Category: Uncategorized

A former student of mine takes to Facebook often and posts these incredible little vignettes of life from the rough part of the city where he currently works and I assume lives. Through some sort of Lynchian magnetism, he seems to attract some of the most off-kilter characters who interact with him in all sorts of odd ways. Some stories are shaggy dogs, full of little humorous details. Others are transcribed dialogues. All burst off the page with crazed life.

So after reading a recent one I reached out.

To proselytize a little bit, I said, stop giving your art to Facebook and put it on your own (future) site. Your stories are hilarious and droll and need to be your own. Seriously consider owning your art. Soon enough at the end of a year or so, you will have a great book of some kind. And it’s the same amount of effort you put into taking your art and throwing it into the raging stream that is social media. (Which, as I saw, was not a lot of effort. Precisely because he wasn’t thinking what he was doing was “important.”)

Maybe he will turn this into a book. (I hope so!) Indeed, he admitted that he’s wanted to put out a book for some time. It was a dream project, he said.

I think, I replied, you already have that book.

(image: Foggy Night, San Francisco (1946) by Fred Lyon)

I was in the Funk Zone this afternoon for the soft opening of the LaPlace Wine Bar & Shop (man, they went all out with the hors d’oeuvres…I should’ve snuck home a full filet of lox for the morning), but on leaving I decided to stop by the Arts Fund and make chit chat and check out the current exhibit.
While I was about to leave a family rolled up, peeked in, and a boy about six stepped in to ask if this was a gallery.
Why yes it is, the gallery sitter replied. Do you like art?
I *am* an artist, the kid said.
Oh really? she said.
Yes, he said. Did you just open?
The sitter was torn between saying, no, we’ve been here for many decades, but instead said, the show just opened this month. Do you like it?
Yes! He continued. Was this your grand opening?
By this time I’m thinking this kid is wondrously precocious.
As I left, the kid did too–I think the parents were dragging him along to the wine bar opening–but then he doubled back.
I have some of my art in the car, do you want to see some?

Way to hustle, kid. Way to hustle.

This six year old spoke with more confidence about being an artist than the artists I hang out with, some who shuffle their feet in the dirt while admitting their profession.

Takeaway: Be more like this kid and less like the people who are gonna make him embarrassed later in life.
 Having said that, I certainly didn’t have that confidence when I was six, I was very shy. Is it just genetic luck?

(And no, I didn’t stay around to see his art. I’m sure it was fabulous.)

(Above painting: Portrait of Shorty by Jamie Wyeth when he was a wee lad of 17)

I’m going back to Flickr (Man, I don’t…think so?)

Twitter is an open sewage pipe of hate. Facebook is full of Russian bots and fake news. No wonder we all pine for the days of the early internet…even the post- 9/11 version. Well, I discovered a site that is exactly that, it’s one I didn’t give up, and it’s something you may have heard of: Flickr.

I don’t know if anyone else thinks this, but Flickr is cool again. At least for me. I came back to it when I noticed that Instagram dropped a Flickr upload option. I guess their UPIs or whatever they call them stopped working, one of those under the hood changes that happens without anyone telling you. Like if you drove all the way to Palm Springs and didn’t get notification that, whoops, yeah, your car manufacturer had a disagreement with the coolant hose manufacturer and dropped all U-rings compliance, the ones connecting air to your face.

It turned out I had to rewire a IFTTT routine and then, boom, my Instagram uploads were once again going to Flickr.

But once on Flickr in order to confirm my upload, I began to wonder, why did I give this site up as an afterthought? And isn’t this what a lot of us have been looking for?

I mean, look at the benefits:

• User-controlled.
• Very easy to make albums and join groups.
• Exceedingly easy to navigate your past photos (esp. if you made albums)
• NO FUCKING ADS
• No social networking, although comments were always a part of Flickr
• NO FUCKING ADS
• You can completely ignore everybody on Flickr and just use the site as storage cataloguing.
• And…just in case you missed it: NO FUCKING ADS

I stopped using Flickr as much around 2013, when it was slow to join the smartphone revolution, and uploading pics from the iPhone *as it happened* was preferable to taking photos on my various cameras, uploading them to Abode Bridge, sorting, processing, using Bridge’s interface to upload to Flickr. I was getting overwhelmed.

But now, I’m rebooting everything (and trying to sort out this blog).

This is all part of an effort by me–but I’ve noticed others doing this too–to move back to a pre-streaming, pre-social media, pre-Facebook era. That means more blogging, more owning of my own material. Less monetizing. So we’ll see. You can’t put the horse back in the barn, but I don’t have to chase after the horse.