A mid-semester picture, just finished tonight:

Diamond Home, 2008, oil on panel, 11"x14"

Examples of head studies from my life drawing class:

If we’re talking about 700 billion dollars, is it a better investment to prop up some of these failing firms, or is it better to put 700 billion dollars into providing health care for families?

--California Congressman Adam Schiff

Maureen Dowd (click here)

Republicans, who have won so many elections painting Democrats as socialists and pinkos, have now done so much irresponsible deregulating and deficit spending that they have to avoid fiscal Armageddon by turning America into a socialist, pinko society with nationalized financial institutions and a financial czar accountable to no one and no law.

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."

--Randy Pausch

"He kept painting. Why? Because it is controllable reality. It is a form of thinking that frees up thought. It is time-consuming, but time-slowing, isolating but self-fulfilling. It is a part of life, but also a metaphor for how life should be: with everything in place, every pattern clear, every rhyme exact, every goal near."

--Holland Cotter on the Morandi show currently at the Met

“Today people believe more in art than the stock market. At least it’s something you can enjoy.”

--Jose Mugrabi, New York art dealer

I did it, and got this nifty picture in the mail:

(The mail carrier kinda scrunched it, but I still like it.)

Just Do It (click here)

Alongside my daily commute route--and I live in a blue state!

Maureen Dowd (click here)

The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.

Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.

Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead. Like W., Sarah has the power of positive unthinking. But now we may want to think about where ignorance and pride and no self-doubt has gotten us. Being quick on the trigger might be good in moose hunting, but in dealing with Putin, a little knowledge might come in handy.

An interesting site from San Diego State University (click here)

Ariel Levy (click here)

Staring into the middle distance, as she often does, Cindy McCain proceeded to contradict her husband. “What I tell everyone is, regardless of whether we win or lose, I will continue to do what I do because it’s so important to be an example,” she said firmly. “To my own children, and also for other kids in the community. Regardless of whether we win or lose.”

“Stop saying that,” John McCain interrupted.

“Say ‘when we win,’ ” Janet Huckabee instructed. She and her husband, the former Arkansas governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, were travelling with the campaign that day.

Cindy McCain gave a flicker of a smirk. “When we win,” she said. And she didn’t say anything more.

Bob Herbert (click here)

John McCain, who is shameless about promoting himself as America’s ultimate patriot, put the best interests of the nation aside in making his incredibly reckless choice of a running mate. But there is a profound double standard in this country. The likes of John McCain and George W. Bush can do the craziest, most irresponsible things imaginable, and it only seems to help them politically.

My beautiful friend and artist Diane Stemper:

How to Make a Perfect Malevich (click here)

(I found this on Rhizome; one of my favorite sites.)

Judicious Pruning, ceramic, 2008:


(I'm going to try to take a brief break from obsessing about this election to savor a terrific work of art by my colleague Mary Mallahan.)

Thomas L Friedman (click here)

As Neil Oxman, political consultant at The Campaign Group, put it to me: For half the country, “Sarah Palin is Roseanne from the ‘Roseanne’ show. ‘Roseanne’ was the No. 1 comedy five years in a row and seven out of nine in the top 10.” She is connecting at a gut level. So does McCain — and, therefore, they don’t need to give their constituents many details.

This race has a long way to go. It is still Obama’s election to lose. But Obama got where he is today by defining himself as the agent of change and by defining change as the issue in this election. McCain, with Palin’s help, has once again not only made Obama’s experience an issue, but has now moved in on Obama’s strength and tried to define the G.O.P. ticket as the party of “change.”

How, you ask, can two people running with the exact same policies as the party that has been in power for eight years, claim to be the agents of “change?” That’s politics. There’s no shame. But what this has done is to make the word “change” as a campaign slogan meaningless. Obama will need to find another way to connect his ideas — clearly, crisply and passionately.

WFMU's Beware of the Blog (click here)

Like 37,000,000 other people, I heard Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention last week. I was listening to the Yankees game on the radio, and I heard A-Rod hit the home run that made the first-ever instant replay in MLB happen, and then the Yankees won and the game was over right about the same time that Sarah Palin was supposed to read the speech that someone else had written for her. So I didn’t see Sarah Palin’s speech, but I heard it on the radio. I was listening to her, and about 10 minutes into it, I suddenly thought, “Oh, shoot! This woman sounds just like my Aunt Karen in Omaha!”

I love my Aunt Karen. She is awesome. She married my Uncle Bikey when they were super young—17? 18?—and they had three kids on not much money, and she kept it all together when everything was chaos and my Cousin Lanny was always breaking his arm or something and my one other cousin was running away from home. Aunt Karen even lived through my Cousin Derrick becoming a Dallas Cowboys fan. She was always looking on the bright side, and everything always turned out okay. She was an absolute rock, and she was very good at cooking and tole painting and other creative stuff, plus she also had that hot school teacher thing going on. I totally admire my Aunt Karen—but I don’t think she’s qualified to be Vice President.

So I was listening to that speech and thinking, “How many of the 37,000,000 other people listening to this think she sounds just like their Aunt Karen?” and it scared the crap out of me. Because how many of them were thinking, “Oh, it’s just like in a movie! If we vote for her, it’ll be like making Aunt Karen Vice President of the United States!” Won’t that be wacky and fun? It’ll be like one of those movies where some girl’s going to high school and then she finds out she’s a princess! It’s like a TV show, it’s like a sit-com, it’s like reality TV. It’s something we can all vote for, the way we vote for American Idol. And it scared me, scared me, scared me, because I think that’s what a lot of people think this election is, they think it’s like a reality TV show. And it is, except that reality shows aren’t real. But the politicians keep talking about the candidates’ “stories,” and about how they’re trying to put together “compelling narratives,” and now the Republicans have cast Sarah Palin as everybody’s Aunt Karen, America’s Hockey Mom, and how are you gonna vote her off the island?

Maureen Dowd (click here)

“How would you like this pit bull grandma to clean your grandfather clock?” she’ll tell President McCain in her flat “Fargo” accent. He’ll confide in his pal Joe that being a P.O.W. was nothing compared with being trapped in the White House with “that woman.”

PALIN: I’ve got a little news flash for you, Hillary. Your night-shift, blue-collar-waitress, boilermaker routine didn’t fool me. It’s in your polls but it’s in my D.N.A. I’ve actually been up at 3 a.m. — gutting moose. While you got to go to your snooty Wellesley, I had to switch colleges six times in six years. While you got to go to Yale Law, I had to enter beauty contests and turn my back to judges in a bathing suit to get scholarship money.

CLINTON: I’ve got a little news flash for you, Annie Oakley. Dinosaurs disappeared a lot longer than 4,000 years ago. I admit you’ve had a profound influence on America, and I’m not just talking about all the women wearing up-dos and rimless titanium $375 Kazuo Kawasaki designer frames. You and John are now at war with four countries — Russia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, even as Osama bin Laden has opened a storefront in a strip mall in Pakistan to make TV ads.

Thomas L Friedman (click here)

But where are our priorities? How many wars can we fight at once without finishing even one? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Georgia. Which is the priority? Americans are struggling to meet their mortgages, and we’re sending $1 billion to a country whose president behaved irresponsibly, just to poke Vladimir Putin in the eye. Couldn’t we poke Putin with $100 million? And shouldn’t we be fostering a dialogue with Georgia and with Putin? Otherwise, where is this going? A new cold war? Over what?

And that brings me to our election...

If we were serious about weakening both Putin and Putinism, we would be investing $1 billion in Georgia Tech to invent alternatives to oil — the high price of which is the only reason the Kremlin is strong enough today to bully its neighbors and its own people.

Hypocritical Karl Rove, et al. Check this out if you haven't seen it yet:

Thomas L. Friedman (click here)

"Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.”

(It appears that the Russians have an economic interest in keeping Republicans in the White house.)

Garth Johnson

Garth is a radical ceramicist/crafter, and has become my son's new artistic co-conspirator. He is also my swell new colleague at College of the Redwoods. Click on his name to learn more about his work.