I like to find art and write poems and read magazines and listen to my iPod and daydream and walk my neighbor's dog - that one's my favorite

Thursday, February 21, 2008

I haven't really decided on the direction I want to take with this blog, but I do have a couple of things that I've been thinking of posting ever since the concept of BLOG entered my mind. Isn't funny how the whole world becomes a sort of endless material for the shit on your blog, once you have one? I'm just interested in so many things and assume that everyone else suffers from the same sort of scattered brained bullshit, so I'm going to give it all, I suppose. First a couple pictures of some cute dogs that I know of, Gambit (the larger) and Skid (the smaller), who are definitely worth sharing:


So cute, you know?

Now I can't decide which of these poems I want to post and if I want to post them at all because I don't want to seem like a douche, but these are actually really cool. I'm also not looking forward to transposing them because the seat at my desk is really uncomfortable even with a pillow. Whatever, I'll just do the darker of the two, even though it doesn't match the dogs at all. It's by Mark Doty and is out of his book School of the Arts:


Last Flight


The pilot of the little plane must stop his engines
while the fifty pounds of sand are lugged into the nose
to balance out our weight. He explains, turns his key

in the ignition - sputter, whine, nothing.
Again: grind and cough, nothing. Ripple of doubt.
Third time: unpromising silence and then the motor


shudders awake, and we taxi till we face
a swath of black pavement bound by rowed lamps
--then race and lift so swiftly our colletive weight


seems nothing at all. Over the dim marshland,
a bit of bay, rows of rooftops bordering the shore,
the harbor islands with their lighthouses.


And turning back to look--we all turn back to look--
--what is it these glittering fields are like?
One wants words, but words are wanting,


figures worn: deltas and archipelagoes,
red nerves, coppery rivulets of a freeway's
arcing ramps. Then further, higher: hot jewels.


Scintillant flakes on a video screen. Better:
holes in black paper, an immense page
held between us and an overwhelming realm,


so that just this clattering glare comes
bursting through, just enough that we can bear to see. . .

Which seems to prepare us, somehow,
to turn in the other direction, toward the place
we're headed--nothing now but a tonal,

seamless night, darkness made intimate.
By all the lamps we've seen, whose multiplicity
made this warm field seem serene.

Or by the panel of intruments,
plate-glass green beneath the windshield,
the churning engine that faithfully pulls us


into the huge, physical dark.
As if it were all that's unsaid,
untranslated into the busy syllables of light.


Not afraid. Home in a while. No sign
of the town yet, glowing in its crook
of peninsulas, its dim nest of sea.


Lustrous, coninuous, unspoken night.
The self isn't made of language;
the self is made of night.



Since you're in a serious, poetic mode I thought I'd introduce to you an artist that I found out about through poetry class (which is where I found this poem). His name is Robert Arneson, he's a sculptor and he developed cancer from the clay that he was using for his sculptures. In reaction to this, he started doing these sculptures that represented his art killing him, which turn out some interesting images, you can imagine. The best one, the one we found in poetry class, is Eye of Beholder but there are no good images on the internet of this picture. So here are a few cool things I found at an Arneson website.....




This is the closest I found to Eye of Beholder because the paint seems to overwhelming him (it's a self-portrait, which he does a lot of).

Those are all by Robert Arneson and come from http://www.verisimilitudo.com/arneson/artworks.htm

Another artist I was made aware of through poetry class was a photographer by the name of Meatyard -- which is a weird name and suits his weird photographs that are kind of scary and demented:



I just found these on Google images.

There's a famous artist right now, Takashi Murakami, who I think did the artwork for Kanye West's album Graduation. Murakami is the one who designed the Louis Vuitton rainbow bag that made it so famous. But here's a few artworks I found on Google images. They're titled, respectively, Flower ball (3D); 727-272; Jellyfish eyes--Black 4; and Skulls rock.




Here are some good sites I found for Murakami:
http://www.wakaba.net/murakamiprint.htm
http://www.wallpaper.com/newgallery/17050173/1

During my search for the above images I stumbled upon this little site as well, which is a portfolio of a photographer named cindy sherman. It's actually really cool, but the images are kinda small -- check it OUT!
http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/cindy/sherman.htm

That's all for me, bitches, I'm fucking hungry. See you next time, over and out.

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The thing about blogging is that it has now become the new tool by which the world is changed. Politics, fashion, art, television – you name it, we got it. It's not just the Internet anymore: it's YOUR Internet, it's OUR Internet. You can put your whole life online, and people will actually look at it, read it, feel it as if they almost knew you. Maybe that article you uploaded just for fun and because you thought it was cool will be discovered by a magazine editor who happens to be a blog junkie, or maybe that geeky little film you made at film camp will be watched by Wes Anderson – and even if he doesn't call you up and “discover you,” it's still really cool that he saw your video. When thinking about the Internet, I think of the ocean (and this metaphor is purely because I live in the Midwest): It's always there, it affects the weather, it affects the moon, it affects our lives even in Nebraska. Same with the Internet. It's there, it just affects different things.And you can't just yank out a big plug and BOOM, there goes the Internet. So this is my contribution to the huge ocean of Internet, the gigantic voice that we can all use.