Drawing: the Best Way to Learn – Drawing should not be about performance, but about process – A way of taking in the world – by Anne Quito (Quartz)

 

“I just can’t draw.” It’s a refrain most adults say when confronted with a blank piece of paper. Something happens in our teenage years that makes most of us shy away from drawing, fretting that our draftsmanship skills aren’t up to par, and leaving it to the “artists” among us.

But we’ve been thinking about drawing all wrong, says the design historian D.B. Dowd. In his illuminating new book, titled Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice, Dowd argues that putting a pencil to paper shouldn’t be about making art at all.

“We have misfiled the significance of drawing because we see it as a professional skill instead of a personal capacity,” he writes. “This essential confusion has stunted our understanding of drawing and kept it from being seen as a tool for learning above all else.”

Put another way: Drawing shouldn’t be about performance, but about process. It’s not just for the “artists,” or even the weekend hobbyists. Think of it as a way of observing the world and learning, something that can be done anytime, like taking notes, jotting down a thought, or sending a text.

Mistaking drawing for art is embedded in our institutions, says Dowd, a professor of art and American culture at the Washington University in St. Louis. For centuries, schools have lumped drawing with painting and confined it in an “aesthetic cage,” he says.

Our anxiety around drawing starts around puberty, when we begin self-critiquing our abilities to render a perfect likeness, Dowd says. “The self-consciousness associated with ‘good’ drawing, or a naive form of realism, is mostly to blame,” he explains to Quartz. ”If you take a step back, and define drawing as symbolic mark-making, it’s obvious that all human beings draw. Diagrams, maps, doodles, smiley faces: These are all drawings!”

Drawing Helps Us Think Better

At its core, drawing is a problem-solving tool. Scientists are often avid doodlers, like the Fields-Medal-winning mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, for instance. “The process of drawing something helps you somehow to stay connected,” she explained in a 2014 interview. “I am a slow thinker, and have to spend a lot of time before I can clean up my ideas and make progress.”

Even if you’re not tackling hyperbolic geometry, drawing is useful for our daily affairs from giving directions, taking meeting notes, outlining an presentation, or making grocery lists. It fosters close observation, analytical thinking, patience, even humility.

 

An Alternative to Google-Based Learning

Digital technology coddles us by giving us shortcuts to “instant knowledge,” but drawing breaks our collective instinct to Google everything, argues Dowd. He cautions against relying too much on easy paths to learning:

When we ask for something from Google Image Search—say “airplane”—we get contemporary definitions of same, which in that case yields thousands of pictures of commercial airliners. That’s a narrow result from a general inquiry, and one version of how aggregation keeps us from seeing a wider world. Drawing works in exactly the opposite way: close observation of almost any particular engages the senses and heightens experience, making the world seem bigger, not smaller.

There is a physical dimension to this, too. Our brains got bigger when our thumbs moved into an opposable position vis-a-vis our fingers. Our hands, fixed on the ends of our arms, brought us news of the world, and we evolved rapidly to take advantage. Our manual capacities are critical to our understanding of the world. Isn’t it weird, and a wicked paradox, that the digital has eroded the manual?

Dowd, who has been critical of the graphic design industry’s over-reliance on digital illustration tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, argues that drawing isn’t necessarily anti-tech: “I have no beef with technology per se—after all, pencil and paper is a technology. But drawing offers simplicity and directness compared to other information gathering procedures.”

Freedom. Photo by Reuters/Thomas Peter.

Drawing Makes Us Better Humans

There’s another fundamental reason for using drawing as a learning tool: It can bring out our better qualities as people. “If practiced in the service of inquiry and understanding, drawing does enforce modesty,” says Dowd. “You quickly discover how little you know.”

The observation that’s necessary for drawing is also enriching. “Drawing makes us slow down, be patient, pay attention,” he says. “Observation itself is respectful, above all else.”

In the closing chapter of Stick Figures, Dowd argues that drawing can even make us better citizens, in the sense that it trains us to wrestle with evidence and challenge assumptions. “It might seem sort of nutty, but I do think that drawing can be a form of citizenship,” he says. “Observation, inquiry, and steady effort are good for us.”

This form of individual sense-making is a practice that’s ever more vital at a time when we’re inundated with falsehoods and bad faith, says Dowd: “When we look hard and listen carefully, how are we not led back to questions of justice, of what is right?”

Perhaps drawing pads should be standard issue in government offices and boardrooms.

Random Line Drawings From the Files –

Kurdish Participation in the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – by Morgan E. Hunter – 30 Oct 2019

 

A bipartisan 405-11 majority of the US House of Representatives decided Tuesday to condemn the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. The result came after decades of attempts by the Armenian lobby, which had been successfully opposed by Turkey and its friends in the United States, especially – until recently – the pro-Israeli Jewish lobby. (A fascinating article in the Jewish Daily Forward by Nathan Guttman from 2010 entitled “Jewish Lobby Sits Out Vote on Armenian Genocide,” describes how deteriorating relations between Israel and Turkey had led the Jewish lobby to stay largely neutral in a very close but unsuccessful vote that year.)

The huge margin this year was primarily the result of President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Northern Syria – an intervention that began under Obama and was always pushed primarily by the US intelligence community, but also supported by Israel and its US supporters as an anti-Assad operation. No attempt was made to link the current vote to any anniversary of the massacre itself. The timing of the vote was clearly meant instead to signal disapproval of Trump’s actions and of Turkey’s military campaign to take control of the border area between Syria and Turkey from Kurdish militias that had captured control of the region during the recent Syrian civil war.

(Islamist Militia in Syria)

Turkey’s use of Sunni Arab militias in the campaign had been particularly attacked by advocates of the US Syrian adventure. Ironically, those same Arab militias which are now being correctly described by deep state spokesmen as “thugs” and “murderers” were only six months ago being praised by these same people as the “Free Syrian Army” and “moderate opposition”. Before that these same militias were actually funded by the CIA and their leaders were posing for photos with John McCain.

The New York Times account made the connection with the Kurds explicit:

Livid at Turkey’s bloody military assault in northern Syria, some lawmakers saw an uneasy parallel between the Armenian genocide and the bitter warnings from Kurdish forces that the withdrawal of American forces would lead to the ethnic cleansing of their people.

“Recent attacks by the Turkish military against the Kurdish people are a stark reminder of the danger in our own time,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said in a speech on Tuesday.

Not widely known in the United States, but very well known in the region, is that among the most enthusiastic participants in the Armenian massacres of 1915 were Kurdish Muslim tribesmen, who largely inhabited the same regions of Anatolia as Armenian Christian peasants. This fact also goes unmentioned in the New York Times piece, but can be found by a casual perusal of Wikipedia, and the associated footnotes.

The Ottoman government of World War I (whose most important leaders, such as Kemal Pasha and Enver Pasha, were actually Albanians by ethnicity) considered Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians as a potential fifth column for the Russians, and made every effort to encourage Muslim attacks on them. The best parallel is with anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia of that same era, which were encouraged by government officials but mostly carried out by local Polish and Ukrainian peasants.

In the context of the House resolution, it is ironically appropriate that the only Kurdish political party that has actually acknowledged that Kurds participated willingly in the Armenian massacres, and were not just ordered to do so by the Ottoman government – namely the PKK – is the only Kurdish party that is condemned by the US Government as a terrorist organization. I will discuss the PKK and its Syrian offshoot, the PYD in a subsequent article.

Morgan E. Hunter received her PhD in Classics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2019. She also tweeted as @Molotov_1917 as part of the award-winning #1917LIVE Twitter project that reconstructed the daily events of the Russian Revolution and the beginning of the Russian Civil War.

Judy Collins Singing a Medley From French Revolutionary Flavored Marrat/Sade (5:43 min) Audio Mp3

I have been singing these songs from this arrangement lately… the spirit of the French Revolution of 1789.

 

Judy Collins – Marrat/Sade Medley (5:43 min) Audio Mp3

Picture the Soviet Union in A Space – Retrofire – 1961

 

The song celebrates the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human in space, orbiting the Earth once in Vostok 1.  Gagarin described hearing a whistle and an ever-growing din as the rocket trembled all over, and tore itself off the launchpad.
“The noise was no louder than one would expect to hear in a jet plane, but it had a great range of musical tones and timbres that no composer could hope to score, and no musical instrument or human voice could ever reproduce.” Yuri Gagarin

Retrofire – 1961 – In The Nursery (3:52 min) Audio Mp3

Soviet Themed Tarot Cards – October 2019

I was thinking of what a Russian Revolution set of Tarot cards might look like and I typed in the words “Soviet Tarot.”  I came up with this collection on Imgur.com – not how I pictured the set in my imagination, but a beginning.  I do like the colors. 

https://archive.ph/bfNaq

The Strange Death of Sean Kealiher AKA Armenio – Portland Antifa Anarchist Hit By SUV Under Gunfire – Nobody’s Talking – 18 Oct 2019

Why haven’t the police announced who was in the SUV that apparently struck Sean Kealiher?  The police arrived on the scene of an accident where the bullet riddled SUV was near the Democratic Party Headquarters.  No one was in the vehicle.  Police must have seen the license plates on the crashed SUV and run the license number through their computer system within ten minutes of arriving on the scene.  Perhaps a search might take longer, but, days later there seems to be nothing in the press reports of who the owner of the vehicle is and who was driving in the vehicle.

A man who was sleeping rough in a tent a short distance from where the crash occurred said that there were loud arguments and one tough guy told people to leave the area or get physically beaten.  Was that Sean Kealiher who was a reputed martial arts practitioner and is online in a number of videos at demonstrations threatening people with violence. 

In the upside down world of anarchist flavored Cider Riot drinking establishment people think that they are living in Nazi German conditions from the 1930’s.  The anarchists see the police as fascists or agents of fascists.  So, the anarchists are proud to say, “we don’t call the police.”  The anarchist also don’t want to talk to the police to help find out what led to Sean Kealiher’s death in the street at the young age of twenty-three.  The police are the armed agents of the authoritarian state.  The police are viewed by the anarchists as proto-fascists forces.  So no one who saw Sean Kealiher knocked down wants to tell any Portland police officer what they saw.  In the anarchist mind they are living in Nazi Germany and resisting the forces of fascism and darkness. 

Taking things one step further into a delusional understanding of the society they live in Sean Kealiher’s mother asked people at a memorial in the street where the young man fell to not talk to ‘the media’ either because they tell lies.   So, as little publicity as possible might get out and in a few days most people have forgotten that a young man was struck down in the street in the middle of the night while he thought he was fighting ghosts from fascist Germany.  What a nightmare. 

I draw on every scrap of paper in my apartment – Every recycle cardboard box is turned inside out – I must draw

Audio of Article – Mp3

I was looking at pictures I had posted on Imgur.com mostly pictures from the day’s news that I want to highlight.  I saw the picture I had taken when I looked in my recycle bin and saw I drawing I had made among the recycle materials.  There is printed material and a sardine can that is a little bronze color, a styrofoam cup from Dunkin Doughnuts, and empty olive oil bottle, the expensive stuff, that’s not from my house.  Of all the letters and half words and ingredients printed on the paper in the bin, my drawing is the only thing that is hand made, hand draw.

I have been trying for a long while to draw on every piece of scrap paper, or cardboard box that I toss in the recycle bin.  I have become a habitual drawer because I draw every often.  When a box of cereal is finished I take the box apart and use the brown clear inside of the box to draw.  I have cans of broken crayons and odd pens and pencils in cans and have these drawing tools and playthings in easy reach in every room in my five room apartment.  After a while when I see a blank sheet of paper, or a cardboard box, or even a clear surface I instantly think of what kind of a line drawing I would like to put there right here, right now.

I said to one of my wives many years ago that I was going to throw out all of my sketches everynight in the recycle bin.  I wanted to stop treating the results of artistic expressions as objects.  Objects to be venerated and hoarded, and stolen and guarded by armed men.

After a while she was looking at some of the drawings in the blue recycle bin and said that some of them were pretty good and that I should just put them aside and save them. So I did start saving ones that pleased me.  But I had definitely created a habit of drawing a lot and not being worried about using up expensive material, or even unused paper, or thinking about ‘art’ as something to be framed and saved and awarded and monetized, et cetera.

I wanted to emphasis to myself my complete rejection of that mindset.  That curse.  So out went the simple line drawings that are the way I express myself .  Love it or hate it, I can’t stop.  When I started to have the cavalear attitude to the paper I filled up with whatever nonsense came into my head, or through my fingers I made more drawings and I felt freer and as if I had quit a job.  I do have a large number of drawings saved because they are repetative for one thing, but there are enough variations to interest me and every so often ones that really please me.

I saw that Leonard Cohen did a lot of sketchy, lazy, seemingly childish line drawing sketches that reminded me of my work.  But, when I see a series of his drawings and some of the songs or poems from the man juxtaposed I gain a greater appriciation for the man’s visual expression through seemingly simple drawings.  Childish? or Childlike?

I read some ‘self-help’ advice in an article that warned about taking care with the first thing in the morning a person did because that could set mental patterns for the way the person behaves all day.  In other words getting up and instantly checking a phone, or going on a computer for social media could be metaphorically ‘re-wiring’ a person’s brain so that one is almost living in the computer and smart phone world.

So I was interested when I read that the first thing Leonard Cohen did when he got up was draw a self-portrait.  A crappy little bunch of squiggles that took about three minutes.  But look how he set his brain up for the rest of the day by making drawing his first activity.

No wonder the man had a second, or was it third, career in music when he was cheated out of a lot of his money when he was  in his sixties.  He stayed creative and woke up by waking up his creativity.  So, I think I am on the right track.  Draw, draw, draw!  I even draw on the Paul Newman Green Tea wrappers.

 

https://archive.ph/IVA8e

 

Portland OR: The Sad Death of Sean Kealiher Outside Cider Riot – News the Local News Simply Can’t Or Won’t See – There Will be More Violence Between Right and Left – 14 Oct 2019

Clueless Reporting – What happened? The young anarchist has been going to Leftist and populist protests since he first showed up at age 13 to Occupy Portland where he slept out with other protesters. He has been around the Anarchist scene ever since. He has been videoed at numerous protests. He was given a 15 day jail sentence for assault and battery on opponents. Judges do not give people time in lockup for simple shoving matches at heated demonstrations. The Cider Riot bar where he is a frequent customer is an organizing spot for left wing anarchists and similar people. Right wing opponents have shown up more than once at Cider Riot to bring their opposition to the Leftists.

What happened the other night? Probably the SUV with Right Wingers drove by and shouted insults or challenges to the Leftists outside the bar. Sean Kealiher probably shouted things back, and got in the street to block or attack the SUV and the Rightists. The driver of the SUV hit Sean Kealiher. A leftist armed with a firearm of some kind fired shots at the SUV leaving the scene and the SUV crashed into a tree near the Democratic Party building close to the Cider Riot bar. The SUV driver and passengers fled the scene under gunfire.

The friends of Kealiher did not call an ambulance. They were heard telling the dying youth, “Walk, man.” As if that is a way to treat someone who was struck by a car. The anarchist refused to call police and instead of waiting for an ambulance and medical professionals who would have told them not to move an injured person they decided to put Sean Kealiher in a private car and drive him to the hospital themselves.

Unfortunately Sean Kealiher died. The police arrested the people who brought him to the hospital to question how they came to be transporting an injured dying man to a hospital with no call to authorities.

Who was in the SUV. The license plates will give the police a pretty good idea who the owner of the vehicle was. If the police had been called right away the people who hit Sean Kealiher might have been apprehended withing minutes. But, anarchists don’t call the police.

The ‘news’ report looks like it was something written by someone in high school who has very little idea of how the city they live in operates. Or, are the ‘reporters’ afraid to express observations which just about any adult in a coffee shop in the neighborhood would make. But, all of this is speculation, no speculation allowed on the news. “He had a wonderful smile.” That’s the news. Look forward to more Left vs Right in Portland, and this may not be the last time there is gunfire or sadly a death. I’m thousands and thousands of miles away and I can see this, why can’t some people in Portland see what is right in front of their eyes?

Sean Kealiher – Requiescat in pace et in amore

………

Update:

Darryl Perez, who lives less than a block from the site of the crash, said Monday that it appeared to him that the deadly encounter started with a road rage confrontation.

Perez said he was in his tent across from the Democratic headquarters, 232 Northeast Ninth Avenue, when he heard two cars speeding up Northeast Everett Street before coming to an abrupt stop near Ninth Avenue.

Perez said he heard people from both cars begin to argue, followed by the sound of a physical altercation.

“I heard someone say, ‘The best thing you can do right now is get back in your car and drive out of here because otherwise I’ll kill you,’” Perez recalled one of the people saying.

Perez said he then heard the sound of a collision. Four gunshots came next, he said.

That’s when he came out of his tent, Perez said, and saw an SUV stalled on the sidewalk in front of the Democratic headquarters. Nearby, two people stood over a bloody man on the ground, he said.

“The two dudes kept telling their friend to get up and walk, but he wasn’t moving,” Perez said.

The two people picked up the man, according to Perez, and started dragging him across the street, creating a trail of blood behind them.

The three eventually got into the car and drove off, Perez said. He said he could not identify the make and model of the car.

Perez, who has lived off the corner of Northeast Everett and Ninth for about two weeks, said he provided his account to police.

…..

https://archive.is/PklJc

Portland Anti-Fascist Activist Killed In Hit And Run Outside Cider Riot

by Rebecca Ellis Follow OPB Staff OPB Oct. 12, 2019 6:18 p.m. | Updated: Oct. 13, 2019 5:14 p.m. | Portland, Ore.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/antifa-killed-homicide-cider-riot-sean-kealiher/

CIA ‘Poisoner in Chief’ – Book Talk – by Stephen Kinzer – 26 Sept 2019

By Jared Prenda 

Magical realism is defined as “a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy.” Upon the first glance of Stephen Kinzer’s book, one might categorize ‘Poisoner In Chief’ under magical realism, with events too absurd to comprehend, but it is entirely nonfiction.

Kinzer came to Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue to have a discussion about his 10^th book, highlighting the life of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb was the chief chemist of the CIA and director of the controversial MK-Ultra program from its beginning in 1953 and served as director for 10 years. During his tenure, Gottlieb was responsible for spending $240,000 in order to attain the world’s entire supply of LSD in order to research the possibility of mind control after the CIA feared the Soviets were already capable of such a feat.

Kinzer is one of the most influential foreign policy journalists who served for 20 years covering foreign news for the New York Times. During his tenure with the times, Kinzer sat as the bureau chief for the New York Times offices in Nicaragua from 1983 to 1989, Germany from 1990 to 1996, and in Turkey from 1996 to 2000. His coverage of the political turmoil in Central America and Eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union earned Kinzer multiple awards and recognition. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Before the release of the book, little was known of Gottlieb and Kinzer even stated at the beginning of his talk.

“I think I discovered or stumbled across, the most powerful, unknown American of the Twentieth Century. Unless someone else conducted extreme experiments on human subjects across three continents, lived in complete invisibility, and had what amounted to what was the license to kill from the US Government” said Kinzer.

The book shop café, Politics and Prose, was packed with rows of local residents to hear the author speak about his discoveries about the little known director of one of the CIA’s most controversial research projects. The discussion was broken up into two segments with the first half being Kinzer’s outline of his research and discoveries about Gottlieb, who died suspiciously in 1999 before a lawsuit about his research was about to be brought to court. The second half was a Q&A section where many of the attendees bounced their own theories about the fallout of Gottlieb’s work off of the author.

Gottlieb himself was a fascinating character. The son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, he was one of the first Jews hired by the agency in 1951 at thirty-three-years-old. He was a type of hippy who lived in an eco-home in the woods and would milk his own goats every morning. Following his career in espionage, he went on great mission trips where he’d work in leprosy hospitals in India and perform other works of charity. All the while, he was wreaking havoc on the lives of American citizens and committing war crimes against East Asian prisoners of war deemed “expendables.” As his time as chief chemist, he came up with various ways to administer poison in assassination attempts, particularly on infamous Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Congolese president Patrice Lumumba.

Throughout the lecture, the journalist outlined horrific stories of research where the CIA used prisoners of war, unknowing American and Canadian citizens, including terminally ill hospital patients with a variety of drugs and torture in order to accomplish the goal of mind control in a two-part process.

“At the end of these 10 years, he came to what amounts to a double conclusion. One, yes it is possible to destroy a person’s mind. He verified this time and time again with his experiments and destroyed countless lives,” Said Kinzer. “Two, it is not possible to insert a new mind into the void you’ve created, and the 10 years of suffering was in vain.”

These research facilities were often unaware of the CIA’s involvement in these experiments. Some of which happened even here in the DMV area at the University of Maryland, George Washington University, and Georgetown University according to a Washington Post article written in 1977 following congressional hearings on the matter. All three universities either denied any knowledge of the experiments or declined to comment.

One particularly horrific tale outlined by Kinzer spoke of seven anonymous African American prisoners in Kentucky, who without consent or permission were isolated in small cells.

The inmates were administered “triple and quadruple doses of LSD for 77 straight days without any idea what they were being given or what might happen” said Kinzler.

The book is for sale on Amazon and Kinzer himself is on a book tour, speaking with NPR and visiting various book shops across the country. One line from the acknowledgments section details the mystery behind both Gottlieb and MK-Ultra, as all documents, including the names of its test subjects, were destroyed on the CIA’s orders.

“Everything in this book is true, but not everything that is true is in this book” wrote Kinzler.

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