Changes

#119: "Ourselves We Sing," Book Bans, Sol Lewitt, Danah Boyd, Michael B. Jordan & Michael Shannon in Fahrenheit 451, David Bowie, and Erik Wernquist.

HERE AND NOW

I’m enjoying a quiet birthday weekend and unusually warm weather. I know this doesn’t exactly sound like “birthday” material, but I celebrated, in part, by finally installing Linux Ubuntu on one of my computers. It’s one small step away from the corporate megladon¹ operating systems. If it works out, I’ll go whole hog and install it on my other computer.

“Turn and face the strange” (see Changes in the “Soundings” section). Are you getting ready for Halloween or Dia de los Muertos? So is our local florist, Flor de Monterey!

Now that the 2023 Artists Studio Tour is over (for me, but definitely still going on this weekend for other artists), and after leaving SaatchiArt, I can put more work into my own art website/shop. I rearranged my home art studio a few weeks ago, and realized I have a ton of stuff to sell, and hardly any have been uploaded. So that’s another task for this fall. Also, I have a lot of ideas for art pieces that I want to get to, as well as writing, so I look forward to that.

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ART

One of these days I’ll post a process video. For now, here’s a piece that was fun because I used cutouts of sticky shelf paper to mask areas to be drawn on with ink. The negative space was painted with acrylics.

Untitled. Acrylics and ink on paper (10/2023) By Jean Vengua.

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RABBIT HOLE

• Check out “Ourselves We Sing,”² a juried art exhibit and series of events celebrating our national song, with poets, writers, and musicians at the Pacific Grove Library. Including Daniel Summerhill (Oct 20), Georgina Marie Guardado (Nov 3), Robert Gomez (Nov 17), Lee Herrick (Dec. 1), Malinda DeRouen and Mahi Shah (Dec. 15). Closing reception on Jan. 5. Artist Edward M. Corpus, featured in EO #115, will be showing his work there.

• This year my birthday (Oct. 6) happened to take place during “banned books week.” An article was published by LA Times staff, noting that book bans have increased by 33% in the United States just over the past year. Emily St. Martin explains in the article that groups are targeting books that deal with race, sexual abuse, and LGBTQ+ issues. Banned books include the local classic, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy (illustrated by Harmony Becker). Read some banned books this month! Here’s a list of 5 AAPI banned books.

• Danah Boyd on re-reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and thinking about screens as the medium.

• Remake of Fahrenheit 451 (2018), starring Michael Bakari Jordan and Michael Shannon:

• One of the modes I want to get back into this year is old school, rule-based, algorithmic (but non-AI) art. I’ve been thinking about how I could incorporate Philippine babayin script in this process. “Why is This Art?” is an article about one of the U.S. pioneers of rule-based art, Sol Lewitt. More about this topic in a future issue.

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SOUNDINGS

• David Bowie singing Changes (written by Butterfly Boucher) at the Olympia in Paris:

• One Revolution per Minute, a haunting short film by animator Erik Wernquist. He says he created it to “explore [his] fascination with artificial gravity in space.”

  “I was also particularly interested in how light and shadows from the sun play around in the interior as it spins around.

  For those reasons, I decided to keep all artificial lights off - with the exception of some emergency lights to avoid complete darkness - and to only let natural light illuminate the interiors. As this made the place appear quite desolate, I found it interesting to imagine someone being onboard, alone…” :

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1. I’m just being snarky. Megladon was a “big tooth” shark that existed long ago and finally went extinct. They were likely the largest sharks that ever lived. It’s also been posited that they had “cannibal” babies that ate their siblings.

2. Referring to Walt Whitman’s poem, “One’s-Self I Sing.”