There is no progress
“There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.”
— Man Ray, in his essay “To Be Continued, Unnoticed” (1948)
Artist William Kentridge on charcoal drawing
Artist William Kentridge on charcoal drawing | Art and design | The Guardian.
For me, the drawing is the process of arriving at this image. This process is usually very fast to begin with. I work with charcoal and charcoal dust, and within the first minute, the large expanse of white paper can be turned into a dirty grey. I’ll put lines across it, finding vague geographies of where things will go, and then the process of drawing is the remaining hours or days it takes to work through the drawing. The art is to try to finish at the same speed you begin with – to not let the drawing become more and more cramped, to try to keep a looseness and an open-endedness right to the end.
Often, the finished drawing is different from what I had in my head when I started off, and the better ones are those that don’t look anything like I thought they would. The ideas are not the driving force in drawing, nor is meaning. The need to make an image is the driving force. It isn’t like a writer who has a story they have to tell, and so they write a novel. It isn’t as if I have an image the world has to see. Rather I have a need to be making marks on paper. Drawing isn’t a decision, it is a need.
Meaningless
or the end of the line..
Town Hall
Town Hall USA
The State of the Music Business
Head over to Huffington post to read the full article:
John Mellencamp: On My Mind: The State of the Music Business.
Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business, highlighted by finger-pointing and blame directed against record companies, artists, internet file sharing and any other theories for which a case could be made. We’ve read and heard about the “good old days” and how things used to be. People remember when music existed as an art that motivated social movements. Artists and their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide. These days, that possibility no longer seems to exist. After 35 years as an artist in the recording business, I feel somehow compelled, not inspired, to stand up for our fellow artists and tell that side of the story as I perceive it. Had the industry not been decimated by a lack of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music rather than trying to market it as well.
Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
via Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly – A hand picked TV channel.
The end of our civilization
The end of our civilization. If you believe in global climate change and Al Gore, which I do (both) then as much as Gore doesn’t want to say it because it would be counter-productive for him to, our civilization is on the path to self-extinction.
Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn’t growth the whole problem? Shouldn’t we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.
The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we’re adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can’t sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven’t done anything to limit growth.
So maybe this isn’t the biggest downturn since The Great Depression? Maybe it’s bigger than that. Maybe this is a corner-turn for the human race, maybe last September was when it finally occurred to us, collectively, that we couldn’t keep going as we were going, and we hit the brakes in the way the Invisible Hand does. Maybe the efforts to “jump start” the economy won’t work, and maybe that’s as it should be, and maybe that’s a good thing?
Population: The elephant in the room
Fundamentally, we need to ask what is the greater threat to human welfare: the possibility that humane efforts to address population growth might be abused, or our ongoing failure to act to prevent hundreds of millions, even billions, dying as a result of global ecological collapse?
via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Population: The elephant in the room.
There are some people – at the top of the economic pyrimid – who benifit greatly by being able to sell their products to huge populations. We wont hear the Gates foundation proposing population control for instance. Of course these same people can afford to puchase large swathes of real estate for their own use.
Orange Free State
orange Free State South Africa
I have been driving around the Free State near Smithfield South Africa recently, perhaps there is a political reason the Free State used to be called the “Orange” Free State, but it certainly is orange these days.
John Martyn – Lyrics – Solid Air
via John Martyn – Lyrics – Solid Air.
You’ve been taking your time
And you’ve been living on solid air
You’ve been walking the line
And You’ve been living on solid air
Don’t know what’s going wrong inside
And I can tell you that it’s hard to hide when you’re living on
Solid air.
