Mark Romanek directs music videos. His website is a great example of the web providing supplementary and explanatory material to more traditional forms of media. His music videos are all online in quicktime and you can read original treatments and see on set photographs. Romanek directed the video for Jay-Z’s 99 Problems this year and the video for Johnny Cash covering NIN’s Hurt in 2003. These are both great videos, and they complement each other perfectly. They are both by quintessentially American artists who work in quintessentially American forms, but their music could not be more different. Both videos offer recapitulations of the artists path and the choices they have made. The video for Hurt suggests that Cash wouldn’t change a thing, while the video for 99 Problems suggests how easily things could have ended differently for Jay-Z. And they both illustrate what music videos can do best: provide an alternate narration for a song, expose meanings you hadn’t considered before, evoke new resonances.

If you have any appreciation of the psychedelic G-Force software — also known as the iTunes Visualizer — check out G-Force Gold Upgrade. I post this as an excuse to reinforce my meme-child: Andy O’Meara has more than earned a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellowship. Make his Christmas merry with a purchase, if the spirit moves you.

Fametracker :: The Fame Audit :: John Ritter

I cheerfully tolerated Three's A Crowd, the ill-advised spin-off that was almost as ill-advised and unnecessary as AfterM*A*S*H*. I watched all the episodes of Hooperman, the before-its-time dramedy with no laugh track. And I will always sit through Hero At Large, the 1980 movie in which Ritter plays a guy who's mistaken for a superhero, whenever I catch it on cable, which is increasingly infrequently these days. (...)

[It seems] somehow fitting that Ritter should be overshadowed even in death, because he was often overshadowed, or at least taken for granted, in much of his life.

David: You'll get a free trip around the White House. You say, 'I wanna come and see it,' and they say. 'Oh yes, please come along.' I mean there aren't many people who can do that - you know, go and have a quick look around the Oval office. But that's about it. That, and maybe a restaurant reservation. And there's nothing else! Believe it, there is nothing else fame's good for.

"Three's Company" looks goofy enough in memory, basing almost every plot on Roper or Furley overhearing something and completely taking it out of context, but the writers get credit for making their slapsticky situations feel real. And Ritter gets the most credit, for carrying the whole goofy enterprise on his broad shoulders. His Jack was never cruel, never a jerk. You could write a book about the show's attitudes towards gays and women, but you never got a sense that any of that came from Ritter.

artnet.com: Tripping on the Wall “Since the late 1980s, the New York artist Fred Tomaselli has been celebrated for visionary artworks made of intricately collaged images clipped from magazines and nature guides and also including, somewhat more notoriously, marijuana leaves, pharmaceutical pills and other literally mind-altering substances.”

Stereo Images - Time for Space—“Experimenting here with a way to present stereo images on the screen by simply putting the right and left images in an animated gif.” [via MetaFilter]

Moroccan weavers use a multitude of designs. Sometimes they are of things from everyday life, such as a car or an animal. More often, they are geometric shapes -- stars, diamonds or zigzags. Weavers are very clever and imaginative in using patterns to decorate their work.

Tyree Guyton’s “OJ House” has been dismantled and sold.

originally posted by xowie

The Spector Watch by Alison M. Rosen.

originally posted by xowie

The top result of a google image search on ‘p2p art’:

Metaphorically, the path of the wounded healer, or the journey of the shaman has very important implications for the future of spirituality. No other metaphor sufficiently deals with the journey of humanity. We are wounded, and whether we're going to be the wounded victim, or the wounded healer is our choice. We have wounded the planet. We have wounded our genes. We've wounded the coming generations. Whether we make some remediation to the environment, and to our psyches, is something that only time will tell.

The next day people in like radioactive suits came out with tongs to pick up the poor thing. They put it in a big metal canister and took it away. Sure enough, it was rabid, and I had to go through all these shots in the fleshy parts of the stomach area, and in my back. The antitoxin that they injected me with contained dead dried duck embryo and it would leave a lump under my skin. It was very painful. I think that stopped me from picking up dead animals for awhile. (...) It was a medical school morgue, so we prepared the bodies for dissection. When a new body came in, if no one else was there, I would do a simplified Tibetan Book of the Dead ritual, calling their name, and encouraging them to go toward the light.(...) I experienced a vision where I was in a courtroom being judged. I couldn't see the face of the judge, but I knew the accuser was a woman's body who I had violated in the morgue work. She was accusing me of this sin. I said "It was for art's sake." This excuse didn't hold up under scrutiny for the judge. I was put on lifetime probation and not forgiven. The content of my work and my orientation would be watched from that point on. It made me consider the ethical intentions of my art. The motivation that moves us to creative work is critical. (...) I hope that death will be like a cosmic orgasm, where I'm released into convergence with the infinite one. Certain tantric traditions have sexual rituals to be performed in charnel grounds, and there are some pretty intense paintings of Kali astride corpse Shiva. (...) Even young children know the fear. (...) It was prior to my name change that I went to the North Magnetic Pole, and I shaved half my head of hair, in alignment with the rational and intuitive hemispheres of the brain. (...) The painting acts a portal to the mystical dimension. (...) That was an extraordinary trip that really convinced me of the reality of the transpersonal dimensions. We experienced the same transpersonal space at the same time. That space of connectedness with all beings and things through love energy seemed more real to both of us, than the phenomenal world. (...) It seems to me the universe is like a self-awareness machine. I think the world was created for each individual to manifest the boundless experiences of identity with the entire universe, and with the pregnant void that gives birth to the phenomenal universe. That's the Logos. That's the point of a universe, to increase complexity and self-awareness. The evolution of consciousness is the counter-force to the entropic laws of thermodynamics that end in stasis, heat death, and the loss of order. The evolution of consciousness appears to gain complexity, mastery, and wisdom. Lessons are learned over a lifetime-- maybe many lifetimes. And the soul grows and hopefully attains a state of spiritual awakenedness. Buddha was the "Awakened One". To be able to access all the simultaneous parallel dimensions, and come from a ground of love and infinite compassion like the awakenedness of the Buddha, is a good goal for the evolution of consciousness. The spiritual "fruit" in many spiritual paths is compassion and wisdom.

R.A.: Most of the drawings in it are of Aline. Is she your muse?

R.C.: Oh, you know. She's around a lot, and she always wanted me to draw her. Back in the 70's and 80's, she'd say: ''I'll pose. I'll pose.'' After about half an hour, she'd say, ''Can I go yet?''

L.E.: Do girls ever dress up like one of your fantasies to meet you?

R.C.: When Aline first met me, she used to dress up to suit my fancy. She kind of got tired of that. She used to put on white knee socks and these little schoolgirl outfits. She was a lot chubbier in the early days. Now she's gotten quite thin. It's a little disheartening to see her derrière go down. But she's happier being that way, so what the heck. But she's still quite muscular. She says her ideal body type now is Lance Armstrong's.

originally posted by xowie

A match is approaching the American flag.

pencil carving

Most of the world cried out at the slaughter of the people of Guernica. Such bombings were considered highly inhumane and Picasso's painting caught much of the outrage that was shared by most civilized people... Perhaps remembering the original horror and revulsion that was felt in 1937 after the bombing of Guernica will remind us that the bombing of civilians is a hideous and immoral practice of eliminating helpless and innocent people whose only crime is living in a war zone.

originally posted by daiichi

originally posted by daiichi

FROM THE POETRY BLOTTER OF EARL S. STONAH, ESQ.

Taxicab, pouring
ass rain. I'm trying to meet
my sweet baby Jane.

Peer out the window
what do I see? Cupid's bow
pointing straight at me.

originally posted by daiichi

I’d like to invite you to explore the randomWalks wiki. [Thanks to riley dog for that poor fucker with the scissors.]

(Basically) every day for the past 6 years I have painted with watercolor for an hour. This activity has proved to be one of the most important aspects of my process, I believe there is a lot to be said for a daily practice. Since the possibility of being able to observe cycles by keeping work in chronological order appeals to me AND since I feel dealing with process is about honoring the ugly as well as the beautiful, keeping a bound journal was the next step.

originally posted by xowie

During the first days of Ocean View, Abramovic seemed restless, moving around, no doubt, so she would not drift mentally. She had to stay "present." She knew she would face this. First the boredom, then the pain. She had turned her most banal activities into rituals: showering, peeing, drinking water. By day three, she had taken to standing for long periods at the edge of the center platform, right behind the knife ladder. She looked shaky, vulnerable, like a person on a tightrope.

originally posted by xowie

Visitors to the exhibit will be encouraged to make their own cow poetry by taking a tiny cardboard cow, writing a word on it and setting it down on the vibrating board from an old electric football game so it can wander and interact with other cows.

originally posted by xowie

"He'll have jazz playing up his ass all day long! Man, he'll be sorry he met me, 'cause I don't let nobody run my life for me. I'm a man. Can't he see that? I'm a man. And I ain't doing nothing just 'cause some bus driver says so."

originally posted by xowie

"I would say tiki, and people would say, `What's that?" said Mr. Fisherman, scratching his goatee, his eyes wide behind rectangular glasses. "Nobody had ever heard of it. I was sad."

originally posted by daiichi

Sedona, Arizona, Takes on the Big Boys of Sculpture, by my homegirl Patti Cohen.

originally posted by daiichi

The amount of time depicted is so great that the record at [the La Brea tar pits] began one-hundredth of an inch from the end of the ribbon.