Manufacturing consent

    I liked this documentary. It talks about the invasion of east Timur and americas apethetic attitude towards sending aid or selling weapons. It points out how American society has been manipulated to keep a minority of white guys in power with all the wealth, resources, and media control. Bankers and brokers take your money, send the countries economy into a nose dive and get a huge contractual settlement for their sabotage. Capitalism, communism, socialism, anarchism, too many ism's for the simple fact that the mass majority of Americans believe everything they are told and are more concerned with the day to day than the actual mechanics of politics. We are all doomed if we continue to obsess with individual material gain. He gives us the common mans explaination of just how horrificly Skrewed up the world really is and motivates one to take an open mind when they walk the minefield of life.

Yea...so I've spent so many hours trying to figure this share ware photoshop program gimp, and this is about as far as I got. I still have allot to learn witht his immage manipulation stuff.

Spice Weasel......BAM!!!

So my roomate is a chef and he likes the show Futurama. For his birthday I made him a spice weasel out of sum old gaudy neck wrap or shoulder whatever that i picked up at a thrift store a teeshirt and a bottle of cirrache hot sauce. We use this thing almost every other day in the kitchen.

Man Vs. robot

"I don't care to consort with the robot race" ~Unknown Henson~

    Im all about random trivia games. spent a good deal of my childhood eating dinner while watching geopardy but I never thought much of robots in a positive light. I don't have cable, but I was able to find a full episode of geopardy on youtube with IBM's Watson computer/robot/screen face, whatever it's called. It's pretty impressive how fast "Watson" was at answering questions, and it kept the other contestants on their toes but left them in the dust. I beat the computer with a few questions and it felt pretty good, and I did find it amuseing that some of the answers were miss interpereted by the machine. The question was about car racing through city streets and roads and the robot kept repeating auto racing, auto racing. the answer was rally racing. With the two best geopardy contestants of all time losing to a robot I don't see how an entire season of geopardy featuring Watson would be enjoyable to watch.

Valentines Day / Apocalypto

 I'm a bit of  a cynical curmudgeon when it comes to valentines day so I thought I'd make a bunch of anatomical glass hearts today during my glass shop time. It's strange, but I think it's kind of funny a heart shaped box of chocolates is the standard these days, but when the Americas were first discovered, human sacrifice sometimes involved digging the heart out of living subject in front of mass gatherings for sacrafice, like in that Mel Gibson movie Apocalypto... Anyways, here's a finished heart I made. Think I might make a bowel or chalice to put a bunch of them in.

ART 21 : Humor........

I watched the Art 21 show on Humor. Starting off with a goofy skit playing off of stereotypes and misinformation. Moving into segment on an eccentric artist Elanor Antin, who makes very elaborate photographs of staged recreations of ancient Greek art. Then Antin explains some of her earlier work........Maybe I'm not getting it. There are some elements of Humor in her work, but very subtle and dry. I don't particularly care for it. Raymond Pettibond was the next highlighted artist who works in a kind of mixed media writing typography. I really like his process in making art, being immersed in a mess of paint and drawings and writings as the only means of operation. I enjoy the film noir element of his drawings and how he explains he see's more failure in his work than success. Elizabeth Murray is a painter covered in the next segment of the pbs special. Her intense use of color and playful shapes have a dr seuss quality about them that suggests a more innocent type of humor that what I am used to. Again, I am thoroughly perplexed by this enigma that is Art with a capital A. To use so many words and say nothing. I get lost in how biased and subjective labeling and categorizing art becomes. The last highlighted artist, Marvin Ford makes allot of narrative paintings of animals and birds. A sinister, dreamlike, quality to his work lends itself to a dark, almost British humor.

TAZ article...

"Despite the occasional Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to construct political dogma"

Yea, right, sure thing guy...

In response to the reading:
This essay, to me, seems very convoluted. All this talk about cyberpunks and not trusting the word revolution, psychic nomadism and counter-net leads me to believe I'm in way over my head. The temporary autonomous zone idea is interesting, but seems futile when one realizes that dependence on technology is already taken for granted to such an degree, many are hopeless dreamers detached from reality. But if reality is dictated by the masses, and more and more people are becoming fluent with the progression of technology, who's to say what  our definition of "Space" will be in say, ten years. If we continue to increase our expectations and dependencies on computers, I predict a sad and lonely future full of emotionally and morally detached zombies, but hey, I've been hit in the head allot, so who knows what I'm thinking.

Trash Disco Bowling Ball

I was on the road in florida this time last year selling glass with a glassblower out of Reading, Pa. and as luck would have it I was near my friend from high schools house so I was able to hang out for a couple days and get away from work. One of the neighbors had been evicted and out of the great big pile of trash we harvested a bowling ball and a mirror. Cut all the pieces of mirror up with a glass cutter and started siliconing them to the ball starting around the finger and thumb holes. We ended up mounting it on a dowel with bearings from a razor scooter so it would continue to spin from the thumb hole but could be taken off to, well i dunno, it was pretty cool to hold and swing around... His mom really liked it in her garden and it drives the neighbors crazy at night because passing headlights make the whole block go funky for a minute.

 

 

hanging A ventilation hood in My buddies shop

So today I helped out a friend hand a ventilation hood in his lampworking shop. Lampworking is another name for glassblowing on a torch, rather than from a furnace. This new shop is going to be great for their business, and hanging a ventilation hood this size means that they will be able to set up 6 torches to work off of simultaieously. Can't wait till they're all the way up and running so I can go learn some cool techniques and have free time on a bench torch.

 

OH-FUR-ALLS!!

Over winter break, I came accross a couple of mink coats from the 1930's that someone was throwing out. they were in pretty bad shape when I got them but they were exactly what I needed to start my Oh-Fur-Alls. I had started a collection of furs from thrift stores, tag sales, and donations years ago with this idea in mind and was pretty anxious to get started. I ended up having to do allot of work on the two mink coats to loosen up the fur. They were all dry and cracked, and overall, very tough and unworkable. I set up a ladder directly over a humidifier overnight to ger some moisture back into the pelts, then spent the next two days conditioning the leather from the back side. I've never undertaken making cloths before so my template was a pair of overalls I had allready had. About a week later and a couple thousand stitches, I now keep warm with what you see here...

Pig Sticker

So I made this knife for a friend of mine out of a spiral cut ham he brought me one time he came to visit. The sheath is made from the shoulder socket of the pig, bamboo, armature wire and rawhide. The handle is the upper part of the leg and some deer skin. I also but a herkumer crystal on the bottom of the handle to balance the weight of the blade.

so I started a skull collection?

This is kind of a work in progress, in the sense that I don't think I'm ever done looking for whatever catches my eye. It started with a Cayote skull I found in sedona arizona while visiting family and has since grown by a deer, beaver, camen, finch, and a cat skull. Also thew in a bunch of other stuff I've picked up while hiking, mining, or camping.

It's been a couple years.

So It's been a few years, and as you can see, it's been a great way to display all of the odd little things I find walking around in philly, and well, wherever I go. I'm a bit of a pack rat when it comes to little odd things and this lamp has all kinds of stuff hanging in it from hospital wristbands, pez dispensers, used lighters, teeth, and even the suture needles from when I stitched up my thumb and head after waiting too long in the E.R. waiting room....

This here's a lamp I made out of about a thousand tiny nooses

I made this lamp in my first apartment where I lived in a dark basement and kinda went a bit crazy. I don't recomend basement dwelling for extended periods of time. Every thime it rained the walls slumped and sweat and there was a family off squirrels in the cieling underneath the kitchen floor.

catching up...

I think I have some grip on this blogging thing now, so I figured I'd catch up by posting some things I've made in relatively sequential order. Ever since I was a little kid, I've always enjoyed making things, most of the time they're functional. I like to be handy and tinker with things when I get an idea or see something that needs fixing. Craft seems to have become a compulsion of mine, but years and years of Art school have honestly turned me off of the whole "what is Art" debacle. I just want to make cool stuff...