ChristianMcLean

It occured to me that i need to make “trash” art. Art that references american culture and the way we use things. and by things i mean anything - concumption of anything.

A funny thing happened to me the other wednesday, when i was laying around on my couch watching tv on hulu. I realized how much of consumers we are, especially in this country, and when people think of consumption they usually refer to things you can buy, but when i say it it is anything that you use, that you consume; tv, air, food, community etc.. I often wonder if my balance sheet for consuming and ,i guess for lack of a better term now, distributing is ever balanced. Are the things that i take form this world equal to the things that i give back?? Maybe its not taking and giving the same thing, but if there was a way to gauge how that meter globally was looking like then maybe we would have a lot of the problems that we have. I think the first step is to get away from such a me-centric society in the here United States, and look at how choices affect everybody.

We all have our morning routines, Mine starts out with COFFEE because without coffee i am useless. After the caffeine kicks in i usually make a round of my favorite blogs and news site to see whats going on in the world. I hit some of the big ones like nytimes.com and guardian.co.uk and the bbc.co.uk, and if i had tv i would watch FOX news, just so that way i could be fair and balanced, but i also check out more individually interesting sites.

For Instance designklub and dezeen are great jumping off points for aesthetic news. Designklub is more of a design and craft driven blog, which is great because currently i am working a lot with craft in ceramics, and Dezeen is more of an Architectural meeting place.

Also I am doing a lot of digital work and a computer is a big part of my life (not that the world would end if i didnt have one) I look at engadget , TUAW , and the processing website. All of these places lead to other places that i can organize, read rss or atom feeds and keep up to date on whats happening in those fields.

The last few places i go are music websites to keep up to date like pitchfork and metacritic.

But the most important of all is www.dogwalkblog.com.

Keeping a sketch book for me has always been a problem, because of the way I process information. Usually when i learn something I tie it to something else and thereby building a web of experiences, that all correlate an build on each other. The linearity of an old sketch book tends to separate thoughts instead of unifying them. There is no way of keeping a current dynamic log of events and things that you have seen and read. This is why I use a computer to keep ideas together, because i can always search through stuff to find it, spending less time organizing things and more time producing. Especially with what I do, I need a dynamic way of tagging things and keeping a constant flow of ideas.

What is a corporation?? Well it is this thing that only exists on paper and is greedier than any one person. So the MLB was trying to sue a company that does a fantasy baseball league on the grounds that using the players names and stats is an infringement on MLB trademarks. 

How silly is this? C’mon, as far as I’m concerned these are things that happened not things people own. Corporations are getting greedier and greedier. Especially in the domain of genetic engineering. Monsanto, an prolific perpetrator of patenting living life forms because of what they altered. I just wonder when the day will come when you can claim rights to another human being.