On the stoep

calling elvis

In the beginning

via Gangs of the Caribbean – Photo albums from sail-e.com.

“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)

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.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

via xkcd – A Webcomic – Tech Support Cheat Sheet.

Town Hall USA

Everyday is like Wednesday

via this isn’t happiness.

via mattbors.com

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.

via http://www.truthdig.com/

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. 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?

via Scripting News: 2/15/2009.

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 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.

Check out the photos

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.

You’ve been painting it blue
And you’ve been looking through solid air
You’ve been seeing it through
And you’ve been looking through solid air
Don’t know what’s going wrong in your mind,
And I can tell you don’t like what you find,
When you’re moving through
Solid air.

I know you, I love you
And I could be your friend
I could follow you, anywhere
Even through solid air.

You’ve been stoning it cold
You’ve been living on solid air
You’ve been finding that gold
You’ve been living on solid air
I don’t know what’s going on inside
I can tell you that it’s hard to hide
When you’re living on
Solid air, solid air.

You’ve been getting too deep
You’ve been living on solid air
You’ve been missing your sleep
And you’ve been moving through solid air
I don’t know what’s going on in your mind
But I know you don’t like what you find
When you’re moving through
Solid air, solid air.

I know you, I love you
I’ll be your friend
I could follow you, anywhere
Even through solid air.

You’ve been walking your line
You’ve been walking on solid air
You’ve been taking your time
But you’ve been walking on solid air
Don’t know what’s going wrong inside
But I can tell you that it’s hard to hide
When you’re living on
Solid air, solid air.

You’ve been painting it blue,
You’ve been living on solid air
You’ve been seeing it through
And you’ve been living on solid air
I don’t know what’s going on in your mind
But I can tell you don’t like what you find
When your living on
Solid air, solid air.

I know you, I love you
And I’ll be your friend
I could follow you, anywhere
Even through solid air.

Ice blue solid air
Nice blue solid air

Alison doing the banshee

I realise that i have not put up a single photo from 2008 – these arent so bad – perhaps a little heavy on the corny sunsets:

Smithfield South Africa photos from 2008

We are greatly honoured to join the millions around the globe congratulating you on taking office as the President of the United States of America. We believe that we are witnessing something truly historic not only in the political annals of your great nation, the United States of America, but of the world.

Your election to this high office has inspired people as few other events in recent times have done. Amidst all of the human progress made over the last century the world in which we live remains one of great divisions, conflict, inequality, poverty and injustice. Amongst many around the world a sense of hopelessness had set in as so many problems remain unresolved and seemingly incapable of being resolved. You, Mister President, have brought a new voice of hope that these problems can be addressed and that we can in fact change the world and make of it a better place.

We are in some ways reminded today of the excitement and enthusiasm in our own country at the time of our transition to democracy. People, not only in our country but around the world, were inspired to believe that through common human effort injustice can be overcome and that together a better life for all can be achieved.

Your Presidency brings hope of new beginnings in the relations between nations, that the challenges we all face, be they economic, the environment, or in combating poverty or the search for peace, will be addressed with a new spirit of openness and accommodation.

There is a special excitement on our continent today, Mister President, in the knowledge that you have such strong personal ties with Africa. We share in that excitement and pride.

We are aware that the expectations of what your Presidency will achieve are high and that the demands on you will be great. We therefore once more wish you and your family strength and fortitude in the challenging days and years that lie ahead.

You will always be in our affection as a young man who dared to dream and to pursue that dream. We wish you well.

Sincerely

Signed N R Mandela

The Wild Frontier at The Times » Blog Archive » Nelson Mandela’s message to Barack Obama – full text.

I ask him the question that has been nagging, the question that lay at the heart of his book and at the heart of the country: is his vision of South Africa born of objective analysis or psychological necessity? Is it out there in the city, or inside his head?

‘The thing was,’ he says, ‘if I had been born black in this country would I forgive me, people like me? Would I fuck. I would cheer for Mugabe as well. It seems so logical to me. South Africa needed to have this really brutal dialogue with itself: black South Africa would say, “Look, you came here, you stole our lands and our cattle, you raped our women, you destroyed our lives completely, we hate you.” And white south Africa would respond, “Yes, but look at you now in your BMW with your cell phone; everything about you would not be like that if we had not been here. It cannot possibly be as simple as just to say race no longer matters in South Africa.’

Tim Adams travels to Johannesburg to meet the controversial writer Rian Malan | Books | The Observer.

Truthdig – Cartoons – Easter Bunny