Thank you, Jeffrey Rowland for reminding us that we are just like monkeys.

In other news, I'm going to be a daddy soon.

Back in the day, before the beginning of the twentieth century, creators of images were invested with magic powers. Wealthy and powerful leaders invested absurd amounts of money in both the craftsmanship of their palaces and in their own portaits. Because of the mystical significance the creation of images had, the more realistic the image, the more power the creator had. Therefore, the Renaissance painters seemed even more magical than those who had come before them, the medieval painters who had no concept of perspective were more impressive than the dark ages painters, etc, etc, until you get back to the sorcerors of Lascaux, magical because of their stick figures on the cave walls. Now we are in the 20th century, and photography has progressed from a roughly magical process itself to a more and more commonplace thing. Not like walking or anything like that, but those who have cameras can pretty reliably make a decent image that looks, despite its lack of color, pretty much like reality. And so the painters, who have trained so fucking diligently to represent what their eyes see by the use of paint, and have even had in some ways a running dialogue about what reality really looks like, suddenly find that some jackass chemists have taken over the dialogue. Framed the discussion, pun intended. Photography suddenly becomes the bar. Painters are applauded for being "photorealistic" rather than just realistic. Then, as artists are a crafty and limelight-seeking crowd, they take a cue from one of their own that was shunned in his time and probably had a brain disorder, and they start deliberately being unrealistic. From these clever bastards we get the latter impressionism, surrealism, modernism, and then postmodernism. Of course, since people can't just look at one of Pollock's drip paintings and know what it is, the philosophers get involved. They start assisting the artists by creating theories about the art, or at least pointing out that it will sell better if there is a theory that the prospective buyers understand no more (and ideally, quite a bit less) than the art itself. Meanwhile, photography marches on, even documenting the new movements in the painting/sculpture world. After all, now that the painters have created things that the photographers can't (because these things do not occur in nature,) the photographers can now take pictures of what the painters have envisioned. And now the art world becomes more about what is inside the artist than what is outside, just like the literary world. Then along comes photoshop (which is Dylan's own personal shorthand for digital image creation and alteration) and suddenly the photographers can do what the painters have been doing for the last century. As a matter of fact, this new set of digital imaging tools allows all sorts of people to more easily express what is inside in something other than words. At the same time, the cameras have gotten smaller and cheaper and easier to attach to a computer. So now, the magic of image creation (realistic or surrealistic or whatever) is spread to the same masses that previously were locked out. How 'bout it, Painters? Ball's in your court.

I'm getting a new digital camera soon. I'm very excited, especially since this gives me the opportunity to do something I've been thinking about for a while, which is the use of digital photography and image manipulation to do comics. So I may be putting some comics up here, or directing folks to a page created in Google Page Creator. Or something else entirely, depending on what I can get set up. Perhaps I will be talking to people about how to do webhosting and how much it should cost. Also, I looked at Cafe Press and it looks like they have a pretty good setup for someone who sells tshirts to make money without having to do anything other than dream up good designs. So yay. Hopefully in the next month or so, I will have some links to point you to if nothing else.