*impulse

The Titanic Clash Of Archangel Michael And The Incredible Hulk

With the wretched serpent still under foot, a hulking greenness approached. Massive, angry, oh, very angry, its hands scrunched into deep fists. It readied itself to rend the archangel and twist him into feathers and fabric, all a-gossamer, all a-floating amid the hazy mead.

The ground thundered, the rage was endless, the sky, a deep red, the nearby lake, a teal glimmer. So awful was the gargantuan monstrosity that the dewy cherubs dabbling in watercolors and sporting over the mead flitted off in flickers and gleams, sparkly trails and glitter, fleeing in every way, in 360 degree ways, in awful terrains, over staccato hills, over grass and oceans, leading off toward the verge and its immense oneness.

A soft sweep of Michael's sword swept the green goliath into the sky and over the planet, dropping him into a primordial ocean with choppy waters, filled with unfolding trails and cryptic beasts. Greenness was not easily deterred. Greenness leapt out and over the curved continents in a wild, massive arc, landing feet away from the demur archangel. Greenness delivered a clobbering punch and Michael reeled, heaved and gasped, as he flew back and into a massive flustered yew.

This gentle fay of a messenger was not discouraged, only mildly psychically overwrought and twirling. He gathered himself and floated upward, his cheeks turning slightly rosy and touched with frustrated tints. His ivory wings spread wide as he approached the raging hulk with increasing menace and purpose. Onlookers swapped sides, realizing that the disarming innocence was now channeled, redirected to purpose for the occasion. The eyes squinted slightly. The muscled monster screamed: "Smash again. Silly man does not realize how strong Hulk is."

The seraphic eyes squinted to crescents and the sword loomed high in Michal's hand, growing beyond the laws of the universe, beyond brute strength, beyond newtonian mechanics, beyond any mechanics. The laws continued falling away into the entropic sea surrounding them both. The Hulk's eyes deepened with rage, but this angel was beyond strength and rage.

Just before the Hulk was thwacked into the lake of fire with a graceful swipe, he declouded for a lucid moment, sensing that the imminent display of power and lordship was beyond his ken, beyond what he could effectively neutralize or fathom. The blade's swaggering arc motion seemed almost prolonged, as if to taste the moment before the kill just a little bit longer, but angels are not capable of such measured spite and vengeance, and thus the coiling was simply vast. With this heart-sinking notion coalescing in the Hulk's wild but competent mind there was a conclusion to the vast sweep and then, silent contact:

As the Hulk hurled away from Michael, he followed the path of an arc beyond dimensions, beyond space and time, beyond string theory and multiverses, and it landed him in a lake of fire from which there was no escape.

Thus, the Hulk menace was gently and quickly disspelled by guardian Michael.

The Google Paradox Continues

The Google Secretary-Artist Post received an unexpectedly powerful reaction via email and thread commentary, so we were kinda compelled to do a simple study to see if this is a trend or a flash in the pan style rarity.

Check out the results of our little survey: Download Google_creativity_profile_1

Otherwise, enjoy the first day of the new year!

The Golden Age Is Surely Upon Us

From the back of The Portable Renaissance Reader:

The 200 years we call the Renaissance were so eventful and contradictory that one man, Erasmus of Rotterdam, could decry their tyranny, avarice and iniquity, yet proclaim the "near approach of a Golden Age."

The quote, from a letter to Wolfgang Capito, is mildly out of context, but the power is fully in context.

We are flux aquatic amid the glittering meme globules which wash over us and swamp the sloops with whirling stellar skirmishes.

Fractal Geometry To Guide Reactor Construction

Fractal Reactor, 2000, model/sculpture

As opposed to design, architecture and engineering's typical limiting factor, Euclidean Geometry.

Such are the premises and theories, aspirations and promises, of the scientartist, Todd Siler, a creator whose ideas and works I was first exposed to earlier this century.

It is sort of like he is whirling in an endless loop, circa 1974, with a push from 1999, that finally came around in its angular gyre to be monumentally relevant today.

Prius meets Logan's Run.
Chaos theory meets Three Mile Island.

The style and aesthetic, which may be an acquired taste for some, but is worth it, is generally close to O'Keefe meets Frankenthaler meets Kandinsky meets Duchamp meets earth science text book illustrations meets senseless doodling.

Some more of Siler's art for technology's sake:

Below Clouds Of Consciousness

A Truizm

Is A Secretary Google's Most Brilliant Employee?

Welcome!

An interesting twist on the old aphorism, 'there's no accounting for genius'.

A reliable source has informed us that an artist on the brink of Miro-level recognition takes dictations, formats correspondence, makes photocopies, and generally toils away in the lower echelons of the haunted, hallowed Googleplex halls by day, without a care for Web 3.0 and C++, but with much care for charcoal sketches and cracked compositions. It seems that the mindlessness of administrative and receptionist work allows her creative faculties to fully focus on abstract scapes and expressive portraits.

Brancusi

This is not a unique brilliance-inversion. It has happened many times throughout history. To note a few:

• Einstein spent years reviewing other's patent claims, while frustrated inventors, who doubtless thought they were 1000x more creative, talked down to him on many occasions.
• John Keats was a failed surgeon's apprentice. It is reasonably certain that the medical minds at Thomas Hammond's Apothecary thought they were leagues above the cockney poet.
• And all the once-aspiring but-now-worldchanging artists, poets and composers who found early work in research labs, techology firms, and universities, while they were obscure and unknown.

In fact, it is nearly statistically certain that the greatest creative minds that ever set foot in the Googleplex will be outsiders, visitors, payroll clerks, food servers, and rejected job applicants.

Sure, the rank-and-file intelligent minds will all be Google engineers and programmers, buttressing the continuing web revolution in an incremental fashion, but no Faulkners, Renoirs or Turings from thence will spring. 'Tis a mathematical certainty.

Sorry to be the ones to reveal this, Googlers.

The Google 'Idea Board'

So playful and imaginative. Matisse should take heed.

We feel kind of spiteful, but we cannot help but be mildly amused at how the news will break while the Googlers are playing Nerf soccer and vintage video games in the happy, fun rooms, or lounging in the spas and jacuzzis, feeling playful yet creative, brilliant yet whimsical, innovatively peerless, and then it will leak out that this hard working, scorned clerk has risen like the Kraken to artistic prominence, leaving every Googler in the dust in terms of pure creativity.

Someone has to knock the Googleplex down a few notches. Recognition of a lack of pure genius among its 'elite' is a perfect way to accomplish this. And for that, we have the splendid juxtaposition of a rising visual artist and a bunch of overly complacent, deluded-about-their-genius, techies.

A hater couldn't ask for a better scenario than the one that's about to unfold.

Klee

Our source? A Google employee whom we are acquainted with who befriended this artist at a nearby Burger King and learned of her accomplishments and that she was on the brink of fame. If you work at Google, you may already know her.

More of that caprice

More Google dalliance, or, should we say, Googliance.

Although presently a respected name in many artistic circles, she has somehow managed to keep it a secret that she works at Google, fearing it would negatively affect her artistic aspirations, but she also realizes that if an upcoming installation receives enough press coverage, allowing her to reach that critical mass, she is prepared to reveal herself to her employer. By the way, local San Francisco art blogger, The Laughing Squid, is aware of her, but has no idea about her day job.

Leger

Kutscherauer

Once we get the ok, we will post a mini gallery of her paintings.

Are we catty bitches or what?
And, to wrap things up:
We are certainly not frustrated techies.
We never worked for a large IT company, nor applied for work at one.

We is just roiling the kettle!

Let Us Celebrate American Art And Sing It As Well

That really bold, vibrant modern art, with deep cyan and endless expanse- that's my thang.

Whitman did boardwalks, Frost did pastoral New England, Guthrie did personal liberty in the great expanse, and Jobs did tech in geekchic.

Here are the rest:

Here is some shiny, sandy, spacey, California-ism. There is nothing like a used car lot with banners fluttering overhead, sailing in the gusts:

American Collectors
Artist: David Hockney
Completed: 1968

Beach Umbrella
Artist: David Hockney
Completed: 1971

Here is some glassy, glossy, abstract, faceted, photorealistic 1970s modernism:

Central Savings
Artist: Richard Estes
Completed: 1975

Unidilla Diner
Artist: Ralph Goings
Completed: 1977
Remark: Perhaps a Hopper diner scene would be a fitting contrast.

Here is some De Chirico on the highway and along the coast:

Rooms By The Sea
Artist: Edward Hopper
Completed: 1951
Remark: East Coaster!

And some highway, freeway, strip mall photography:

Pikes Peak Park Colorado Springs 1970
Photographer: Robert Adams
Taken: 1970

 

San Francisco's cable cars climbing the Powell Street hill.
Taken: circa 1945
That west coast america! Splendid then, Silicon-spectacular now. Always now.

Neon fruit supermarkets and stacks and stacks of commodities:

Busboy's Lament
Artist: Tom Christopher
Completed: Recently! New stuff.

The final crosshatch of Hopper's geometrically fractionalized realism and the planar photorealism creates a haze that is filled with filmy sylphs that leap into any conjuration of artistic inspiration when it happens and ask nothing in return, unlike the more pernicious figments that await around the spellcaster, in clouds and mists, and, when he casts a spell for which he has insufficient readiness and forces readied, the cloud streams into the casting aura without permission and the sorceror unknowingly strikes a clickwrap-like pact with each one, one of which may be the devil.

The american gauze field here is nothing like that.
Just lots of diners, highways, strip malls, and multimedia, and it is very very grand.

Here is to the new patriotism, the new americana, the new constitutionalism, that celebrates our vast pool of everything and immerses into all, that dives into the thick syrup, that indulges but does not waste, that sees the blue collar no longer as the backbone of the nation but as an essential cultural coolness that just has to stick around for a while longer, that adores technology but remains wary when tin gods presume to shape it beyond unearthly parameters.

That whisks us away in The Chronicles of Riddick and Doom, that screams when Steve Jobs speaks and hisses at Bill Gates, but loves him just as much, that admires wealth but realizes that one can have a broadband connection, a nearby Starbucks, and a weekend foray into Target and Costco and have a grand old time, that realizes that the rages against poverty and promises of job creation by the demagogic politicians are misguided and that they need to merely let the grand Internet and all its accessories progress blindly and let all the commodities grow cheaper so that poverty, in spirit, is inevitably abolished via this ever-cheapening of accessible gizmos and psychic recreation, and the rest of the time, we can dally in verse, film-making, auto-beauty and veganism, and fly over the endless rooftops in splendid, stirring spectacle.

Oh, we do adore you, America!

The MoMA Effect

A traipse through the MoMA: perfect recommendation for Autumn. It invariably elicits a blurring, gleeful, exhilarating and ebullient response. I can think of nothing more exciting.

Try it.

That gauzy sleeping eggyheady: Brancusi's doing.

Sad Autumn, Happy Autumn

If a frosty star
Sips a drop of joy,
Will he flicker brightly
While the cooling cloys?

Or might the morph
From lord to queen
Force a position
And warp him green?

For this, no answer.
The sky is mute.
The beams' dilations
Spangle and toot.

Painting is 'Night With Stars' by Van Gogh

Transcendence With CK MAN

Nightfall's captivating tonality spews infinitely complex memes that disperse like particulate smog across vast valleys and galaxies and then are reabsorbed, reinterpreted and redistributed via Fabien Baron's ecstatic wild aeroscape.

Calvin Klein's MAN Fragrance.

Blandified Life Extension

Whereas Proctor and Gamble, the Mayo Clinic, and Gillette commodify and overly medicalize life extension and antiaging matters, Consumer Reports uses the Occam's Razor of blandness to strip away all but the most bland, trite, collectively known, and uncreative principles, results and products, and, in doing so, competes with Reader's Digest and infomercial afterthought for most vanilla of information resources, more affirming than informing.

9 Ways To A Longer Life courtesy of Consumer Report's March 2008 issue, page 6:

• Eat whole grains
• Consider Vitamin D
• Limit time in the sun
• Eat colorful produce
• Exercise
• Get enough sleep
• Don't smoke
• Eat fat
• Chill Out

Did my beloved better half already post about this not long ago?
Well, it's so splendidly Gary Gnu-newsless that we deem it newsworthy enough to remention.

Painting is a cropped section of 100 Cans by Andy Warhol.

From Keats To Halo Chronicles, Bypassing Lincoln Center

As a lifelong devotee of art, music, and literature, some find it strange that the thought of Lincoln Center, SoHo, and dramatic black and white photo shoots, fills me with nausea, dark brooding cityscapes excepted.

They must be bypassed. Keats' Grecian Urn will dock with the Nanobot Mothership when a Flash-speckled, moon-flecked firmament shrieks at each star-tablet.

Pope's light militia of the lower sky will synergize with Augmented Reality.

Screencapture is from FlashFridge.com.

From Amp Relaunch To Motley Bird

Such a range of imagery and outlook to contemplate. But, both are all about not brooding, so, *impulse wraps around both:

From waking up hungover in a strange bed to aligning the cosmos and pattering through daisy fields whilst flinging poesy into the far flung universe.

To dally in the darning needle haze or to jet invincibly through the gray urban night?

The Dreamster likes the hummingbirds, so we will flit through the capillary dew with them. But, when the sun dips itself into the brine, I will dash about the barren city scape seeking fast cars and glossy branding.

Amp and Motley Bird.

Monet's Waterlilies Drift Nearby

Pure light, pure color, delightful, gleaming orbs, dewy sculptures, luminous knotty contraptions: otherworldly light painting.

Song And Flash Merged By Skillful Alchemy

'Gothic' and 'web noire' are probably not tags or keywords used by the developers of this creepy-cool, interactive music video site, but, in its subtle artistry, it is more gothic and noire than any more overt example.

Anyway, I have a new respect for The Arcade Fire now.

Artist: The Arcade Fire
Site: The Arcade Fire presents though I guess you could call it by its anagrammed URL, beonlineb, as well.
Song: Neon Bible
Director and ActionScript Developer: Vincent Morisset

J.G. Wentworth Ad Looks Like Wagner, Sounds Like Handel

'Messiah' meets 'Gotterdammerung', and, I believe, George Lucas claims influence from both.

Amusing ad, but the original CASH-NOW ads were better when J.G. Wentworth himself asked: "Do you need caaash now?"

Girl With A Dusty Earring

The deranged eremite gapes at the windshield and morphing ink blots as they fizz and strain through his lenses and filters until he sees a plaintive dutch lady. Then he drives off in his Duster.

Artist: Scott Wade

The Flea

Vincent Price's successor in transformation.

The cardboard-extended feet suggest great leaping power. The tense, tightened cardboard-spring body suggests additional potential for this being to hurl itself into the air, over the gossamer garden, and down the hillside.

Artist: Lucy McRae and Bart Hess aka LucyandBart
Title: Spring

Bioluminescent Spider Bats

Angelo Bod's Website

There is really no other ways to describe these beasts from Angelo Bod's bestiary.

agencynet.com's Job Openings For Those Interested

agencynet.com web development employment opportunities

I have been coming across job listings all the time while browsing for a web developer. I should probably post them here for those interested. This is the first of many.

They appear to be seeking developers skilled with Flash, JavaScript, ASP.NET and CSS.

Cellular Automata's Now Famous Celebrity Uncle, Fibonacci

Levitated.net's Seeds

Fractals, Cellular Automata, and Fibonacci Numbers:
The trivium is complete.
The instant 'in' for aspiring geek scholars is laid bare.

1. Medieval mathematics and sunflowers
2. State machines and crystals
3. Irreducibility and snowflakes

The pond surges. The heath bends against the plasma vortex. The hermit shrieks.

Fractal's Less Popular Cousin, Cellular Automaton

Levitated.Net's C.A. Worm

Cellular automata? Think sea shell.
Fractal? Think sea shore.

Felix The Square, Felix The Mod

Although Felix was generally portrayed as the squarer of the two between himself and Oscar, season 3 episode 22, 'Take My Furniture Please', temporarily inverts this imbalance, but not without precedent. Felix is the more artistic of the two, and not entirely reactionary, so it is not surprising that when there is an opportunity to refurnish the apartment, Felix has more progressive ideas than Oscar.

The potato chip recliner, hand-shaped chairs, and ridiculous mock-digital wall clock, confuse and upset Oscar. Felix, on the other hand, has not even started realizing his transformative vision. It is through the indirect conduits, the splashes and sharp edges, the non-representational and the ludicrous of contemporary furnishings, that Felix streaks past Oscar into the less-square modern age.

Photo is of a Panta Rhei Two Person Accent Chair by Gypser.

A Dream of Totems

Ancient Spaces exhibit at the University of British Columbia website

My beloved awakens after dreaming of an ancient, subterranean shrine and starts looking up totemic images online. Not to pretend to have been an ancient warrior at the dawn of civilization, nor to attempt to bond, in the most shallow, distasteful fashion, with indigenous peoples, but rather to simply reawaken the dream within her via the stylized evolutionary hierarchies and symbols of strength and protection that are totems.

This led us to the 3D modeling of ancient sites underway via the University of British Columbia's Ancient Spaces endeavor: Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, ancient barks, and more dazzle spectators and hint at near-future, virtual world immersion in reconstructed ancient kingdoms, perhaps the seventh generation of God of War and Zeus: Master of Olympus.

Or, even finer, the greenest of tourism: virtual ancient world tourism. The idea is anything but fresh, but its realization is still eagerly awaited by a longing few.

Online Art Galleries All In Flash

It is possible that art gallery sites are the best showcase for an emerging developer's talent. To make a site gleamingly cool, while not overshadowing the artworks themselves, indicates talent and restraint, sought after designer traits.

How dulcet are the crackle and ribbons of Flash.

Screencapture is from VirtualBrush.com

Renaissance Geek Learning Aid, Part I

A few summaries, lists, binary couplings, and silly mnemonics to gently reinforce knowledge and understanding of the arts, sciences, and humanities:

Very very short history of early man:
Paleo-Neo-Bronze-Iron

This one's painful but, perhaps for that reason, almost unforgettable:
'Lipids aint fun. Their O to H aint 2 to 1'

Some gauzy contrasts:

1. Impressionism :: Post Impressionism ... Fleeting :: Permanence
2. Rationalism :: Empiricism ... Deductive :: Inductive

Said in a whiny voice:
'Species change over time, Cuvier.'

Because they kinda sorta rhyme:

1. Genus Linnaeus
2. Vesalius the Anatomist
3. Leuwenhoek the Microscope
4. Evolution Hutton

Copernicus' biggie:
Using math to prove his heliocentric hypothesis.

Classicism vs. Romanticism:

1. objective vs. subjective
2. Inspiration: Greco-Roman vs. medieval-folk-dream-exotic
3. reason vs. imagination

That crazy unconscious:
Schelling knew it was there and that it was big, but Freud mapped it.

Three noteworthy characteristics of DaVinci's paintings:

1. mysterious landscapes
2. atmospheric perspective
3. scientific study of facial gestures

Victorian glimpse of the alienation and disillusionment of the modern world:
Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach

A few critical perspectives:

1. Structuralism: relative difference
2. New Criticism: all interpretations are equal

A mnemonic to help remember three of the main themes of the romantic period:
'I freely express my feelings as I commune with nature because I am a visionary genius'

Ancient Athens was democratic, but what was missing?
The social contract: The Magna Carta, The Constitution

Heard of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but not quite sure what they admired so much before Raphael?
'Twas the detailed depictions of nature.

Thus ends this brief sampler.
Coming soon: Part 2.

The Search for More Invincible Monsters Continues

Medieval Bestiary: Dragon

Look out, Superman and The Incredible Hulk, a list of invincible beasts in mythology is being compiled here: monsters that will make you quake in your spandex and shredded trousers!

Though qualified and watered down for modern fantasy and role playing games, the medieval dragon was often invulnerable to physical attacks, was primordial, fearsome, and unbelievably huge, and would doubtlessly give Superman, The Hulk or Silver Surfer the business in a really quick and effortless manner.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus notes of the serpent: "for to the end to slay anything, to him venom is not needful, for whom he findeth he slayeth"

And, further, from the Harley MS 4751 (Harley Bestiary): "It is harmless as to poisons, but they say poisons are not needful to this creature for dealing death, because if it has caught any one in its coils, it kills him."

And, in the cascading style sheets of invincibility, the most ancient is prioritized, for it is cryptozoological, frightening, immense, and terrifying.

Up next, perhaps the Basilisk, Catoblepas, or the Kraken.

Since We Mentioned It

Rosenquist's Fahrenheit 1982

Still a Classic

The Sword of Shannara, and, later, The Elfstones of Shannara, and the Wishsong of Shannara were my favorite fantasy works as a teenage Rush/D&D/LedZeppelin/Fantasy-lover.

For some reason, this illustration by The Brothers Hildebrandt (Grimm?) from the original release of The Sword of Shannara, is the most memorable. Only years later, did I realize that subtlety, chiaroscuro, and expressionistic force likely gave this its impact.

I want to believe that the dragon dagger attack motion in Runescape was inspired by this work. Runescape, btw, somehow bridged the gap between Euro-gaming-techno-culture and American-swords-and-sorcery-geekdom like no other MMORPG has been able to do (or wanted to do) thus far.

Link: Shannara.

Who makes Twitter's alert photos?

Link: database maintenance" href="http://www.twitter.com/poopoorama">Twitter / database maintenance.

They are always so minimalist, so decorative, and so cool.

Splendid Art History Site

Link: History of Art - contents.
Just browsed the symbolists, the futurists, and the pre-raphaelite brotherhood. So much more to see.

Painting is The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown

Microtonalism, Jungian Psychology, Transcendence, and Much More: meet Matt Searles

Stumbled upon this and liked the blogger's aspirations, accomplishments, aesthetics, philosophy, visions and renaissance person range of interests. The only thing I differ with is some of the influences and shout outs. I wonder if someone so vibrant and ready to build 'the culture of tomorrow', with such abstruse musical conceptualizations can really like Stanley Kubrick...2001 A Space Odyssey, excepted, of course, because it is awesome. But, the balance of Kubrick is, imho, overrated and stagnant.

The spelling is another highlight: either purposefully or via stream of conscious phonetics, is visually pleasing.

Link: Matt Searles.com Home.