The Irregular Rant

Crawling Tree 3

2011-10-25T07:35:00.001-07:00

Crawling Tree 3, a photo by I_N on Flickr.

This painting seems to be ending.So I think I'd better get started on another. Maybe this time the cycloptic arboropods are in the hey day of the culture. Flying genetically altered box kites over a pasture with those ancient god heads presiding over the scene. Or maybe the god heads are holding the kite strings in their teeth, while the arboropod frolic. Frolic, no not frolic; that is one the of wishy washyiest words there is. Could be the arboropods are in a trance, or dancing, or in a trance dance at a prophetic gathering - conjuring up visions of a happy future. Ha! how wrong they are.

Last bit of the hay barn

2011-08-23T12:58:00.001-07:00

Last bit of the hay barn, a photo by I_N on Flickr.

This is keystone of my summer. After it comes down, summer will be over. The hot days of waiting for the pool to be open, mornings pulling nails till the sun gets to me, nights that the bugs make all that sound. Winter will be the time of meticulous doings, of dark nights the wind plays an that unholy symphony, days when you leave the stew pot on low - and stand close. All that will be left of that barn will be a battered concrete foundation on the tell, covered with drifts, and frost heaved out of perpendicular. Oh ya and there the wood, I saved it - so - if ya be needing any old oak barn wood, tell me.

Cloud watching

2011-08-20T09:23:00.001-07:00

Cloud watching, a photo by I_N on Flickr.

There’s corn, then to break it up, beans. Variety is the stuff of life. Oh I forgot The clouds.

Under the Surface

2011-04-13T18:38:00.001-07:00

Spacetah, a photo by I_N on Flickr.

Is where they first took root. The seeds shot from a distant place and over a great amount of time, landed in a well timed piece of choreography, that spread them onto the most fertile places on the host planet. It took more time than is easy to imagine for the first tube like, liquid filters to evolve from the virus that was the seed.

Via Flickr:
Plant life in a very different place.

Crawling Tree 3 5972

2011-03-29T06:52:00.001-07:00

Crawling Tree 3 5972, a photo by I_N on Flickr.

This painting has been stuck at this stage for about three weeks. Many things have impeded it's momentum, spring break, nice weather, back problems. Those are all just excuses that have little traction slowing this thing up. The real problem is that the subject matter of this painting is gloomy. Conceived in the dark days of winter it no longer seems to be relevant in the spring, it's harsh.

- Opto-fish -

2010-12-02T07:40:00.001-08:00

opto-fish
Originally uploaded by I_N

The darkness makes me laconic. If you stare at this opto-fish long enough I think I could be like a cup of coffee, though I drink tea. I've stared at it and it seems to work, otherwise I would not have written this; If I had a flag mine would surly be like the Opto-fish.

Red Wing Blackbirds

2010-11-22T07:23:00.001-08:00

red wing blackbirds
Originally uploaded by I_N

How do I know what kind of bird those black blurry shapes are? I walk the same area of land about every other day, and in the days preceding this shot, the trees were gradually filling up with a noisy flock of black birds, not starlings, not grackles, but red wing black birds. Usually they congregate in smaller groups and head south and spend the winter in big flocks. But this year has been warm, and the big flock seems to have been forming up here. When this image was shot the birds might
have been testing the waters, and small groups would break away and do a fly around. Today, November 22, I think they have all gone.

- God head 5 -

2010-11-10T07:27:00.001-08:00

god head 5
Originally uploaded by I_N

This must be the god of short breath. He is chiseled out of sand stone, the dust of, is horrible to inhale. His eyes seem to be saying what the ?#$% are you doing, ya idget.

Indigo chip

2010-11-08T07:54:00.001-08:00

Indigo chip
Originally uploaded by I_N

One bleak day, a day when it was raining and thirty five degree's; my computer helped me along with this notion. May be it was going to be an animation, maybe just an cyclical type of movement, or just some color to look at on a gray day. Oh wait I remember! It was a flow chart, illustrating pathways from the digital to our analog.

tomato nebula

2010-10-29T09:55:00.001-07:00

tomato nebula
Originally uploaded by I_N

It was startled to see a cauldron of activity in it's immediate enclosure. Strings of more tangible things and area's were selective vision occurred - this was the sustenance of it. Back when it was a omniVisional environment, control was not hard, but now it took more manipulation and many occurrences were out of it's control. Now it could perceive it was not surrounded, and the landscape of time became apparent. Scale and rhythm is its obsession, a tool of now.

Head in a tree

2010-10-21T08:23:00.001-07:00

Head in a tree
Originally uploaded by I_N

This could be a an Idea I would like to incorporate into one of my crawling trees. Good or bad I don't know - from the view point that all my
artistic excretions aren't even worth being labeled with the "kitsch" moniker - this idea might grow legs and take off (or toes).

T.V. knows best

2010-10-19T06:48:00.001-07:00

humanoid ignoring tree
Originally uploaded by I_N

It's your duty to consume its product. Don't look away - do listen to its valuable message - Do Not infringe upon its right to be a good citizen in your home. Smile at all times there is nothing wrong.

Faces in the paint

2010-10-08T07:55:00.001-07:00

Faces in the paint
Originally uploaded by | /\ /\/

If you flip this around you can see different faces staring out at you from the digital gloom.

Carl Sandburg's evil twin

2010-10-04T08:30:00.001-07:00

Carl Sandburg
Originally uploaded by | /\ /\/

The number of views on this is low. Little wonder - what with the poo colored background, icky green complexion, irritated skin, and those black pit eyes make this guy an unfriendly. Well , I like him - that poor dense creature - he never was somebodies baby.

The Alerton Park Ugly

2010-03-03T12:49:00.000-08:00

I was walking along the Sangamon river around Monticello, on the state of Illinois conservation land, and came upon this excessive amount of orange spray paint on the trees, marking the border with the University of Illinois Allerton park. I assume this is to warn the hunters not to cross into the park; If you were really so blind as to need all that orange paint maybe you shouldn't be out hunting; And those avid outdoors men should learn how to read a topo map so as not to cross the boundary, and never mind that there is already a old barbwire fence marking this line. I don't know which institution tagged the area( I will wager it was the U of I ) but if this sort of thing was done in any town, village, or city it would be called vandalism. This assault on the aesthetic quality of Allerton park has been going on for a decade or more, but has accelerated in the last four or five years. The trees are all heavily tagged to mark the hunting boundaries within the park, never mind this boundary runs along paths. The staff have been driving over the pathways while wet,creating large ruts. I don't know why this has been going on, but in the past twenty years I have been walking at Allerton, the last Three have seen the most ruts. In fact one soggy day I had to jump out of the way of a gator (an all terrain golf cart) with four or five young people barreling down the path leaving deep ruts. Why couldn't they walk? That gator was probably hauling its cargo of students to drop off their next experiment or field study. Equipment to be left and forgotten about after the student has moved on. On down the path a few culverts had been washed out and a misdirected effort at replacing them had resulted in some, highly erodible- poorly designed -stream crossings, made out of rip rap and plastic tile. UGLY!

In other places the chain link fence blocking the bridge exudes that industrial park feel. And that fence around the gardens has me looking for German guard towers, Steve Mcqueen (ala The Great Escape) or William Holden ( Stalag 17). The spiral stairway that led from the house to an old concrete room and bench ( possibly was the best feng shui in the park) was taken out, those spirits will be angry. And the final straw, somebody let the old old old hot house jade plant die.
The University of Illinois has an art department, a landscape architecture department, a horticulture department, and the Japan house; The institution has the talent resources but does not use them.
As the minster of the Department of Aesthetic Justice, I pronounce ye verging toward Ugly.

Oxymoron

Scoop For Your Life

2010-01-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

After a heavy snow I noticed more than a few people trying to walk on the un-scooped side walks. They weren't on a leisurely stroll,
they were trying to get somewhere, probably a bus stop. In many cases the sidewalk had been piled up with snow from a parking lot or a road, and the only way through was to walk on a busy snow packed thoroughfare. Where I live, property owners are supposed to clear the side walks, almost none do in a timely fashion, and the local government clears the road way. This is discriminatory, it's the only way it can be describe. Many of the people walking are poor, many are old and many are young. Not scooping the sidewalk is socialopathic symptom that will only hasten our use of a car when we need not.

In the rural areas there is a deficit of reserved walkable pathways. In Britain there is a right to trespass, that is there are trails that lead often from town to town, that have been used for a very long time. People have asserted their right to walk these trails over and over again, and have gone to court to keep their right to trespass open, the enclosure acts is what you will have to read about if you what to learn more. In this country it was and is a religious orthodoxy of property rights that have shape our land. (Set aside the issue of a slave as property, even though that is gigantic in historically figuring our property rules) Now this is speculation but I would say that this idea of property developed as a reaction to the Native American assertion of their rights to pass freely on the land. You see the land scape wasn't just as free and untrammeled as we have always been led to believe. There were native pathways all over the place. In fact: (not speculation) - if you pay close attention there are pathways in the Rockies that have been converted to hiking paths, and are named accordingly. Where there was no land set aside, the trails were blocked with fencing or made into road ways. One of the ways to keep the native from migrating back in to your land was to make trespassing illegal. That would effectively put who ever wanted to travel, on a government controlled highway system. So the process of segregating the Native Americans led to a extreme shortage of public pathways, and as our cities became more Sub-urban they adopted this sort of transportation frame work.
again all speculation.

I went to south Florida once, and you can inversely read the age of the development by how many lanes the main road has. That could be to simplistic, but in and around the newer gated communities there are roads that are 10 lanes across. Being from a small Midwestern town, this blew my mind. I kept repeating, “look at that! Eight lanes. Oh my gosh 12 lanes. Oh no, just 11, or wait - I can't figure out.” They need all these lanes because there is only one way in and one way out of a gated community, (there could be more I only saw one) traffic doesn't have many ways to flow but one. Also I will wager that in a few years or months, maybe two or more of these gated communities will get in a war and mount cannons on their walls and put bunkers in key positions. That would lead to even more snarled traffic and eventually somebody would come up with the idea that maybe they could build a office or a shop close to there house, so that somebody would never have to leave the gated community and the ten lane roads could be used for landing strips for a local air force. But seriously, everything is so spread out, and dependent on a large infrastructure to support driving like a maniac from your gated community to the restaurant to gas station to work to the restaurant to the school to the gas station to the enemy gated community to the gas station, that eventually the tax burden will become so heavy that the local economy won't be able to support it. It seems they are all incredibly wealthy down there so maybe they could. In most environs that will not be the case, and if development like that is continued, there will be a point of no return and an unsustainable debt load will keep economic activity suppressed. We could be in that situation now, I don't know

So scoop your side walk for the survival of the Republic.

Of liver failure and the latest former Bush presidency

2009-02-04T12:30:00.001-08:00

Last summer someone that has a modicum of medical knowledge told me that I should never drink alcohol again. I accepted that grim fact like I accepted that horrible fact of the presidential inauguration in the year 2000. That day, the equivalent of an high school bully entered our lands highest office and made a joke out of it. Some would say, What about the outstanding way he handled Nine Eleven; that was good, Right? He was great because our expectation was that he would declare martial law and hide in a bunker for the next three and half years. He did what he should've done. After that, he stepped back into his character and fell for the bait Al Qaeda provided. It was the classic strike and faint strategy, only Osama bin laden got a two for one with the invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile the Bush/Nixonian Neocon demolition squad was busy wrecking our government-The banking system was using a Neil Bush playbook with the help of some of the old crew from Enron - and his oil/coal buddies secured the lock on this nations antiquated energy system. So that leads to our impotent position in the world as a castrated superpower.
May be, could be, would it be, that Barack Obama will put the right people in charge to change our government and regain the confidence of the people. As of this writing it seems not. A retread of the Clinton government was put into place and a economic policy that has more to to with the thirties than the present. Throwing money at an deeply indebted inconfident economy so it can buy more, does not seem prudent. What needs to happen is a prosecution of those people responsible. It's all about morality and lawlessness, the organism that is the economy reacts to this as a justified threat. The mass mental health of the economy must witness punishment for the crimes that were committed. No one gets off, not even George W. Bush. Then maybe some of the cash that is sitting on the sidelines will be put back to work.
Now we get to my second point with the guiding of Barack Obama. If he and other future presidents perceive that there will be a penalty for any crime they would commit, could be we would have a more restrain executive; Could be, Barack Obama would think more than twice about sending more troops to Afghanistan. A country almost exactly on the other side of the globe, with a culture that is alien to ours, and history that does not favor invading foreign powers. That bring me back to some one with a modicum of medical knowledge telling me never to drink again and I accepted that grim and unkind fact. As a country we need to be told, induced, pleaded with to stop consuming and start saving; Saving our money, our land, our government, and yes our moral standing. That is the grim fact we are facing. You should be told that it's stupid or even down right dangerous to have a TV in every room . The thirty two ounce super gulp Would be banned as a biothreat. Giant trucks could be taxed into oblivion. And all these freaking birthday presents kids get should be exchanged for money that is put into education. Or hey, just not buy as much crap and use our money in a clever and thoughtful manor.

Memo from the Department of Aesthetic Justice

2008-09-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

A 1:1 scale toy rail road near by, bull dozed trees, undergrowth, and I'm sure many homes of animals. I've heard this was done for aesthetic reasons. As in, “we'll just go ahead and clean up this area“, and by “clean up” they mean demolish any living thing, and if its in the budget, pave it. Somehow trees, shrubs, and all sorts flora that Central (the most intensively used landscape in the world) Illinois is missing from around ninety percent of the landscape, was seen as ugly. Now it will probably be overgrown with ragweed, poison ivy, and exotic invasive species - then mowed down at exactly the wrong time of year for native plants to flourish - then called a beautiful improvement upon this landscape of beans and corn. If only they could of got those noxious species to grow in neat rows. Why this is seen to be more pleasing to the senses than that remnant of the prairie savanna? For example, how does an old factory, With some very beautiful details and a design that was well thought out, get regarded as an ugly blight. But an empty lot with a mowed weedy lawn look better. In another place that ruin of an old factory would be quaint, rustic, charming, and a tourist draw.
Order over disorder, I think that is the overriding factor. Persons not aesthetically aware mistakenly regard an orderly looking or sounding environment as higher in quality. This is not true. The chaos of the galaxy is beautiful, the chaos of ocean waves have a wide range of dramatic quality, and the clouds in the sky are always chaotically incline to please the senses. I think that this order over disorder mental pitfall has to be eliminated. How to go about this? Lets for a moment imagine that there was a United Nations department of aesthetic quality, which in turn handed down a program for each nation to use in its department of aesthetic justice - and the “DAJ” ,as we'll call it, oversees laws that conform with the UN program through a state government, called the department of environmental zoning - which would work with local county and city zoning boards to create a high aesthetic quality to our lives. And if I were appointed a supreme justice of the court of aesthetics, my first act would be to , ( and I might be going off the deep end at this point) abolish all strip malls and big box style development. My second act would be to bury all lines of transmission, no exceptions. And my third final act of my revolutionary first phase would be to enforce the littering laws with vigor. Oh ya and abolish the use of those silly court robes, maybe we could use clown suits or some form of archaic clothing.
As an artist I have been trained and have a natural tendency to not edit out my surroundings.
If it's there I see it, and let me tell ya there are a lot of things people just don't see. Power lines are a big one, road noise is another, that Christmas sock my wife has left up in the living room for over 9 months, is yet another. The clinical word for this is scatoma and I believe that the engineering profession is full of personnel that demonstrate what a severe scatoma is. Engineering is responsible for nearly all of the material objects in our culture, Heck they even set zoning rules. And if that isn't bad enough, general contractors design whats left. Our culture needs input from the artistic set and as I see it the engineering class is not going to ask or this ugly society of ours would not have developed. We have to push and take crucial quality of life issues away from those who don't care or are impaired. We have to get out there and do what is right.

Ian

Restarting the Irregular Rant

2008-09-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

It may be that I've written of this before. It may be I've just thought of this before. I know I have talked about this with some of my friends. Or at least thought about it in their presence. What I'm think-U-late'n about is the next step in human mental development. In the not so distant past a great many of us "humans"( I use the word loosely) had the notionthat if they remembered somebody that was dead, saying or doing some thing, that this memory was in in reality a spirit in contact with them. Those distant Humans apparently didn't realize this was a memory lodged in their brains. One day, some of us got it, and made the mental jump that we were actually remembering those instances for ourselves. My inclination is to believe that we are in the middle of, or at the beginning of the next big mental leap. Oh to be sure, we have had thinkers in the past like Kant, Jung, and Freud that have dusted the darkness off of our mental labyrinth, and there must be some person or people out there right now, out of my limited knowledge of the subject matter, working on this next great leap. This mental Leap, or maybe it should be called the neo-enlightenment or some such thing, is about a self realization of our thinking processes. For instance, I know a great many us humans don't differentiate between a hunger pain and a stub your tow pain. I know pain from your torso is unsettling( believe me I know ) and far different than that stub your tow pain, but when your just a little hungry or even after a day of fasting, it still isn't the same pain as, gall stones. But that won't register with lots of us humans and some portion of us eat even though we really don't need to. Another example, is greed, humanity as a whole seems to thinks that more of anything is equal to pleasure. So buying stuff is what they do to feel good, and to buy stuff you need money and then the acquisition of money is the thing you do to feel good. Any thing beyond fiscal stability, in my judgment, is greed. Again I think this is a false pleasure reading People that fall into this greed cycle are not delineating between buying power and true pleasure. In the not so distant future I think more people than not will be able to discriminate between those sensations that are true and those that are false. There are many more mental misconceptions to be uncovered. I discover a few every month, in my self. And sometimes to change those thought processes it take an incredible effort, but it most always is for the better I know that there are people that have been communication on those ideas for quite awhile, but I would like to state, ever so cautiously, that humanity is at a tipping point and all you need to do is get out their and nudge it. Ian

How Zen Meditation is Causing Global Climate Change

2008-02-07T03:43:00.000-08:00

All right, could be that title is a bit much. It may be that zen meditation isn't the biggest factor in global climate change, but I am sure it's contributing to it. How did I arrive at that conclusion-well: people like to mow their lawns. Here in the Midwest I would say it's a major fixation of some individuals, and if they complain loudly, it usually will become the "major fixation" of the city or town they live in.
I don't think it's the lawn they like to mow or any thing about grass cutting, the majority of the population could do with-out it just fine. The Aesthetic perspective that is looks better just isn't true. In fact long grass has grace in the way the ends taper off to a point, or the way it waves in the wind. Some folks say it's for the physical activity, I can think of many other ways a body could get active with out mowing. It could be for the fact that it is uncomfortable to walk in when it's high, or attracts the bugs, in fact I would say those two would be the best excuse, but what accounts for the person who mows a lawn nobody will use.
It all comes down to one thing and that's zen meditation. The mowing pattern, the mower hum, and the steady slow pace it takes to cut grass properly is a formula to induce meditation. It's the good feeling they get from the effects of meditation that they associate with a clean cut lawn. So when they see an uncut area they have an uncomfortable agitated feeling and instead of realizing that the uncut lawn is upsetting their zen conditioning, they think of it as a civic aesthetic violation, and they want it cut. So if we could attain our meditative frame of mind in other ways we wouldn't have everybody and there cat, out using an gas engine mower. That, I've heard, will put out more polluting exhaust than a car, and at the same time the extra flora would fix carbon and output oxygen.
I must say, or state or impress upon you that I am a hypocrite. I have cut grass for all of the above reasons and more. That's not to say I don't loath mowing, I do, it's just that I have to live in a social frame work that I'm uncomfortable with. In time the lawn I mow will be converted to very low maintenance gardens, and the only mowing will be for hay.

Ian

The Qin the the U.S.

2008-01-22T07:15:00.000-08:00

I've been reading about the Qin and the Han dynastic periods in Chinese History.
The Qin culture was based on mobilization of a large civilian military force (like a militia)
and Agriculture, all else was considered unnecessary and unwanted.
This was all fine as long as they had wars to fight with other centralized societies,
for about 300 years (I think?).
The whole thing collapsed in about 10 years for lack of those two things.
We ( the U.S.) have been slowly sliding, and some times not so slowly,
to this kind of cultural model through out our rather short history.
Their is another large component to our culture other than agriculture and military,
and that's Merchant class. The Qin would have thought all this frivolous
and I think even outlawed it or excessively taxed it. May be that is our savior, any how,
I think this will be the next topic I'll paint. With the way my mind works this could turnout to be an abstract worm, or God heads flying box kites made of body parts (nothing sick please) on a grassy plane, and or maybe A dark thingy surrounding an even darker whachmacallit.

Why no Sequitur?

2008-01-18T06:45:00.000-08:00

Man is it cold,
I took a walk down an old RR line this morning and the frost heave had moved the ground up about 6 inches, well 6 inches in some places,
it was like walking on top of pointy spikes.
Imagine what is was like for my dog, she was hopping from point to point, very funny in a cruel sort'a way.
My ankles arn't doing so well either, I slipped and jolted from point to point. Not to mention all those newly formed points were a strange sight, and as soon as I got in, I just had to worked up this image.
Why?

creative photo retouching

2008-01-14T18:09:00.000-08:00

I used to do photo retouching or compositing or what ever you call it, quite a bit.
All of those files have been misplaced, so I have come up with some new images.

inmitchell.com