Revised Vision:

I generally thank the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore for my quiet yet enduring interest in folk and outsider art. AVAM had just opened when I graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1995 and through a connection at the Baltimore Jewish Times, my first employer, I managed to get a private tour of their opening exhibit called the Tree of Life. I went back to it a dozen times, taking every person I knew in town and several visitors.

Visioniary Art is loosely defined as art produced by non-professionally trained artists, often the handicapped, the incarcerated, the insane, the voiceless who have found their voice buried in the folds of their own creativity. In contrast to Folk Art, often defined by untrained artists working in thousand-year-old traditions, Visionary Art often seems to come from nowhere, artists whith few influences save their own lives. It's a movement with very loose boundaries and therefore prone to a lot of curators with political agendas but the style nonetheless hits me right between the soul and the conscience.

Around that time, I had been spending what little disposable income I had on the work of local artists to decorate my apartment. My main criteria were if I liked them as people and their price. Style didn't really matter. I had it in my stupid 23-year-old head that I was an art collector, and pursued it with the same organizational vigor that one applies to a baseball card or dead moth collection.

AVAM changed that. I got interested in folk and visionary art not as an acquisition or even a hobby but as a passion. I would go to shows and follow artists I could never afford nor meet, artists whose work I enjoyed on their own rather than how it might look on my wall. I realized that buying art, if you're serious and respectful of where it came from, carries with it a certain social responsibility, to care beyond the point of getting, to know of what and whom you speak.

I've got a long way to go, before I could be a serious art collector but visionary and folk are where I'll go when the times comes. And when I've learned a thing or three...

Places to Start: Visionary Art

• American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore, MD)
• Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago, IL)
• Intuit's directory of Visionary and Outsider Art Galleries.
• Raw Vision magazine
• Visionary Art.com

Folk Art:

• Folk Art Society of America
  
• American Folk Art Museum (NY, NY)
  
• Museum of International Folk Art (Santa Fe, NM)
  
• Folk Art & Craft Exchange (online marketplace)

Scubbing in Style:

If you like to pay fine attention to the mundane as I do, have a look at Soap in the City, a New York store specializing in handmade soaps of every conceivable size, texture, odor and sensation. It's not cheap stuff, but fun to think of rubbing yourself with a cucumber/honey/cinnamon sugar mix with a great smell and feeling as your reward. I walked out with a bar of read clay something, that felt neat and looked like showering with a bar of raw earth.

Warning: Their site has a completely illogical, hard-to-navigate design but the clerk told me they do a decent ecommerce business and seem nice enough that they'd let you return a soap you didn't like the smell of it. But I'd ask them first.

And now I'm back...

My dad used to say that the sign of a good vacation is when you are ready to leave and happy to come back. And while I had a large time in both Baltimore and New York, with much to share in the coming days, all I've been saying this afternoon is "God, it's good to be home."

So Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to the holiday season, WTS-style.

Off we go...

Ya'll Blog Back Now, Ya Hear?

Leaving for da east coast and Thanksgiving with my family. Blogging will be sporatic, if at all. I come back a week from Saturday. Happy Holidays everyone!

"It's Still True..."

Did you know that Paul Harvey, Mr. "Hello, Americans", is still on the radio after, like 500 years in broadcasting? It's true. If you didn't have a classmate who did a Paul Harvey imitation in 7th grade homeroom like I did or you're under the age of 90, you probably know Harvey as the guy who parodied himself (well Harry Shearer did it actually, but whatever) on that Simpsons episode when Marge and Homer are trying to inject a little romance into their marriage. They buy a sexy audiobook, called "Mr. and Mrs. Erotic American" narrated by Mr. Harvey.

Called the world's largest one man radio network, Harvey can be heard on over 1200 radio stations and 400 Armed Forces Networks throughout the world. At 84, the dude still gets on the air six days a week and has a few words with millions. They might seem like antiquated papp (and they are) but he's been doing this little soft shoe for so long that it's almost hard to remember American radio without him. And that kind of brilliant run gets a hat tip from me, in addition to the compulsory smirk.

Crap.

My credit card company has been bothering me for two weeks insisting I owe them money. I told them I told them I have a record of the check in the exact amount of the money they say I owe. I get my bank to send me a copy of the check and it turns out I sent it to the wrong credit card company.

Crap.

Now I have to find out who cashed my check, get it to the right people all before I leave for the east coast on Thursday and below the finance charge bury me alive.

Crap again. I hope I'm not the only one who has made such a personal finance blunder although it's beginning to feel that way.

That's the Cache!

I hadn't gone geocaching in a while but it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and my buddy Britton and I were looking for some whopah do so off we went. What fun. It still gives me a high when you finally locate the cache after many minutes of walking in circles and moving fallen tree branches. .

I'm going to have to go hunting when I get to Baltimore later this week.

One Sentence Movie Reviews #4

Town Without Pity (1961): A great way to tie a bow around a film that doesn't have much going for it is to title it after a popular song and then play that song endlessly.

In Praise of 'Malaise':

The other night I was wasting time playing Game Neverending and Suzan called me in to the living room where she was watching part two of Jimmy Carter: American Experience, a biography from his election to his receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize this fall. I wasn't in the mood to watch anything but I ambled in anyway. Now I'm glad I did.

Jimmy Carter is a great man. I don't think I ever realized this when he was president (I was in the first grade) and never quite took a close enough look afterward. Here is a man who had a disasterous run at the most powerful job in the world, then turned around and devoted himself to building homes for the poor, building a center of international diplomacy and acting as a moderator for peace efforts around the world.

I know this is a PBS documentary intended to convey that message but call me converted.

And in 2003:

The South by Southwest Blog is back for the 2003 Interactive Conference. If you're a weblogging kinda person, SXSW is the perfect opportunity to meet your kin. It's like the Woodstock of weblogging right deep in the heart of beautiful spring mornings in Austin, Texas.

March 7-11, 2003. I'm speaking on two panels but that shouldn't dissuade you.

Great fun, don't miss it.