Thursday, May 03, 2007

Winner/Loser takes all


Spears
Originally uploaded by hoveringdog.
Speaking of Hinduism, I heard last night about the highly-touted return of "La Spears" as Olbermann likes to call her. I'm sure he will have something to say about that tonight.

Perhaps he refers to her in this way because it seems she has no true personality beyond tabloid "news" (video/print/blog) and surveillance cams. In any event, she got up on that stage and did "it again, baby...one more time" for old times sake, I imagine.

And while some may hear some reverberating chisme about this "entertainment event" around watercoolers and such, Tracy Clark-Flory, writing for Salon's Broadsheet, thinks Ms. Spears appearance last night is really not "a good thing" for the former Mouseketeer:
The buzz around her reappearance isn't so much a celebration of her return to a relatively functioning state as it is a salute to the return of Spears, the symbol. It strikes me as sad that her reembrace of the very carefully choreographed seductress role -- one that has all the depth of a blow-up doll and, arguably, led her to very publicly deface her own body -- can be seen as a comeback rather than a relapse. "Stripperific" Britney's back

oh, and thanks to hoveringdog for allowing use of his images for blog posts ...i love green spears.

Ganesha, the amazing XXX Hindu god

Within the past few days, I've begun playing with SharePoint Services at the university for a graduate course. While not the speediest interface, nor the most flexible in terms of page width, it does provide a lot of collaborative tools that are usually needed for departmental web sites and blogs. In addition, I asked and received information about whether or not my family's own domain could utilize the service where our sites reside. Unfortunately, the sites are hosted on a shared server, and cannot utilize the service.

At the same time, I've been investigating various articles that address Foucault and his thoughts on Visual Resistance. I say thoughts because several critics find the philosopher had a bit of resistance himself when it came to fully devising a comprehensive theory about resisting the visual. However, I have found that the initial chapters from his Archeology of Knowledge to put me on the right track for analyzing urban art and visual resistance.

Finally, I have shot a large number of stickers, stencils, and wildstyle graffiti murals, of which this one of Ganesha is part. I located this wonderful Hindu god across the street from a XXX adult bar on Texas Street near the city's downtown. It was strange standing there, trying to shoot pictures of this and the rest of the mural while men continually exited the bar. Talk about visually resisting my presence! Coming out of the back of the bar, the men hurried into their cars and trucks without looking at me, the street, or the wall.

Sometimes you need to get away from it all.

And sometimes, it's time to return and be part of the larger world.  Between the first of 2023 and February 14, I painted many watercolo...