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Visual art news, views & reviews in Dallas, Texas, USA
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ThEdBlog#8

Stories + Photographs by J R Compton

On The Corner of My Desk

I've just completed my first project on my new big office desk. On the phone with my mother, I mentioned if I ever could get it clean, I could do a long-procrastinated job on it. The job involved dragging out an ancient box of negatives from the Jurassic Era — the Mid-1970s. I needed horizontal space for several piles of contact sheets, a pile of tiny prints I made back then, and an attempt to copy them myself.

Or so I thought. Well, I attempted. My set-up for copying slides and/or negatives relied on me manually focusing black & white negatives, which I almost accomplished. Not good enough though, as I learned when I attempted to process them. I emailed Xpert Imaging, learned their website hadn't been updated since 2003, linked to BWC, drove over there to beat traffic (did not) without my wallet, left the negatives I'd carefully chosen during my First Desk Project, and promised to call in my card number. Did.

So I managed to clear off enough space for a quick-term project by wanting to bad enough after not clearing it off for a couple months of not wanting to bad enough. My first new big office desk project. I'm so proud.

Sun-striped Tree

I spent all afternoon today cleaning up our once wildly popular Aesthetic Crisis Center. Of course that was a long time ago. Up to six or seven years ago, when the Internet was a strange new place of wonders and amazings. A lot has changed since then. Many of the links that worked once then settled into obscurity and forgottenness didn't work. A lot of them didn't work for years and years. Some of those now work but to new, other pages of much less interest here.

I got rid of several of those errant links that this morning went to porn sites or other sites that had nothing to do with the text we so lovingling and excitedly added over the years since the inception of the Aesthetic Crisis Center. Some of what once seemed amazing, now just looks like junk. Most of those links are gone, too.

What's left is a motley crew of fascinating, animated, interactive, goofy, political, art- and other- related internet websites. 202 websites.

Thing with Wire and S-P Chair

My office is much more together now, yet still pretty far apart. Bookcases are beginning to fill, though in hardly any order. There's new piles of junk on both my computer and my thinking and reading desks. I've cleared maybe four square feet of open space on the bigger desk. Enough to read more pages of The Girl Who Played with Fire, but not enough to give me peace doing that or anything else in here.

There's only a few spare square inches on the desk I type at. But that's not unusual. The bigger one has been and will soon again be wider open. Just that what is resting there now defies organization so has no immediate destination. There's lots of open floor space and only a few stacks of mostly emptying and one or two piles of full boxes in here.

It is not yet obvious where all the books that I am keeping and am not losing into deep dark storage will find themselves for the next few years. This afternoon I installed Mary Iron Eye's silk-screened 1994 postcard of The Gathering back into the same pushpin hole between the windows where it had been since before she died. And Alex leaned Ken Shaddock's 2008 The Alchymical Byrd digital photomontage over my photograph of the Book Store Tape Rental / Private Viweing Rooms upper, staircase-accessible red door.

There's probably some subtle message in his re placement, but it continues to escape me, although I will hang the former, and maybe the latter, too. I do want different art over there than was there before all this change. The Ram Dass poster — or perhaps my 5 x 7-inch photo of him here — will go there, too.

Three of TJ Mabrey's mystery symbols are already on the one wall space in this office that I did not have covered over with sheet rock. The clicking electric clock is now in the big middle of that raw, deep brown shiplapped wall. Tiny bugs flit around me and every other thing in the whole room, so I'll have to either set out wine glasses of cheap sweet wine for them to buzz into, get drunk on and drown or light some candles for when the room goes dark, so they can immolate themselves.

Frank X. Tollbert's black line drawing of a Pegasus hoof print spouting a small fountain, which image later became the color painting on one of Bob Trammell's Dallas New Arts Festival posters, is leaning against the wall facing me on the bookcase that overflows with books sans notions of organization.

There is progress, but there is little of the peaceful variety that blends to temporal invisibility. In every direction, visual chaos reigns. It is on the far side of the middle of the beginning of the end, but the end of the end cannot come too soon.

Cherry Pits s90

I'd have to admit that I never read the whole article I commented upon today, but I read enough to know I did not wish to read the whole bleeping thing. It was about my friend and fellow writer and publisher and full-time poet Bob Trammell, who died in 2006 of what the story in the Dallas Morning News described as "cholangiocarcinoma, vulgarly known as cancer of the bile duct ... [and] anxiety over money."

The story, by Dallasite and one of the former presidents of Bob's board of directors and author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara," whom he also probably did not know that well, all but calls Bob a saint. One of two comments when I added mine, was from another who also described himself as a friend, and said he thought Bob — only he called him Robert Trammell, would have liked the article.

I doubt it. Bob rarely liked anything the usual press said about poetry in Dallas. I'm certain he'd disagree with several characterizations.

One of my lots in life is to rearrange idiot histories to describe what really happened. Historians, whom are any of us who get published, tend to wax prosaic, especially if the subject is dead, although they usually cannot utter — or scribe — the d word.

I like that the writer quoted profusely from Bob's poetry, although I didn't want to read it today any more than I usually did then, but he goes overboard in describing Bob as a virtuous man, then manages to leave out the most salient factor in Bob's life.

I got into writing and publishing by responding to published stories in Crawdaddy and Ramparts and other magazines of the day, and continued later in The Dallas Morning News, Dallas Times Herald and The Dallas Observer, so I always feel at home responding to the press' sillier notions. To wit:

Might be a little early to canonize Robert Trammell. The Bob Trammell I knew and worked with and for and published and saw read poetry many times was not usually the gentle soul you describe.

If there was another C.O.D., it was probably alcoholism, not poverty, although they dance together.

A mutual friend calls him "an obstreperous drunk." My outstanding memory of Bob was him and Dallas writer-poet Roxy Gordon standing just behind the audience, talking and drinking loud like compassionless louts while whomever followed them read poetry.

Bob himself always shook nervously and sweated profusely when he read his work in public. I liked a lot of what he wrote and even published some in DallasArtsRevue* — and an irregular column in which he wrote about his many friends who were artists. But not many considered him that great a poet.

The only real truths he sought were in his poetry. If you're looking for a saint, check out Bob's good friend Gerald Burns, who actually won a big grant — after Bob urged him to enter — and spent it touring Europe.

The only things I've changed from my original post was placing a period after the phrase, "his many friends who were artists," where I began a new sentence, because I don't know what most of his friends thought of his poetry — although I know what others think and thought.

I should also have added "party with" in my first paragraph. I liked Bob's parties and felt privileged to be invited. He had great and wonderfully creative friends, from many strata, and I doubt he thought much about poverty. It just is.

Here, I deleted" in "the words of" before "his poety" in the last paragraph," for being wordy. Writers and poets keep changing lines.

Only three changes from that publication to this is remarkable, because when I do letters to editors, I usually get so het up, I make more mistakes and regret them. Maybe I'm finally growing up.

I think Bob and everybody else lodged in public history deserves the unvarnished truth. Although his surely would not have been the first name to come to my mind for a story headlined, "Robert Trammell pushed against the values of mainstream Dallas," which is weak and sad.

He did, but that's hardly a good way to sum him up. He organized art shows and festivals of art shows, he organized and participated in poetry readings and included many other poets in his reindeer games. Overall, a good guy doing good things, but he was always number one, as he should be.

* When this was published on paper.

Light-Pull Bell s90

The real trick with websites is to keep updating pages. That's what wins high google scores. It helps if what you say your site contains actually contains that. And other tricks of the trade. But I still like thinking if I put energy in, readers will want to share it. Iif you provide a semblance of accurate information, add new ones and update them early and often, your links go higher up on the Goog's search pages.

I learned that from a book about how the internet is supposedly making us all dumber, What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. I don't fully subscribe to his theory, but it's nice to know about such things. I feel need to read books on the evolving philosophies and zeitgeist of the Internet often as I can find good ones. There's plenty junk.

One of what Carr thinks makes us stupider is that few of us ever finish long pages of text, even if it's scattered with alluring images, if there are links in that text. He says, we see one of those, we click, and we never come back to finish a sentence, paragraph or thought.

Lately, I've become fascinated by Longform Writing online. I found William Langeiesche's A Sea Story from The Atlantic utterly fascinating — a real page scroller. (Supposedly, Noah Webster named that magazine, saying it was "just a notion," but that fact is not in its Wikipedia listing, so it may not be true. I don't mind sometimes if the facts aren't true.) I suspect it happens more often than we will ever know.

My elderly 13-inch Low D TV is still in the closet, and I've been about a month now without it. I wonder if I can last through the new fall programming.

Meanwhile, I keep going back to the net for more great faction — and hoping for fiction, too. It's fascinating. And I still have time to update up to a dozen pages of this thing on days like today when my car's battery wouldn't start, and I have to sit here until my new battery-charger charges my slightly less-than-new battery, and I can drive off somewhere.

Red Translucent Plastic Trash Can Full of Sunlight s90

Women friends mostly, and family, keep asking for advice, then when I wrap my mind around their issues and render it careful and deep, they get pissed. Must be a trend — there is a full, full moon tonight. Why anybody would want my advice is baffling.

Yeah, I know who I am and what I'm good for — short list, and keep busy doing that — writing, photographing and figuring things out. I've been through some stuff — nine close friends committed suicide in the 70s and 80s. Another couple are still dangling on the edge. Took 20 years but I let dope go its own way — and that was 22 years ago, don't care for booze, mistrust addictions and other crutches — even if I keep some around in case I fall. Have engaged in a lot of Recovery. Lost forty pounds this year. Need to lose forty more. Will.

I'm pleasant some of the time, though I tend to be direct and appreciate desiccated humor. I can be a good listener but not always, and I love deep conversation with old and new friends, but we don't have to agree. I appreciate contradictions and consensus. But save us all the time and energy, if you don't want my advice, don't ask.

Mokah's Handicapped Parking — I still have s90
a permit, but I don't park there anymore

Those who worry about inanities should know I just re-registered www.DallasArtsRevue.com for 20 more years, good through April 2031, cheap bargain that long. My current deal with the current webhost, West Host, whom I call WetHose because they hired somebody stupid enough to turn the fire sprinklers on over their servers — including mine, and have been offline more than the dreaded DreamHost, whom I got rid of to join Wet Hose.

Because I maintain account with DreamHost, many of the hit counters on DARts pages still work. In fact, they work better than WetHose's, which semi-automatically reset of themselves way too often.

Almost every web host's prices keep falling, and for my next boffo (or buffoon) trick, I hope to try out FatCow, if only because they used to advertise in Macintosh magazines, and I liked seeing them there. I chose Wet Hose because Kevin Kelly, whose Cool Tools is one of the few sites I visit every day, wrote that it was great.

Kevin founded Wired magazine, and his CT is a contemporary Whole Earth Catalog (which he edited after Stewart Brand) for tools of our lives. I assumed he knew what he was talking about WetHose, but he didn't.

So we're registered for twenty more years, but it doesn't mean we'll be online all that time. If I ever find a really good webhost, though, it's possible.

Brown Shoes s90

My new office is begun, but it's not how I expected. My plans would not have worked, against electric power, AC and other physical exigencies. My plans were dreams, but this reality is working well. So far. Computer and various peripherals just where they need to be, though I fought the notion.

At the Benefit Store I found a small computer desk that's the color I hoped to find a two-pedestal desk in, but now it's covered in wires and connections, keyboard, mouse, monitor, hard drive, speakers, ad nauseum.

I bought it thinking I'd unscrew the exquisitely simple keyboard drawer, but it dint want to be removed, and told me, repeatedly. Never even got out the screwdriver. Kept thinking what a great place to put my pyooter ... But why did I buy that lovely desk with all those drawers? I suppose I will find out.

Meanwhile, I like both desks. All $105 worth of them combined. The pedestal one is nicked enough to see — now that I've got it home — that it is veneer — both are — but I don't care. They look like wood, and I love the flavor of whorls, burls and grain.

Keying on my keyboard and mouseing with my mouse on that smooth roll-out keyboard, and I did not have to cut the board or reattach the glide guides to the new desk.

I'm mechanical enough to know I could get both chunks into my office — not that it was easy. Lot of huffing and puffing, even used my car jack to lift one end of the big desk to get a grip to right it after sliding on my little sister's donated blanket that was "the wrong color" — a concept I never understood — in through my office door under its forgotten protrusions. Just. Fraction of an inch short of too wide.

Pyooter speakers are up, bass booming, playing Mozart's Piano Quartet in G minor K478: Ill. Rondo. Think I'll start that one again. Great sound.

I haven't connected all the connections yet, or installed books, stereo, etc., but I did find the Fire Wire, so I can slurp up new images — and I need to photo some more birds.

Neon Quarter Rounds s90

Loved it empty. Kept it thus about a week. Then I dragged in the pyooter, did some birds, appreciated the quiet — no stereo yet, finally got KERA-FM online, keeping the window open. Kept the big Swedish bookcase here all that time. Today emptied maybe ten boxes of books.

They're in discrete stacks now. Art. Lit. Consumers Reports back to the last century. Graphic Arts; self-help is the tallest pile (they're all going); history, feng shui. Birds have moved to where once were Orson Scott Card, Lewis Shiner and Spider Robinson. Not sure where they'll go next, but they're being replaced by the few soft books I still have ware for.

Maybe rest in boxes a decade till I need them again. I'm leaning toward a Kindle, but an iTouch would read them to me as well as I them. Not sure I'll need paper books anymore than paper much else, besides the occasional page to send back to Canon with the their latest disintegrating camera.

Tentatively placed the neon red quarter-rounds José kept accidentally getting yellow or white paint on, repainted them twice after his indiscretions before he goes back to Mexico for a coupla months. He did not seem to like the idea, did not want to involve in radical interior dec, then left the place a sty, why I wanted it changed after years in dishevelment. Took a couple days to clean it back empty.

This pyooter's in the wrong place facing the wall — not the door. The medium oak desk I had my heart set on is no longer available at Office Whatever, so I'm scouring resale, junk and benefit stores, with two more tomorrow. Might settle for a put-together (yuck) one of that same high wood grain color. Wanted a bi-pedestal with lots of drawers, but another file cabinet may keep stuff more organized. Not sure where that goes yet, but I know where it faces.

So the perimeter's took and getting tooker. Books piling filling my empty.

Except for a big battle-scarred trash can, my major red shop vac, two towers of CDs, couple boxes full of wires (yet no Old to New FireWire cable so I can steam load Nikon images without burning through batteries) and that noxious stewpot of over-concentrated Murphy Oil Soap and water concoction for when I find another skirmish on my luscious wood floor, this place still has at least the lilt of empty.

The Sky Is Falling s90

Thought I would and could and should stay off the pyooter for a whole week, but I didn't get that far. Reading a book about how the internet is dumbing us all down and couldn't go the three more days to make a week without my net fix, broke the iMac and nearly none of its usual accessories out of luke warm storage, stuck them on a feeble and elderly wood desk that's barely in five pieces now and set up temporary ops to answer email, change the cover of the DallasArtsRevue and add some old bird pix to the brrrd jrrrnll.

The reason for the sudden office reno is above. The roof hadn't leaked in more than five years, but when it did it created a subtle weakness over there over where the bookcase was till we moved it and everything else in here out there or back over yonder, so José could clean up, re-sheetrock, paint and put in my neon-orange quarter-round to keep the flying cockroaches from buzz-bombing me next spring.

While we're at it, might as well replace the desk, throw or give away about half the books, rearrange everything else and add even more colors to the yellow with strips and stripes of green, blue, orange, white, lavender, purple, pink, red and wood grains.

Then the desk I had my eye on at Office Max wasn't in stock anymore, so I'm seeking a clean, medium oak veneered (at least) executive desk with actual drawers. Need to check out the big Salvation Army store, some used and new furniture and consignment stores, and will probably still hafta use some of the book clunks we dragge out of here last week.

Seems like I do this every ten years. No big melodrama trauma this time. But change nevertheless. And a good one this time, I do believe.

Turns out the 2x4 cross brace didn't stop anything from falling, and now there's a nice flat ceiling over the whole room.

Blood on the Bathroom Floor s90

I limped into that room from the kitchen where I watched with interest that suddenly turned to surprise then leaned into horror, as the bottle containing my two varieties of insulin fell to the floor — and shattered. Neither insulin bottle broke, only the short jar I used to keep them with their injectors in. The shattering left tiny and large shards of glass all around and under where I was standing in my bare feet with the refrigerator door open and that pesky light staring at me.

I felt a bit of stab in my right foot, looked down at a pooling of red stuff, looked around for something to wipe it with, and without moving anything any whatsoever, planned where my next footfall would be leading out of the kitchen, through the dining room and into the bathroom. Found a mostly open pathway and limped (prior injury) to follow it, leaving a spot of blood at every right foot placement.

By the time I got to the bathroom, I was gushing a fair amount. See above. I looked for my tube of Neosporin clone, found none, wiped the offending area with some paper towel, washed it quickly with soap, dried it with more paper towels and found a band-aid, which immediately staunched the flow.

Then I took the towel back along my obvious track back to the kitchen, smearing the blood into the wood, hoping it would help the color, found the vacuum, plugged it in in the dining room and rolled it rumbling into the kitchen and cleaned every square inch of visible and invisible shatter.

Gold and Purple Wedding on Winfrey Mound 780

Been another while. That's good. No sense inundating us with temporal understandings. A self-contrarian concept, at best. Anna called, saying she and Susan would attend some emergency funding deal for or about the City. She just wanted to touch base. She knew I wouldn't want to attend.

She probably surmised that such shenanigans regarding the vagaries of City government were well beyond my pain threshold and would overload my Bullshit Detectors. Furthermore, I do not believe City or any other government can properly fund art, even if they wanted to. Never have. Always mess it up somehow. Even if they could afford it. Politics makes bad art. They and their chosen bureaucrats and committee persons choose poorly and reward lamely. Art and Politics successfully touch edges sometimes, but melding is unlikely and depends more upon the stars and happenstance than logic-driven energy.

I.e., a big waste of my time, though not necessarily of others with longer fuses.

Meanwhile, speaking of slosh, I have been working diligently on the actual fact and presentation of The Great Art Camera Shootout, in which that usually much-ignored backwater portion of my brain/mind/soul has been making graphs, tests, comparisons and conclusions about which of my cameras and lenses are best for shooting art. I been philosophizing for weeks and months, now I'm physically comparing. And learning.

This endeavor is an offshoot (if you will, considering it's a shootout) of my burgeoning Cameras & Lenses page (officially titled Cameras & Lenses Useful for Photographing Art, except, of course, they are useful for a great many more subjects than just that. And that page is an earlier offshoot of my remarkably popular (so, naturally, I put a lot more energy into it), How to Photograph Art page.

I am having great fun doing these pages, all the more especially, because they are not specifically about art, which subject I am happily — joyously — all but ignoring these halcyon days as I recover from my various physical maladies — broken foot/ankle; stroke-not-stroke; Blood Pressure; Diabetes; Overweightiosity.

Oh, I still photograph the stuff now and again. And I still think about it sometimes. But mostly I do not. And for the now of it, that makes me very happy.

Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill Cockroaches s90

Best possible use for Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill wine. Science tells us cockroaches that live with us like the same foods we do, or the'd go next door. I take a sip now and again, but even for a big fan of cheap and sweet, it's less-than. Nope, what it's useful for is catching cockroaches, who crawl down into the jar in the dark back of a shelf for their sip, stay for more, then can't crawl up the glass to get out. Or don't want to.

Meanwhile, more join the party, and they all stay. Eventually, I discover the writhing pile of them, long antennae twitching slowly. I empty them into a baggie, seal it, clean the jar, refill it — maybe a couple inches — and put it back in the cupboard where I don't have to look at it for another couple months.

Works even better — and is far less disgusting for littler bugs and moths in wine glasses. It's easier on the humans than poisons that kill us, too.

Butterfly Plastic Pumpkin Laughing Inside Out s90

Feels like I'm trying out a new foot. It is the same old foot, complete with two fractures in the same old Little Toe extension, but since that same old foot has been in an Ortho Boot since February 3 (Yes, I slept with it on many of those nights, too.). I still treat it gingerly. I'm very careful. I have not yet run on it, although a couple times yesterday I caught myself walking on it like a normal foot. My normal foot.

Yesterday morning while waiting for the City's Weatherization people to come by as promised (They never showed up, and they did not bother to tell me that, even though the appointment had been set for more than a week, and they had reminded me of it three times.) I remember trying to walk normally with it, even though I didn't feel normal with it. Healing is a slow process.

Walking from my car in the Handicapped Parking (complete with official temporary tag good till August) slot to the Bath House Cultural Center last Saturday for Anna in a show there, I was cowardly careful up and down curbs and across that expanse. Like an old man, which of course, I am. So very careful. Wincing at any motion that did not feel right. And few did.

Now, two days later, I am a walker again. It still hurts. Not as painful as my fractured ribs that my new camera gave me, more like a normal (keep using that word, probably because it is that which I seek) headache or something. I walk from room to room, out to get the mail. Drive to the grocery. All with just my foot, not that humongous Big Black Ortho Blot.

I'm like my new foot. Maybe another couple weeks, months, years, it'll be same as it ever was. ...

Next day, I could barely walk. Slowed. Put the boot back on. Ortho forever. With it I feel no pain. Use it intermittently. Walk, don't run.

Near the Ziggy Roll s90

Turns out the rib pain I've had since rolling out of my chair (pretty much the whole story) onto the camera around my neck Sunday afternoon April 25, is three fractured ribs and now, because it hurts to breathe, a severely shrunken left lung that I am gradually pumping back up. My doctor tells me to breathe deeply, which I love to do but have been avoiding because of the pain. She also says that I can take more pain pills, even though they mess with what's left of my mind.

Anna says I slur even more than before. Right now the whole world is slurring around me, and I'm dropped out mostly. I was supposed to shoot work for a new member but can't even find the door, and it hurts too much till the pill kicks in my ribs again.

Today's photo is from very near where I tumbled, though I shot it a couple days before the Ziggy pet while looking for birds. There's more flowers in there than show here, and more birds, too.

My Niece - photograph copyright Joyce Compton Culbertson

An aged and discolored photo of my niece Joyce, who sent it
to me many years ago that I still have up on my office wall

Something I've crusaded for all my professional life is fair compensation and credit for artists and photographers. Especially for photographers, since I am one. Two artist friends have recently discovered sites online that were using those artists' art and those artists' names to sell products that they had not got permission for. Together we sent notices, and now both have dropped the stolen images, and the other is still in limbo.

Today I am doing a lengthy, it turns out, Google Image Search for my name, and I have already found several fraudulent uses. Why is the late Andy Hanson's photograph of me (stolen from the DallasArtsRevue Contact Us page and copyrighted by the publisher of DallasArtsRevue.com, who is me) stacked among all those other names on this page — as if I were somehow affiliated with them, whoever they are. Some nice people there. Did they give permission to have their pictures used or do they just not care?

Or with a poem in Spanish on this page under "Las palomas de mi patio" (The doves of my patio)? Or this shot of two egrets having sex at The Spillway stolen from this page. Or here, where it states that my photo belongs to 500X Gallery, which seems very odd indeed, because it is my photo, just photographed there and not for them. Under the photo it says it was taken from Texas Arts Revue, which was edited by me and published by Artists Coalition of Texas (which became D-Art and The Contemp). Use of that photo seems to be part of Randall Garrett's photostream. I would very probably have given him permission to use my copyrighted photograph, if he'd asked, but I don't remember it.

Or this Spanish blog, where someone has stolen two of my images of Tom Orr & Frances Bagley's sets and costumes for the opera, Nabucco. Credit but no link. Bad faith theft of my copyrighted material for their use. Rude! Can public radio steal any photo they can find online for their own use, even if they give credit? And I sent Treehugger.com a bill for the unauthorized use of my copyrighted photograph, although if they'd asked first, I might have donated it.

Google provides a page, titled Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that explains and begins — if you click "infringement notification" — the process of removing copyrighted material from web pages found via Google Image Search begins. Of course, you have to provide all the information their forms require: URL of the stolen artwork; your email address; include the following statement: "I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.".

Include the following statement: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." Sign the paper. Send the written communication to Google at the address provided:

Google, Inc.
Attn: Google Legal Support, Blogger DMCA Complaints
1600 Amphitheater Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043.

Anna sent me this link to How to Build a Copyright Notice, precisely stipulating what a Copyright Notice on your artwork (or an image of it) should say. Oddly enough, it is what most of mine already comprise. For the link adverse: It should include in this order: [The word Copyright] [the year date] [Your full name] and add [All Rights Reserved.] That last does a great deal more than just protect your work in Bolivia and Honduras. It seems to remind image thieves that they shouldn't mess with this one.

Bob Coffee Pop the Whip photo by J R Compton

Here, someone else has written about art I wrote about on this site and used a badly reproduced, very low quality black & white version of this photograph of it on what's left of the TSOS (whatever that is) page. Without permission. Without even a link to my site or the page they stole it from. Very rude. On Google Image it shows up with my name on the photo underneath this one. All their contact links report "Page Not Found." Seems only fair they've abandoned their site.

How difficult could it have possibly been for "Scrio" to find three images on my Contact Us page for this page that also includes that same Andy Hanson shot that the Elitist Cornflation stole? I consider that postcard a treasured part of my collection.

Or Gail Sachson's dreadful snapshots of my and other artists' work for last year's MAC Member show. I gave permission for her to use my photo of that image, not her awful one. And a story that mentions, quotes and misquotes me in Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine — but doesn't, thank goodness, use or abuse any of my pix. Or Pixdaus, which has stolen an image of two egrets supposedly having sex [They took it down the next day.], even though it warns uploaders not to post copyrighted material. Guess they haven't read the Copyright laws this century.

I'll end with some positive notes: Sheila Cunningham blogs about a show I produced, shows the invitation (small but still legible) and links the pertinent page on DallasArtsRevue.com. Brava. I think that qualifies as fair use. The rest of these clearly do not. So very nice to see my glow-eyed coyote again — on UnFair Park.com, used with permission.

North of Acapulco

I know I've become a serial blogger. I get bored with one of these fool things, and then on some lame excuse or nother I go off and start another one. It hardly even matters that nobody hits it, I keep writing. And writing. This entry is here, because I hadn't made any other entry here for about a couple weeks, which wasn't so uncommon when I started it, but then through the fat middle of it, began to be a little maniacal and probably too often entered into.

So I laxed back a bit and decided, as I usually do, to stay back back there calmed out and subtle till I came up with another good thedblog pic, which is generally what guides these entries. Even if I used it on that other new journal first. Hey, nobody reads that one, so who's to know?

These various blogs serve differing purposes for me. This one feeds me back what I've kept from telling myself or letting me find out. Secrets from the secret-buster. Deep-down truths I don't want to know. And cute stories that go round and round till they come back upon a reality that I've known for years but never quite knew that I knew until I told myself in one of these.

My horrorscope is telling me I've kept too many juggler thingies in the air too long and stop adding new ones. I keep telling anybody who won't listen or agree that I gotta stop shooting up this DallasArtsRevue habit. Went to a art tour -ish sort of thing this weekend, saw some interesting art in farther-out categories that I still don't quite know what to think of, but liked it enough that I'm roiling it on the back burners till I know what to say.

I guess I'll always want to say things about art. Like I'll likely keep learning more about photographing birds. And writing. I remembered today that I started that bird thing to teach me how to write better, then forgot along the way some time or how, now have to reopen my mind about it again.

Terri Thoman's Drawing Hanging on my Office Wall

It is fitting to start a new ThEdBlog under new circumstances. I am on vacation from DallasArtsRevue and formal art criticism, but I keep looking at and photographing art, because doing it makes me happy, gives me something to do. It helps that I do it pretty well, and that I ocassionally have something intelligent to say, even some of the artists I say things about thank me. But for the moment, I am more than willing to show without telling so much.

Mine is not a vacation where I go someplace amazing for ten days and come back broke and tired, but a mind vacation, where I do fun new stuff and take pictures along the way and post them on my S90 Journal of learning a new camera or Art Here Lately or the AHL before that or somewhere, maybe even here. I'm too addicted to showing photos online to stop. But sometimes I write about art, too.

But I am unwilling to keep wracking my poor brain into saying intelligent things about every piece of art I think is worth photographing. Lots of art, once you see the photo of it, doesn't really need that much explaining. Lots of us get it. The trick is seeing the art. Too many times that means going somewhere, leaving our carbon footprints all over the earth, sometimes paying to see stuff we can't really afford.

If you want to know what's going on in my head and life and photography, probably a better bet until I get bored with it and come back here is my newish S90 Journal about me learning how to use my new camera. Although I must tell you how exciting it is to arduously produce a page online every single day, that has so far netted 29 hits. Only one of which is mine, because that webhost will not count mine past that.

Even my seriously less popular now birding site is at least twenty times more visited than that.

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The ThEdblog Index of all Theds Blog

ThEdBlog #7 - Henderson Art Project winners strung down Henderson Avenue in East Dallas from Ross Avenue to Central Expressway | Hecho en Dallas at the Latino Culture Center | Sarah Williams - Outskirts and others at 500X | Corazon at the Bath House, Dallas' only Community Art Center where budding and pro artists alike can show their work — until the City in its infinite stupidity closes them down, because all they have money for is more concrete, not the arts or anything that might serve the community | Modern Ruin at an new bank building that was never a bank building but for three and a half days was a very interesting exhibition of rather strange art by some of Dallas' best artists | The Dallas Art Fair downtown with art from everywhere and here, too | And the grand opening of The Dallas Contemporary with art by an LA artist who put airplane wrecks in their hangar-like space

ThEdblog #5 - Starts with a disorienting blank (gray) image, which stands for the half terabyte of data, images, letters and everything else I lost that week, and other stories, including: Not the DO's art critic (I blogged while they blithered) and my unDO stories;

ThEdblog #4 - It's almost not fair | plagiarizing art | se fini | Kim Cadmus Owens | Pix2 at UTD,

The Second ThEd - the Fort Worth Art Dealers Association's tour just before the DADA art tour. If I'd had an Art Here Lately page then, this page would have been there, but it's here instead.

I used to illustrate these abstruse and personal issues with images by anybody I had art by. Now I restrict the imagery to my own photographs with some of Anna's whose usually there. Seems more personal that way.

As always, I'll entertain suggestions.
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