American Graffiti.

When I photograph street art I never think of myself as making art; I think I’m merely documenting someone else’s work. I know it’s much more complicated than that. After all I’m choosing how to frame the work I’m photographing, choosing the camera, even if it is just my phone, the distance between me and the work. Sometimes I crop the image, and if altering a picture isn’t an artistic process I don’t know what is. There are also other factors like the ambient lighting that I can’t control—or that I could partially control by choosing to come back at another time. Nature photographers sometimes try to capture their subjects either at sunrise or sunset, considering the lighting optimal at those times.

So I recognize that the pictures I take of other people’s art are, themselves, art, but I try not to think of them that way. After all I’m looking at the art critically—not in a negative sense, but I’m trying to understand what the artist was trying to convey. Because it’s street art I have no way to talk to the artists. It’s their work that speaks for itself, and I like it that way. Some artists are happy to describe their work, the inspiration, what they meant by it, but I enjoy it when an artist just puts the work out there and leaves it up to us to understand it, to decide what it means.

I’m breaking my own rule a bit here, though. I found this red balloon when I was out for a walk and decided to put it next to the red building, among the green plants, next to the red No Parking sign. I made this little scene—sort of. The balloon was out on the street. I have no idea where it came from, and the red building—Gilda’s Club—just happened to be near where I found it, as did the sign and the plants. All that got me thinking about how much art is a result of coincidences. I know some artists dismiss or downplay inspiration. They talk about how much time they spend learning skills, honing their craft, all of it so they can be ready when inspiration strikes to make the most of it. I haven’t really studied photography but I’ve spent a lot of time looking at art and studying things like composition and I feel like all that was preparation that allowed me to take advantage of this confluence of events to make a picture.

As for what it means I leave that up to you.

An employee of a German museum has been fired for smuggling his own artwork in and hanging it on the walls. I haven’t seen the artwork but I can already say I like his style. Yes, I understand that museums can’t let in just any artwork by anyone—there always has to be a certain amount of gatekeeping and at least some basic philosophy or statement of purpose, but it was a gallery of contemporary art. You can’t get any more contemporary than someone who currently works for the museum. Also it’s not as though he broke in or that he wasn’t authorized to be there. The museum’s being very circumspect about his specifics but he worked in Technical Services. I worked in Technical Services for a library, which was a catchall term for everything from the mailroom to paying invoices and assisting with collection decisions.

And why, instead of turning it into a criminal matter, couldn’t the museum take the opportunity to have a community discussion about what qualifies as museum-worthy art, who gets to decide, and why? I cringe when I hear the term “outsider artist”, which usually refers to self-taught artists, but why is that term never applied to Francis Bacon (the 20^th century painter, not the 15^th century philosopher)? Mostly because he was established decades before the term “outsider artist” was coined, but he also had connections to upper class British patrons and was friends with prominent art critics, which made him very much an insider. But he was still self-taught, as are many artists.

For that matter why is it that when Banksy sneaks his works into museums it’s considered an art stunt, if not a form of art in itself, but when someone who works in a museum does the same thing it’s a crime?

I understand the museum couldn’t just let this stand but, in addition to using it as an opportunity for discussion, couldn’t they have just docked the artist’s pay, made him responsible for fixing the holes in the wall? They don’t want to encourage copycats—fair enough, but one way to do that could be to provide staff an outlet—or inlet, giving them a chance to be more than just workers. Most people are drawn to work in museums because they have an interest in art. Why not tap into that?

This also reminds me of the time I was talking to librarian who worked in a music library. I said to him that it was cool he played so many instruments. He smirked and said, “You know everybody who works here is a musician, right?” I didn’t know that, and I wonder why.

It’s a local shop for local people. There’s nothing for you here! Source: Tellyspotting

A friend of mine who’s from Chicago is really annoyed by a recent story about the best Chicago-style pizza—the deep dish stuff—being found in California. There are a few things to keep in mind here. The first is the ranking came from Yelp so there’s not exactly a lot of control. Another thing is that taste, especially in food, is really subjective and there are a lot of factors that influence it, including price, which is why you can pour cheap wine in an expensive bottle and wine snobs will love it. Also the best Chicago deep dish pizza I’ve ever had, which was the first time I had it, was in Chicago. A lot of things that had nothing to do with the pizza itself made it great: I was with good friends, we’d had a fun evening, and it was nine o’clock at night and we hadn’t eaten since a little before noon. I also mentioned that I’d never tried deep dish pizza and that’s all it took for us to decide we wanted some. We wandered down the street from our hotel and asked a nice cop where to go and she directed us to a place just one block over. It was a nice place with checkerboard floors and friendly staff.

There was also something special about having Chicago-style pizza in Chicago.

I get it: Chicagoans, like people in a lot of other places, take pride in things that make their city distinctive and when somewhere else lays claim to those things it can be annoying. It bugged me when KFC started selling “Nashville hot chicken”. I felt like something special that originated in Nashville, something people purposely go to when they come here, was being ruined by mass-production. It was losing its authenticity.

What’s authentic, though? I get defensive about Nashville hot chicken but I also love the fact that I don’t have to go more than a few miles to find restaurants that are Vietnamese, Korean, and Thai. I can get “certified” Neapolitan pizza, made with ingredients imported from Naples and baked in a special oven that’s been approved by a committee of Italian chefs. Across the street from the pizza place I can get sushi. Could I get similar sushi in Tokyo? Maybe, depending on where I went, but having it in Tokyo would feel different. Maybe it would even be better—or at least it would seem that way, even if it were made with the same ingredients.

In fact there’s a place just a few blocks from me where I can get an authentic Chicago-style hot dog. I could really go for one of those right now.

Would someone please pass the ketchup?  

Source: Yarn

I took a lot of books to the used bookstore, most of which I’d read, but it’s still always difficult for me to let any book go. There are some I’ll always treasure, and I’ve passed on a few when I know they’ll be appreciated. A friend of mine is a big Walt Kelly fan and, as much as I enjoyed a Pogo collection I had, I gave it to him without any regret because I knew he’d enjoy it even more.

The used bookstore is a little more of a crapshoot, though. I never know what they’ll take and what they’ll reject. It’s great when they take a book. I get a little money and, hopefully, it’ll find its way into the hands of someone who will enjoy it, maybe even treasure it. If they reject a book, though, I don’t know what to do with it. There are two big bins in front of the used bookstore where people drop their rejects, and I often see people going through those, looking for the wheat in the chaff. And since one person’s reject is another’s treasure it’s possible some of those will find someone who needs them. I saw a guy pull out a Windows 95 manual and carry it away so you never know what someone will consider useful.

I still have so many books I could part with, including more than a shelf of anthologies from college, which I’ve mostly held onto for sentimental reasons. Anthologies are great introductions to a wide range of authors but every time I look at them I think they’re for readers, not writers. Anthologies are like greatest hits collections, which are fine, but for aspiring writers the real lessons are in the deep cuts. It’s the forgotten or neglected works that can reveal an author working out the ideas that would eventually crystallize into what they’re known for, or that show their mistakes. The best lesson of all is that no one’s perfect all the time. It may even be possible that, doing a deep dive, you find something better than the anthologized work—after all, anthologists make mistakes too, and many anthologized works are pulled from previous anthologies.

That was a bit of a tangent but I also think used bookstores are the ideal place to find those neglected, forgotten works. After all they have a lot of stuff, and a lot of very specific categories.

I always wonder about the things I see left by the side of the road. Why are people throwing away that old couch? Or what looks like a perfectly good table? Or a chair? Most of the time stuff gets left there because they’ve called a removal service to come and take it away but I wonder, would they mind if I pulled over and grabbed it? Most of the time it’s not something I want or even have space for, and in the case of that old couch, if it’s rained recently it’s probably not even worth taking. It’s going to be consigned to a sad fate in a dump somewhere.

And then there was the piano. The house it was sitting in front of was being completely refurbished—I mean there was a construction crew tearing the house apart from the inside, leaving the outside mostly intact, I guess so they could completely update it with a modern design. Maybe the house was falling apart inside but had solid bones that they considered worth keeping. Most of the time in my neighborhood when a house gets sold, even if it seems to be a perfectly good house, it gets completely demolished so they can build a McMansion that’s too big for the lot and taller than any of the other houses, so it was nice to see the outside of a house being preserved.

What about the piano, though? Since I was taking pictures I also tapped a few of the keys—they were sticky. I don’t mean my fingers stuck to them, but they were hard to press down and didn’t make much sound. Some were okay but even my tin ear could tell they were seriously off-key. It reminded me of a piano my grandparents had in their front living room, which sat under a reproduction of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. Nobody ever played it except me—I liked tapping on the keys sometimes, but most of the time it sat closed. I never thought to ask why they even had it since no one in my family had any interest in music. Maybe, like the Gainsborough painting, it was just something post-war middle class suburban people had in their living rooms, along with overstuffed chairs and sofas.

There’s something special about a piano, though, something that makes me hope this piano will be rescued, that makes me hope the one from my grandparents’ house found a better home.

Here’s a song about rescuing a piano.

We have a wooden fence in the backyard and sometimes when I sit by it I feel like it’s watching me. I know it’s just pareidolia, that tendency to see patterns, usually faces, in random assortments of things. I’ve experienced it all my life but I wasn’t really conscious of it until I learned the term and then I realized how often it happens. But that’s no big deal because we all do it, right? Not everyone paints or draws but our ability to look at a work of art and see it as representing something, not just dabs of paint on fabric, is pareidolia. There’s really no such thing as truly “abstract” art because our brains will always perceive some kind of pattern or meaning in anything. Even the visually impaired perceive patterns in what they perceive. Pareidolia isn’t just visual–it can also be auditory. It makes evolutionary sense: camouflage is part of the arms race between predators and prey and being able to distinguish something hiding in the bushes is good for survival. Even if it turns out the bushes just look like there’s a jaguar in them at least we’re on alert. So we all experience it, right?

Then I read this article about how experiencing pareidolia is a sign of creativity and it’s made me really anxious. It says this:

Scientists are now exploring the connection between pareidolia and creativity; several recent studies have found that creative people are more apt to see pareidolias in the world around them than are less creative people. Assessing individuals’ capacity to recognize such patterns has even been proposed as a way to measure relative levels of creativity.

Am I experiencing pareidolia enough to legitimately call myself “creative”? What if I stop? Creativity is really important to me and always has been. I remember being told I was creative a lot as a kid. One example from second grade really stands out in my memory. My teacher, Mrs. Knight, had some kind of toy model kit in her classroom. It was like a Tinker Toy set but it combined hard pieces with colored flexible tubes. I found it one day and made an alien creature I called Boka. Boka was sort of a cross between a jellyfish and a giraffe, and I was marching it around the table when Mrs. Knight saw it and got really excited. She was always encouraging us to be creative—she was a great teacher—but Boka, this thing I’d just put together without much thought, seemed really imaginative to her. And that kind of recognition felt really good. Being creative felt like a superpower. Of course as my favorite superhero is famous for saying, With great power comes great responsibility. I felt pressure, all of it internal, to continue to be creative, to keep chasing that feeling. I also had, I think for the first time, a feeling that’s probably experienced by every person for whom creativity is important. What if this is the last thing I do? I couldn’t just keep copying Boka but what if I never created anything else that reached the same creative level, never elicited the same response? And that feeling never goes away. I get something published, or win a contest, and it feels great but I can never escape that thought of, what do I do next? What if this is my last success? In college a friend and I once talked about Van Gogh’s suicide–always a cheerful topic–and she said, “I believe he shot himself because he’d completely run out of ideas.” I thought, oh, if that were true I’d shoot myself at least three times a week.

Something else I think about, though, is that knowing what pareidolia is, and seeing examples of it, has probably caused me to see it even more. Creativity can actually feed off itself, and even if I didn’t come up with something on my own I can be inspired by the ideas of others. The article even says, “spending time looking at ambiguous figures ‘primes’ a creative mindset, inducing people to think with more fluency, flexibility, and originality.” Creativity is like a muscle. It can be strengthened through use.

The wooden fence in our backyard is really old and the knots are starting to wear down and disappear so to get that picture I had to look really hard for some that still look like eyes. So anyway there’s my workout for the day.

It’s spring which means boxes of Venus flytraps are springing up in the garden sections and next to the checkouts at hardware stores everywhere. I took that picture just a couple of days ago at a certain big box hardware store—blue or orange, take your pick—and I was pretty surprised that the plants looked like they were in good shape. And this is right after I read about two people charged with stealing nearly six-hundred Venus flytraps from the wild, which, for so many reasons, is a really stupid crime to commit. About the only smart thing they did was pick the time of year when Venus flytraps typically put up flowers which makes them easy to spot. Now let me get to just some of the reasons I can think of why stealing plants from the wild is a boneheaded thing to do:

-Venus flytraps are cheap. The small boxes in the picture above were five dollars. The large boxes were seven. I’m not sure why there was a difference since you’re getting the same plant either way. Of course a major retailer is going to buy plants for a lot less than that so once you figure the costs of getting to the plants, carrying them out, packaging them, then trying to unload them at a hardware store or nursery I don’t see how they could make a profit. Or how showing up at a garden center with a truckload of plants isn’t going to prompt as many questions as someone walking into a pawn shop with a box of brand new Rolexes.

-Venus flytraps are easy to propagate if you know what you’re doing. There are lots of plant sellers that specialize in carnivorous plants—California Carnivores is one of my favorites—and none of them sell wild-harvested Venus flytraps. For one thing it’s a felony to take the plants out of the wild. For another professionals have mastered cultivating the plants and have even produced cool varieties like the dark ‘Red Dragon’ so there’s no need to take plants out of the wild. Besides…

-Venus flytraps are really popular but they aren’t that easy to grow. They need a winter dormancy, they need extremely pure water, and they like a lot of sunlight. A cultivated plant grown in a nursery, though, is going to be hardier and better adapted to being grown on a windowsill or in a home garden. Wild plants, on the other hand, are more likely to die when transplanted. This is true of almost any wild plant. Even if you’re a professional chances are you’ll have a lot of trouble recreating the exact conditions it’s used to. If you’re some amateur who goes and digs up a wild plant in a protected area all you’ve done is destroyed someone else’s chances of seeing a natural wonder. Congratulations, asshole.

So there’s my annual public service announcement: leave the wilderness as it is and if you want a Venus flytrap buy one from an established nursery. Or go with the original.

Source: Medium

Source: Reddit

Several years ago I was taking some pictures of graffiti and met a guy who was painting over some of it. I talked to him a little bit and he said, “I don’t know why they keep doing it, they just make me have to come out and paint over it again.” He seemed annoyed so I didn’t say anything snarky about how taggers were providing him with job security, or that it was on a temporary wall that was around a construction site so it was eventually going to be torn down anyway so it didn’t make sense that he felt a need to paint over a few scribbled tags.

A friend shared the “What kind of paint are you using to paint over this?” with me because he knew I’d find it funny. I like the cleverness of it and the understanding of materials. My wife paints some—mostly with watercolors—and when I go with her to the art store I just get overwhelmed by how many options there are just for painting. There’s watercolor, oils, latex, tempera, even encaustic paints, and probably other types I’m missing. It always makes me think about how the effect an artist wants to achieve often depends on the medium they’ve chosen.

It also reminds me of the time I tried painting and I decided to use oils because that was a traditional medium. I didn’t realize that oils take forever to dry, or that they require thinning—if you just squeeze them out of a tube onto your palette and start painting with them they’re thick and show the brushstrokes. That’s fine if it’s the look you want but it wasn’t what I was trying to achieve. What I ended up with was thick impasto works, very much a Van Gogh style without the talent, but I wanted a smoother look. Also pizza boxes are not a great canvas for oil painting. I ended up selling the oil paints to my roommate who, unlike me, was taking art classes and had a better idea of how to use oil paints.

Here’s another fun cover-up effort.

Source: imgur

Source: ARTnews

So much has already been said about Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow, an obvious and apparently cheap knockoff of the Willy Wonka universe, that saying anything about it just feels like piling on. Yes, the “sad Oompa Loompa” compared to a Manet painting made me laugh more than it should have, although I’ve never thought of the woman in the original painting as sad and the woman playing the Oompa Loompa, well, in that picture she just got caught at a bad moment. She described the experience as “trying to be the sprinkles on shit” but that’s something I want to focus on: she was trying her best to take something bad, something that was far beyond her control, and make it enjoyable. She also said,

I didn’t want to let the people around me down. The actors I was working with are amazing people, and this has got nothing to do with them. So I just thought, I’m going to make the best of this.

I’m sad the whole thing was such a poorly planned fiasco that even the company that organized it has admitted they should have cancelled the whole thing instead of trying to make the best of it, and I get why the adults were upset. Paying £35 per ticket to go into a poorly decorated warehouse with a bouncy castle is ridiculous. I even understand that the kids were upset that it wasn’t all I’m sure they were told it was going to be and that in the end all they got was a handful of jellybeans and a small cup of lemonade.

I also have memories of going to something like it when I was a kid, only in my case it wasn’t nearly as terrible for several reasons. I was, I think, only four or five, and my aunt took me to the Cain-Sloan store downtown. I don’t remember if she told me why we were going—if she did I don’t think I understood that it was something special. It helped that there was nothing to anticipate. When we got there we joined a small group that was led through an Alice In Wonderland-themed tunnel. It used pictures from the 1951 Disney film, which I hadn’t seen and I didn’t know the story at that time. What I remember is that we went through a dark room decorated with pictures of things the cartoon Alice sees as she descends down the rabbit hole and a woman in a department store uniform recited a script, saying, “She fell and fell and fell.” I thought, who is she? Because I’d missed the entire introduction. Also I was only four or five and experiencing sensory overload. The woman’s performance wasn’t especially dramatic but I think she was probably just a cashier who got roped into being a tour guide/narrator and did the best she could.

Then we were led into what, in my memory, was probably an employee break room poorly decorated with paper cutouts, and folding tables scattered with pages from coloring books, loose crayons, and a few cups of candy. I think both Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny came in, but they stayed up on a stage at one end of the room and we weren’t allowed to actually talk to them.

I recognize now that it was bad but I had an okay time. Maybe it was free—a promotional event to boost sales—which would have kept the complaints down. I also think that, as a kid I didn’t have the critical awareness to recognize just how bad it was. I didn’t have any experiences to compare it to so I was just able to take it in and enjoy it.

I don’t know if parents putting on a positive attitude in front of their kids would have helped save Willy’s Chocolate Experience. Maybe even the youngest, most unaware kids saw it for the trashy money grab it was, but when I’ve done things with friends’ kids I’ve tried to be aware that, when you’re young, everything is new. Kids grow up so fast and will have most of their lives to be cynical, sarcastic, and bitter. During that brief time when the world is still new and strange then I’m glad some adults try to be the sprinkles on the shit.