Saturday, December 26, 2009

my life, revealed

It is apparent that I was cut out to be a mechanical engineer. Very early in life I found mechanical objects the most fascinating things in the world, and was adept at figuring them out. I looked at everything with an engineer's eye. When they told me, at age five or so, my paternal grandfather was chief engineer at MacNeil Memorial Hospital in Berwyn, IL, I thought he was a graduate of a college of engineering, or something like that. I was very impressed. Unfortunately, he was only the building superintendent. This misunderstanding may be the root of everything that went wrong in my life. They thought I wouldn't know the difference between an engineer and a super. They were wrong. They tried to pawn my grandfather off on me as an engineer. As time went on and I saw what he did for a living reflected in people's remarks, it was apparent he was only a super. But while this realistic impression was forming and I still thought he was an engineer, I apparently decided engineering was a worthy occupation and I devoted myself to learning about the world through that perspective. The family had no idea what was going on. They thought I was a budding scientist. They wouldn't have known the difference between a scientist's mind and an engineer's mind if you paid them to guess. It's obvious they were trying to cultivate my grandfather's social position. I really doubt that his formal title was chief engineer, though I don't know. If it was, then the hospital can be considered overly protective of its mechanical staff. An engineering society would probably look askance at formally calling a building superintendent an engineer. Engineers are schooled and get degrees in engineering--college degrees. Building superintendents work their way up through various trades learning about mechanical systems from an operational viewpoint. The two are very different and deserve different social statuses. My interest in engineering was the result of a fraud, one might say.

Considering how disastrous my life has turned out, and that over more than half of it, I would consider the fraud a greater call to attention than anything positive that I might have going presently.

The family's desire to build up its members in society's view was basically a fraud. All my young life, doing well in school, was highlighted by the family building it up into an unrealistic mark of distinction. There was no correspondence, point by point, between my achievements and family recognition. It was all smoke and mirrors, taking advantage of what good I did do to build up the family's notion of its own grandeur, without care or concern for the realities of the directions I was taking.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Why I went insane.

I believe I know why I became mentally ill.

In my freshman year at Yale I had an intuition about the direction my life would take. I saw myself working in some inner city on behalf of the poor, with my own means totally unprovided for. I carried this into my preparations for a career at Yale, and when I got a job afterwards in an architecture office I continued to pursue this concept, and found no place for it in the profession and went nuts trying to find a place for it.

Today I face this same fate: no means, because my preparation was for no means and it's too late to make other arrangements. I am unable to conceive of anything related to money, so I am unemployable, and my English Transformation Art is not looking like a good sell.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

rule and order

It is apparent there is around me a vacuum of rule and order since the presence of government is dilute. I am invested with ultimate authority to establish rule and order but even within my own mind there is disorder and competing imperatives. I was chosen for strong will within the disorder, not for my personal orderliness. This can be established without need to prolong deliberations. The best order is vanity. Time is short.

Order must enable everyone to act in knowledge of what order ordains and it must be manifestly useful. Provided I can be relied on to endow offspring with the ability to endow their offspring with strength of will, the order I create can be based on me as a necessary factor. Endowing multiple generations is a matter of speaking restraint as a first principle.

Order must respect the limits of the people, but enable the better concept to advance in preference to a worse, a state of order which the limits of the people will in some cases oppose. The addition of order must put the people in their places according to the advancement of better concepts, beginning with the whole. This is an idea new to many people, and without its expression progress will be held up.

Any collective will have its own means to augment but it is the whole alone whose means are synonymous with good.

Wholes begin with me.

One whole is my financial family, of which Chase, VISA, and Mastercard are a part. There is a natural goodness about this whole like any other. There are collectives here too and these obey what I have said about collectives. In matters of my financial family, my well being determines its goodness, and as VISA took a gamble on me it showed favor to me proving it had favorably assessed my financial soundness, an act closer to this particular whole than others had taken.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Gallery preview video, interesting.

Here is a video preview of a gallery show. I like it as much for the enunciation of the narrator as for the look at this person's art.

A video of a very talented sculptor--fascinating!

I found a video of a sculptor at work on a clay portrait of a very interesting man. The insights into the minute movements of the artist at work, how the portrait unfolds under his very adroit fingers, is just fascinating, and would be of great use to any beginning sculptor, and maybe even to a graphic artist. Here is the video:

Friday, December 4, 2009

a movie trailer

Here is a trailer for a movie, The Fall. I enjoyed it a lot. I haven't seen the movie. It has some music at the end that I really love.

Here is a very interesting video about a photographer who works with a whole crew to construct his work.


next blog for quality art blogs

I am exploring the function of blogspot's "next blog" button. They recently made it a relevant to blog last viewed button. So if you have a topic you want to look through blogs in, you have to first somehow find a blog on that topic and then hit "next blog".

I wanted to see some art blogs, so I googled art blogspot. It got me to a chintsy art blog and next blog continued to give me chintsy blogs. So then I tried googling art blogspot museum, to get the quality up. This got me to the University of Wyoming's art museum, and from there next blog took me to this blog, http://microsketchbook.blogspot.com/ and I liked it quite a bit. Now I will try next blogging some more along that path.

An art video of some merit and note.

Here is an unusual and I think merit-worthy video of some very abstract forms which I liked.

blink (hc gilje 2009) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Courtship of Crystal is over.

I have made the final severance with Crystal Newell and will no longer be courting her. I had asked her if she was attracted to me and she said no. For a while I was thinking I would give it some more time, but it is very apparent that this is not going to change. Dating her further would be entertaining impossible changes, and a waste of both time and consideration.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

English Transformation Art group, a new Google group

I have now created a Google group for anyone to join and discuss English Transformation Art. Its name is English Transformation Art group, not to be confused with English Transformation Art purchasers' group. To visit this group, click here.

This group will be for anyone to join and post their questions about the art, whether before or after purchasing, and have them answered by anyone in the group. This way it will serve as a resource for anyone with questions that others have had and had discussed and hopefully answered already. It will be of great help to the artist, James Batek, by enabling questions to be answered by others in addition to himself, and thus a better overall service to the potential buyer of the art.

English Transformation Art purchasers' group, a new Google group

I have created a Google group for purchasers of English Transformation Art only, for them to discuss their experience with the art. The name of the group is English Transformation Art purchasers' group.