Description of a struggle

I started this painting in August, 2010. After months of work, neglect, a little work, lots of neglect, and then a little more work, I think it is done.


Triptych.

the regenerating organism

Cancer stem cells have acquired the behavior of normal stem cells by activating the same genes and pathways that make normal stem cells immortal -- except, unlike normal stem cells, they can not be lulled back into physiological sleep. Cancer, then, is quite literally, trying to emulate a regenerating organ -- or, perhaps, more disturbingly, the regenerating organism. Its quest for immortality mirrors our own quest, a quest buried in our embryos and in the renewal of our organs. Someday, if a cancer succeeds, it will produce a far more perfect being than its host -- imbued with immortality and the drive to proliferate.

--- from The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

via The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Exchange

Like the phoenix, it rises:

johnmartinbell.com!

I'm trying something new out with this one, dudes. So, I've never really had luck selling artwork. Partly this is because I'm awkward at it and don't put much effort into it. Partly it's because I don't like it and it makes me feel weird. I have a job, and I like keeping my art production separate from my livelihood because I don't want to place any burdens on it. If I want to hot glue flowers and weeds and trash together for a week, I like not having to feel like whatever results should have monetary value.

So I've got this "Exchange" page. I want a more structured way for people to ask for paintings through trades, barters, or even just because they like them. Sometimes I worry that people feel weird about wanting art-- they feel like its beyond them or somehow degrading to bring it up. Anyway, I want my paintings to go to different places. There's no set parameters for this, it's totally up to individual negotiation. And I, for one, am open to all offers. I hope that people feel comfortable engaging if they're interested (a big IF!)

I want a way to more directly engage with people that look at and would like to live with my artwork.

I think it's also that I like getting email from people through my website and wish I got more of it.

THE DREAMER

Snapshots before a move

I've been packing up to move to a new studio space. I've been so lax about posting new projects, I thought I should take a few snapshots. A couple of them are finished, but most are still in progress.

non-human entities, non-human goals

Posted: Visualizing US expansion through post offices by Derek Watkins

"Invaders from Mars" by Charlie Stross

"...Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.

Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.

For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion."

The Charlie Stross text was obtained from mentholmountains. The amazing video is by Derek Watkins.

all the rest is silence

I should say a little more about this, about not writing. A lot of people ask me about it, and I ask myself. And asking myself why I do not write inevitably leads to another, much more unsettling question: why did I ever write? After all, the normal thing is to read. I have two preferred answers. The first, that my poetry was- without my knowledge- an attempt to create an identity for myself; having created and assumed this identity, I was no longer concerned to throw myself into every poem I set about writing, which is what fascinated me. The other, that it was all a mistake: I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem. And to a degree, an unfortunate degree, I have achieved this; like any reasonably well-crafted poem, I am all need and internal submission to that tormented tyrant, that insomniac, omniscient and ubiquitous Big Brother: Me. Half Caliban, Half Narcissus, I fear him most when I hear him interrogate me, next to an open balcony: "What's a boy of 1950 like you doing in an indifferent year like this?" All the rest is silence.

-Jaime Gil de Biedma

via MentholMountatains