search for TL

In later years of life I've gotten in touch with my art side, and even sometimes consider myself a pop artist who uses Amazon book covers as a medium. My own art education is a tragic story. In high school the art teacher let kids play whatever music they wanted to, but they had horrible taste and I am a musician, sensitive, so I was angry; I kept talking in class and pretty soon was assigned to write a 500-word essay on "why you shouldn't talk in art class." I wrote it all in one sentence, and my art career went downhill from there.

Fast forward to today I'm a 71-year-old with business in the University of Iowa Hospitals and while in town I try to find an artist, another TL, to ask him a couple of questions about people he knows, my first girlfriend, and a woman who died recently who was his father's personal assistant. His father was famous, you can probably already put two and two together, so he was born into the art world. He started a gallery in Iowa City in a pretty redecorated building just south of the tracks.

But here's the thing: the art world has just undergone a huge crash. Apparently people were rolling in it just a couple years ago, and now nobody can sell anything. None of the high rollers are investing in art at all. Now I guess if you're really rich you just ride it out and the art will still be there when this is all over, but who knows. I peer into the windows of his gallery and it's locked, again, with a single mattress in one of its main rooms. Maybe it's open by appointment. Maybe he's found another way to make money. I'm not sure what's going on. There were a few cars in the driveway, as if someone is using the back part of the gallery to live in.

It's curious, the world of art. I should make an appointment, but I don't want to buy anything. Also have an aversion to phone calls. I emailed him but he didn't answer.

Instead, I just head home to make more of my own art. To be continued.

book covers as media

Let's continue on what I was saying before: I am a pop artist who uses book covers as a medium.

Now it's true that I had to write 28 books, give or take a few, to have any kind of range out there in the world. There are four or five that I've taken off the market, not because I didn't like the art, but more because I didn't like what I had written within them. Or, it was old, or stale, or whatever. But the art wasn't. There is a sense that the art is secondary: that I choose it only after I have published something, or while I am publishing it.

Sometimes when I'm about done with a book I start fishing for cover ideas. I have a consistent font and a consistent style so I have what amounts to an exhibit, for sale on Amazon. Pretty sneaky way to get your art in front of the public, eh? If I were a better writer there would be people all over my art.

I have new books coming, so that keeps my pop mind alive. In addition I find myself changing covers on some of my books some of the time. This makes the older stuff inherently rarer and harder to find.

I could use that kind of reverse marketing to make it. Warhol made it, in end, as a kind of belwether for the pop market. One could do worse. He however is not around to enjoy his fame.

Here's my elevator rap. It's what I'd tell you about myself very quickly, if I want to impress upon you that I'm a pop artist.

My medium is book covers. So, if I have a book about McDonald's, and I come up with some new pop art on the subject, I can and do exchange an old cover for a new cover. Some of the books that I own are unique - there isn't much out there that is exactly the same. But when I make a good one, I hope it lasts for years even if nobody cares that much for the stories within.

Lately I've been drawn into the national politics, which has rendered my writing somewhat pointless. I was a big fan of the USA and now all I can say is, boycott the heck out of us. Don't let us have any of those rare earths, we'll just use it to invade Greenland. I take pictures of the demos and hope they get bigger. A nation that has gone fascist is something one doesn't want to take in silence.

If I make some of these covers, what should I put in the books?

My pleasing, humorous look at the US in better times just makes me uncomfortable; I don't even want to market it. But what do I really want? To warn the world of the rising fascism? to mock it?

The pop art will keep coming, I hope. I'll work on what to put in the books.

As a pop artist, I have created most of my art for the benefit of a certain facebook site, which has given me somewhat of a reputation as a Quaker pop artist. But basically, for the purposes of advertising a Cloud Quaker meeting once a week, I have taken a number of interesting pictures, let the "kandinsky" function of lunapic make them impressionist, and used them as advertising. Some people are mad at me for basically just stealing pictures I find on the web. To me, nobody really owns a view of a place, and the doctoring of it makes it legal, or so I believe, though I realize I'm walking onthe edge of copyright theft. I'm not making money off of them; that's probably my saving grace. They could sue me, but for what? Me and Andy Warhol, we just are interested in the image and people's reaction to it.

Now I have a new topic and I'm slowly warming up to it. That is, I want to market my books in about 80 sites, and really give Facebook marketing a try. To do this I'm heavily leaning on pop art. And the more I can make every site different, the better I can do. I'm not sure I have eighty separate images for any given book, but with e pluribus haiku I have almost that many, and so I find myself digging into the archives for old pop, bringing it up to the surface, and using it.

For example, in a recent campaign I was doing Do Unto, which has Barbie as a theme. I only had about ten images with Barbie but a few more were similar, and the cover images were good too. I tried to hit all eighty or so sites but in the end probably only got about sixty or seventy. Some people who are on multiple sites were surprised, I think, to find different pictures on different sites. I had one where Barbie was in the sand and it's in general best when someone has "done into" a barbie clearly. I had some Barbie pictures with no clear "do unto" idea and I ended up using them more sparingly. I only have eighty slots, might as well put the best pic possible in each one!

I cruise around the different sites, and if they let me, I drop my version fo the ad with a piece of pop art - no words on it, just a picture. These had a lot of deer bones along with the Barbies as if they'd been thrown in a pile with all the deer carcasses. My version of a twisted Georgia O'Keefe/Andy Warhol collage, and for those it's clear that someone has "done unto" both the dolls and the deer.

I am beginning to fall asleep, as I write this. The whole thing, making pop art, dropping it on FB, taking in the chats from marketers, on top of writing and door-dashing and other marketing, is wearing me out. I need to get more sleep. Warhol I'm sure would agree with me.

Pop resolutions

I'm actually a fairly prolific pop artist, though I don't talk about it much, as evidenced by the fact that this blog is somewhat sleepy asd poorly linked to most of my work. I'm most active on my Cloud Quakers site, but that's not the only place I post. I consider myself an impressionist, and a kandinskyist, since I almost exclusively use the kandinsky function on the lunapic app to create impressionist art for various sites and book covers.

I don't plan on changing any of this any time soon, though you never know when another app will come along that will make ordinary photos into impressionist masterpieces. One thing I like to remember is that it's the book covers that will survive, as most of the stuff I put on these blogs or facebook is really somewhat temporary and in any case not easy to find. What is the cover of the book, though, is in an entirely different arena. Those will still be looked at years from now, and will serve as a kind of record of my ability to get words on a piece of pop art and still have it do its job. Of my thirty books, almost all are pop works of some kind or the other, and three I'm itching to delete, I'm saving now for the pop alone. It's occurred to me to change the covers regularly and have a revolving door of covers such that all the books of a single series (e pluribus haiku) are spread out and quite random in terms of their pop covers. They are, as it is, a kind of record of my pop journey. But that is a kind of abuse of the zon's liberal policy of letting artists change their covers easily, which I don't want to upset really.

I've noticed lately an explosion of good artists, many of them impressionist, who have good Facebook pages and aggressive marketing strategies based on those pages. I don't really have a desire to do that, to move into an independent identity as pop art producer, but I still have this undeveloped side of me that yearns to be known as a pop artist. I no longer make calendars, but would like to do it again. These are all hazy bucket-list resolutions, but resolutions nevertheless.

1. Consider making a calendar again. Specifically, a Quaker Book Charity calendar.
2. A pop artist should have t-shirts.
3. Take a good hard look at all thirty book covers: these will go down as my legacy. Make them as good as possible. Some that need work are: CRTLI,HOTP, and AfB4 (these are acronyms, but you can guess or find them)
4. Explore other impressionist-making apps.

See you in a month or two, to see if I've made any progress!

lately

I have to say, that although I am not having exhibits around town, or gathering up fame and notoreity like Banksy is, I am at least creating art regularly. Check this out if you doubt me. It's not much, it's not organized, but at least I'm cranking it out.

That's because I'm determined enough to keep creating that I put it on a schedule that is otherwise very full with writing. I need pop for my covers (see that Disney one? that will be a cover) but to make good covers I have to be in good practice, not only keeping an eye for what makes a good 6 X 9 or 6.25 X 10, but also evaluating how the cover will look when script is put in it. My titles sometimes change in the course of working with them, but they might change even according to the kind of space I have to put the words in.

Ideally I would organize this pop art and put it into exhibits - say, one for Disney, one for Illinois, one for anything else - and these would appear on my blog. This, as I've inferred, is not happening, or at least not happening well. Maybe what would be ideal would be if I were more like Banksy, and got in everyone's faces more readily. I noticed with joy the other day that a Banksy pop-art with Trump, Putin, and Jong-Eun got in my Facebook and I thought, that's clever. Somebody is getting himself out there. But it wasn't me; I'm still sitting here talking about it.

Some of the good pop art is related to the book of Quaker plays; I have Hoover, Nixon and Nayler so far but really this could be a whole collection. In addition I'm still creating a Cloud Quaker pop art every week here. Check it out. I like to keep it coming.

strategy strategy strategy

In keeping with my pop art strategy, on this blog one post down, I have to decide whether to shelve a couple of haiku books or maintain them as a kind of cover-design experiment where I'm the only one who buys them, yet they still allow me to crank out pop art over a period of time.

Not many people read haiku, and even fewer read a book called e pluribus haiku 2017, and even fewer of those would be willing to buy one, even if it had the best pop art cover a person could possibly imagine. But with making museum-grade pop art as a goal, I have to create a few just to get better at it. It's worth a couple of bucks to me to get a book with my own pop art on it; if I don't like it, who else can I expect to like it? I've worked hard on the haiku. I can wrap it in pop art and call it a product.

Taking three books off the market would free me from worrying about how to keep their ratings from going over the cliff. Two of them no longer show their kindle ratings, as no one has read them in a couple of years. What should I do, make a new account and go read them? No thanks. I don't even want to put them on the table for other authors to read, if it's not the kind of thing people would ordinarily want to read. But the real problem with them is that, as time goes on, the years attached to them (in this ase, 2016, 2017 and 2018) are not really that related to the haiku themselves; these are only the years in which I wrote them. That's right; I wrote a thousand haiku in each of these years, more or less, less in the case of 2016. That's a lot of work and a memory I'd like to preserve. When I put them all in e pluribus haiku anthology: 3487 haiku I figured I'd preserved them, and maybe so. The duplication alone is probably a good enough reason to can the old books. The pop art is the part that makes me reconsider.

Maybe what I should do is make a number of selfies that showcase the different pop art covers, like a museum wall with art on its walls. Show it off while it's here. Celebrate life, and put art in all corners of it.