You can only work for people whom you like.
If you have a choice, never have a job.
Some people are toxic.
Avoid them.
The good is the enemy
of the great.
Less is not necessarily more.
Style is not to be trusted.
How you live changes
your brain.
Doubt is better than
certainty.
On aging: It doesn’t matter.
Tell the truth.
Milton Glaser
1929 – 2020
“No one has ever taken this kind of jackhammer to the economy in such a brief time and shut it down. We just don’t understand whether this is going to take a year or ten years to work out of. Therefore, the prudent thing right now is to hunker down, minimize discretionary spending, build up liquidity, get into cash, and buy gold. There’s no playbook that will tell you where we’re going. We’ve violated all the rules of economic life and monetary rationality that have ever been created over the last centuries.”
— David Stockman — InternationalMan.com
“He had a strong sense of his life being upon the turn, between two seasons, as it were, with the certainties of the one no longer valid for the other. He was not a fanciful man, but for some time now he had had an indefinable sense of chaos following order, of impending disaster; and it oppressed his mind.”
— the thoughts of Captain J Aubrey
Treason’s Harbour by Patrick O’Brian
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless supply of hobgoblins.”
— H L Mencken“The projections from the data were wildly off base, but were the basis for this national lockdown. Remember when you hear that social distancing and other measures are why the projections are now being revised down: key data models assumed full social distancing.”
— Brit Hume“I would lift stay-at-home orders except for known risk groups. We already know certain conditions that are predictive of severe disease. Especially since young healthy lungs tend to be resistant, I would let the virus circulate in the population that is not likely to get severe disease from it. This is the only path that comes close to balancing the needs of all groups. Vaccines are not coming anytime soon, so natural immunity is the only way out for now. Every day, every week in the current situation is ruining innumerable lives in a criminally unjust manner.”
— Michael Burry, MD
“When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: ‘Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.’ … I don’t believe the feminine is sublime and the masculine is horrifying. I believe both are valuable, essential, powerful. But we have maligned one, venerated the other, and fallen into exaggerated performances of both that cause harm to all. How do we restore balance?”
— Brit Marling 2/7/20
“The advent of civilization is a wonderful thing. It creates leisure. It creates material wealth, luxury. It’s civilization. It’s not tribalism. It’s not barbarism. But in that process, we become tame, and yet the world around us is not tame, and we don’t quite know how to justify using violence against people who want to kill us.”
— Victor Davis Hanson 2/13/20
Robert Conrad
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the quintessential
television star
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“The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.”
— Wendell Berry — from The Hidden Wound
This is Wendell Berry’s must-read 2015 editorial about art censorship:
“When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.
— George Carlin
I first noticed the statue in McDowell Park about the time I started to walk around Danville after we got the Town House. There was something about the artistic interpretation that appealed to me — not entirely realistic, but only slightly abstracted from life, perhaps like the way I might draw something. I reacted to it as sculpture before I thought much about it as a Confederate symbol. Eventually I did draw it. I don’t remember the year, although I could look it up. At any rate, it was a long time before tragic events were used as an excuse to denounce antique works of art. As soon as they were condemned elsewhere, I thought, “Danville seems immune to such things, but it’s only a matter of time before that statue becomes a target for destruction or removal.”
My recent conversation with a local artist has informed me that the day has finally arrived. The decision to spend a lot of money to truck it off apparently has sparked a firestorm within the church congregation with jurisdiction over the statue, which is probably about a hundred years old. I once heard that it’s the northernmost Confederate memorial, but I can’t see how that would be possible. It is understandable that with the Perryville Battlefield only a few miles away, and the history of the conflict’s effect on Danville, that there would be a monument here to honor dead CSA soldiers. More than that, it is a work of art. Period. It was created as such, and is part of of American, Kentucky, and Danville history. It makes sense to preserve it, to conscientiously interpret it, and to put it into the context of the times. Some are certain to have found it offensive, most likely from the time it was erected, and I can respect that, but it is very dangerous territory to use that as justification for the censorship or desecration of art. The whole thing brings a wave of sadness over me. I doubt that those who oppose the decision will successfully swim against a strong tide of political correctness. When the relocation takes place, I hope it ends up north of town, over at the Danville National Cemetery, near the graves of southern men who were buried far from their homes.
Each time the Taliban or other radical groups obliterate Buddhist artworks deemed objectionable, it would appear to a reasonable person, on the face of it, as an abomination. When art historian Robert Hughes describes Stalin’s repression of the Russian avant-garde after 1930, he writes that, “as a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler’s demolition of the German modernists compares with it.” Although I’m not holding my breath, it will remain my hope that American culture warriors with a self-righteous upper hand are not embarking on an enterprise that people in the future will classify as yet another ideological outrage.
Here’s an overview from The Collage Miniaturist about the
creative development of my tenth poster for the GABBF:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
“While many modern-day album artworks tend to favor strict minimalism, The Beatles make a serious case for going bold and wacky without any type of restraint.”
— Nicole Singh
As promised, I’m devoting an entry to the project that kept me out of the collage studio for at least a dozen weeks. I shall beg your forgiveness at the outset for delving into the details of a digital process. Not only has this site kept a seven-year focus on traditional cut-and-glue techniques, but I haven’t indulged the applied-arts side of my multiple personality as a graphic artist. I’m going to depart from that now — perhaps just this once — because it’s been an extraordinary circumstance for me, and a few of you may find the description worthwhile. At any rate, I encourage everyone to read Patrick Roefflaer’s article for a story that is genuinely more interesting than mine!
Not so long ago, a prominent local musician and former brass band director took me aside at an exhibition opening. Based on her recognition of my fondness for collage, she asked me if I would take on a visual homage to the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover design. The purpose would be to mark the 30th production of the Great American Brass Band Festival, held each June in our hometown of Danville, Kentucky. 
It had always been her dream to link the announcement of her retirement at the annual weekend of concerts to the classic album, with a medley of tunes arranged for brass instruments. Sadly, a severe health crisis had forced her early retirement before that could happen, but she preserved hope that a multi-discipline Beatles tribute for the festival’s upcoming milestone might happen in 2019.
I’d already designed nine posters during the festival’s lifespan. To create a tenth was tempting, and this idea had a barbed hook. It really snagged me. My previous experience offered no sense of proportion about the magnitude of time to which I was committing myself when I said, “Sure.” The first obstacle was whether we were allowed to do it at all. we soon discovered that an enormous number of entities had made a visual salute to the famous image over the past fifty years, and that it had already become a ritual of pop culture, in spite of the complexities involved. There’s even a website that shows over a hundred previous parodies. Before long, we had mutually decided that it might as well be our local festival’s turn to pay homage.
The assignment was now in my lap, and I was overwhelmed with a desire to do it justice and exceed expectations. I found inspiration in filmmakers who I admired (like John Frankenheimer or Robert Altman), because their time-consuming approach would be required for what I’d bitten off. I wanted to bring the same passion, attention to detail, and collaborative leadership to my effort. I ended up shelving all other priorities and putting a ludicrous amount of time into the project, but not without the help of many partners. First and foremost was my wife, Dana, who jumped in head first to play a key part in nearly every aspect of the creative enterprise. After getting advice from an experienced model railroader, she began crafting a miniature flower garden to display the festival acronym for a mandatory foreground allusion. More than once, she would come back to the unfinished artifact to find that its spongy base had “spit out” some of the “flowers.”
The rest of it hinged on two important elements — whether we could pull together our own “Fab Four,” and then surround them with a crowd of numerous figures. 
It was determined that the Beatles would be “represented” by the previous directors of the Advocate Brass Band, a Golden-Age-style band associated with every festival. Their initial formation to color a political rally in 1989 was a direct influence on the organizing of the annual event itself. This made perfect sense because the foursome would include the festival’s pair of co-founders and their band uniform jackets, although not psychedelic, would be an effective visual reference point. We immediately knew that some digital sleight of hand would be called for, since only two of the four were locally present.
One was near a university town many counties away, and the fourth had moved to a distant state. It took lots of coordination to solve that equation, and we pulled it off with the crucial participation of my friend, photography pro Bill Griffin, who took time away from his day job of wealth management. In keeping with the guiding theme of “a little help from our friends,” getting all the ingredients for the poster art to coalesce would demand the magnanimous assistance of others — furnishing space, props, and standing in at our photo shoot, plus image research and acquisition.
At a certain point, I began to focus on researching the background “crowd of fans,” to honor the countless performers, organizers, sponsors, staff, and volunteers who made three decades of festivals possible. It became a daunting, complicated task of culling and selection. I realized that the poster would be the size of a picnic table if everyone who deserved to be on it were included. The original setup by Jann Haworth and Peter Blake was peopled with life-size, hand-tinted cut-outs that imposed a certain physical limitation, and it was fabricated within two weeks. A virtual approach was too open-ended for comfort. There was a limit to how methodical I could become in choosing ingredients for the montage of faces. The solution was to approach it more intuitively, as I would any of my “maximalist” works.
All collage art worthy of the name is irrational at some level, and one of the reasons the original Beatles art is so iconic is the sheer illogic of it. And so, for us, that idea led to a few incongruous personalities, such as Carrie Nation and Howdy Doody. The final assembly was challenging, painstaking, rewarding, and fun, all at the same time. After refining the list of candidates and compiling the source files, each master image had to be sillouetted, retouched, color balanced, and optimized for inclusion. It seemed like the rearranging would never end before every element of the composition appeared to “belong.” I shall confess that I do not possess a powerhouse workstation. The increasing quantity of digital layers in Photoshop had to be continuously merged to prevent the composite file from paralyzing my Macintosh. Even so, it would often exceed 500 MB in size. I tried to save and back up as often as feasible without breaking stride, but there were periodic freezes that would result in “three steps forward and two steps back.”
There should be no misunderstanding, however. The marathon endeavor was punctuated by many fortunate, often astonishing developments. One of our “Fab Four” individuals made a vital connection with an outstanding photographer in Athens, Georgia, who went the extra yard in matching my parameters for an important superimposition of the black-suited Dr Foreman. He also shot an antique bass drum to add another convincing Sgt Pepper’s touch — the same one that appeared on the festival’s first poster in 1990, and it still had the original, hand-painted emblem! Dana took the lead in preparing the poster “mechanical” for offset production, as she always has done for Dixon Design. She also knocked one out of the park during the solicitation of bids. As a contribution to the landmark production, Mike Abbott of Thoroughbred Printing agreed to produce the job at cost, and spent an hour with the press operator, Dana, and me, making sure we were satisfied with the quality.
Our closing duty was to devise a printable key for identifying all the individuals and design elements. My original idea of including a longer “blurb” for each line item quickly became far-fetched when producing the abbreviated version dragged on. By the time we declared it done, the “labor of love” vibe had been exhausted. There wasn’t much love left in the air, and I just wanted all of it to hit the street, which it has, of course, and the positive response has been even more than I anticipated.
This post is already far too long, so I won’t get started on my Eva Marie Saint story, but I need to explain why we included a picture of the creators, and then I’ll finish up on an appropriate collage note. I was adamant that I would not fall prey to the Hitchcock Urge. I had no interest in, nor justification for, inserting myself, since I was making so many brutal choices to leave others on the cutting room floor. Dana was in total agreement, but the team of people who helped with the proofing process took an opposing viewpoint. Their collective drum beat was that the final rendition must include us! You can see that we eventually waved the white flag and stuck a small portrait on top of the Bourbon barrel.
A tiny figure seated at a kitchen table was provided by the Great American Dollhouse Museum as a nod to the Shirley Temple doll in the original composition, which also featured a Madame Tussauds wax figure of Sonny Liston on the opposite side. I knew there had to be a way to include Kentucky’s own Muhammed Ali in our version. Rather than take unavailable time to solicit permission to use a photograph that might get buried in the sea of faces, I turned to my friend Robert Hugh Hunt, who kindly let us insert the extraordinary collage portrait from his 20th Century Icons series!
Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends!
30th GABBF Poster
digital homage by Dana and John A Dixon
24 x 36 inches
Purchase one now!
Online order page includes a printable key to identification,
plus a ‘special thank you’ to all our essential collaborators!
Stephen Rolfe Powell
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⚘
master of hot glass sculpture
exceptional teacher
friend to all who knew him
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“Individual freedom is the product of civilizational advancement. The division of labor, essential to the free market, and the division of meaning, essential to human liberty, are the result of society becoming more “complicated.” Fascism, like socialism, was reactionary, precisely because it sought to restore the ancient human impulses of tribalism and authoritarianism. The cult of unity is simple, freedom is complex. Mussolini was just one of thousands of intellectuals who thought that economic planning, nationalism, socialism, and collectivism generally were more sophisticated and advanced ideas. He was wrong, and so are the people who make the exact same claims today.”
— Jonah Goldberg 2/27/19
“The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.”
— Camille Paglia 12/4/18
“It’s great and good that people are praising Charles. But it would be nice if more people on the right thought for a moment about why his insights and contributions were so valued. Charles came to play. He brought facts with him and he never went beyond them. He never caved on principle, either. In short, he didn’t pander to his audience. He told them what he thought they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear. Moreover, Charles was never mean or conspiratorial or demagogic. There was not an ounce of cruelty in Charles Krauthammer, yet we live in a moment when too many people think cruelty is a form of strength.”
— Jonah Goldberg 6/22/15
“I made a promise to myself on day one [after my injury]. I was not going to allow it to alter my life. All it means is whatever I do is a little bit harder and probably a little bit slower. And that’s basically it. Everybody has their cross to bear — everybody.
— Charles Krauthammer
“I would think about Charles any time I started to feel sorry about myself for any reason, and that would pretty much snap me out of it.”
— Brit Hume
Charles Krauthammer
1 9 5 0 – 2 0 1 8
a giant among
conservative thinkers
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Tom Wolfe
1 9 3 0 – 2 0 1 8
a peerless observer
and communicator
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Junger still understands what it is to be a journalist. These honest professionals still exist, but there are fewer and fewer of them.
Martin Landau
1 9 2 8 – 2 0 1 7
an actor’s actor
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“You’ve got to pick the right girl in the first place. And much more important, as a husband you have to remember the crucial importance of three little words — ‘I was wrong.’ That will take you a lot further than ‘I love you.’”
Thursday ~ Cared for Mombo at the Hall, and she was trying to shake off some cold symptoms. Joan got home as early as possible, so I could get back to Danville for drinks and dinner with the visiting brothers Andrew and Rory from South Africa, along with local friends (Lee and David with granddaughter). The owner of the Bluegrass Pizza Pub invited us to draw on the wall with chalk, but only Zoey and I took him up on it. I cannot remember ever being uncomfortable with a piece of chalk in my hand, which stimulates a direct, electromagnetic current to my imagination. Nor can I recall life before my chalkboard career, as a matter of fact. Like clockwork, Scott V turned 65 first today, but, for some reason, I haven’t reached out yet.
Friday ~ Spent a lot of time monitoring the stock market and setting up trades. Made a trip to Minuteman Press to arrange for the printing of the Carol & Bob portraits. The happy image was taken by someone at a Band Fest picnic years ago, but I have no recollection who it was — a total mystery. We watched the first disc of The Wire, Season Three. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any new ground being broken, but it always fascinates me to observe Dominic West’s acting, and the way he projects different characters without saying anything. I am still reading the new biography of Heston (Hollywood’s Last Icon), and the same basic sense of the great man is reinforced. Loaded with photos from his family archives. The first time I immersed myself in Heston, I was influenced by his values and principles. This time I am struck more with his stubborn refusal to allow personal, professional, or societal obstacles to remain unchallenged. Late in the evening I spent time on the phone with both Marty and Terie, trying to defuse another domestic flare-up. I believe they have exhausted their ability to live with each other at this point in their lives, and I can only trust them to resolve it and not let it spill over to affect those who love them.
Saturday ~ Up at 6am to go get a free load of compost from the city (out at their farm off Standford Road). Spent the rest of the morning working on the Town House yard, fueled by Subway’s new Keurig unit. Not a bad way to spend my birthday so far. We had a relaxing afternoon with early drinks, hot baths, and general sweetness. And then it was time to head to Lexington in search of Moules et Frites. We were early (imagine that), so we stopped into a pub to have a Belgian Red Ale. I was pleasantly surprised by its refreshingly dry, tart, slightly apple-vinegar quality, and it hit the spot better than a typical brew. Dana was still hobbling from her basement-stairs mishap, so we were moving a bit slow, but all went well. The moules marinière at Le Deauville were perhaps the tastiest mussels I have ever enjoyed, enhanced by an exceptional New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. I had crossed the line of no return into Medicare and hit the pillow hard when we arrived home.
Sunday ~ We had our typical brunch-with-morning-political-news-shows, and the exasperating scene in Washington, DC continues. Politicians are unwilling to forge anything balanced enough to anger everyone in the country, except for the few who remember what a compromise actually looks and sounds like. The problem is that most citizens who care are convinced that compromise will not actually solve anything and they want their side to hold sway. It hardens the polarity and ensures another pendulum swing. It is a pathological state. The rhetorical downtrend deepens. And, of course, many troubling problems such as health care only get worse. Later in the day we drove to Lexington to attend Drew Robertson’s graduation celebration. Dana was adequately ambulatory, but still treading very cautiously. It was a pleasant backyard bash. Mingling with extended relatives, plastic cup of iced Buffalo Trace in hand, I lost track of time and jeopardized our getting to Costco before it closed. Still feeling in the “birthday zone,” I treated myself to socks and underpants, and we finally had that misbehaving tire on the Avalon fixed.
