And today’s new feature to play with… carat browsing. I might be a mouse and stylus junkie, but sometimes it really is easier just to use the keyboard.

What happens when a clueless First Lady invites the wrong poet to the wrong event? You get Poets Against the War and A Culture of Resistance.

You also get some interesting parallels between the current attempts to marginalize antiwar artists and the attempts to do almost the same thing with the same arguments to the punk artists almost 20 years ago.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of diving into verse to try and order my thoughts on the mess that is current politics, but nothing worthwhile has come of it. However, what *did* get my dander up were varous comments in a few Op-Ed pieces and from the First Lady’s office that injecting some current political debate into a literary event was inappropriate. That politics and art should remain separate and involiate. To which I reply:

Art should not be political?
What would you have art be, then?
Useless, sitting in a corner or
worshipped from afar on ivory pedestals?

Words have power, and images too
that once were acknowledged with honor.
Would you squander such a resource
hiding with your nose in the air?

Foolish academic with your airs
come breathe less rarefied air
and use your art for something better
than proving your own stodgy worth

Prove to me that the blood of bards
runs strong and bold in modern day
and art is worth more than the posturing
of puffed up academia.

Else regulate yourself to forgotten
dusty corners with your fellows
while youth, vibrant and immature though it be
moves the passions of the world - without you.

Grover is Bitter - for some reason, it reminds me a lot of bios of the old rat packers. A great read, regardless.

More than one of my posts have been about some facet of being an artist, and tonight I found myself wondering, just what makes an artist?

No matter the medium one works in, there are limitations. A writer must adhere to the rules of grammar and sentence structure, a potter must respect the physics of drying clay and glaze composition, a programmer must write compile-able code, and so on. However, there comes a day when one realizes that, as creator, one is essentially playing god. An author can have *anything* they wish happen to their characters, a painter can transmute what they see with their eyes into something more inline with what they see in their head… with me so far?

That moment of realization, when one steps back and thinks, “wait, I can make *anything I want*” - that’s what I’m talking about.

BUT

And I can’t stress this enough - but, this doesn’t happen until one knows the fundamentals. Any full of them self art student can throw random blotches of paint at a canvas and call themselves the next Jackson Pollack (and a good many do). This might mean you’re a very good, even slavish imitator, but it does not mean you are anything approaching an artist.

So, there are two things that it’s very easy for those who might become artists to do. One, they can let their chosen medium hold them back, becoming a technically proficient craftsman, but never moving into the fully creative sphere. Or, two, they can ignore all restraints and rules and produce very enthusiastic but still amateurish work. Now you can make a living doing either of these things - I see it happen all the time. But to really be an artist, for me, is to walk the line in between. Always learning the technical side of your chosen craft while never letting the constraints of that craft hobble you. It’s not an easy balance.

Eric Meyer just put up a nifty little applet that will let you calculate the the midpoint and up to ten intermediate steps between two hex colors.

Thanks to a growing tolerance for NyQuil, I am fighting a holding action with my head cold, yet am still unable to sleep. This has led to some middle of the night puttering around and then random surfing.

Random surfing, of course, leads to random thoughts.

What is up with everyone and their grandmother calling themselves an artist? Once upon a time, the term was barely even complementary, and artists as a whole were tolerated because of the contribution they were able to make to society and culture at large, but were considered, personally and individually, to be not the sort of folks one wanted to associate with.

Word associative stigmas have a habit of fading in this day and age, but do we have to use the word artist to refer to everyone who produces *any* sort of content? Writers, musicians, programmers, and who knows who else are suddenly being lumped under the banner of artist. Of course, some of them are.

Most, on the other hand, are tradesmen. Or crafters. People of skill who create things. Well and good. But artist used to mean something more. It meant that you put something of yourself into what you made. That it was something more than just a product or commodity or (god help me) intellectual property. It was, well, art. I don’t see a lot of art being produced these days. Certainly not by the people everyone keeps telling me are “artists”.

Second thought - content producers and artists alike have something in common. (Actually they have almost everything in common, but moving on from that…) What we make our livings from is far more jealously guarded than what we create for ourselves. What we produce to sell is hoarded, rarely put on the web; and when it is, it’s ringed with as many notices of ownership and copyright as one is able to muster. What we produce for ourselves (or, what no one is willing to pay us to produce/create but which we create anyway) is given like a gift; sometimes with no strings at all, sometimes with a token request. Feedback, linkbacks, a small monetary donation - you get the picture.

We (artists) need to have both kinds of artwork in order to survive. Too much work done “purely for love” and one will starve. Too much “I’m getting paid to do this” stuff and all the joy goes out of what you do. In spite of this, I do sometimes wish that everything I create could be of the “purely for love, give it like a gift” sort.

Having failed to make Amiri Baraka resign, the NJ state legislature is abolishing the position of poet laurete. Wow. Once again we prove that we are, indeed, the armpit of the union.

Especially not today, when all I wanted to do was get home a little early and take a nap. But no…. I check my mail before taking a nap like a good girl and find out that one of my sites is serving up old content. Seems the servers got switched (good thing) with no one letting me know (not so good) with some not quite current content then going live (heading towards the bad place) and I don’t have stinking upload permissions. (This? This would be the bad place.)

So, no nap for me… I get to wait around for my tech guy to let me back into the server so I can get the correct content back up so the site is back to what it should be.

Maybe I just should have been a bloody journalist….

For all the folks who’ve ever asked why I don’t want to work from home.