Olympia Podcasters Unite!!!

This months Topic: Fan-Based Sports Podcasts!!!

We'll be meeting at the Plenty Restaurant, which has great WiFi, so bring your Laptop!!!

As always, make sure and register, so we'll know you're coming!!!

Here's a picture of a previous meetup, can't you tell we're having fun!

We'll have a WiFi bridge demonstration, to show how to connect "non-computer" ethernet-enabled devices to your network. (In our case, a hardware VOIP Phone).

Come on down, and don't forget to register on the Olympia WiFi Meetup site, or nobody will know you're coming!

or at least my personal "Coming Out" party here at my cool new Bryght Powered OlyBlog.Net Site.

As to introductions, I'm Cosmo G Spacely, (The Unabonger), host of the Clubside Breakfast Time Podcast, an Olympia based podcast, with Music, News and (sometimes witty) commentary on Life in Olympia. I'm a long-time Olympia resident, and frequent Evergreen "Community Member", having started on my degree back in 1984, (I'm closer than three years ago on getting my degree, I swear!)

There's also an associated CBT WordPress Blog but since I'm a Podcaster, and not a Blogger, it's largely a "work in progress", so to speak.

To get the Podcast, here's a browser friendly feed, which also doubles as the RSS syndication XML file for aggregators, and a Link for iTunes.

Come on by and have breakfast with me (and sometimes a special guest or two!

Cosmo

While reading Steve's great Evergroove Trivia stories, a story of my own keeps knocking at my mind and insisting on being told, so I'll concede and write it.

Mid 1990s or so, I'm at TESC, enjoying my studies. One day on a break during some sort of group activity, several of us fell into chit chat, nothing important being said, just idle conversation.

Somehow we ended up talking about food poisoning. Stories of various food poisoning episodes were shared, we laughed a lot and competed to tell the worst story. I piped up with my story of getting very sick on clam chowder, two different times at two different restaurants in Port Townsend.

More...

On my walk to the downtown library I was met by an eruption of sudden loud noise and noxious fumes. A nominally white beater of a car pulled out of The Vault parking lot and was haltingly making its way elsewhere. With many a belch and crackle and cloud of exhaust.

I felt a headache kick in and thought I'd best distract myself, maybe by figuring out just what sort of car that was so I could perhaps report it to some Authority that could make it stop. I squinted to see what was written on the car but then quickly looked away when I discovered that the solo driver, while halted at a red light, was gesticulating wildly. I think to himself and the situation at large.

Once done at the library, I walked back towards my eventual goal of Bayview. Once on Capitol Way I noticed that an eerie calm had settled. In this calm rolled a long white limo. Silent, no visible exhaust, windows darkened so I could not tell what the inhabitants were doing.

The beater car had been headed somewhat towards the Dome. The sleek limo away from the Dome. I'm determined to come up with something wise and pithy to say about this. Certainly the two white cars of such contrast can be used in an eloquent metaphor.

I've no clue how to do so, though. And I still have that headache.

Artful Life is hosting an open and exploratory discussion focused on how we can create a community-based, sustainable local marketplace. We will explore evolving Artful Life into a co-op model.

Please join us for this discussion, facilitated by Andrew MacLeod from the Northwest Cooperative Development Center.

Your input as a potential customer, non-member displaying artist, or active co-op member is greatly desired.

Spread the word. We need to cast our net as wide as we can, to create a form, which really serves our community’s needs.

Public Meeting
Monday, January 9th, 2006
7 to 9 pm

Artful Life
506 Columbia St. SW, Olympia, WA
(360) 357-6900
open until January 27th. Monday – Saturday 11am – 7 pm

--Picasso was a bald fraud. He drew merely for money. There is a story that Pablo visited a collector who was very proud of his Picasso painting. The Great Man viewed it and said it was a fake. The collector was beside himself with fury. "You mean I paid all that money for a counterfeit?!" "Oh, I painted it alright," Picasso supposedly said, "But I produced just for the cash. It's a fake."

--Bob Dylan was the musical equivalent of Picasso. He had just converted as a Jew for Jesus at this time, which freaked out the class anyway.

--Emma Goldman, as her autobiography proves, was highly dependent on men for her self-esteem.

--Carl Jung had a highly questionable relationship with the Nazis.

--And so on.

Yes, you guessed it. Statements like these elicited the predicted response. Rage. The faculty knew full well what we were doing, but I think she egged us on anyway. But at least no one got hit (see Evergroove Trivia pt. 35)

For a college now famous for producing so many cartoonists, it sure was hard finding anyone who could act as a faculty sponsor in the 1970s. For my own part, all of my cartooning instructors were English teachers. I never took a course at TESC in graphic art technique. (Some would say, "Yeah, and it shows!") Teachers like Thad Curtz, Josie Reed, Margaret Gribskov, and Peter Elbow taught me about cartooning through the written word, not the drawn line.

This was before the days of affordable photocopying with the ability to reduce and enlarge images on your own. But as a student, I had access to the campus print shop and was able to produce three comix from 1976-1978 as part of my academic work. The second book, An Untitled Portfolio, (pictured here) was produced with the teaching/editing of Thad Curtz. Charles Schulz once said something to the effect that cartooning was a "sort of" art. You had to be sort of good at writing, and sort of good at drawing. Not great, just sort of good. The trick was blending the two together. Thad knew this and sent me in some great directions. A couple years later, Seattle cartoonist Ray Collins told me, confirming Thad's view, that the best way to learn cartooning is to study poetry.

I did have one informal class in art while a student at Evergroove, probably about 1975. I went to the home of a fellow student where his eccentric father had boxes of art clippings throughout the house. When he learned I was a cartoonist he launched into a long (and boozy) lecture on the place of the cartoon in American culture. A modern painter, he said, could use abstraction in a work and hang it in a gallery and the normal Joe on the street would reject it. But the same principles of abstraction, like the squiggle for Charlie Brown's hair, or Nancy's dot eyes, or that incredibly disturbing > symbol for Fred Flintstone's ear, are accepted as, well, normal by normal Joe. As long as cartoons were on the low end of the art chain-of-being, they would maintain their power. But once a cartoonist starts running with the gallery crowd, they might as well crawl in the grave and cover themselves up.

He was funny. He was engaging. He was wearing a t-shirt with ketchup stains on it. It was the best lecture on art I had ever heard. I learned he died shortly after my visit. And you know, I never got his name!

I wonder what the Corrie's really think about the Palestinians now? At least their daughter didn't run back into the protective arms of the USA, like they did, at the first taste of what it really is like there.

Rachel Corrie, a terrorist sympathizer--yes, a traitor--maybe, but not a coward.

Link to Olympian/AP story