AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

not MY space


I can see clearly now – foto by Smith

On MySpace I tried to blog a foto of a clear plastic scale-model male human torso showing plastic ribs and lungs I had shot in the doctor’s office — and either because I titled the foto “torso” and/or described it as “body part”, instead of showing the foto, MySpace came back with this message:

Terms of
Service
Violation

Without even viewing the foto, MySpace judged it obscene, censored me, and deprived me of my freedom of artistic expression.

This is not only grossly wrong but hypocritical as well because MySpace is about nothing so much as sex, bad language, and body parts. I see more tits and ass and profanity on MySpace than all the soft-core porn I come across in the Huffington Post’s Entertainment and Style sections.

MySpace is a cheap, salacious, sexual networking site with no real morals or standards and yet they think they have the right to tell me a Doctor’s clear plastic model of a human torso showing no naughty bits is unacceptable. Well Fuck You Very Much MySpace — you’re as scummy as the slimy right-wing politicians and the fundamentalist religious wrong you lay down with.

What’s really weird is the bottom foto was titled “torsos” and described as “body parts” – hmmmm, “torso / body part” is censored” sight unseen yet “torsos / body parts” is deemed okay?

The foto above is the one they censored, the foto below the one they accepted.

I renamed the censored foto from “torso” to “lungs” and changed the description from “body part” to “body parts” since they’d already accepted “body parts” on the second foto and they still censored it; so I reprocessed the foto, titled it “lung” and changed the description to “I can see clearly now” and they accepted it, so they are really quite stupid as well as fascist.

If they kick me off for this rant, good riddance to them – they remind me of Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Their holier-than-me attitude cost me a good half hour of my time to program around their totalitarian tendencies.

I despise the autocratic Big Brother attitude of MySpace – I only stay on it because it’s the easiest place for folk to leave comments on my blogs and I’m addicted to daily feedback. But I’m not sure their “you do as We say not as We do” attitude is worth the aggravation for my mere 80 daily readers (or less) so I’m thinking of leaving MySpace because you lay down with scum you end up slimy, and they rile me way more than they please.

I understand why folks are leaving MySpace in droves. Over the past four years, all the really cool folk I once enjoyed have left MySpace and moved on to FaceBook. My main problem is I find FaceBook even more mindless than MySpace, so my options are slim.

Of course at heart this question is moot because I get fewer than 100 people a day on MySpace and a dozen or so daily on FaceBook while our main blog base at WalkingThinIce.com according to the log averages 2,428 successful requests for pages per day. I’d say MySpace needs me way more than I need them.

Heed or bleed, O Great Anal Orifice of Satan.


body parts – foto by Smith

THE NEXT LEVEL

“I want to totally transform myself tonight. I want to go to the next level,” I said.

“Well, for *you*, the next level is probably hangover!”

“Oh, that’s not very nice. Oh!”

“You know what’s horrible, don’tcha?”

“What?”

“The only way to get to the next level is by your own work. And that’s not easy. Most folk don’t make it. And those that do, usually don’t tell.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I think they lose interest, once they go to the next level, you know? Do you explain to the ants once you’re bringing the exterminator in, huh? You think butterflies go back and hang around with coccoons? I don’t see no butterflies hangin around caterpillars. Once you get on to the next level, you lose interest in this one. It’s like once everyone got out of jail, they promised to send LSD-spiked fruit in to us. And no one ever did. When *I* got out, *I* promised to send drug fruit. But once you’re out, that don’t matter no more. They’re *gone.* You’re on to other shit.”

– Smith & Lady

naughty bits get more hits


body parts – foto by Smith

I daily harvest headlines of the sick, the strange, the surreal, the social, the psychiatric and the psychotic. I used to blog them once a week as a world overview, a weekly state of the disunion between good and bad, a symptomatic list of this collective disease called inhumanity.

Haven’t blogged any for two months due to new art and poetry and my headlines file has grown heavy, so I have to start cleaning it out and I guess I’ll begin with what Monty Python calls the “naughty bits.”

I find it strange that news feeds have become sexually explicit, so surface and shallow. I see more tits and ass on Huffington Post than I do in R rated movies these days, which is okay by me because I’m hard-wired for female flesh and openness is preferable to censorship; but is it really news when someone’s strap slips and a nipple blips, especially in a world as gone wrong as ours?

Here is my tasteful selection of sex and body-part headlines from the past two months for your judgment, edification, education, and perusal — the list starts off salacious, then goes societal.

~ ~ ~

Vagina Facial, Or ‘Vajacial,’ Becomes Newest Beauty Trend

Feet=Sex? What’s Behind the Kinky World of Foot Fetishes

Japan Celebrates Penis And Vagina Festivals

50 Things To Do Butt Naked

Man Used PENIS To Assault Female Police Officer

Vibrators — A Girl’s Friend or Foe?

Courtney Love Wants To Hate F*** John Mayer, Has A Powerful Vagina

Women Hospitalized After Having Caulk Injected Into Their Butts

Boy George: Lady Gaga Asked Me To Sign Her Vagina

‘Rock Paper Scissors’ Glove Lets You Play With Yourself

Cops Order Family To Cover Up Naked Snow Sculpture

101 Sex Positions That Won’t Spice Up Your Sex Life

Man Sold His Wife For Sex On Craigslist

Korean Man Marries Pillow

Swiss Prostitutes Trained To Use Defibrillators To Prevent Clients Dying

70% Of Men, 34% Of Women Think About Sex Daily

Indecent Fruits And Vegetables

Topless With Tacos: Food Porn As High Art

Artist INSA Sculpts 10-Inch-Tall Elephant Dung Stilettos

Sex At Public Parks On The Rise In LA

Body Painting: “They Say ‘Drop The Robe And Spread ‘Em”

Priest Becomes Prostitute

Rihanna Gets A Lap Dance From A Midget Porn Star

This Valentine’s Day, Think Carrots And Sex

Penis Pants Modeled In Madrid

Jon Gosselin’s Playgirl Offer Is Small, Like His Penis

Coco’s Butt Crack Off MySpace: Ice-T’s Wife’s Photo Removed

Playgirl Will Pay Jon Gosselin By The Penis Inch

Jennifer Garner Brought A Dolphin To Orgasm

Georgia County Replaces Sex-Scandaled Politician With Man Who Cheated With Mother-In-Law

Chef “Milks” Wife’s Pregnancy For Cheese

Cuba Begins Performing State-Sponsored Sex Change Operations

Was Shakespeare A Woman?

Love Handles Stop Bullet

Introducing The K Cup: Breast & Bra Sizes Are Growing

PHOTOS: Oscars’ Breast Dressed — Who Wore Cleavage Best?

‘Oral Sex’ Anti-Smoking Ad Causes Outrage In France

John Mayer’s Penis Speaks! Hates On Black Women, Embraces White Power

Kate Major Agrees Jon Gosselin’s Penis Is Small

Ewan McGregor Talks Flashing His Penis, Sex Scenes With Men

Lorenzo Martone Talks Penis Size

Hooters For Sale

The Female Condom: Effective And Underused

Man’s Testicles Severely Punctured In Super Bowl Fight

Ann Coulter: Full Body Scanners Are Useless, Can’t Stop ‘Foreskin’ and ‘Anus’ Bombs

The Butt Bomb: Al-Qaeda’s Next Threat?

Carville On Airport Security: ‘Measure My Penis And Let Me Get On The Airplane’

Film Star Claims Naked Body Scanner Images Of Him Were Circulated By Airport Staff

Columnist: My Left Breast Put The TSA’s Full-Body Scanner To The Test

Male prostitution is Nevada’s newest legal profession

Prostitute Fined $820,000 For Evading Taxes

Europe’s Sex-Slave Industry

Man Charged $21,000 For 90 Minutes At Strip Club

Lap Dances For Haiti? Ohio Strip Club To Donate To Relief Efforts

Child Finds Penis Picture On Used PSP Christmas Gift

Saudi Man To Receive 1,000 Lashes For Bragging About Sexual Exploits

Court: Loud Sex Justified Warrantless Search That Led To Drug Bust

God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever

‘Reality’ Show Lets You Decide If Women Get Abortions?

Pregnant Man Expecting THIRD Child

~ ~ ~

PS – Lady and I have been married four years as of yesterday. Wonder what our nay-sayers have to say about that?

We got hitched by a Wiccan 6 months after we met. Would have been sooner but she had another husband in her past she’d left three years previously she had to officially shed before we could meld.

Four years of monogamous marriage — at least we know where our penis and vaginas have been lately.


body parts – foto by Smith

3 lost found


untitled January 2006 assemblage painting by Lady K. 7″ x 5″ – foto by Smith

“The cat can pet the blues away, the purr in fur unfrown.”

I was brooding and pet the cat and immediately felt better and that sentence suddenly popped into my brain straight from the WordLand Express.

When I was little, my mother told me not to go into the Words by myself because I might get lost. Looks like she was right.

Found these three collages in a plastic garbage bag in a closet. It’s weird — I’ve been looking for these for almost a year now, and it was a delight to pick up a garbage bag, wonder what’s in it, and find our missing art. Must have got lost when we moved in 11 months ago.

Top foto is one of Lady’s first assemblages, done early 2006 in Cleveland. The next she created in Croatia late 2006. Bottom collage I did in Croatia and titled The Rise of the Novel, then totally redid in France and retitled The Coca-Cola Wars.


untitled December 2006 assemblage painting by Lady K, 5″ x 6″ – foto by Smith

The Coca-Cola Wars, 2007, 7″ x 9″ – collage & foto by Smith

When I say I redid my Croatian piece in France, you’ll know why when you glance below and see what it looked like as The Rise of the Novel. Sometimes with collage assemblage paintings, you just go wrong, and this went very very wrong. I’m surprised it cleaned up so well.


The Rise of the Novel, 2006, 7″ x 9″ – collage & foto by Smith

mea culpa


me running from yesterday’s statements – foto by Smith

My mea culpa.

I mis-spoke in yesterday’s blog, got cavalier and smudged my point when I said 1% of creative output is special and the other 99% throw-away. An unfortunate choice of words.

My words were short-speak referencing a theory I’d read which said over the thousands of years of human history, basically 1% of the creative output of each year is saved and passed on, so you get this slowly expanding impressive pile of culture that contains Beowulf, Shakespeare, Camus, Faulkner, Bach, Bob Dylan (but not Britney Spears or Mariah Carey), and every new year 1% of its plays, movies, songs, books, poems, paintings, etc are added to this continuously accumulating cultural accretion. The other 99% of each year’s cultural output is essentially forgotten over time, even though it affects the next year’s.

I sort of agree with this. But I mis-characterized the 99% – it’s not throw-away; rather each year’s output is more along the lines of 1% genius, 9% real good, 20% good, 30% so-so, 20% so, and 20% in need of vitamins.

And with poetry I average this over my spectrum. On my one hand, we have a large roster of amazing reading and writing poets in Cleveland. In fact as Lady and I read our poetry in London, Krakow, and Oaxaca from 2006 through 2008, we decided Cleveland had the liveliest, edgiest and most dynamic poetry scene of them all. But on my other hand I’ve been reading massive amounts of famous and unknown poets in books past and present and I’m finding more less than more, especially when evaluated over time.

I also have to factor in how I’ve become a tougher critic after trolling through poetry scenes for 47 years and collating my own pile of impressive poetic impressions and poems along the way so I tend to end up comparing my past years’ highlights to this year’s readings.

This 10% quality level also seems to hold true within individual poets/artists careers — even with such an acknowledged master as T.S. Eliot, 90% of his output is more or less so-so while much of his 10% genius output cannot be understood without footnotes and explanations. Same thing with Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams — mostly 10% decent and 90% filler.

Part of me says I shouldn’t be judging in the first place, that I should just listen and learn, but there is so much poetry out there I can’t possibly hear or read or embrace it all so I have to select, and selection is evaluation is analysis is judgment. For example, I admire and appreciate the poetry of Wallace Stevens a heck of a lot more than the verse of Rod McKuen and his American Greeting Card school of poetry.

A general lack of analysis and judgment in most folk is how Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ended up in Government instead of programs for brain transplants (for the first two) or psycho wards (for Cheney).

Anyway, I tend to go to readings these days hoping to hear voices I don’t know because I already know the voices I do know — I’ve heard most my poet friends hundreds of times, hear their voices in my head when I read their words upon the page. One of my greatest pleasures is hearing first time readers and imagining how they’ll grow and blossom through the years. I’m getting to the point where I’m going to readings more to keep friends happy than to hear poetry simply because I’ve heard so much for 47 years that it frequently has the feeling of been there done that.

As for my second complaint in yesterday’s blog that there was less and less actual poetry in poetry lately and more and more confession, diary entry, mundane lies and lives, whining, wishing, vignettes, short stories and description – well while this is true, it misses the point that if it is done right, written well, each of these genres can produce genius poems as well. Ann Sexton is a good example of confessional poetry frequently working. It is all how it is done. Even in tired formula movies, excellence can arise from a fresh interpretation — like District 9 in the sci-fi genre — and although a famous artist once said “rap was short for crap” (which is mostly true), folks like Public Enemy still come up with killer content. A perfect example of this is accordion music, which I find usually to be shallow oompa oompa German band shit can fly high in genius territory for Lady and I came across three accordion players in the old square in Krakow who were playing fantastic intricate classical music pieces and raking in the dough from the tourists.

Perhaps the perfect example of this is my friend Jeff Chiplis, whose found neon sculptures I highlighted in yesterday’s blog. Neon is ubiquitous and mundane — you’ll find beer signs in every bar, endless restaurant signs, check-cashing signs, even sign signs everywhere. Chiplis has taken this particular mundane and made it new again so it sparkles and brings a lift to your heart and a smile to your face simply by taking the old apart and recombining it into new.

(I wrote this blog because Jesus Crisis aka John Burroughs called me on my 1% statement yesterday, and he was right.)


Lady’s bath – foto by Smith

neon noon night day


Jeff Chiplis found neon sculpture
in upcoming Butler Institute of Art solo exhibit – foto by Smith

We watched Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland yesterday in 3-D. The 3-D was nicely done, but the movie itself is all art, no heart; a big hole rather than a bright whole; eye candy, so best not keep your mind handy.

This is the first Tim Burton movie I’ve not enjoyed. Failed movies drain my psyche rather than invigorate my spirit.

The problem with 3-D is the glasses are dark and greatly dim the color and experience. We saw Avatar in 2-D after we watched it in 3-D just to compare, and the color loss is vast.

On a much brighter note, one more spiritually joyful, I spent a day down at the Butler Institute of Art with found-neon artist Jeff Chiplis helping install his upcoming solo show Neon Works in the 21st Century. (I’ll blog the date of the show once I again find out)

I interspersed helping Jeff with walking around the museum seeing the usual so-so art art museums seem to love mixed in with a selection of visually and mentally interesting pieces. I’ve seen so much art in my 46 years in the art world that the run-of-the-mill stuff just bores me at this point and it takes something a little extra to thrill me these days. Plus just like any other art, 99% of what one sees or reads or hears or tastes is throw-away while less than 1% zings the mind the eyes the heart. This is especially true of poetry readings where even my 1% quality estimate might be optimistic. (I mourn the loss of poetry in current poetry — most “poets” write and read their diary entries or daily descriptions of their mundanity and lists of their gripes and whines.)

Here are a few shots of Jeff Chiplis’ solo art show in the making. I’ll try to get down to the opening to shoot the whole show. Jeff is one of my 13 guest artists I’ve put up on AgentOfChaos.com. You can see a slew of his previous work at www.agentofchaos.com/chiplis/index.html. I’ll be adding dozens of fotos of the show to his AoC site.

As you can see, a Chiplis found neon show is a joyous explosion of color and form. One’s spirits rise just walking into the room.

* Disclosure – some of these are very odd shots of his work and give you absolutely no idea what the piece/s look like, but they do make for dramatic shots . . . this shows more how I look at shows rather than what shows look like.










Jeff Chiplis found neon sculptures
in upcoming Butler Institute of Art solo exhibit – fotos by Smith

UTILITY AND INVERSE UTILITY

Utility and inverse utility. Little Nemo, crawling softly in broken glass. Cloud hypothesis. Does my gospel grope my thought? I kneed the immovable putty of your chest. The Dada utility chings channels. The Dada utility is aware.

Two can be afraid. A mistake is involved in entirely. Give in to release. Weather from or where art for. Insight from Grace. That which is left behind when the wave bleeds. That which is imparted in lipped licks. That which creates is drawn to us in waves.

Light is the eye of God, a momentary respite. Receiving is believing. The shadowed profile of your bust tangled in the garden. The emptying of the urn. Say it and it becomes yours.

– Lady K

“Portable Crime Scene 1: Reset” is done


Page 50 & inside back cover of just-completed Reset – collages & fotos by Smith

I finished the final two collages of Portable Crime Scene #1: Reset. Going to miss its nightly creative companionship – these 54 collages have dominated my last 19 days.

This final two-page spread is my signature in that the word “Smith” appears 12 times across the two pages.

The two yellow goats are from a Gauguin show that was at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In the last room of the show they had ink pads and stamps featuring various elements of his paintings so we could create our own Gauguin.

The newspaper paragraph that’s too small and yellowed to read reads:

Instead, Harris quotes Smith as say-
ing he was led by an “old spirit” who
“transfigured himself from a white
salamander in the bottom of a hole.”
The letter also says Smith used an
enchanted stone to look into the future

Now before I begin volume 2, I’ll finish getting Criminal – A True Tale of Armed Robbery, Stolen Cars, Alternative Art, Mainstream Poetry, Underground Publishing, Robbing The Cradle, and Leaving the Country ready for another round of shopping around to literary agents. We have a great story here, and the world’s indifference is frustrating. But at least we wrote the bloody thing. If we don’t get a nibble from the publishing industry over the next 12 months, we’ll publish it ourselves through Lulu.com.



Pages 50 & inside back cover of just-completed Reset – collages & fotos by Smith

paper in a minor key


Pages 48 & 49 of work-in-process Reset – collages & fotos by Smith

Laid these two collages out last night but didn’t glue them down because there are only four blank pages left to fill and these two didn’t seem worthy to be part of the final four. But they’d be fine if they weren’t in the last quartet, so I’ve decided not to be intimidated by quality or my own standards and publish them anyway. After all, this is America where everyone but me watches American Idolatry and Scumvivor, so quality is obviously not a factor.

Spent yesterday down at the Butler Institute of Art in Youngstown helping Jeff Chiplis install an exhibition of his found neon sculptures. I’ll blog some of the fotos as soon as I finish and blog the final two collages.

Had an odd thought last night — what if my visual dizzy spells are glimpses into reality instead of glitches in reality?



Pages 48 & 49 of work-in-process Reset – collages & fotos by Smith

Urban Dictionary

One of my new hobbies is writing definitions for Urban Dictionary. I’m very interested in philosophy, psychology, the mechanics that drive behavior and creation and information processing.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=shadyladyk

I submitted “Egotistical dividends” today:

Egotistical dividends

The fallout in terms of benefits of having an ego.

“There are concrete egotistical dividends; an artist’s ego is what compels him to create art; a poet’s ego lends her sufficient hubris to cause her to express herself in a poem.”

Related concepts: byproducts, ego, creation, art, process.

– –

Here are the rest of my submissions, which have all been accepted by Urban Dictionary:

Planned casualness

Use of maturely worded cliches to imply a level of maturity–of self-possession–that the speaker doesn’t actually possess.

“I think your planned casualness rather gauche, rather inconsistent in comparison with your demonstrated behavioral spectrum.”

Related concepts: authenticity machiavellian delay self-consciousness transparency ego.

Machiavellian delay

A conscious delay in response for the purpose of not appearing too overly eager to respond.

“I reject the concept of a Machiavellian delay. I think social networking has made this tactic transparent. The new ethic is authenticity, which lends itself to fluid communication.”

Related concepts: authenticity self-consciousness transparency ego premeditation.

article bling

A citation or link to an article in a social forum used to advertise social, cultural or intellectual capital.
“I like how you prefaced that cool article bling with a teaser citation.”

“Nice article bling bootie.”

Related concepts: eruditism social capital framing machiavellian reasoning game theory.

Thought poacher

A thought poacher consciously takes someone’s thought and presents it as though it is their own. To poach a thought, one must be aware of its source when elocuting it.

“She stole my hep idea, that dag-blasted thought poacher.”

Related concepts: parrot mimic ape plagiarist pretender.

Thought bling

An original idea advertised in a social context to enhance the reputation of the person presenting the idea.

“Ew, she’s such a brain. What a bunch of thought bling. Let’s rip her to shreds.”

Related concepts: intellectualism egotism precociousness personal marketing elitism.

– – –

I’m working on definitions for the following phrases, which mostly deal with learning theory:

Free flow thought panning, meta-extrapolation, shape ideation, thought salting, learning salt, oysterization, organic construction/composition/engineering, beachhead organization, audience salt, caustic byproduct, context wrapping, context condensing, concept beachhead, consideration territory, consideration frontier, consideration mapping, situational epiphany, serendipitous collage artifact.

– – –

And these are to do with learning, expression and perception:

Cyclical progression/regression, concept cloud approximation, public thinking, banal ethic, quieted ethic, associative blaming, blamecasting, faux abstraction, unintended gloving, shrinkwrap victim, mistaken interpolation, aggressive esoterica.

– Lady K