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will brady's >online< journal |
short notes | blog ruminations | | |
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will brady's >online< journal |
short notes | blog ruminations | | |
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30 march - 4 april | current text blog updates can be found at blogspot's log entries 4 april | 11:28:27 PM |  Rockwell Kent | While sort of aimlessly surfing sites about a couple of different artists, I stumbled upon a wealth of sites about the artist Rockwell Kent | I've long admiered his work, as well as his indomitable spirit | And it takes very little encouragement (none, actually) to spend a moment telling you all about one of my most favorite artists |Now, to bring you up to speed on this, Much of the time I spent was while looking at a remarkable site devoted to Kent's work that was put up by Doug Capra, a history and writing professor at Kenai College, up in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District | I wrote Capra about his site | Herewith I share what I wrote | Coming across the pages -this evening- that you've put up about Rockwell Kent's time in Alaska was a breath of fresh air for me. And I read what you have written thus far on your play, which I gather you have already had at least part of it performed. Hope it was well received ...or is he still getting bad press in Alaska? And since I was able to enjoy another's perspective on an artist I have for many years enjoyed, I thought it only fair to share with you a brief encounter with Mr. Kent, albeit, posthumosly; he being represented by his widow, Sally | I was, at the time, working for a printing company (Denton Publications) in the Adirodacks back in the late 1970s. One Christmas season it was my job to come up with a center spread "Christmas Card" that would be published in all the 10 papers the company printed each week | One thing was certain was that everybody was tired of having head shots of themselves with some holly and wreaths on the side |  Since I was handy at pen and ink sketching myself, I was assigned to come up with something new |At the same time, I had recently seen a show at Lake Placid Arts Center that was comprised of many different Christmas cards created by Kent for friends, family, corporations and just as concepts for cards | I quickly saw that whatever I would do wouldn't hope to match up with the beauty of Kent's possibly "minor" works | My idea, then, was to see if we could get permission to print a card or two as the centerpiece in the papers |  I had no idea what I was getting into |I got the gumption up, looked in the phone book, and called Sally Kent Gorton at Asgaard Farms | She said she'd be delighted to have me come visit and see what might be suitable | I expected to stay an hour or so. I spent the entire day | She graciously showed me around their home, the one built after the fire in 1969, pointing out a vast array of paintings, prints, raw sketches, stage designs (for an opera, Peer Gynt) that he had done and were still at home | Because it was cold, the studio was closed, but after the tour of the home, she left me alone in a room filled with drawered cases of works on paper | She apologized for the work being so disorganized and told me I would have to look through the darwes to find the images I fet I needed | The rest of the day I was left alone with the collection | It was like being thrown in a cave of riches and told  to look at whatever I pleased | When I was through, I'd pared it down to some two dozen images, which she then entrusted me to take with me for a week so the printing company could reproduce them | She asked only that the paper print a proper copyright notice as the Estate was having troubles with an unnamed but prestigious publishing house in New York City that had apparently taken to publishing works of her late husband without even a scintilla of permission or credit, profiting from the sale of reproductions of work without proper payment |At the paper, it was difficult to pick out which ones would go larger which would not | We opted to print them all |  One of them, a cross section of a family's home at Christmas, was the cover image |When I brought them back, she again thanked me and gave me a print of Kent's of the Upper Jay, NY covered bridge, only a few miles from Asgaard | I thought I should be thanking her | Later, I was to receive two gifts | One of them one of the few remaining signed copies of N X E, the other, an 1890s edition of William Blake's "Jerusalem" with two different bookplates on the inside page | A letter was enclosed noting "...the book had survived two marriages and a fire and that whenever I got tired of doing hand lettering to look at these things for inspiration..." | I still do | I also further marvel, to this day, how both the power and generosity of Rockwell Kent survived all this time, well after his passing from this realm | While I was disappointed in not learning what or how the play concludes, what I read so far has me hoping to some day read the rest | If you haven't already done so, I hope you can complete your play about Rockwell Kent | I recognize though, that, sometimes, any thoughtful project can take years to complete | It seems so important that people do what they can to preserve and make known the work and life of this exciting human being | How much richer we all are for the vibrance of his life, and for the ability he had in being able to chronicle it so skillfully | for more info on Rockwell Kent: Plattsburgh State's Rockwell Kent Gallery | Rockwell Kent Wilderness Homepage by Doug Capra | Smithsonian Magazine article The Stormy Petrel of American Art | Artcylopedia's Rockwell Kent entry | The Hermitage Museum collection | 04:24:05AM |  Who watches the right wing ranters? | I read with interest and curiosity the POV of some characters and pundits who make no attempt at ideologial neutrality |There's NewsMax, touting itself as "America's News Page" filled with bits about everything from Castro's daughter to creating spume and foment supposedly about John Kerry, whom its claimed rakes massive sums from campaign financiers (as if Dubya's rake was smaller) | One thing you WON'T find on the site, however, is who is behind the website | When you follow the web funding and support comes from none other than Richard Mellon Scaife | Is this honest journalism? | Not in my book | Gotta thank Conservative Web Watch for its work at exposing the crusty links in the disinformation war Another site that takes a closer look at enemies of free speech | Both warrant review | 2 april | 09:04:05 PM | music right now | Acoustic Alchemy | Against the Grain (1994)
image credit: International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation"
 31 march | 09:23:54 AM | wither "recovery"? | The mental illness industry has once again glommed onto its treatment flavor of the month from those who are in the system | The clients argued during the 1990s that people can and do recover from prolonged bouts of psychic/spiritual/emotional disabiling experiences (short verson "mental illness") and, eventually, the service providers got the words of the message | Some may have even gotten the message, going so far as to self-disclose during therapy sessions with "their" patients | But many just mouth the words without having any idea what they are talking about |As a concept, it first drew attention as far back as 1985 when researcher Courtney Harding and John Strauss conducted a long term follow-up study with people in Vermont to see what success they had (if any) at recovering from their travails | the findings of their work showed that as many as 66% of the people once believed to be "forever ill" had gone on and left the mental health treatment system | A number of those interviewed said they recovered "in spite of" what the system proffered as care or services | Now, some 20 years later, the career bureaucrats have latched on to this and suddenly embrace the concept like a fuzzy toy, and further try to shoehorn the idea in with their own career objectives | Show "success" and maybe they will go on and get accolades at a national conference | But what they are still doing is riding the evident success of some who were once severaly disabled without ever having done much more than fill out some grant applications from SAMHSA | Alright, maybe that sound too cynical | They are still slow on the uptake | And, by trying to make the process of recovery ~itself a very personal journey~ into some facet of the rehabilitation treatment model for mental health, they show how far they miss the point | What point, you ask? Point being that rather than create a new set of complex treatment plan curriculae and models and workshops to force non-comprehending staff to encourage or cajole "their clients" into following in hopes they get better (so as to allow the system to meet "measurable goals" and satisfy funding sources) how about providing people with:
• Supportive, non-judgemental helpers • An atmosphere of safety • Chances to be treated as equals • Combat the prejudices of a society that devalues people who don't appear to be "doing anything" • Ask people what seems to work for them when in crisis ~and then make sure its available • Make certain that basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, ability to get around are ensured • LISTEN to people who suffer and/or experience disturbing discontinuties of thought • Help provide people ways OUT OF the treatment system 
30 march | farmland preservation | This is about saving individually or family owned farms | Corporate agribusiness does quite nicely on it's own | Around the USA and the world farming conducted on a livable scale has been assailed most of the 20th century, but with pronounced vigor since WWII | Legislation and grants programs have been created ostensibly to assist smaller farms, but they've not been the beneficiaries of such supports |How family farmland gets saved, and how economies of a scale friendly to keeping such endeavors viable, can vary | The 'mechanics' of such are less critical than sustaining the values to keep them going | In the USA, whose leadership is picked mainly from the corporate communities, this means a real tough cultural battle must be waged simultaneous with the efforts made to keep small, community based farming extant and healthy | Also to be challenged is the ethic of urban convenience to goods, together with a citizenry largely ignorant of and/or indifferent to, the realities of Nature | Simply put, so many people don't understand that things don't come in a box, nor does chicken grow so it ends up being exactly by the pound (or kilo, depending) | This is yet another part of the puzzle this site indends on grappling with | Stay in touch | other stuff || ECONOMIC TREASON: Do travesties like ENRON make your blood boil? There's a new discussion group on the Yahoo Groups website. The conversation has just begun. Participants are welcome. Stop by, sign up, and add your POV. This website is maintained by Will Brady / wbrady@rondak.org / Last update: see most recent entry |
 | What's up with this? | yer host's booklist | events of interest | write me: wbrady@rondak.org | travelogue | madbook | homo ruminations still looking for vera cais If anybody knows how to contact Czech/French film director Vera Cais, have them send the contact information to her brother Milan Cais/Gauguin at milancais2@operamail.com | Thank you  OTHER VOICES from monde's weblogMEMORY HOLES In the Orwellian 1984 totalitarian scenario (which already seems kinda tame, nowadays, doesn't it?) any bits of information which were to be "revised" would be tossed into tubes called memory holes, little vacuum-sucking holes used by the workers at Minitrue. Once disposed of in this fashion, it would then be considered to have never existed at all...and reality was considered to have never been otherwise. Reality is quite bendy-twisty, flexible. In this sci-fi hell we're living in, truth sometimes just doesn't stay true, and often seems to pass into a state of irrelevancy, of unbeing. The facts change: but the factors stay the same. Or is that the other way around? search engines | iTools | all the web | scrub the web | altavista | northern light plague you with cookies or pop-up adverts but still okay to use | dogpile | yahoo | hotbot
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ABOUT THE "PIX OF THE DAY": Each "day" I present a new image from my own work. The image may or may not be relevant to the text the is next to it. The purpose is more to show off my work | Hope you like them | e-mail | you can write me either at wbrady@rondak.org or at will-b@earthlink.net | I have a couple of older e-mail addresses which have become so clogged with spam that I barely look at them anymore | Too bad, really, since I still seem to get a number of notes on US Civil War artists on one of them | I won't write you back from the old addresses | Regrets for this inconvenience |
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