BluBlu
Very cool! You have to check this guys work out!
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Peer groups, relationships, loneliness and life in this crazy world we live in…
I find writing to be this double edged sword… I want to share so much and in fact writing is the only place that I can really express myself at times… I find it amusing how my mind works… I think that no one could possibly want to wade through the long winded pages of bullshit that I write. I mean I am really just writing for myself and I can’t even be bothered to read it, so come on why oh why are you reading this. I mean the one or two people that I really want to read this will likely not give it the time of day… sigh… oh well such is life… Anyway the more I realize that people actually do read this drivel that I commit to screen the more I think that I had better have something worth saying. I mean if you are going to actually commit your valuable time to reading this I had better be worth your time… It is kind of like being up on stage, sure you can dance your heart out and you may be very good, but as soon as there are people watching you and the light is on all of a student the little foibles that make you who you are and make watching you a pleasure are scrutinized. Was that a trip there? Did he really miss spell four again? Oh the joy of semantics. I have a love and hate of semantics. If you ever want to avoid a subject semantics is a wonderful way of avoiding the topic entirely. “My god man you’re about to drive into that bush!” “Oh come now dear, I believe that is a shrubbery” “Are you sure? Pray tell what exactly is a shrubbery?” Mean while the green living thing is squished… anyway, I know I miss use and miss spell shit. don’t care. if it gets to the point that the idea is not getting across I care. but you know what. I am beting I cna miss sepll everi wrod ni a sentase adn u wll stll uder sand me. So I will endeavor to become a better smith with my words and shout semantics when someone says that the 5 sense don’t include hearing but sight twice. You got the idea yeah, so shut it! :) LOL yes yes yes words are powerful. I truly believe that, and ideas are what make words powerful with out the ideas behind those words the are all just a bunch of fluff. Empty promises that no one believes in… So I choose my words carefully and I do what I can to say only a little so that what I do say reveals more about you… I do what I can to write in a way that I do not gender anyone unless it is a specific and even then I will dance around the subject… Go look if you like. I often use words and turns of phrase that have many meanings… I like to see who picks up on what… It is very revealing LOL Anyway I am way off on a tangent here and I have no idea of any of that will make it into the final published work… but it is a little peek into who I am… if you really wanted to know… So I have this pressure that I put on myself. I MUST strive to be the best, the best at something, anything… but I must be good at something… Yes I deep down inside I am extremely competitive, yes I loose all the time but none the less I am always striving to be better. and on the out side people say that I am very humble… Trust me it is a struggle… Anyway I feel like the more eyes that a reading this drivel the more I must have something worth saying. I mean really if I have your attention why not say something interesting rather then “wow it’s raining again here in Vancouver…” Fuck off already! we live in a rain forest on the coast it is going to rain all the time every month of every year. so say something new… I don’t know that any of the bull shit that I spin here is any better than that but I feel closely too it and well I can only speak of what I know so there you have it. Lately I have been feeling this imposing presence of time… What are you doing with your life, are you where you wanted to be by this age? what are others doing that you grew up with? are they married? Do they have children? have they traveled to the places you want to go? are they living the life that you want to be living? what is holding you back? are you going in a direction that you want to be going in 5 years? questions that 5 years ago didn’t really mean anything to me all of a student feel like there is a ticking clock… maybe it is the subconscious female clock that is saying act now or your chance is gone forever… I have had this conversation with a number of my very close friends of late… No longer are there dreams of taking over the world… Instead there are dreams of a nice house and a happy family… and I must admit that I find myself wondering maybe that is not such a bad dream to have. I mean it is something that is so very vital to our society and yet everywhere I look I wonder if finding a partner in crime or a partner in time is even a reality in our day in age… I wonder to myself what am I doing wrong… of all the loves that I have had and truly loved all have broken my heart and gone their own ways… yes many of them will remain great friends and will always hold a special place in their hearts… but didn’t quite fit… So I get cold and become cynical, maybe there is no hope for someone like myself, I think too much… great as an artist, wonderful as a lover, but too intense for a relationship… shitty deal… but I hold to a hope that my parents are still together… they are very much in love with each other. they have a relationship that I would count myself as being very lucky if I have what they have. And so I have less and less time for things that are not real, things that are just the motions of the passion. I refuse to settle for the dance without the passion! It frustrates me so when I see things, see how they can be and yet in order to have a relationship you have to have commitment from both sides. all you have to do is commit. and commitment is something that you and only you will know the power of. and trust me it will be tested in so many ways. ways that you will not even see as tests until you have come threw them. The human will is an amazing thing! There are a number of people in my life that I admire and I really believe that they will go far and it gives me hope that maybe should things aline and the cards are play correctly that I to may be with someone that is the whole world to me and I to them… Maybe this is all just a pipe dream, but fuck it I am used to dreaming big ;) A friend of mine sat me down the other night and told me that much of what I had been writing made her very sad. Sad that I would disregard Vancouver and all that is Vancouver just to chase something bigger and shinnier. It is not so much that I am running away from Vancouver, and I guess you can not be running to something with out running away from something else… I am frustrated by the lack of passion that seams to be present in Vancouver… It feels like the pot culture’s second hand smoke is being inhaled by everyone on the west coast regardless of weather or not they can smell it… How many emails and conversations have I had about doing something… and… here I am sitting… waiting for the phone to ring… The other week was rather hard… I have been really really wanting to push myself out of where I am… somewhere anywhere… I had scheduled 5, count them five, like one for every weekday, just like fingers on your left hand… Five creative shoots… As of Friday noon I had taken 0 that would be a big fat ZERO photos… I am not sure why I feel so strongly attached to my photos… but when someone cancels, it is not just that they are canceling on a shoot. They are saying that what you are doing is less important than whatever else is going on in their life. And granted we all have lives that are chaotic and unplanned, somethings do need to be attended to. I guess it is just hard as every creative that I participate in regardless of weather or not I show it. If I am doing it I am at some level quite excited to be doing that. and I always feel like a little kid being told that there is no field trip today because of rain… but I turned up with an umbrella, boots and a waterproof lunch box! why is there no field trip? :o The shitty thing is that each of the shoots that were canceled were all for very good reasons… So I can’t just sluff it off as flakey people. Though I have had way way way more than my fair share of flakes. Sigh that is a whole nother story… Anyway my friend painted out that there are people that are just as driven as myself out there, even in Vancouver, you just have to find them… And it is not easy… I myself am very guarded, why, why do you want to be my friend? why do you want me to come to your party? why are you talking to me? What’s in it for you? what are your motives? what about me and what I want? I really want to be part of something. I feel so much like I am alone. Partly that loneliness is part of my childhood. Party because it is a way to hide from everyone. Stay safe… If you don’t share any of your hopes and aspirations with anyone they don’t know when you fail. If you don’t count on anyone but yourself you will never be let down by anyone but yourself. You take full accountability for yourself. Maybe that is not a great way to be part of a peer group… I really don’t know. I have never really been part of any group… I have always been on the outside… always known by everyone… able to move in and out of the group but not part of it… I just don’t know. I am 30 now and they say that most of your true friendships are formed before this age… at this point there is just too many social references that “you just had to be there” to understand… that if you are not part of the group you will never be part of the group. Sigh. I really do want to feel like there is hope and that I fit in somewhere… I have just not found it yet… and though I feel like poo sometimes deep deep down inside I really am a positive kind of guy :) I just take photos when I am happy and write when I am sad. I will endeavor to write more when I am happy and take my camera out when I am sad as it is a sure way to see the light… ;) - Q 
What is offensive?
You are all sheep!OK, folks, here you go. Look below and see the June 2008 Vanity Fair photo of Miley Cyrus, shot by Annie Leibovitz, that has the world a-buzzin’.My god she’s 15 in sheets, and those rosy lips why they look just like she gave a blow job… right?
To me this photo looks a lot like a Caravaggio paintingLink: http://weblogs.newsday.com/entertainment/celebrities_blog/2008/04/the_miley_cyrus_vanity_fair_ph.htmlhttp://fabsugar.com/1570483How about this?An ad from Tom Ford eye wear…
Are you offended?It was pulled from Italian Vogue for being too vulgar? And what about these ads?
That’s Victoria Beckham in the bag…
And what is this ad trying to tell us?That it’s OK to have a gang bang so long as the guys are covered in oil and it does not look like pornography?So how do I find or create a community around myself that is willing to play games with the sheep and not be scarred of the darkness?I am no closer to understanding what is offensive than before…All I understand is that those that are easily offended are not open to seeing from someone else point of view and want to put their own view on to what they see and complain….But what does it really reveal?What you are thinking ;)So where does your mind wander?And where do you want to take it?How far are you willing to push?How far will your inhibitions let you go?
Click here for PhotosWhat is Truth.
What is real?
Do you know? Do you care? Does it mater?
Real is what is real to you. If you believe it, it is true to you and it does not matter who or what someone may say to you. So if you don’t believe that you can or be something then you can’t. and if you believe that you can or are then the wold is your oyster.
So here is something that I have been wreasealing with in my mind…
What is offencive what is exploitive what is masogonastic?
Recently I have managed to offend many a folk, some that have taken me aside and spoken to me and others that have written to me. Now I want to publicly say that I respect and welcome constructive criticism and from some of these people their opinions I truly value and it makes me ponder… Perhaps what I am doing is not having the impact that I desire… Now I know that you can’t please everyone all the time. Maybe what I am doing is “Unequivocally, that a lot of the stuff that you do would be considered categorically, across-the-board offensive” and more to the point “misogynistic, exploitative and disturbing“
Offensive. I can deal with, I don’t expect everyone to love my work or even care for it. But if my mother and father think it is great, I can shrug off offensive.
Exploitive. Well as Richard Billingham put it “All photography is exploitive”
http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/billingham.html So I don’t quite get this… What is exploitive? I don’t understand this…
Misogynistic (Of or characterized by a hatred of women. Yeah I had to look it up too. Sigh). Wow that one stings. I am really sorry that someone feels that way when they look at my work, because I know that threw and threw that I am not. and maybe she is seeing something that everyone else sees too but no one else has the guts to tell me.
And Disturbing. Again I am OK with that so long as it gets my point across… and my point is that you can be whoever the fuck you want to be and all you have to do to make this happen is start believing that you are and act accordingly.
Now I really respect her opinion and she may be very correct in her sentiment that what I am doing is hindering my career as a commercial and successful photographer… And I am stubborn to a fault and I want to be successful on my own terms… So yeah maybe I am taking the long way and the hard way, but I know that I am not following…
So I have been pondering something for some time. and I think I may have mentioned it before… Can you make an impact without using force (Now please don’t get hung up in semantics here, if another word would fit better for you like intensity or passion use it, but for the metaphor I am using force in the physics sense). So I would like to enrich the lives of those that I interact with, and with my work I want it to have the same intensity and passion that I have in real life… I don’t just want to make pretty pictures that are forgotten the moment the page is turned, I want to affect peoples lives. Maybe that is a grand dream for someone like myself but hey I can dream right. That’s not going to offend anyone is it? but I must warn you my dreams might not be for the faint of heart…
And besides if you think what I am doing with a consenting adult, not breaking any laws, and calling it art is offensive then boy are you going to be in for a shocker when you open your eyes and see what’s going on these days!
I am sure by now you have heard about the Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas Jiménez (who is in his early 30s, goes by the name “Habacuc”) down in Nicaragua that as the story goes had some children that he paid go and find a starving dog from the streets that he tied up in an art gallery and just out of reach he put bowls of food and water. And in dog food he wrote the words “Eres Lo Que Lees” (translates as “You Are What You Read”)
http://www.theginblog.com/2007/10/artist-chains-up-dog-until-it-dies-is-this-art-or-animal-abuse/
How does that make you feel? Do you feel outraged? Do you feel like doing something? Do you feel like acting? Do you see how the intensity needs to be there in order for you to feel anything?
So I mean if that can pass as art, can’t I ruffle a few feathers, why hell I really need to really step it up if I am going to come anywhere close to calling myself an artist.
Now from his perspective he was just taking one dog that was already starving and on the street and saying look at the hypocrisy of this! You would chase this dog out of your yard and yet you will come downtown to see the very same dog starve to death in an art gallery.
He was making the point that there are all these animals around that no one cares about until you make it the center of attention. In his own mind he was doing a good thing by bringing awareness to the plight of all these strays. Doing a good thing right? So do the means justify the ends? The dog was pretty scrawny so it was not like it got that way over night in the gallery, I am sure it was in it’s last legs and died in a nice warm gallery surrounded by adoring fans… Right?
http://marielouiseplum.blogspot.com/2008/04/starving-dog-as-art-gallery-confirm.html
http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/vargas.asp
http://arthistory.about.com/b/2008/04/20/the-starving-dog-exhibition-controversy.htm
So here was the true genius of what he did. The words on the wall. Think about what he chose to put on the wall “You Are What You Read”
Now neither you or I were there and we were not behind the scenes so we don’t really know what actually happened. You can choose to be outraged by some monster that kills dogs in the name of art and go on living in your comfortable bubble where you are spoon fed opinions and don’t have to think for yourself. or you can look around you and start asking questions…
Don’t believe everything you read ;)
And remember the camera lies, just as much as the printed word!
So what next?
What’s real?
Who do I want to be and how am I going to succeed?
I have never been more unsure of myself and yet confident in myself that something will work out. Maybe I am being naive or maybe I am being cautiously optimistic but it does not really mater so long as I move forward.
The next big think that I am throwing myself into is a secret!
In fact it is a Super Secret!
So if you want to be involved you must prove that you are open minded and willing to do something that will push boundaries, it may, no scratch that will offend some and most certainly be loads of fun!
And there will be a test ;)
1 commentAh ha! I found the offending FB Photo!
Yeah I can see how this would really be offensive to someone…
Wankers!
