Category: blah blah

All things change. Who am I to resist? I’ve changed the name of my website for several reasons, and I don’t know you well enough to get into all of them. Suffice it to say I was bored, and looking to muck things up a little bit.

So what does Polymanic mean? The short answer is that I’m not really sure. Poly means ‘many’, and the suffix -mania denotes an obsession or madness towards something.

So is polymania an obsession on things in large groups, or a large group of obsessions? Is there a difference?

I don’t know, and that’s why I chose this name.

When I draw, I watch my hand & the pencil making their movements in realtime, correcting and adjusting constantly. For me, it’s the typical creative process, to watch something becoming, and to push that becoming towards something recognizeable. I control the pace, though I don’t really know where I’m going till I get there– sometimes not for quite a while after that.

I’m learning to play the guitar, and there’s something markedly different here; with a pencil, I can be deliberate and slow, and a drawing may still be coherent. But if I slow down so my unaccustomed fingers can shape the chords correctly, the music I play becomes incoherent. It comes down to control of time. When drawing, I can control time– slowing it down til it nearly stops, to capture the nuance I’m looking for– but when playing music, the time controls me. I’m unable to slow down, unless I break the continuity of what I’m creating. I’m a slave to my own time-traveling limitations.

It’s very frustrating– like having your car stolen– it used to be you could go to all these places easily, with little effort. Now they all seem so far away.

In the introduction to the second edition of his book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan writes, “The art and poetry of Zen create involvement by means of the interval, not by the connection used in the visually oriented Western world. Spectator becomes artist in Oriental art because he must supply all the connections.”

Hot Damn! This is what art is all about for me! That’s the kind of art I love, and the kind of art I try to create. It’s kinda like legos– you have all these different shapes, but it’s up to you to put them together. Isn’t this so much better than art that does all the work for you? If you want it all spelled out for you, just watch MTV. But wisdom you didn’t work for has no value. It’s just a cliche until you put the pieces together for yourself. That’s my bent, anyway. Speaking of Bent, I’m listening to their album “The Everlasting Blink”. I’m pretty sure one of my english teachers had a rule against having the phrase, “Hot Damn!” twice in the same paragraph, but I cannot resist. Hot Damn! Wait, that’s three times. Nevermind. What I’m trying to say is I really like this album. It’s… charming or something. I don’t know, it’s just good.

Last night at 1:00 in the morning I had a fantastic idea for a post topic. Well, I thought it was fantastic at the time. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to remember it. Maybe I should have written it down, but when I do that sort of thing, by morning I’m always left puzzling out what it was I had written while half awake and in the dark. It’s probably stuff like the things that seem like good ideas in my dreams, like the combination exercycle/toilet I dreamt about the other night. While they may make sense there, they tend to not translate well to this world.

“Think for yourself, schmuck!” Wisdom of the ages.

Been calling myself an artist this long and still have no real handle on how to generate imagery on demand… I realized today that I almost never start with an image as the core of a piece: the idea usually comes in the form of words. All my talk of visual literacy, and I’m still just translating– not directly creating in the visual language. It’s kind of a roundabout way to work, and may be part of my problem of inconsistent productivity. But I also noticed later today that I do create imagery spontaneously in my mind– I just never notice that I’m doing it in time to draw it. It’s like complaining about not having change for the parking meter without noticing you’re sitting on a stack of gold — let ’em tow the car, just buy another!

I think we might be too dependent on verbal means of communication. Verbal communication applies “lossy” compression techniques that too often obscure clear mutual understanding. Expressing feelings and other pre-verbal (deeper than verbal–not less developed) experiences simply cannot be encompassed by our abstract alphabet. Anything that tries to open the bandwidth to normal experience levels quickly becomes unreadable; like Finnegan’s Wake. If not unreadable, it’s certainly limited by the amount of time it takes to download all the information it contains.

This is one of the reasons I’m fascinated by visual languages. An image has far greater bandwidth than a word. The cliche underestimates the number of words that can equal a powerful image. Image can handle pre-verbal experiences with much less loss of signal as well.

Unfortunately, most people I meet are visual illiterates to some degree. There simply is no societal-wide push to teach how to communicate with image. Not like there is to promote verbal literacy (I’m using “verbal” to refer to both the spoken and the written word. Lossy compression again). I see it every day. 2 of my favorite t-shirts contain image information, that when understood, can be expected to evoke a response. Few respond. This is good for me in the sense that there is a vast untapped market awaiting me, if I can only find a way to crack it open. It’s bad because I have no idea of how to promote visual literacy on a broad scale. I guess this is why most really popular artists can bullshit with the best of them: since few potential customers can actually understand sophisticated visual communication, the artists that can talk fast are the ones to land the sale.

I’ve been thinking about the term “indian giver”, mostly because my daughter (1 yr old) seems to be one. I’ve always disliked it, thinking it was another example of “White Man’s 1001 ways to screw over the Red Man”. This week I realized that I was misunderstanding this figure of speech; an “indian giver” is not “one who gives, then takes back like a good-for-nothing redskin,” rather, he/she is simply one following the standard practice of “the White Man” in dealing with Native Americans. One gives to an indian, then one steals it right back. Not “an indian who gives” but “one who gives to an indian”. This is how you can find humor in anything. Funny how I’d been seeing it upside-down all this time.