And now for something completely different!

OK, let's slip back into travelogue mode, with a bit of art sprinkled in...
Who wants to read about heavy gender-related issues anyway, jeez!

We have now completed 2 out of the 3 days here at the Las Vegas Electric Daisy Carnival... and it's a trip. Some of the art is great, the culture of the festival is super weird, and as Vegas has a few tricks up its sleeve as well...

Let's jump in.

We are staying at the Plaza Hotel and Casino. They have a hot tub, and one of their buildings has huge murals on the sides by Faile and Shepard Fairey. The one above is by Faile. 

Before we even arrived at the festival, we made a little field trip to the Las Vegas Strip, mostly to see Marco Cochrane's Bliss Dance. It's really lovely - and the story behind it and the other two sculptures in the series is interesting.

Upon arriving at the site of the festival, one is struck by the scale. It's a big venue - a motor speedway. This photo was taken from high up in the grandstands...

After setting up the Hand of Man we took a walk around to look at some big art. A few pieces stood out for me. This is probably my favorite piece... called Anima, by Daniel Popper.

My other favorite piece is not really a "sculpture" in the sense of being a standalone piece by a single artist, but it is rather the large scenic elements of the main stage. When I first saw these I thought they were some sort of hard materials, but they are actually inflatables - fabric creations filled with compressed air (low pressure, fed continuously by large fans). Funny enough, there are major and obvious similarities between these pieces - both feature female heads with hands (heads and hands, my favorites) and both depict blissful expressions with closed eyes. Both show essentially non-human characters; Anima is made of wood and plants while the scenic stage faces are clearly robots.

Here is another one of the stages. The big rectangular elements at the sides are 40-foot shipping containers standing on-end - everything here is big. I find these stages quite interesting, and emblematic of this strange DJ-centric culture, insofar as they are these huge attention-grabbing constructions with video screens and lighting and fire elements and at the center is this tiny little stage with an even tinier little famous person (the DJ). It seems as if these stages, with their hugeness and grandiosity, are made to compensate for the absence of a traditional rock band with multiple musicians (and therefor multiple points of focus). The kids need something to look at, and that something is epically enormous video screens. And by their very scale, these stages reinforce the concept of DJ-as-superstar.

And then... oh god... the gates open. 160,000 people per day flood in. The boys are all wearing board-shorts and the girls are all wearing fetish underwear. 

Yes, boys and girls. Not that many men or women here.

I find the culture genuinely strange. The attendees flock from one stage to another, mesmerized in front of the huge video screens, bouncing their bodies endlessly to the oontz oontz oontz of very repetitive music that has no instruments, no narrative, and minimal lyrics. I'm trying to be non-judgmental here... but I just don't really get it.

Another thing they do is stand in really long lines to take their picture in front of scenic elements which are made... to be places to take your picture. The line of people waiting to take their photo in front of this EDC "billboard" was about 200 long. "Hey look, Instagram... I'm at EDC!"

But, OK... it's not all so incomprehensible. There is a bar where all the bartenders are "little people," called the MiniBar. The drinks are really small. That's pretty good. 

We spend a lot of time at catering.

It's a very entertaining place to be, and not only because the food is plentiful and healthy and delicious. The mix of people at catering is really great... it feels like the backstage of an old Hollywood movie. You've got firemen and policemen and stage personnel with all their safety gear and dancing girls and artists and and and... (These pictures are not particularly great... sorry about that... I was taking them surreptitiously! But take a close look at the cast of characters in these... You can see why we are usually here when we are not smashing cars with heavy machinery) 

The festival runs from 7 in the evening until 5 in the morning... and everything looks different at night!

Space Girls (??)

and the main stage...

and Anima...

The Hand of Man is pretty photogenic, but that being said it's always a challenge to get a really good picture of it...  Photo above by Cedar Goebel

I think this one above is pretty damn good. In the background is "Night at the Climb In," or "The Car-B-Cue" from last year's Burning Man.

The wreckage left by the Hand is often entertaining. This is part of a sticker on one of the cars. 

And... EDC at night, also taken from the grandstands. 

Signing off, from the city of Lost Wages

(If, for some reason, you do find the topic of beauty and its role in society to be an interesting one, HERE is a great video. It's not heavy; in fact it's narrated by John Cleese and it's quite light and funny, while also being super informative. I recommend it.)

It must be difficult...

(So I've just finished proof-reading this post and now I am adding this preface. This post is sloppy. The ideas are all over the place. I guess that's just how it is.)

_______________________

So now I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada for another Hand of Man gig. What a strange place.

When I was living in New York City in my early 20's I had an ongoing joke with some friends that there was a warehouse somewhere where all the beautiful women were kept. They were brought out only briefly for advertising campaigns or photo and film shoots. Or maybe... I realize 30 years later... maybe they were kept in that warehouse for their own protection...

In contrast to my political rant of a few weeks ago, this post will be more about questions than answers...  When it comes to politics, I know that I am right (but doesn't everybody "know" that they are right?), but when it comes to gender politics, I'm just a question asker, a student.

This coming weekend, while I am running the Hand of Man at one of the largest music festivals in the entire world in Las Vegas, Christina and I will also have several sculptures set up at one of the smallest, at a music venue in Taos. For the event in Taos I brought out several old sculptures, but I also wanted to do a little something that was new. In the spirit of strong and empowered women I decided to pose two store mannequins next to two of my old robots, each mannequin playing the role of Amazon robot trainer, or robot overlord. The Amazons were to hold the robots on leashes, making clear their position of power. And, borrowing from the aesthetic lineage of Wonder Woman while also sexing it up a bit, I sewed minimalist bras and skirts and wrist cuffs for them.

(Bras are difficult, but sewing this stuff was really fun)

I set up all the sculptures on Monday of this week, and the robots and their Amazon overlords were among the first I set up. During the brief few hours they were set up, Christina and I heard a bewildering array of bizarre and off-color comments about them. Most of these comments were fundamentally misogynist, one comment was downright creepy, and another was even directed at Christina.

I removed the mannequins on Monday evening and by Tuesday morning I'd decided that I would not be reinstalling them for the festival. The robots will have no trainers.

Somehow these paragons of female beauty opened the doors to some very weird corners of the people who sauntered by - doors which are usually kept closed by the pressures of socialization and good manners and common sense - and this has really gotten me thinking...

In 1974, acclaimed Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 0, a performance in which she stood still for six hours amongst a public audience while they were invited to "perform acts" upon her with a group of 72 objects laid out on a table. The objects included honey, a feather, razor blades, and a gun with a single bullet. In that time she was written on, her clothes were cut from her body, her skin was cut with razor blades, her body was subjected to minor sexual indignities, and the loaded gun was held to her head by one member of the audience. Another person intervened and wrestled the gun away. When the six hours were over and Marina finally moved -finally acted like a person again, the audience scrambled away... unable to face her. 

Marina Abramović is, not coincidentally (to my discussion, anyway), a beautiful woman, and was arguably even more beautiful 45 years ago in 1974.

What if the performer of this courageous act had been a man?
Would the male body be treated with such disrespect?
What if it had been an unattractive woman? Or a black man?
(I think that among other things, Abramović's experiment proved that people are cowardly animals.)

Beautiful women are like unicorns - they are rare (Although they are less rare in certain places such as, ironically, New York City, where I proposed the warehouse theory. And another point; if you only looked at advertising, you would think natural beauties were everywhere. But the reality on the streets is different.)
They are like polar bears - they are the canvas onto which we project all sorts of hopes, fears, and hyperbole.
And the conventional wisdom is that beautiful people are treated better than others, but I think beauty can also bring out the ugly side of people... like Trump, or the internet.

Why is this?
Why is beauty so charged, so potent, so divisive?

One answer, at least insofar as the negative effects that beauty have on women, seems to be that beauty is held up as an (unattainable?) ideal to which all women should aspire, and those who do not meet conventional definitions of beauty are somehow considered less valid, or less worthy. This is a problem no matter which way you look at it, and when magnified through the prism of social media can become a life-threatening danger. One in eight UK adults consider killing themselves over body-image issues.

And on a certain level all of this must be seen as driven by men's desire for beauty, and women's desire to be desired. No wonder women fear other more beautiful women. 
The male gaze dominates advertising, guaranteeing that beautiful women are ubiquitous in ads. Advertising fuels insecurity. Insecurity fuels fear and resentment.

But why does beauty bring out such base impulses in men?
I don't really know; all I can do is guess. 
Beauty can make people possessive. When we see something beautiful, we want it. (Haha.. cultivate non-attachment... to beauty!)
When we can't have what we want, we get angry. Or maybe abusive.
When we see something we can't control, we get fearful. When we get fearful we get controlling, or violent. I think that on a deep level many men have a deep fear of women, because they (we) can't control them. Some men try. Some women submit. I feel sorry for all of them.
William Moulton Marston would probably postulate that this fear also derives from a dim awareness of women's innate power, and I might agree with that. Maybe men also fear their own inability to control themselves.
Men can achieve amazing things in many areas of life (and of course the same can be said of women.. but my point here is about men) such as science or law or medicine, and yet can be reduced to animalistic idiots by women. Melvil Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal System, the sophisticated library organization system still in use today across much of the world, and yet he was so unable to control himself around women that he was eventually forced out of the American Library Association!

(I've made reference several times on this blog to the fact that there was one idea that I had for an image which caused me to jump into learning to oil paint, and this theme of men being reduced to animals by beauty runs hard through that image. One day I will get it painted.)

One very old definition of beauty is "that which pleases the eye." But how can you experience the pleasure of the eye when beauty makes you want to self-harm, or makes you angry, or makes you want to possess it? I have this idea that beauty is something that everyone can and should enjoy, if only the heavy emotion around it could be eliminated. It's somehow tied, in my head, to the simplicity of the way the ancient Greeks elevated the idea of beauty, and celebrated youthfulness. Of course they didn't have social media or advertising, and I can imagine that older women felt jealous and old or ugly men felt desire and frustration even in ancient Greece, but my sense is that beauty was culturally celebrated in a more honest and simple way back then. And if that is correct, I think they had the right idea. I think that if all those complicated emotions could be removed from the perception of beauty - emotions which are at least in some small way products of our modern civilization (insofar as they are related to the possessiveness and acquisitiveness endemic to capitalism, and the negative effects of pervasive advertising), then men and women alike could perceive the beauty of a young and well-made man or woman with the same sort of sublime pleasure that comes from viewing a sunset, or a perfect seashell. 



Well that would have been a great way to end the post, but I do want to add one more thing.

Las Vegas is a tremendous culture shock compared to Taos in so many ways, but one clear difference is the pervasiveness of images of beautiful women here. In fact it extends beyond just images - sex and sexiness is woven into the fabric of this place. Waitresses wear miniskirts, half-naked showgirls pose on sidewalks with passersby, and the place does not want for strip clubs. 

The obvious question is: Is this progress?

I guess on some level I am just trying to process the thing with the mannequins in Taos. Taos is progressive in some ways, but not in every way; it's still a small town in rural America.
I had an interesting (though short) conversation with our friend Claire, who is here from Barcelona helping with the Hand of Man. She asked me why I was into Wonder Woman. I tried to formulate an answer around the challenges of understanding the subtleties and overlaps and boundaries between empowerment and sexiness, and she made the excellent point that a woman who is beautiful/sexy must also be empowered in order to not be perceived as an object or a victim. Beauty combined with vulnerability is asking for trouble.
And so, back to Las Vegas: Is this progress? A place like this is obviously much more accustomed to seeing strong and sexy women (and images of them) and so I don't think a pair of mannequins dressed like Amazons would necessarily elicit the same weird responses, but on the other hand the line between empowered agent and vulnerable object is thin and subtle and there must also be a very seedy underbelly to the gender interplay here. 
An offhand and not-well-supported idea I've had (which might well be wrong) is that in more developed and cosmopolitan places like NYC or certain urban centers in Europe, beautiful and strong women might be more integrated into the culture, more accepted, less at-risk. 

Who knows. Some people are just raised wrong. And that happens everywhere. 

It must be difficult to be a woman.

Walmartville

I knew that the first three weeks of May were going to be a whirlwind, and they're not even halfway over.

In truth it started earlier than May. In the last few weeks of April I tried to paint while also preparing the Hand of Man for its big month: May. I made a few repairs and improvements, notably installing an extra hydraulic cylinder on the wrist so it can pick up cars better (all the better to drop them with, my dear!).

About 10 days ago, the shows began; at that time I loaded the Hand onto a semi-truck bound for Bentonville, Arkansas. I then flew to Arkansas and installed it at the Scott Family Amazeum, an interactive children's museum. 

And then I did something I've never done before; I flew home... leaving it in the care of strangers! OK, well they are a bunch of nice and competent people who run the museum and its maker-space-like shop, and... they're not strangers anymore. I went home for a week while the Amazeum folks ran the Hand every day for a week-and-a-half, and then I flew back to Arkansas on the day before yesterday and yesterday morning we dismantled the Hand and put it back onto its pallets for its homeward journey later today. 

When it returns to New Mexico, it will sit on my land for about 5 days before I then load it onto another semi-truck bound for Las Vegas, Nevada, where I will run it at a giant corporate music festival called Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC). This is a 3-day event which has operational hours of 5pm to 5am (or 17:00 to 05:00 for you European folks!). I might be too old for that! Haha, we'll see. 

And during the same weekend that I am running the Hand at EDC, Christina and I will also have several sculptures installed at a great-sounding music festival happening in our hometown of Taos (called Monolith on the Mesa, being run by our friend Dano Sancho.) I have to install those sculptures before I leave for Vegas, which means they will be fully installed for several days before... and then several days after... the Monolith Festival. I would have loved to attend Monolith, because I think it will be fun, but everything happened all at once this year, and I guess that's how it is sometimes. 

On top of all that, I have a paying fabrication job in the shop that I'm trying to bang out in the spaces in between all this travel, which frankly isn't easy.

When it rains, it pours.

Bentonville Arkansas turns out to be a unexpectedly interesting place. When I first booked this show I thought... "Arkansas... ho-hum... it's gonna be boring." But North-West Arkansas, or NWA as they call it, is not boring. Bentonville is the home of Walmart, and the billionaire heirs and heiresses of Walmart's founder Sam Walton still live here. The entire town seems touched in one way or another by the Walton family fortune. The town is clean and well-taken care of, the culinary options are pretty damn good, and there is a truly world-class art museum here (more on that in a second), which all makes sense when you realize that Bentonville has the highest per-capita population of millionaires of any area in the entire USA. Amazing, but true (or at least that's what someone at the Amazeum told me.)

So it turns out that one of Sam Walton's heirs, his daughter Alice Walton, likes art. Well what do you do if you like art and you're a billionaire? You buy a lot of it. And then what do you do? You could stuff it all into your own home(s), or put it into storage, or... you could spend a few hundred million dollars on an art museum. Alice Walton has spent about $317 million of her own money to build the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, with an additional $800 million coming from the Walton Family Foundation. It's truly a beautiful and world-class museum, sitting in the middle of a town of 40,000 people in Arkansas. (Click the link above for some pictures of the place)

There's an awkward tension, if you think about it, between the daily reality of an average Walmart store, with it's underpaid workers and shitty products from China and its under-educated clientele (yes these are grotesque stereotypes, but relax... I shop there too sometimes) on the one hand, and this high-culture "bomb" that Alice Walton has dropped in the middle of Arkansas. When you consider that the museum entrance is free, and that the Walton Family Foundation is also doing a lot of other good things for the people of NWA, Alice Walton starts to look like some sort of inverted Robin Hood (instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, she is stealing from the poor and giving to Bentonville). Anyway it was very interesting to see farmers and other sorts of people who you would never imagine walking into an art museum strolling through Crystal Bridges. But it's free, and its in their town, so why not?

Here are a few of the pieces that I personally liked at the museum...

It turns out that Crystal Bridges isn't the only art-trick up Bentonville's sleeve. Another worthwhile destination is 21C, which is an interesting cross pollination between a hotel and a contemporary art gallery. The art here is considerably more cutting-edge than at Crystal Bridges, and is all privately owned by... you guessed it... some really rich people! At some point they had purchased too much art for their own home, so they opened this place. There are apparently eight locations around the South. By putting the art in a hotel which also features a popular restaurant, they too are exposing a slice of the populace to contemporary art who might otherwise never see it. If you're going to buy up all the good art, it's at least nice to share it. So... good job, all you obscenely rich people!

The show at 21C is called "The Future is Female" and here is some of the work...

(This one is my favorite piece in Bentonville)

And here are two more pieces I like, photographed from books...

Speaking of the female future, I continue to be interested in William Moulton Marston and his pop-culture creation, Wonder Woman. At this point I've watched the film version of his life as well as read a biography (and I can tell you that the film version portrays him very kindly.) The guy had some pretty wacky theories and somehow managed to live with three women simultaneously (which would take a lot of skill.. or charisma.. or something!), and he created this ultra-strong and ultra-feminist character who has stood the test of time for almost 80 years. His wacky theories include ideas that all human interactions are moderated by either domination or submission, that the world will be at peace when we all learn to enjoy submission, that women are stronger than men in part because they are better at submission, that women must teach men this skill, and that sexual power is one of the aspects of female superiority (sound familiar?). He was a psychologist during the early days of psychology. I think he would be laughed out of the professional world of psychology if he were alive today... and that's almost what happened to him back then too; before inventing Wonder Woman he was regarded as a self-aggrandizing quack and was professionally a quasi-failure. I think it would be interesting to look into HIS psychology, which I haven't seen anyone really do yet. It must be all about his mother...

Ironically I missed by two days the closing date of a special exhibition at Crystal Bridges focusing on the art world's reactions to Wonder Woman and SuperMan. There was an entire shelf of Wonder Woman books at their gift store...

With all this travel and work on my sculptures, I've not had time to paint. The last time I was in the painting studio was almost two weeks ago. At that time I had the following thoughts about my progress:
If you want to look at painting in an extremely reductivist way, it's about 1) mixing the right colors and 2) putting those colors in the right places. I'm doing OK with #2 in that equation, but not so great with #1. I've read that most of your time as a painter is spent at the palette, mixing colors... and I thought I'd been spending enough time there, but I'm clearly not. My skin tones are all over the place, and not very convincing. 

Her hand is too green, her face too red, and her skin tones are too dark overall... although to some degree I think this is a problem with my printer printing too dark (I'm printing parts of the source image for color matching.) And the sky is too blue, although that doesn't bother me.

Oh well, one of these days I will get back to it.

Funny enough, the big sculptures feel like my "job" right now, taking me away from what I want to be doing.. which is painting. 
I could have worse problems.

Oh and I discovered a painter I like, called Thomas Hart Benton. His subject matter doesn't do THAT much for me, but I love his technique.

OK... off to the Walmart Museum before I get on a plane!

Wonder Woman

First off, thanks to everyone who responds to my posts, either by email or in the comments section. I appreciate hearing your feedback, and it makes this whole blog thing feel less like a monologue and more like a conversation.

____________________

As a result of the informal resolution I made with myself, some time ago, to make this blog about my life in general, the blog can take several forms from post to post.

• It can be an exploration of art, both mine and the art of others, with a little amateur art theory thrown in.

• It can be a discussion of art-making, with all its attendant triumphs and challenges.

• It can be a travel and adventure story.

• It can be an exploration of psychology, usually mine... a kind of self-analysis on the page.

• It can occasionally veer off into politics, when that feels necessary.

• And I'm sure I do go off in yet other directions, once in a while.

I know that not all of these topics are of equal interest to all readers. While I imagine that travel and adventure is probably popular with everyone, I'm sure that certain readers are bored (or even offended) by my politics, while others have no interest in my self-analysis, even as others would rather I skipped the art theory. These days, as Christina and Kodiak and I travel a bit less, I find that my posts are shifting slightly more towards the "interior," which is to say more towards stories of art-making and associated self analysis... because, that is what occupies my mental landscape more now. I find, ironically, that I may in fact be in danger of going into that more private territory which evidently makes some people feel forced into an uncomfortably voyeuristic position. I do have to strike a balance here; and I try hard to do that. It's occurred to me that I could put a disclaimer at the start of each post, stating its main themes and topics, so that people could read only that which interests them. I probably won't do that; why make it easer for readers to censor parts of my output?

____________________

So, on to the meat of the post.

Here I go... striking that balance... going inwards while trying not to make you all uncomfortable... watch me!

DANGER! Discussions of art-making and self-analysis ahead! (Oh damn, I said I wouldn't do that!)

Christina and I had an interesting conversation the other day about my interest in the female nude and what it really means. It's obvious that the nude (female and male) is a popular and enduring subject for art (nudes could probably put up a pretty good fight with Jesus in the competition for most prevalent topic in the Western art canon) and one can engage with that subject matter without causing a stir. And it has immediate appeal both for erotic reasons, and because it is the 'measure of all things' for us humans, but it also means something else to me. That question, what it really means for me, is endlessly fascinating to me right now, and feels like the most interesting current avenue of inquiry in the department of art-production.

Christina suggested that perhaps it has to do with creating a sort of primordial sense of well-being, something subconsciously related to the realm of the maternal. This dovetails with the "sense of calm" that I first reported feeling back in Berlin at the Helmut Newton museum. My friend Richard suggested some time ago that it was my way of uncovering or discovering the female part of myself, which also seems pretty damn plausible. There is an interesting progression to be observed in the trajectory of my recent artistic output from robot -> human, hard -> soft, analytical -> emotional. The big red robot smelling a flower, called Becoming Human, now at Meow Wolf, looks like a lynchpin transitional piece if we buy into this progression theory.

There is also a very strong overlay of interest in the "strong" female character or archetype, something I've mentioned here before. The images that come to me as possible paintings are all combinations of the (traditionally male) visual trappings of strength - usually expressed in posture and expression - and female nudity and beauty. Christina advanced to me the idea that the nudity and beauty part of the equation undermines the strength part of the equation... that nudity and beauty make the female vulnerable. I suppose that in this fucked-up reality in which we live, there is perhaps some truth to this; some men are intimidated by female power and want to crush it, or possess it through force. But I believe that's not the only way to look at this and that there is a more positive alternative vision, which is that female strength and power does not need to be de-sexualized (think: female politicians) in order to manifest, precisely because beauty and sexuality are a huge part of that power. A beautiful woman walking into a room of men will instantly transform the men into blithering idiots. Christina countered this point by saying that 20% - 30% of those men will have malevolent thoughts towards her, and.. well.. that is a problem (see above.)

At this time, I am generating ideas for paintings much faster than I can bring them into reality, because... I still suck at painting* and also I am having a hard time getting in there to practice, both for legitimate time-management reasons and also because I get discouraged by my poor skills and am reticent to go into the studio and confront my shortcomings. Christina suggested I start sketching the ideas so that they are at least committed to some sort of material form. I've begun to do that.

* OK maybe I don't totally suck at it. The background of my first painting came out surprisingly well, but as I've moved on to the figure I find it very difficult to paint skin convincingly. This is what's caused the most frustration... 

Now, before you guys think I've gone off the deep end with all this female empowerment in art mumbo jumbo, let me just drop two words right here:

Wonder Woman.

Yeah, that's right. Wonder Woman. I just watched the 2017 movie version of this comic book hero and, well, I loved it. To be fair, I recognize the fact that it is not exactly a "great piece of cinema," and the climactic battle between Wonder Woman and Ares is a bit too over-the-top fantasy for me, but I think the movie appealed to me for other, deeper psychological reasons in line with what I'm attempting to get at above. There were scenes that left me emotional... and I'm not talking about the reliably tear-jerking type of scene built around deep connections between characters that you find in the last 20 minutes of every Pixar film, I'm talking about simple scenes of clean power, scenes of an incredibly powerful and incredibly beautiful woman kicking ass. Why would scenes like that have such an impact on me? Who knows, I'm trying to paint myself to the answer.

Spending a bit of time on the Wikipedia page for Wonder Woman opens up some interesting topics. Firstly is the idea of Mythopoetics (or Mythopoeia), a term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930's to denote myth-making by modern authors through the incorporation of traditional mythological themes and archetypes into modern media. To me, this is a fascinating idea. Joseph Campbell and others have shown the enduring power of myths, and I believe that whoever would use artistic vision to shape and modernize myths to fit our changing times would wield an incredible power. It has been suggested that the 2017 movie has done just that.

Wikipedia points us in another fantastic direction, which is towards the inventor of Wonder Woman. I won't go into too much detail here about William Moulton Marston because you can just read about him yourself, but suffice to say that I find him intriguing. He was a psychologist, an inventor of an early lie detector, an early feminist, a believer that women were superior to men and would rule the world someday, a cohabitator with three women (his wife, his and his wife's polyamorous lover, and his mistress - with whom he shared an interest in bondage), as well as the inventor of Wonder Woman. He modeled Wonder Woman after various aspects of these women with whom he lived. Early incarnations of Wonder Woman were more sexualized and featured elements of bondage, even while she subjugated men and women alike. (Don't ask me how that all works, I don't know.) Interesting guy, to say the least. I will be reading more about him.

Well, it's Easter Sunday (or Zombie Jesus day, as I prefer to call it) and Kodiak and I are about to go fossil hunting in Pot Creek with our friend Thomas and his kids.

Actually I just read that the name "Easter" is derived from the original pagan name for this spring-time holiday of birth and fertility, so I should probably just stick to Easter. 

Happy Easter!

Veering Off Temporarily...

This post is going to veer off, at least temporarily, in a different direction than normal.
In fact, I have some doubts about whether these thoughts are even appropriate for this blog, but I decided a long time ago to just make this blog about my life and thoughts. Plus, there's a chance that this could all end up being relevant to my artwork...

Not long ago I was waiting impatiently for my biography of Caravaggio to arrive in the mail, when Christina suggested I start reading a book called 'Sapiens,' which is a short history of humanity on earth. The writing is great (very engaging and smooth) and although I was skeptical that such a book would hold my interest, I found that I didn't want to put it down.

Well I am the kind of guy who likes horror movies and finds serial killers fascinating, but about 100 pages into Sapiens I read something which left me genuinely shaken, and I've been afraid to pick up that book ever since. What I read was that every time homo sapiens has colonized a new land mass (such as, notably, Australia) we have decimated the animals we found there. Before people landed in Australia there were 22 species of megafauna (big animals), including a marsupial lion! We promptly made 21 of those go extinct.

This bit of history doesn't sound that devastating, right? But it thoroughly undercut my naive understanding of things. I'd always imagined that aboriginal populations around the globe had intuitively lived in harmony with nature, and that the current crisis of the environment was a byproduct of our modernized, technological way of life. If we could just get back to the wisdom of pre-tech cultures, I thought, we could get things back in balance. But guess what? We are a destructive force. Those "idyllic" pre-tech cultures were also excellent at killing everything they found, just in slightly different ways than we do now.

Are you aware that in the last 50 years, populations of wild animals the world over have decreased, on average, by 60%? Are you aware that if things continue in that direction, it will be extremely bad for humans also? It takes a real skill... the skill of disassociating oneself from reality... to NOT care about that. (Take a few minutes to watch this video. It's a David Attenborough project, so it's even-handed, and not alarmist or partisan. If you like the video, there are more great ones on that page. These videos have informed this blog post even more than Sapiens.)

I'd like to be optimistic about this situation, but I'm not. I think my generation, those of us in our 40's and 50's, are like lobsters in a slowly boiling pot. We didn't have to think about this stuff when we were young, and we didn't learn how to think about it. The younger generations do give me hope. They seem to think things can improve. I hope they are right. 

A few posts ago I wrote about the short-term thinking and selfishness that motivate and define conservative thinking. The situation facing our planet right now demands leadership and unity. How can we have leadership when this country actually elects dangerous idiots like that fuckface in the White House? How can we have unity when the principal criteria for liking a policy in this political environment is that the other guys don't like it?

The modus operandi of the political right is so transparent. They desire power and money above all else, but the only way to maintain it is to stay in office. How do you stay in office when your positions and policies are so obviously disadvantageous for the vast majority of the populace.. the very people whose votes you need? You stir up fear... fear of gays, fear of muslims, fear of Mexicans, fear of abortion, fear of change. Get the people afraid, and they will vote for you... because you will protect them from all that stuff which threatens their "way of life." If you succeed and get elected, then... great! Now it's time to rape the environment and the lower classes for all they've got, so that you and your buddies can keep living in luxury. The selfishness and short-term vision is astonishing. It's disgusting. Rich people who don't give a shit about anyone else's welfare are the ONLY segment of the population who can honestly vote Republican; everyone else is being tricked into voting against their own interests. And an undereducated populace is an advantage to the Right, because dumb voters won't see all this quite as clearly.

But the Right is the party who decided that the USA will withdraw from the Paris Accords, and who keeps loosening regulations on industry, and who is gutting our environmental agencies, and who is authorizing drilling in natural preserves, and running pipelines through Native American lands without their permission, and and and... so this is not all just political games; there are real ramifications for the earth. They either can't see, or simply don't care, that this attitude will hasten the degradation of our planet.

I think that if I didn't have a kid, it would be a lot easier for me to assume an ironic distance from these concerns and think "Oh well, what the fuck. The earth is going to go down in flames and there's not much to do about it." But I do have a kid, and my ability to distance myself from all of this has been hobbled. The fact that I do care makes me angry at the people who are dragging down the planet for their own selfish reasons. How can a person who thinks and feels vote for the right? How is it possible? I don't understand it.

I believe that in the long term, we humans will probably snuff ourselves out, and that the planet will be better off without us. Something else will come to take our place. Hopefully that something else will do a better job of stewarding their home. Or, maybe, a small percentage of humanity will survive... and maybe they will learn the lesson. Maybe they will be the "wise elder" version of humanity. It's too bad that it's probably going to take an apocalypse to wake us up.

When all of this hit me a few days ago, I had to stop reading the news for a few days; it was just too depressing. They say that activism is one cure for this kind of unblinkered vision of just how bad things are. Maybe I should try that. In the meantime Christina and I are committed to finishing the installation of the solar electricity system for our home and to buying an electric car. It doesn't seem like much, but we want to do what we can... and it's important to show our son that these small steps can and should be taken. 

All this puts ENDGAME into a new light. Not really a different light... maybe just a brighter one.

I've actually started my first painting since "educating" myself through Mark Carder's site. It's not technically my first painting, but it's the first one in which I sort of feel like I know what I'm doing. It's a practice run for my big painting and I think it's coming out well.
I find that I am daydreaming about how to combine this vision of the coming apocalypse with the female form... in a painting. Blade Runner 2049 and Mad Max Fury Road are two films that come to mind that did a nice job with this combo. The very last two episodes of Wicked Wanda also ventured into similar territory. (If you click the Wanda link, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the last two stories for a tongue-in-cheek look at a post-apocalyptic future.)

OK, I know that this sort of post is not everybody's cup of tea. Some readers will not agree with what I've written above (discussing politics is so effective at dividing people!) and others will just think that discussing politics is boring or uncouth. Personally, I think that discussing politics is divisive, boring, and uncouth, so we're on the same page. I would like to promise you that I won't discuss that sort of thing again, but... I can't. What I can say is that I'm ready to switch gears now.

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I had an interesting (though brief) discussion with my mom the other day which started out with her asking me "Why do you like Caravaggio so much?" What I realized, and what I've been pondering ever since, is that I am drawn to certain artists because of a mixture of interest in both their work and their lives, their biographies. And... the ways that the work and the biography influence each other.

The three artists which come to mind who fit neatly into what I am getting at here are Francis Bacon, Alexander McQueen, and Caravaggio. While I genuinely like the work produced by all three of these guys, what elevates my appreciation of the work even higher is an appreciation of their life stories. All three were gay, as I pointed out previously (actually it seems Caravaggio was bisexual) but what's really quite a bit more important is that all three were complicated, tortured individuals, and all three were major iconoclasts. Each one found a way to channel his personal angst into an art that was totally original, totally personal, and that totally broke with his contemporaries. Each of them created darker and more challenging work in difficult times of their lives. To some degree it begs the question: Do you have to be tortured and maladjusted to create lasting work of genius?

If I had to hazard a guess to the above question, I would say "No, but it doesn't hurt."

Joy Division, whose fame only seems to grow over time, comes to mind here too. 

Well, I said I'd started my first "real" painting. 

I took this picture this morning, and then painted all day (which was really fun!) and so I'm quite a bit farther on it now than when this photo was taken. Thanks, Oswald, for making me a real easel.

In the next few weeks I have a ton of Hand of Man related work to do, so finding time to paint might be hard... but I will try.

If you made it this far, 

Cheers