Sewing

 

 

TIME Magazine article on The Singularity

I thought this was a very good article:

 

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138-1,00.html
 

 

I find this stuff fascinating, scary, creepy, and exciting.  Will my children be immortal? Will humans be extinct in fifty years? Will my grandchildren by sleek hybrids of genetically modified flesh and steel? Will people still be buying artwork to hang on their walls?

artist links

Artist mentioned in previous post:

http://www.teridryden.com/index.htm

I tried to find a site for Craig Lloyd but, though I found him mentioned in a few places and found out that he teaches art in Cincinnati, I didn't actually find a Web site for him alone.

2011 Water Tower Regional review

On Sunday I went to the opening reception of The Water Tower Regional (open until April 10) and, though I enjoyed the show, I was a little disappointed by the dominance of digitally produced artwork.

I respect and accept digital work, inkjet prints, and digital photography as art, but I don't find it as enjoyable to look at—especially in a gallery setting. When I look at art in person, I want to be able to see the process of its creation. I enjoy the artifacts of the artist and his or her tools left behind in the medium, I appreciate the sense of an artist leaving fingerprints (real or figurative) in the work, I want to be able to change position and note how light plays differently on from different angles on a manipulated surface. You really don't get that much with giclee prints and framed photos.

There weren't many works that met those needs. Of the ones that did, my favorite was just inside the entrance to the exhibit: "Storm," an oil painting by Craig Lloyd of Cincinnati. It struck what was, to me, the perfect balance between convincing representation (as seen from a few steps away) and the interesting presentation of paint strokes on a canvas as objects of interest in and of themselves (close-up view). This is what I want to look at and how I want to paint.

The painting is loaded with tension; I found it impossible not to view it without imagining the storm-cooled breeze beginning to blow around me and feeling like I should check the radio for severe weather alerts.

The second work, which I found to be easily the most interesting artwork in the second room of the exhibit, was "Are We There Yet?" a collage/mixed media work by Louisville artist Teri Dryden. I spoke briefly with Ms. Dryden, who recently moved here from Los Angeles. Her works are comprised chiefly of pieces from old books torn apart and arranged. "Are We There Yet?" was both subtle and complex, and is something I could keep coming back to.

I also enjoyed "Circles of Confusion," an impressively large and complex graphite and oil pastel drawing by Paula J. Dalton; and "Narcissus," Matt Weir's somewhat entrancing sculpture in cast aluminum, chrome plating, and synthetic grass.

The Girl Who

Well, last night I finished The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second book of Stieg Larsson's thriller trilogy about Swedes who have sex with everybody.  I enjoyed it (and could hardly put it down), though I understand criticisms that too much of the plot relied on coincidences.  Too frequently, a character just happened to be in the right place at the right time to see some important event.

 

Now I just need to read the final book to be free of this monkey.

 

I'll probably watch the Swedish movies, and I'm also interested in the American remake of the first movie, which might be out by next Christmas.  It will be set in Sweden, like the books and the previous movies, but this to me presents an aesthetic problem that I think about from time to time with movies.

 

If it's an American film intended for U.S. audiences, how will they do the language?  Most likely, they'll film it in English.  But will the characters have Swedish accents?  If they are filming it in English, why would they bother with the Swedish accents?  Will they adopt some sort of neutral-sounding blend of British and Midwestern U.S. accent?  That sounds like the best policy to me, assuming it would just take too much effort to get the cast to learn all their lines in Swedish.

 

The accent thing bothers me from time to time.  If they are supposed to be speaking in English, but they have an accent, that's fine; and if they are presumed by the audience to be speaking in another tongue, and they don't have any clearly defined (to me) accent, that works for me, too; but if it suddenly dawns on me that they are supposed to be speaking in their native language, but they are delivering their lines in English, and the director is making them adopt a foreign accent, it starts to bug me.

 

 

Art

 

 

I miss painting.  What drove me to switch to primarily pen-and-ink is a desire to be able to work with less mess and set-up, since I don't have studio space.  Unlike with oils, or even the less messy acrylics, all I have to do is pull out my paper and my pens and get to work.

 

It's been a good trade-off, and I value my explorations of pen-and-ink.  Sometime over the next week I'll have to use the gift card that Julie gave me to get some new pens.  The ones I have are good, but I think I'll get some Rapidoliners, which I haven't used in 15 or 20 years.  The pens I'm using now wear out very quickly on rough-surface paper, but I've heard that the Rapidoliners last a lot longer.  I'm eager to give them a try.

 

Anyway, I still miss painting.  I feel like I can apply some of what I've learned in the pen-and-ink process and apply it to acrylics and oils.

 

I'm just not sure what I'll paint.  Last night I dreamed that I was in a painting class at U of L again; it was a busy art room, lots of painting going on.  I have had similar dreams every once in a while for years, maybe since I graduated.  I think that when I first started having the dreams they were typical anxiety dreams:  remembering an assignment the night before it was due, that sort of thing.  Lately, though, they have been more fun.  In last night's dream I had so many ideas, and the means to work on them, in a group of like-minded people.

 

I think I might try working on some small paintings in the near future in a way that occupies a middle-ground between the pen-and-ink work and larger oil paintings.  Perhaps I'll do some subjects similar to my pen and ink subjects, working in acrylics or acrylics with oils on top.  It's been years since used acrylics for anything other than underpainting or tinting, with just a few exceptions.

 

I also want to try another linocut soon.  It might be fun to do a linocut print of the horses I drew recently.  I wonder which would be better, an 8 x 10 inch size or a greeting card size?

Two Old Romans

Here are scans of a couple of coins I've had soaking in distilled water for…I don't know, a couple of years, I guess.  The coins are pretty crummy, and the pictures make them look even worse. I got these in a small lot of uncleaned, unearthed old coins. 

 

Distilled water is the most widely-recommended, safest way to clean them.  I'm supposed to switch out the water every few days, but in reality I've been lucky if I've remembered to do it every few months.  So they have just been sitting in a jar on a shelf.

 

I pulled these two out a few days ago.  They might actually be clean enough to identify.  I'm pretty sure that first one (A) is a coin of Julian II, who ruled the Roman Empire from A.D. 355-363.  He was the last pagan emperor, and also the last of the Constantinian dynasty.

 

I can tell by the style that it's late Roman, and I was finally able to make out what I think is DNIVL, which would stand for D[ominus]N[oster]Julianus," with only the first part of the "Julianus" visible.  "Our Lord Julianus."

 

It's hard to tell in this photo (it's hard to tell in real life, too), but the reverse of A is the common soldier-spearing-a-fallen-horseman design.

 

Coin B is a Constan- something.  Constantine the Great? Constans? Constantius?  I might be able to figure it out with a little more research.  The reverse is two soldiers flanking a standard.  I can read just enough of the reverse legend to be sure it includes the word EXERCITVS, so it probably said GLORIA EXERCITUS, or "Glory to the Army."

 

If both these coins were in much better shape, they'd still only be worth five or ten dollars, probably.

 

I might be able to manage a little more cleaning on them to help with the details.

 

 

IMG00102-20110203-1747.jpg

So hard to get a good shot of this little girl, especially when my camera phone has a slow reaction time.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Sock

 

Last night Erin was curled up with Kim, and they were looking at a pretty cool application on Kim's new phone.  You can say a word into the phone and it will do an Internet search for that item, producing retailers and prices.

 

Erin decided to search for socks.  She said into the phone, as clearly as she could, "SOCK."  She tried it a few times, but it kept misunderstanding her and searching for other things.

 

Kim: "Maybe try it like you're looking for two socks. Make it plural."

 

Erin: "SOCK SOCK!"

 

Saturday night update

I have shaved off my beard. We are keeping warm with emergency heat since we have a leak in our outdoor unit compressor. Erin and I went swimming today. I lost the gas cap to our van, went back to find it, and there it was-- run over and smashed to pieces. We all saw Curious George at the book store. It was sunny and felt kind of nice outside.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

store

I've been slowly adding to my Zazzle store.

http://www.zazzle.com/KentuckyBristle

Another race horse drawing

I finished this today. It's about 8 x 11 inches. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I like the pose a little more than the last one, but I like my cross-hatching a little less.

Drawing, books, movie

I am nearly done with another horse-and-jockey drawing, similar to the last one. I am also making progress on my drawing of the YUM! Center (lest anyone think that I haven't been attempting to sell out, man.) I'm far enough along that I need to figure out what my next project is going to be. I have a few ideas, I just need to settle on something.

I've lately taken up the idea of working on two things at once, one big, the other small. The bigger ones (like the previous subjects of Farmington and Big Rock, and the YUM! Center currently) are longer-term, larger scale, and done with the intention of just looking more impressive. The smaller ones are ones I can pull out and put away again quickly and easily when I only have ten minutes at a time, or only a few square feet, to work.

I've been reading Nigel Rodgers' Roman Empire, and enjoying it a lot. I've found ancient history somewhat difficult to approach. Most books seem to either want to throw you off the deep end with contemporary, focused accounts that may or may not be very accurate and for which I have little knowledge framework to rely on for context; or they are a very dull sampling of a huge period of time and cultures with little or no attempt to give you a good sense of what life was like for any single person of the ancient world.

Roman Empire seems to bridge that gap pretty well. Comprised of fairly short articles, it gives overviews of many aspects of the Roman Empire, encompassing religion, politics, the economy, the military, clothing, etc. It pulls it all apart and then puts it all back together. It's very easy to flip through; I can read about a battle, encounter a term I don't understand, and then flip to the section on different military ranks for an explanation, then get sidetracked into an summary of some general's reforms in both military and politics. Basically put, the book is neither too smart nor too dumb for my level of knowledge.

Per the recommendation of three or four friends, I also started reading Storm Front by Jim Butcher. I'm not far into it, but so far it's entertaining. I'm told it's not the best of the series of books (about a wizard detective in Chicago).

With those same friends, last Friday night I watch the movie "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World," and I liked it a lot. It's hard to recommend to people, though, because it's such an odd movie. I was a third of the way through it before I started feeling like I was "getting" it. The movie is sort of like if "Wayne's World" cross-bred with a bunch of video games, and the offspring somehow ended up intelligent and attractive.

edit: I should have mentioned, that picture isn't a drawing, it's a facial scan.

The Little People: review

The Little People by John Christopher: my book review

 

This isn't a real book review because I don't want to, and I'm not forced to, write very much on the subject.  So in brief:

 

The cover of this book was very misleading.  Instead of an over-the-top horror romp in a castle infested with whip-cracking Nazi leprechauns, it was a well-paced, psychologically rich character drama involving Nazi leprechauns who, it's mentioned in passing, might occasionally crack whips.

 

The set-up: It's Ireland in the 1960s. A young English woman inherits from an uncle an isolated Irish castle (not really a castle, she learns, but a large country house built on the remains of a castle).  She considers selling it, but opts instead to run it as a vacation spot for tourists—a bed and breakfast situated in the middle of a bog.  She and her fiancé check the place out and are amused at all the little dollhouses her uncle built in his tower workshop before he died. How cute!

 

After running a few ads for the vacation spot, she gets some takers: A bickering American couple and their teenaged daughter, and a German couple troubled by the (figurative) ghosts of post-war German grief and guilt.  They join a young alcoholic Irish lawyer who's been staying at the house helping the Englishwoman get the place up and running, and the Englishwoman's fiancé, who is a London attorney trying to keep a lid on his own superiority complex.

 

Yes, it does sound like a lot of clichés, but the author starts chiseling away at the archetypes, giving them believable backgrounds and reforming them around the details of their existence.  In fact, you could edit out the whole "little people" element and still have a decent book.  They do, however, lend the novel an extra bit of depth as well as mystery (I wouldn't call it horror, exactly; I was never horrified, even when the lights went out and there was an imminent threat of whipping).

 

I also found myself frequently delighted by Christopher's descriptions and choice of words.  The biggest problems I found were in some of the character reactions later in the book; I'm not sure that some of the choices were entirely credible, but they weren't outlandish.  Also, what in 1966 might have passed as a novel premise in fantastic-horror stories now comes across as a little quaint, but like I said, the fantastic-horror element is only part of the draw.

 

This would make an excellent book club discussion book. I'm not joking!  I can easily see hours of debate about character motivations, relationship development, and other storytelling choices.

 

And it's a slim book and a fast read, so if you want to borrow it, I'll let you, sure.

 

 

Alien Invasion

I saw a trailer for the movie "Battle: LA" a couple of days ago. It's about space aliens attacking Earth (again).

Although it looks like it has spectacular visual effects, there is no clue given about alien motivation for the invasion, and I suspect that—as in most alien invasion movies—any reason given will be unrealistic. Maybe they won't give a reason at all. Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" was all the better for not delving into motivation or means. The monsters in that movie were a sudden cataclysm akin to a massive storm or earthquake.

So I was thinking about invading aliens, why they might do it, and how. There are very few scenarios that, in light of the tremendous effort it would take to undertake the conquest of Earth, give a realistic explanation as to why creatures from another planet would try it. But just a few minutes ago I thought of a good one which I had not considered before: to save our souls.

How is this for a great scifi premise: An alien race detects our presence and realizes that we have an intelligence similar to their own, but we're not quite as technologically advanced. These aliens are also very religious.

After a brief period of studying our culture, missionaries arrive. They might not even be very representative of the entire alien species; they might be relatively poorly equipped and underfunded due to a lack of support at home. But they are determined to save us, even if they have to kill us to do so.

There could be several religious factions, just to make it more interesting. One group establishes a stronghold on a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean and takes over most of our airwaves for religious broadcasting, but they are relatively peaceful until earth religious groups attack them. Another fringe alien group destroys Rome and installs their own alien Pope, thinking that they can just take over and convert Roman Catholics that way. Individual aliens establish compounds to preach their own versions of the truth, and look for ways to control human minds in order to reach more converts.

I think this premise is great, and more believable than most. I'm sure I'm far from the first person to think of it, but it's novel to me.

Right to Left

For me, weeks start on the right and flow to the left.  That means this calendar feels more natural to me than others.  However, I could never really use it, because I'd have to switch back and forth between this format and other "normal" formats.

 

I'm sure there is a link, somehow, between this and my mental-year-as-a-counter-clockwise-clock imagery.
 

 

Scanner

 

 

Books

 

Last week I finished reading "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose" by Lee Alan Dugatin and I thought it was pretty good.  It gave an interesting perspective on the beginning of U.S. history, tying together natural history with the politics and economics of late 18^th and early 19^th Century America and Europe.  It's also a small, quick read.

 

Over the weekend I started reading "The Little People" by John Christopher.  I picked up the book years ago because the cover art was irresistible; and didn't put it back on the shelf because I've read some other things by that author and enjoyed it.  However, I never read it, and it ended up in a storage box until I recently found it.

 

I'm about half way through, and it's pretty good so far, although it's unfolding slowly.

 

That cover art, though. Genius.

Science Cafe

February Louisville Area Skeptics Science Cafe is scheduled:
 http://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Area-Skeptics/calendar/15933616/

 

I'm looking forward to this; I enjoyed this speaker quite a bit the last time, when he talked about "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose."  Anyone else want to go with me? Let me know.

 

In Pursuit of a Fiend

The gendarme, aghast, walked into a shocking scene. The killer had taken her torso!