Blues, 1 CD <s>Rock Am Ring, 2 VCD</s> (sorry, I can't make VCD copies) Other Comps & Collections Neil Young Meets Buffalo Springfield and The Squires 1 CD, soundboard recording demos from Elektra Studios in 1965 (tracks 1-9) and two from Elektra in 1965 (tracks 10 & 11). The last two tracks from NY MEETS... are the singles from Neil's first "real" band, The Squires, in 1963. Songs: Sugar Mountain, Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing, Run Around Babe, Don't Pity Me Babe, I Ain't Got The Blues, The Rent Is Always Due, When It Falls It Falls All Over You, Down To The Wire, Do I Have To Come Right Out And Say It, There Goes My Babe, One More Sign, The Sultan, Aurora Hawks & Doves/ReAcTor Live, 1 CD (1) The Old Homestead 8-15-74 Uniondale, NY 2) Stayin' Power 10-3-80 Berkeley, CA 3) Coastline 10-3-80 Berkeley, CA 4) Union Man 10-3-80 Berkeley, CA 5) Comin' Apart At Every Nail 10-3-80 Berkeley, CA 6) Hawks And Doves 9-25-84 Austin, TX 7) Opera Star 11-21-86 San Francisco, CA 8) Surfer Joe And Moe The Sleaze 5-11-87 Berlin, Germany 9) T-Bone 11-13-90 Santa Cruz, CA 10) Southern Pacific 9-25-84 Austin, TX 11) Motor City 7-15-83 Dallas, TX 12) Rapid Transit 7-27-97 Clarkston, MI (note: just a snippet, not the song) 13) Shots 5-27-78 San Francisco, CA) Neil's Rarest, 1 CD, 16 tracks, (1-5 NY & The Restless: Eldorado EP) 1.Cocaine Eyes 2. Don't Cry 3. Heavy Love 4. On Broadway 5. Eldorado 6. War Song 7. Home on the Range 8. Pushed it Over the End (9-11. Sample and Hold 12") 9. Sample And Hold (dance remix) 10. Mr. Soul (dance remix) 11. Sample And Hold (single version) ; (12-13 NY & Bluenotes) 12. I'm Goin' 13. Ten Men Workin' (NY: 14-16 Dead Man promo single) 14. Edit 15. Edit w/ Johnny Depp spoken words 16. Long Version On The Beach/American Stars 'N Bars live, 1 CD (sixteen tracks, varous venues and bands) (1) Walk On - 9/8/74, Roosevelt Raceway, Westbury, New York (w/ CSNY) 2) See The Sky About To Rain - 2/27/71, Royal Festival Hall, London (little distortion at 2:57 and 3:15) 3) Revolution Blues - 1/25/83, Cow Palace, San Francisco 4) For The Turnstiles - 6/9/89, Great Woods Perf. Arts Center, Mansfield 5) Vampire Blues - 7/95 Rustie Tribute Version (note: from the unreleased Tribute III Tape recorded by Sacred roots (Paul Gase: Guitars, Drums, Percussions / Rich Hand: Vocals, Harmonica / Chuck Singer: Keybord, Bass) 6) On The Beach - 5/16/74, The Bottom Line, New York City 7) Motion Pictures - 5/16/74, The Bottom Line, New York City 8) Ambulance Blues - 7/13/74, Oakland Stadium, Oakland 9) The Old Country Waltz - 3/19/96, Old Princeton Landing, Princeton 10) Saddle Up The Palamino - 6/19/84, Palomino Club (Late Show), Los Angeles (note: Hey Babe - live version unavaiable) 11) Hold back the tears - 6/19/84, Palomino Club (Late Show), Los Angeles 12) Bite The Bullet - 11/22/76, Music Hall (Late Show), Boston, 13) Star Of Bethlehem - 9/14/74, Wembley Stadium, Wembley 14) Will To Love, - from: Chrome Dreams, unreleased album 15) Like A Hurricane - 3/3/76, Aichken Taiikukan, Nagoya 16) Homegrown - 2/6/84, The Catalyst (Late Show), Santa Cruz. Total time: 79:22 min (80 min CDR will be needed) ) 1990 Ragged But Right Ragged Glory rehearsals plus five live tracks from various dates, 1 CD "Warpath" (inc. 1/91 show as "filler") 4 CDR; Disc One: Santa Cruz 11/13/90: Country Road, Surfer Joe & Moe the Sleaze, Love to Burn, Days That Used to Be, Bite the Bullet, Cinnamon Girl, Farmer John, Cowgirl in the Sand Disc Two: Over and Over, Dangerbird, Don't Cry No Tears, Sedan Delivery, Roll Another Number, Fuckin' Up, T-Bone, Homegrown, Mansion on the Hill Disc Three: Like a Hurricane, Love and Only Love, Cortez the Killer; Minneapolis 1/22/91: Hey Hey My My, Crime in the City, Blowin' in the Wind, Powderfinger, Farmer John Disc Four: Country Home, Mansion on the Hill, Days That Used to Be, Love to Burn, Campaigner, Rockin' in the Free World, Love and Only Love, F*in' Up, Tonight's the Night 2001, I'll Cover You, Too (ICY2), NY cover compilation, 2 CD, artwork Thirteen Moons, Live Performances Captured Between January 21, 2000 and January 22, 2001, 4 CD Young Does Dylan, 1 CD (1. Forever Young - With the Grateful Dead – 11/3/91 2. Just Like Tom Thumb Blues – Acoustic - 9/18/92 3. All Aong the Watchtower – With Semi-Acoustic Crazy Horse - 9/18/94 4. Everything Is Broken – Acoustic with Tom Petty - 10/28/89 5. Blowing In The Wind – With Crazy Horse - 4/9/91 6. Forever Young – With Acoustic Stray Gators – 11/2/91 7. Just Like Tom Thumb Blues – With Firefall – 8/28/76 8. Baby What You Want Me To Do – With Booker T and the MG’s – 1/16/92 9. All Aong the Watchtower – Acoustic – 10/2/94 10. Helpless / Knockin On The Dragon's Door - '75 SNACK Benefit (with Dylan) 11. Forever Young – With Nicolette Larson on Pump Organ – 11/2/91 12. Just Like Tom Thumb Blues – With Booker T and the MG’s – 10/16/92 13. All Aong the Watchtower – With Booker T and the MG’s – 10/16/92 14. Blowing In The Wind – Acoustic - 10/21/01 15. Surprise bonus song (It's perhaps the ultimate party song) – unknown EVERYTHING - Is it even Neil? You decide.) Groove City, 1 CD (1. Like An Inca - 9/11/82 - Stadio dei Pini, Viareggio, Italy 2. Down By The River - 5/8/96 - The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, CA 3. Tonight's the Night - 8/20/88 - Cayuga Fairground, Weedsport, NY 4. Big Time - 5/22/96 - Old Princeton Landing, Princeton-By-The-Sea, CA) 1999 Bridge School Benefit #1310-30/31-1999 10 CD (Neil Young, Pearl Jam, The Who, Sheryl Crow, Green Day, Billy Corgan & James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins, w/Jimmy Chamberlin) Tom Waits (Saturday Only), Emmylou Harris (Sunday Only), Lucinda Williams, Brian Wilson) 1997-99, "Pictures in My Mind, A Collection of Unreleased Material 1997-99"- 19 songs, approx 90 min, very good tape, sound, sudden cuts between songs 2000, "Archives Be Damned 2000" Monster collection of unreleased archives CD, http://www.hyperrust.org/Rust/ABD.html, 5 disks, art Rock 'n Roll Cowboy, 4 CD, art, complete in zipped file A Perfect Echo, 8 CD Funniest Damn Neil Young Tape, 2 CD- a compilation of NY talk, mostly between-song, some during songs, with brief amounts of music; both CDs are a single track. For the completist. <s>Saturday Night Live Video Compilation (9/3/89, 12/5/92, 5/6/00), 1 CD,- unfortunately, I can't make VCD copies</s> Tuesday, September 30, 2003 San Diego * Hey, I guess Lynn never read the fine print on my weblog: "© Christopher Ashley." Should I be flattered or outraged that she wants to "rip me off" and make quilts from my images? Is that what this whole file sharing thing has led to- stealing my artwork? But seriously, folks, why would I copyright this weblog? The answer- just in case. Just in case I hit on something. Just in case someone uses something and takes credit or makes money. Sounds remote, yeah, but I'm not opposed to either credit or money. Lynn, you can use any image you like. The easy way to handle them is to take a screen shot, paste it into your favorite graphics program, and save it as a gif or jpg, whatever. I'm curious- which ones are you interested in? Monday, September 29, 2003 Winton, CA * Thanks to Pepe who passed on to Lloyd who called this to my attention: Tuesday, September 30, 5:15 p.m. Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London: The Aesthetics of Net Art- a lecture and demonstration with responses by Greg Niemeyer, Assistant Professor of Art, Technology, and Culture, Department of Art and Whitney Davis Professor of History of Art and Theory and Chair, Department of History of Art Room 308 J, History of Art/Classics Library, Third Floor, Doe University Library Sponsored by The Department of History of Art; The Consortium for the Arts & Arts Research Center; The Center for New Media (New Academic Initiatives); The Dean of Arts & Humanities, L & S * Artist Tips- a weblog with, so far, a single entry. Sunday, September 28, 2003 Victorville Saturday, September 27, 2003 Tehachapi Friday, September 26, 2003 Lone Pine Thursday, September 25, 2003 Yosemite Wednesday, September 24, 2003 North Star Tuesday, September 23, 2003 Atlanta * Hey Karin, can you email me? I need a managing editor password for /curriculum. In fact, it seems that I don't actually belong to some/many of the sites you handed off to me, so I think I need your password. Thanks. Monday, September 22, 2003 Mazatlan Sunday, September 21, 2003 Zurich * Minus Space Saturday, September 20, 2003 Reno * Karin, you might take comfort in knowing that when I read your latest entry about not getting the reading right away, I thought, "whew, I'm not the only one." You know, you show up for class, you've read the chapter, and then everyone starts talking about it and you think, " well, I see that now that you point it out..." Friday, September 19, 2003 Las Vegas * I've had this a couple of weeks now; it sounds great and is fun to play: Thursday, September 18, 2003 West Monroe, LA * As this is Icelandic, I think, I need a translator: Kallisti september 17, 2003 Listablogg Christopher Ashley gerir abstrakt listaverk með töflum í html og setur þau á bloggið sitt þegar hann getur ekki hugsað í orðum heldur aðeins í málverkum. Sniðugt. Wednesday, September 17, 2003 Dublin * I got a mention at artkrush, which caught me off-guard this morning, but then later saw it reflected in my stats. It's kind of weird to link to. The main artkrush page has an embedded scrolling frame for daily news, which says: Siegfried Holzbauer html paintings. I gleaned this from Chris Ashley's daily blog who is also a html devout. A direct link to this embedded page can be read outside of artkrush's contextual framing. I don't know if the "I" here is Christopher Elam, Editor in Chief, or someone else. * Lloyd writes, "Chris, this Joycean fan would love to know the story behind today's Dublin drawing!" Well, thanks for asking. By the way, don't I have a story about Inisheer to finish? I can't say that there is exactly a story here, but there are some elements of knowledge and personal memory and vision that give the image meaning for me. In particular, it is interesting that you invoke Joyce. Anyone who hasn't been following along -- and why should you; these drawings are just a bunch of texty code that have me hamstrung by a limited palette and lots of right angles -- should know that the long list of cities currently along the left side of this weblog are cities in which I've slept during my lifetime. This listing is something Lloyd instigated among a number of Berkeley webloggers several weeks back. After making the list it occurred to me, aha, this is content about which to make drawings for... days, even weeks. Great! I can stop thinking and just start responding. That's important- having something to respond to- a person, place, thing, time, phrase. Here are things that was on my mind while making today's drawing, Dublin: Our trip to Ireland in August 2000 was one of the best bit of traveling I've done. The country, land, people, culture, and history made a deep impression on me. I felt a deep connection with the place because of my own Scots-Irish heritage. I read Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, at a tender age, and the story "Araby" in particular is one I've re-read many times and carried with me over the years. Images of night, dull light, curtains and shades, loneliness, disappointment, and yearning are evoked for me by this story. I didn't plan this, necessarily, but the color and arrangement of two disconnected figures evokes this for me. I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. (The entire story, the entire book, can be read at Bibliomania) The floor plans of cathedrals take the shape of the cross. The cross is an important figure, of course, in Ireland; the celtic cross, in particular, is a powerful shape. I wanted to subtly evoke both church shape and cross, but subvert a direct literal reading so that the shapes can be or do other things, like a figure, architecture, a landscape, a street path. By the way, the shapes I used in the drawing I did of Quin (near Shannon, Co. Clare) the other day are very interesting to me: the image reads as a landscape with an architectural element- this shape came right out of my memory of the enormous and beautiful skeleton of an abbey, Quin Friary, just down and across the road from our B&B, but when I finished the drawing I also realized that the form looked very much like a harp, another very important Irish image. Another by the way: I just discovered a weblog called North Atlantic Skyline, which has photos of the friary. Yes, the halo on the Virgin Mary by the side of the road in that first photo is neon and lights up at night. The statue is right across the road from the very friendly and busy pub where we spent the evening drinking Guinness, scotch whiskey, and watching Simpsons reruns. I believe it was the only pub in all of Ireland in which I saw a TV. Yesterday's drawing is about Kildare, in Co. Kildare. Besides the literalness of blue skies and green land, Kildare is set among rolling hills and is a desintation for horses and horse racing. See if that's in the drawing for you, too. The overlapping of the verticals and horizontals results in a darker area, as if the two shapes of the same color crossing over each other make a denser, thus darker, area. This is an effect I use now and then, but it is very easy to get carried away with it, to become illustrational, to make it an eye-catching, too-clever technique. I try to avoid this, but it's a bit seductive. It does betray an understanding of color, but it creates an artificial depth I find a bit, at times, calculating or obvious. Something I haven't talked much about is how many versions a drawing goes through to arrive at the one I actually show. Sometimes the page I work on for the day in Dreamweaver may have several different drawings on it, some sublte variations, some quite different, but only one is used for the day. This Dublin drawing did get carried much further with a lot of this overlapping, layered, color-density build up, but I decided it had gone too far and so backed off to something far more restrained. I had wanted to stay away from Irish colors, orange and green, but didn't totally- it just happened. I wanted dark interior colors, colors seen through windows, under clouds. Muted colors under rain clouds. The dim light of the pub. A slight feeling of movement, a subdued but truthful energy. I think I wanted both the feel of looking at something and being inside of something, of an inside and outside environment feeling. I could do a hundred drawings about Ireland. * Artist Steve Mumford has another installment of his Baghdad Journal at Artnet. This is a terrific series of ink wash drawings, first person accounts, and interviews from the streets of Baghdad. Previous installements include: 9/16/03; 8/27/03; 8/19/03. * Linked from Arts Journal- lots to read at Butterflies and Wheels: Butterflies and Wheels has been established in order to oppose a number of related phenomena. These include: Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated. Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games). Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments. Tuesday, September 16, 2003 Kildare * A former student of mine (grades 4-6 in Oakland), and now friend, has been studying digital art at the Art Institute of San Francisco (not the SF Art Institute, not the Academy of Art). He's an amazing artist, but has learning disabilities related to reading and memory. In order to graduate he's going to Laney to catch up on math, and is getting tutoring in pre-algebra- mulitplication, division, fractions, etc.- at Laney and from a community group. He's a hard worker, dedicated, determined to make it, and is a joy to work with. He is looking for more low-cost or free tutoring. It's a little hard to find programs for a 20 year old that can give him the support and time he needs. If you know of any community or campus-based tutoring programs in the Oakland, Berkeley, or even San Leandro areas, perhaps even San Francisco, please let me know so that I can pass the information on to him. * I would really like to read Rick Visser's interview with Stephen David Ross at Artrift about "The Gift As Art," which began many days ago and is today part 13. But I look at the page, the colors, and the three different fonts, and it just hurts my eyes to look and and even think about reading this. What I need is plain black on white, no fancy font. I'm hoping there will be a final compilation of the interview as, say, a PDF, or that, at least, I can copy and paste it all as plain text. I just cannot submit my eyes to this. What's the deal with webloggers who don't make their design light, fast, and readable? Or is it just me? Monday, September 15, 2003 Twain Harte- history * Lloyd, there's an interesting and related angle to what you wrote today -- "But if the example of California is to be any indication (Hawaii is too small and isolated a place to obtain solid generalizations), then I feel the chances are good that, in the not-so-distant future, considerations of one's ethnicity and race won't be an overweening factor in everyday social intercourse." -- in the SF Chronicle: "Diversity flourishes in gay, lesbian couples; In Bay Area, 25% are biracial or inter-ethnic." ...an estimated 25 percent of gay and lesbian couples in the Bay Area are in biracial or inter-ethnic relationships, according to an analysis of Census 2000 data. Comparatively, 7.4 percent of married couples are in similar relationships nationwide, and 15.6 percent of married couples in California are equally diverse. * Good interview about painting with Gary Stephan by Bradley Rubenstein at artkrush. GS: Yeah, I'd like to make abstract pictures that go right up to the line, and sometimes fall over into representation. I'd like to load them with as much stuff as I can without having people say, "oh, a dog" or "a golf course." But I'd like to get that level of complexity, that level of world-like material. See, the problem for me with representation is -- I love it's complexity, it's richness -- but I am troubled by the fact that once you read it, essentially all the meanings are collapsed at that moment. Like when you see something in a bedroom, a shaft of light comes in the window and catches a wrinkle on the sheet and for a split second you think there's a toy duck on the bed -- that moment where it's open is great -- it's completely open, then the minute you realize "oh, no, I know what it is" the whole thing collapses. You can never turn it back into a duck, it just won't go, the brain sees that as a mistake. So I'd like to see if I can make abstract pictures that have that kind of openness to them, where you can still find them highly suggestive.... BR: So it can always be a duck... GS: It can always be a duck, or if you make a duck out of it you know it's your making, not mine, I'm not making pictures of ducks... although oddly people have complained that these pictures fail because they saw something they had imagined and they were so convinced that I had willed it. They didn't realize their responsibility as constructors of the images... * Also at artkrush... WRITERS ON ART: Stations of the Cross: The Paintings of Barnett Newman by Erin Hogan Their linearity can, from afar, be seen as a kind of facility, a technology of the hand that reduces painting—as Newman was accused of doing—to stripe-making. But this iciness is offset by what can look like mistakes. A flock of paint specks in the fourth station, for instance, makes it seem that Newman forgot himself and turned around too quickly with a loaded brush in his hand. And amidst the elegance of his lines, the cleanness of his canvases, Newman’s signature looks completely forlorn, these tired blocky letters shakily spelling out his names, both first and last, "Barnett Newman," as if "Newman" alone couldn’t possibly be enough. Jackson Pollock’s signature, in comparison, is dashed off and in keeping with his loose lines. But in Newman’s emphatic fields, his signature is utterly incongruous. Against what he is doing in these paintings, he has to assert himself the only way he can because his subject is too vast to be human. How hubristic and inconsequential of Newman, really, to even sign these things. You can contemplate the divinity of what he’s trying to do, you can sit in the midst of all of the paintings and marvel. You can see a developing narrative, if you want. You can shoulder the cross. But the closer you come to them, the more the paintings break down. You see Newman’s signature. You see his unprimed canvases, all full of flaws and knots and knurls. They look so utterly like canvas, like what they are, a substance many of us nonpainters have forgotten about, buried as it usually is under layers and layers of gesso, ground, paint scrapings, varnish. Humility raises its head again here. The nakedness of the canvas makes the paintings seem vulnerable, as if you are looking through them, seeing the back of the stage set where the lighting technicians are ugly. In a curious reversal of the trope of painting-as-window, you see through the paintings not to a world beyond or a world pictured, but to a naked canvas that we regularly overlook. The closer you come to the paintings, the more evidence you see of their making, and the sublime turns to the sympathetic. The physical facts of the paintings hurl you back down to earth. The contradiction between what Newman is claiming to represent and how he does so is astonishing. * OK, time to get serious about figuring out which presidential candidates are worth following and working for. Right now I don't have a clue. A good place to start is On The Issues. I have tried to swear off voting for Democrats, and want to vote Green. But I've heard both Dean and Kucinich talk and they interest me. I would like to hear Carol Moseley Braun speak. Could I honestly consider Al Sharpton? Carol Moseley Braun Howard Dean John Kerry Dennis Kucinich Rev. Al Sharpton Sunday, September 14, 2003 Le Havre Saturday, September 13, 2003 Munich * Catherine, that picture is bizarre. The way your right arm is twisted away from you makes it look like another left arm. I can't get over it; you look deformed. Your bicep looks like it's coming out of your breast. And you don't quite look locked out, you look caged in. The true Peets giveaway, thought the cup in your hand makes me think of Peets, is the fuzzy-edged cross-hatching at the top of the banner. Friday, September 12, 2003 Quin, Ireland * "Donald Dahlsten, leading expert in biological control and forest entomology, dies at 69" (UCB News, SF Chronicle). I was fortunate to work with Don occasionally through the City Bugs project both when I was with OUSD and here at the IU. I liked him a lot, respected him a great deal, and appreciated his commitment to education. * When I was a kid I had relatives who liked country music, but country music always sounded kind of kitschy to me. I avoided it. It wasn't rock and roll. In 1980 I was cleaning out a garage to use as a painting studio I saved a box of records that someone had left behind. A Hank Williams Greatest Hits collection became a regular on my turntable. I listened to Loretta Lynn all over again. And I realized as I listened to the Clash and Hank and Bob Marley and Buddy Holly and the Stones and Muddy Waters that all of this music was deeply interconnected. Eventually, I found my way back to Johnny Cash, and heard the roots of rock, the foundation of gospel, and the stories of old time back through America to the British Isles all woven into an unmistakable sound and historically significant art form. The records that Johnny Cash recorded during the last nine or ten years are anchored deeply in a complex mix of love and lust, death and redemption, God and sin, and have rock and soul in a single voice and single guitar than most of what gets attention these days. It's easy to find testimony that Johnny Cash is a very important figure in American music, and I want to add my two pathetic little cents to the testimony. When I heard Mr. Cash's strong and clear voice on the radio this morning singing "Folsom Prison Blues" from his great "At Folsom Prison" my emotions were a reaction not only to the news that he'd died, but also to the fact that I was hearing again how great he really is. * Deven Golden on Karin Davie: Exuberant and graceful, the artist's brush work is the kind possible only when an artist paints with her entire body engaged. It is hard to think of antecedents for this kind of brush handling other than perhaps the late de Kooning's, which calls for a brief digression. At the time of the brilliant show of those late de Kooning's curated by Robert Storr at the MOMA in 1997, many in the art world questioned aloud whether de Kooning had painted the works on display and, if he had, whether or not his advanced Alzheimer's condition made them "not" de Kooning's. Gallerist Charles Cowles was among that latter group. Standing with me at the opening in front of one of the works in the very last room, a giant white painting with long, powerful red strokes winding diagonally across the surface, I asked Charlie, "Do you think that he actually painted these?" "Yes," he replied. "Well," I asked, "regardless of de Kooning's condition, can you think of any better paintings painted in the last ten years?" He paused and said, "No." The point being that certain things cannot be faked, any more than their meaning can be ignored. Simply put, the late de Kooning paintings are just too good technically and emotionally for anyone other than a master to have painted them and, medical evidence not with standing, the paintings themselves prove beyond a doubt that while de Kooning the everyday person may have ceased to exist, de Kooning the painter had not. This is not to claim that Davie is on par with the late de Kooning. What I am asserting is that certain aspects of technique may simultaneously reveal many truths while at the same time sailing clear over the heads of many less technically savvy viewers. Davie's brush strokes are a prime example. Gracefully to the point of appearing effortless, they pile up in shimmering bands of color that traverse monumental lengths with unflagging intensity. Just how ambitious these brush strokes are, however... Karin Davie Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated #2 2002 oil/canvas, 78 x 90 inches courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York * This painting by Augusto DiStefano really intrigues me; Augusto DiStefano Untitled 2002 oil on canvas, 16 x 13 in. in "Dallas Come Forward" at the Dallas Museum of Art collection of Peter and Julianna Hawn Holt ©2003 Augusto Di Stefano, photograph by Brad Flowers, Dallas Museum of Art Thursday, September 11, 2003 New York Wednesday, September 10, 2003 Dromore West See where we slept in Dromore West, Co. Sligo, Ireland, 2000... * Chris Knipp: After the "Victory," the Quagmire In the four months since Bush theatrically announced (in military costume, with a warship as a backdrop) that ?America and its allies? had ?prevailed? in Iraq, reality has increasingly pushed its way through American propaganda. Even censored, the bipartisan congressional report on the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks showed the obvious: none of the terrorist bombers came from Iraq, and 15 of the 19 came from Saudi Arabia. America didn?t go after these terrorists? supporters in the country from whence they came for an obvious reason: oil, and close ties with a backward regime. In Iraq, which it made less sense than Afghanistan to invade except to seize further control of the world?s oil supply, no weapons of mass destruction ever turned up, nor did Saddam. Where was the evidence to justify the invasion which most of the world opposed... Tuesday, September 9, 2003 York, UK * Art in the Twenty-First Century broadcasts on PBS/KQED Tuesday and Wednesday night. See SJ Mercury review. ``Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century,'' a series that explores contemporary art though interviews with 16 American artists, is back for a second season after a two-year hiatus, with four new installments. If you ever stared at a work of art and wished you could hear what the artist was thinking, this is just the thing. KQED (Channel 9) is airing Parts 1 and 2 on Tuesday from 9 to 11 p.m. and Parts 3 and 4 at the same time the following night. Monday, September 8, 2003 Lubbock * Strangely, just today received a postcard from Karin dated August 9, 2003, Brussels. That's one month. The back is stamped "Not Stanley Hall Mail," but the card is clearly addressed to Evans Hall. Something weird happened there with campus mail. This postcard is pure Karin in Europe, summer 2003: Hi everyone! 2 1/2 days in Euyrope left. I'm so sad but I'm also tired. I've turned into an old lady! Burssels is really nice and all, but the chocolate... the chocolate is outstanding! Simply the best I've ever had. It starts to melt in your fingers before you can even get it into your mouth because it's so soft and creamy. It's to die for! all of the dair products in Northern Europe have just been incredible. I'm able to see all of the pastures and cows from the trains that I've been on and these are truly "happy cows" - not like our "happy California cow" commercials. These cows make our cows look sad 8). There's so much to eat in Europe. Next time I come, it's going to have to be all about the food! * Mary Heilmann at Secession, Vienna, summer 2003. A talk at Tate, including Mary Heilmann (RA stream). Lots of good Tate lectures... Sunday, September 7, 2003 Barra de Navidad * 12 string guitar- http://interactiveu.berkeley.edu:8000/CA/discuss/msgReader$466 * Escape from Cacaville, a weblog about leaving Silicon Valley and moving to Santa Fe. I don't know why for sure; he links to me. Saturday, September 6, 2003 Baumholder * Blinky Palermo: To the People of New York City by Blinky Palermo, Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, Michael Govan * Hmmm... this drawing(?) by Marcia Hafif... (added later- turns out the site has mislabeled the Sharon Ryan drawing as by Hafif). Hmmm... Barbara Mueller... Hmmm... Jill Baroff... Friday, September 5, 2003 Cardiff * Goodness. I saw this link in my stats-- (http://labs.google.com/cgi-bin/keys?q=%22Chris+Ashley%22+weblogs)-- I've been referenced to death. * I listened to the fuzzy flickering sound of the gubernatorial candidates debate on the radio Wednesday as I drove winding, tree-lined, mountain-blocked roads home from Occidental. Something is up with my car radio's reception, and even a strong signal like KQED's gets blocked over a distance my hills and such. So I didn't hear absolutely everything. It seemed like a very efficiently run event. The moderator, whose name escapes me, really kept it going and everyone respected the time limits (I just saw in the transcripts that it was Randy Shandobil from KTVU- good job). Cruz Bustamante sounded impatient and humorless; I didn't hear anything wonderful from him (check this out). Arianna Huffington sounded like Zza Zza with brains; I liked her. Tom McClintock didn't sound horrible, but my ears glaze over when Republicans talk like Republicans. Peter Ueberroth sounded a little unprepared, but I appreciated that he said he's not a politician, is committed to dealing with the budget, and will not run again. Over and over again Peter Camejo said the things I wanted to hear and that are important to me. I voted for him in the last election, and I'm going to do it again. At first I voted for him because two parties aren't enough. This time I'm voting for Camejo because I like what he said and because I'm Green. The entire transcript of the debate is available- nice. * Uh, like, duh? <blockqoute>'Big Government' Getting Bigger Under Bush (Reuters) - The era of big government, if it ever went away, has returned full-throttle under President Bush, who came to office championing "conservative ideas" as an alternative. A report released on Friday by the Brookings Institution think tank and New York University said the "true size" of the federal work force -- which includes employees for federal contractors and grant recipients -- grew by more than one million, to 12.1 million, from October 1999 to October 2002. </blockqoute> Thursday, September 4, 2003 Seattle * Read the excellent commentary on the Philip Guston retrospective now at SFMOMA by Tucker Nichols at Stetcher. * Intrigued by the idea of a million and catching herself drawing ellipses, (Mary) Temple embarked on her "1,000,000 Ellipsoids" project -- a quixotic effort to create exactly one million ellipses in a series of drawings... the artist does each drawing at one sitting, at the rate of about one per day... daily drawing has become a meditation for Mary Temple, who has said that, after a while, her mind goes on automatic and suddenly the drawing is over. Wednesday, September 3, 2003 Glasgow * I've become a wee weary with Garrison Keillor, but I whole-heartedly endorse this advice from a Salon interview, via Raymond: If you could give me one piece of advice, what would it be? Get outside more and take long walks. Much sadness is caused by lack of sunlight and exercise and visual stimulation. * Speaking of walks, I've done plenty of walking lately, and gladly, too. The more than usual walking has come about because of our new charge, one Ruby, a lab mix (terrier and pit?), seven months old, who has been in our company four weeks now. Ruby-con. Ruby-ella. Ruby-at. Ruby-girl. Ruby-dooby. Ruby, no, come, no, good girl. No bark. No chew. Sit. Shhhhhhh. Good girl. Where before I would walk and measure and note and absorb the trees, the sky, the light, distance and shape and shadow and how one thing overlaps another, now my mind is completely in the present, and spanning about four feet, and every few feet I'm talking out loud, "Good girl, good Ruby, don't pull, goooooood girrrrrlll." I'm noticing hardly anything anymore. What's more, I'm not used to talking so incessantly. I don't mind conversation, but I'm quite quite entirably comfortable, thank you very much, with long periods of no talking. Now, it seems, I'm talking all the time, yap yap yap, and it's kind of one-sided. I'm feeling the pull of my brain as it changes shape and has to reconfigure into a talky brain, and it kind of hurts. I was happy with my old quiet internal dialogue brain. Now I have to have a happy doggie-talk brain. Owww. The sacrifices we make for the youngsters in our lives. There are times I feel like I'm back to teaching 8 and 9 year olds. Ruby, West Ridge Trail off Skyline Gate, East Bay Regional Park, Oakland, 20030829 * Dear friend, I'm writing to ask you to join me in signing a "Recall No! Democracy Yes!" pledge to defeat the California recall. Click here to sign: http://moveon.org/pac/recall?id=-2683845-DLXkTl0al9dKyTKKTAnvWA If the recall succeeds, it will set a dangerous precedent for the whole country. A far-right businessman spent 1.7 million dollars to bring us the recall campaign, and has thrown California into chaos. GOP leaders who should have condemned the recall instead cheered it on, hoping they could gain from the unraveling of our democracy. We can't stand by and let this happen. These attacks on democracy are not a California issue or a Texas issue or a Florida issue -- we all must step forward together and make it clear that elections will be honored in this country. This pledge is a national effort to mobilize one million California voters in the recall election. Please sign the pledge no matter where you live and please ask friends and family in California to sign the pledge and to remember to vote October 7. http://moveon.org/pac/recall?id=-2683845-DLXkTl0al9dKyTKKTAnvWA Thank you. Tuesday, September 2, 2003 Padua * Rudolf's Diner's Issue Five, Shoes, Fall 2003, is hot off the weblog chockful of good reads. * The IU Community News September issue is published today. * Raymon Montalbetti picks up on the Jonathan Lasker I quote (20030827) and adds another: "Certainly the shapes in these early paintings seem like actors. Actors with fragmented bodies; lost wraiths. Such theatrical metaphors are inherent in American painting: Rothko wrote in 1947, 'I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.'"(Sperone Westwater: Jonathan Lasker: the dialectics of touch ) See Raymond's "Writings 1 - 22," which begins with a great quote from Marguerite Yourcenar-- "When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex," and then proceeds with 22 short writings-- meditations, definitions, captured moments-- about... well, almost everything: 13. Knowledge Information, data, details, facts dissolve into truth and reality. Laughing with raw scepticism brings no delight. Searching for authenticity, validity, accuracy disintegrates into random walks. Intelligence stops well short of the heart. Inside, outside, within and without are paradoxical conundrums. Tangible, actual, concrete stop me in my tracks. Please leave me alone. And now for a moment brought to you by my own PR machine, Raymond says, ":: note :: . . . remarkable following chris ashley in a place to work, nothing fancy . . . the work . . . the daily studious practical and articulated research . . . the body of work is much appreciated . . ." Thank you. * For reference- http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/8/ Op-Ed: Framing the Dems How conservatives control political debate and how progressives can take it back The American Prospect By George Lakoff September, 2003 On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words "tax relief" started appearing in White House communiques. Think for a minute about the word relief. In order for there to be relief, there has to be a blameless, afflicted person with whom we identify and whose affliction has been imposed by some external cause. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, thanks to some reliever. This is an example of what cognitive linguists call a "frame." It is a mental structure that we use in thinking. All words are defined relative to frames. The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero. The term tax relief evokes all of this and more. It presupposes a conceptual metaphor: Taxes are an affliction, proponents of taxes are the causes of affliction (the villains), the taxpayer is the afflicted (the victim) and the proponents of tax relief are the heroes who deserve the taxpayers' gratitude. Those who oppose tax relief are bad guys who want to keep relief from the victim of the affliction, the taxpayer. Every time the phrase tax relief is used, and heard or read by millions of people, this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced... The rest of this editorial is not online yet, but should be soon. * What a beautiful family (via The Free Radical): Monday, September 1, 2003 Occidental There is no doubt what Occidental means to me, which is why this image is so direct and simple: sky, earth, redwood trees. As I write this I am staying in a small cottage west of Occidental on a ridge a couple of miles above Bodega Bay. On a fogless day one can see southward the mouth of Tomales Bay (last Sunday we spent a couple of hours with friends Karen and Dan and four year old Noah on the beach directly oposite this same baymouth) and northward towards Jenner. Just up the road is the Grove of Old Redwoods, where Ruby and I vigorously walked to and around this late afternoon, slowly absorbing the sun rays through the magnificent sequoia. The sky is blue, the ground gold and green, and I can look south over rolling California hills between forty and fifty miles to Mt. Tam. This is a powerful, natural area. Ann went home today, leaving Ruby and me to keep each other company. This drawing uses three colors and four shapes to evoke for me a very important place. (More about Occidental: Trees Are The Best Sculpture.) Out here one can see the Milky Way, Mars is the shiniest apple on the tree, and satellites are readily discernible from airplanes. I saw two shooting stars last night I wished on them but they were only satellites Is it wrong to wish on space hardware I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care Billy Bragg: A New England * Remember Labor Day, a day to commemorate the struggle of working people to organize and make their working conditions safe, fair, vital. * I hope Karin blogs her entire graduate year at Harvard. That would be quite a cumulative record. Yes Karin, we "have" a dog. Rather, she acquired us. We keep saying Ruby is a foster, but in my heart I know that she's already part of us and that with a little more time we'll drop the "fostering" label. She's a sweet-tempered seven month old puppy with a good amount of residual training not lost during a post-SPCA two month adoption with a very young and too-large family in our neighborhood that should really never have adopted a dog. She's a runaway from a whole block away, and a group of neighbors rallied to give her a safe home and find her owners. The owners, however, saw the fliers in the neighborhood but never bothered to call. In the meantime Ruby came to stay with us, and she is the dog I've been wanting for quit awhile. As I write this around 11:30 pm in the Little House near Occidental she is curled up on a blanket a coule of feet away deeply engage in doggie snoozing and canine dreams. * Tom Friedman, NY Times: Policy Lobotomy Needed With one bomb at the U.N. office, they sent a warning to every country that is considering joining the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq: Even the U.N. is not safe here, so your troops surely won't be... I don't know what Mr. Bush has been doing on his vacation, but I know what the country has been doing: starting to worry. People are connecting the dots — the exploding deficit, the absence of allies in Iraq, the soaring costs of the war and the mounting casualties. People want to stop hearing about why winning in Iraq is so important and start seeing a strategy for making it happen at a cost the country can sustain. * dan>weblog=erase>coder as artist Sunday, August 31, 2003 Needles * Ruby on the Madrone Trail, Redwood Park, 20030829 East Bay Regional Parks maps; Redwood Park trail map (PDF) Saturday, August 30, 2003 San Simeon Friday, August 29, 2003 San Antonio * In the latest From Now On: Pedagogy Does Matter! http://www.fno.org/sept03/pedagogy.html By Jamie McKenzie McKenzie argues that artful teaching strategies offer the greatest promise of improved student performance - not equipment or scripted lessons. Technology as Diversion http://www.fno.org/sept03/diversion.html By Jamie McKenzie Some technology integration lessons are diversionary according to McKenzie, who argues that classroom teachers now seek powerful ways to improve student reading, writing and reasoning. Forced to jump through NCLB hoops and cope with high stakes testing, teachers require something better than trivial pursuits and powerpointlessness. In particular, the article about pedagogy reminds me of the argument I've made about the weakness of many univeristy K-12 and outreach programs the goal of which is to plan, design, and implement curriculum and other resources, professional development, and learning activities- often the program staff have little or no teaching experience. At the risk of sounding condescending, if you haven't taught, felt the rhythms of the classroom and the school, worked through a unit from planning to culmination, then you don't have much business engaging in the above work which, if you do go ahead with, will probably wind up weak or unused. An understanding and feeling for pedagogy, the "act, process, or art of imparting knowledge and skill," in a K-12 setting with thirty students or more on a regular basis, is an absolute necessity for developing and delivering curriculum resources, professional development, and both face-to-face and online learning activities. * Berkeley bloggers- add yourself to http://www.berkeleyblogs.org/. * SF Chronicle: The SF Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco receive by bequest "five major postwar American paintings... one each by Mark Rothko..." I am not normally a tremendous Rothko fan, but just yesterday I was looking at a book of Rothko's Multiform paintings (ca. 1947-49), and thinking how good they looked. Multiform 1948 is one of a small group of untitled works collectively known as 'Multiforms' that Rothko painted during the years 1947-49 immediately preceding the mature works for which he is best known. In these transitional paintings Rothko abandoned the Surrealist-inspired imagery of his earlier works to develop a fully abstract vocabulary. * Thursday, August 28, 2003 Florence * Now, that's a good looking dog: Ruby 20030821 Wednesday, August 27, 2003 Tahoe * Steve Mumford has another installment of his Baghdad Journal, drawings and text, at Artnet. * Excerpt from an interview by Hans Michael Herzog with Jonathan Lasker from Jonathan Lasker Gemälde | Paintings 1977-1997: Hans-Michael Herzog So you don't consider abstraction any longer to be ideologically loaded? Jonathan Lasker Not presently. Abstraction is no longer the representation of an modernist ideal. Herzog You said once that your paintings depict abstraction. That is a very good way to put it. Do you still hold to that? Lasker No, I might say it's the other way around. I use abstraction to depict other things. I use abstract images as figures, as forms, as potential real world space such as a landscape or interior space. I use abstract forms to represent. Herzog Do you think that abstraction is a more adequate means of depicting life and reality today than figurative painting? Lasker No, it's just that it's useful in the sense that it creates a threshhold into something pictorial. If you use an abstract image to talk about the notion of making a picture, then you think more about how you make a picture than about the picture itself. It's a way of protecting yourself against fully engaging the narrative of an image. Creating a narrative which is more analytical than it is fictional. Herzog In what sense? Lasker I think that abstraction prevents you from fully entering a fiction. A picture is a fiction. Abstraction keeps you away from that fiction and gives you a means of approaching a narrative in an analytical manner. * A just OK article about weblogs is in today's Daily Cal: UC Berkeley Students Find a New Voice in Blogs. * I decided to try out bloglines today to see if reading weblogs in a central place using RSS is nicer or easier than actually going to weblogs. My first reaction: yes, it's nicer, and it's sort of Scholar's Boxish. * Lloyd asks, "...who are the figures in the San Felipe beach drawing, and what were they doing?" This is a pretty literal drawing. The two figure are immersed in the environment of the beach and ocean, and are intensely "being" together in a new, deepening relationship. They are away from the rest of the world. I wrote about this in the first piece I wrote for Rudolf's Diner, "She Has Remedies." In the same piece I wrote about the Death Valley/San Bernadino trip which I drew on 20030826. I find I'm constantly shifting back and forth in what I draw and write between present and past, so Lloyd, when you say, "It's all of a piece anyway, isn't it?" I have to say absolutely. My life becomes bigger and rounder and more full of reference points. As Neil Young has said a few times when someone in the crowd shouts out a song request, "It's all the same song." In other words, it's not about the one song, it's about the body of work. Tuesday, August 26, 2003 San Bernandino After a few day's camping in Death Valley the distributor in my pickup went wobbly. We drove to Las Vegas in search of a new part, parked overnight in a casino parking lot, and found the next morning that the part for my truck couldn't be found any closer than San Bernadino. We took our time that day driving there, coming into town in the early evening towards the filthiest air I have seen in my entire live, before or since. We found a cheap hotel, took showers, and turned on the TV later to find that Ronald Reagan had been shot that day. * Pretty nice: Tom Moody writes about and quotes an HTML drawing: "Post-painterly abstraction" was Clement Greenberg's term for a kind of self-referential art that, by the 1960s, was becoming increasingly less rooted in the physical world of art-making materials. The then-new polymer paints made possible a kind of uninflected visual experience: color experienced as pure presence. The minimalists took this logic further than Greenberg was willing to go with an emphasis on found materials and processes: e.g., Dan Flavin's colored light bulbs. Extend the logic even more and art would be a series of Sol Lewitt-like commands to a piece of hardware such as a computer monitor, telling it to beam certain colors in certain configurations directly to a remote viewer's eyes. And that's what Christopher (or Chris) Ashley is doing with his "html drawings," it seems to me: these aren't jpegs that can be right-clicked and saved but a series of instructions to your browser, telling it to draw tables in particular shapes and fill them in with hexadecimal colors... I like Tom's take on my work. I owe him an email and a response on this weblog, but at the moment... time... need... too... much... must... go... Later: apparently, the very very few times I have suggested that IE might be a better browser for a few HTML drawings has taken off in a direction of discussion of which I don't really feel a part. I mean, I could get all worked up about it, but as far as my drawings go it's not a concern. I use simple HTML so that my drawings display the same in all browsers as much as I can control. As for color display and all that I can't even think or worry about it. As I can recall, on the Asian Influence in Drawing series and the Hippie Dreams drawings used IE-specific table attributes. Since then I've stayed away from those tags. While I do use IE a lot, I also use Opera almost exclusively at home, and am using Mozilla more and more. Defending or critiquing IE is a non-issue for me (unless we really want to talk about consumer domination and monopolies, MS, and Gates), but a couple of exceptions aren't a big deal. Here's an excerpt from an email I wrote to Tom: I found your take of computer drawing as an extension of Greenbergs ideas fascinating, and I accept it as a valid take. I'll write again soon and tell you a little more of the why and how- I could try really hard and get all theoretical about it, but the origins of the work are really based in recording memory, story, place, nature, color and space, the need to have a regular art practice during a time when a studio practice is difficult to maintain, my interest (commitment? belief? desire?) in abstract painting (a kind of romantic minimalism, I guess). I've learned over three year's time the potential of the weblog as a personal work space, a time-based portfolio, that is a place of production, exhibition, and archiving, being both an individual space and a node on a network(s). I've learned to push up against the extreme limitations of HTML (no style sheets, nothing fancy at all, made in Dreamweaver) to keep finding imagery for a variety of intentions. BTW, only a couple of series have used IE-specific table attributions, and I feel controlling about those because viewed in other browsers the meaning changes seriously; what happens is that the the 3D-like beveled table edges show and create an illustionistic structured space that I don't want to use- it's like how a frame can change how a painting is read. I want the space to come from the rectangles and colors in the drawings, not by border attributes. In a couple of series I made screen shots and loaded a gif in the page, but this goes against my wanting the page to carry the image in it in the code, that no external files are needed to make the image. As much as I liked the flexibility some non-standard table attributes provided, my preference for tables that can be read by all browsers has made me stick with standard, straight forward HTML, and to find a lot of freedom within those extreme limitations. Some things I've just had to accept and have become part of my drawing language- for example, while I can make column widths as narrow as 1 pixel, row heights can only be reduced down to around 14 pixels because rows are made to carry text. That's just the way it is, and I've learned to use it. * Siegfried Holzbauer writes in an email today: "Ex voto" is a votive picture. This is a religious custom, when you do a pilgrimage to a powerful chapel or church and pray for something, and it comes true, you give such a votive picture. It depicts the fullfilled wish in a symbolic way mostly, e.g. a heart, when you got healed from a heart disease. See this series at [http://www.advancedpoetx.com/exvoto1.html]. * When I do a drawing with the "weaving line" thing, as above, it's a little too easy for it to start looking like something by Peter Halley, but my imagery is intended to be quite open, could be taken in some ways as being actually pretty conservative, and doesn't share any of Halley's concerns beyond being one of many possible readings: Halley at Waddington, 1999: The elements of his iconography are rectangular cell units, linked by linear conduits, which represent the individual organisms and networks of contemporary urban existence. The paintings are depictions of the social landscape, of isolation and connectivity, and this sociological theme extends to his work in other media. The cell was originally conceived as a prison, as a critique or parody of idealist, formalist modernism. But the idea of the cell particularly appeals to Halley because its meanings range from the concrete, such as a room, to its virtual application in cellular telephones and computers. In his current work, the simple diagrammatic structure is repeated on two-panel paintings, which in this exhibition are integrated with circuit-like wall drawings. Recent installations combine these with flow charts and wall works derived from digitally manipulated and cartoon imagery which explore social systems, hierarchies and apocalyptic narratives such as the Exploding Cell series. Once I recognize a drawing is veering toward someone else's my tendency is to change the drawing. But I know that this is just today's drawing, that I'll do others, that my intention and the result are quite different, and the proof is in the series and body of work, not in a single image. Also, is it really such a bad thing to look like someone else's work? Originality as an intention can be a misguided strategy with dead ends and short lifespans, whereas a real path comes about by trial and error, imitation and stealing, repetition and culling. Even though the drawings are infinitely reproducible they are still handcrafted. My interest in the body of work is still linked to the idea of the artist having a craft and being a kind of cottage industry, that there is meaning in that production context. When a drawing is reproduced out of context, out of my weblog and apart from its related drawing, the meaning changes, which I can't control. I am asked occasionally how could HTML drawing be satisfying in a way that traditional drawing is, and I answer that it's really no different, just a different medium with a different process, but there is still a kind of mental and handiwork required, it's still a process, which for me is very collage-like: build it up, tear it down, change the dimensions, add a row or column, copy this chunk and move it over there. It's still a very physical process. Without that I would've lost interest long ago. And I think the the extreme limitations have challenged me in a way that, say, just using Photoshop, which mimics all to well existing media, almost on a silver platter, does not. * Linked from Arts Journal, 08/25/2003 (no permalink on the day of post?): The "Distributed" Library An experiment in the San Francisco area tries to create a virtual "distributed" library. "List the books and videos that you own. You will then have access to the multitude of books and videos available in other people's collections. You can search for specific authors or titles, browse individual collections, find nearby users, or find people who like books in common with yours. You will have access to user-written reviews and have the opportunity to write your own. If the owner of a book or video you're interested in has time for you to pick it up, you can check out items for a 2, 7, 14, or 30 day period (at the owner's discretion). Returning books late will get you negative feedback, while returning books promptly will get you positive feedback." * I slightly revised yesterday's drawing today, which is something I don't do except when I discover a code error. The drawing just needed a slight tweak to be a little more itself than it was. Monday, August 25, 2003 A beach in San Felipe, Baja * This Thursday is the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington. NPR is running a series this week that began late last week. This morning an episode set the scene of the days before and morning of the march, and includes the accounts of people who were there, how they road buses from all over to be there. You can hear stories in streaming audio a the site and see photos. I have heard Dr. King's speech so many times over the years that I don't know if I really remember hearing it for the first time. All I know is that everytime I hear that speech I am so incredibly moved. I do remember very clearly seeing pictures of the civil rights movement in life magazine- pictures of people being attacked by dogs, sprayed with hoses. I'm pretty sure I saw it on TV at the time, but it was Life magazine that really informed by world view in the early and mid-60's with pictures from Vietnam, of the Black Panthers, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Woodstock, the Free Speech Movement (before it was an iconic period in time that was capitalized), even People's Park. Get yourself over to NPR and listen in. Radio is a wonderful thing, and The March on Washington is an extremely important moment in American history. * Karin lists all the places she slept in Europe. She has a new laptop and is off to Hah-vuhd. * Frederick Hammersley Sunday, August 24, 2003 Half Moon Bay Saturday, August 23, 2003 Mono Lake Friday, August 22, 2003 Harlingen * Here's what I don't like about Userland- today in my weblog I open a page to edit and now the edit window is about half size, which means I can see less of my writing at once. That's bad. If anything, I'd prefer to have a larger window. Userland just makes these changes willy nilly and then the updates are automatically made to our server, so we are at the whim of their really lousy design instincts. And I mean it- this is lousy design. There is so much about Manila that is just plain stupid, that makes it plain and clear that these are people just designing for themselves, not for real users. Manila as a viable weblog app for the public is out of the question. * There's a bunch of things I want to read at Aesthetics On-line on the Aesthetics Ideas page, so I'm posting the link here as a kind of bookmark. Thursday, August 21, 2003 Santa Cruz, Monterrey, Pacific Grove * OK, well, it finally happened: I've recently learned about an artist doing HTML paintings, as he calls them, which I think are, like my HTML drawings, a serious art project. But I didn't find Siegfried Holzbauer's work by looking for it; instead, it found me. Siegfried lives in Austria, and wrote to me about trading for a Gillian Welch bootleg. A few days later I noticed a link in his email signature: Siegfried Holzbauer Medienkuenstler/media artist ::DIARIUM - Projekt::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::DAILY UPDATES! Website: http://www.advancedpoetx.com/DIARIUM/ WAP-Handy: art.wapjag.com/diarium2000 So I looked at some samples [1] [2] and was surprised, and wrote Siegfried and told him of my surprise and pointed him to some of my things, and he wrote back and told me of his surprise.                         20 08 2003 Siegfried Holzbauer, 20030820 A couple of days he wrote me a long email describing his approach to the work. His is a more conceptual, language-based art, while mine is more picture and nature-based. For example, he uses German and English words to generate the hexadecimal code used for cell colors. As he writes: Das DIARIUM - Projekt wurde im Jänner 1996 mit der Frage: Läßt sich das (individuelle) Leben als poetischer Text begreifen? (Wenn ja, wie beeinflußt dies das gelebte Leben und wie wirkt es auf den Nebel des noch zu lebenden Lebens?) Google translation: The DIARIUM - Project became in the Jaenner 1996 with the question: (individual) can the life be understood as poetic text? (if, as this affects the lived life and as still affects it the fog to living life?) My attempt: The DIARIUM - The project began in January 1996 with the question: can (an individual) life be understood through a poetic text? (If so, how does this affect how one lives one's life, and can it make how one lives clearer?) Now I owe Siegfried an email. While there might be somewhat outward similarities, our projects are conceptually different. I'll be interested in getting more clear about these differences and similarities. One thing we share is the use of seriality, although the meanings of resulting from the use of this device are quite different. * Lies, lies, lies: digital retouching. Here's a discussion item: what are the ethical and moral considerations regarding digital retouching? * Lloyd, this may interest you because you actually saw (part of?) the Cremaster Cycle. Tom Moody mentions a slowly growing Matthew Barney backlash, and links to a hilarious pre-review of the films (now here's something interesting- "Reviews of Movies that haven't come out yet and the reviewer hasn't seen or otherwise have any idea about") and to some suggested future Cremasters: Cremaster 6 Whoopi Goldberg reads the Magna Carta over the Yankee Stadium PA system, as a boa constrictor slowly slithers around the bases after a remote-control toy car with a real mouse in the driver's seat. In the outfield, 30 naked women play 30 grand pianos wearing cardboard Dalai Lama masks. When the boa makes it home, fireworks erupt, spelling "I LIKE IKE" in the sky. * Yesterday I received another (final?) postcard from Karin: Brugge, August 10, 2003. She pretty much just talks about chocolate. * Someone searched Yahoo for man+wanting+man+sex++monterey, and look at what page it took them to... * Linked at ArtJournal: PAINTING - NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN IN 17,000 YEARS Picasso, on visiting Lascaux, reportedly remarked that "we have discovered nothing new in art in 17,000 years." NYU professor Randall White writes in a new book that, "all of the major representational techniques were known at least by the Magdalenian [Period, beginning about 18,000 years ago]; oil- and water-based polychrome painting, engraving, bas-relief sculpture, sculpture in the round, charcoal and manganese crayon drawing, molded clay, fired ceramic figurines, shading, perspective drawing, false relief, brush painting, stamping and stenciling." Japan Times 08/17/03 Wednesday, August 20, 2003 Russian River, Jenner * This actually quite cool- artist Steve Mumford's Baghdad Journal includes ink wash drawings and a very long written entry, all very fascinating. Tuesday, August 19, 2003 Portland, Ashland, Corvallis * Rick blogs! * Why I don't do listlogs: I've never listlogged, really. I actually don't read many weblogs, only the first dozen or so on my weblog list and a few artblogs. Lloyd does a great job at it, and is a natural since he's the instigator or much of this weblogging business, so when I do read a Berkeley-related weblog not on my list it's because he's linked to it. My weblog's project is not so much anymore about community. It's become something more self-centered, even somewhat narrow. * The story of Ruby... I can't even finish the Inisheer story- how am I going to tell this one? In short: Dog turns up on neighbor's porch We get involved, foster for a couple of days We start getting attached, but the plan is to find the right place for her Uh oh, we're getting more attached Cat's lives disrupted, but not too freaky I'm out walking her late one night when a young family with three very small kids comes around the corner and gets all excited- their dog Turns out... This family lives right around the corner She's an SPCA survivor Not the first time she ran away This dog is supposed to be Dad's project, but... He's not into it anymore He saw the flyer's in the neighborhood and told his wife she'd call, but never did As we're talking late at night, two of the young kids bouncing around, Dad calls to see where they are, she tells him they've found the dog, he's totally cool with her not bringing the dog home We know we're not letting that dog go back anyway if we can do anything about it We tell her the dog has options Mom is actually very nice, sensible, hardworking We decide to work with the dog ourselves I've wanted a dog for quite awhile, so we're test driving She's working on us, very sweet and well-behaved I just spent $40 bucks on treats, chew toys, a chokeless collar, and 25 pounds of food What do you think is going to happen? Monday, August 18, 2003 Rye, Dover * It's looking like a l'il doggie has acquired us. Look at that face. She's lived with us for a week now, is about seven months old, is named Bunny, but we're working on a new name- Ruby, Stella, or Gigi and some other names we're trying out. As of this morning Ruby is the frontrunner. Sunday, August 17, 2003 Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen * Markus Linnenbrink Saturday, August 16, 2003 Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Gallup * Hmmm... "Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue" at the Whitney Museum, with Red Blue (1963) (left) and Red Green Blue (1964) Friday, August 15, 2003 Los Angeles, Anaheim, Long Beach, Hollywood Thursday, August 14, 2003 Carlsbad * Syllabus Magazine: Campus Communications & the Wisdom of Blogging In a very short time, blogging has moved beyond a niche activity for the hyper-extroverted to becoming the backbone of a new Internet communications movement. Although often deeply individualized, Web logging has revitalized the idea of online communities: many blogs have moved from obscurity to having a large and devoted readership—many blogging sites enable people to link their blog to other blog clusters, based on topic and the interests of the authors. * EBN in the NYT: Can Johnny Blog? This may be the year that school blogs come into their own. A school blog is simply a Weblog - an online blend of diary, links and commentary - that is used by teachers and students. * I'm sitting at Yali's with Isaac and Ann from OUSD, drinking Mighty Leaf Chamomile Cirtus tea and sharing a scone. AirBears works great here. Wednesday, August 13, 2003 Castro Valley, Hayward, San Lorenzo * Yankee doodles Everything Julian Schnabel does has only one meaning: it's over. Jonathan Jones on the death of American art Tuesday August 12, 2003 The Guardian The trouble with American culture now is that it is too smooth, too accomplished, too witty, too stylish. Its finest expression is in its brilliantly engineered TV shows. When did the US get its rough edges rubbed off? When did it become so accomplished in small things and so feeble in big ones? Perhaps Americans are too happy, in their august isolation, to make good art any more. Only the non-American world sees, and feels, those jagged edges now. * Still to come, writing about Inisheer, which will use this picture: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 Sheffield * Syndicating Learning Objects with RSS and Trackback Abstract- Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack... * Karin postcards from, again, from Confoederatio Helvetia (Switzerland)- Bern, August 3. She likes CH. * bo/ny Monday, August 11, 2003 Clear Lake * Two more postcards from Karin: Füssen, July 20; Hamburg, July 25. Sunday, August 10, 2003 New Orleans * Nifty, interesting, adventurous reporting: Lloyd's wifi tour of San Francisco. Saturday, August 9, 2003 Modesto * Professors With A Past, NY Times, 20030809 Friday, August 8, 2003 Shasta * How did I get from from Inisheer off the west coast of Ireland to deep sticky memories associated with photographs from my childhood? Is it meaningful, or is it a mess, and is there any reason to care? Does it matter where stories come from and what shape they take, as long as there is meaning? And once I've gone off on a crooked path, how do I find my way back? Here is one thing I know: the idea that even one person will read what I am writing is the difference between writing this and not. I am glad for myself that I have this, but it is highly unlikely I would write it for myself. Travel is about experience, the new and unknown, and it is also about memory and associations. In memory things become larger or smaller, more elaborate or less. The photos are half truths, if even that, and really are springboards to the story that is lurking in our minds that we sometimes manage to let ebb out, somtimes painfully, to our tongues. This photo is dated June 1960, meaning I am more or less straight up three years old. I like the little boy I see, and I wonder what has happened to him. I like his face, shyness on the verge of friendliness, pausing and looking. I like the way he stands, active and ready to move, balanced on his right foot, his left leg bent in and his left foot lifting just a bit. His arms are spread and he is ready to fly, which is much how swinging can feel. I am saddened to know that this is me, that I am so much older, so much grayer, so much craggier, and that as experience and knowledge enters, innocence exits. But I look at my abovedescription of the boy in this photograph, and I see that description still in myself. I know that person described, because it is how I still am, and that I haven't changed that much. And I also know that innocence isn't lost. It's kicked around and buried, but it doesn't die, and it can be what brings great joy to life by making things wonderful and new, postive and full of potential. I want to be that boy as much as I can be. Several things occur to me about this picture as I look at it today. First, this is the backyard of my grandmother, my father's mother, in San Lorenzo, California. A year or so before this photo was taken she returned from a year in Sheffield, England as an exchange teacher That event is the basis for a short story I wrote and drew last July, "Now his toddler eyes and brain struggled to know her." I am not sure who took this photograph- I think my mom did. The swing I am holding hangs from a plum tree, one of two large trees in the backyard. Directly behind whoever stands holding the camera is an apricot tree. The apricot tree figures in another story and drawing from a year ago, "He examined the evidence of their earlier work." I spent a lot of time in and around these trees, and ate a lot of the fruit from each of them. Upon looking at this photograph recently, not having really looked at it for a couple of years, the lattice-like fence is remarkably like the lattice-like abstraction that is supposed to give the feeling of the openness of looking up through trees and into the sky in "He dropped his bike by the side of the trail." Finally, more tenuously but no less importantly, I have written about and drawn trees and tree-like images in this weblog quite a bit. In this photo here I am, with another tree, one that was a lot of meaning for me. A piece I wrote about a year and a half ago, "Trees Are The Best Sculpture," provides an idea of the kind of image and space that forms in my mind when thinking about trees I take great pleasure in making these connections, as it seems to ground me, to make life real as I connect the past and present out of the accumulations of my life into something whole and surprising and evolving. I remember much of the 1965 Europe trip, but Ireland is a bit of a blur, perhaps because it was a brief part of the trip. I've mentioned Dublin and Belfast, and the only other significant memory is the Giant's Causeway and Finn McCool, and the Finn mug my brother and I brought back for my father from which he drank his weekend morning coffee for many, many years. It is a long stretch between 1965 and 2000, the year I finally returned to Ireland. And there is a thread. In the intervening years I had married an "Irish girl." "Finn McCool is the Anglicized spelling of Fionn Mac Cumhail. Finn could be called the "Irish King Arthur" and is certainly one of the most celebrated heroes of Irish mythology. According to Peter Berresford Ellis in his Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford University Press, 1992)..." This name, Mac Cumhail, is very close to MacConmhaoil or Conmhaoil, the second being the Gaelic name from which my wife's family name, which I won't write here, is derived. This is not a terrific stretch; the family name has been traced to the region around south Armagh, where the reason for our trip originated, and through history has been linked to Conmhaoil. It turns out that, then, I am married to a woman desecended from Irish warriors. The reason for our trip to Ireland was a "Mac Cumhail" family event in Co. Armagh, after which we toured through Counties Sligo, Mayo, Galway, and into Clare, staying in a small town called Corofin from which to daytrip the area in and around the Burren. We stashed our extras in a friendly B&B at which we'd spent a few nights, caught the ferry from Doolin for Inisheer, heard Irish - not Gaelic - and looked back at Ireland across a slip of Atlantic, and later watched the sun set over Inishmaan, the next Aran Island to the west. * Karin updates from Amsterdam. Her trip ends in four days. Thursday, August 7, 2003 Paris to Milan * I have been tinkering with and improving and making clearer and understanding more what I wrote about yesterday. * Al Gore speaks to Moveon.org at NYU. Read the text or watch the stream Hard-hitting stuff, he barely, with just a tad of diplomacy, holds back. Imagine if he'd been our prez. It seems obvious that big and important issues like the Bush economic policy and the first Pre-emptive War in U.S. history should have been debated more thoroughly in the Congress, covered more extensively in the news media, and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen, and in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes -- and the die -- were cast... Here is the pattern that I see: the President's mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals. In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances. * Wonderful: Regional Oral History Office turns up the volume for hidden voices (Berkeleyan); the Oral Histories Online Collection (at the CDL). Wednesday, August 6, 2003 Rouen * Julian Spalding in Spiked: When David Frost asked Tracy Emin on his TV show why her bed was a work of art, she replied 'because I say it is'. He didn't then ask her, as he could have done, 'But who says you're an artist?'. Artists don't, by any means, hold all the cards. They are free to try to be artists, but others are also free to decide for themselves whether they have achieved this goal. * The image below right is of my older brother Rick and me in Dublin, Ireland, summer 1965, sometime in July. Nothing is written on the back of this picture, and I sometimes wonder if this isn't really in Belfast instead. I find myself working my memory to see if I can figure out where this is. I remember crossing over into the Northern Ireland in a rental car one afternoon: me, Rick, my grandmother, and my grandmother's friend, Leila, who travled with us part of the trip. We had to stop at the border and show our documents. There was a line of cars. I was in the back seat holding a small flag of Ireland, and my grandmother jokingly, I think, said I should put it away so the guards won't get mad at us. I was puzzled by this, and years later thought it had something to do with The Troubles, but that doesn't really make sense- no Northern Irish police or military, which are essentially British guards, would be upset by a flag from the Republic. But because we crossed the border in the afternoon, and because I know it was taken in the afternoon in front of our hotel soon after arriving in town , I sometimes think this picture must be in Belfast . It's more likely that this really was Dublin, because we flew from London to Dublin, arriving midday. We took a taxi to our hotel just a few doors down from a main street where, coincidentally, a parade was about to commence. We joined the crowd and watched the bands and floats and cars go by. I have no idea what this parade was for. I remember loud music and lots of green, fancy uniforms, and I remember a red-haired girl. One float went by, and sitting on it was a girl my age, around 8 or 9, with red hair, quintessentially and stereotypically Irish, perhaps; being a boy who never went through a girl-hating phase I thought she was beautiful, and I was captivated. I believe I can still see her face to this day, but of course my memory is foggy. Perhaps if I had a photo of her passing by I could pick her out. It is surprising how many times over the past nearly forty years I have thought of that moment, that brief glimpse of a pretty girl passing by, and how clear that short brain-movie moment is for me, how strong I feel the excitement, compared to the rest of the parade, which is a blur. The mind and memory are odd things over which we have little control, it being very powerful yet fugitive and tricky. Things planted long ago come back in odd ways. At a very early age I heard my father use the word "jew" as a verb, as in to deal and bargain a price. I don't think my father was particularly anti-Semitic or racist, and I can recall many instances of him going out of his way to talk to people quite different from himself, though I really have no idea what went on in his mind, and what he thought of when he used such a derogatory term. He did, like many of us, have his prejudices, and he had somehow come to think that using this perfectly fine word in a inarguably negative way was acceptable in certain company. Being very young, and relatively sheltered from diversity, even perhaps prejudiced against difference by a relatively fundamentalist Christian upbringing, I didn't fully understand what Jews are, or what Judaism is. All I know is that, as alleged by my brand of church, Jews betrayed and killed Jesus. I wonder if somehow my father's own sheltering and indoctrination had made him ignorant about why this use of the word might be wrong. Not to excuse him, however, as I recall feeling a twinge about that usage being wrong, even at a young age. Perhaps the word had been passed on to him and he couldn't shake it. Or maybe he is anti-Semitic. I don't know. I saw other examples, though quite different from the negative example above, of my father's misuse or mispronunciation. For example my father pronounced the word "facade" as "fah-kade" rather than "fuh-sod." He told us that, having learned to read at a very young age and reading beyond his age group that he often sounded out words on his own, and that the internal prounciation he used had transitioned over into verbal usage, and some of these he had been unable to shake his whole life. The use of "jew" as meaning to bargain and dicker, though, has stuck in my head all of these years, nestled down in some cranny as a word and a meaning and a context ready to pop out. I must confess that anytime I say "negotiate" or "bargain" or "offer" the word "jew" is right there as a vocabulary choice, and it is extremely disturbing to me that I can't get it out of my mind and stop that cycle. I have never misused the word, I think, but I often censor the impulse to use it still, as in during the quick moment of searching for a word it is one of several that flashes in my mind's eye, and I think of my father, and then recoil from the word. I can't help but wonder if somehow this word lingers in my mind as a symptom of my difficult, even non-existent, relationship with my father. Perhaps, having written about this and exposed myself here I will have flushed out this little tick of memory that is secret and stashed away, ready to spring at unexpected times, though it will do nothing to resolve the difference and gulf between my father and myself, and instead, in a way, maybe disappear one of the few threads I have, even an awful one, with him. This is a sad thing to have offered myself as a possiblity, as if such an awful thread would be worth maintining simply because it is one of few connections. One sees this, though, in abusive relationships and addictions and other crazy things we do to stay connected to people. I won't claim to understand something that, as a result of the magnificent web of the mind, can work to bring forth memories both pleasant and unpleasant. So I remember the pretty Irish girl. Why does my mind work like this? What do these memories amount to in my life? I have daydreamed about the moment that floated past my 8 year old eyes, struggling to recall the wet streets, the sound, her waving, who else was on the float -- was it a float, was it the back of a truck? Did she see me, and if so, does she remember me? It is a single memory as powerful and consuming as all of Ireland, 1965. Within the hour the parade had passed and we walked back to our hotel for lunch. In the lobby were some members of a marching band, and my grandmother is probably the one who asked if we could borrow the hat and drum for a photo that she took. I have another photo where I have on the hat and drum, but it's a little blurrier and our faces don't show. Also, Leila is walking in the background and she looked like she has a nasty scowl on her face, a look she often actually wore, and a look that was sometimes expressive of her true feelings. Tomorrow, another photo, more on my grandmother, and eventually more on Ireland and, perhaps eventually one day, per Lloyds' request, Inisheer. Tuesday, August 5, 2003 Brussels * Got a postcard yesterday from Karin from the Rhine area, dated July 27. She stayed at Burg Stahleck, which is now a hostel. She's traveling with her sister and having a great time. * EDUCAUSE 2003: Emerging Best Practices for Integrating Library Content and Services with Educational Technology * OUSD Teachers facing 4% salary cut * Excavation, de Kooning The Piano Lesson, Matisse The Mourning of Christ, Giotto Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso Las Meninas, Velasquez Sunday, August 3, 2003 Galway      * The details and reasons aren't necessary. I only need say that the circumstances of my family have created in me a deep nostalgia for happy moments in my life. I often daydream very clear, specific, and powerful faraway memories. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ My older brother and I are in Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery behind us, in the middle of Swingin' London, 1965. Pigeons kept landing on my head, which we found hilarious. I am 8 years old, and Rick is 12. His birthday is June 8, two days before mine. I am looking at my grandmother while she quickly tries to capture the moment; that is her finger blurring the right side of the picture, something she did a little too often. The single most important influence in my life, on who I am, my grandmother took my brother and I on a summer-long European trip that year to England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein, and France. We were gone nearly two and a half months, and I remember much of this trip. For an 8 year old, that's a long time to be away from parents, but I do not recall getting homesick once. I think that is because I was with her. Rick turns to look behind, the square a flurry of fluttering pigeons, spraying water, and circling traffic. I stand still for the picture, happy in the moment. Now I look at a much younger self through my grandmother's eyes, looking at myself looking back at her. It is like I am carrying her with me now, seeing more clearly that moment, who she was, the example of a way to live. She died in 1992, and I think of her frequently. I wrote and drew a short story just over one year ago about this photograph. My grandmother is featured in some of the other stories: 2002/07/24; 2002/07/25. Rick is the oldest brother in two other stories: 2002/07/19; 2002/07/23. * At UCB: "The Geo-Images Project attempts to make images (mostly photographs) that are useful in teaching geography more widely available using computers and the internet." * Women Of Our Time photo exhibit at the Smithsonian- beautiful design, excellent content, nice audio. * Pat Delaney has a new weblog. Will no longer be using IU. The new design incorporates a painting by Goya, Le Chien, presumably in tribute to Pat's dog, Harry. Saturday, August 2, 2003 This drawing got showy, overly designish, too compositional, too many things going on, too much of a "picture." The last few days seemed headed towards this. Not sure where this is going. Sometimes I go ahead and post things I've drawn that have gotten away from me, and this is a big case of that. Still, I'm just going to leave it as an example. This will probably make me revert back to something simple. The simple blocky crosses of July had much more going for me than the little tour de force show off this drawing turned out to be. One day at a time. Friday, August 1, 2003 * No power in Barrows Hall from 6:00AM on Saturday 8/2 to 7:00 AM on Sunday 8/3 means that interactiveu will be shut down on Friday, 7pm. No weblogs until Sunday. * More postcards from Karin: Interlaken, July 14 Prague, July 18 Berlin, Jly 20 * For later... Thursday, July 31, 2003 * The International Children's Digital Library: Description and analysis of first use The International Children's Digital Library: Description and analysis of first use by Allison Druin, Benjamin B. Bederson, Ann Weeks, Allison Farber, Jesse Grosjean, Mona Leigh Guha, Juan Pablo Hourcade, Juhyun Lee, Sabrina Liao, Kara Reuter, Anne Rose, Yoshifumi Takayama, and Lingling Zhang We present the first version of the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). As a five-year research project, its mission is to enable children to access and read an international collection of children's books through the development of new interface technologies. This paper will introduce the ICDL and an initial analysis of the first seven weeks of the ICDL's public use on the Web. * Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is the beauty of things modest and humble. It is the beauty of things unconventional. * Helmut Federle Wednesday, July 30, 2003 * From Primary Source, the IMLS' Monthly E-mail Newsletter, July/August 2003: Web-Wise 2003 Papers Published on First Monday Conference papers from Web-Wise 2003, held February 26-28, 2003, in Washington, DC, are available on First Monday at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_5/ The theme of this year's conference (sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and co-hosted by Johns Hopkins University's Sheridan Libraries) was "Sustaining Digital Resources." Discussions focused on preservation and economic issues at the conference, attended by over 200 participants involved in the creation and use of digital resources, including library, museum and archives professionals, computer scientists, educators, and learners. For more information about the Web-Wise 2003 Conference, access the IMLS Web site at: http://www.imls.gov/pubs/WebWise2003/wbws03.htm * All right, I'm game- a partial but pretty full list of where I've slept. Where I've been would be a fuller list. Hayward Castro Valley San Lorenzo San Ramon Sacramento Carmichael San Jose Oakland Santa Cruz Monterey Calistoga Occidental Russian River Jenner Half Moon Bay Clear Lake Tahoe Northstar Reno Shasta Los Angeles San Diego San Bernadino Las Vegas Yosemite Death Valley Lone Pine Mono Lake Tehachapi (Hey Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Victorville (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Needles Winton Modesto Twain Harte a whole bunch of little towns and campsites all over California Seattle Portland Ashland Corvallis (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Victoria Minneapolis Carlsbad (CA & NM) Albuquerque Santa Fe San Antonio Lubbock, home of Buddy Holly and Aunt Evelyn San Antonio Harlingen (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) New Orleans Atlanta West Monroe, LA New York Kapaa a beach in San Felipe, Baja (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Mazatlan Puerto Vallarta Barra de Navidad London Sheffield (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Dover Rye Cambridge York Edinburgh Glasgow Cardiff Dublin Crossmaglen (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Dromore West Clifden Galway Corofin (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Inishere (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Quin Kildare Belfast Brussels Amsterdam Stockholm Oslo Copenhagen Frankfurt Bonn Munich Baumholder (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Hamburg Vienna Zurich Le Havre Rouen (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) Paris Geneva Basel Florence Padua (and hey, Lloyd, hi-lite this one, and ask me why.) No Asia. The first time I flew west was when we went to Kauai three years ago. There is a huge part of the US to which I've never been. I have never been to DC. I've never been to Chicago. If Lloyd asked each person for whom he highlighted a city to write a descriptive piece about that place we'd have quite an extensive collection of location-specific writings. So, hey, Lloyd, ask me why! Tuesday, July 29, 2003 * Raymond writes about the quandary of how much to write about oneself in a weblog, about how much to process about one's life in public? Will it be valuable to oneself and others? What are the risks, and what are the gains? In what unexpected ways will one's weblog be used in positive or negative ways? Anyone who has used Usenet or belonged to a publicly open mailing list that engages in ongoing dialogue about a common area of interest -- and I mean more non-professional groups, perhaps hobbyist types of groups -- has seen the flame wars that develop and occasionally spin out of control with one person making life miserable for, if not one person, then the rest of the group. What, you've never experienced that? Oh, I could tell you some stories. (I am an excellent speller. I can visualize words. I always won the spelling bees. But for some reason, I have a block on "occasion;" I always forget how to spell it- ocaission, occaision, ocassion. Why is that? I do not have this problem with any other word.) And the thing about these terrible incidents is that the injured person had no idea that anyone could ever so casually violate another person's privacy, or use previous comments lifted out of context against them, or have enough imformation to put two and two together and be even more threatening. This is the funny thing with the web; often times you only know how vulnerable you really are when it's too late: you've been hacked, or slandered, or had emails circulated behind your back, been impersonated with free webmail accounts, had your words changed, or just been misunderstood. It's creepy. This is a big part of why I have reallly pulled back on the personal. I do not want to be this vulnerable. I want my privacy, and I want control. The second part is that, in this medium, one has to go to such great effort to explain, set contexts, provide an introduction, consider all the angles, and still there it is so easy to be misunderstood. It's a lot of effort, and not always that easy to do. So, to put it simply, I don't really mind if someone doesn't understand me. But at the same time, what I don't want is for someone to grossly misunderstand me. What I hope for it that either I'm understood , or that I'm not thought of at all. Leave me alone, invulnerable in my privacy. This weblog is mine, and it's a place to do part of the work of my life. But since it is public, I am being careful, and that determines what I will write about here. And even still, having written this, I worry that it won't be understood, that it will seem as though I don't care about others, when the opposite is true. But there are people I don't know, and that I wouldn't want to know, who can also come here. Monday, July 28, 2003             * Something I had noticed before: SIMS final projects for 2002 & 2003. There are some very interesting projects here, for example, WhereIS: A locating service. The project is to build a customized item locating system with a map interface, supplement to current library online catalogs. When a user searches for a bibliographic item, the search result will not only display the textual bibliographic record, but also visualize its physical location on a map, from the targeted building, the floor, to the stack. * Just got a postcard from Karin from Copenhagen. Here are the postcards in reverse chronological order. She's covering territory. Copenhagen, July 22 Lausanne, July 12 Geneva, July 11 Rome, July 8 Florence, July 6 Paris, July 1 London, June 21 She updated her weblog from Berlin on July 19. * A nicely designed education site for last year's retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art gives a good overview of Barnett Newman. Sunday, July 27, 2003             Saturday, July 26, 2003             * Friday, July 25, 2003             * Hey, Raymond has been written up on the front page of the CETIS site: http://www.cetis.ac.uk/: July 24, 2003 Transformers! The advantage of a standardised, structured data format is not limited to data exchange with other systems that understand the same format. Some cool work with XSLT by Raymond Yee and also the Digital University (DU) of the Netherlands demonstrates that content in one standard format can be transformed into another in practice. Full article: http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20030724173636 * As Lynn notes, playing with variations on the cruciform -- or perhaps trying to either deny or cancel the cross form, each of which are not the same thing -- inevitably leads one towards the need to avoid the sw*stik*. The cross itself is a loaded form, and there are actually many types of crosses, too. The problem of the sw*stik* can even present itself with a simple grid; make too many turns in the same direction and the form starts suggesting other things: This is a common problem in abstraction: how do you use forms in ways that do not set the viewer's eye into a rut of identification, even with less controversial forms, when the goal is to have an openness to a range of associations? One can learn more about learn more about how the N*zi's stole the sw*stik*: A few years ago, voters in Nepal went to the polls. They expressed their choice by stamping a swastika next to the name of the candidate of their preference. Farmers in Tibet frequently place a swastika on their home doors, so that no evil can enter the place. A similar custom is followed by Irish farmers, where the swastika placed in their doors is called a Brigit's cross. Cuna Indians in Panama design their blouses with colorful swastikas. Navajo medicine men use colored sand to draw swastikas on the floor while performing their curative rites. As a form of benediction Indian boys paint a swastika on their shaved heads. The swastika is, without a doubt, an ever present symbol. A modern author called it the "Symbol of the Century." Thursday, July 24, 2003               * Patsy Krebs Wednesday, July 23, 2003           Tuesday, July 22, 2003               * A year ago at this time I was in the middle of writing some very short stories, each of which had an HTML drawing to go with it. There were fifteen stories, and this series was a bit of a breakthrough for me in terms of 1] writing, 2] using images that were still rather abstract but were still very loosely a kind illustration, and 3] using the development of series as a way to develop individual bodies of work, and a larger body of work. By doing these drawings I was able to push through a bit to what an HTML drawing could do; the July Short Stories Series, as I pretty obviously titled them, have been a foundation for a lot of what I've been doing, and I've learned a fair amount during this time, as I occasionally remind myself and reflect on. This would not have happened if I didn't flip and do something in this weblog everyday. Monday, July 21, 2003               * My mind wanders from thing to thing. Today is the birthday of Hart Crane, born in 1899. It is also the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, also born in 1899. I only know this because as I was driving to work Garrison Keillor told me so. Every morning at 9:00 a.m. on KALW, right before Fresh Air, Mr. Prairie Home Companion does a little five minute spot called The Writer's Alamanc, during which he reports the birthdays of various authors and poets, reads some quotes, and often ends with a poem. And as Mr. Keillor reads or talks I wonder how and when he breathes as he talks in a soft breathy continual exhale, a wheezing out of words while subtly sucking in faint whisps of spare oxygen, a technique to be used during a contest to see who can talk the longest without stopping. You can hear how his arched eyebrows and the deep sincere furrow in his brow tug the skin tight in the dip of the nose between his eyes. How has he escaped being caricatured on Saturday Night Live? And I thought of how I briefly entered grad school way back when, 1981 or so, when I had it in my head that as much as the art thing was my thing that I was smarter than that and that I would become a writer, which I didn't, and I dropped out. I had a writing teacher named John. I can't remember his last name. He had been a screenwriter in Hollywood. Our classes were often just story hour, with John holding court. He said that Cary Grant was the most vacuous personality he'd ever met. Professor John once read us a Hemingway short story- I'm closing the loop here- and at one point he kept say a line over and over that he thought was a particularly tight and beautiful and descriptive Hemingwayesque line, something like, and I'm not going to look it up to get it right, as I don't even know the short story, he kept reading, "the flapjacks cooked on the griddle," or something like that. Maybe instead of "cooked" it was "sizzled," or some other more colorful word. Who knows? He kept reading it over at different speeds, pausing, emphasizing different words. "The flapjacks... cooked... onthegriddle." "The flapJACKS cooked... on the... grid-dle." "The flapjacks cooked... on... the... griddle." "The flapjacks cooked on the griddle." What a great line, he kept saying, what distilllation of language, of boiling down something to such essentials that then illuminates the moments, the smell, the time of day. Sure, John. Whatever you say. How about some more Hollywood gossip. "Cary Grant sizzled on the griddle." "Cary Grant was a flapjack." "Gary Grant ate flapjacks and thought of Ernest Hemingway." "Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway celebrated their birthday by eating flapjacks and debating Cary Grant's personality." "Garrison Keillor ground Cary Grant's bones into the batter to make flapjacks for Mr. Hart and Mr. Hemingway." These are the kinds of distractions that Garrison Keillor's pretensions, and literary information services, drives one to. Knocking Garrison Keillor? What, am I some kind of uptight conservative Republican who doesn't enjoy community and story? No, I'm just knocking down idols. Down comes Saddam, down comes Garrison. Thou shalt not... hold before you... something... idols, etc. Let's hook a tank up to the old guy and topple him right over, the inhabitants of Lake Wobegone shouting and firing Russian made rifles into the air to celebrate their freedom from tyranny and oppressively picaresque moral tales. * Why does this weblog have so many hits from Google Belgium on the painter Phil Sims? Who in Belgium is looking for him? http://www.google.be/search?q=%22phil+sims%22+a... 11 Seeing this led me to a page of recent paintings, digital representations of monochromes which make me think, "why bother representing them on the web? For all the info those crummy little jpegs give, I coulda just made those in HTML." This is why for purposes of display on the web an installation shot is much more effective and informative for some kinds of paintings than a straight shot of the painting. And at this page, a good starting point from which to take off and think some things through: The Presents of Paintings (that should be "Presence") by Stephan Berg What can paintings be, if they neither wish to be a comment on something materially or immaterially external to themselves nor are intended to be understood as a pure expression of their own internal autonomy. This question arises not only in relation to the reality of the paintings of Phil Sims, which oscillates between these two poles, but also in relation to the general development and possibilities of painting in the twentieth century. Up to this point, the development of the medium can be described, by and large, as a process in which the self-significance, the self-assertiveness of the picture increasingly gains weight against the moment of the depiction, the visualization of something which lies outside the picture itself. From this viewpoint, the recently-ended twentieth century, whose first half saw the breakthrough to a fully non-representational pictorial concept justifiable only in terms of itself, can be understood as the logical and, in Hegelian terms, ideal completion of a route pursued step by step down the centuries. Recently this interpretation has attracted criticism, directed on the one hand against the reduction and linearization of complex historical processes to a monocausal development pattern, while on the other generally expressing doubt about the possibility of absolutely autonomous artistic styles. The area in which the debate about the risks and chances of a pictorial concept directed purely at itself remains the most pointed object of discussion is still monochrome painting. The development of monochrome techniques in this century, starting with Kasmir Malevich's "Black Square," up to Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman or Marcia Hafif, makes it clear, however, that the setting of focal points within its radical framework can give rise to extreme variation, and in its breadth indicates, above all, the possibilities for differentiation in which the autonomy of the image can be discussed. * I often get hits for Sea Ranch, and I imagine those in search of info about that wonderful place are disappointed by my "playing with colored blocks" drawings from a week spent there last year. Sunday, July 20, 2003               Saturday, July 19, 2003             Friday, July 18, 2003                 * As a long time Gillian Welch fan, why have I not raved on about her in this weblog? I've seen her and amazing guitar partner David Rawlings four times, I've got a very nice stash of live bootleg recordings that I listen to quite often, and I ocassionally play a few of her/their songs myself on guitar. I think the reason is that I'm afraid they'll get too big and then it will be too much of a hassle to see them. But it's probably too late now. The last time we saw them, at the Fillmore nearly a year ago, the scene was already too big. No more watching them up close at a two hundred seat club like th Freight & Salvage. So that fear is now baseless. I missed the opportunity to rave on and on about what a great record 2001's Time (The Revelator) is. But it's such a great record I'm going to rave right now: epic, epochal, dark, depth, poetry, history, harmony, complex, surprising, rave, rave, rave. The latest record, Soul Journey, is more personal, a little quieter, revealing, and again, rave, rave, rave. After first listening to Soul Journey I sat down on June 8 at the computer, played the record on my CD drive, and furiously typed up the lyrics because they don't come with the CD and aren't online, because I wanted to understand them better, and because I wanted to teach myself a few of the songs. And since June 8, when I posted the lyrics to Soul Journey in this weblog, I have received an incredible number of hits daily via Google and other engines by people looking for those lyrics. Here are just a few from this morning in my referers. http://www.google.com/search?q=gillian+welch+soul+journey+lyrics&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://www.google.com/search?q=gillian%20welch%20miss%20ohio%20lyrics&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 http://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+a+wrecking+ball%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=40&sa=N http://www.google.com/search?q=%22i%20was%20just%20a%20little%20deadhead%22 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=gillian+welch+soul+journey++lyrics&btnG=Google+Search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=lowlands+%22gillian+welch%22+lyrics http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22look+at+miss+ohio+she%27s%22&btnG=Google+Search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=gillian+welch+lyrics+%22like+a+wrecking+ball%22 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22headed+for+the+wall+like+a+wrecking+ball%22 http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=been+in+the+lowlands+much+too+long&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&meta= http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=gillian+welch+lyrics+wrecking+ball&ei=UTF-8 http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=gillian+welch+lyrics++lowlands&ei=UTF-8 * From The Hairy Eyeball jill/txt's weblog definition, from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory A weblog, also known as a *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader sees the most recent post first. The style is typically personal and informal. Freely available tools on the World Wide Web make it easy for anybody to publish their own weblog, so there is a lot of variety in the quality, content and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-nineties and became more widely popular as simple and free publishing tools such as Blogger.com became available towards the turn of the century. Incredible. People have already lost site of the notion that the Web log is a log of the Web: a record of where you went and what you found. On the Web. In other words, the genre is defined by a topic that is also its medium: the Web. It's not just on the Web. It's about the Web, and the aggregate of Web logs impose some semblance of annotated order on the mathematical possibilities of the Web. They become the Web. Is that so hard to understand? I don't agree 100% with Hairy that a weblog is necessarily about the web, but that idea certainly is missing from the above definition. Others would argue that a weblog need not have anything to do with the web other than that is the space in which it exists, and that a weblog is primarily about writing, or more broadly, authorship, which would include, besides words, images and sound. But a weblog without links is just a column, and is not really engaged with networks other than as a place of distribution. Text without links on the web forgoes an dynamic and important dimension, and also misses on the ease and immediacy of an important component of building arguments, making cases, and goood scholarship- citations and references. * Thursday, July 17, 2003             * I suppose the maxim really is true: if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all. Clarification time, this is excerpted from an email I wrote to a friend to whom my criticisms would absolutely never apply about why I posted yesterday what I did: A couple of posts this past week are based on some general observations... (of) how quite a few people don't understand writing, the purpose of writing, what's conveyed through writing and what's valuable about it. In particular, I'm reacting to two... (who) use email in such a cavalier way that I can't tell much at all about their intentions, tone, understanding, making me as a respondent confused and cautious... not young people, educated, and should really know better... it was disturbing... and made me think about how genuine these people are, or what their intentions are. And I think the instantaneity and impersonal feel of email for some people makes them forget there is another person on the other side. Writing conventions, and care in expresssing thought, seem to be losing value in a broad cultural sense... a real shame because I think it is something extremely valuable. What if everyone began dropping the use of simple manners? Oh, wait, that's already happening, isn't it? But so many people who should know better are dropping even the simplest conventions like it's too much work. Is is that hard to begin an email with Hi or Dear? How about using that shift key, giving me a period or question mark so I know what you mean? These are things that help us talk to each other, recieve some implied understandings, set a context. I'm not looking for a perfectly proofread email with no spelling mistakes and proper use of the dreaded semi-colon, but come one. It just amazes me how intellectually thoughtless some people appear to be just because they don't make the effort. Connected to this, here's something Raymond referred me to: My obligtation to you... I feel a personal obligation to the people who read this site and to the world at large not to... I feel a very different kind of obligation to the friends that I've made online and the community that has grown up around this site... ...I feel absolutely no obligation whatsoever to write to entertain the people who read this site... Wednesday, July 16, 2003                     * Some people assume that since you keep a weblog you must have time on your hands. Perhaps they don't know or haven't considered or have forgotten the value of writing everyday, of thinking, and how over time the accumulation of words and images can be sifted back through for reuse, patterns, and synthesis. Some people also assume that since you keep a public weblog that you're automatically writing for them, and that if this is so then as a member of this self-identified audience they have the right to judge you. Go ahead, I don't care, but I wasn't writing or drawing for that person. For my purpose, see the previous paragraph. Some people don't realize that the appearance of their writing effects how I read it. Lack of capitalization, no punctuation, and incomplete sentences in emails are signs that I read. Make me laugh, tell me something important, give me something to savor and I'll look past what's missing. Failure to do that exposes your writing and ideas as coming out of indifference, and I will be annoyed, though I will try to forgive, that you have wasted my time. Some people are generous, and others aren't. In a world of words and images, which is what the web is now, and email, too, what you say and show is inevitably tied to how you do it. A lack of generosity shows itself quickly. Dear reader, don't assume that this post was made for your benefit. * Received two postcards from Karin, from Firenze and Geneve. No time to type them up. Tuesday, July 15, 2003 Monday, July 14, 2003                     * Somewhere around almost three years ago this weblog, following on my original weblog, XYZ, was founded and called "a place to write, nothing fancy." Later, when I started doing HTML drawings, it became "a place to write (and draw), nothing fancy." But this weblog has become a place to write, draw, exhibit, archive, think, synthesize, reflect, search, collect, reference, link, debate, cheerlead, question, critique, wonder, stare at, curse at, ignore, and live. So today, I'm tweaking the name to something a little more inclusive, and maybe a little more serious, but it's a change of only one word: "a place to work, nothing fancy." Ta-daaaaaa! * Very good to run into Lloyd this morning. I eat breakfast at home, and rarely buy anything in the morning, but since the cupboard is a little bare at home right now it looks like it was in the stars to run into someone with whom it's always good to talk. I really had little time this morning, but I must have needed a little break to talk to someone who is has good things to say and is a good listener, too. Lloyd, I hope I didn't keep you from anything. It's been too long. Lunch is in our near future. * Ahh, Lynn, you should've stopped by when you saw Lloyd and me. * Lloyd inventoried our discussion, and I'll do one, too: his Saturday dinner, AIC, crosses and other HTML drawings, housing, living in Hawaii or other small places, moving to Kauai, Pono, Isaac's growing family, Karin, Kala, archiving weblogs, the future of his weblog, using past weblog material to make something new, why not many others are dipping into their archives to do this, is it developmental or does it have to do with whether or not one is a "creator" or is there some other reason, the hazards of setting the timezone of your weblog to one other than the one in which one lives, a future lunch. * I'm writing less on here than at times in the past, but it doesn't mean that I'm not writing. I continually bump into reminders that I am a writer. For example, email exchanges- I'll often put in some effort, explain, try to set a context or make something plain, get down something that is not an off-handed, breezy, quick reply, and then I get back an email that says, "Thanks," or "I agree." Recently I had exchanges with a couple of people, people not living in this area, and gave each of them something to think about and respond to, and also asked some questions. One person replied with a one word answer, the other used five words. That was the entirety of both emails, except, of course, for all of my email to them needlessly quoted back to me below in the reply. And of course, what I wrote used all of the conventions: capitalization, puntucation, complete sentences. My first reaction is offence. I gave them something, and they gave me nothing back. Am I supposed to get something back? Is that why I wrote? While it's true that not everything I do is calculated to get something back, in this case I did want something more. But this is a reaction to get past. My second thought, though, is that perhaps I'm a writer, one willing to be in dialogue, and either they're not, or they don't do it in the context of email. Maybe it's just not their medium. Maybe I'm a little more willing to do it with strangers. Will this make me write less? No. I have the need to write things to make them clear. But not everyone is like me. But I know from this that I'm a writer. * Karin posts from Lausanne. Observant repeated visitors will notice that Karin has changed her preference to display several days worth of post, so that now if you just go to the front page of her weblog you can scroll down and read all of her posts from Europe. * Buddhism Quest by Fred Stern The conventional wisdom that Buddhism traveled in the 6th century A.D. from India to China and from there to Japan was ably disputed by the recent exhibition at Japan Society, "Transmitting the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan." It turns out that Buddhism came from Korea to Japan, probably by 538 A.D., or by some accounts by 552 A.D. Seated bodhisattva in pensive posture Korea 1st half of 7th century * How much are the cross and a buddha related? How Christian are the cross drawings that I am currently making? How far are they from a buddha-like aspiring mind? What, for example, is the image of yesterday's black cross wearing a blood red necklace, lei, or vest really about? Is today's drawing a cross seen from the front or from behind? * I heartily recommend Pete 'n Mom's Thai Plus restaurant on San Pablo at Solano. Excellent. Try the spicy fish. Good curries. Great, friendly service. Very reasonable prices. Wonderful decor. You'll thank me for suggesting it. Go. * To read: Preserving Scholarly E-Journals Sunday, July 13, 2003                     Saturday, July 12, 2003                     * Barbara Rose, in writing about Joseph Marioni [Joseph Marioni: Paintings 1970-1998: A Survey, Rose Art Museum, Boston, 1998], says something that is related to what I barely hinted at yesterday regarding the falseness of currently culturally accepted "creativity," something for which I'm just beginning to find words. Marioni's analytic work is conceptual in the sense that Poussin, Cezanne and Johns are painter philosophers, not just illustrators of philosophical textbooks. In his examination of first premises, Marioni addresses such issues as progress in art, the communicability of intention, and the potential for concentrated, centered, introspective art in a fragmented, undisciplined, randomly collaged culture such as that of the present (italics mine). Something else from Rose that interests me: Since judgments are meaninful only in relation to quality, the death of art criticism is the logical, if ironic, consequence of proclamations of the death of painting on the part of "art critics." For what once was criticism now functions as publicity and public relations for the expanding art entertainment industry. Value judgments have no role to play on the leveled field of appropriated, simulated, mediated, hybridized, and recombined- but never entirely invented anew- second-hand images fueling that vast cultural waste recycling project known as post-modernism. * Karin is in Geneva. * See Raymond on David Wiley's weblog (second from right, obscured by his laptop). Friday, July 11, 2003                     Thursday, July 10, 2003                     * Michael Krasny talks with Randolph Ward, Oakland's new state-appointed school administrator for the Oakland Unified School District. (RealAudio stream) * Lloyd asks, "what are you reading these days?" I'll mention two things. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard Publishers Weekly: "French phenomenologist Bachelard's classic study of the psychological affects of domestic space." Amazon: This is a deep, magical, densely captivating book about space, our homes, how we live in them, and how dwellings and space affect us; it is as much a book of philosophy as a work of serious literature. It requires careful, preferably leisurely reading, with the possibility of moments to pause and digest and re-read the words. It will change the way you look at your home and your life, providing a deeper, more insightful relationship with the spaces you occupy. Clyfford Still by David Anfam, Neal Benezra, Brooks Adams, et al Yale University Press: Clyfford Still (1904-1980), best known for his compelling abstract works with jagged fields and powerful expanses of color, stands among the giants of post-World War II art... The contributors to this volume explore various aspects of Still?s art, his accomplishments, and the Abstract Expressionism movement. David Anfam presents an overview of Still?s career from the 1930s through 1950s. Brooks Adams examines Still?s artistic legacy and influence on succeeding generations of artists. And Neal Benezra?s chapter focuses on a provocative, unexplored element of Still?s studio practice: his habit of painting replicas of many of his own works. It surprises me a bit to be reading about Clyfford Still. SFMOMA has a collection of around 35 of his paintings, many in the ten and twelve foot range, given by the artist to the museum in the late 70's with the stipulation that a gallery be set aside so that a portion of this collection is always on view. You can always see Stills at the museum. I have known these paintings for about 25 years. Earlier, when I was younger and absorbing everything, I looked at them a lot and tried to learn from them, but that didn't go anywhere. I became ambivalent about the paintings, and I thought, looking back now, that they had failed me because they weren't giving me enough. I now think, however, and this is rather recent, that I failed the paintings. I have carried around with me the experience of looking at these paintings over many years, and at the museum I would pause to look at them, to try to get something from them. But instead, I would grow, what... anxious, bored, impatient, to feel like an outsider? I don't know what. The paintings are large, dry, crusty, use a limited range of colors and marks, appear to be more obvious than they really are. I think that's what I thought. I'm thinking now that instead of trying to get something from the paintings that I wasn't giving enough of myself to them. I had an email exchange with George Lawson's about his idea of the painting as an open image, which I have been struggling to understand in a way that I can talk about rather than just experience. Writing about George's drawings, Bernd Growe refers to the search for images that are, "visual equivalents to the overlays of memory and association, as they inevitably influence the perception of the viewer [link]." I had written that I was interested in painting that instigates a, "mental image that is created by looking, used while looking, and is carried away from the looking." I now think an open image would allow or ask of the viewer to bring something to the painting rather than just take something away, and that my idea of the mental image isn't something merely created from the looking, but is also built from what the viewer brings, too, and is built in collaboration with the painting, that the paintings supports or influences this building, and that it is a necessary component to this process. The components of the painting themselves are selected and composed in ways that strike within the viewer the bringing forth of memory, vision, idea, feeling, and emotion the are within, perhaps at times even barely within, the viewer. This structuring is both the art and the craft of making an open image. In writing to George I gave a couple of examples of painters in whose work I found this experience, and I was completely surprised when I mentioned Clyfford Still. He just came to me suddenly as an example, and I mentioned how I've struggled back and forth over the years to get something from his work. Occasionally I would immediately connect with a painting and enjoy looking at and experiencing the surface, marks, and composition. Other times I was almost offended by their lack of appeal, their lacking in "art" or craft (and, I could almost say, creativity, which is interesting to me because I often think creativity, in the way it is often bandied about in our culture, is problematic, even false concept- at this time I won't try explaining that more), or their apparent sameness. George asked if it was Still's "brand of ego" getting in the way for me. I wrote, "There are seeming contradictions. There is a severity; the paintings are hard, barely material, almost unpleasant, ungenerous except in square yards of canvas. But there are moments where the drawing is surprising, and there are spaces- slots, crevasses, and vast fields- that really let the viewer inside, leaving the room and body behind- that seems beyond ego, to me. And although there is tremendous consistency, it isn't accurate to call them formulaic. Being in a room surrounded by three or four walls of Stills can be engrossing, almost powerful, yet you don't have to look directly at them, but maybe out of the corner of the eye. I don't really like the paintings, they kind of make me mad, yet there is still some experience there beyond the paintings that persists, something beyond the actual paintings. I know that size has something to do with it, but there is more." I would change the second to last sentence to say, "I sometimes don't really like the paintings; they can make me mad because I sense that the paintings seem to have the characteristic of indifference towards me and my feelings. Reflecting on that, I imagine that this is a problem of my expectations, because there is still some experience there beyond the paintings that persists, something beyond the actual paintings, and I think this experience is one where the paintings are waiting for me to make the first move, for me to engage them, not for them to engage me. They will meet me half way, but they won't entertain me." At that moment, and now continuing for the past couple of weeks, I began to rethink a bit how to look at a painting. This isn't new to me; I already knew this, I think, but it became clearer and more conscious and present to me: 1) how much I brought to looking; 2) how much my looking was on the surface, seeing the materials, seeing the decisions; 3) how much was about responding to and being inside the image- color, light, form, etc.; and also 4) how much was about being the painter of the painting, a surrogate, reading the making of the painting, analyzing all of the decisions made to make the thing before me. It was because of this that I looked into some books on Still in the UC Berkeley library, about whom I hadn't read much in a few years, to re-engage with his work and see what I can learn from it. And from this thinking I decided to finally read a book that I'd stored away in my memory some time ago, Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space." View some digital representations, or surrogates, as they say in the library world, of paintings by Clyfford Still. * Howard Smith at Rupert Walser, Muenchen. Wednesday, July 9, 2003                     * Karin updates from Rome. And I received a post card yesterday from her from Paris mailed July 1. She writes, "Hello everyone! Hello from Paris! It's so beautiful here but I've been sick for the past 3 days and haven't been able to go out much. 8( I'm leaving Paris for Florence tomorrow morning so I'm going to miss all of the museums. But I did have 3 good days here and I ahve to say that the French are really nice. Please tell Isaac that San Sebastian was awesome and that it was the highlight of my trip so far! Hope things are going well!" For more weblogging from Italy read Evan [1] [2]. Tuesday, July 8, 2003                     Monday, July 7, 2003                     * Raoul de Keyser | Joe Fyfe | Stephen Mueller | Melissa Meyer Sunday, July 6, 2003 Saturday, July 5, 2003 Friday, July 4, 2003 * Out of Line, review by Jerry Saltz of James Siena, drawings, June 6-July 31, 2003, at Gorney Bravin + Lee, NY. * Alan Ebnother, works on paper, 70 x 50 cm Alan Ebnother at Galerie Klaus Braun, Stuttgart. "Das Grün ist eine unendlich ruhige Farbe". (Green is an infinitely calm color.) Alan Ebnother malt nur grüne Bilder. ( Alan Ebnother paints only green pictures.) Alab Ebnother currently has a painting at BAMPFA. Thursday, July 3, 2003 * Laura responds, "Chris, I was teaching at 1:45 on Tuesday and thus could not have been the mystery woman walking past the library." Huh... I could've sworn. Dressed like you. Doppelganger? Wednesday, July 2, 2003 Tuesday, July 1, 2003 * The painter George Lawson recently launched a web site with paintings, drawings, installation views, writing, and bio. On June 13 I posted a statement by George about his show last fall in SF. I have known of George's work for well over twenty years, having first seen his show of Cold Mountain Paintings at Shirley Cerf Gallery, San Francisco in 1980, and also in 1980 at the same gallery in a show titled Color Painting (with Phil Sims, Joseph Marioni (currently showing at Charlotte Jackson), Marcia Hafif and Max Gimblett), the catalogue for which I still have. Looking at George's resume and installation shots I'm reminded of how many of the Bay Area shows I've seen; I wouldn't have thought that it would add up to this many: 1980 Color Painting (with Phil Sims, Joseph Marioni, Marcia Hafif and Max Gimblett) Shirley Cerf Gallery, San Francisco Cold Mountain Paintings Shirley Cerf Gallery, San Francisco 1981 1981 SECA Award Exhibition San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco 1981 California Artists Exhibition Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA 1982 New Abstraction (with Joseph Marioni, Phil Sims, Joseph Hughes, others) Bluxome Gallery, San Francisco 1985 George Lawson & John Meyer, Collaborative Paintings Acme Arts, San Francisco George Lawson & John Meyer, Paintings Khiva Gallery, San Francisco 1987 George Lawson, Recent Paintings Khiva Gallery, San Francisco The Open Image, Recent Abstract Painting from Germany (curator, with Bernd Growe) Goethe Institute, Art Institute and Khiva Gallery, San Francisco 1989 George Lawson, Recent Paintings Mincher/Wilcox Gallery, San Francisco Quiet (with Roy Thurston, others) Oakland Museum, Oakland CA (curated by Paul Tomidy) 1993 George Lawson, Recent Paintings Haines Gallery, San Francisco (also 1991) 2002 Jizo Paintings Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco * Unexpected place from which to get a hit. * Gail Gregg has some interesting work, and has a nice way of doing an elegant digital twist on the expected sheet of slides. * Laura, are you wearing all brown today? Longish skirt? Black headband thingie? Were you walking by the north side of the library around 1:45? Do you feel like you're being spied on? I just thought I saw you from a distance. * Lynn sees pop beads in the drawings; that's fine with me. Monday, June 30, 2003 * One year ago.. * Is Google God? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us — whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet — more than ever. Sunday, June 29, 2003 * Looking back: Birthday Hike, 20030609 Saturday, June 28, 2003 Friday, June 27, 2003 Thursday, June 26, 2003 * Lynn, the $99 Can*n scanner I bought at C*mp*sa works like a dream. Better than the one that cost $450 eight years ago. Wednesday, June 25, 2003 * Isaac finds a few minutes between baby duties to update. * Hey, cool, just got a postcard from Karin in London. It's dated June 21, 2003- that means it took only four days to get here, even through the additional hoop of campus mail. It has a 42P stamp with a profile of Queen Elizabeth, which looks just like the one pictured here except for the 1P difference. Rather than scan the postcard I thought I'd try to find it on the website of the company that produces it but they only display a limited selection. Anyway, how's that for obsessive linking? The postcard is divided into a grid showing numerous London sites: Buckinghan Palace, changing of the guards, Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, etc. She writes: Hi Everyone! I'm in London and it's great! I'm staying at a hostel called the Piccadilly Backpackers Hostel and I've met people from all over. 2 of my roommates are from Denmark and the other 3 are from Pleasanton- can you believe it? I came all the way to Lond and meet people from Pleasanton. I never made it outside of London because it's so expensive here, but that's okay because there it so much to see and do in London itself. I spent an entire day the the National Gallery (free!) and saw some amazing paintings. I'm having a great time- Karin * More updates and travel- Evan & Family are in Rome. Tuesday, June 24, 2003