As Mentioned...

Artists on the Future

People have forgotten that
every line, if it is to be harmonious , must express human joy and sorrow. And in what is called great art, in sculpture  for example, as well as in the making of ordinary things, machinery has put dream to flight.

Rodin to Anatole France

Crayola and Semantic Mysticism

Crayola in 1999 changed the name of their Crayon "Indian Red", because of a misunderstanding in language.   Words have two meanings the literal one in the dictionary, and the connotative meaning found in the culture's use of a word.  

Parents were raving madly in a superior din when Johnny brought them a Crayon with the words, "Indian Red" printed on the red crayon.  

"How dare they print this racist term on my child's crayons." they roared in protest.

Crayola seemed to be residents from a bygone era.

But in fact Indian red was a term for a type of red found in India.

This incident proved that words do in fact have power, a sort of semantic mysticism.

Eric El Camion Hates Imperial Bedrooms by Brett Easton Ellis

Imperial Bedrooms

By Bret Easton Ellis

(Knopf, Hardcover, 9780307266101, 192pp.)

Publication Date: June 15, 2010

Categories: Literary

Eric El Camino has hated me for loving Brett Easton Ellis novels. His feelings were a flame of burning desire. His rage burned like a bonfire set by an eddy on the beach.   He would put a chock hold on me and hang me in my locker, because he was the authority on what was good literature.  He was only thirteen but he knew better than all the other kids, and he was willing to use violence to prove it.


I consider Brett Easton Ellis one of the best writers of all time. He is one of my guilty pleasures.  There was a time when his books, even American Psycho, shaped how I interpreted the times I was part of. Ellis books are always dark, but inside that dark is a flickering light that gives hope, a promise of future glory. They are a true reinterpretation of the American Dream. Something happened to the American Dream between 1997 and 2010 (tragedy at Columbine, the twin Towers, space shuttles exploding on a return flight, the dot boom fiasco, the BP Oil Spill) taking the alluring world of Ellis and twisting it into a knot. An unyielding knot holding hope and joy locked into an affair with disillusion.


Today, I listened to the album that coincides with Ellis's new novel Imperial Bedrooms and think,

"Wow, I can't wait to read his new novel!"


I also think I will download the soundtrack and raise a toast to my innocence.

Thomas Hart Benton An American Original

(Kansas City)  I recall enjoying the brisk September air, and that flap jacks were sitting heavy in my stomach.  I had just eaten at a local greasy spoon.  I was enamored with all of the big pretty white suburban houses.   Then, I chanced upon the former residence of Thomas Hart Benton.   I had no idea who he was.  I decided to go and visit and find out!   I am glad I did.  His studio was left just as if he had gone out for an errand, downtown.  Coffee cans held paintbrushes.  His studio was a  place where work had been done, not necessarily orderly and clean. A place reserved for creative expression.  Thomas Hart Benton embodied the Western Landscape just like the buffalo did long ago.

 Thomas Hart Benton
on the model for Susana: 
"that delightful hillbilly girl (a true Ozark product gone wrong) who became the model for "Susannah" - My boy- what a skin what a blood pulsing skin - just enough yellow in the belly to make the tits look pink - we don't find models like that anymore."
on his art 
"We were different in our temperaments and many of our ideas, be we were alike in that we were all in revolt against the unhappy effects which the Armory Show of 1913 had had on American painting.  We objected to the new Parisian aesthetics which was more and more turning art away from the living world of active men and women into an academic world of empty patterns."

Simpson Marc, Sally Mills and Jennifer Saville The American Canvas Paintings from the Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1989), 218.

Discord and Harmony: On Postmodern and Hegelian Thought

Yesterday's junk is today's cool.

"Uncool" become the "New Cool" because the Nerd/Geek/Fool/Punk studies the culture, juggles the culture into their unique lives, tosses it into their behavior and re-arranges what is hip into the artful Modern New Cool.  Hegel sees this as his triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  We have a truth (what a culture considers cool) balanced by the opposite of that truth (what the rebels and reformers consider cool and the majority would consider uncool), synthesized into the new meaning of NEW COOL.  A good example of this would be Japanese Fashion.  Time progresses out of a synthesis between two extremes continually synthesizing into something fresher/newer.  Yesterday's junk is today's cool.
-Gregorio Roth

Mayfair by the Lake: Haikus

Dad and I hike up

through dewy laid state park, 

gray slug crawls on moss.

                        - Gregorio Roth

Up way too early, 

have to put up the Artwork,

I need coffee now!

                 - Jessica Baylor Rothbard 

These Haiku were written by my wife and I, the morning of Mayfair by the Lake. The influence for Gregorio Roth's poem is a recollection of a hike my dad and I took at Ecola State Park, Oregon.   It was a rainy day and we witnessed a Slug slurping up a leaf; it was amazing to see something so slow, yet progressing steadily consuming a whole leaf.    I hope you enjoyed them.
Mayfair by the Lake

Tuesday-Moonpies and Good Reads

Angel Time: Anne Rice
Where most Christian Writers stumble in their writing, Ann Rice moves them gracefully and deals expertly with: church, church history, Jews, Mission Art, Consumer Culture, Catholicism,
prayer, alienation, alcoholism, and broken homes. She shows how God redeems all who come to him with repentant hearts; even an assassin with many kills can be Redeemed and saved from sinful living.


Can a "Christian Book" be written well? Can new light be shined from a 2,009 year old gospel? Rice answers, YES!.
"In keeping with my commitment to do Christian fiction in a variety of forms, I am developing a new series called Songs of the Seraphim. I'm hoping for a long life for the series..
I continue to work on Christ the Lord, the Kingdom of Heaven, the third book in the Christ the Lord series."

Can a pulp vampire chronicler tell the gospel accurately? Some Catholic ideas bleed into her fiction but for the most part as a Reformed Christian I did not see a stained gospel.

She makes us look again at division between the Jews and Christians, and the scripture cited in Matthew 28:11-15. She asks us to not tell tales but live in the light of truth.

This book begins in Riverside California.