Listening.

Nine Inch Nails- With Teeth.

"I think I used to have a voice, now I never make a sound. Every day is exactly the same, There is no love here and there is no pain."

Absolutely brilliant album. While more 'pop' than my normal listening habits, it really underscores the mood I've been in lately. The whole album really flows mixing in a wide variety of influence with thought provoking lyrics. Listen to it!

Viewing.

Southern Graphics, The works of Glen Southern. (Southerngfx.co.uk)

If you haven't seen his work, stop reading and take a look. Glen is a great artist, and an even greater human being. Equally versed in digital techniques as well as traditional sculpting, sketching, and rendering, his style is his own. He has a firm grasp on his imagination and isn't afraid to push it further. Whatever medium you work in, you'll benefit from viewing Glen's work.

The works of Luis Badosa.
[link]

Luis Basosa is a Portugese painter, that I've recently stumbled across. His style is absolutely stunning. At times, combining chaotic composition with incredibly smooth color arrangement. The piece that really glued me to Badosa's works was a portrait of Fernando Pessoa (see 'reading section').

[link]

Reading.

Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

The book is written by 'Senhor Soares', a personality of Fernando Pessoa. Soares is a complete alternate and ficticious self of Pessoa. Pessoa developed his charecters so deeply that they fractured him. They took on thier own literary and religous influences, professions, locations, habits, and horoscopes. Thusly, every personality has it's own literary style, from upper crusted dry to lower class overly imagined and imaged. The Book of Disquiet is a 'factless biography'. Basically, it is the autobiography of an alternate personality describing things that never existed and signed by Fernando Pessoa. I mean, how absolutely stunningly brilliant is this guy? Everyone contemplates what they would have been like under different circumstances, but Pessoa actually formed, "Heteronyms". I am blown away. While very similar in theme and tone to Kafka, the scope is staggering. Every thought, every instance of Pessoa's charecters lives exist in his (thier) work.

The Boring Stuff.

After profiling the great works which are currently providing the framework for my meager existance, I feel quite embaressed writing down the events which mark my passage through that often fleeting, always precious collection of observation and theory we call time. Most of my recent time has been spent prepairing for events that are seemingly ficticious to certain aspects of my being. Spending countless hours with my various tools of expression, cameras, pencils, and pixels. I have three shows, one of which a one man show, lined up for later this year and early next. I keep waiting for the pieces to immerge, to burn themselves on the camera sensor, or leave thier smoldering impression on paper, but this has yet to happen. I'm assuming the message that is waiting for me is parallel to a quote from an anonymous warrior, "We do not rise to exceed ourselves, but merely sink to the level of our training." In short, I need to spend more time focusing on learning the tools, and less time dreaming of what I -will- be able to do with them. (As is evident by my lack of grammatical abilities) Okay now for some witty insightful phrase to end this on. Something that will burn this into your memory, so that I may die, but my existance was validated by your reading of this partial record... Screw it.

-Matt.