new painting, some good lectures to check out, other stuff too maybe
hi livejournal! sorry i've been quiet for the past few weeks. i've been busy. but i've got a bit of a dry spell, work-wise, for a while now. so i'll be updating more. to start things off, this is one of those obligatory art posts, with some youtube/podcast links listed afterwords.
i finished this painting a few months back:
Get Familiar, 2009 (Mixed media: pencil, gouache, india ink and paper collage on board, 16" by 20")
Detail (Top left of image)
... as you can see, it's just a little guy. i've been working on a big 5' by 5', acrylic on canvas piece for MANY MANY months now, and i can't figure out what to do with it. so i'm falling back on smaller work for a little while. basically, i'm just shooting off ideas at the moment and not really thinking too hard about how good/bad the results are. expect more little guys like this over the next month or two.
since i've been away from lj-land, i thought i might also share some cool lectures i've been watching/listening to in the studio. my external hard drive died about 5 months back, leaving me without a substantial mp3 connection beside me while i painted. so i started to explore podcasts and video lectures. i became excited by sites like TED, FORA and Talks@Google. here are a few things i recommend checking out...
1.
i've spent the past month or so reading kim stanley robinson's sprawling, epic novel red mars. believe it or not, this is my first foray into "hard" science fiction, and it's proving tougher to get through than expected. the novel is often amazing - particularly as a way of imagining future ecosystems and new forms of social organization. robinson considers himself a "green socialist" - and also writes extensively about the actual, non-sci-fi, earthly environment (and its degradation). his essay about sustainability and "post-capitalism" struck a chord with me... and inspired me to begin reading his work.
anyway, his lecture for google tech talks is pretty impressive, and full of interesting hypothetical solutions to the increasingly catastrophic problem of climate change (which will factor into many of the lectures i'll share below, for better or worse). youtube won't let me embed the video, so CLICK HERE to see it.
2.
joshua klein's lecture about the amazing intelligence of crows is an oldie but a goodie. this one is short, and a bit of a crowd-pleaser, maybe (apresminuit and chocolatebark will <3 this, i think):
3.
speaking of TED talks, mark bittman's snarky take on meat consumption and climate change is remarkably persuasive. you'll either love or hate his abrasive style (i love it; i have a soft spot for smart folks with a wicked streak), but it's tough to argue with his logic, imo. some of you might be familiar with some of these arguments, c/o the also-quite-persuasive michael pollan and folks like that:
4.
chances are you probably already know about sarah haskins' target: women videos, but if not, you should. every time i watch one of these, i think about how fun it would be to hang out with her. i swear to god sometimes i just sit around imagining what it would be like to shoot the shit with public figures. anyway, the "yogurt" edition is a good place to start with these. and the more you watch, the funnier these become. lately, i feel like great comedy is more about charisma than gags or timing. if i decide i like the person telling the jokes, my affection amplifies the impact...
5.
bill moyers has been reliably excellent lately. in a way, i think he's exactly what the american political landscape needs. there's nothing like a calm, kindly old man to make universal health care, prison reform and strong civil liberties seem sensible and un-radical. moyers feels like a relic from the new deal era, which seems like a useful evocation as we try to reform health care and pass a sensible energy bill. his show is always good, but if you CLICK HERE
you can hear him interview my favorite ecological fatalist mike davis. together they debunk some needlessly scary assumptions about "socialism"...
6.
i've never read either of zadie smith's novels, but eventually i will. me and my GF went on a road trip about two months back, and we downloaded several podcasts to keep us entertained. smith's lecture to the new york public library was definitely the best of the bunch. it's titled speaking in tongues, and it does a number of things. it's a personal memoir, a study of shaw's pygmalion, a guarded appreciation of barack obama and a partial defense of equivocation. here she is discussing barack obama, cary grant and what it means to occupy several voices simultaneously:
For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden-it is also a gift. And the gift is of an interesting kind, not well served by that dull publishing-house title Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance with its suggestion of a simple linear inheritance, of paternal dreams and aspirations passed down to a son, and fulfilled. Dreams from My Father would have been a fine title for John McCain's book Faith of My Fathers, which concerns exactly this kind of linear masculine inheritance, in his case from soldier to soldier. For Obama's book, though, it's wrong, lopsided. He corrects its misperception early on, in the first chapter, while discussing the failure of his parents' relationship, characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. "Even as that spell was broken," he writes, "and the worlds that they thought they'd left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been."
To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It's more interesting. What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? "The Man from Dream City." When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man-we see in them whatever we want to see. "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," said Cary Grant. "Even I want to be Cary Grant." It's not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.
anyway, this is probably one of the best lectures i've ever heard, and you can LISTEN TO IT HERE.
finally, now that you have a full year's worth of online lectures to watch... and since you've made it this far... and since this post has been a bit on the serious side, here's a painting i made around x-mas time of my GF's dog, lentil:
i finished this painting a few months back:
Get Familiar, 2009 (Mixed media: pencil, gouache, india ink and paper collage on board, 16" by 20")
Detail (Top left of image)
... as you can see, it's just a little guy. i've been working on a big 5' by 5', acrylic on canvas piece for MANY MANY months now, and i can't figure out what to do with it. so i'm falling back on smaller work for a little while. basically, i'm just shooting off ideas at the moment and not really thinking too hard about how good/bad the results are. expect more little guys like this over the next month or two.
since i've been away from lj-land, i thought i might also share some cool lectures i've been watching/listening to in the studio. my external hard drive died about 5 months back, leaving me without a substantial mp3 connection beside me while i painted. so i started to explore podcasts and video lectures. i became excited by sites like TED, FORA and Talks@Google. here are a few things i recommend checking out...
1.
i've spent the past month or so reading kim stanley robinson's sprawling, epic novel red mars. believe it or not, this is my first foray into "hard" science fiction, and it's proving tougher to get through than expected. the novel is often amazing - particularly as a way of imagining future ecosystems and new forms of social organization. robinson considers himself a "green socialist" - and also writes extensively about the actual, non-sci-fi, earthly environment (and its degradation). his essay about sustainability and "post-capitalism" struck a chord with me... and inspired me to begin reading his work.
anyway, his lecture for google tech talks is pretty impressive, and full of interesting hypothetical solutions to the increasingly catastrophic problem of climate change (which will factor into many of the lectures i'll share below, for better or worse). youtube won't let me embed the video, so CLICK HERE to see it.
2.
joshua klein's lecture about the amazing intelligence of crows is an oldie but a goodie. this one is short, and a bit of a crowd-pleaser, maybe (apresminuit and chocolatebark will <3 this, i think):
Click to view3.
speaking of TED talks, mark bittman's snarky take on meat consumption and climate change is remarkably persuasive. you'll either love or hate his abrasive style (i love it; i have a soft spot for smart folks with a wicked streak), but it's tough to argue with his logic, imo. some of you might be familiar with some of these arguments, c/o the also-quite-persuasive michael pollan and folks like that:
4.
chances are you probably already know about sarah haskins' target: women videos, but if not, you should. every time i watch one of these, i think about how fun it would be to hang out with her. i swear to god sometimes i just sit around imagining what it would be like to shoot the shit with public figures. anyway, the "yogurt" edition is a good place to start with these. and the more you watch, the funnier these become. lately, i feel like great comedy is more about charisma than gags or timing. if i decide i like the person telling the jokes, my affection amplifies the impact...
5.
bill moyers has been reliably excellent lately. in a way, i think he's exactly what the american political landscape needs. there's nothing like a calm, kindly old man to make universal health care, prison reform and strong civil liberties seem sensible and un-radical. moyers feels like a relic from the new deal era, which seems like a useful evocation as we try to reform health care and pass a sensible energy bill. his show is always good, but if you CLICK HERE
you can hear him interview my favorite ecological fatalist mike davis. together they debunk some needlessly scary assumptions about "socialism"...
6.
i've never read either of zadie smith's novels, but eventually i will. me and my GF went on a road trip about two months back, and we downloaded several podcasts to keep us entertained. smith's lecture to the new york public library was definitely the best of the bunch. it's titled speaking in tongues, and it does a number of things. it's a personal memoir, a study of shaw's pygmalion, a guarded appreciation of barack obama and a partial defense of equivocation. here she is discussing barack obama, cary grant and what it means to occupy several voices simultaneously:
For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden-it is also a gift. And the gift is of an interesting kind, not well served by that dull publishing-house title Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance with its suggestion of a simple linear inheritance, of paternal dreams and aspirations passed down to a son, and fulfilled. Dreams from My Father would have been a fine title for John McCain's book Faith of My Fathers, which concerns exactly this kind of linear masculine inheritance, in his case from soldier to soldier. For Obama's book, though, it's wrong, lopsided. He corrects its misperception early on, in the first chapter, while discussing the failure of his parents' relationship, characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. "Even as that spell was broken," he writes, "and the worlds that they thought they'd left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been."
To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It's more interesting. What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? "The Man from Dream City." When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man-we see in them whatever we want to see. "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," said Cary Grant. "Even I want to be Cary Grant." It's not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.
anyway, this is probably one of the best lectures i've ever heard, and you can LISTEN TO IT HERE.
finally, now that you have a full year's worth of online lectures to watch... and since you've made it this far... and since this post has been a bit on the serious side, here's a painting i made around x-mas time of my GF's dog, lentil: