Category: General

I have produced a tiny comic for your amusement. Painted by hand specifically for reproduction at this scale, and scanned for the final artwork.

Things could get messy around here, I have to completely overhaul my office. I’m about to switch from cable modem to DSL, but unfortunately my phone socket is behind some bookcases, in the most inaccessible corner of my tiny 10×20 office. I have to move about 1500lbs of books and bookcases out of the way so QWest can access my phone jack.

One of my old bosses used to lecture me endlessly about this problem, he said it was my biggest time management problem, he called it “Goal Displacement.” You have a simple goal, but instead of expending work towards that goal, you get diverted into some completely irrelevant task that’s blocking you from achieving your real goal. I just wanted to install DSL, QWest says it’s easy, they’ll rewire the wall plate for me at no charge. Unfortunately it’s going to take me 2 or 3 days of hard work moving books and furniture just to get to the wall plate.

Here’s an intereresting postcard I picked up at a museum in Japan, showing a Jomon icon. I love the abstract grooved patterns, which are a distinguishing feature of Jomon pottery.






There is no particular point to this post, I mostly wanted some other material to push that hideous Chris Reeve picture down off the home page.

The Art Newspaper is reporting that Texan stock swindlers have stolen $43 million dollars from the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. The AIC filed suit in Dallas county court for the return of stolen funds, plus $50 million in damages.

The artworks in Museum of the AIC are donations, and the financial endowments of the donors ensures that the museum continues to exist and maintain that collection. This swindle is a threat to the continued existence of the museum, it undermines the financial stability of the museum.

I note that the Bush administration is rushing to put more federal law enforcement effort behind terrorism, by taking agents from other duties like white-collar crime. It’s open season for swindlers and their Enronomics.

I just received this extremely strange piece of junk mail, a wall calendar attached to another Pity Marketing pitch. I opened the calendar and this full-page image greeted me.





I can’t decide which is creepier, Reeve, or the Borg Queen’s rippling cleavage. Better loosen those retaining clips..

Dee Dee Ramone is dead. I haven’t been this upset since Wendy O. Williams’ suicide. There seems to be an impenetrable barrier at about age 50, and all the punks hit it and go splat.

I’m experimenting with changes to the site’s appearance, I’ve just figured out how to put tables into a CSS layout so I’m experimenting with a few of my favorite tricks, like that split left right graphics gadget at the top of the page. I’ll refine it and get things set up properly.

I also got Dreamweaver MX working to a minor degree, so I can do some WYSIWYG editing of the main templates without trashing them totally. Now I can do a few more layout tricks. If only I could get Dreamweaver to recognize my linked CSS style sheets, I’d be really happy.

I am pondering a problem, or perhaps it is an opportunity, but I cannot decide how to proceed. What I am considering is a radical departure from everything I’ve ever done as an artist, so I must consider it deeply.

For over 25 years, I have been researching antiquated photographic processes. I have found certain processes that are basically lost arts, and with the application of some computer technology, I can compensate for the flaws in these processes. I am now profitably exploiting the very problems that caused people to drop the process.

I have accumulated research going back over 25 years, I’ve consulted with artists and photographers, some of them freely shared their information, some will not divulge it at any price. The ones who freely shared their information believed that anyone who made anything from it would do so on their own accord. I know that the teacher who originally showed the process to me had no idea I’d continue to develop it for 25 years. I actually met my old professor a few years ago, I thanked him for teaching me the process, and briefly told him of my work. He asked me if my work was successful, I told him I thought it was successful, but nobody had the least interest in it and certainly nobody wanted to buy it. Then he grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously and said “congratulations!”

The process is extremely labor intensive and costly, with a high failure rate. It can take a week to produce a really good print. I have taken prints to local galleries, they offer to sell them at about half what it costs me to make them. They don’t seem to understand that alternative process prints are much more expensive. My prints are true archival art, in an era where galleries rush to sell nonarchival inkjet prints at fine-art prices.

So there’s the crux of the matter. I’m not making a cent with my printing. I can’t even get galleries interested in selling them for reasonable prices, even in the $800 to $1200 range which is the low end for alternate process photographic prints. So I am considering opening up and publishing my entire research as an open source project. To do so would reveal all my most closely guarded trade secrets. However, some other authors have started to publish related information they have discovered on their own. So I feel compelled to publish fully, in order to establish my work. Perhaps if I cannot gain recognition for my work, I can gain recognition for contributing to the photographic arts. Ironically, my own university has shunned my work. Their printmaking department has a fancy mechanical process they’ve patented and licensed, I can do the same thing with a few pennies of chemicals and some paintbrushes. They hate my process.

So, what should I do? Should I reveal everything, or continue to go it alone? I decided I would publish everything once I had a major showing of my work. Perhaps I can spur a gallery to show my work by publishing. Probably not.

Headline writing is a neglected art, as I observed today reading my local newspaper. It seems that today’s generation of editors just does not know how to write a good headline. There was a time when headlines conveyed much of the tone of a publication, and some papers had such a distinctive style that you could instantly know a headline came from that particular source. A good example would be the staccato Hollywood alitterations of Variety magazine. I think the best headline I ever saw was a parody of this style in a Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s, it read “Lax Styx Wax Clicks.” The headline is incomprehensible unless you read the article, where it is revealed the band Styx had not produced an album in several years, and the new album is a hit.

Headline writing has a long tradition of stylistic conventions. I remember my first training in headline writing in a journalism class. We got handouts of long lists of common verbs, with synonyms sorted by length in ems. You’d find a word like “win” and you’d find a list of dozens of synonyms that you could choose to shorten or lengthen the head to fit the space. It took quite a bit of skill at copyfitting and some artistic ability to say as much as possible in a short headline. But the average hack just used the list to rotate verbs once in a while to keep the headlines from sounding stale. Unfortunately, your average hack will also drive those synonyms into the ground. Look at your average sports page and see how many times you see relatively disused and odd synonyms for “win” or “defeat.”

I particularly began paying attention to headlines when I started reading Japanese newspapers, the styles are entirely different. Headlines often omit verbs, leaving the reader to complete the sentence. Long complex word structures are often abbreviated with a string of even more complex kanji. The main headline may not be the primary focus, a subhead may be the core story. I remember reading a headline of an airline crash in the US, the top of the page had a massive bold headline, “No Japanese Killed.” The secondary, much smaller headline said “250 People Killed in Airliner Crash in US.”

I’ve found that as I read more Japanese, some of my English writing skills deteriorate. My essays tend to be written in kishotenketsu style, which is not really very straightforward. My headlines are dull, they start with dull words like “the” and use cliches like “The Art of..” I haven’t decided on proper capitalization rules. So I’m going to go back to school and dig up my 25-year-old papers on the art of headline writing. Some research in Strunk & White and the AP Stylebook seem to be in order.