a little collaboration

Life in Rural America: The Work of Matt Webster, pt. 2 from Painted On Productions on Vimeo.

thank you B40.

faces

i just finished finalizing some random portraits.  click the title of this post to check them out. thanks

By Matthew Webster 

Google.

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.“ Einstein

perfect

The Anti-Immigration Movement Goes Green | Mother Jones

here we go!

A Joyful Noise

A Joyful Noise: "

A few summers ago I heard that the historian David McCullough would be giving the commencement address at a fine-arts college in a small Connecticut town, and, finding myself in the area, I went around to listen. McCullough is my role model for his honorable conduct as a writer, and on this occasion, as always, his values were solid.

The graduating class only had 25 young men and women, and it would have been easy for McCullough to give a standard commencement talk, exhorting the young to go forth with high hopes and high ideals and love of country. Of course he didn’t. The code of honor says: Do it right. There’s no free lunch. He had written a talk specifically for those newborn artists–a talk generously furnished with helpful admonitions by great artists of the past. The one that I wrote down was by the American painter Robert Henri: “You should paint like a man coming over the top of the hill singing.”

Amen. That’s also how you should write, sing, dance, draw, sculpt, act, play an instrument, take a photograph, design a building, live a life. I often think I’m the only teacher who talks about enjoyment as a crucial ingredient in writing. My students seem puzzled that I keep coming back to the subject, that I find so much amusement in what I see and hear and read every day. Life is serious! Writing is serious! Most writers take the act of writing with grim solemnity, fearful that they won’t be worthy of the gods of literature scowling down from Mount Parnassus. Or is it that they take themselves so seriously?

When I write I make a conscious effort to generate a sense of enjoyment–to convey to my readers that I found the events I’m describing more than ordinarily interesting, or unusual, or amusing, or emotional, or bizarre. Otherwise why bother to describe them? I also try to convey the idea that I was feeling great when I did my writing–which I almost never was; writing well is hard work. But readers have a right to believe that you were having a good time taking them on your chosen voyage.

So, please, lighten up, even when the story you’re telling is a dark one. The family that you remember as impossibly dysfunctional also had a lot funny stuff going on. Humor will get you out of some of life’s most painful corners, as Frank McCourt proved in Angela’s Ashes. I’ll get to that next week.

(Copyright 2010 by William K. Zinsser) www.williamzinsserwriter.com



Read More Zinsser. . .

"

Faux Friendship

Faux Friendship

this article i found through UTNE. i was impressed.

a short story in process

july 18, 2009.  here is a short story i have nearly completed. it goes along with the photos below. i would love to hear if you enjoyed or despised it. thanks.

digital organization

so far i have been a little overwhelmed with the amount of save, share, read, mark, tag, options that are available for the individual media experience. this blog is intended to be among other things a way for me to design an appropriate effective media relationship. this will be a quick post to help clarify what i have learned so far, for you, and for myself.

facebook, gmail, ferrisconnect, youtube, pandora, delicious are only a tiny fraction of the networks that modulate my interaction with contacts, photos, research papers, bookmarks, news music and videos. that vast array of information is accessed in just as many ways. i chat with friends using facebook, i write and edit papers using my google account, i bookmark interesting and informative content using delicious, i listen to music by utilizing a number of websites, pages, forums, and downloading streaming suites. all of this while often exciting and fun, quickly becomes overwhelming and time consuming.

tv is interesting because it does not conform to the web medium. It has resisted the powerful absorption properties of the internet. but as lines between cable, satellite, and broadband telecommunication networks blur so will the tv/web experience. as this process continues i will probe the difference between tv and internet. i would like to be able to watch live cable television on my pc. i could take screenshots and be able to do interesting things with this in-process media journal.

so far i have began to shape up my online footprint. i want to be able to utilize the web without becoming consumed by it. here is where i am along this process:

i need facebook^^^^link profile. agh. this website offers a clean easy template to create, manage, and share a personal profile of yourself. it allows you to connect with people you do and dont know, and is an organized way to maintain personal relationships. it has worldwide the most users of any other social network (cite this in natgeo). not to mention, i have an extensive library of photo albums that i share using facebook. so far facebook remains an integral part of my online experience.
on the other hand, is facebook sufficient for handling all my media needs, would it be proper to use facebook to conduct this sort of journal(blog)? while facebook does contain blog like tools(notes and links) i have not found these features compelling or appropriate. i do not think that i would like to share all of my web discoveries on my profile. i belive facebook is more personal and that a library of scholarly bookmarks although convenient would be ultimately innappropriate. while facebook is a sort of journal in its own right it is a journal i would deem more private or managed than what other tools may provide. i will continue to monitor integration possibilities, because ultimately ONE digital journal remains temptingly utopian.

next, i need gmail. ^^^facebook has a mail feature but i would have to invite someone to facebook if they wanted to communicate***interesting point of distinction to discuss here. gmail is a robust email suite that allows access from any online computer and has an array of extension products making it nearly universal. it also is more professional facebook. i do have a number of other email addresses and again this journal has inspired the process of combining and managing these sources of contacts, information, and communication.
gmail also contains the advantage of a google account. this includes interesting features such as large file uploads, googledocs, Picasa, (blogger), a calendar, and many more. what this means is that google provides a conduit for electronic communication. gmail aside, with googledocs i am able to create, upload, share, and edit word documents, powerpoint presentations, and excel spreadsheets. i still utilize microsoft office products, but googledocs has been changing this with opensource nature of their product, and the beautiful management interface that is accessible from any computer. google calendar offers the same universal accessibility. picasa is a similar photo management software that lets me share and store photos online. i have not even mentioned googles outstanding search engine which is, at least now, a foundation for using google so broadly(or is this a good reason?***)
problems i have encountered with google is their current bookmarking tools. in the midst of google bookmarks, google chrome, google notebook, google books, googledocs, and googles history feature i became wearingly lost. from an ultracomprehensive history bar to a disconnected tagless! relationship between g bookmarks and g chrome, to a great but oddly misplaced sync feature in googledocs the concept of bookmarking seems to be lost on the giant of search engines. and so tragically google does not provide any sort of effecient, comprehensive, universal, diverse bookmarking process. in a perfect tech world i could bookmark from any browser on any computer, have tag and folder capability, sync options, and an multiple share capabilities. while the rest of the google suite is, so far, essential, the bookmark process is sadly inadequate and has spurred my attention to...

delicious.^^^link my delicious page
THUS! i am using delicious for the brun tof my bookmarking work. it offers access from any computer, easy tagging/organizing, and multi web browser support. i still bookmark particular sites in firefox, as well google bookmarks( ikeep a gadget on my igoogle page for often used links), and i am leaving open the option of using google chrome for this task. but for now the load of bookmarks i deem necessary to save goes to delicious.

so this is where i am at.

the goal is to be able to deal with accomodate any and all sources of information. i also want to be organized and precise. i also want to critically sort and sift the web to obtain the most meaningful relevant material. it is often overwhelming for example feeling like i need to read every single nytimes top stories blog update. i am considering how to filter this voracious stream of information properly and consciously. and even more importantly how to break out of the mainline this stream tends to flow with. what i mean is discovering unveiling creating information that is valuable, relevant, important, and unconsidered, unspoken. i cannot allow one two three even really good sources to dominate, train, and prescribe my thought. i must remain closely introspective parrallleing each channel of thought alongside my deep solemn contemplating self.

one of my next tasks is to filter my delicious bookmarks of advertising, of sites that only influence me to want. i figure if i want so adidas kicks ill go buy some. i dont need to have their website bookmarked. this is oddly difficult but should be rewarding. it will help my digital self my database to contain a purer content. ha maybe only superficially. well see.

alas this is one of my first real blog posts. i am learning how to make websites, how to read, save, cite, and share on the web. i am proud that i have a decent system established. i am still learning. next i would like to jump the hurdle that is making my home computer a server(accessible from anywhere on the internet). i sometimes feel the vanity of this enterprise is overwhelming. ill try not to lose that. please read. peace

time is the problem

another tedtalk. daniel kahneman speaks on the difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self.

deviantArt profile

so here is the link to an old gallery i use occasionally on deviantArt. check it out. comment. see what happens.

The Curse of Bigness | Orion Magazine

The Curse of Bigness | Orion Magazine

necessary illusions

here is a link to a film based on noam chomsky's book manufacturing consent.  in my opinion, one of the quintessential readings concerning politics and media.

raps i wrote recently

lately ive been rapping. my friend dj gooZ has a studio. so i scribble down a little poetry and then try and rap it. here are a few examples of the scribblin.  i am working on posting the hot trax too. be patient.

the state of media consumption

while intensely scouring the web to determine the best way to build this blog, my friend popped in this dvd. zombie media, zombie politics

here is a lovely photo glimpsed while perusing facebook. does this count as media? yes. politics? unsure.

privacy considered, the owner of these legs will remain anonymous.

The Family of Man

yesterday i found this wonderful photo anthology in an absurdly disorganized used book store in Kalamazoo, MI. i paid $5.30. the book is called The Family of Man and was exhibited in the MoMa NYC.

I also have included this google image search for your viewing pleasure.

i am very happy with the book.

teaching books to the rescue

this is a piece of media my mother excitedly pointed me to when i told her i was trying to make a blog.  she has a book called teaching adolescent writers by Kelly Gallagher.  The book referenced a couple of sites for writing help and blog guidance including:

NCTE.org
Writing.com

she also showed me another book which told how to make a classroom analog(manual) blog for unconnected schools.  this book is called but how do you teach writing? by Barry Lane.

thanks, Mom.