Welcome to the 21C...

Last Wednesday I bought an iPad 2. I'm in the garage typing this blog entry using it, right now. It's quite a useful little device, and does most of the things I wanted from a touch-screen device. It has a much better notebook feature than my cell phone (I'm a compulsive list maker), and the calendar feature is also much larger and more versatile than the very limited calendar on my cell phone. It stores music, books (I downloaded the Kindle app along with several books already) and its really cool to be able to surf the 'Net at a restaurant or the DMV (which I had the dubious pleasure of experiencing this afternoon!)

But, its music I wanted to talk about, tonight. I own around three thousand music CDs. (I'll post a photo soon...). Theres no way the iPad can hold even a fraction of my entire collection. My computer is nearly full, and I haven't copied all of my CDs onto its drives, yet. I am going to buy a terabyte of external storage next month, but even if that's enough memory to hold "everything", I'm still not going to be getting rid of the actual CDs, for the foreseeable future.

I have some friends who sold fairly large CD collections after buying really large hard drives for their desktops, and I suppose that's not a horrible thing-- if you aren't too attached to some (or most) of the music you've purchased over the years. Or, maybe there isn't much music in your collection at all.

I still listen to damn near everything in my collection. Most of my favourites come from the 80s: Peter Gabriel, OMD, Simple Minds, XTC, Kate Bush, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Thomas Dolby, Cocteau Twins, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode...but there's music I love from the 60s, 70s, 90s, and the 00s (along with classical stuff going back to the 14C.) Cause, sooner or later, the hard drive will crash, and all that carefully collected music will be lost. I simply cannot bear the thought of that, so I'm keeping my CDs, all 3000 of them!

Down Time

The May show came down last Wednesday. It feels good to have my paintings back home and safe; the spece where I had exhibited since April is coming under new ownership, and I was not sure if the space would remain secure during the transition. Anyway, the artist who invited me to exhibit in this show would like to exhibit again right away, but I'm really not feeling it. I am looking forward focusing for a few months on several new paintings and carvings without the pressure of a looming deadline. I have two paintings under way, and they are somewhat larger and more complex than most of my other recent pieces. Several artists I know are going in "the other direction"; because things are tough right now, they feel that it is more prudent to concentrate on smaller paintings--which, for them, seem to sell well. For me, though, while I have sold some of the small spiders, they haven't sold any better than some of my medium-sized pieces, either. I think it's a good idea to create pieces in a variety of prices, so nearly evebryone can afford to buy something. Some artists offer prints; I have the small spider pieces priced just over $100.00. So, if I'm not selling tons of paintings in any case, I can't see it much difference whether I am not selling three thousand dollar paintings, or not selling thee hundred dollar paintings. So, there will be some new paintings, but it may be a little while. Please don't go away...