Art from the Outskirts

The magic of StumbleUpon has brought me to this display of toys to make their predecessors “green” with envy (If toys could talk, that is).

(See the toys).

Toys from the Outskirts are cool!

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*Calling all bloggers, artists writers editors and all creative people* I’m looking for opportunities to write articles, interviews, transcriptions and books. Please contact me at the comment box for more information.

Thanks,

Mike

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Regular postings will return tomorrow. For now please enjoy this tasty treat from December 2, 2008 (with minor alterations)

Also featured at Waxing Poetically.

Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.

“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”

He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.

In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief ” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight. - Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker essay “Late Bloomers” October 20, 2008

I, like Mr. Fountain, received a calling so to speak a bit later in life than most my age. Like probably many of you, I had big dreams growing up. There were so many things I wanted to do, to be, to make. Early on at the age of eight or nine I wanted to make toys. Then, for a couple of years, I fiddled with the idea of broadcasting. Voice-over work became my passion’s fruit of choice, but that dream soon fizzled away with a teeny, little, nagging demon of voice modulation called puberty - suddenly my Mickey Mouse was turned to “Mickey Moose” before I could say “genitals.” So my sights turned to computers. I liked them, thought they were cool and I had a pretty awesome collection of video games in my bedroom, so it seemed the next logical step. Several years and a few flunked math courses later, that dream flew out of the window too. College came and in first two years or so, I decided to get a bit creative. My list of classes included TV Production 1 and 2, Ancient World Literature, Contemporary Poetry, History of Rock [Music], and Theatre but also Cultural Anthropology, Prehistoric Life and even a Quantum Physics course I’ve since forgotten the name of for good.

With my mind all ablaze with curiosity, I graduated from junior college in 2002 with a Plain Joe Liberal Arts Associates degree and absolutely no further clues as to what I wanted to do with my life. I took a year off, deejayed a bit, dated an Autism programming specialist, explored religion, and developed a screenplay. The year somehow morphed into a year and a half only for me to find that my college of choice had lost my transcripts. I re-sent them and was placed in my handicapped accessible dorm in the fall of 2005 during which time I hosted my own radio show, joined a poetry club, met the love of my life…. Oh yeah, and I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Management after flirting with the idea of getting an MBA in Marketing. I now stand (or sit due to my wheelchair) before you one and a half years into a career in freelance writing… I turn 28 this month.

I have money… not a lot but I have it. I moved back home to help myself with getting my career started. My lady and I are going strong and she knows there is a ring in her near future . Above all this, I’m very, very, happy!

Never give up!

(Read Gladwell’s full essay).

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In light of a recent spike in viewers and advertising opportunities, Starting January 15, Art from the Outskirts will switch to a an online art gallery format while still bringing you the usual blog posts in between the art and style of the various arts media.

Stay tuned from the Outskirts!

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Photo source at story link here

[NPR’s] Weekend Edition Saturday, December 13, 2008. The foul-mouthed fourth-graders from the TV show South Park have finally made it to college — as the subject of a new class.

South Park and Political Correctness is the brain child of Brooklyn College Adjunct Professor Brian Dunphy, who hopes the audacity of the series gives students an open environment for discussion

This is a likely addition to any contemporary college curriculum as South Park’s plot lines have always had a satirical tinge to them. Everything from the media’s frenzied obsession with a fallen Britney Spears, to satirizing MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, by giving a sweet sixteen Bacchanalia bash to Satan himself to giving one of it’s characters AIDS and having the cure be Magic Johnson’s money — literally.

Rather than critiquing the cute, brightly-colored visuals and notoriously sub-par animation that is the show’s production legacy, the class is asked to watch the shows and critically analyze the social, political and metaphorical meaning behind each show in all its politically irrevocable irreverence. The offensive cartoon is what provokes a heightened awareness of the issues of the day.”South Park is what gets us talking about the issues,” Dunphy says. Students don’t want to discuss politics and and social issues when they feel they’ll offend someone. He tells NPR, isn’t it better to “get the real offensive part out of the way and just have a real dialogue amongst people?”

South Park from the politically incorrect Outskirts!

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In a world where digital vendors such as itunes and Amazon are quickly becoming buyers’ method of choice to shop for music. Spin Magazine columnist David Merchese notes an all too insidious down side to it all: the white power rock movement.

In a short essay in the January 2009 issue of Spin Merchese tells the little-told tale of white power music’s rise in the digital age:

“Like any musician, Brutal Attack’s Ken McLellan wants to be heard. Only, what he wants people to hear are self-described ‘white power’ anthems with lines like ‘This is the Final Solution / Our turn / They’ll burn,’” says Merchese. But whereas in previous brick and mortar times, patrons would be reluctant to purchase the music of aryan revelers, it’s all now one click away.

Bands such as the questionably named Brutal Attack have spent many years being banished from retailers for the fear that those stores carrying the titles would face sales-eviscerating protests and logically enraged shoppers. So for many years mail order and concerts were the main line of both promotion and distribution. But now that the digital era has allowed a much more faceless and clandestine distributor to sell through a third party on sites like Amazon and itunes with out much of a middleman or content filter, these titles creep into the growing plurality on content from excellent to horrible.

“For $9.99, you can download Brutal Attack’s anti-immigrant, pro-white Tales of Glory from iTunes. It’s a buck cheaper on Amazon. A physical copy is yours for $16 on CD Baby,” says Merchese. However, impossible it may sound, in America under the First Amendment, it is perfectly legal to sell songs of any type of protest so long as it does not directly advocate unprovoked injury, or death to another living being. But according to Nora Flannigan of the anti-defamation organization Turn It Down, it has never been a legality issue, but simply an issue of right and wrong. She tells Merchese, “Companies could choose not to sell this stuff. Instead, they hide behind the First Amendment. Refusing to make money from racism isn’t censorship; it’s the right thing.”

But Amazon spokesperson Patti Smyth and others present a slippery slope agrument that if they were to censor one, than any number of others may equally be in trouble. Smyth says “[Amazon] doesn’t feel it should be deciding what’s right for consumers. That’s a slippery slope that we don’t want to be on.”

Finally, Merchese points to the recent election of Barack Obama as a mark agaist the white power rock moment saying that though Ken McLellan and others like him may have a right to an opinion, like the opinion of the world being flat, it is just wrong.

After reading the piece, one might consider online retailers’ changing their tunes (for risk of a bad pun) and realizing the voice of consumers. But with the ever-expanding diversity of product available online, that voice becomes increasingly schizophrenic. So it may be that that old mantra of Libertarianism of “If ya don’t like it, don’t buy it!”

(Read the full article here).

Stop the hatred from the Outskirts.

Art Teacher Controversy (2006)

Also posted at Waxing Poetically

In this clip from December 2006, a local FOX Network affiliate in Virginia reports a high school art teacher has been suspended for using his buttocks (and supposedly his genitals) to make art prints. Many of which and composed by his stamping is paint-soaked posterior on to a canvas to make floral prints and more.

The man who goes by the alias Stan Murmur has his work available online at buttprintart.com.

Video uploaded by SSarah98

It is to be noted that while his technique is controversial and abominable to many his work is structural well composed Also the above website does not either explicitly or implicitly advocate any particular behavior.

Weigh in on the debate: Does this art offend you? Does it intrigue you?

Controversy hits the Outskirts!

Charlie Rose sits down with music production icon, TV producer, social activist and unofficial American ambassador of music, Quincy Jones on his life and legacy. The man whose friends affectionately call him “Q”’s list of collaborators include such noted folks as Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Count Bassie, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Will Smith and Oprah Winfrey. His humanitarian efforts have lead him to areas like world aids relief, poverty relief, world literacy, arts education and he has been an honored guest in such hallowed arenas an the United Nation’s and the Vatican. At age 75, he has 60 years in the music industry, 27 Grammy awards, has traveled the world over and he has just released his second autobiography entitled The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey and Passions.

Q from the Outskirts

Also featured at
Waxing Poetically

Is this coming back?
Image from girldir.com

The world economy, especially in the United States, is in a recession. This means fewer jobs, fewer trips to Cancun, fewer trips to restaurants and overall, a more frugal holiday season for many folks. But Dan Brown of the London Free Press considers popular culture to be the next big sector of peoples’ lives to affected by the pinch of the penny. He make a pretty persuasive case. Everything from the grunge rock of the 90’s to 1971’s dystopic and hopeless classic film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange Brown feels were a direct result of economic hairpulling. He asserts that even Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make A Porno made just this year reflects what people will do during times of financial desperation. He raises the question of whether hip hop’s “bling, bling” mentality will be able to reflect anything real for much longer and if the affluence of The Cosby Show of the mid 80s yuppy era would be marketable today at all.

But regardless of whether it will happen, Is a recession-driven pop culture something thought of by people today? It would take a survey to answer that question accurately. But with the word “bailout” on the worlds’ lips so often in recent days, something is going to change. Only time will tell what in form that change will come or if it will be the form the world wants or any sort of hopeful, Obama-like positivity can realistically muster. Will there be unforeseen changes in fashion? Will Wal-mart buy out major labels? Will hip hop get a punk rock dirt bath? How will Zack and Miri’s cinematic romp influence the minds of viewers? In all these instances, one can only hope times get better before long. Besides… flannel is probably over for good!

(Read Dan Brown’s column here).

Art comes in good times and in bad.

Also featured at Waxing Poetically.

gladwell.com

Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief ” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight. - Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker essay “Late Bloomers” October 20, 2008

I, like Mr. Fountain, received a calling so to speak a bit later in life than most my age. Like probably many of you, I had big dreams growing up. There were so many things I wanted to do, to be, to make. Early on at the age of eight or nine I wanted to make toys. Then, for a couple of years, I fiddled with the idea of broadcasting. Voice-over work became my passion’s fruit of choice, but that dream soon fizzled away with a teeny, little, nagging demon of voice modulation called puberty - suddenly my Mickey Mouse was turned to “Mickey Moose” before I could say “genitals.” So my sights turned to computers. I liked them, thought they were cool and I had a pretty awesome collection of video games in my bedroom, so it seemed the next logical step. Several years and a few flunked math courses later, that dream flew out of the window too. College came and in first two years or so, I decided to get a bit creative. My list of classes included TV Production 1 and 2, Ancient World Literature, Contemporary Poetry, History of Rock [Music], and Theatre but also Cultural Anthropology, Prehistoric Life and even a Quantum Physics course I’ve since forgotten the name of for good.

With my mind all ablaze with curiosity, I graduated from junior college in 2002 with a Plain Joe Liberal Arts Associates degree and absolutely no further clues as to what I wanted to do with my life. I took a year off, deejayed a bit, dated an Autism programming specialist, explored religion, and developed a screenplay. The year somehow morphed into a year and a half only for me to find that my college of choice had lost my transcripts. I re-sent them and was placed in my handicapped accessible dorm in the fall of 2005 during which time I hosted my own radio show, joined a poetry club, met the love of my life…. Oh yeah, and I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Management after flirting with the idea of getting an MBA in Marketing. I now stand (or sit due to my wheelchair) before you one and a half years into a career in freelance writing… I turn 28 this month.

I have money… not a lot but I have it. I moved back home to help myself with getting my career started. My lady and I are going strong and she knows there is a ring in her near future . Above all this, I’m very, very, happy!

Never give up!

(Read Gladwell’s full Essay).