Thursday, June 23, 2011

Comic Book Storage

The other day I put most of my comic books online. I found out that I have over 300 comic books with over 100 being Spider-Man. The website I used was StashMyComics.com, a free organization service.

They also provide a way to add comics you want onto a "wish list." As I browsed the website I found some pretty cool covers: (Featuring Venom, Mesphito, Anti-Venom, Stephen Colbert, Michelangelo, and the New Goblin)

the Amazing Spider-Man 569B
the Amazing Spider-Man 545B



the Amazing Spider-Man 571B
the Amazing Spider-Man 573C

S.H.I.E.L.D. 1B


the Amazing Spider-Man 595B




Did you know that the Amazing Spider-Man featured Pres. Obama on the cover; later to feature a variant cover of Nixon in a much similar fashion?




Monday, June 20, 2011

The Arts and the Raven/Crow

This weekend my sister and I went over to the lakefront of Milwaukee to see the Milwaukee Art Festival. We almost ended up at Polish Fest but made our way North towards the Art Museum (past the Sumerfest stadium). It was a great time, lots of walking in a big tent and many great and unique art creations.



My favorite artist was: Sam Spiczka
http://www.sculptorsam.com/galleries.html
From rural Minnesota, Spiczka uses influences from bone structure, rural technology, and natural geometric shapes on a wood or metal medium. Spiczka has come up with some beautiful shapes and shows high end mastery in many of his works. Including some which hold a ball of wood inside of it (never removed from the original wood). This is something that is difficult for even the most-practiced wood-workers.


"In a Polyculture, the yield of any one activity is less than that capable of being produced via Monoculture, but the overall yield of all activities combined is much greater. This is due to the inherent complexity of the system. What appears inefficient is in fact the ultimate in resiliency. 


My life is becoming a Polyculture. That is both terrifying and completely natural." Spiczka



Two other great artists were Matthew Hatala, a woodturner (his work is depicted straight above http://matthewhatala.blogspot.com/), and Gary Curtis, a painter.



One of the other artists (The Michigander, Mark Orr) had all of his objects featuring a Raven/Crow and shared more mythology behind the bird. One of the tales is that the Norse god Odin had two ravens, Thought and Memory which flew around the world by day to report back to him events in the world. The artist still sees these birds as the unfolders of our universe and constructors of fate.

Here it is more raven mythology on his website: http://www.scavengerart.com/raven.html

We also made our way into the newest Art Museum (temporary) exhibit which held a piece of Chinese historic artifacts that a Dynasty leader was saving in a garden for his retirement. Sadly, he never made it to retirement and now, many years later, his objects are circling the globe in displays before they find their final place back in their homeland of China. (This display was awing through its historic perspective, but artfully, it seemed to be just a bunch of furniture.)