Tonight I”ll be unveiling a new project, The Doris Ennis Collection, at Shine a Light, an event the PSU Social Practice MFA students are presenting along with the Portland Art Museum. The night’s events are $12 – there will be lots of music and a different activity/project starting every 15 minutes during its 6 hour run time.
Shine a Light
A Night at the Museum:
Saturday, September 19
6:00 P – 12:00 A

Today I’ve been reading an interview between Ivan Illich and Jerry Brown that I found whilst exploirng my Delicious contacts page. It gives me a different lens through which to reflect upon the value The M.O.S.T. placed on feelings of love and friendship. Mostlandia had an entire bureau, The Love and Friendship Index (LFI), devoted to measuring the populace’s feelings of love and friendship and reporting those feelings as frequently as local news stations report on the weather. The Mostlandian economy was built around the LFI, and multiple bureaus (eg. Your Fan for a Day Group, The Cabinet of Well Being, The What to Say Program, Clapping Team, Friday Night Movie Club) addressed the root causes of a low LFI . I always wondered how feelings of belonging could translate into politics. Intuitively I’ve always felt that a correlation exists, but have had trouble articulating it. I think the articulation I’m looking for lies somewhere between the two passages below.

an excerpt:
“Now, friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach. Virtue meaning here the habitual facility of doing the good thing which is fostered by what the Greeks called politaea, political life, community life. I know it was a political life in which I wouldn’t have liked to participate, with the slaves around and with the women excluded, but I still have to go to Plato or to Cicero. They conceived of friendship as a flowering, a supreme flowering of the interaction which happens in a good political society….So we start with a world where the good society creates the virtue and the virtue is the basis of friendship. Now it’s reversed. Now it seems we have to create the friendship and in the context of the friendship virtue is practiced and that might lead to a community which might lead to a society which might be a whole other kind of politics.”

And, this quote from Hugo of St. Victor, written in the 12th Century

“To my dear brother Ronolfe from Hugh, a sinner. Love never ends. When I first heard this I knew it was true. But now, dearest brother, I have the personal experience of fully knowing that love never ends. For I was a foreigner. I met you in a strange land. But that land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don’t know whether I first made friends or was made one, but I found love there and I loved it and I could not tire of it for it was sweet to me and I filled my heart with it and was sad that my heart could hold so little. I could not take in all that there was but I took in as much as I could. I filled up all the space I had but I could not fit in all I found so I accepted what I could and weighed down with this precious gift I didn’t feel any burden because my full heart sustained me. And now having made a long journey I find my heart still warmed and none of the gift has been lost for love never ends.”

If you decide to go ahead and read it, I’d recommend listening to the podcast listed here: To Long, Too Long.
I’ve been listening to all of the podcasts on this blog at work lately. I’m not sure whether I feel like the answers to the questions raised are satisfying to me, but the music is taking me there.

Some summer reading.
I made myself a poster based upon the following quote by Vaneigem.
“We are moving toward the end
of the exploitation of nature,
of work,
of trade,
of predation,
of separation from the self,
of sacrifice,
of guilt,
of the forsaking of happiness,
of the fetishizing of money,
of power,
of hierarchy,
of contempt for and fear of women,
of the misleading of children,
of intellectual dominion,
of military and police despotism,
of religions,
of ideologies,
of repression and the deadly resolutions
of psychic tensions.
This is not a fact I am describing, but an ongoing process that simply requires from us increased vigilance, awareness, and solidarity with life.”

The Temporary Services/Half Letter Press blog recently highlighted the work of Javier Rodrigo, an educator and art researcher with an interest in artist groups and collective action. Rodrigo and his colleagues recently published a 12 page PDF of the pedagogical methods of various artist groups.

Our first STOCK dinner and artist grant event is this Sunday, July 26th. Please arrive between 6:00 & 6:30pm to be seated for dinner and begin taking part in selecting the winning artist’s proposal. RSVPs encouraged.

The dinner menu comes straight from the lush local gardens and farms, all cool to beat the summer heat:

Just $10 for a full dinner, plus the chance to vote on which project wins the grant money. This month there are 10 proposals that will be vying for your affection. Come check them out, size them up, tell people what you think, hear what they have to say and be a part of deciding who will walk away at the end of the night with all the money.

STOCK: DINNER & ARTIST GRANT
hosted by:

Gallery Homeland
2505 SE 11th Ave.
at the corner of Division

Parking lot just south of Division on SE 11th

Labels: STOCK

I’m teaching a 3D design foundations course this summer.
The students are keeping images of our projects and activities at: Summer Session
The picture above is from an activity on our first day where students worked in small groups to build the tallest structure possible using only newspaper and masking tape in a 2 hour period.