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Is This Culture ?
As the salesperson in support garments said, corset is.
And so is humour.
Sooner or later, everyone has to nail some chow to keep going, and these days, most people take a bag lunch or takeout to their workstation cubes and sit in front of their computer wondering what's out there.
Here's a few of my favourite places to switch to when it gets to be a bit too much or when the "hungries" take over and I need to take a break:
Music
Unrestricted free music videos requiring no log-in or the rest of that creepy user-tracking market research applet garbage:
007 Music Videos at http://www.007musicvideos.com covers the entire ran
ge from Johnny Cash to Linkin Park, and it doesn't cost you a dime or your privacy, though they do drop a perfectly innocuous statcounter.com cookie into your cache (that's how they pay for the site, through polling general public tastes on an anonymous basis). You will never get spam from this site, nor .ASP or .NET or Telnet login attempts and takeover hacks as a result of using this site.
Useful tip: if your boss is heading your way while you are bouncing up and down with the headphones on and you are in full screen mode, it takes TWO CLICKS on the "Escape" button and dropping down to your proper worksite to make a clean getaway before the floor manager arrives.
Unrestricted ad-free jazz radio which isn't just elevator music, but the real megillah
:
Http://www.jazzfm.com from London, England is a great site for those who appreciate true evolutionary jazz work. Don't miss their last year's top annual 100 jazz listing.
There is as yet no classical online station which provides substantial alternatives to the general tranquilizer-dart classical programming which seems to be the norm. There needs to be a Mahler/Shostakovich/Schulhoff online station. If you find one, please let me know at editor@transactionsmagazine.com
Thanks very much in advance!
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Figurative Graphic Arts
My tastes aren't everyone's, and I also refuse to apologize because my gut reaction to abstract art is that it is the religious iconography of a church I never want to attend. For textile designs and architectural trim, it's fine. I am also baffled why everyone who should know better thinks cameras and digital art made figurative art obsolete or redundant. Let's not go there today, it's lunchtime or breaktime.
Here are my favourite sites for goggling at pictures that make my painting cells itch:
Http://www.artrenewal.org. This site is a celebration of the representation of the human form from Giotto to current licenced and juried portrait masters, of which there is a new generation arising which makes the Regionalists and Modernists look like Norman Rockwell-grade magazine illustr
ators.
Http://www.forumgallery.com is where such modern masters and Greenshields award winners figurative works are sold. They also are the gallery designated as the repository of Ralph Soyer's work.
Http://ein-hod.israel.net is a rapturous deluge of colour and vision. It is the site of the Ein Hod Artists' Village, one of the world's best places for art and artists. Magnificent sculptural works there as well.
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Literature & Poetry
The Pedestal Magazine at
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com is a huge repository of current work in both fields, principally the short story, reviews, and poetry or a contemporary bent, but still not anything you need to see a therapist about after viewing. It is also a launch pad for new writers and poets as well as graphic arts practitioners, and lots of it is quite good. All of it feels fresh and bright-eyed.
The links also are astonishingly useful to anyone who thinks proper, juried and vetted literature and poetry are dead, which of course they are not: it's just gone underground, and on consideration, I am rather glad it has, for the sake of the artists themselves.
Everyone keeps trying to steer me to the London Review of Books and the New York Times Review of
Books and the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books, when in fact all are political mouthpieces little concerned with craft, but rather with the promotion of political agendas, not in developing the standard of effective presentation of the vagaries of human character and universals relating to personal experience.
Ms. Ceri Radford's literary blog and her sidebar links at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk very well address the best out there today in the way of literary achievement in the English language. "The Daily Telegraph," the newspaper for which Churchill wrote, does not honour the criminal National Union of Journalists anti-Israel boycott, which makes it the sole major Gentile daily in England to stand on the side of what is right.
I challenge one and all to live their literary dreams by going to http://www.aar-online.org, and seeing which agent best fits your representational
needs by clicking through on the reviews for the specific categories of books with which the given agent works.
If you've got a manuscript gathering dust in a drawer, what better place to go to online to find someone who will buy it than this? If not now, when?
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