Not to get all heavy on you.

So America is in free fall, we can all agree on that right? Everything is falling apart and all the lies from the last 8 years are coming to light. Banks with no money, overpriced homes not worth anything, new construction of horrendous quality, GM, Chrysler and how many other corporations failing right and left. The gig is up.

This is mirroring the collapse of the Soviet Union after communism failed, the difference being they went bankrupt playing high stakes poker against us. In America corporatism became cannibalistic, as is it's nature, and we destroyed ourselves with greed.

New Wacoms.

Wacom Intuos4 - What's New

Working Under Pressure

With 2048 levels of pen pressure sensitivity, Intuos4 gives you the creative power to dynamically adjust exposure, brush size, line weight, opacity and more. The Keys To Success

Work smarter not harder. Set-up the Intuos4 ExpressKeys™ to activate your own unique, time-saving shortcuts and modifiers in each of your applications. With Intuos4, remembering your shortcut settings is now as easy as casting a quick glance at the tablet. Each ExpressKey is now equipped with an accompanying illuminated display providing a constant reminder of the key's application-specific function.*

Interesting....

I wonder how this effects the Cintiq line?

Jason Leisge's new work

Jason D. Leisge - New in progress stuff

I am adding some new stuff here because its either not finished or its a fresh photo.

These two are done, I just need a healed photo of them.

The black and white phoenix is amazing. Tattooing is such a strange art to me. You have to get in so close to people and then physically hurt them. So it's this very intimate thing in a way with all this trust going on. It's interesting to hang out in the shop when they work.

A good idea.

How to Test RAM Under Mac OS X | Command-Tab

Memtest Usage To run memtest on a new memory module, first shut down your computer and install the new chip. (Some helpful guides for doing this can be found at iFixit, if you’re unsure of the exact steps.) Ensure the chip is firmly in place, close up your machine (or don’t, if you’re a pessimist), and power it on while holding down the Command and S keys to force Mac OS X to boot into Single User Mode. Once you see a black screen with white text, you can release the key combination. After all the system logging is done scrolling past, type memtest all 2 to test ‘all’ memory ‘2′ times. Two passes should be enough to detect any blatant problems, but I wouldn’t hesitate to let it run for hours on end if I suspected an intermittent memory problem (memtest all). When complete, you should be greeted with “All tests passed” if your new RAM is in good condition. If your system locks up or freezes indefinitely during the test, you may have a bad memory module on your hands.

Cool project

Ghost in the Machine - a set on Flickr

In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels.

So to be clear, they pulled out the tape and used it to draw the portrait. Very cool use of materials.

addicted to information

The Quietus | Features | Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny On Why Downloading Music Is An Addiction

"And I do believe we are becoming addicted to information. You only need to look at those people who have hard drives filled with songs that they have never even listened to. They are not even collecting music. They are collecting information. And the more people become addicted to information and the faster they can obtain that information, the less they will be able to contemplate that information, and it is the contemplation of the information which makes it art."

An argument I've heard advanced is that there's been a general devaluing of music in recent years - not merely in economic terms and expectations, but as a more central role or defining marker of what makes a person and who they are. What would be your take on this assertion?

BC: "I do believe that music is generally being devalued because of this addiction to information that I was speaking of. I like to compare it to a drive through the countryside. If you are driving at a comfortable pace then you are able to enjoy the sights of the countryside for yourself; the trees and the color of the sky and the sad-eyed cows, etc. If you are driving 100 miles per hour, there is no way you will be able to enjoy what the countryside has to offer. You will be too busy reacting to contemplate; the potholes, the corners, the lone farmer's truck.

Oh, I know the pain....

Adobe UI Gripes

Me moaning about shoddy UI inconsistencies and mistakes in Adobe products and how they get shittier with every release.

For the record I can not use CS4 with my comp for unknown reasons. I have been on support calls with Adobe and they say I have a unique case after going through hell and back.

OMG WOW

YouTube - Hausu (1977) Killer Lampshade

It is a lampshade and it kills and then the cat painting attacks, but a pair of legs appear and karate kicks the cat causing the woman to burst out of her cloths and then start bleeding which then breaks open the floor into a river of blood while two girls scream. Only a horrible run on sentence can describe this.

Robert Freakin Pollard

Vice Magazine - ROBERT POLLARD -

Was it difficult when things took off for you, to juggle family and a band? You were a schoolteacher and you had two kids.

Yeah, it was extremely difficult, but I was somehow able to do it. Much to the chagrin of some of my relatives, I just couldn’t give up fucking around with music and art ideas. And we didn’t put as much time into it as people thought we did. We would meet on a Saturday or Sunday, get fucked up and record everything we did, and then sit back and laugh at it. And we could barely play. We would make noise, play acoustic guitars, act out skits, experiment with feedback, break things, create radio talk shows, DJ, all sorts of things. And always record it all. Then on Monday I would go back to being a dad, a coach, a teacher, a husband, and an amateur athlete. Too many irons.

Though it may not be cool to link to a Vice article, I dunno. The hipster police may track me down over this one.

Man, I like Prints.

MIT Visualizing Cultures

Kiyochika’s War

The energy and artistic skill of the best war prints are all the more remarkable when we keep in mind the haste of their composition. Some sense of the impressive nature of this accomplishment can be gleaned by an overview of prints by Kiyochika, the most esteemed of these artists, who is calculated to have produced more than seventy triptychs during the brief ten months of the Sino-Japanese War. Kiyochika’s impressions of the front ranged from the lyrical to the atrocious, sometimes even bringing these two extremes together.

This image of a sinking ship is my fav.

This and the following link via Plep

Pabst!

Pabst ads from old newspapers - a set on Flickr

This is a set of Pabst beer ads from late 19th and early 20th century American newspapers. All images were mined out of the Chronicling America project (http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/) . To my knowledge, these images are in the public domain. Cheers!

More beers can be found at this link BEER!

Disclaimer: I really,really like beer.

challenge! address! engage! -Pffft!

Twiglog » Blog Archive » Charm

The black sheep of the contemporary arts family is commonly supposed to be beauty, but if you are truly determined to be erased from the Blackberries of your creative friends and relatives you should try putting in a good word for charm. The drama-free, accessible beauty of small gestures and quiet moments, charm is simply too nice, an embarrassment best left to historians of the eighteenth century and the home styling pages of middlebrow newspapers. True art is not supposed to be comfortable or easy to live with - it should challenge! address! engage! - and the vital processes of discourse and narrative are expected to convince by argument and assertion, not rely upon the suspect crutches of easy sociability and gentle persuasion.

VIA: Wood S Lot

I agree, so much art is just empty comments on the art world. Navel gazing inside of uglier navel gazing to draw attention to someone else's ugly navel gazing. But I am very cynical as to what is called Fine Art. To me 95% of it is made by rich people or kids of rich people with connections to the galleries, A.K.A. Ryan McGinley.

Morning Coffee web readings...

whiskey river

Sin The worst part is failing to kiss the ground each morning. Or the cold pot of resentment stirred and simmered well into the evening. Everything else comes from this, grows. It wouldn't be so bad if such immense portions of good fortune weren't squandered each hour, minutes the long dead would ransom eternity to regain. Even now, ripe apples lie rotting casually about the floor, single bites taken from each - there is no worm, no snake . . . only this failure to praise. - Dane Cervine

Whisky River is one of my daily must reads. So many gems here that can really make your day.

Pano Pic from a River stroll.

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Took this a few weeks back and started working on the post the other day. It's 13 images stick together. Started to hail about 5 minutes after this was taken and it was very dark under that bridge.

Wachella Falls

Shot on a hike in Wachella Falls here in Portland. Posting this more as a test to see what images look like in this format.

While I like what I have going on now, I do not know if I care for how many pages there are. So I playing with ideas to consolidate things. I just don't know if I like the idea of images sharing a page with blog postings. Comments are on to see how much spam I collect.

  Update Code is all screwy and comments give me a fatal error anyways. Keeping them off.

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In Praise of Boredom

[Paleopsych] Joseph Brodsky: Listening to Boredom

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. "You are finite," time tells you in the voice of boredom, "and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile." As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of the limited significance of even your best, most ardent actions, is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement.

Savor your boredom

Superbad shoot.

 Posted the pics from the shoot the other day.

Fun shoot. See the notes below if you are interested about the lights and all that.

Click here for the gallery.

If you want to hear the band check out their myspace page Superbad Grindcore.

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Titles return

Changing all sorts of stuff around here and now it looks like titles shall be making a return to the blog. It looked clean with the last template, but I feel this one holds up nicely with titles.

So there you have it.

Other new items of note is that I have a nice Profoto rig now which should make my life easier. But as of now I need to finish the band shoot from last Sunday and get that posted before I have pissed off Grindcore people beating on my door.

Shoot from last Sunday

 So I posted a pic from a shoot I did last Sunday and I am messing around with the layout here, so I figured I should see how this looks.

Heavy Metal Parking Lo

Television for the People - Triple Canopy

The story behind Heavy metal Parking Lot, which turns out is pretty interesting.