"It will give you a pony that shits $20 dollar bills."

 Your stupidity has killed me...I'm no longer alive.

Quick...must...make...knuckles drag harder

Kepler spacecraft with 95 megapixel camera

Hundreds of new planets have been discovered by Nasa's new space probe, sparking new hope of life outside our solar system.
Up to 140 of the newly-found planets are rocky and Earth-like containing both land and water, conditions which could allow simple lifeforms to develop.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1297499/Deep-space-probe-finds-hundreds-new-planets.html#ixzz0uis2BgFl

This is pretty cool.
Yet, ironically, Know Nothing(ness), Teabaggery and fundamentalism (of every stripe) expands as the world shrinks.

Science has been their enemy all along.

UPDATE:
Apparently the scientist should have said Earth-sized planets instead of "Earth-like" planets.

Painting #9 (final)

Painting #9 of 9        (30" x 31 1/4")

Details:

I continue to figure things out. They are entirely situational (and self-seducing). The process boils down to chasing a series of subjective visual hooks that I eventually blunt, obscure or eliminate..

While each painting has illuminated an aspect of what I want to do, I really am beginning to like doing them. I enjoy it as a practice, something I can do daily with the simple goal of moving on to the next one...and finally...to have a completed painting require the next one.

View preliminary states and comments below the break.

The Pixies

One of the best alternative bands of the late 80s, early 90s.

Complex, loud, and beautiful music.



One more.

Painting #8 (final)

Painting #8 of 8           (30" x 31 1/4")

Details:

My approach is changing as I do these...certainly more thoughtful. Or at least doing more deliberate work alongside the direct and impulsive. I am learning (possibly again) that there are more places I can go as I work...more mindsets. It has been so long since I painted regularly, I honestly don't remember if I was conscious of "wearing different hats" as I painted.

 View preliminary states and comments below the break.

Well done (and bleak)

Animation and Direction by BLU
Produced and Distributed by ARTSH.it
Soundtrack by Andrea Martignoni


Very ambitious on-site painting and animation (check out their equally creative website at blublu.org).
I like how the painting/drawing seeps through and incorporates pre-existing graffiti and urban/industrial decay.

Happy Fourth of July!

Welcome to the 21st century where, politically, we will live out the 20th century in reverse...sort of. Or better yet, to conduct politics as a vaudeville review of the 20th century's low points...to gradually unwind real progress, cultural or scientific, because it's too hard to lie and bamboozle in the face of an enlightened population.
Post-modern empowerment...yay!


Sound familiar?


You can make horseshit look glitzy and informed.


Don't mess with Texas (as it cranks out stupid kids).

For fun, and greater effect, play all the video clips at the same time.

Painting #7 (final)

Painting # 7 of 7              (30" x 31 1/4")


Details:

This one was interesting to work. Even though it required more effort (revisions and re-thinks), I felt more confident that I could get the thing to go in a better direction when it had crashed.
I was able to approach it in different ways as well...not just with "rough-handed" brushwork, but also, at times, a calmer hand.

View preliminary states and comments below the break.

Riding a tiger

When I was doing this years ago, there was always a point where I couldn't work a painting any further without it seizing up, becoming mannered or just tickled (and it showed). With this painting, I was able to keep it suspended longer, make critical changes and course corrections along the way...persist.

Painting #6 of 6       (30" x 31 1/4")

Details:

View preliminary states of the final painting below the break.

This guy is a pitch-perfect political assassin

A couple of things:
The political and media theater that this clip represents is rather disgusting...okay...especially that it followed the Biden's "Super Soaker" picnic that many of these journalists attended.

But...the political instincts of this sharp elbowed Democratic veteran "reluctantly" taking on another tone deaf Republican talking point is brilliant. When finally "coaxed" by the White House Press Corps to address Joe Barton's undemocratic apology to BP, he destroys Barton and the Republican's position on the oil spill. He makes it clear that the corporatist, big business loving, free-market wanking Republicans don't give a shit about the "real americans" they always claim to represent.

Great-grandparents

 

Butler County, Ohio 1918

This photograph of my great-grandparents and their children (my grandfather is standing on left) has always intrigued me. My grandfather's sisters are rather frightening. He regularly gave accounts of his sisters' cruelty toward him (with the exception of Ruth, far right). 

 

His father was born in Canada of Scottish parents, who migrated to Connecticut. My great-grandfather was a farmer like his father before him.

 

His mother was born in New Jersey and in the 1880s moved with her family to southwest Ohio. My great-grandmother was a member of the United Methodist Church and regularly taught and performed music and musicals for her church and the local Grange.

 

I have no accounting of my great-grandparents age or the circumstances around their meeting and marriage. 

My grandfather.

He learned farming as a boy, but initially worked at the Ford manufacturing plant in Hamilton, Ohio. Just before the stock market crash of 1929, he became a policeman in Hamilton and later a motorcycle patrolman. His time as a cop was notorious and mythic (largely as a result of his alcoholism). Around the beginning of WWII, he retired from the force (was asked to leave) following an off-duty motorcycle accident (that nearly took his left leg). He returned to the work of his father, farming and farm management, which he did well around his alcoholism. He would regularly make arrangements to move to another farm job just ahead of going on a binge. Consequently my grandmother and mother lived in many different parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Boy needs a haircut...

I almost passed out from laughing when I saw this 30 years ago. Eugene Levy's Floyd the Barber is the best.

I apologize for not being high-minded today...

Given the current situation, this is in bad form. But I hadn't heard of the Uzbeks until I saw this bit on SCTV.

Another painting...

(#5 of 5)    30" x 31 1/4"

(Painting #5, details)

I think this one is finished. The marks, lines, shapes and palette are starting to move beyond a phantom-like recall...slowly becoming current, more now than mere physical memories of having once painted.

The Right is always wrong

I've posted some version of this before, but it's worth a look every  month or so. One might listen to this and think..."Why so harsh Mr. Burroughs? After all you're dead, and certainly things have improved in the past 24 years"
Just read a Sarah Palin Facebook post. Listen to Rand Paul talk about how mountain top removal is okay if the mountain belongs to you or your company. Watch anything uttered by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Think about the politics of South Carolina and Arizona.
Oh, let us not forget the Gulf of Mexico.

You can never be too harsh when discussing the American right wing.




UPDATED: American politics have become a zero sum game. Let's face it, some of the right wing, libertarian and fiscal conservative bullshit is attractive to a lot of Americans. Processed within a life of work, debt, fear and hassles of every proportion, the "I've got mine, screw you!" mentality hits a chord.

Whether the issue is guns, re-segregating private businesses, illegal immigration or the deficit, a moderately clever right wing strategist can appeal to a large number of Americans who struggle enough on a daily basis to have long ago walked away from the idea of citizenship; the concept that the real founders folded into both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (and yes, they were wealthy and white, but philosophically visionary). The challenge that the founders faced (and well meaning Democrats/liberals still face today), is convincing the population to take the bet that helping the least among us, and advocating for the middle class over corporate power, will benefit the whole and preserve a modicum of social stability and harmony. The more rightward politics move, the less anyone really benefits.

Come on...reasonable federal gun laws, the EPA, Social Security, Medicare...state sponsored law enforcement, fire protection and local social services for the poor, the addicted and the crazy...does anyone really think that eliminating these things will make life better?

Really? Come on.

A Painting

(#4 of 4)    30" x 31 1/4"

Reaching back to my own painterly abstraction from the early 80s. I have been trying to work through "not painting:" many years of not painting. Consequently, I thought it was necessary to mine old ways to see if I can cycle up to the present. To keep it going, it seemed that tapping into "pleasure principle" work of my past might help me want to work.

Who knows, maybe in a few months I'll be (re)doing the disconnected image and text anchored work of the "late capitalist" period (late 80s-90s)...you know...images of a smiling Ronald Reagan, barking dogs and a mushroom cloud.

Memorial Day, 1994

My mother when she was a teenager.

She died on May 30th...16 years ago. I still miss her.

Leon Golub

Mercenaries IV, 1980

I studied with Leon Golub in the mid-80s. He was a mystery before I met him...I only "knew" him through his work...very large paintings with a dark perspective.
In reality, he was very thoughtful, generous, gentle, and funny. He pushed young artists to read art criticism and write about their work and the cultural/political moment...to become aware of the assumptions and speculation that surrounds artmaking, and the art object...to become familiar with the players, other than the artists, that actually shape, promote and often misdirect the life of an art object.

Leon was from Chicago, it was subtle, but growing up with a family from Milwaukee, I always felt there was something familiar in his physical gestures and speech; a "son of an immigrant" toughness that existed in the upper mid-west, a crucible for labor unions and social activism.

The clips below were lifted from Golub/Spero, a documentary produced by Kartemquin Films.






Later, his work did change from the iconic canvasses of the 70s and 80s. In 2001 he described his new work:

"my work these days is sort of political, sort of metaphysical, and sort of smart-ass."

He was a funny guy who consistently worked just beyond the art world's approval.



















Stop Rushing Me!, 2003

American art museums are still slow to embrace Golub's overtly political work...given this decade's revelations of government sanctioned torture and covert operations...why does this body of work remain "controversial?"

Ridiculous.

For Ramiro

My solitary blog follower...



...oh, and fuck Arizona.

We can only hope that all this christo-fascist, regressive, racist, teabagging bullshit is a sign that the fever induced delirium of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush era is about to break.