What God would Bless America?

One of my favorite bloggers, Two Crows, recently wrote a comment which echoed my own feelings about this national "holiday"...July 4th is

"a pretty hollow holiday, these days. it never _was_ one of my favorites -- I never could get behind celebrating genocide, slavery, discrimination, sexism and the general sense of 'we're better than everybody else and don't you dare forget it!"

Sometimes I don't say anything rather than venting my frustration with the state of things...of course change rarely comes from silence however. They were celebrating the troops, including the marines, etc. and this will bring to mind my student Chris (see former post, Now, I'm Angry. I cannot celebrate the fact that the marines have taken him away from those of us who care about him, about his soul (how else can I put it? The army sends home hollowed out people. There must be no mistake in the words "Hollow" and "Hallow" being so close to each other.)

What God would Bless America?

Yahya! Love the Swedes!

This commercial shows some of the true beauty of the world. Wish more companies were willing to break with the status quo.

The Chess Game: See the Whole Board

Bush is a classic fratboy and I've always been wary of those types. They are always crass, sexist, secretly or loudly racist, and don't think there is anything wrong with putting their selfish desires above the good of everyone else. Basically that means that partying and drinking his braincells away while bashing them out of others has always made a lot of sense to Bush. I couldn't dislike him more. But on the other hand, he is just a puppet leader. Especially if he is as stupid as he acts. The real power players include Cheney, Bush Sr. Mrs. Bush Sr., Karl Rove and Company (that is a real political consulting firm based in Austin, Texas), and many others in the national and international arena, whose names we may never know. They are playing a deft chess game and when they lose a pawn (Bartlett), a bishop (Wolfowitz), or even a rook (Rumsfeld), you can bet they saw it coming and thought it was worth the sacrifice. I think we (I'm always guilty of this, see previous post) need to stop focusing so much on the individual and whatever other candy they hand us and look at the goddamn big picture. Because you can medicate the pain and the patient will still die of the disease. And I see us, as a global society, bleeding in a million places right now....Vampires at our necks. Remember...Bram Stoker's Dracula was written (based on a real man)about the wealthy aristocracy exploiting the less fortunate ...No matter how much we may wish it so, it's not just fantasy horror. This game is happening right now.

Don't Get Caught with Your Pants Down

...or your pants up and your zipper down. Or your zipper down and staff members "helping" you get it back up. Bush is an idiot. What more can I say?



No, I'm not sure this is a genuine photo. The original poster (a DNC employee apparently) is someone familiar with Photoshop. But I ran this one by some similarly skilled friends and they said it was a darn good job if it isn't real. Apparently Bush just needs help pulling up his zipper. Lies and can't keep his pants up...sounds like he's impeachable even by the Republican party's own measure.

Now, I'm Angry.

I just realized that in all my emotional upset this May, I didn't think to blog about what was bothering me. I'm really upset that one of my former students has decided to join the Marines. He's a really nice person as far a I could tell and he will never be the same again because of this monumental decision he has made to pay for his education by joining perhaps the worst of our armed forces. I know he has always worshipped order and routine in some ways and he used to say that he wanted to be a prince but that was silly kid stuff and also him trying to deal with a hard home life. His mother is depressed and they have tons of money troubles but how awful is that to decide to escape it all by joining our murderous forces. I'm just terrified for him. He will truly never be the same again. So many local kids have already gone and either never come back or returned mentally scarred (the July 4th fireworks isn't helping anyone's PTSD, that's for sure) and physically disabled. The latest to return came back with literally no feet. I just wanted to talk him out of it and I'm sure he would have listened - he basically had had noone to talk to when I wasn't there - but he had already sworn in by the time I showed up for his graduation. I've cried and wanted to cry some more. This is all so unjust. They are truly taking some of our best and brightest and twisting them into their contorted molds. Chris got duped, like so many young people, and now there's nothing I can do about it. I've never felt more like I failed a student. History: He was a student at the first school I taught at (an awful elitist boarding school). Said school has gone only further down the tubes since I left. Everyone said I was lucky to have left after the first year.

Get 'Em Young

Deserving of a Post

Click the title of this post to read an inspiring author of today. I love how the internet has been a natural medium by which author Tao Lin communicates with his audience (in the most untraditional of ways) and, generally speaking, simply expresses himself on a day-to-day unedited way. His stories remind me the most of Kurt Vonnegut but, on the other hand, they are nothing like that. Ho Hum, Eeeee Eee Eeee. Happy Birthday, Tao Lin!

It's a Small Classroom, after all...

I'm keeping track of all the countries from which hail (or have hailed) my students. The list just keeps growing every year. The additions from the just ended school year are the island of Dominica, New Zealand, and Australia. The kids from the last two countries were not even friends with each other or in the same class. It just happened that those very close countries both ended up with representatives in my classes last year. Go figure. I don't know if I could write all the rest down from memory. Cameroon is definitely on there...

Cameroon
France
Italy
Taiwan
Thailand
Korea
Puerto Rico
Mexico
New Zealand
Australia
Cape Verde
Norway
Dominican Republic
Island of Dominica (sp?)
Japan
Vietnam
Sri Lanka
India
United States
Canada
...

Those are the 20 that I remember. I'm sure I'll have to update this list later when I recall who I've missed. :-)

Shine Some Light on the Situation

I am attempting to construct my own lightbox. I tried to use a couple of mini-flashlights at first for lighting but of course that really didn't work at all, especially since my box is so short. The "box" is constructed of two picture frames. The top is the two sheets of glass from the frames with tissue paper sandwiched in between. I'm going to krazy glue the frames together I think. But still need to get a fluorescent bulb for the box or it won't work. Hopefully there's a small enough bulb for my 11 x 14 "box".

By Request

Figure Drawing for All Its Worth is a pretty darn good text on drawing...well, figures. I started with this text by Loomis and have supplemented it with many other texts as well. He has several including one or two focusing solely on how to draw some of the two most difficult aka interesting parts of the human body (no, that's not what I'm talking about, get your mind out of the gutter)...I mean the head and hands.

This Phillipino blogger's site is a good starting place if you want to download these books by Loomis and other worthy art teachers. I'll link to some other sites with Loomis titles soon. I meant to just upload the files since I have them myself and would like to make them as widely available as possible but...how to do this easily on Blogger? If you know, please do tell.

The Topic of the Summer

I've considered starting a new blog with the graphic novel project as it's main focus but decided to keep it all right here. Afterall, I don't write on this blog nearly enough and maybe I'm a little superstitious...every one of the other million blogs I've made for projects and goals has sat inactive for months or years and the project/goal that inspired each has been abandoned or all but. I can't help but think that most of the time, when I think I have a great blog idea, I really just have a great post for this blog. If only there were some fast way of consolidating all my blogs! That'd be vunderful. :-)

Classic, Man, Classic

Why the Artist is Starving

So, as I said...I am learning to do graphic art. It seems that the brushes for inking drawings...well, for coloring/painting them after the outlines are already inked, are incredibly expensive. So much so that one ends up trying to decide between buying the paper, markers, paint, etc. for the traditional inked pictures and buying a graphic tablet like the Intuos 3 or even a tablet PC. Markers like the Sakura Pigma Brush Pens or the Copic Sketch Markers have these beautiful brush nibs so you can essentially paint without the hassle of painting (stretching the paper, etc.). You can even blend colors and so on but the prices are absolutely exorbitant. Of course the professional comic artists don't do their own inking at all, they do all the sketching in black and white and then send them on to another department, well ok...another person or two.

So, just wanted to register that complaint...about the exorbitant cost of doing this kind of art. If anyone has a set of Copics they would like to donate for a good cause, drop me a line. :-)

How to Draw Eyes

Some of the not so hidden potential of sites like YouTube is as an open university online, like so much of the internet, where people are sharing knowledge in new and really exciting ways. Maybe I should make videos of me solving math equations with some simlarly cool musical soundtracks. :-)

Travelling in the Twilight

A Post from Beppe Grillo.

"Someone has given me a book called "Viaggio nelle tenebre" {Travelling in the twilight} by the Centro Aurora, the National Centre for children who have disappeared and those who are sexually abused. I've read it. I felt sick. It's right that you too should feel sick. I will ask the publishers for permission to publish it on the blog.
It's a document on paedophilia, on organ trafficking and on Satanism. The principal actors: children. Stage: Italy

From the book:
"In Italy calculating exclusively the data on the declarations made from the year 2004 to March 2007, we see that there are 3,399 minors who have disappeared and are not yet found.
Some disappeared children will sadly be destined for organ trafficking like macabre spare parts. The estimates relating to this are to say the least chilling and they present a real table of prices…. 50,000 euro for a new born, 30,000 a liver, 15,000 the corneas
According to the Trieste District Anti-mafia Division, it is a place with a lot of traffic for the buying and selling of organs so much so that a dossier on the topic has been presented to the Ministry of the Interior. Pier Luigi Vigna, National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor has denounced that just in 2004 there have been about 30,000 victims of trafficking in human beings."

Italy is even active in imports from abroad:
"Italy is denounced by René Bridel, the UN representative of the International Association of Jurists for the Defence of Democracy, by the daily papers "La Nacion" in Buenos Aires, "O Globo" in Rio de Janeiro and "La Repubblica" in Lima: our country is defined as the biggest importer of Brazilian children, as the biggest purchaser.
Léon Schwartzenberg, euro-deputy, has stated that: "From 1988 to 1992 four thousand Brazilian children have left their country for Italy. The official reason is always adoption, but of these youngsters looking for a family only one thousand have been found alive….""

Graphic Novels, Comics, and Society

As some of you know already, I am working on producing a graphic novel this year. Therefore, a lot of my "free" time is spent researching whose shoulders I am attempting to clamber up on. The history of comic books it turns out, is really very interesting, especially as a lense through which to understand more about United States history. Well, perhaps lense is the wrong word but the history of comic books is indelibly linked to that of the country in which they were largely created and the politics of the society from which hail its writers.

In watching this documentary on comic books from the history channel, I found it particularly interesting that, during WWII, comic books were full of hyper-patriotic propoganda where the superheroes ran around beating up the enemies of America, the Nazis in particular...but they were (as they mention in the video) themselves representative of a Nazi ideal, that physically superior aryan male specimen of fantasy that dominates everyone else. This is of course not surprising given the ultra-racist dominant culture of United States itself. The writers of the comic books themselves had ended up writing those magazines of comics in the first place because they couldn't get a job writing comic strips in the respected newspaper business because they were Jewish. So the superheroes could go beat up the Nazis but mentioning that the holocaust was taking place was not going to happen and neither was demonizing the racist philosophies of the Nazis because, after all, our country shared many of the same beliefs.

Also of interest, that even when comic books have deeper storylines (like contemporary comics that question American policy surrounding the Iraq war and that would even go so far as compare the destruction of 9-11 to attacks carried out by the American Government on say...Dresden) none of that is translated to movies and other pop culture media through which those of us who don't actually read comic books on a regular basis understand who these comic book creations are. The layers are almost entirely lost in translation. However, since the essence of X-Men is it's message about bigotry, perhaps it was harder to make this more superficial or maybe its simply because in that case the original creators of the characters were involved in the development of the screenplay/movie.

Black Sheep - Movie Trailer

28 Sheep Later? This is particularly amusing if you take into account that there are at least 10 sheep for every person in New Zealand.

Torture by Any Other Name and Other Linguistic Exercises

"The arguments used to justify the administration's coercive methods can be used to justify anything," writes Steve Chapman in his article, Parsing Words About Torture.

Fuzzy Math Lesson

I looooove this! I've got to show my kids. A fabulous opening to a conversation on place value.

Human Devolution

There's a reason The Simpsons has been on for such a long time. While it can (of course) also be really dumb, it's often also "right-on". Here's a example of the kind of Simpsons humor I love. Note: Like a lot of television, I don't actually watch it regularly or basically ever...but when I have seen it, I've generally been very amused.

Things You Shouldn't Do on the Beach

..if you want lucrative corporate sponsorship from anyone other than the adult film industry, then don't do what Ronaldo's ex did...with her boyfriend...on the beach.