My Website in 2002

// June 16th, 2010 // Comments Off // Literature, Personal

The Wayback Machine, has archived over 150 billion web pages from 1996 to a few months ago. I was delighted to find my site archived at various stages of its history. What stood out was a primitive “blog” post I had published back in 2002 entitled, “Artistically Speaking”. Below is that unedited post in its entirety, warts and all.

Artistically Speaking

February 21, 2002

Needless to say, I spend much of my time on the computer creating digital art. I use the term “art” loosely, because I mainly deal with web design and Flash animations/presentations. As an artist, this tends to create a certain degree of discomfort as time passes along. I long for the feel of graphite on paper. I miss the feeling of the brush on canvas.

Of course, I tell myself on a daily basis that I shall resume creating traditional forms of art… tangible forms of art. For the digital realm requires time to get used to. All I ever knew was the “old school” methods, until the late 1990s. That’s when everything I ever knew, was whisked out the door. It was then, I took a mouse in my hand, and commenced the inevitable battle of learning how to control this strange contraption.

Today, I have comfortably mastered the fine art of precision mouse control. I’m finding more and more that I can easily zero in on a pixel from a zoom level of only 50%. I’m sweeping across the screen with confidence and ease. No longer do I fight with the mouse. In fact, I fear it has become an extension of my body. Frightening indeed…

So, until that fateful day comes along when I drop the mouse for a day or two, I guess I will keep reaffirming myself that, yes, I’m still an artist. I’ll keep telling myself that I still have it in me to use my hands, body, mind and soul to create wonderful traditional art. Art on paper… art on canvas… try my hand at ceramics. God knows it’s been probably 15 years or more since I took clay in hand and formed it into some crazy shape. I miss that innocence. I miss that whimsical mayhem…

Here’s a great quote I read a while back in my travels: “When I was a child, I wanted to grow up to be an artist. Instead, I became a graphic designer.”

True… true…

The Dharma Bums, Chapter 6: “white-tiled toilets” and “supervised sewers”

// October 20th, 2009 // Comments Off // Literature, Personal

I’ve been reading “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac. In chapter 6, Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder are on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley…

“We pushed the bike down past the various college hangouts and cafeterias and looked into Robbie’s to see if we knew anybody. Alvah was in there, working his part-time job as busboy. Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene — college being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. ‘All these people,’ said Japhy, ‘they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it’s all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.’ ”

Classic. Love it.