Saturday Morning - Catching Up

[Saturday morning, March 27, 11am Thai time] My impending departure seems to be sinking in at the office. "But you just got here." Our housesitter emailed "You are welcome to stay where you are for a few years if you like. We'll keep an eye on things.." Yesterday we had our most serious meeting about the website. I had made some mock up pages and so with the printouts in hand, plus my mockups projected on the whiteboard, we got through a lot of stuff. It won't be done before I leave, but it's getting closer.

The air has been much cleaner this week. You can see the mountains. We've had attempted thunderstorms several times - gusts of wind jump up like sleeping cats briefly batting at flies then die down, clouds appear in the sky, there's a flash or two of lightening and distant rumbling of thunder. A couple of times it actually rained hard, but mostly just some scattered drops or nothing at all.




The picture on the left was yesterday. You can actually see that the sky has a suggestion of blue in it compared to the picture on the right from a couple of months ago. And you could actually see things on the mountainside, not simply the faded silhouette in the picture on the right. You can also see this teak tree had a lot more leaves then.

Firefox 3.07 as soon as I had loaded it about two weeks ago had seriously slowed down my internet access, so this morning when 3.08 asked to be downloaded, I immediately said yes and things are moving much faster.

But I'm moving much slower. Somehow I've done something to my right ankle and walking is a less than easy, but I'm determined that we're not going to spend our Saturday inside. We only have one more Saturday after today before we head home. Tonight is Ann-Marie's good bye party. She was a volunteer at my office for two years and had been away a while when we came last year. She's been working at Chiang Mai University and is headed for a job in Paris.


Several days ago I noticed a stack of king-sized mattresses in the laundry room. I immediately asked if we could have one. Even when you put two twins together, there's inevitably a crack that interferes with marital harmony. And the next day our two twins were bridged by our new superhard (I always liked the mattresses in Asia because they are so hard, but had never seen it so clearly stated. I bet there'd be a market for harder mattresses like these in the US. The line above LADY is clear in my photo and if you double click on it.)





I'm looking around at miscellaneous photos that never got up. Here's Matt standing next to a tiny little red Rover about two weeks ago.









Here's a building they've been working on while we've been here. It's just before I get to work on my bike in the morning. The first picture was March 3 (thanks to digital cameras that keep track of the date) and the second one was March 25.



And here's the mural across the street that I pass as I pull out of our building's little parking lot every morning.








And here's an artist who was sitting at the table outside my office one evening as I was leaving for home. This wasn't any parricular village, but a mix of features from a number of villages.

Bike Ride to Hang Dong 2 - Furniture World

[Tuesday, February 24, 2009, 10pm Thai time]

Lots happening, way behind blogging. Let me finish the bike trip from last Saturday. We arrived in Hang Dong about 12:30pm and there was a huge furniture store so we stopped to look around. When I say "store" it certainly wasn't like a furniture store in Anchorage or elsewhere in the US. It was mostly very open buildings and a lot of stuff was actually outside. It was really more like a museum.We parked our bikes next to the Chinese room and as we walked around a delightful woman discretely began talking to us, explaining what we were looking at.
And inviting us to see other parts. Soon she was back with a tray and a couple of cold sealed cups of water.


At this point, seeing the whole front - India now - I was overwhelmed at the kinds of stuff they had.

There was door after door after door. These two are Chinese, and these are the insides. There were Indian doors and Pakistani doors as well. Not to mention windows. Part of me is wondering whether these are from places that were demolished for high rises or whether they just bought them off of people's houses.

If I were a US interior decorator, I'd spend a lot of time in Hang Dong and simply convince my clients that the wait was well worth what you got. Things weren't not terribly expensive at all. Some of the elaborate Indian doors - not those above - she said were 27,000 Baht - about $755. You could pay that much for a door at Home Depot and not get anything nearly as exciting as these. Of course, the catch is the shipping costs. We didn't get into that since I wasn't buying a door.

Here was a small display under a corrugated steel roof of how you might furnish your room. If we had a room that big.

These men are guarding the Burmese room.

And then there was the room of mostly Indian lamps. Here's is where we broke down. Two small hanging lamp shades for over our dining room table. They assured us they'd pack them so they wouldn't break and we could carry them on to the plane But even if we didn't carry them on they wouldn't break. We'll figure this all out when we get home. Will the work over the dining room table? We'll see.

These are Pakistani beds. There were lots and lots of them.

Here's our host. She apologized that she couldn't speak English - her parents were very poor and couldn't afford school for her beyond a couple of years. But she was so charming and such a great host - very Thai in that regard. As you can guess, this place covered a lot of land.

Bathroom sink anyone? The water worked.

And there were little things too, like drawer pulls, door handles, hat and clothes hooks, and things I wasn't sure about. We bought some drawer pulls too. I have no idea what we're going to do with them, but we'll figures something out.


Here is part of the front of the store that faces the street. As you can see, this place is called the Golden Triangle and you can visit their website yourself. And order an Indian door or a Chinese door, or maybe have a Thai door made. My guess is that most of the website is the Chiang Mai store, not the Hang Dong. As you can see it is a little slicker presentation than here. And while she didn't teach me the pricing code on the stickers until we were in the last room we looked at, the prices she did quote me seemed to be much less than what is on the website. If you were really going to buy a few large items, you could pay for your trip to Thailand and more in the savings you'd get. And the selection is sooooooo much greater.

After the Golden Triangle, we were overloaded. We rode our bikes a little way, but stopped for lunch where we saw the Elvis and the King picture. This was on a street that turned off from the main road and was furniture store after beautiful furniture store. I'm not sure how far it went. Our host had suggested we ride out to a place called Baan Tawai that was 3 km away. We'd had our quota of furniture for the day, but I can imagine there were stores the whole way. Not sure though. There was a whole complex of buildings - most still empty - that looked like it was going to be a furniture store city. Above I peeked into a lamp store that wasn't open.

Here you can see just a small glimpse of this newly built set of shops - as far as the eye could see in the picture - most still empty.

And I couldn't help but take this picture of the exquisity wood doors on this brand new - well I'm guessing it's a house - in the middle of this area with all the storefronts. Well, on second thought, maybe those doors open up into a store, with the house on top. As I say, this would be an interior decorators dream trip.

Now, let's talk about beauty and consumption. We are in a phase of our lives when we are trying to get rid of things, not take in new things. We aren't the sort of people who economists say make the economy work. And I think we have to have a new level of equilibrium in our economy so that we don't keep wasting so many resources just to package the things we buy, let alone the resources for the things themselves. We try to limit our purchases to things that have practical use, that we need, and that bring aesthetic pleasure. I think beautiful things are probably calming. But we want things that are seriously beautiful and will continue to bring that satisfaction for years and years. So, our temporary fix of a dining room lamp, a Japanese paper globe that has some tears in it now, is in need of replacement. So the two lampshades, theoretically, are a purchase that has a practical use and one that we have a need for. Whether we will be able to get enough light inside these lampshades and then out into the room is another questions. But for us this was like walking through a museum of of beautiful pieces of art, pieces that also happened to have price tags.

We biked back to the Golden Triangle, picked up our purchases, crossed the street and hailed a yellow song thaew. The driver got out, climbed up to the roof, untied the giant bungee cord, and I passed up the two bikes and he put them in place and tied them down. In 20 minutes we were in downtown Chiang Mai, and biked the rest of the way home.

Art Matters - An Xioatong

Which door would you go through? J wanted to go to the hotel across the street from the train station to find a bathroom. Both the Hilton and Meridian hotels are in the same building. We walked up from the parking lot and had this choice.




I don't know about you, but I couldn't resist the one with the art. But maybe I'm just weird.




I did check out the Hilton too. It had some neat fish, but when I took out my camera a guard told me 'no pictures.' Hmmmm. No pictures in a hotel lobby? What if you want pictures of your friends while you have a drink in the lobby? The Meridian wins this round.

Under 30 at Out North

We went to Out North Friday night for the Under 30 performances. These are short pieces by local folks that are under 30 minutes. While some of the people of the years, maybe most, have been actors or at least people who are involved in the arts more than the average person, there are also performances done by 'normal' people. This year there were three very different pieces. Here's the description from the website:

Julius Rockwell’s
“The Sexual Behavior of the Male Red Salmon”
This nonagenarian blends science, humor, and anthropomorphism in a story that demonstrates how the mating rituals of salmon are surprisingly similar, and just as complicated, as those of humans.

Corinna Delgado’s
“Cell Therapy”
is the true prosaic story of one woman’s journey through incarceration to poetic justice.

Joan Cullinane’s
“Dive In”
is an invitation to the audience to get off their beach towels and jump in the water, even if it is mid-winter in Alaska. Joan the water witch says forget the role of the voyeur, no one really needs directors, writers and actors to play!

Imagine a ninety-year old man telling you his story about studying how salmon spawn, out in the Alaskan wilderness 50 years ago. It was interesting, informative, funny, and amazing. We learned about the different kinds of male salmon - the ones that stick loyally to their partners, the loners who dart in just when the female is about to spawn, the ones that just fight, etc. Among other things.


Corinna soft-rapped her story of incarceration and getting out. Watching her messed with my images of 'the prisoner.' A powerful performance revealing both toughness and fragility. And the battle continues. Although she is participating in prison poetry projects now, she's still having to deal with being an ex-con when looking for jobs.



Then, after intermission, Culinnane. I confess, I think she's spectacularly disarming. I could watch her wait tables or sit and read and be totally entranced. We'd seen her in a previous Under 30 and she had the same effect. I think it's the total authenticity in her performance. There's no mask. It's just her. Naked. Figuratively, and almost literally in this piece. Not only is she authentic, but she's knows stuff. She understands how people relate to each other. She's one of those people who watches other people and figures it out. And I liked that she was performing an anti-performance piece. She engaged the audience by telling us things about ourselves we don't usually admit out loud and got us into the performance. She was talking to us and even if we weren't all talking back aloud, we were all engaged. And some of us ended up down on the stage - actually a fair number. As I'm writing this, I'm still scratching my head at all the things she squeezed into 30 minutes, though I suspect it went over. The last part involved everyone deciding, in groups, where to donate $50 she was contributing. One rep of each of the five groups went down to the stage, told us what our group decision was and then they were told to mill around. One organization had to be chosen. She checked on whether they'd grouped up. Not really. Then she said, "Well, if you can't come up with something, then I'll just take my money home." Within a minute they'd all coalesced behind one charity. She was just showing us that there were other ways to make decisions. The whole piece was amazing, though I think 90% of it belongs to her ability to speak directly from her heart, no bs. Oh yes, the word 'play' came up a lot. As in playful.

Note: My pictures were taken before and after the performances, but I did sneak the one in when the audience was on stage, but with no flash.

There's one more performance Sunday afternoon at 4pm.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 4: Surrealism, New York, Native American Artifacts

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]

The following is from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (1991) (translated by Paula Wissing) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[Prior to this passage, he returns to France after spending 1935-39 in Brazil. He gets drafted into the army, but through some lucky events, does not end up in battle. He got demobilized and assigned to a college. But the racial laws are coming and he gets fired. Through help from an aunt in the US, he gets invited to the New School for Social Research and comes to New York in late 1940 or early 1941.]

D.E. Once you arrived, you got to know the surrealists in exile in New York.
C.L-S. Breton and I kept up our friendship. He introduced me to his old circle.
D.E. You were a young, unknown university professor, and you became part of a group of famous artists - stars, even - Breton, Tanguy, Duchamp...
C.L-S. And Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Matta, Wifredo Lam. . . Masson and Calder were living in the country. I went to see them on a few weekends.
D.E. Did you like the members of the group?
C.L-S. Some of them. I liked Max Ernst right away, and he is the one I stayed closest to. Tanguy, whose painting I admired a great deal, was not an easy person. Duchamp had great kindness, and for awhile Masson and I were very close. I also became friends with Patrick Waldberg. Our friendship continued after the war ended.
D.E. Peggy Guggenheim was financing the existence of the group?
C.L-S. She helped this or that one out financially, but Max Ernst, whom she married, was more affluent than the others. They were leading the Bohemian life in Greenwich Village. Until Max Ernst left Peggy Guggenheim. One day, Breton called to ask me if I had a small sum of money to buy back one of his Indian objects from Max Ernst, who was now broke. This historic object is now in the Musée de l'Homme.
D.E. This little world had its social side, too?
C.L-S. We saw one another at various people's homes. The "truth game" was very fashionable.[Footnote 4: A kind of psychoanalytic parlor game, of which André Breton was said to be particularly fond, the object of which was to elicit the participants' intimate feelings. Peggy Guggenheim mentions it in her memoir Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books, 1979). -trans.] And we would go out to sample the exotic restaurants of New York.
D.E. Playing the "truth game" with people like that must not have been easy!
C.L-S. There was a lot of consideration for outsiders: myself, Pierre Lazareff, who sometimes came, also Denis de Rougemont.
D.E. How did you meet Lazareff?
C.L-S. Breton, Duthuit, and I needed extra money and were working for the radio service directed by Lazareff at the OWI, the Office of War Information, on broadcasts for France. There we all were, among people from different backgrounds, and sometimes we would get together outside of work. There I became friends with Dolores Vanetti, with whom Sartre was later to fall in love.
D.E. Describe your radio work.
C.L-S. I'd already had some experience with radio. To be less of a burden to my parents, I found a job as a student reading the bulletin for the Bureau International du Travail over the microphone at Radio Tour Eiffel in the basement of the Grand Palais. This was why my father painted me as a speaker when he made the huge (30X5m.) murals for the Madagascar Pavillion (a country where he'd never set foot) for the Colonial Exposition.
Two or three times a week in New York, André Breton, Georges Duthuit, Robert Lebel, and I would read the news and propaganda texts issued by Lazareff's offices. I was given Roosevelt's speeches to read because it seemed that my voice could be heard best over the jamming.
D.E. How did you happen to find the work?
C.L-S. Through Patrick Waldberg, whom I've already mentioned. He worked there too. He was both a poet and art critic. Later he wrote about Max Ernst and published some charming books on the turn of the century epoch. At the time we never would have guessed that back in Paris he would become a corresponding member of the Institute de France! He used to drink and lead a wild life, going to little bars in Harlem where he would sometimes bring me along.

D.E. If I'm to believe your essay on New York, one of your main activities at this time was acquiring artwork.
C.L-S. Max Ernst had a passion for primitive art. On Third Avenue - which was very different from what it is now - he discovered a little German antique dealer who sold him an Indian artifact. At that time you almost never saw such things for sale. Max Ernst told us about the dealer. We had very little money, and whoever had a few dollars would purchase the coveted object. Since our antique dealer had found an outlet, more and more objects became available. In fact - I can tell the story now because it has been published - they came from a major museum that was selling them because they were considered duplicates of works in their collection. As if there could be duplicates! When the dealer discovered he had a market, he became the intermediary between the museum and ourselves.
D.E. Did you know that at the time?
C.L-S. We very soon found out. With the help of the guard, he took us into the museum storehouses, in an isolated building in the New York suburbs. We would make our selection, and a few days later the objects would appear in his shop.
D.E. What became of the things you bought?
C.L-S. I brought them back with me to France. But I had personal problems and had to sell them at Drouot's in 1951. The Musée de l'Homme and the museum in Leiden bought several of them. Also private individuals, such as Lacan and, I believe, Malraux, bought a few others. I have two or three of them.
D.E. Did you maintain your ties with the surrealists after the war?
C.L-S. With Ernst, Breton, and Waldberg, yes. I lost track of the others.
André Breton went back to France before I did, since in 1945 I was sent back to New York as the cultural counsellor to the French embassy. So we didn't see one another for three years. We had a ritual going to the flea market every Saturday with his small band of followers. It was considered a great honor to be allowed to accompany Breton on this occasion.
D.E. Were you ever banished from the realm?
C.L-S. Of course we had a row, for which I was unwittingly responsible. Breton had been asked to do a book that was to be called L'Art magique. Inspiration failed him, and as one often does at such a pass, he made up a questionnaire, which he sent to me and some other people. I admired Breton. When we looked at art he had an infallible eye for objects, he was always right on the nose, never hesitating in his assessment. But the term "magic" had a precise meaning for me, it was part of the anthropological vocabulary. I didn't like to see it put to dubious uses. Instead of stating my objections, I preferred simply not to answer. Breton sent me another questionnaire. I was in the Cévennes on vacation with my son from my second marriage, who was seven at the time. The questionnaire came with reproductions of artworks you were supposed to rank as "more or less magical." Even if I objected to the project, I thought it would be interesting to have a child's reaction, and I thought it would interest Breton in the same way. Particularly since my son ranked the pictures without any hesitation. I sent it to Breton, who responded with an acerbic letter. The book came out, with my son's answers included. But the copy he sent to me bore a curt dedication to my son.
D.E. And you didn't see one another again?
C.L-S. We more or less reconciled our differences but it wasn't the same.
D.E. And with Max Ernst?
C.L-S. Our friendship continued after New York. There was never a problem. When the Collége de France invited me to give the lectures for the Loubat Foundation - I was not yet a member, it was about the time I was turned down - Max Ernst came to hear me. I happened to describe a Hopi divinity while expressing my regret that I was unable to obtain a slide to illustrate my point. The following week, Max Ernst brought me a drawing big enough to show for a lecture. I still have it. Max Ernst's attitude toward anthropology was the opposite of Breton's. Breton distrusted it, he didn't like having scholarly matters get between him and the object. Max Ernst collected objects but also wanted to know everything about them.
D.E. Did this contact with the surrealists influence you? I mean your work? Rodney Needham, in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1984, compares your work to that of the surrealists.
C.L-S. In a way, the comparison is valid. It is true that the surrealists and I all belong to an intellectual tradition that goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Breton had a passion for Gustave Moreau, for the whole symbolist and neosymbolist period. The surrealists were attuned to the irrational and sought to exploit it from an aesthetic standpoint. This is part of the same material I work with, but I am guided by the intention of analyzing and understanding it while remaining sensitive to its beauty.
I will add that among this group there was a climate of intellectual ferment that did a great deal for me. Contact with the surrealists enriched and honed my aesthetic tastes. Many objects I would have rejected as unworthy appeared in a different light thanks to Breton and his friends.
D.E. You say in The View from Afar that the books in your Mythology series are put together like Max Ernst's collages!
C.L-S. The surrealists taught me not to fear the abrupt and unexpected comparisons that Max Ernst like to use in his collages. This influence can be seen in The Savage Mind. Max Ernst built personal myths out of images borrowed from another culture. I mean from old nineteenth-century books, and he made these images say more than they did when viewed by an innocent eye. In the Mythology books I also cut up a mythical subject and recombined the fragments to bring out more meaning.

pp. 31-35

His tone is very modest as he talks about people who are giants of the 20th century. Normaly, I would put links to key names, but there are so many well known people in here and it is late. Google it yourself. :)

Monday Odds and Ends (posted Tuesday)

After a couple of long posts, I get to do a short one. Just a few shots from yesterday. After class, I stopped at the UAA library to get the Levi-Strauss books and ran into this old friend. I got to see this Steven Gordon painting everyday when my office was in the library building in with ISER. That was before the library was expanded. It was nice to see it again - still in the library building. Gordon manages to capture the look and feel of the trees here. I mean, it's just a bunch of trees, right? No, it's much, much more than that. (I thought about cropping the chair out of the picture. It really messes up the balance badly. But, it's part of the environment of the picture now. And this is supposed to be a fast post.)

Then back home with my treasures. It was gratifying to see that I'm not the only one still using my bike. While I'm not riding with the frequency of the summer, at least to the University and back isn't too far and the paths are well maintained. I was also glad to see in the ADN yesterday that the city has put up new bike racks. I'm curious to see what they got. Not all bike racks are equal. Some are almost impossible to use, but the ones here are good. It says $17,000 for 13 bike racks, which sounds steep. But each rack should accommodate 5-10 bikes which would come to $130-$260 per bike space. It also included two bike boxes - I saw some of those in Portland - which I'm sure are much more expensive. But, compared to car parking spaces, it's a great deal. And if bikers had better spaces to ride (the trails are nice, but only if they go where you are going, and the ones along the streets can be pretty bumpy) and safely lock their bikes, more people would bike, even in winter.

Then we needed a Thai fix, and ran into our mayor, whose suspense over the election might end today. He was picking up take out with his son at the Thai Kitchen. Of course, he can't do this without talking to everyone. I wonder how long it will take, if all goes well, for everyone in DC to know who he is too. A little more time than it took Sarah I'm sure.

More Class Poster Fixer Uppers

I posted earlier about our assignment to take a poster from the Art Building bulletin board and jazz it up a bit. Here are a couple more examples. I bet you can tell which were the originals and which were the student remakes.

La Nostalgia Re-Mix: Best Hits and Out takes for an imaginary bar Guillermo Gomez-Peňa & James Luna

Out North had one of its culturally challenging nights. By that I mean, I had to stretch a bit, I had to think about where I was on the continuum between insider and outsider, between supporter of the status quo and challenger. Between comfortable and on the edge.

The bleacher seats were facing each other with a small stage on either end. We ended up sitting right in front of James Luna's bar as often violent black and white video splashed on a screen to our left to a varying playlist. On the other end of the field - it felt more like a field than a stage, I thought of ball court at Chichen Itza - was Guillermo Gomez-Peňa, in a feather headress. I snapped the picture quickly before the performance officially began.

And we watched the ball bounce from one side of the field to the other as the artists alternated short vignettes from their side of the stage. Luna took us, on his turns, into his life as an artist and Indian challenging the world's stereotypes. His first piece was about an early performance piece at a museum where he, in the Indian exhibit, with a lot of his own memorabilia, lay flat on his back in a loin cloth, on a bed of sand in an open display case as the unsuspecting museum goers came into his hall. We saw photos of the event as he lay flat on his back in a loin cloth at Out North telling us about the experience.


Then, we shifted our attention to stage left, where Peňa read his outsider artist manifesto. The most startling piece was when audience members were brought up to him and given a machine gun and asked to pose with him, dressed as a terrorist, and they holding the gun on him - to his head first, to his chest, genitals, mouth,etc. They held the pose for - I really don't know how long, I didn't time it, but it was a long pose. Maybe a minute, maybe two. These were the stereotypical television images of the terrorist being menaced with a gun touching his body by a soldier. Seeing the image, held for a long time, right there in front of us, was very powerful. It also forced me to think about whether I would agree to participate in that event if asked. (No.)

This was a thought provoking evening with people whose authentic voice most of us never hear. There will be a performance Saturday night November 15 and Sunday afternoon November 16. Getting performances like this in the tiny Out North theater means you are right there, almost on stage. No need to bring your opera glasses. There were no empty seats that I saw tonight. You can save $2 a ticket buying them online.

Encaustics Poster

It was sunny when I went to my digital art class yesterday at 1. But it was drizzling slightly when I got out. There was a big hole in the sky. And now, it's snowing.




We're moving on from our 'fantasy' pictures where we take four photos and merge them into one picture. Mine is taking longer than I thought, partly because I'm using way more than four different photos. Getting the light to match in each of the merged pictures may be beyond my ability before it's due.

But yesterday we started and finished a new project - focusing on text. Prof. Gonzales' assignment was to go downstairs to the bulletin board in the Art building and find a poster. Then we were supposed to redo the poster so the text and graphics were better. I chose the white one with all the text and one picture on the lower left before the lighter panel.

It's for an Encaustics workshop. I never heard of Encaustics either. So I turned to the web. There were a couple of great descriptions of how to create the encaustics materials on a site called wet canvas (and wet canvas2) but I had to look further for a definition which I got on jocelynaudette:

Encaustic paintings are painted with beeswax, resin, and pigment. It is an ancient process that was used by the Egyptians and Greeks, and examples have been found in Egyptian tombs. Generally, the painting process involves using a hot palette to melt and mix the colored wax, painting it onto the panel using a brush, and fusing the layers with a heat gun. All paintings are on wood panels which provide a rigid and supportive surface. (Like always you can double click to enlarge the pictures.)

So, here's the original poster. It has a lot of details about the class, about cost, discounts, times, places, etc. but it isn't very eye catching. It seemed to me that a poster for an art workshop ought to be somewhat artistic itself. So I googled encaustics images and there were plenty. The workshop poster talks about collage too, so I figured I should have a collage like poster. And as much should be visual as possible. So I got the seven people - all from different encaustics work on line - that was the maximum class size. I found an encaustics picture I could use as the base of the poster - one that had a fair amount of white space I could fill in. The flag is a Jasper Johns encaustic. And the beeswax had to go somewhere since it is the basis of encaustics as I understand it.

I had to leave out a lot of the text, so I put the contact information in a prominent place. We were supposed to then take our printed posters and pin them up next to the old ones. But yellow wasn't working on the printer, so it should get done Wednesday. Fortunately we were supposed to get this done in the 45 minutes left of class so it was 'done' when the time limit was up and I don't have to agonize over it to make it perfect.

These workshops were over in September, but I guess if you're interested you could still go to the website and see if new ones are planned.

Art for Art's Sake

What with the trip to LA and all, I didn't get to post the project I turned in for my computer art class. I wrote about the instructions earlier and showed what the professor demonstrated. Since I was headed out of town, I did a number of different projects and then turned in the one that I did in the required 30 minute time limit.

This is the display with all the student products. (Like usual, you can double click to enlarge the pictures.) Mine's in there somewhere.

It really is pretty amazing what the computer can do for you. A lot of what comes out is 'accidental' as you explore the different filters that can cause all sorts of interesting effects. But we did all stick within the guidelines. And the similarity shows. Even though they are all very different. Below are some practice eggs I did. These didn't get done under the time limit, not even close. But I got better using the Photoshop tools as I did them.

All the horizons in the original examples were at the top, so of course I had to do one with the horizon at the bottom. There's even an underwater filter which helps give it the watery sense. I tried the shafts of light because Mariano had done that in one of his demonstrations. His looked a lot better than mine.



Based on the three practice eggs, can you figure out which one is mine in the group display? If you figure three rows A, B, C, you can identify your guess as say A1 for the top left egg, or C6 for the bottom right egg.

The new project is to take four pictures and combine them all in one "fantasy" picture. I'll try to post mine on Tuesday if it's ready.

Air Art and Snacks

I flew from LA to Portland today, via Reno, on a smaller plane that didn't fly as high. The air was clear so I got to see the art of nature and man from above. Sculpting the landscape. First, suburbs north of LA in their continuous push into the hills. Little (from the air) matchbook housing developments.
The houses moving closer and closer to the hills. Some even jumping up onto the tops of the hills.

Further out still, little isolated houses spreading like weeds.

And here's what I refer to as air ag art. The beautiful shapes made by farmers' fields from above, contrasting with the harsh natural landscape.

The dam.

And then I got my bag of Mama Mellace's Chedder stix mix. Look at the little stix. Then look at all the ingredients. But, according to the cover, no cholesterol or transfats. How can such a tiny piece of 'food' have that many ingredients? (Like usually, you can double click the pictures for a better view.)


This was somewhere in the area of Yosemite. The pilot didn't point things out so I'm not sure exactly where we were. As we flew into Reno I saw how Lake Tahoe sits above Reno, held in check by a small range of mountains.

Visiting Marty in Portland, will be back in Anchorage soon.