BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

One of the nicest things the recent Holiday Season brought me was six new canvases and a box of new paints (thanks to assorted family and friends who know that enabling my artistic wrongdoings is the way to my black little heart). I'm starting off 2015 in some good, self-indulgent fashion.

 

Art addiction is a jones like any other. You have to create. When you run out of material to create with you need to improvise. When you run out of room for what you're creating, well.....it doesn't matter, because you still have to create. There are little road blocks, sure, but you need to improvise. Faced recently with a space crisis, I've spent the last several months dumpster diving for cardboard boxes that I've been makeshifting into “canvases”.

The boxes present their own kinds of problems....because they're flatter than a traditional canvas they're easier to store and they take up a lot less space. The downside is that because they're all oddly

sized, I have no idea how I'm going to frame and/or mount these things in any kind of a nice presentation.

'Nice presentation”, of course, has never been my forte. 

For the time being, anyway, I'm good on canvas and so I'm reverting back to the normal format. The Space Crisis is an ongoing issue, though-----but like I already said----with an Art Jones you create by any means necessary.

 

RANDOM CRIPCRAP:

All kinds of hype seems to be surrounding this TV mini-series called “The Slap” that's coming out soon. Saw an ad for it and it looks like shit---no huge shock, I suppose. A neighborhood and a family is divided over some guy smacking his kid.

You're joking, right?

Ooooohhhh.....what if it happened in YOUR neighborhood????

There seems to be this running paranoid delusion, mostly among people who fetishize hurting children, that if you so much as swat an errant kid on the butt, Hillary Clinton, DHS and a legion of UN Peacekeepers are going to descend on your lawn, remove your children and issue some kind of PC Smackdown. I've yet to see this scenario play out in any kind of realistic fashion, but we do seem to keep hearing stories about kids dying from what someone considers to be “good, old fashioned discipline”, and none of these folks seem to have any good responses for that.

And then I looked and saw that the crux of this miniseries is some adult slapping a kid who is NOT HIS OWN.

OH.

(Channeling Gilda Radner) That's very different. NEVER MIND.

Or maybe it's NOT that different. I don't know. I don't give a shit.

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Between blogs I heard that any/all local newspapers are officially kaput-----they had really been busted down a lot over the last few years, I guess....the Corporate Consolidation Monster just took another big bite and what's left of these papers will basically be a newsier version of the Parade section attached to the ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE.

As ever. Money talks and localism walks....media's a shambles and the streamlining from the overlords ain't helping much....of course, I have to recall some of the feuds me & mine have had over the years with local editorial staffs-----that of the NWA TIMES in particular---and think if they'd spent a little less time doing hack jobs on local activists or toadying up to local politicians and real estate interests, maybe their journalistic pedigree would be a little more robust and it would have been harder to defend killing them.

So-----sorry to hear it.....but not THAT sorry.

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THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS-Piougheed/Widowermaker

BUTTER 08-Self-titled

HAWKWIND-Levitation

HAWKLORDS-25 Years On

ROBERT CALVERT-Hype: Songs of Tom Mahler