What has eyes but can't see?

Snake Shaman presides over the Socratic Circle of Serpents.
The rapt reptiles listen as the Shaman relates a series of
Irish jokes, which tho' poorly understood in literal terms
are instinctively perceived by the snakes as conveying a
form of wisdom outside of words:
Q: “What’s a seven-course Irish dinner?”
A: “Six pints of stout and a potato.”

Russet Burbank, Russet Arcadia, Norgold Russet,
Goldrush, Norkotah, Long White, White Rose,
California Long White, Idaho, Round White,
Round Red, Yellow Potato, Red Potato,
Salad Potato, La Soda, Red La Rouge,
Red Pontiac, Red Nordland, Red Bliss,
Yellow Finnish, Ruby Crescent,
and Australian Crescent.

One Man's Revelation is Another Man's Hearsay

..."All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
- Thomas Paine, The AGE of REASON

Yesterday afternoon while sitting in the back of Isac Artzi's E-Business and Marketing class, I doodled a portrait of Thomas Paine, based on the Wikipedia image of the man, (which is a reproduction of a posthumous oil portrait housed in the National Portrait Gallery in London). According to the Wikipedia Commons entry the portrait was painted in 1880 by Auguste Millière after an engraving by William Sharp, after a 1792 portrait by George Romney. So my rendering is at least four times removed from its Revolutionary subject.
...I had been reading from Paine's book The Age of Reason a day or so previous, and he and his works were on my mind. The Age of Reason is a worthy, lucid treatise in which Thomas Paine explains his views on religion, and in my most humble opinion, study of it would benefit us all, especially in light of the way we are being constantly barraged with propaganda designed to make us feel threatened by someone elses ideas about religion, economics, or anything. ...According to legend, Paine fled to France from London, at the urging of his friend William Blake, who was himself to be tried for sedition later on. Not only did the officers of King George III consider Paine a traitor, but apparently a number of English Tories still feel that way today. My advice to them is: Get Over It.
...The picture I post here was drawn this morning, using my yesterday's sketch as a reference.
The William Blake Archive

Booksellers Panic to Meet Demand

Port of Spain, Trinidad, April 19 - News organizations around the world have published pictures of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez giving President Obama a copy of the book Open Veins of Latin America by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano – which soared to the number 5 place on Amazon.com after it’s yesterday’s sales rank was No. 54,295.
Now photos are emerging of President Obama receiving a second book from President Chavez- Zoot Scooter and the Micro-Nots by US author Neil Atwood -yet the booksellers are out of stock, and scrambling to obtain copies, offering as much as US $1.5 million for single copies.
-al Jazeera English

First thought upon waking

The Sheriff declares WAR ON DANGER. We must be ever vigilant. We must win the War on Danger.The Danger Strangers spread their evil Danger everywhere. We must hunt them down and bring them to justice. Be on the lookout for suspicious activity and report suspects to your local War-on-Danger Hotline.

Most preaching is against something or other. There is a law of irony just as sure as there is a law of gravity. When I preach to others, the law of irony dictates that I am the enemy of whatever I preach for. When I preach against something, I am the living embodiment of whatever I preach against, in inverse proportion to the insistence of my preaching. This process is a wellspring of humour. Preachers are hypocrites, so we laugh at them.
"Coffee, are you done yet?"
We broke our backs lifting Moloch to heaven.

striking archetype

...........As phenomenological models go, synchronicity appears more useful than our old ideas about cause and effect. The "cause & effect" model presupposes the existence of a linear time-line which so far as I can tell, does not exist. Sometimes the effect appears before the cause. The appearance shifts in time in accord with the viewpoint.
Some people have told me they had seen the image of Alfred Hitchcock shooting billiards, before I drew the image for the poster that appears in the last week's article (17 March).
I don't know where the idea came from, so if anyone finds such an image, please forward it.
Usually I can trace exactly where I got an idea and how it developed. Not this time- immediately having abandoned the well-worn Hitchcock sillhouette idea, the next thing I knew I was sketching the billiards table image.
I may have seen an image of Alfred Hitchcock playing pool and looking directly at the camera, forgotten it, and the subconscious memory percolated into my mind's eye- if so, it surely must have been a published image, which means others saw it as well- maybe.
On the other hand, maybe I struck an archetype- an image that lives in all our minds, but had no obvious external source. If that's the case, it represents real paydirt for an artist. It means I'm doing the right thing- the image struck a deep chord.
Classical Greek art of the highest order is like that: for instance, a statue of a ram is not just a ram, it is "Ram" - Ram-ness manifest, a terrestrial iteration of the celestial archetype. Call me a neoPlatonist, if you will.

Up All Night with Alfred Hitchcock

Yes, children, it’s that time again! The Art Institute of Phoenix is staging another Up All Night party this Friday, 20 March 2009. Wayne and Laura in the AIPX Library Film Committee encouraged me to design a poster to advertise the big Hitchcock double-feature, AIPX Reel Inspiration presents North by Northwest at 10:15 PM & PSYCHO at 12:45 AM.
Isak Artzi asked if I’d give a description of how I made the image, so here’s the story:
Initially we wanted to have a triple-feature: North by Northwest+Vertigo+PSYCHO.
The first image that entered my head was a rusty-metal/ industrial render of the famous Hitchcock profile as used on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series of the late ‘50’s/ early ‘60’s, inside which sat a colour photograph of a human brain atop the spinal cord. The brain would be cut into three pie-slices, each slice bearing one of the films titles scrawled in lipstick or nail polish.
I then thought of a simpler approach, with three identically-sized Hitchcock silhouettes projected through three lenses in yellow, cyan and magenta overlapping each other, with the titles coloured likewise.
I decided against these ideas because, gee-whiz, that profile / silhouette imagery has been used a bit much over the years and I didn’t want to be quite so obvious.
I don’t know where the idea came from to depict Hitchcock shooting pool, but next thing I knew I was drawing the director lining up a combination shot with a 3-ball aimed at three balls painted with the titles of the three films. Then came the word that we would only have enough time to show two, so I changed the 3-ball to a 2-ball and deleted VERTIGO from the trio.
I drew the whole illustration on a standard-issue WACOM tablet checked out from the video cage, with the Standard brush tool set between 9px & 20px (depending on the desired line thicknesses). Shape Dynamics and Smoothing were in the ON position. I worked in Photoshop CS4, mostly on the 308-06 & 307-01 workstations. I also used CS3 on pc Laptop #03 between 6 and 10 pm on the evening of March 10th. Any number of witnesses can verify my whereabouts on that evening.
When it comes to drawing with the pen tool, Photoshop is Photoshop. Adobe adds some new features to the Photoshop package every year, but drawing has remained pretty much the same for the ten years I’ve been using the program.
For the colours I did not want to use anything obviously associated with Hitchcock. However, I wanted a touch of “PSYCHO”, so I picked my palette from Van Gough’s psilocybin pool parlour. Many people say they remember PSYCHO in colour, although the film is black-and-white!
The Print Bureau did a marvellous job printing the poster six feet tall. Now if we can only find a frame to fit!
Probably not many people know that Alfred Hitchcock began his film career designing titles, and his continuing choice of outstanding, award-winning title sequences for his films bears this out. Saul Bass’s animated title for North by Northwest is thought to be the very first use of kinetic, moving type in the movies. PSYCHO is great titling too. Not to mention all the vintage footage of downtown Phoenix, Arizona in 1960!
Happy St Patrick’s Day, Mr Hitchcock, wherever you are.

What sin, a word?

Two weeks on, we’ve all probably had a chance to take a few deep breaths, and assess our situation. It seems…hard to believe. We face a real possibility of living in a world in which the President of the United States is not a creep.
What I really found difficult to credit was the hostility expressed against Barack H. Obama from some quarters. As the number of people who expressed absolute conviction to vote for more of the same hell we’ve been through the last three decades dwindled week after week, the often hysterical use of the word “socialist” to describe Obama spoke volumes. “Socialist”, the s-word, is the new code-word for an old n-word.
When did socialist become a dirty word? The rightwing radiodivs spent three decades to pejorative the word “liberal”, an adjective synonymous with “generous”. As far as the US corporate media was concerned, “liberal” = “witch”. But “socialist” = “devil”?
All the world is a stage. We are never really who we pretend to be, and we believe so only at our peril. Even Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare, so it’s said.
So let’s not get too giddy for our own good. We are in what appears to be a Humpty-Dumpty situation. We should still be careful what we wish for, bearing in mind the laws of irony and unforeseen consequences. Today’s military-industrial monsters are descended from a baby conceived on FDR’s watch, before even the attack on Pearl Harbor.
That said, there is more than ever, nothing to fear, but fear itself. Great Things are in store, greater than we know.