Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

We had stake conference today, so we're already home from Church before we would have even left home on a normal week. It's nice to have the rest of the day available to us. We'll see what mischief we can come up with later this afternoon. :)  read more »

Last night, we had another fancy dinner cook-off with some friends (with nice seared duck and some pork/gouda open faced sandwich things) and our friend, Chris, told this joke:

A man went into a pet store one day. He said to the clerk “I want a parrot, and it better be able to talk.”

The clerk replied “We have one talking parrot, but we’ve had some trouble selling it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“But…”

“I don’t care, I just want a talking parrot.”  read more »

"Cyclical time is already dominant among the nomadic peoples because they find the same conditions repeated at each stage of their journey. As Hegel notes, “the wandering of nomads is only nominal because it is limited to uniform spaces.” When a society settles in a particular location and gives space a content by developing distinctive areas within it, it finds itself confined within that locality. The periodic return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a sequence of activities.  read more »

"Trinkets such as key chains which come as free bonuses with the purchase of some luxury product, but which end up being traded back and forth as valued collectibles in their own right, reflect a mystical self-abandonment to commodity transcendence. Those who collect the trinkets that have been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating commodity indulgences — glorious tokens of the commodity’s real presence among the faithful. Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity.  read more »

Bums don't carry cardboard signs anymore. That's what we learned yesterday. We wandered around San Jose and Santa Cruz looking for someone with a sign so we could buy it off them. Wayne and his classmates are becoming art collectors for a bit here. If we can find any panhandlers carrying a sign, that is -- and convince them to sell it [a long explanation to this one... so only ask if you want to hear it. -wayne]. Didn't they used to stand on medians before freeway entrances?  read more »

That's right. I went back to school. This late into the year. While everyone else has been in school for several weeks, I had my first classes today, which turned out to only be one day's worth of classes on Thursday. Pretty uneventful, but at least I'm finally getting back into school.  read more »

I have been listening to a podcast from the MoMA THINK series on Brice Marden, following his retrospective at the museum. Brice Marden has quickly become a hot item in the past 30 years (is that quickly), but people are collecting and talking about him in the "art scene." The podcast is of a panel including Francesco Clemente and Christopher Wool (others as well) discussing Marden's work and forms.  read more »

This was my last real week of break before school. I have been trying to take advantage of the last relaxing moments of my life by sitting around and doing nothing, but this week I sort of worked on painting at home. We stopped by campus late last week to pick up my paints and stuff so I could paint from home. And it worked, because I did paint from home this past week. I received a commission from some friends who wanted a monkey painting for their nursery room (they have it safari themed), so I took care of that early on and then dove back into some technical skills projects.  read more »

I like being busy. I can say that now because I feel like we're working on things and making progress, but I don't have to stay up all night to finish a project for school or a paper. :) Oh, I loved school; I just also love being able to work on my own projects in the evenings.  read more »

I have been reading Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's Postmodern Theory over the past week. I believe I will be able to retain this information if I put some of my thoughts down into writing.  read more »