� Nick Hornby, Songbook

I watched the movie Food, Inc and recommend it to everyone who has even a passing interest in food or health. It was a riveting, and sometimes harrowing, documentary about the corporate involvement in our mass-production food system and arguably impacts everyone in the country. It covers a lot of familiar ground, stories you’ve likely heard bits and pieces of. But when the threads are carefully laid out, and the entire tapestry presented as a whole, the completed image is absolutely compelling.

What struck me while watching the movie was the faceless nature of the decision-making these corporations make. The practical problems of our food system results in some (for lack of a better term) evil decisions. The very term “large corporation” is virtually synonymous with a morality-bending, soul-crushing devotion to profit. But I immediately recalled some of the research from Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational. In it, using a marketing perspective, he breaks down the psychology of human decision-making, exposing the rational weaknesses and bias we’re all subject to. In the book, it becomes increasingly clear that most people surprisingly don’t actually know what they want at all. We tend make decisions much as we would take a multiple choice exam: we look at the available options, apply some basic reasoning, and go with what we consider the best result. The problem with this is that it both assumes that the available choices are indeed the only choices (sometimes the test is rigged with favorable answers to someone’s agenda, or the best answers aren’t even shown) and that the practice of logically breaking down large decisions into smaller ones will always yield congruent results.

When you understand these concepts it becomes easy to understand how a series of good decisions can result in something absolutely terrible happening. I don’t think the problem of evil decisions is necessarily endemic to corporations, but rather the scale of the decision-making process they are forced to use exposes this fundamental flaw in human reasoning. But this is true of all decision-making on this scale, including mobs, governments, and even social groups. The only way to combat the ever-increasing manipulation of the Science of Influence is education and knowledge. Whether those corporations depicted in Food, Inc. inflict harm intentionally or not is a matter considerable speculation, just as whether or not corporations as a methodology of getting business done are inherently evil. The reality is that both are here to stay and clearly need some revisiting.

The natural reaction to watching a documentary like Food, Inc. is outrage, or as the movie supports, participating in your local markets and paying attention to what and where your money is going. Some people will always claim money is the root of all evil, but I think money can be used as a force for good. The movie’s message of civil activism though voting with your dollar is an richly empowering one. Money isn’t the root of all evil, money is really just the green leaves on a sick decision tree, who’s poorly-tended to roots lead to short-sighted and counter-productive growth. These roots need to be strengthened, so that they may support the heavy weight of very the real issues we face such as feeding and caring for our increasingly large society. There needs to be a rational public discourse regarding these archaic decision-making strategies and increased accountability for this type of unchecked and destructive reasoning. There needs to be corporate transparency and a realignment of common business and societal goals so that we, as a species, will end up living in a world that we chose, not one that we arrived at mistakenly though poorly considered action.

So I’m sick, which basically sucks. However, sometimes there’s an upside. Maybe it’s the fever, maybe it’s boredom, but I have the strangest dreams when I’m ill.

So, in this dream I’m taking a test. It’s a specialized test, called a Change Blindness test. Normally, humans are pretty awesome at spotting small changes; we’re good with patterns and narrative, bad with things that aren’t. Change blindness is that strange exception to the rule, where our ability to spot change right in plain view is remarkably poor. This is some pretty interesting stuff because it gets down to the nitty-gritty concepts of perception. One of them is the notion of something called “Cross Modal Sensory Confusion”. That’s just a fancy way of saying we use more than one sense to commonly confirm our impressions. For instance, you might hear a very indistinct name such as Anne or Pam, but if you happened to be watching the person speak it, the specific lip movement would clue you in. But it goes a little further. Sometimes these senses inform each other so much that they actually ALTER your perception; that’s the confusion part. In the Anne/Pam example, if a video was substituted of a person making a pursed lip motion for “Pam” but the audio said “Anne” most people “hear” the word Pam. Another classic example is potato chips. For most people, the crunchiness of potato chips has less to do with their actual texture than it does with their sound. Scientists report that people who have their hearing muffled while eating chips consistently report the chips as less crispy. Cross Modal Perception and Synesthesia both are yielding interesting insights into human cognition.

In my dream I’m being asked to scan large fields of blinking dots with one eye and graphic drawings of items in the other, looking for specific changes. Normally, a small change on a uniform pattern of dots would be easy to spot, but the blinking complicates this. In my dream, this pattern reminds of me of the mechanical screen tones artists sometimes use to shade illustrations. The small dots are printed on clear film. What’s cool is, if you layer the film on top of itself, and angle it a bit, the uniform fields create patterns with themselves. Mathematics refers to this phenomena as a “Beat Frequency”. There are lots of examples of this in nature, but basically any wave crossing over another one can create a new, distinct pattern. A musician friend once demonstrated this to me by setting up two speakers on opposite sides of the room, each playing an individual undulating sound. In the middle of the room, where the two sounds intermixed, a third beat became audible. Anyway, these blinking dot patterns were giving me a headache. As I stared at a drawing of a bunny with one eye, the dots in the other, I would get a sharp pain in my head. But if I blinked either eye I found the headache went away. The two images, coming together in my head, were producing the pain and it occurred to me that some forms of pain might be a function of Cross-Modal Sensory Confusion and Beat Frequency.

Pain, in general, serves many useful functions. It informs us we’re being injured or something is wrong and we should take action –a hand on a hot stove or a toothache for instance. It can inform us we’ve pushed ourselves too hard and we should take it easy –sore muscles after an exercise, a sore knee or back. But chronic pain doesn’t serve this useful function. Unlike the transient nature of acute pain, chronic pain lingers and has a terrible impact on quality of life. Medical science has made enormous strides in repairing the underlying causes of acute pain, but when it comes to chronic pain, it’s as if we’re still in the dark ages. Statistics tell us 1/5 of the adult population suffers from chronic pain. It’s referred to as the “Silent Epidemic” and acknowledged as the most costly health problem in America, yet it remains commonly under-treated, misdiagnosed and misunderstood. Migraines, injury, lumbago, neuralgia, neuropathy, fibromyalgia, arthritis, disease, the list of things that make us hurt are endless. The list of effective treatments is frustratingly small.

In what I can only call a most curious coincidence, this morning’s RSS feed contained an NPR story called How Do You Amputate A Phantom Limb? In it, a doctor has an amputee patient with chronic pain in the phantom limb. The doctor treats the problem with a box and a mirror. The patient sees his other hand in the place where his amputated limb is and is instructed to practice clenching and unclenching it. To everyone’s surprise, the treatment works. The Doctor theorizes that the brain had not caught up to the reality of the missing limb and that the brain’s mental map of the body needed to be reconfigured. What he saw is what he became. Considering sight is a major factor in how we both relate to the world and our own bodies, it seems only logical that it could be exploited as an equally powerful cross-modal therapy. This can hardly be the only example of these principles at work in the real world.

• I’m sick with the flu, so work is at a standstill.


• I recommend you watch the live action short film Signs. 12 minutes, but worth it.


• Scientific American has an interesting article on their site about the evolution of primate color vision. It sheds some fascinating light on the how we ended up with trichromatic vision, its rarity, some genetic issues associated with it (including genetic color blindness, which effects a disturbingly high 5-8% of the male population) and brain plasticity.

� Pat

People ask me about cloud computing sometimes and I’m usually ambivalent. Ok, distributed computing is useful, but it’s really just an efficient use of existing resources -a networking optimization. I don’t necessarily buy it as revolutionary concept. People try to democratize the system, but essentially the most-discussed paradigm is informationally asymmetric (the work of the many serves the needs of the few) so there’s not much immediate benefit, or guarantee of one, for most of us. Cloud computing is this year’s “timeshare”. But the idea isn’t a wash if you mix it up a bit. Let’s use music as a metaphor.

I used to listen to music on the radio. That sucked. What few stations I got were awful, and when I heard songs I was interested in, it was random. Ok, it was free… but there were ads and the songs I liked played too often, or not often enough. It was someone else’s playlist and that meant tons of crap to endure between the good stuff. Frustrated, I bought albums and made my own mixtapes. Eventually, my tapes became CD’s and my mixtapes were replaced with .mp3 playlists. The important thing is I went from a limited number of music channels, and someone else’s audio agenda, to unlimited channels and my agenda. Old news, I know. But what both of those shifts shared in common was the limited number of people responsible for creating the playlists. Cloud computing changes this.

These days I listen to music online. Pandora is pretty cool, but sites like The Hypemachine just might represent the future of entertainment. Hypemachine is curiously different than other online music stations because it scans and aggregates music blogs on the web and allows you to listen, from one central place, the contents of the blogosphere. Notice the audio agenda? The playlist is not generated by any single person. It’s generated by what all the people are talking and posting about. People can vote on their favorite songs of course, and seach data is tracked, so popularity searches inside the site are possible. But theoretically, with metadata, the search criteria are limitless. What’s interesting about this is that a computer, performing an unbiased statistical analysis of individual contributions, automates the distribution and exposure of relevant new media customized individually to you. Sorry, that was a mouthful, but that’s a form of cloud computing.

In mass communication, this concept is referred to as a “Gatekeeper”. In my music metaphor, DJ’s used to be the gatekeepers. They controlled which songs were played, they were the filter. If he had similar tastes as you it was great. But if he was taking payola, you got what some record company wanted you to get. As the Information Age progresses, and the sheer volume of data and media we need to sift though becomes larger and larger, we need assistance to find the signal in the noise. Increasingly, software has become the gatekeeper of choice. Amazon is scary in its ability to select book choices I might be interested in. I sift Google News using topical filters. My RSS tracks updates to only the few sites I’m interested in.

Where is this all headed? Some say the Semantic Web. We teach the World Wide Web to index itself, to classify our information automagically, and filter it for us. But the problem is computers don’t think like we do. As we become increasingly dependent on computer algorithms in the gatekeeper role, successful distribution of your ideas will hinge on your ability to be indexed and understood by a machine. In short, data on the web will have to comply to whatever indexing mechanics become popular. We see this now to a limited extent with Google. Search Engines index content by using simple keywords and a few other criteria to determine relevance. Exploiting this system and topping a search list can yield substantial financial gain as well as advantageous memetic fecundity. Complex ideas and metaphorical constructs, the cream of human expression, are largely incompatible with machine logic because they’re heavily reliant on human, not logical, experience. The risk here is that in a rush to accommodate convenience we’re potentially changing our communication behaviors. If the basic building blocks of ideas are formulated using language, linguistically speaking you can then argue this potentially changes the very way we think. I don’t know about you, but I already observe a dangerous amount of literal, mechanical thinking and not nearly enough of the creative thinking accountable for our most progressive insights. To be fair, the Semantic Web can encompass these values, but realistically an implementation will be in place before these technical limitations are solved.

I sometimes wonder what they’ll call the World Wide Web when the Moon gets its own IP address. A thinking human and a thinking computer can parse that statement, but only one might smile. The sad fact is humans are already short-sighted enough as it is, so let’s design informational systems that promote creativity and insight, not ones that limit it. I’ll concede this point when a computer can be programmed to understand my dirty jokes or explain to me exactly why I hate the term “World Wide Web”. But until that time let’s not let them control it.

• This week has been devoted to rewriting/updating another book about digital coloring in Photoshop. It’s about 150 oversized pages, but it’s relatively simple work, so I expect to be done by Tuesday. Which is a Good Thing™ because orders have already been placed for it and everyone needs it done yesterday.


• Research indicates what artists already knew: Doodling aids in memory recall. I doodle all the time in class, so maybe there’s hope.

People sometimes say “Art is dead. You can’t do anything new, it’s all been done before.” Whenever someone tells me this I know I’m looking at an idiot. For one, it’s easy to parrot the cliché in favor of an original thought. But also, given the popular perception of what we call art these days it’s the safe bet; and worse, a difficult argument for a dignified artist to refute. Generally they’re baiting me; they barf this pronouncement onto the floor, writhing like a parasite in foamy blood, both ill-equipped to defend it and strangely confident with their position. It’s a fallacy of course, if for any other reason because it presupposes the argument that art has to do something new. But the armchair pundits have a point. When the idiots become brave enough to assault the artist in his own territory, it’s clear they sense weakness and the pack grows more confident and starts to circle. How did we arrive at this situation?

It’s no secret art has become extremely ideologically abstracted. “Modern Art” is difficult for the Jacks and Jills to understand. To them it’s no longer relevant, it’s impossible to decipher without a degree, and frankly it smacks of pretension. There are many reasons this has become our modus operandi, and ironically you’d have to take an art history course to understand why. Or, you could do what I do and blame Humanism.

Humanism is a sacred cow in the world of academics, so how could I possibly make such an absurd accusation? By reviewing a little history and with a dash of common sense, it’s simple. They say sacred cows make great steaks, so here’s the argument:

It’s no coincidence that Modern Humanism coincided with the Renaissance. The Catholic Church, divine texts and providence in one hand, maintained a philosophical death grip over their largely illiterate society in the other. At that time, the collected wisdom of man was painstakingly handwritten (generally in Latin) and in the protective hands of an elite few. The manuscripts themselves were works of art, and owning books was actually a measure of power and wealth. And like any treasure, these were jealously guarded. The Church safeguarded their control with a deliberate policy of cultivating their flock’s spiritual enlightenment in lieu of their intellectual development. An intelligent person is far more difficult to govern than an ignorant one; so the trade-off proved advantageous. It’s difficult to imagine now, but this was so much so the case that the interpretation and explanation of love, marriage, divorce, politics, and nearly every important aspect of a person’s life, became someone else’s job. During this time, the Church used its power and influence to commission the best painters of the day to adorn their places of worship, as both a sign of the opulence of God, and perhaps more sinisterly, as a practical method to dramatize and bring to life the biblical stories their illiterate parishioners could not read. The paintings we now refer to as Renaissance classics were, in fact, part of a propaganda campaign to educate morality without having to teach literacy. It was a powerful use of art to establish and maintain social control and mores.

Rapid advances in technology sparked developments which eventually undermined the Church’s control. The advent of the printing press made the dissemination of writing more prolific. Suddenly, information flowed more freely and there was a reason to learn to read, and owning a book wasn’t an impossible dream. Perhaps more importantly, the benefits of learning and science became immediately apparent to the people. Cannons made defeating your enemies more likely, so warfare became a successful venture. Optics gave us the telescope and let us see farther, meaning more trade ships returned with their cargoes. Medicine meant your sick loved ones lived instead of died. The scientific method provided the populace with an alternative to faith for approaching the mysterious world, and the long-deprived intellectual curiosity of the people exploded. These were tangible, relevant improvements that people immediately desired, and these changes came from education not from salvation. This is where the heroic ideal of humanism comes in.

Humanism rejected the dogma of Church, instead celebrating the new-found self-determination of the people. It liberated us from the dark times, empowered both artists and the common man by replacing blind faith in the supernatural with dependence on the practical potential of mankind. And, for 600ish years, our focus on institutionalized intellectualism has refined and specialized our academic disciplines to the point where it has utterly revolutionized every aspect of our culture. But, as a sad footnote, it has left so much of our art sterile and incomprehensible.

Secular Humanism brought with it a wave of changes, some necessary, some good, some bad. But germane to this line of thinking are two notions about how it changed art forever: 1) The loss of the apprenticeship system and 2) the individualization for the responsibility of creativity. These are fundamental paradigm shifts which artists labor under to this very day. Make no mistake, by accepting Humanism and all its benefits, we also lost something valuable.

The master/apprentice method to teaching, which was popular with trade artisans and artists during the Renaissance, was largely supplanted by the university model. To this day, a typical artist is educated by committee; handed off from specialist to specialist. True to the precepts of Humanism, they are impressively independent, rational and exceptional critical-thinkers. They are exposed to a far greater number of concepts and methodologies than previous generations. It is difficult to argue with the brutal effectiveness of a well-executed modern art education, in the hands of an smart student is a formidable tool. But the system isn’t without weaknesses, and chief among them is the notion of relevance. If you, as an artist, are taught -deliberate or otherwise- to celebrate the tenants of Humanism, it’s only natural for your work to feature some measure of expression of Humanistic ideals. Humanism has become the central axis around which artistic expression now rotates. And a precious few artists are even aware this basic influence. In fact, for many of them, it is the unvoiced reason they became an artist, a source of pride, strength and inspiration. But it has also lead us down a primrose path of defining, redefining and specialization which terminates at our current problem. Modern Art may be the worthy and logical progression of art, but it has finally come full circle in that, as once the Church’s writings were inaccessible to the populace, so too has the narrative of Modern Art become indecipherable to today’s patrons. Universities mass-produce cookie-cutter artists who’s work becomes increasingly irrelevant to mainstream audiences… and like poets, these artists find that the only people that can truly appreciate their work are… other artists. This is an error in relevance, made possible by committee education, because at no time was any single educator made responsible for teaching the discretionary use of the education this artist received. In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character highlights this nearly ubiquitous trend when he quips, “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The master/apprentice model of training solved this problem by placing the responsibility of a complete training curriculum on the master; by tying the master’s reputation to the the student’s performance, it acted as a natural selector and safeguard not only for excellence, but also of discriminatory application of craft.

A University education is deemed complete in, what seems like an almost arbitrary length, of four years. Compare this to the master/apprentice system when the education was tailored specifically to the student and the duration lengthened or shorted depending on the student’s ability.

Additionally, instead of a “General to Specific” idea model like we use today, they employed the exact opposite approach. By this I mean apprentices weren’t presented with a holistic exposure to ideas and theory, from which they adapt more and more precise techniques as they sub-specialized, but rather they were taught a very specific craft, a specific set of techniques and set lose upon the world to find a way to define and adapt their expression to what they saw. This fundamental change radically effects the artist’s approach, because the model employed by the master/apprentice system, by it’s very nature, fights to make the subject relevant to the artist, the technique and the viewer. The university system guarantees no such assurances. If you assume the challenge of the artist is understanding or communicating the world around them through their work, and that the work produced by a more modernist university model has grown to where it can only be understood with the presumption of assumed prior knowledge, it has ironically betrayed the principles of Humanism because it appeals to a quality which is now externalized from man and no longer self-evident except thorough the practice of disciplined dogma.

My second point is that Humanism has internalized the responsibility for creativity with each and every artist. This gives rise to a wide array of expression, but just as in the master/apprentice argument, this advantage has also come at a price. Prior to Humanism, the notion of creativity and genius was divorced from the individual. The Greeks considered genius to be a form of madness, because they often observed a more-than-casual relationship between the two traits. They thought these people were touched by the Gods, that the source of their insight was divine. Many cultures shared the notion of a muse, a creative force external to men, who whispered or breathed inspiration into artists. This “channeled” view of creativity was greatly beneficial to early artists, who were free to focus on the role of interpreting instead of editing, observing instead of self-dialoguing. Today’s artist bears the terrible weight of pushing creative boundaries alone, and with less time devoted to observing or playfully manipulating concepts in a manner which doesn’t reflect on him or herself personally. Artists have always been risk-takers and will continue to be, but to what degree? With the modern focus on commodification of artists and their work, the freedom to dissociate themselves personally, to create an environment conducive to creativity -free from the fear of failure- is a luxury that is difficult to afford. And, in fact, what we see now is that the reputation of the artist has grown in importance independent to, and often times more important than, the success of their work. Think about that for a moment: the artist’s masterworks are no longer the fruitful triumph of thought or technique, self-evident in the work itself, but rather emblematic evidence of the process, an extension of his reputation and observable only in the context of all his work.

Creative thinking requires the ability to wear many masks, yet the penalty for creative failure now is so intrinsically linked by Humanism to the artist, that it is a failure not only of cognition, but a failure of person. This new association, placing the onus of creative success or failure directly on the artist is, in my estimation, a large contributing factor to the epidemic degrees of depression and suicide associated with creative personalities. The act of creativity now carries with it an inescapable risk which, when coupled with an incomplete artisitic identity, can lead to a creative chilling effect. So, while Humanism leads to a wide, and often stunningly original breadth of creative expression, the depth of these insights can be remarkably shallow and their pertinence is questionable. This raises some serious questions about the efficacy and sustainability of the system, as well as its safety.

The question really isn’t if Humanism has forever changed art, because it has, but rather what comes next? Maybe this time life will imitate art. If you were to return to our fairy tale, instead of Jack and Jill heading up the hill to fetch a pail of water, maybe they’ll dig a well in the valley where it should have been dug in the first place. Who digs a well at the top of a hill anyway? When the absurd circumstances of art are swapped with the rational circumstances of life, when the metaphorical exchanges positions with the literal, we can learn from Jack and Jill’s fall and art can hint at the changes to come by providing us insight to the way we think and what we choose to do. That, my friends, is proof-positive that it art isn’t dead.

All of this brings me squarely back to some idiot and his ugly, wiggling idea on the floor, lathering itself in its own blood, and the circling pack impatiently waiting for an answer to his profound challenge. I usually look them right in the eye, and I suggest you do as well, take a breath and tell them with a straight face, “Art is dead? I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about art. I’m just here for the free wine and cheese.”

I’ve been drafting the story for my shadow puppet animation in my head over the past week and yesterday I sat down and set up an experimental project in After Effects, only to be severely disappointed. Even though I’m current through AECS4, I’m running v6.5 because my processor doesn’t support SS2 instructions. I’d forgotten how parenting, in this version, is laughably primitive for this type of animation. Even with a creative rig of null objects and pre-comps, animation was tedious. I have a solid idea of how I want the short to play out, but without the new Puppet Tool from CS3+, or more sophisticated parenting functions, I just don’t see a way to elicit the performances I need from cut-outs without spending ridiculous amounts of time keying individual frames or tediously editing velocity vectors. Yeah, it’s possible. But no, I’m not going to spend the next two months animating this short when I can get a better result in half the time. I’m loathe to say it, but this is a project which will so clearly benefit from a single new tool that it’s actually worth postponing until I upgrade my hardware. Right now I’m considering drafting an animatic just to get the ideas down. In the meantime, I’ve given the project a reference name: “This Is The Way The World Ends”. Like all my project names, it may or may not end up being the title of the project, but until it’s finished or I actually name it, this is what I’ll refer to it as.

• Congratulations to Wall*E for winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year! Also, La Maison en Petits Cubes by Kunio “Mr. Roboto” Kato for taking the Best Animated Short!


• My Dreamweaver/CSS studies were making me claw my eyes out so I switched to After Effects and studiously knocked off 16 chapters today, completing the whole course. I guess that means I’m back to clawing my eyes out with Dreamweaver again tomorrow.

Intellect is an admirable quality. But being smart is like being right; even if you’re right all the time you’re still trumped by someone who’s lucky all the time. So it goes with intellect: no matter how intelligent you are, you can always be bested by an idiot with greater insight. This is the value of perspective and why creativity is the hallmark of genius.

Last night’s art opening was a lot of fun. It was well-attended, well-received and well, pretty interesting. The show was smaller than I initially expected; the gallery space was tight, but the pieces were expertly presented and visually arresting. Kudos to Joe Bravo and his curating prowess; he unified two disparate artists magnificently and the whole show felt both relevant and timely. Alex Rubio’s work was a visual punch to the face. His color palette was outrageously saturated and festive, an eye carnival complete with organ music. I felt his “Abbadon” diptych was probably his most successful piece, and despite its mannered nature and literal metaphor, clever and expertly executed. As painters, we’re taught to avoid certain color combinations -red and green being one of them. Yes, they’re complimentary colors, but that’s not always advantageous. We refer to these combinations as “loaded”, because if you’re not expert with their application, these colors carry baggage (in this case “Christmas”) which can supercede and taint the artist’s intent. But he pulled it off. The piece was vibrant, bold and energetic. The canvas was filled with movement and there was a stark, graphic audacity which echoed Rubio’s heritage and attitudes.

In contrast, Graham Toms’ work was far more subtle and introspective. Toms’ paintings were no less powerful, but instead of being a sharp jab to the eye, they were more a sucker-punch to the mind. His tentative technique belied a very deep connection to his subjects and a thoughtful exploration of the symbols and metaphors of the Apocalypse. He clearly demonstrated an affinity for the stated intent of the show, and whereas Rubio’s work traded heavily on the brute force of his personality, Toms’ work evoked a provocative dialog with the viewer, coaxing and teasing, shocking and teaching with an almost playful naivete. The grotesque is a subject very near and dear to my heart. I’ll probably write a considerable amount about it in the near future but for now, suffice to say the deformation of an ideal, moving a notion from the literal to the symbolic, can often reveal the sublime. To decode a masterful painting is take a journey, led by the hand of the artist. And at the end of the journey, if the meaning resists closure and impales you in the moment as you struggle to rectify “what category should this fall under?”, “the sacred or the profane?”, “the beautiful or the ugly?”, you have achieved the wonderful transitional state we refer to as “Paradigm Crisis”. It’s often a brief moment, but in that glorious, ephemeral time, the mind is open to any possibility and intuitive leaps are your only way out of the rabbit hole. Graham Toms’ work challenged the easy narrative of comprehension with an almost corrupted representation, a touch of irony and a healthy absurdity. His Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse looked like a merry-go-round at first glance, but on closer inspection, revealed a horrific composition of despair and death. This is a rare insight and a wonderful gift which I hope he continues to refine. Toms’ idiolectic representation threaded in and out of his pieces uniformly and with the conscious yet hidden deliberation of a poet.

In summary, I could not imagine two more different artistic approaches to the same metaphors. One would be tempted to pick a favorite, but I won’t. However, if I were to summarize my emotive response to the show with a music metaphor, I would go as far as to say Rubio was tonight’s one-hit wonder. In a handful of paintings I’ve come dangerously close to taking the full measure of the man and his message. While he’s catchy, infectious and utterly refined, unless he finds something new and interesting to sing about, no amount of polish will find me tapping my toes to his next melody. Toms, on the other hand, was an album you bought because it had a B-side track you were interested in. But the more you played the album, the more you discover new merit and meaning in all the tracks, and it quickly grows comfortable and leaves you wanting more. Both artists put on a wonderful show and I’m eager to follow both into the future. And I’m left with the overwhelming sense that they’ve reminded us that our perception is, and always was, a process -a progressive narrative. And, if these are the songs to be sung from the end of everything, it’s not so bad because oh, what a symphony it was.

• Attending the “Apocalyptic Visions, the paintings of Alex Rubio and Graham Toms” which is being curated by my friend Joe, who coincidentally drafted the show synopsis. Haven’t been to an art opening in a while, so I’m looking forward to it. It’s at the Semmes Gallery in the Fine Art Building at the University of the Incarnate Word from 5:00pm - 8:00pm.


• Still studying Dreamweaver and CSS. Into the good stuff now and I expect to be complete in the next day or two. Then the fun work of transitioning sites from HTML to XML begins.


• My tag cloud was growing like an unkempt beard, so I shaved it by rate-limiting it to a couple of dozen tags. The large number of tags could also take quite a while to fetch, which slowed page rendering times. Ok, not a lot… but I really don’t like waiting that extra second. It’s much more tidy and neat looking now.