LIPSTiCK TrACeZ

If you haven't heard of FLOR check it out.    This is an amazing and economical way to carpet your house, office, patio whatever.    The modular carpet squares are easy to install and can even be washed.   Works with small or large spaces and you can customize your patterns and designs.   A beautiful contemporary carpet 8x10 is very expensive.   Flor allows you to customize your shape and size and the prices are recession friendly.
I love the shapes, textures and colors and the photography in the catalog is gorgeous.
FLOR SITE

Back in the day I enjoyed the pleasures of Mary Jane to unwind.   Now I go to the country and just smell Herbs.  I love to cook with them, scent my home with them and just be around them. Herbs make me feel good.    Growing herbs is easy and they are pretty low maintenance.   I'm Italien so ofcourse I love cooking with Basil.    Rosemary is great to scent the house and rooms with and Lemon Balm is an amazing pick me up.    Put it on your dashboard (you can do this with any herb) and it scents your car.     Here is the Herb Garden at the Ojai Valley Inn.   Its amazing to walk through this garden and just smell the sensory delights.

Now that I find myself blogging and reading more blogs than ever I have to wonder, what are the ethics of blogging?

The Ethics of blogging

1- Honesty: 
In certain countries journalists are licensed.   That is not the case in
America, although I feel that sometimes it should be. Fact check your
sources, print accurate text and check your spelling and
punctuation.    (please note: wikipedia is not fact)
Like your mother said,  honesty is the best policy.   
 
2:
Credits:  If you are reprinting information or images give credit where
it is due.    The internet is the public domain of the information
highway, but stealing is totally unacceptable.  Plagiarism is
cheating.   That little credit is always appreciated.     If you are
doing a feature, ask the source if possible.   Credit is a great thing
and its nice to get people's work out there so other's can follow up on
the trail.
 
3: Images: A picture is worth a thousand words, but
its nice to see some text.    Try and furnish content whenever
possible.   If you are publishing images, than follow up with a
sentence at the very least.   Anyone can choose cool pics and post
them.    What really makes a good blogger or tastemaker is producing
content.     Remember, you are creating a record for a long time,
possibly forever in cyberspace.    Post the date and location or film
or person and give a brief description. 
If you are promoting
events, give  a little backround on the promoter or crowd or music.   
There is so much out there, a little filter is always good.
 
4:
Time:  Try and post your information in a timely manner.    If you are
covering an event or party make sure you get it up there asap.     No
one cares once it has run in the tabloids.   Old news is boring.     If
you are talking about politics or News this is imperative. Op ed or
editorial comments can be published whenever.    (although chances are
you will get more hits when the information is timely)
 
5: Fact v. Fiction: Distinquish whether your information is factual, commentary
or advertising promotion.   Don't blur the lines.
 
6: Blogger as
subject-personality: Don't talk about yourself.  Major pet peave here,
I'm sorry but no one is that interesting.    Maybe Norman Mailer can
get away with it.   You just come across as a blowhard.     Your
sensibility is far more interesting.   Talk about what you like, what
you did, and what you think.    It does not need to be written in
relation to you.  That's obvious.   Your blog is a reflection of
yourself.   Art imitates life.   IF you are an asshole, the blog will
reveal it.

7: Standards: Hold yourself to a higher standard of
good taste.  Keep language clean and upscale.  Avoid gossip and
pandering.    Save that for the celebrity blogs. 
 
Hold yourself accountable if you make mistakes and correct them right
away.     Never print something questionable, false or
unsubstantiated.   If you move forward,  state that you are in doubt. 
If you hated the show, tell me why.   Be ethical.
 
 
8:  The
Critic: Don't be mean or vindictive.    Realize that critism can hurt
someone, if you are writing a critique- fine.   But realize that you
must be objective and present your reasons. Tell me why you hated it. 

Always back up your opinion.
 
 
9: Knowledge is the beginning: Talk about what
you know or want to know.    The best artists, writers, and musicians
write about what they know.     If you are eloquent, nothing is
banal.  
 
10: Titles: Cryptic titles don't work.   They just
limit your hits and the links that will connect to your posts.    Look
at magazine and newspaper headlines.   They are always pretty
direct.    The average reader spends 4-5 minutes on a website.   You
better get their attention.     If you write about something or someone
known you should have that name in the title to your post.
 
11:
Promotion: Feel free to promote your friends and occasionally your
business.   If you have a line, book, project coming out-great.   It is
ok to talk about it.   But don't make it about yourself all the
time.          Promote your friends, but as artisans or creatives, not
just because you know them.   Nothing is more self absorbed than saying
I did this and that and I own this and that and I know that rockstar.  
If the blog is too self involved it gets pretentious.    Keep things
more accessible.   
 
 
12: Information:   List information,
links, videos etc.     A great tool when you talk about something is to
link to a website or video.    Blogs are about disseminating
information and this makes it easy for your readers to follow up on the
post.   Your mission should be to create awareness for something and
let your readers follow up.
 
It also creates a link back and forth and increases your exposure.
 
Don't print incidents or content out of context.
 
13: Sensitivity:   Never use tragedy or personal loss to exploit a story.  
If you are writing about Katrina or the Beijing Earthquake be sensitive
to victims of tragedy.   
 
14: Privacy:   Realize that
celebrities are public figures and your friends may not be.    If you
are publishing images or stories about private citizens be careful to
respect their privacy.
 
15: Motivation: Have fun, most bloggers
write for free so make it a pleasurable experience for you and your
readers.

( Adorable blogger in this picture is my friend Marina, and, no I never look
this great while blogging, nor do I blog on my lawn.)

Ok, the godmother of cool contemporary art (or atleast one of them) has got to be Louise Bourgeois.    She is so cool and talented.   This was an artist with balls.   With a big personality and positive ego to match Duchamp's the nonogenarian (97), was one of the first women out there to bring us the penis sculpture and do it elegantly.    She is a mentor and icon that all of us should know and appreciate.    Thank god we live in a time when a woman's art can open a world class museum.   Her massive spider sculpture greeted art lovers at the TATE Museum in London when it opened.  (Portrait: Robert Mapplethorpe)

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois's early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work--her childhood. She has famously stated "My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama." Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take--the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade--are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois's work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lives in New York.   (Source for this paragraph is PBS.org)













































































Spider currently at Guggenheim de Bilbao

For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Cheim & Read, New York  |  Hauser & Wirth, London
Louise Bourgeois on the Art21 blog

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/bourgeois/index.html

At LACMA in LA are the iconic photographs of Philip-Lorca diCorcia.        (Affectionately referred to as PL in photographic circles)   I love the Hustler series, still my favorite and one of his first series.    He also had 1000 Polaroid's on display on little shelves.    That was cool.   The Polaroid is a dying breed- more and more collectible.      Im not that impressed by PL's new work, but he's still a photographic icon. Im including the stripper series as well.   A new vision in lighting of this oft photographed group.  Not to be missed.

PL alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions that often have a baroque theatricality.[4] Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations.[5] His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire.

Brent Booth, 21 years old, Des Moines, Iowa, $30

During the late 1970s, during diCorcia's early career, he used to situate his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus, that would make the viewer think that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someone's everyday life, when they were in fact carefully staged and planned in beforehand.[7][8] He would later start photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world. When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would iluminate a random subject in a special way, often isolating them from the other people in the street. His photographs would then give a a sense of heightened drama to the passers-by accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions.[9] Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached to the world around him, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject's name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city's anonymity.[10] Each of his series, "Hustlers," "Streetwork," "Heads," "A Storybook Life," and "Lucky Thirteen," can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia's formal and conceptual fields of interest. Besides his family, associates and random people he has also photographed personas already theatrically enlarged by their life choices, such as the pole dancers in his latest series.  (Wikipedia:source) Images Pace McGill gallery

I love tattoos and tend to favor the classic american style.    Iconic images taken from a bygone era, sailer tattoos, birds, pin ups and classic imagery.    Lots of color.    Tattoos are  extremely personal, they tell a story about the person wearing them.    Unfortunately, like bad art, there are thousands of bad tattoos.  Much more bad than good, as is the case with taste in general.   Tattoo enthusiasts rock their kids, their mothers, their girlfriends or boyfriends, their pets, and anything else that can go on your arm.  I recently came accross some very funny tattoos of the canine variety.    This is probably the best pug tattoo I have ever seen.    It takes pug lover to another level when you whip this baby out.
 




My advice to anyone who wants a tattoo is do your research, find an image or visual that you can take to a reputable tattoo artist and have them draw a custom tattoo for you.     Some of my favorite tattoo artists are:   Charlie and Bob Roberts, Dan Collins, Chris Garver, Mark Mahoney, Cartoon and Juan Puente. 

If you have ever been to Los Angeles or plan on visiting I highly recommend reading City of Quartz by Mike Davis.

Mike offers a cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles from the eyes of a scholar written like a noir novel.   It is a riveting book and a must read for anyone interested in urbanization.   True brilliance.    (If you like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy you will love this)

  Other books by Mike Davis I recommend:

Ecology of Fear and Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums  is especially timely since it talks about the history of disease, the environment, and population growth in the cities that we can't control.        If you are interested in the human footprint and society as we know it today-Read Mike Davis.

All these books are available at Amazon.com

A little about Mr. Davis, courtesy of Random House, Inc.

A former meatcutter and long-distance truck driver, Mike Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, was a fellow at the Getty Institute, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.  He was born in Fontana, a suburb of Los Angeles, and now lives in Pasadena.

Every parent dreads the day their child brings up one of several milestone issues.  Sex, drugs, death.   I didn't realize that drag queens were going to be the first issue i would have to tackle. 
  

Graphic images and dialogue on the internet and television add to the pop cultural vernacular.    Can't Hannah Montana and the Jonas brothers keep things simple and sweet like Happy Days did back in the day?   Driving along my little sponge saw a poster for Gossip Girls that had two "teens" making out and the word OMFG plastered in bold letters on it.    Her hawk eye went right there and said, Whats OMFG.    I'll cross that bridge when she starts texting her friends.      Living in an urban jungle forces children to grow up much faster these days.   

When my daughter was 4 we were playing at the park off Santa Monica bvld.    This park bordered on part of the street where "colorful characters" were known to roam.
As we drove on, my daughter, in total deadpan from the backseat says,   "Sounds like a man, dresses like a woman, there goes a drag queen MOM"

and that was the end of it again.     She just kind of accepted it as a way of life in the big city.   Remember Paris is burning, what an amazing film.    You realize nightlife and the evolution of downtown and counterculture wouldn't be the same without the impact these performers had on music, fashion, and pop culture vernacular.       Didn't RuPaul start the expression, "GIRL" to emphasize her point.      In the late eighties I'd done many a night at the Pyramid club with my arms in the air dancing with these lovelies.    I had to introduce my mini me to the true legends of drag; Lady Bunny and Rupaul.   For drag is an artform, and it really needs to be discussed that way.   " Mommy, look at those nails"
.
.

The digital age is upon us.    What are the ethics of blogging, the legal ramifications of copyright infringement etc.   There are many questions about what "public domain" means, republishing images from other blogs and taking images and content off the internet.    Hopefully this great article will shed some light.

The Future of Copyright

How relevant is it to declare oneself to be "for" or "against" copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month's G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the "Pirate Bay killer" that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.

A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000). Originally the law was designed to regulate the use of one machine only: the printing press. It concerned the reproduction of texts, printed matter, without interfering with their subsequent uses. Roughly around 1900, however, copyright law was drastically extended to cover works, independent of any specific medium. This opened up the field for collective rights management organizations, which since have been setting fixed prices on performance and broadcasting licenses. Under their direction, very specific copyright customs developed for each new medium: cinema, gramophone, radio, and so forth. This differentiation was undermined by the emergence of the Internet, and since about the year 2000 copyright law has been pushed in a new direction, regulating access to tools in a way much more arbitrary than anyone in the pre-digital age could have imagined.

This change has taken place because previously distinct media are now simulated within the singular medium of the Internet, and copyright law simply seems unable to cope with it. Consider radio broadcasting and record shops, which once were inherently different. Their online counterparts are known respectively as "streaming" and "downloading," but the distinction is ultimately artificial, since the same data transfer takes place in each. The only essential difference lies in how the software is configured at the receiving end. If the software saves the music as a file for later use, it's called a "download." If the software immediately sends the music to the loudspeakers, it's called "streaming."

However, the receiver can always choose to transform a stream to a digital file. It's simple, legal, and not very different from home taping. What now fills the record industry with fear is the possibility that users could "automatically identify and separate individual tracks from digital transmissions and store them for future playback in any order."[2] In other words, they fear that the distinction between streaming and downloading will be exposed as a big fake.

For example, Swedish company Chilirec provides a rapidly growing free online service assisting users in ripping digital audio streams.[3] After choosing among hundreds of radio stations, you will soon have access to thousands of MP3 files in an online depository, neatly sorted and correctly tagged, available for download. The interface and functionality could be easily confused with a peer-to-peer application like Limewire. You connect, you get MP3s for free, and no one pays a penny to any rights holder. But it is fully legal, as all Chilirec does is automate a process that anyone could do manually.

Cutting a recorded radio stream into individual tracks and entering each correct song title is easy, but takes lots of time. The open source community is continuously coming up with free tools for simplifying it, such as a program called The Last Ripper that can turn the on-demand streaming service Last.fm into a library of MP3 files.

Record industry lobbyists smell the danger, and now they are urging governments to criminalize such practices. On their orders the so-called PERFORM Act ("Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act") was introduced in the U.S. Senate last year. [4] The proposed law would force every Internet radio station to encrypt the transmission of file information, such as the name of the song. Yet anything visible on the screen can still be easily obtained by special software, encryption notwithstanding, and such restrictions would therefore be ridiculously easy to circumvent. Thus the PERFORM Act includes a follow-up clause banning the distribution of this class of software.

People with some programming skills, however, won't need to do much more than combining a few readily available and otherwise perfectly legal code libraries to compile their own streamripping tool, one that would circumvent the PERFORM Act. For regulations like these to be effective, it is necessary also to censor the sharing of skills that potentially can be useful for coding illegal software. The circle of prohibition grows still larger: Acoustic fingerprinting technologies, which have nothing copyright-infringing to them, but which can be used for the same feared identification of individual tracks, must probably also be restricted.

This domino effect captures the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses. This development undermines the freedom of choice that Creative Commons licenses are meant to realize. It will also have seriously chilling effects on innovation, as the legal status of new technologies will always be uncertain under ever more invasive rules.

Anti-piracy agencies are today fiercely attacking different kinds of search engines, solely because they provide links to files which may be copyrighted. This includes the bizarre case against Swedish BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, as well as recent lawsuits against Yahoo! China and Baidu. Only Google remains largely uncontested, although they operate in the same gray zone of copyright. For example, the business model of Google Books is to display millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising.

Gray zones like these are omnipresent in 21st century copyright law. One reason for this development is the uncertain status of the very idea of "copying" today. Contrast today's world with the golden age of copyright, roughly speaking between 1800 and 1950. Back then, enforcement was easy. The act of reading a book was far removed from the act of printing one. Record presses and gramophones were safely distinct machines. Since then, things have changed.

If you know me you know I love to entertain my friends and cook big Italien meals.    During the summer my family hosts friends for big garden BBQ's.   I love to cook so it's more fun than work.   The key is preparation.   I usually make all the dips and sauces that morning or the night before.     It's all in the marinade.    My favorite foodie mag is FOOD & WINE.   Its elegant, contemporary, hip, has beautiful photography and lighting, and the recipes are easy and quick.

Most of the time I cook from memory or I improvise which is what makes it fun and creative.     However, there are some dishes you can't do that with.    I started a collection log book for my favorites.   Like the geek I am they are organized and separated by sauces, desserts, fish, salads etc.  Makes cooking super easy and fun.    I took this one step further and use this method to save clippings, design ideas, stories etc.    When I renovated my house I used a lot of ideas from magazines and it was easy to show my contractor a visual.   Works great for clients on jobs as well, show them a visual and everyone is happy to know what is happening.



































































































To do it, you just need glassine  inserts from staples or an office supply and a binder.    I like the plain white ones and I type the dates on the back and file them in my bookcase.    You can also put colorful food shots on the cover.    (I also collect tears, design and historical articles for inspiration this way, its easy to file, you can see the visual and makes for a clean presentation)  This is super easy and a great way to stay organized by subject.