------->Today, the Late Merce Cunningham, Interview (w/Cage)

On Fresh air. Listen with me on WBEZ, Chicago. 11:00 Central time.

"Declare Interdependece," 2009

Art is not propaganda, but Art always represents some attempt at solution and Art movements fit the curve of a society's unique problems. Via: http://www.elahoffman.pl/



Declaration of cultural revolutionaries for 2009

This is an open experiment.
A putting in words of what is already in the air.
The more this declaration is being read, thought or spoken out, the more its energy will manifest in our world and in our society.
If what is written here resonates with you, make it your statement.
Find ways to read it, share it and put it into action.

DECLARATION OF CULTURAL REVOLUTIONARIES 2009

Cultural revolutionaries in 2009…

_live, act, work with and not against nature
_know that life is too complex to understand it intellectually
_build and support local, self-governed economies
_value and safe-guard diversity of all kind
_value interdependence, since they know that nothing is separate
_regard themselves as equal to all life forms
_protect and support life
_love and support children unconditionally
_work on themselves towards greater awareness
_know about ecological principles and integrate them into their lifes
_see music and dance as an integral part of their expression and communication
_live on an animate earth and regard it as sacred
_know how to grow their own food
_appreciate their sensory awareness
_celebrate life
_cooperate
_make the shift from thinking ‘either, or’ to thinking ‘as well, as’
_share their knowledge
_understand and integrate process as a way of being
_are not identified with their body, thoughts or emotions
_see the mind as a tool
_realize that there is no right or wrong
_are not identified with any social tag, their past or their future
_are aware that the very essence of who they are is life itself
_take responsibility for their emotions
_are aware of and value their relationships to their living and seemingly non-living surroundings
_value and integrate the wisdom of women
_value and integrate the wisdom of indigenous cultures
_value generalist knowledge
_are aware of change as one of the core principles of evolution
_work towards diversification and decentralization
_engage in and create bonds to the place where they live
_turn from dependent consumers to responsible producers
_are looking for ways so that their interests and talents may unfold
_have the courage to resist and disobey laws that render self-rule, self-provisioning, and self-sustenance illegal
_are informed about the current money system and identify it as a contemporary form of enslavement
_identify and boycott biological, cultural, social and philosophical monocultures
_boycott monopolies of any kind
_question everyone who promotes one solution
_value environmental and human ethics over profit maximization
_boycott corporations and banks operating for profit maximization
_reclaim land and forests as common good
_reclaim water as common good
_reclaim biodiversity and knowledge as common good
_are aware that they participate in the process of co-creation at all time
_allow life to unfold through them

Berlin, 03/2009

Been watching David Lynch's Interview Project. Continuing the wonderful work of the late Studs Terkel:

http://interviewproject.davidlynch.com/www/

------->art adventures in twitterdom?

Well, I've been hearing about thiseer Twitter thang for sometime, how it's going to revolutionize art and such. And as an artist with a specific interest in new modes of expression and technology, my twitter-lack would seem an odd oversight.

Although I've long been a skeptic, some friends finally convinced me to join the twitter world. And because of them, I'm glad I did.

And though I'm fairly convinced that the Twitterboom is little more than short-lived advertising hype, I will try to be an open-minded skeptic.

But let me voice my skepticism. May the gods prove me wrong.

Can something like art be made on Twitter?

Well, I'm not sure, but I don't think so. At least not good art. If any, it would be a literary art like haiku. But Twitter brings nothing new to haiku. Relative to the web-publishing ability of blogs to integrate pictures/audio/video/text and hypertext, Twitter is very limiting. The Twitterature movement? I'm trying to stay open-minded. Will Twitter bring something new to Art?

Does Twitter represent the new read/write best of the web--the kind of democratic format that allows artists to build audience?

Absolutely not. Twitter, if anything, represents a read-only regression from blogs. It is not, as I've been told by the media, the new punk rock. It is the opposite of punk. It is much more like a pyramid scheme. In fact, it IS a pyramid scheme. Were you bottom level? Then Twitter is going to be GREAT for you.

Is it good for advertising?

Definitely yes, at least until the pyramid reaches it's mid-level burn-out. And especially for low-level pyramiders.

Is it good for making friends?

Maybye. Well, because of the format, more like acquaintances. Certainly not as good as more democratic tools like forums or blog communities.

However, its top-down read-only nature makes it a good place to meet a certain kind of person... the kind of person who'd want a top-down read-only soap box. And that appeal, to that certain kind of person, and the promise to others of meeting this kind of person is the whole hype of Twitter! Of course, I'll retract my cynicism and remain in obscurity for a while.

But I will go out on a limb and say:

without major changes: multi-media integration, longer format, alteration of pyramid structure, well everything that separates Twitter from blogs, Twitter is but a fad. In fact, those things are the only difference between Twitter and blogs:

1. More limited in expression--no logical persuasion (too short for syllogism,) no image/video/sound integration.
2. More "read-only." Less democratic.
3. More pyramid-like in structure.

This last was clearly the whole point! Twitter was based on the business idea that blogs were a fad and clever marketing could move bloggers to Twitter, which, because of its more pyramid/read-only structure is better for centralizing profit. Blogs give those little people too much opportunity to profit off their work!

The oft-stated meme is that people who missed the blog "fad" could be sold a "bottom level" product. But as always, business men know the "cost" of things but the VALUE of nothing. Blogging, as multi-media self-publishing is revolutionary. Twitter is a pyramid scheme, and with new twitter-gaming technologies, guess what, it's probably past the burn out level. Alas.

If you want to be "bottom level," go bet on the next big thing and ride it to networking success, fortune and fame! THe NIN forum and DeviantArt are due some media exposure soon....

But so far Twitter can be fun! So if you like, you can catch my inane, cynical Twittering at: http://twitter.com/zamyatin_lives

------->The Unforeseen

Went to a showing of The Unforeseen last night. A compassionate and effective documentary on land use planning, development and sprawl, a Laura Dunn film with Robert Redford as an exec producer and cameo.

This is an excellent piece of propaganda and an interesting popularization of daring film techniques. After, many of the people I talked to said "it was strange how it would go off on these artsy sort of things..." or "I've never seen a documentary that was so beautiful."

The film often integrated in incongruous or even comical images, giving it a sort of zen Buddhist sort of humor. Many images seemed to follow a sense of chance allowing and encouraging viewers to make mental leaps and actively participate in creating meaning. The image of children, or of a sheep escaping its fence aren't directly related to the content of the film except by a sort of synchronicity. Experiments in story-telling and even characterization give this documentary a very new feel...

What is art? What is propaganda? Propaganda attempts to persuade toward an opinion? I don't think art tries to do this.

Conversation...

Met a young film student at a party this weekend. Spoke about art, psychology, the paranormal, film, flash mobs and the Avant Garde. "I love the crazy stuff that makes you think... I want to find a way to imagine other dimensions... love things that open my mind to ideas I've never considered." A big fan of David Lynch and zombie movies....

Merce Cunningham, RIP-------->

Merce Cunningham, exit, stage (Flip coin)

So experimental a genre of parody was created in honor of him. So experimental he always seemed a sort of parody of himself.

Anyone who's put underwear or a lampshade on his head and flailed about saying "modern dance" is a fan of Merce Cunningham, though he might not even know the name. Cunningham has inspired a generation of artists. Merce, like his Collaborator John Cage, represents the avant garde that so many young artists find so exciting. His choreography represented dance as dance, and dancers as themselves, no attempt to lull us into the romantic fantasy.

The movements often were inspired by nature and animals, but the dancers were not to be animals, but to move with the spontaneity of animals. Not to pretend to be animals, in a way that romanticizes or anthropomorphises but to simply be human animals.

With Cage, Merce experimented with chance operations and letting in new meanings to the symbology of dance.
In conversation with Cage and...

------->Cage echoes in it. (The "Eastern Invasion" Lingers)

John Cage is best known as composer of 4'33, the composition that features 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. For those that don't know it, you enter the hall, the orchestra sits, the concert master comes to tune, the conductor appears and bows, raises his hands to begin and...

...then lowers them and looks at his watch.

Then there's nothing for the next four and a half minutes. Of course, we quickly see that it's not just silence, but in the context of aesthetic appreciation, it is filled with sound, humor, meaning and, yes, beauty.

John Cage teaches us to listen, in a very specific way and it's that silence that echoes...

But Cage was more than musical mad-scientist. He was a prolific multi-artist. And perhaps the most important one, in terms of his influence across all the arts, of the last 50 years.

(Listen/View a beautiful film inspired by Cage's aesthetics, with his piece "In a Landscape":)


Among the emerging artists of today, the experimenter, the wizard and witchdoctor is worshiped. We were a generation raised on pop culture, and when we were exposed to the likes of Cage, DuChamp, Jasper Johns, John Ashbury, Gertrude Stein...

...people totally reinventing art with howling at the moon madness, joie de vivre, where poetry meets its primitive heritage in the incantation, eye of noot, hair of toad, the dull pierce of the wolf's tooth. The "cut" of the haiku, which projects a silent image at the base of the skull. The tools that had flooded in from the east, which released the intuitive back into our art, remain the most exciting and inspiring thing that most young artists today will learn about in art/music/writing/dance/theater/etc school.

At its base, the aesthetic is this: something that cuts to the now, that, in an instant, frees us from some illusion that had held us living in the past or future. We discover that there is a raw mad magic to life just under the surface.

And so there is a generation that wants that freedom, and also enjoys Scooby doo.

Which has created a sort of paradox, apparent in artists ranging from Artist Banksy, to the Dresden Dolls and Franz Ferdinand, to Carole Maso, the Flarfist Collective, the White Stripes, Naomi Klein, Chuck Palahniuk, practically all new photography, the films of Kevin Smith, the Wachowski Brothers, the Coen Brothers and on and on and on. And the same is even more apparent in the youngest generation of artists I meet.

The paradox is this:

Wake-ism vs Dream-ism.
or the concrete vs the sentimental.
Or now vs the drama of learning from pasts and creating new futures.

So we are used to art sweeping us up in narrative. To "get lost" in an imaginary world created by a painting, a novel, a piece of music. We may walk around our entire lives living mostly in a world colored by these imaginary worlds, the sweet conflicts of our literature, witnessed in our own lives. But Art may also wake us up and alert us to the beauty and profound mystical quality of now. And in so doing, create the possibility that we can make our own way, not just live out the dramas of the past and the future we desire. Cage spoke of feeling that paintings wanted to manipulate him, hypnotize him into a fantasy world, whereas he would walk away from a DuChamp painting and suddenly THE REAL WORLD was more interesting. The DuChamp would point to the hidden beauty in cement, or in a door nob. And suddenly he was seeing things as they really are, not just as their trivial and passe "function:" "door nob."


(John Cage speaking of this phenomenon in music, about 5 minutes)



This contradiction between (1) the "fictive dream," which has become so prevalent a tool in our advertising that we've become very suspicious of it, and (2) what moves us toward awake, remains one of the most important problems in emerging art.

------->While Cage, and the previous generation of experimenters were "purists" in their move toward "awake," the newest generation attempts to weave the two contrary elements together.

And it's here that Cage's influence echoes on. Through the paintings of Jasper Johns, who is a major influence on emerging artists and through noise rock, "Language Poetry," which sees raw language as its subject, instead of some romantic fictive dream, Opium Magazine, "Fluxus" and through the exploits of the cacophony society, which inspired Chuck Palahniuk.

How do various artists use/address/solve this apparent contradiction?

Cage pieces on Youtube:










Cage echoes here: (just a few Cage-inspired wonders...)
Woolgathersome ("Still lifes")
Joan Retellack poetry
Mac Low
http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com/

Am I Ulysses?

Cheers to Franz Ferdinand, one of those bands that have made the best of the system, went their own way against the wishes of their corporate backers and made something very new. "Tonight: Franz Ferdinand" is my early favorite for record of the year.

They've kicked off the studio sound and reinvented their own experimental approach to making a record.



In this video about making Tonight, they discuss creating their own ad hoc studio in a local theater, kicking out their "pop" sound technician and getting back to the fun of improvising with sound. This is what I love about the new art; the wacky, intuitive approach that values the process over the product.

Ulysses:

Yes! Yes! Yes!

------->just reread Rupture, Verge, Precipice for myself--says so much so profoundly. And such good fiction too.

The future brings------->

Carole Maso is nothing of an "emerging artist."

She is more the death knell of the "Literary" pretense of big publishing houses. And though she is obscure enough that her wikipedia page remains a stub, her 9 published books have made her one of the most important and most talked about power houses of new and avant guard literature.


And none of these masterpieces were published or even reviewed much by THE INDUSTRY.

If you want to understand where the novel is at today, how it can be adapted to treat modern problems, to understand what literature could be without the constraints of sell, sell, sell then you need to read: Rupture, Verge, Precipice from the great Barcelona Review.

Maso writes a piece that is compelling poetry, story and criticism, blended into one. She improvises with elements and genres, plays with perspective... She understands what real culture and literature can accomplish, when we knock down useless old barriers.

Perhaps "fiction" doesn't need to lull the reader into the fictive dream.

Perhaps there needn't be a "bad guy." Perhaps there never was.

Perhaps none of this is so really experimental. If you let go of the created expectation of what a "good read" is, you'll see that Maso's got it right.

There will be more on Maso in the weeks ahead....

"Michi" by Keiko Abe------->

Performed by Evelyn Glennie



Because it's hard to tell, here's what this blog is about: a certain set of new devices, themes and techniques, which seem to be congealing into the first really distinct artistic movement since Post-Modernism, or perhaps "Minimalism" or "Globalism." These techniques and the artists that use them flow directly out of the last wave of Avant-garde, but represent an attempt to blend the experimental with the accessible.

Some interesting notes on Glennie:

------->In her performances, Glennie seems to blend more "accessible" pieces, like "Michi" with more challenging, abstract pieces, bringing mind-opening, paradigm-shifting experiment to a wider audience...

------->She has an apparent interest in improvising with genres and forms, melding all of her interests into a cohesive Glennie performance.

------->An interest in improvising with tools, techniques and devices. She loves pieces where she can play with her hands, her fingers, her nails... If somebody writes "Tocatta for cow bell and eyelashes" Glennie will be the first to play it. It's like an evolutionary approach to finding the right solution to each artistic problem....

------->Continuing the breakdown of barriers between "art" and "life..." Is this "reality music performance?" Glennie's carving a path as an avant-garde classical performer/activist/motivational speaker....

------->Use of internet and technology that attempts to bring the human component into the technology, not the other way around... For example, when she complains about "acoustic enhancement" (sound systems) of auditoriums. To Glennie, it's vital that there is a direct connection between performer and audience via the unprocessed sound waves. The audience must learn to listen with their whole bodies...

------->Glennie's "activism" represents a democratization of music-making. That music as an art can and should be available to all people. And people should be taught to really listen, even to experimental music....

And there are other vital ways that Glennie fits into the new art. Look closely at the kind of improvisation and tools Glennie uses. You'll see them 1,000 times again, weaving a golden braid through our emerging culture.

Just look at this very same work as an act of "film..."

Note(s) to self------->1) No boobies are coming, 2) New Art

Dear Alex,

Have you noticed that saying "cultural industry" makes you sound like a nutty nut bar?

Well it does.

And no, merely saying "cultural industry" will not make bare-breasted women appear to protest you. So give it up. Besides, when big-bare-tittied nubile XXX teens protested Teddy Adorno, it was all so very upsetting. Poor, poor Teddy. Did those nasty unbound and bouncing boobied young ladies upset you?

Love,

Alex

----------------

Dear Alex,

Have you noticed: The history of the last 100 years is a fake, a fraud, written as sequel, no, no(!) prequel(!) to Zamyatin's "We." I don't believe a single word of it.

Or was "We" the real and true history of the next 300 years, written as prophesy? Actually, I'm certain of this. Isn't this a fact?

These things confuse me.

What they (clever schemers!) call "news" is no more than a fictional story (How could it be true?) the early days of Zamyatin's 300-year war between "The City" and the "Village." That's the "story" we're all living in. The beginnings of dystopia.

--No, no, Alex, in "The City" say:

"The War on Terror."

Saying: "The war between The City and The Village" makes you sound nutty nut bar.

Mmmm. Hungry. Perhaps some tea and toast?

--------------------

Dear Theodore Adorno, RIP:

Sir, I'm quite certain you are a fictional character. You are dead, yes, but there is "dead" and then there is "dead dead." And I'm of the opinion that only the really real can be "dead dead" so why we can't sit down for tea and toast? We are warriors in a fictional war (how can this conflict be real? "War on Terror?" People believe that? Seriously? Crazy talk, crazy talk!) Oh but most of this 300-year war is "cold war," yes but tepid (or is it combustible? Cold like gasoline? Like napalm?) and yes, yes, sometimes it combusts! Gets hot, so hot! Hot war!

The biggest change of the last 100 years, the culmination of so much technology, has been the centralization and consolidation of power and access to resources. This is the BIGGEST change in human history. The first time technology has made it possible.

Everything, including production has become a resource, "property," and access to every resource is being consolidated by The City. Even the genes in your body are "property" of The City. This is not "evil." It is simply "gravity."

This consolidation and the technology that made it possible, was the history of the 20th Century. This inherent conflict became a spectre moving through every dark page and every night of our art.

But there is new technology.

In every aspect of our lives, new technologies are bringing decentralization and democratization, of Culture, of information, of food, of education--and even energy resources!

They will try to stop it at all costs: to reduce these new freedoms to mere "consumer choices."

This is the conflict, again and again, of so much new art, in subtle and blatant manifestations, it is always there. I see it! Always there, I see it! Don't you see it?

And its most profound manifestation is in the very form of "new" and "independent" distribution, where it lends form-content unity to our culture's new apocalyptica.
-------------

Note: Tea and toast with Adorno, discuss:
I. How to get more bare-chested nubile XXX barely-legal teens.
II. Lemon-raspberry scones=yum.

------->The Sound of Drums.

Evelyn Glennie is the first solo percussionist to make and sustain a living as a performer.

It pains me to mention it, because once you hear her, you'll see that it doesn't make the least difference,

but she happens to also be deaf.


I recently performed as a soloist at a certain Chicago new music festival with a highlight on percussion. These were amazing professional percussionists, certainly. Symphony musicians of the highest caliber.

And while I cannot say that Glennie surpasses their musicianship, she certainly equals it.

And she brings something truly unique and amazing to performance.

Artists, educators and thinkers of all kinds cannot fail to find this master class inspiring. If you're an artist, this is MUST SEE.

Glennie talks about how she sees her art as "teaching people to listen." And she talks about "listening" to music with the whole body. This is another 20 minute segment from TED.



If you haven't got 20 minutes, check out Glennie in performance with Fred Frith.



It's wonderful that Glennie is really teaching people to listen to New Music which rarely gets a fair hearing.

And as a quick note, also check out Tzadik Records, Glennie's label. Another small business putting out new music.

Home: http://www.tzadik.com/

More Reader Recommendations:

Great retrospective of "American Independence," celebrating 20 years of Merge records. Imagine starting up a label back in '89! No myspace?! What do I do without Ruppie?!?!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106260795

Basically, these are the good guys and this is their success story. Of course, things have changed a lot since then, but there's still a lot we can learn from their story.

FYI, merge also has a great blog, largely featuring new videos of Merge artists.

Link love from readers:

Recent readers recommend:



Mayan Calendar Girls
http://mayancalendargirls.com/

A flash fiction serial hyper-novel in a blog-based format. A 'pocolyptic Robbins-esque bash for the end o times.

From the web site:
STONE-COLD CENTERFOLDS
ESCHATOLOGY VS SCATOLOGY
ZEITGEIST VS SITE HEIST
COLLIDERSCOPE TERRORIST

MAYAN CALENDAR GIRLS is the fun, sexy, political, cosmic HyperLit serial that runs from now until the end of time as we think we know it.

project poetry

Soon to launch! Project Poetry will publish community photographs of poems written on/in public places. Perhaps a beautiful idea, perhaps not. I'll wait to see the results. Either way, it's an exciting possibility to look forward to. But, given the kind of poetry I usually like*, my participation would only cause a WTF epidemic of public confusion-face and head-scratching/WTF.


*Poetry I like: (warning: adult content)

Intro to new culture/"piracy"

If you want to understand the major currents of culture today then pop some popcorn, pour a beer and watch this speech by free culture activist, Creative Commons founder and all-around superhero Lawrence Lessig. This is tomorrow's art history today.

And --BONUS-- Lessig is quite an entertainer too. You'll enjoy this, I promise.

Lessig's topic is copyright law, but he opens up a profound view of how modern technology has revived real, spontaneous culture and democratized who controls and profits from it. And of course, why that's created conflict between you and me and the Cultural Industy's powers that be.

This video is 20 minutes long, but well worth the time investment for those who want to understand the current technical/legal environment in which art is being made.


For a more in-depth look, check out free culture. For those interested in copyright, new models of art distribution or the debate over "piracy," this is MUST READ material.

------->New fiction: Ink Pen Paper Blood

Collaborative effort launched today by writers C. H. Valentino and Jerry B. Flory!!!

This is a very new approach to prose and storytelling in an online collaborative serial. Flory and Valentino share a style that uses literary minimalism as a blunt tool to smack the reader around and grab them by the throat. Language that's both rich and direct combined with storytelling relayed through a constant torrent of imagery make for reading that's immediately avant guard yet accessible.

The novel intertwines lead characters from their independent novels, tying together literary universes....

Check out the first installment.


-------------------------------------


From the web page:

Ink, Pen, Paper, and Blood a full-length novel by Jerry B. Flory and C.H Valentino featuring Walter Lind and Samantha Marlow as they trek cross-country to find the best and the brightest writers of the new generation while copy cat murders start hitting a little too close to home.

Valentino, ooh la la...

------->Featherproof books in (not so) brief

Which way is the wind blowing? Which way? Which way? Follow the feather in the wind!

Everything changes. Economic realities change, leaving the stodgy and inflexible masters of the past paradigm stinking up history's gutters while the flexible and inventive evolve to find a new way.

Beethoven, Charles Dickens, Andy Worhol------->their ability to mine new economic possibilities and forge new paradigms was as remarkable as their art.

In Beethoven's time, the winds swept the money out from under the old system of aristocratic patronage, which treated artists as well pampered servants to nobility. But everything changes. The money all fell to the new Bourgeois, and men like Beethoven no longer had a taste for servitude, no matter how well-pampered. Beethoven was the first artist to break free of the patronage system and build a career on the backs of the bourgeois need to feel as wordly and cultured as the aristocracy. He sold them sheet music, perfect for home performance and soon there was a piano in every house. And he created symphonies on the scale of spectacle and soon they were performed in every concert hall! The awakening middle class LOVED a good spectacle.

Which way does the wind blow today? Let's call today's dominant paradigm the "corporate patronage system," which treats artists as serfs and their artistic output as an "owned" commodity. This has been a remarkably lucrative situation for those base enough to "own" the artistic output of artists. Alas, the winds come, and artists are finally tiring of serfdom.

-----------------featherproof------------------

So which way will the wind blow next? Look to featherproof, blowing in that wind....

Featherproof is a small Indy publisher founded in2005 by Jonathan Messinger and Zach Dodson (aka, novelist Zach Plague.) They publish "lively" fiction and novels with prose that tends toward an upbeat but baroque aesthetic--novels of "prosetry," where form and technique are as important as content. The kind of novels that you might expect from the MA-grad/Literary-zine authors who find a home at Featherproof.

But Featherproof is also a case study in some common ways art-making is changing: building a more direct link with audience, bashing down genre boundaries, mixing media and performance and making books/posters/cds that are really nice art pieces that you want to own.

Announcing: The Featherproof Dollar Store Tour. Featherproof is going on tour, doing readings with some of its writers. The link even has sound clips if you'd like a preview. That's right, these days, even writers need to be performers.

And, my don't those books look good?

At the same time that commercial books, especially fiction, are looking cheaper and cheaper (my god, is there only one designer making ALL those damn coffee table books with nothing but Adobe CS default settings? Yo PUBLISHERS! HIRE A SECOND GRAPHIC DESIGNER!!!) Featherproof is taking full advantage of new technologies to make their books into works of art that you WANT to own.

Lets face it, times is hard, times is hard. If I'm going to spend my hard-earned dough on something, I want it to look nice. And hey, remember illuminations? Book design used to be art!

What's old is new again.

-----------------Boring Plague------------------

Just look at "Zach Plague's" Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring! Go ahead, look at it!

And Featherproof is offering the book in a variety of formats, both as clever commercialization and ironic swipe at clever commercialization, including CD, posters, book, online version...

The poster set:


The full extravaganza:

Well, that's enough fawning over Zach Plague. At least for now. I'm sure he gets plenty of that from young writers. I mean, he does look suspiciously similar to co-founder and co-publisher at Featherproof and MAKE Zach Dodson....

Which leads to one last point: Featherproof represents artists taking their art back. Their business model is one that values artists as collaborators and equals, not as fodder for profit, profit, profit!

Soon soon soon I will do a full review of some Featherproof books including boring boring boring. For now, if you're interested in new literature, art or design, check them out.

And they've made it easy with:

-------------> !

These are clever DIY freebies you can print off at home!

Anyway, things change.

Yep.

So make sure to subscribe to this blog. You don't want to wind up in the afore mentioned historical gutter, do you?






.

------->After the launch party

Just come to terms with it now: the Boomers are never going to fucking retire.

Ever.

Accept that. It's a fact.

So long as they're alive, they'll keep going to work, making winter crocs, signing Britney Spears to record deals, putting David Caruso on teevee and generally screwing everything up.


And now, some of them are attempting to download their groovy consciousnesses into computers, or shoot up needles-full o' nano-nurse-blood-bots so they can keep screwing things up indefinitely.



That's just what they do.

It's the rest of us who must deal with the economic realities of boomer cluelessness. I mean, except for you boomers who read my blog, Mom, you guys are totally different. (Call me. $0$--new shoes...)

In Art, the reality is this:

it's become damn hard to make a living as an artist, or even to make enough money to support an "art habit."

To The Industry, art isn't "Art" unless it fattens the "retirement" funds Boomers emptied putting their unemployed children through grad school for their 5 or 6 PhDs.

Which means "artists" must make ever dumber consumer chochkies designed to make an ever dumber-ifying populace feel good about themselves.

So if you want to make art and still manage to eat, you've got two choices:

-----------------------------

1. ------->Get comfortable writing limericks for Hallmark cards featuring dogs playing pool.

OR

B. ------->Find your own damn way.

-----------------------------

That's what this blog is dedicated to:

Crocs, childish photoshops and artists finding their own damn way.

And to those rare souls who manage to take The Industry by it's strings and play it like a 7 dollar banjo.

-----------------------------

Here's a preview of what's to come:

Gods of rock n' roll mayhem, who've mixed noise music, noise art, noise content, crossed media borders and burned down boundaries to make a direct connection to audience....

A writer who has mixed genres and forms to become a legend, and made "the bigs" irrelevant in the process.

An artist who has become a one man revolution by reclaiming city as canvass.

And of course, MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you're an artist looking for a way out or an art-lover looking for a window in, stay tuned.

------------------------------------------------------------->This is for you.











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