↑Larryosan's blog

Went to western NY into Pennsylvania to pick up the newest member of the family. Sadie the third Burmese cat in our little pride. A friend of mine from work who hooked us up with this rescue kitty volunteered her car and the two of drove across upper New York down into Penn. We went through a major storm with rain and sleet and a touch of hail on Friday night but Saturday other than being cold was easy going. I had a really good time as my coworker is a very interesting person and we had lots of work gossip to catch up on without having to worry about overheard. There is a lot of dissension in my department and lots of people having problems dealing with the changes. It is kind of sad to see people who teach others about being part of change having such a hard time when it hits them.

I have sent out most of my postcards I have one left before making some more. I am pondering on how to expand the project.

ta ta for now

I now have two people as recipients for my postcards. My buddy Amiko wished to join the fray and now he too will get a postcard or two. I am soon going to be in the thick of school but I am going to keep working on this. I have done a large number of cards prior to things heating up commitment wise. My goal with sending out my cards is to have the person getting the card find some way to alter the piece and make it something new. I wouldn't even mind if they cut it up to make yet a new collage. That is why i scan my works for posterity, as if they have some historical value. Which at least to me they do. I am not sure if they have postcards for overseas mailings, I suspect that there is different rates for different countries. Since I am here on Ipernity which is primarily a European centric outfit, which by the way is one of the attractions to me, I would love to find at least one correspondent overseas.

Physical art via land based mail, although I have not created nor pioneered anything here I still feel like an explorer entering the wilds. It feels new and exciting to me, though I am not simply some hedonist seeking new sensations I am a person looking for the edges, the boundaries to reach and try to push outward a bit, to make myself someone new not just in terms of being a bit older a bit more decrepit but grown in some way. Lifetime learning, lifetime exploration, lifetime struggle to live the life well lived. It is not a battle it is the journey that I seek. And a life well lived is what each of us wishes it to be.

This year I think will be good for me, in some way or another.

ta ta for now

I hope I am not setting myself up for some metaphysical disaster by stating a positive outlook.

My mouth is filled with metal, reference picture just uploaded. I am now officially a middle aged braces wearing geek. Pity me, join me in bemoaning my fate as a thrall of dental and orthodontic supremacy. I should be pitied and perhaps I will take my hat to the corner and see if anyone throws coins. Not to mock people in real trouble in their lives, I have just lost all perspective with my poor life. But on the other hand I could claim I am suffering for my art, yes that is the ticket, I am wearing hardware in my mouth to understand mans inhumanity to man or something like that.

On a serious note, I have moved my postcard pieces beyond simply cutting up and reusing my own work. I am looking to mix found images with mine and start to refine my work.

ta ta for now

Started on my first sculpture using wood sticks and tape. Again I am little nervous about doing this as it is not something I start out being good at and I always have to be good at stuff I do. Which generally has left me not wanting to do anything, a sucky place to be in life. Trying to live up to fantasy standards never works. But I digress, we have started to work on actually creating some art piece. Funny thing, my sculpture teacher is also a postcard artist. And there is a huge show for people who collect and create postcards. So we had a nice conversation along the lines I have written here, concerning going from the digital realm to the physical where you can feel the work and the material. I enjoy using photoshop and doing my digital photography but I also really love sitting at the table with postcard, scissors and glue stick. And the final joy of dropping the piece in the mailbox to begin the journey to be seen by who knows. I actually restarted doing this by decorating the outside of shipping boxes that I was sending cd's with music mixes I had done. I do a little music at work for functions so I make mixes for the type of function. I am the music DJ for the chaplains at work who have a yearly lunch around the holidays.

I am wondering if Amiko has gotten his cards yet. Is there anyone out there who would like a larryosan original art piece? I just need to get an address and figure postage. At this point I am only sending cards, I think they should stay in my financial realm even if sent off to exotic realms. And if not I am still going to enjoy each and everyone I create. It is the act of creation that is the center of excitement. The process not only of doing the piece of the moment but discovering a little different way to do something or have an idea for something just a little off the beaten path at least on my path.

ta ta for now

Work is taking an interesting turn. Nothing to do with art, but it does connect to creativity. I work in Human Resources a unit devoted to internal training. Our department has been in upheaval about doing a research project with focus groups and surveys and information from other companies on their best practices on training. This could mean lots of changes in direction for the next two years. So people are lining up in different ways depending on their felt interests in either moving forward or defending their past work and their position in influence and felt power in our area. So there are lots of different currents flowing around, some of them based on hostility, some on fear and lots on insecurity. But what is interesting is the information gathered during the surveys and focus groups. It was striking to me how little connected training is to the everyday life of the mass of employees. Yes we train people, from supervisors to managers and we do connect with lots of people but for the most part we are not connected to their day to day lives. The people who influence and affect them the most is their immediate manager. And we have nothing in place for those people to help them or coach them or really do much for them at all, unless they are already inclined and have some good sense or independent training on how to do these things. We take people in and then yak at them for a couple of weeks, and interact, draw them out and turn them loose. Some of it sticks, some it actually transforms them but I suspect most of it runs off them like water off a ducks ass. So we have to figure out how to do much better.

The process of deciphering other peoples opinions to see what is there and importantly what is not, negative space in a way is creative. It is like anthropology on a very small scale. But I am enjoying the process a lot. Work doesn't always have to be a drudge, sometimes I actually find it very enjoyable.

ta ta for now

I am going global, my art is going around the world. Yes I know that many of you who have looked at my work on here and on flickr are from all sorts of places. But this is the digital realm, where information and data and content move at the speed of light and can exist in infinite slices of copies. The old war cry of the 60's, "I am not a number" has been overturned and yes in this realm in fact I am simply a number, not even base ten but just a series of ones and zeros. My art for all  the beauty of color and form, tone, hue just series of ones and zeros translated by electronics to assume color values with density and shape and gray scales. To photoshop a picture and find that right balance can be a thing of beauty but to give it form on paper, whether it be photographic print of even ink jet photo paper to me changes the whole equation. So what is the point of all this rambling, I have been invited and I accepted to send one of my postcards to down under, the land of the roo, the land of my first ex-wife, where the marsupial lasted in the face of the mammal. And I am totally psyched by it, first my buddy Amiko and now a new art friend from a foreign land, well foreign to me in distance and experience though I have watched many an ovation tv program on the place.

So I think my new found friend, and thank all of you who read this blog and thank all the people who have taken a moment from their lives to view my work and perhaps enjoyed the time. I hope I haven't robbed anyone of valuable time or as they say, that was ten minutes I will never get back. Please I hope that isn't the case with spending time on my small offerings.

So here is to a new journey for a new postcard, a piece of me traveling to places I have never been and who knows, may never be but I will exist there in my other persona, a little slice of larryosan inhabiting the world somewhere else.

ta ta for now

This is an extra piece because I just had to put this down in writing. I wrote last time about how excited I am about sending my card to an international location. Well I felt like I had slighted my buddy Amiko because I didn't really mention in a big way what that meant to me. Amiko is a very talented individual that I have developed a rapport with via flickr and now ipernity. We have had a few written and visual exchanges over time, sharing a fun sensibility towards our art and I suspect life in general. Funny type of relationship to have strictly via the digital realm. But he has become a friend without ever meeting, something I guess is akin to the old pen pal. 

So anyway, he got one of my cards and his response just hit me hard. Amiko was excited to have a piece of art from me. Without this being sentimental or ego-centric to have someone outside of my family and close friends to actually be excited to have something created by me, just knocks my socks off. I don't know exactly how to put it, but this is a very big deal. 

I just wanted to acknowledge how important this was to me in writing and to let Amiko know  this as well.

ta ta for now

sheesh, do I sound like a little school girl in love or what...yikes!

Life is a busy thing

I am an enigma wrapped in a mystery even to myself

I want to continue expanding my postcard project. The more I learn about postcard art I am finding that I am one of many. My sculpture teacher is a postcard artist and goes to a show with all sorts of stuff centered on creating and collecting postcards. Part of me likes being part of a tradition part of me wishes I had found some new niche to explore with art. I envy those people who can be on the cutting edge, who extend culture into whole new areas of human endeavor. Yet at bottom we are social animals so it is very hard to lead the way and invention happens usually many times by many people until some tipping point is reached. If I was really avant garde I guess I could use my blood to paint postcards or something like that, but then it would be rather messy and very unhygienic. Oh well, for now I shall follow the path of others. 

So for now I am finding ways to extend what I do. If you would like to be part of this project just write me and give me an address to send a card to. I am hoping to reach as many different parts of the world as I can, just like the pen pals of old. I am considering sending my postcards to cultural celebrities if I can figure out how to do that. Then after I die then these people will have major collectibles to give to the next generations. I am not sure if I will figure out any of this or even make this happen. But you can help and share with me more places to send out my cards, kind of like a reverse search for intelligent life. 

ta ta for now 

Leaves of summer past

Before I launch into whatever I am going to launch into, I have to wonder if people who read this, find my musings interesting or my life or both. Enough on that.

So we head off to the weekend, I am so glad, I am exhausted by the whole week. Work has been an amazing ride of stress with goofy meetings all week. My department is in the midst of major change and there is a faction that have been resisting and behaving badly. I don't know about you but I can't stand watching people behave badly and get rewarded for it. What I mean is that people who throw tantrums and then have weenie bosses cater to their crap to avoid conflict. This has been happening to these people including this guy who I work directly with and it has sucked, sucked big time. Well a new day has dawned and this crap is coming to an end but is taking time and while it is changing the rest of us who just want to go to work and enjoy our day and perhaps do something interesting at best or at least not painful at minimum get caught in the crap storm. And it is exhausting to be around and in one of the meetings I was involved in we were sandbagged by a group of these individuals so I found myself in the middle of a fight between the resisters and my manager. And then to top off the week I had to go to a meeting with this guy who was my old manager and is a total putz and just wants to piss in my well. If you don't know what that means, he is a spoiler, saying doing things just to ruin things for other people. Somehow to bring this back to art, I have got to figure out how to capture all this and instill it into a piece of material or digital medium and share it with others in a way that tells the subtext without having to put out like I am doing now. I want you to be able to see this week without having to see the week or hear about the week or God help you go through this week.

When I figure this out, I will let you know, best of all in a picture. In the meantime Don Carlucci is waiting for the transfiguration.

ta ta for now

Thank you Jerry Lee

I was trapped for a long time on flickr discussing the issue of views and faves and explore and how that made me feel as someone who tries to create pieces of art. It reminds me of the debate over the poetry slams that were popular a few years ago. And that still is happening in one form or another, partly in the rhymes in hip hop competitions and other spoken word events. These to me are expressions of pop culture, with all the same mystery of how certain songs, movies, catch phrases manage to make into pop culture and become part of the fabric of our lives. In my life it was a very easy reference to go to Gilligan's Island. When you said the professor or went, "hey little buddy" you knew exactly what I meant. There was a hip hop song that mentioned a cereal that I had remembered until I was interrupted to discuss what items were going into the wash tomorrow. Oh well, there goes that train of thought.

So now flickr is part of our regular culture, enough people are starting to see it, know the name and many pictures are linked from there and Yahoo is big news now, being courted by both the evil empire Microsoft only to try to see if they want to be part of the evil empire of News.com both run by wealthy megalomaniacs, I will take my chances with Bill than with Rupert, At least Bill gives his money to good causes, Rupert is a gutter kind of guy. Wow where did this all come from? Anyway, I forgot what the heck I wanted to say, it was all blown away by someone who always ends up interrupting me when I am writing.

ta ta for now

This was a nice weekend and I have ended it with a couple of things. I tried to go to the Noguchi sculpture museum in Queens New York but they weren't open when I went. I did go to a nearby sculpture park and will post a picture of one of the pieces which has an interesting history to it. The other thing I have been doing is trying to do my programming homework, which finally worked but I am not sure how the heck I got it to work. I did fail a lot and when it worked I had erased and started over for the umpteenth time. So I am not sure what I did right or wrong at this point.

I don't have much to say tonight except go over to Jerry Lee's blog and drop in on his piece on flickr interestingness. I had a lot to say there and it is a topic that I have mulled over quite a bit.

http://www.ipernity.com/blog/27780/44200

ta ta for now

Today I had to take my cat to the vet and end his life. All quality of life for him ended when he began to convulse which led to him losing his control over his muscles. I feel pretty certain he had a stroke of some kind. I have bonded to my Sam over the last few years through having to take care of him medically on numerous instances. I have had to do a regimen of pills, drops, asthma medicine, intravenous fluids and other medications. Sam was a survivor of 9/11 and had been rescued the on the 12Th of September. So he had been exposed to all the toxins from the destruction of the WTC. I believe this contributed greatly to his later ills, especially his asthma. At the end, I was giving him intravenous fluids nightly with pills morning and evening. And that routine really bonded the two of us, after having to do the procedure he would get a treat and then he would come over and demand time being held on my shoulder. So this was my life for the last couple of years with him. Plus he was such a soulful little old man, I would wake up in bed with him leaned against my back or sitting on my shoulder on the pillow. Burmese cats are just amazing people oriented felines. Tonight I am just cried out, emotionally flat from being emotionally and physically spent. Up since four thirty in the morning I never could get myself to sleep again. Tonight I go to school and fought to stay awake. Some people will avoid being with their pets when they are put to sleep but I believe the deal is that if we the owner decide it is time, then we owe our pets the obligation to be there for them at the end. And I have kept that promise 3 times now with cats. It never gets easier but I do know the routine and I am glad even if it is painful that I decided to keep that promise. I can sleep easier knowing that I have shown in some small way that I am the person I want to be.

Perhaps I shouldn't write about this, instead find some visual manner to share this with you but right now I am not sure how to do that so this will have to suffice.

ta ta for now

I was never really a very good school. It was not that I didn't enjoy learning, because that is something I have done my whole life, usually through my reading, but I was always so insecure about my capabilities and had problems with my self esteem. It may for a very fraught academic life, always measuring myself against impossible standards which I always failed, so school sucked. I skipped an enormous amount of class time and barely made it through, though I did well enough on the college assessment tests to get in. So that is my checkered past, which took me many years to overcome, and I was whining about my college failure for years. Well due to internal progress and people around me who got sick of my whiny nature I changed gears and went back to school. And now as an older person in my 50's with most of my career set school has taken on a whole new meaning. I do have a goal for my efforts, to provide documentation of my skills and to expand those skills for my current career and hopefully for my next. So the big pressures both internal and external have gone somewhere else. I feel pretty good about myself and I am taking the tact that school will be enjoyable for me, and it has. With this attitude coupled with an innate desire to know things I am having the time of my life. What has really grabbed me has been my art classes, I have made some really cool connections with my teachers and am learning a lot of fun stuff. My sculpture teacher is a postcard artist among other things, he is interesting, I am still in touch with my color and design teacher and being older I can talk to them as an adult, not just some goofy student, I have to admit to not being very versed in the subject of art, I don't have extensive background in the subject and these classes have really started to fill that cultural void which has bothered me for years. I want to understand the development of art throughout the ages, what makes for the different schools, how the components of art pieces come together and how they relate to each other. Colors, space, line and energy. I know how things affect me but I still haven't developed all the language, I don't really know the vocabulary of art. I am not talking the sense of art in the market value but in the language of the medium and the cultural traditions of the process of making art. I have not been schooled in these subjects, but I am starting to do that now, in fact if I could I would spend my whole career just on this area, but I do have more fish to fry than just carp.

ta ta for now

I putting out fighting words, or trolling for responses. So in your face!

I can't think of anything sensationalist to say to try to get more readers or responses. Should I stand on the street corner and scream, art is dead, photography is visual masturbation, digital is not real, stop the exploitation no more pictures of the world outside of yourself. Yeah that's the ticket, I shall shave my head, don torn sack clothes and ashes and carry a giant poster that screams the world is "coming to an end". I shall open a anti social web 3.54 site that specializes in keeping people apart, designed to have members gossip behind each other backs, stab each other in the heart by only bad mouthing the other persons artwork. The Anti Flickr, where you post stuff only to be insulted, no faves, just pick the worst in your opinion, comments are only prepackaged phrases, like "you suck" "this sucks" "why do you keep on living" "you call yourself a photographer, well don't". Buttons instead of faving will allow you to delete the other persons pictures or move into groups like "crap" "total crap" "too crappy to live". Where the pictures with the most views will be printed and burned in obscene ceremonies that are broadcast across the web.

Would the members still worry about how many views they get or how many comments or anti faves, or if they get picked to have their work burned.

Oh what a wonderful and amazing world that would be, but I suspect it would still be oh so familiar.

ta ta for now