Music: New tunes - Kanye

Downloaded a bunch of Kanye West songs from iTunes. I love the soul/r&b samples - addictively sweet. I played Through the Wire constantly over the weekend.

Art (Theater): American Fiesta

I saw Steven Tomlinson's monologue American Fiesta twice last summer - I loved it. He is reprising it this summer for a two week run and the Statesman has an article about it. I like the fact that they included an image of his notebook - so you can see his work process.

Art: Making art is tyrannical

A good article by Roberta Smith from last week's NY Times about art museums in Basel - In Basel, Contemporary Art Enjoys a Bounty of Friends

"...the very drive to make art is at heart tyrannical; it wills into existence something that no one else can imagine or imagine needing. We are often blessed by these impositions, and equally blessed by the people who figure out how best to conserve and display them."

Quote: Kind vs. True

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. -Robert Brault, software developer, writer (1938- )

Art (Theater): Intergalactic Nemesis website!

The new Intergalactic Nemesis website is up. WOW! Blog entries by Molly, Tim and Jean Pierre. And a weekly comic. I love it! All this is leading up to a New York Broadway opening this spring (we are keeping our fingers crossed).

Music: New CD - DJ Cheb i Sabbah

DJ Cheb i Sabbah - La Kahena
Great North African/Middle Eastern music with electronic beats and super vocalists.

Colaba Causeway, Bombay. December 2005

Music: New CD - The Radio Dept.

The Radio Dept. - Pet Grief
Swedish band. Great synth-pop.

Music: New CD - Peloton

Peloton - EP
One of the staff at Waterloo had this on the back wall with a recommendation. What a neat find. Shoegazey indie pop.

Design: Healthier by design

A good slide show article from Slate - Healthier by design: A new charitable trust asks whether good architecture can help cancer patients.
Excerpt from the last slide:
"One lesson of Maggie's Centres is that architectural talent is too precious to be confined to cultural monuments and—in Lord Rogers' case—high-end office buildings. It's nice that art museums and corporations have great architecture, but it would be nicer—and much more valuable for most of us—if hospitals had it, too."

Books / Technology: Books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together

An excerpt from - Scan this book - from the NY Times Sunday magazine:

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. There are about 100 billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That's a trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book.

Kala Ghoda, Bombay. December 2005

Art: Theory is neat. Art is not.

A good excerpt from an artnet article - Learning on the Job - by Jerry Saltz. Found the link on the MAN ArtJournal blog.
To me, theory and positions are important, but they often lead to dogmatic thinking, obscure writing and rigid taste. Knowing where you're coming from means knowing what you like before you like it and hating what you hate before you hate it. This takes all the life out of art. Theory is about understanding. Art is about experience. Theory is neat. Art is not. My only position is to let the reader in on my feelings; try to write in straightforward, jargon-free language; not oversimplify or dumb down my responses; aim to have an idea, a judgment or a description in every sentence; not take too much for granted; explain how artists might be original or derivative and how they use techniques and materials; observe whether they're developing or standing still; provide context; and make judgments that hopefully amount to something more than just my opinion. To do this requires more than a position or a theory. It requires something else. This something else is what art, and criticism, are all about.

Art / Design: Choreography in public spaces

A great article from last Sunday's NY Times - At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3 - that was linked on a new blog I found - The Artful Manager.
Excerpt:
"The two men thought a lot about which public spaces in New York were well "choreographed" — that is, which shaped people's movement successfully — and which were not.
Mr. Rockwell had been pondering the general subject for decades. Even while a student at Syracuse University, he would stand on the roof of the architecture building and study the patterns carved in the snow by a sort of unspoken group will, patterns he would later connect to those described by the urbanist William H. Whyte in his classic studies of public space. What caused them? It wasn't just expedience, because the paths were often curved, where a straight line would be more direct. People moved as they did, Whyte believed, at least in part because they sought out pleasing experiences; they voted with their feet.
If Whyte was right, then why are so many public spaces so deeply unpleasurable — and sometimes almost dangerous — to move through? How could the exquisite choreography of Grand Central Terminal, with its powerful beams of natural light making what Mr. Rockwell called a "gateway inviting people into the city," coexist with the claustrophobic purgatory of Penn Station? (Penn Station seems to sneer and say, "Get lost!") How could the Grand Foyer at Radio City have the same function as the bewildering entry to the Marquis Theater on Broadway, which is cruel enough to suggest that the place was named for the Marquis de Sade?"

Quote: Writer vs. Author

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. -Colette, writer (1873-1954)

Kemps Corner, Bombay. December 2005

Music: New CD - Deerhoof

Deerhoof - Milkman: A third Deerhoof album to add to the shelf. Discordant and melodic. This one is loosely a concept album about the Milkman pictured on the cover.

Art: Criticism

"Critic's descriptions are lively. Critics write to be read, and they must capture their readers' attention and engage their readers' imaginations. Critics want to persuade their readers to see a work of art as they do. If they are enthused, they try to communicate their enthusiasm through their choice of descriptors and how they put them together in a sentence, a paragraph, and an article." --Terry Barrett, Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary.

Music: New CDs - Talking Heads

I had the Stop Making Sense record when I was a teen. Today, as I was surfing around some music blogs I came across a reference to the Talking Heads. Hmm.. off kilter rhythms by an arty band. Off I went to Waterloo Records and got three cds:
More Songs About Buildings and Food
Remain in Light
Speaking in Tongues

Kabhi Khushi, Kabhi Ghum (Bollywood film title). Bombay December 2005

Quote: Reading as excercise

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. -Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)

Quote: Reading to write

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

Design: Is management of agreement still an issue

An article - The Abilene Paradox: Is the Managment of Agreement Still an Issue - linked from a David Pogue blog post.
Excerpt:
It is provocative to ask why people would actually speak against their own desires. What psychological reasons are there for doing something that is bound to result in both individual discomfort and in a lack of full and valid information for the group and our organizations? It is believed, according to Harvey, that people behave in this manner because they are afraid of the unknown. His hypothesis, quite different from others, is that we know what we are afraid of and that it generally has to do with loneliness, being left out, separation, and alienation. To avoid these, we will actually act against our best interests, hoping to be "part" of something, members of the whole.
We also tend to believe that any decision or action is better than no action at all. The problem is that there is incomplete information in individual minds. The need to act together, to be seen as cohesive, overrides the need to be explicit about group assumptions, desires, opinions, and even facts. Harvey calls this "action anxiety" and he believes it works in close conjunction with another piece of the paradox puzzle: negative fantasies. These are fantasies each individual harbors of what they think would happen if they actually spoke their minds and offered their desires or opinions to the group.

Quote: Thoughts lead to....

Giselle sent this: "I really liked this one young grasshopper…"

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.--Frank Outlaw

Music: New CD - Gnarls Barkley

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere: A good blend between old school R&B soul and hip hop. Short poppy songs - very enjoyable.

Zeitgeist: Talent is overated - Practice makes perfect

An article from Sunday's NY Times - A Star is Made - reviews research by Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University from his upcoming book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
An excerpt:

"...the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better."

"Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. "

Books (Comics): Phantomville

A new graphic novel publisher in India (read about them in Time Out Mumbai): Phantomville

Books / Art: Michiko Kakutani & criticism

A good line from a Slate article about NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. Good words to remember for the art reviews I write.
As a student at Oxford, the future drama critic Kenneth Tynan got back a paper with this comment: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)"

Music: New CD - Built To Spill & The Knife

Built To Spill - You in Reverse: A bit more sprawling and less polished than their last one. Always enjoy Doug Martsch's distinctive vocals and crunchy lead guitar.
The Knife - Silent Shout: The yummiest sounding synths. The album peters off towards the end though.

Art: Bonnard by Kimmelman

A good article from last week's NY Times by my favorite art critic Michael Kimmelman: Pierre Bonnard Retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris.
An excerpt that comments on the current state of art:
"...Bonnard could not have known that young artists in the year 2006 would operate in a commonplace world of budget air travel, proliferating art fairs and museums for contemporary art, where peripatetic pilgrims encounter endless objects once and mostly never again. This, the artist and writer Art Spiegelman pointed out to me recently, may be the biggest change in art during the last half-century or so: that more and more artists make works they never expect will be lived with, looked at day in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby's attention without needing to be experienced twice. Culture slides into the realm of entertainment.
It is no wonder, then, as Bonnard could say even about his own day, that "few people know how to see, to see well, to see fully." In our visual age, amid a glut of freshly minted, clueless collectors, it's truer now.
But fortunately, Bonnard's work is still around to show us a different truth."

Quote: Piety vs. Goodness

Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.
-Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)

Art (Film): Drawing Restraint 9

From the film review: 'Drawing Restraint 9,' a Film Steeped in Ritual, With Whales and a Wedding, a great line -
Bjork, repeats a life-affirming motto in broken musical phrases: "From the moment of commitment, nature conspires to help you."

Music: New CD - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Show Your Bones - intense and insistent. Less raw and more listenable than their first release.

Music: New CDs - Hard-Fi

Hard-Fi: Stars of CCTV - I bought their EP and love the ska tinged post-punk. The full lenght is more varied. Been playing the Hard to Beat remix over and over.

Quote: Poems reverberate

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. -James Fenton, poet and professor (1949- )

Zeitgeist: Foolish Chances With Words

A personal essay by Michael - Foolish Chances With Words. I enjoyed it especially because I still love the physical act of writing with a fountain pen on good paper.

If you're male, you probably acquired, when you reached the brink of adolescence, a machine that burned gasoline or shot bullets, and with it you risked your own life and endangered the lives of others. It took you far from home and gave you an early taste of adulthood's dark cracks. When I was 14, I acquired a typewriter. An aunt of mine, a high school teacher, had rescued it from her school's defunct typing classroom in Michigan, and in doing so she rescued me, too. With a manual Olympia typewriter as my companion for the next 10 years, I endangered myself and others and let it take me far from home so it could give me an early taste of adulthood's dark cracks...

Books: Making a book

I read about Blurb in the NY Times a few weeks ago. Other options listed in the comments section of the Lifehacker blog. I am going to consider one of these to make Taxi Journal books for all the participants.

Technology / Design: Why is Usability Important

Some good articles and resources to make the case for usability from the UPA website:
Usability in the real world

IMG_0615.JPG, originally uploaded by Shrez.

5th Street. Austin, TX. Sept. 2005

Music: New CD - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - Fear is on our side
Athmospheric, melodic - this is my kind of music. I liked it the minute I put it in the CD player. Local Austin band.

Technology: Cool website tools

Found some cool tools for building websites on smarkets:
Ruby on Rails (Used by the 37Signals guys to build BaseCamp etc.)
Zeraweb
If I get some time, I am going to use Zeraweb to build a site.

Art: What Does Islam Look Like?

A good article from last week's NY Times about contemporary Islamic art - What Does Islam Look Like?
It mentions Karkhana and Shazia Sikander.
Excerpt:
The [Danish] cartoon issue isn't primarily an art story, any more than the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in India was an architecture story, or the censure of "The Satanic Verses" was a story about contemporary fiction. It's a political story, an ancient and universal one, about how an image, and almost any image will do, once it is fused to cultural identity — Islam, in this case — can end up being used as a weapon.
As it happens, at the same time that intense partisan heat is being generated around the topic of popular images and Islam, we are getting a number of exhibitions of contemporary work to which the name "Islamic" is attached. Some shows approach the Islamic connection hesitantly; others embrace it. Together they tell us very different things about the reception of a cultural category called "Islam" in the West.

Design: Prefab resource site

For future reference: FabPrefab

Quote: Pluralistic world

Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race. -Jacques Barzun, professor and writer (1907- )

Music: New CD - Arctic Monkeys

All the critics are raving about the Arctic Monkeys. About half the album is very good and the rest is decent.
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Art: Atypical art collectors

A good article from the NY Times about an art collecting couple from Spain: Atypical Collectors With Art to Share
Excerpts:
Still, they said, even then what really interested them was not to possess art, but to participate in social and cultural change through an intellectual engagement with artists who were rebelling against the existing art world.

Unsurprisingly, then, they also see collecting as an art. "That's what Duchamp said," Mr. Herbert said later over lunch, "You can 'paint a collection' together by choosing your works and bringing them into a context. We try to do that, and I think that in Barcelona you see a kind of vision of a whole."

Music: New CD - Love is All and Deerhoof

Love is All - Nine Times That Same Song - Post punk swedes with great female vocals and horns that add a touch of ska.
Deerhoof - Apple O' - I am becoming a fan of the frenetic but tight Deerhoof sound.

Books: Phillip Pullman in New Yorker

A good article from the New Yorker about Phillip Pullman, author of "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Excperts:

“we can learn what’s good and what’s bad, what’s generous and unselfish, what’s cruel and mean, from fiction”; there is no need to consult scripture. As Pullman once put it in a newspaper column, “ ‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.”

In his Carnegie Medal speech, he said, “We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.” What angers Pullman most about theocracy, in the end, is that it blinds people to the true purpose of narrative. Fundamentalists don’t know how to read stories—including those in the Bible—metaphorically, as if they were Lord Asriel’s imaginary numbers.

Art: Hiroshi Sugimoto

An exhibit of Hiroshi Sugimoto - History of History - at the Japan Society, NYC.
A gem of a paragraph about art and artists from the exhibition catalog written by Sugimoto:
"Ever since the age of cave painting, humans have wanted a unified vision with which to see the chaos of this world of ours. It has been largely those people known as artists who have filled such a role - and they still hold this function today. No matter how brilliantly religion and science might explain and persuade, shadowy areas will always remain. Scooping up shimmering particles with which to fashion decoding devices that afford us a look around in the gloom, the handiwork of these people of vision is now known as art."

From the Japan Society website:
This exhibition juxtaposes Sugimoto's exquisitely minimalist works, selected from the photographer's past and most recent series, with fossils, artworks and religious artifacts ranging from prehistoric to the 15th century, all drawn from his own collection. The result is an extended exploration of time, life and spirituality as perceived in the contexts of nature and history. The exhibition, Sugimoto writes, addresses "recorded history, unrecorded history, and still another history--that which is yet to be depicted… like parts waiting to be assembled in a do-it-yourself kit."

Books: Curry

Book review from yesterday's NY Times - How Curry, Stirred in India, Became a World Conqueror. Excerpt:
"She is a good postmodernist who scoffs at the idea of authenticity when it comes to food. One of her goals, in tracing the evolution of curry and the global spread of Indian cuisine, is to pull the rug out from under the idea that India, or any other nation, ever had a cuisine that was not constantly in the process of assimilation and revision. The very dishes, flavors and food practices that we think of as timelessly, quintessentially Indian turn out to be, as often as not, foreign imports or newfangled inventions. That includes chili peppers and tea."

Music: New CD - Deerhoof

Deerhoof - The Runners Four
I heard a Deerhoof song - Twin Killers - on a music blog - You Ain't No Picasso - and was wowed. Discordant but melodic, improvisational but tight.

Art: Indian Artist Enjoys His World Audience

An article about Tyeb Metha in today's NY Times - Indian Artist Enjoys His World Audience
Excerpt
'The central passion of his work stems from his country's central wound: the 1947 partition of British India that left a million people dead, drove millions from their homes and inscribed a deep sense of anguish across his imagination. In the Hindu-Muslim clashes that broke out around 1947, Mr. Mehta watched as his neighbors butchered a stranger to death. The victim was Hindu and the attackers were Muslim, but it happened the other way around in other neighborhoods. Many Indians his age have an identical memory.
"That violence gave me the clue about the emotion I want to paint," he explained. "That violence has stuck into my mind."
The bull became a favorite figure. Not a bull in repose, but a tied-up, writhing, mutilated bull. "I was looking for an image which would not narrate, but suggest something which was deep within me, the violence that I witnessed during partition," Mr. Mehta said. "Have you seen a bull running? This tremendous energy being butchered for nothing."'

Art: Peter Tucker at Polvo group show

Peter is featured in a group show of Texas artists at Polvo gallery titled - What I Like About Texas....
Yours truly is part of the performance piece that was done during the New Amercian Talent opening at Arthouse.

Art (Theater): Intergalactic Nemesis

This was the preview/tune up show for SVT before they went to New York to present it at the Bowery Poetry Club. Go SVT!

Art: Postcards From Cutting Edges of Downtown's Art Scene

Good article from the NY Times - Postcards From Cutting Edges of Downtown's Art Scene. I like the description of the type of art critic Kim Levin is:
"For many years, Ms. Levin wrote the brief capsule reviews for the Choices section of the Voice, and she was a master of that short form. She rarely wrote negatively, and she freely dispensed stars to shows she deemed of particular interest. She was not a militant anti-elitist, but her impulse was to share rather than to exclude; you feel that openness and wide-ranging curiosity in the Feldman exhibition.
The hoarding of ephemera may seem compulsive or maniacal, but there is a sense of fun and love in it, too. Every day can be a treasure hunt for the New York art critic, professional and amateur alike. You just have to keep your eyes and mind open, like the exemplary Ms. Levin."

Art: Who Needs a White Cube These Days

A good article from the NY Times about alternative art spaces by Roberta Smith: Who Needs a White Cube These Days?
Excerpts:
"In a small storefront on Grand Street, overseen by Emily Sundblad, a Norwegian artist, and John Kelsey, an American critic, the operation [Reena Spaulings] has provided an adamant reminder that a gallery is a social organism - even a kind of family - that combines aspects of living room and studio."

"At Orchard everything is hashed out by the collective's 11 members, which also tends to expose the secret emotional life of galleries, where ambition, idealism and vulnerability intersect and conflict."

"It is difficult to be a full-service gallery and maintain a high degree of deviation for long. Friedrich Petzel, who took over the Printed Matter space next to his gallery on West 22nd Street, spoke in September of using it without benefit of a white-box redo or a set schedule. But by December, both were nearly in place, Mr. Petzel said, largely because of pressure from his artists. "

"But even the folks at Reena Spaulings admit that their artists want big careers and that they were impressed by the activities of deliberate, rather than accidental art dealers while participating in the Liste art fair in Basel, Switzerland, last spring."

Music: New CD - Sufjan Stevens

Epic, sprawling, magnificent album.
This is the original cover art by artist Divya Srinivasan (who use to live in Austin and was one of the artist's on Richard Linklater's animated film - Waking Life)

Technology: NoteShare collaboration tool

Read an article in the Sunday NY Times about NoteShare. Excerpt:
"Whether this program will work commercially, I have no idea. Its Mac-only nature obviously limits its market. But its design expresses two impulses that are both the history and the future of the computing business: letting people connect more thoroughly, broadly and richly; and making it steadily easier for them to do so."

Art: Mumbai Mirror

I got interviewed while I was in Jehangir Art Gallery.

Art: Untitled (movies & stamps)

Nov. 22.

Zeitgeist: Everybody's An Expert

From the recent New Yorker - an excellent article about punditry - Everybody's An Expert by Louis Menand.
Excerpt:
Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says:
Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.

Art: Karkhana

I read about this collaborative group of artists - Karkhana - in the NY Times. I am smitten by their work especially since I recently got an art piece by the Austin collborative art group Sodalitas and also because Mughal and Persian minature paintings are familiar to me. Here is the the press release from the exhibition at the Aldrich museum. And here a series of images that shows how each work progressed through the hands of each artist.

Books: Saturday by Ian McEwan (book club)

The second book for book club was very good - Saturday by Ian McEwan. Great writing - a finely detailed observation of human thought. Excerpt:
"Just like the digital codes of relicating life held within DNA, the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its center. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes concious?"

Art: This Whitney Biennial Will Take In the World

A good article from the NY Times about the upcoming Whitney Biennial 2006. Excerpt:

"Another first claimed by the museum is that this year's biennial, which is to open on March 2, has a title: Day for Night.
It is inspired by the English title of François Truffaut's 1973 film, "La Nuit Américaine," which became famous for using a cinematic technique of shooting night scenes during the day by using a special filter. The title was chosen to reflect the kind of restless, in-between moment that the curators believe defines art now - somewhere between day and night, when work may be irrational, religious, dark, erotic or violent."

Quote: Kindness

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. -Abraham Joshua Heschel, theology professor (1907-1972)

Art: East Austin Studio Tour

EAST is growing with 76 studios and about 100 artists. I visited:
Archaic
Fisterra Studio
Ginko Studios
Kala Fine Art
Slugfest Print Studio
Flatbed Press
Bolm Studios
Sodalitas
Splinter Group
Art Palace (Ali Fitzgerald)

Music: New CDs - Laika

A discovery I made on the 3hive music blog - Laika. A combination of trip hop and jazz with fine female vocals. Athmospheric and layered.
Good Looking Blues
Wherever I Am, I Am What Is Missing

Quote: Life and art

If you want to work on your art, work on your life. -Anton Chekhov, short-story writer and dramatist (1860-1904)

Art: To Ask and How to Ask: Those Are the Questions

A good article from the Times about fundraising for the arts (and other non-profits).
To Ask and How to Ask: Those Are the Questions

Technology: If Books Are on Google, Who Gains and Who Loses?

A good article from yesterday's NY Times that discusses Google Print and the (non) controversy around it.
If Books Are on Google, Who Gains and Who Loses?

Poetry: Orr on Keillor - Elitism vs. Popluism

Excerpt from Hit Parade by David Orr on Garrison Keillor's new anthology: Good Poems for Hard Times.
"But great poets often produce mediocre work, bad poets can be surprisingly good, and very good poets are frequently no better than consistently above average - all of which is to say that it's far more difficult to isolate "great poetry" than Kleinzahler (and most critics) might like to believe. We're forced to live with a chaos of styles and a muddle of best guesses. This makes everyone uncomfortable; we're much happier when we can have well-worn arguments about populism and elitism, about Good Poems and High Brows. But what Elizabeth Bishop once said about knowledge may be equally said of poetry itself; that it is "dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free"; not a sure matter of sides, but a fleeting balance of currents. The best we can do - the best we have ever been able to do - when faced with the words "Good Poems" in a book's title, is to turn the page hoping to say yes they are, or yes they were, or yes (believe it or not) they will be."

Art: Untitled (river)

Art: AMOA Tom Lea & Dr. Seuss

New exhibit at AMOA: Remember When Storytelling Mattered - Tom Lea and Dr. Seuss.
I liked one ink on paper work by Tom Lea. The rest was not to my taste - southwestern.
Dr. Seuss - endlessly creative, inventive, humorous and serious. I will need to go back and see the works again.

IMG_0488.JPG, originally uploaded by Shrez.

Austin, TX. 9th and Colorado. July 2005.

Art (Theater): Americamisfit

Salvage Vanguard's new play - Americamisfit - by Dan Dietz.

Quote: Fanatic doubt

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. -Robert T. Pirsig, author and philosopher (1928- )

Technology: I want to - page of utilities

I want to - a page of utilities that help you do stuff you want to.
(Found it on 43 folders)

Technology: Meet the Life Hackers

A very good article - Meet the Life Hackers - from the Sunday NY Times about how we can use "interruption technology" to improve productivity at work. A good website in the mentioned in the article - 43 Folders - gives life hacks: useful tips to make life more productive and less stressful.

Art: Architect Tonic - Gallery 2040

The 2040 Gallery in Austin opened their season with "Architect Tonic" a show of works celebrating the merging of art and architecture. Mo Scollan, the gallery director, picked four Austin artists whose work addresses architecture, each one in their unique way: Margaret Henkels, Roi James, David Leonard and the art collaborative Sodalitas. The show was a coming out party for Peter Dick, an architect (and her husband) who will use part of the 2040 gallery as his new office.
I will be reviewing this show for the December issue of Voices of Art magazine.

IMG_0328, originally uploaded by Shrez.

MLK and Guadalupe. Austin, TX. May 2005

Books: Book club - Kite Runner

Our first book club - Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. A poorly written book that clobbers you with a wooden, hackneyed plot. It is a somewhat compelling story that generated some good discussion. It is a bestseller because US readers post-9/11 were hungry to read a personal story about Afghanistan.

Quotes: Poetry (Frost - 2)

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. -Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)

Quotes: Poetry (Auden)

Another good poetry quote in this weeks AWAD:
Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings. -W.H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)

Technology: Google map hacks (NY Times Circuits article)

A good article about all the nifty things people are doing with Google Maps: A Journey to a Thousand Maps Begins With an Open Code

Technology: Categories in Blogger

Yay! I found a way to add categories in Blogger thanks to Orangewise (Read about it on FreshBlog).

Quotes: Poetry (Frost)

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. -Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)

Art: AMOA symposium

Attended a symposim at AMOA to discuss how Austin fits into the context of the broader art scene.
Self Portrait: Austin Art in Local, National, and International Contexts

Art: Openings - Lora Reynolds & Art Palace

Lora Reynolds Gallery - Suspended Narrative. Group show including a piece by Jason Singleton who is in 22 to Watch. Some of the pieces were impenetrable to me. A very nice gallery.
Art Palace Gallery - Sterling Allen (in 22 to Watch) and Jonathan Marshall.

Technology: The Long Tail

Gary Chapman talked about The Long Tail at a Leadership Roundtable: The Future of Media. Janet sent me this link to the Long Tail blog.

Technology: Folksonomy

A good article in the NY Times: 'Folksonomy' Carries Classifieds Beyond SWF and 'For Sale'
Three websites mentioned:
del.icio.us
43 Things
Pledge Bank

Design: Office 12 - Results Oriented UI

Today's Alertbox article is about MS Office 12's new Results Oriented UI. I like the approach of providing features based on the context of the work you are doing.

Music: My Morning Jacket

My Morning Jacket - Z
I was not sure about this one; their other albums were southern rock. But this album is a genre hopping distillation of the last 30 years of music with hints of 60s pop, 70s rock, electronic effects and great melodies. The album art is awesome too.

Happy Birthday

36 today. I have a feeling it will be a good year. Got this great personalized street-art birthday e-card from Theresa.

Quotes: Vocations

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. -Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850)

Art: Learning to Love You More

Peter told me about this collaborative art web site - Learning To Love You More - when I mentioned Taxi Journal to him.

Art: 22 To Watch - Statesman Review

A review in the Statesman about AMOA's 22 To Watch.

Art: Untitled (Stamps #4)

Quotes: Simplicity

"If I had more time, I would write a shorter letter." Pascal (mathemetician)
Came across this in The Art of Project Management that we have been taking excerpts from to discuss in our staff meetings.

Books (Comics): TinTin in India

Keiko sent me this article about the release of Hindi TinTin videos in India. Yaay for TinTin - my childhood favorite. It is so neat to see the TinTin covers with Devnagri script.

Poetry: Reading list

Just got through reading:
CK Williams - Repair (Excellent. Almost every poem has to do with repair - emotional, mental, physical)
Poetry Magazine - Sept issue (The first three poems were by CK Williams, so I picked it up. Read a great essay in it too. Convinced me to subscribe. Quality poetry.)
Just started:
Vijay Seshadri - The Long Meadows (He wrote the poem in the New Yorker 9/11 issue and I have been meaning to read more of his work. Enjoying it so far.)
On the shelf:
Jeet Thayil - English (I think I saw an excellent interview Thayil did of Seshadri and so thought I would get his book.)
Vandana Khanna - Train to Agra (Not sure how I found this one, but wanted to read an Indian American poet won a first book prize. Get a sense for where I can possibly find a niche for getting my work published.)
Charles Wright - Black Zodiac (I remember reading a poem by Wright in Pushcart Prize in the mid-nineties and being blown away by how long, full and rich it was. Inspired me to write my Lawrence to NYC poem. Saw this book in Davis and picked it up.)
Aimee Nezhukumatathil - Miracle Fruit (Recently submitted to Tupelo Press and saw this book on their website. I was smitten by her poems - sensual, physical. Can't wait to read more.)