But in this lack of timelyness, I learned some things:

The real world of work and responsibility is for suckers. We are all suckers. Yikes.

Never see a concert at the Docks in Toronto, no matter how good the lineup is.

Things always have a way of working out… on Thursday morning.

Now, I’m going to Montreal… oh and submit!

word.

He takes his usual seat on the bus near the middle doors and next to the window (for quick access to fresh air) when at the next stop, a VERY large man boards and squeezes in next to Dale.  After a few short minutes it’s quite clear that the large man is falling asleep.  His breathing gets deeper and deeper, while his head rolls from left to right to left before finally coming to a rest on Dale’s shoulder.

“Five bucks says he drools on you before you can move or wake him.” a voice behind Dale says.  It belongs to an impeccably dressed middle-aged man whom Dale hadn’t noticed before.  Dale laughs, thinking the man is just making light of the situation when the man draws a crisp five dollar bill from his lapel pocket.

“You’re kidding, right?  There’s no way!” Dale whispers back.

“That he’ll drool, or that I’d like to bet on it?  I assure you, I’m quite serious about both.” the man says with a slight grin as he fans himself with the bill.

“So if I can get him to wake up or move his head before he drools on me, you’ll give me five dollars?”

The man nods.

“And if he drools on me, I owe you five?”

Again, the man nods.

“You’re on?”  Dale shouts into the ear of the large man who sits up with a start.  “Oh, I’m sorry.” He says to the man while reaching back to take the bill from the stranger.

“Well played.  I had you figured for a polite sort.  Live and learn, I suppose.” The man bows lightly, clearly pleased with the outcome even though he lost.  “Care to go double-or-nothing?”

Does Dale…
- politely decline and start a conversation with the large man beside him?
- accept the stranger’s bet?

I could spend hours on Google Maps or Google Earth… seriously. Hours.

Not only is it super cool to see the city, town, hamlet you live in from space, but you can go pretty much anywhere in the world and look down on the people there… LIKE GOD DOES!

Enter the design. Urban planning is design right? Hell yes it is. Seeing how cities are constructed and built up over years, decades and centuries is fascinating to me. Take an hour and cruise over Europe. They knew what they were doing, then they didn’t and now they do again. You can see where they messed up!

Rome and Vatican City are worth a look as well. The churches and random other architectural spaces are weird and wonderful. Everything is a shape of some kind. A cross, a star, another cross, a different kind of S… you know the shapes!

The next thing to check out is the design of nature. Deserts, forests, mountain ranges and rivers are all brilliantly laid out in a perfect layout. I’m not saying it’s a map to the universe, but it could mean something.

Of course, why go anywhere in the world without going to places you’re not supposed to go to. Area 51 (type it in and Google takes you there) is really just an air force base. But weird it is. There are landing strips going all over the place and strange shapes in the desert surrounding the base. Plus you can usually see planes on the tarmac. I’m not sure how many times they update the images, but that’s pretty awesome.

Speaking of conspiracy theories and black helicopters, The Register held a contest to scour Google Maps / Google Earth for crazy things. It’s pretty amazing what a satellite can capture. Check out what they found here!

So next time you have some time and need to look at a different kind of page layout or web design, take a cue from Google Maps / Google Earth. I’m sure you’ll find just what you need somewhere in the world.

Oh and take a look at Roswell, NM. Lots of circles… seriously, it’s weird.

Check out these people, places and things and keep the struggle between your left and right brain alive. I promise these are all, in some way, related to the visual arts

In books…

A Short History of Myth
By Karen Armstrong

This book is part of a collection of books entitled ‘the Myth Series’ which includes modern day revamping of some myths by Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson. Unlike those books, however, this book is non-fiction and explores the value of myth to past and present culture. Although I don’t want to give away the ending too much, the last chapter is the real payoff as it explores the role of artists (painters poets novelists etc) and their contribution to a contemporary society. Go, artists, go!

See this review in The Guardian

An Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
By Mark Rothko

Oh boy oh boy oh boy. An Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art comes out in paperback on March 31, 2006. The book is a compilation of the Mark Rothko’s ideas about art, which have recently been compiled by his son, Christopher Rothko. I haven’t read it yet, but don’t think it isn’t going to be great. Once it’s out you can be sure you’ll hear more about it from me, so if you read it now you can be ready to tell me how wrong I am when I review it. In fact, I look forward to it! It’s already out in bullet stopping hardcover version if you have the funds.

As sold and described by Yale University Press

Some people…

Get together in the cold and form art groups. Check out the Royal Art Lodge. Based in cold, cold Winnipeg, they are a loose knit group of art producing maniacs. What are you doing at home, staring at the wall? Get out there and help your friends out by adding antlers to their drawing of K.I.T.T, the amazing talking car from Knightrider.

Check out the dealio:
http://www3.mb.sympatico.ca/~mondmann/

Write songs about painters and hiding out in the sculpture department. Okay, maybe not both at once, but do you really want that? Here are a few choice tracks that are in some way related to, uh, things you can see. In no particular order:

Silver Jews – Random Rules
Al Tuck – Mona Lisa
Modest Mussorgsky – Pictures at an Exhibition
Jonathan Richmond – Pablo Picasso
Bob Dylan – It’s all over now, Baby Blue
Yo La Tengo – Pablo and Andrea
Modest Mouse – Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Belle And Sebastian – Sukie in the Graveyard
Joel Plaskett – Television Set

It’s going to be spring soon. Time to get up and out of your hole. Here are some places worth going:

The Albright-Knox Gallery
Located in Buffalo, NY

This place has great paintings!

Anslem Kiefer’s show at the Musee D’Art Contemporian de Montreal (sorry about the lack of accents).

This show has great paintings!

The National Gallery of Art
Found in Ottawa

Oh man, is this place great! And there are always a few nice paintings showing too.

Anything I missed? I didn’t think so.

Oh wait, in case I did missed you or your friend’s art show, happening, or event email me here and I’ll pass it on.

Here are a few of my strange loves…

Prefab Sprout
Fronted by Paddy McAloon, these Brits have one classic album, Two Wheels Good (titled Steve McQueen in the UK). After researching them on the internet I’ve found that though they may be much loved in their homeland, they’re virtually ignored in North America. Paddy McAloon is a lyrical genious. I haven’t been able to stomach any album other than Two Wheels Good all the way through, but their “best of” is excellent summary of their career – if not a bit overlong and embarrassing near the end. Check them out for yourself on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nes4L_jvY00&search=prefab%20sprout
and my fav… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjXS3A3ctUk&search=prefab%20sprout

Thin Lizzy
Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott are often credited as one of the founders of hard rock, but it took me a while to find them. Their work is certainly spotty… I myself can only wholeheartedly stand behind the stuff from the middle of their career, and their albums are rarely good all the way through (Jailbreak and Bad Reputation are exceptions). I don’t know much Lynott’s life and times, but I get the feeling from listening to him that he’s been through a lot. He’s been called the Irish Bruce Springsteen, but in all honesty I like him much more than Springsteen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmIzB4WkOO4&search=thin%20lizzy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDMEVg-Sar4&search=thin%20lizzy
and of course… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt7H-vHbWsM&search=thin%20lizzy

Bobby Womack
A close personal friend of the Stones (he wrote the one of their first hits, if not their first hit, It’s All over Now), Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, and a session player for Aretha Franklin, among others, Womack has been a round the block. And he’s still alive! (It’s my big hope to see him in a live setting before he passes). His repetoire is spotty indeed. The album Communication is a good place to start. In keeping with youtube, here’s a nice little tribute to Bobby featuring some of his crappy newer stuff (new at the time – late 90′s?) but some excellent old clips and some great impromptu acoustic work for an audience of James Brown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nv2Dm0oflA&search=bobby%20womack

Al Tuck
Al Tuck comes from another time. It’s the only way to explain why he seems so out of place on our current musical landscape. Here’s a great youtube sample of on of his many unrecorded songs. I’m guessing there are about 5 people in the audience… seems about right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj7zeuOHdJc&search=al%20tuck

1. Thing that are broken but are still really cool…those things are worth, like 10 things.

Now one could just aimlessly surf around at random and take out a good hour or two easy, but the results can be pretty hit or miss. The web is so bloated with cat pictures and message board trolls that can almost put you off the whole mess. But there be gold in them thar hills and what we’re looking for is the mother-lode: sites that entertain, amaze and maybe even enlighten.

So here are a few of my first stops when I’ve got piles of work nothing better to do.

Geek News

Need to know about cutting-edge tech stories and news for nerds? There really is no better place to go than Slashdot or Digg. While there is a bit of story repetition between the two sites, the breadth of information available is pretty vast (in a narrow, geek-focused kind of way). Warning: reading comment threads on either site may cause loss of all faith in humanity.

On the less tech-specific side lies Boing Boing. 90% of every link I’m sent or read about was probably first posted here. Weird, funny, poignant, frightening, there’s a little bit of it all to be found here. Pretty much required reading (but you probably knew that already).

Web Design

Whether you’re a standards noob or a seasoned css ninja, CSS Beauty is an invaluable resource. It acts as both a showcase of what can be done with standards based web construction and as a resource for how-toos and articles related to CSS design. On a related note: CSS Zen Garden is a wonderful site for design inspiration as well as perfect example of the flexibility you get with style sheets.

Brain Power

In the last couple of weeks I’ve tried to give up Googling if I’m trying to find answers to life’s questions or trying to find out more information on a subject. Now I turn to the Wikipedia. Articles are valuable, fairly accurate and hyper-linked out the wazoo so expanding your knowledge is just a click away. I’ve especially found it an invaluable resource in boning up on obscure comic book characters. It also appears that someone has figured out how to get the whole thing onto an iPod which is probably as close as we’re gonna get at the moment to a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I figure everyone knows about the Internet Movie Database but maybe lesser known is its music world ugly stepsister All Music. Find out what album that hot new pop single is from, learn more about artists, what other groups they’ve worked with or influenced, or just read the (for me at least) pretty spot on album reviews. Not the easiest site to use and a redesign about a year ago was a bit of a bad flashback to www 1997 but the content keeps bringing me back.

So get out there and get unproductive, just don’t let the boss see you…

Dude, you have just relived Toronto-based Tasman Richardson’s world of the “basement boy,” to which he has dedicated his video art masterpiece, “Basement Boy Hardcore”.

Self-described as “a semi-autobiographical self-marginalizing identity based investigation of North American geek culture cross-pollinated with breakbeat hardcore,” this dvd is a hypnotic collection of short videos that explore different icons in western geekdom. These icons include things like Star Wars, Black Sabbath, ninjas, and the well-loved shoot ‘em up videogames from our youth.  What makes this video collection so amazing is Richardson’s unique editing technique – by treating the audio and visual elements of video as an organic whole, he manages to compose driving hardcore beats as he cuts and pastes each frame together. The result is a frenetic, startling audio/visual experience created out of familiar images from our hormonal youth.

I learned more about Richardson and his work after talking to him between his trips abroad:

ST: What is your training?
TR: I majored in New Media for four years at OCAD and graduated in 1996.

ST: Tell me more about your crazy-ass editing-for-sound technique. How did you develop it? What are the ups and downs that you’ve experience in using this type of editing style?

TR: The technique is a progression from the literary cutups of Bryan Gysin and William Buroughs but it’s also influenced by more recent works by Coldcut. I was working on these old AB roll decks which are just tape rolling back and forth, so you can imagine how impossible it was to be precise with cuts this fast or small (1/30 of a second). It was all just cut and paste or pause and record if you know what I mean, but then along came digital non-linear editing in the form of a very crappy early incarnation called “Perception” for PC and before you knew it I had churned out five new videos, all of them in the style that I’d been wanting to express. After all this time, it’s still those first five that are the clearest primitive break way from standard practice.

The technique is not so much about editing for sound as it is editing for symbolism and immediacy on all levels. I mean, yes, I listen to a clip and think ‘that sounds good’ but it needs to look good and if I freeze frame, it needs to have a strong composition. Each clip needs to visualize AND auralize something significant. Then when they all play together you get harmonies of information instead of noise.

ST: Tell me more about your collective, www.famefame.com. How did you guys get involved with each other? What are the benefits/drawbacks?

TR: FAMEFAME was born out of an earlier collective called JAWA. That’s a whole story in itself but I’ll cut it short. Jubal Brown and myself were already collaborating and I felt the need to take all my work in different mediums and place it under a banner… some kind of seal of approval or quality and that was FAMEFAME. It wasn’t officially founded until Josh Avery and Elenore Chesnutt started producing work that was complimentary to this goal. Then we drafted the manifesto, got our tattoos of loyalty and started the work.

Since then, we have a new member, Alana Didur. FAMEFAME is complex because in some ways it’s a parody of many recognizable institutions, a record label, an artist collective, a curatorial body, an events promoter, a design house, etc. We work with everything from vinyl records to kinetic sculpture, although our main concern lately has been video in the JAWA style or
the updated FAMEFAME style.

ST: What do you think of the Toronto arts scene? I am particularly interested in your thoughts, as you have had so much international exposure and can view the local scene with a more objective eye.

TR: This scene is very important because many cities don’t have anything like it. The artist-run side of things is very much in balance with the commercial. People may scoff at that but if you go to Paris of Tokyo you’ll feel crushed by the ridiculous demands of commercial venues and the impossible submissions process for getting noticed. There’s a lot of creative, underground sort of venue work being done in these places to counteract the commercial imbalance but that’s something we don’t have here, not to the same extreme. I didn’t appreciate that until recently but I’m really proud of it when I go anywhere outside of Canada. I’ve turned into this crazy nationalist canadiana pusher.

The biggest problem with Toronto now is that we have it so good and we don’t know it so instead of keeping the artist run culture sharp and raising standards, there’s a tendency, especially in video, to dumb it down as some kind of accessibility thing for the public. That’s bullshit and it’s sad because when you lower the standard it’s harder to raise it again later. It’s not bi-directional, you can’t just give it a try and see. Once you start showing kid-friendly anti-intellectual, 40 year old identity base work you’re going to introduce an audience that naturally loves it because  they’re just getting to know it for the first time. It’s our responsibility to bring the audience into the present, or even the future of the medium, not wow them with nostalgic concepts.

It seems like Toronto will always have these two type of screenings as a result: the public surface art which is simplified, and the clique powered aficionado types that are so well versed in a medium that the average person has no hope of fitting in. We need to break that and find a way to introduce mature, complex themes in a easy to enjoy format. That’s what FAMEFAME is trying to do, and I hope we succeed.

You can find more about Tasman Richardson’s work at www.famefame.com. You can also order a copy of “Basement Boy Hardcore” from their online shop.