Author: Josh Philip Ross

Through my friend’s blog, Blissfully Enparadoxed, I found a link to a nifty toy with which to track my NaNoWriMo progress:

Because I can’t stand to think about politics anymore today, here’s a NaNoWriMo update.

Word Count
Goal Today: 2,400
Actual Today: 2,307
Goal to Date: 7,200
Actual to Date: 7,254

Yesterday’s writing felt like it wasn’t going anywhere, but I feel like I made good progress today, and I’m actually feeling good about the overall shape of the thing again. The protagonist’s emotional dilemma is sufficiently complex and ambiguous, and I’ve managed to get him to relax about it enough that he feels real to me, which I was starting to worry about. I don’t want him moping like a Romantic dork over his sorrows, I want him carrying them around with him as he tries to live in the actual world. And I’ve managed to make him recognize that his personal tragedy is rather small in external terms — not that this necessarily makes it easier for him to deal with, but it’s a requirement if I’m going to send him wandering around India, looking serious misery in the face.

I shared the plot with Daniel and was pleased that he seemed to think it works. He’s a skilled and experienced director, so this means that my story has some drama behind it.

But enough about my story. One day, hopefully I can just post my story instead of the story about my story.

So the Boston Redsox broke the curse — and under a lunar eclipse, no less. This, taken with this year’s quartet of hurricanes over Florida, must be taken as a sign that God is backing John Kerry for president. What other conclusion could one draw?

Lately I’ve made a couple of technology purchases, and I have to admit that I’ve found it a surprisingly trying experience. We now have a flat-screen TV (just a cheapie, mind you), and digital cable with a zillion channels to go with it. And digital video recording, which is what we always wished TV was: you can record the shows you like, watch them whenever, pause them, and fast-forward through the commercials. Then today I ordered a cell phone from T-Mobile. We already have one, but now we’ll have two, so Jenny and I can reach each other as we wander the city.

The thing is, there’s now both so much technology and so many roughly equivalent products that the old way of shopping — doing research, studying features, making an informed decision — becomes absurdly cumbersome. And for any particular purchase, the price is just high enough that I wish I could do sensible research, but just low enough that it’s kind of a waste to bother. With this kind of saturated market, where there are twelve cell phone companies offering twelve phones and twelve rate plans each, the concept of the informed consumer, so vital to market theory, goes out the window. Instead, we end up with a glut of similarly shoddy products on the market, with very little incentive for one company to offer better phones or better customer service. I suppose that gradually the right information will percolate through the market, just as it did with Web portals — how often do you use AltaVista or Excite.com these days? Not often, because they sucked. But those were free services, and there was absolutely zero barrier to switching to Yahoo and Google. With cell phones, it’s different: you get stuck with a contract, so it can take years for word to get around that T-Mobile is good (as I hope very much it is) or that Cingular sucks (it does, and as of May 15 we can switch without paying $70).

As for the TV, it’s an Esa, a brand so obscure that it has no website, yet so prominent that MSN and Circuit City sell them. I went to the store, it looked okay, it was cheap enough, and I bought it. Was it an informed decision? Not hardly. Does it matter? Only if the TV breaks.

I made it! I actually managed to visit all 20 studios on the tour. Day 2 involved giant superhero collages made entirely from torn-up bits of the New York Times; a very funny exhibition by a Russian artist who seemed deeply bothered that people were laughing at his very serious work, which included a coffee table consisting of two legs sticking up out of a pile of sand to hold a glass disc; and an opportunity to take a felt-tip pen and trace your own section of an active ant farm being projected onto the wall. At the latter studio, I caught two artists having an earnest discussion over whether they should subscribe to ArtForum now that they’re not in school anymore.

Overall, the show was mixed, but with a tremendous amount of very good art in it. Compared to other shows around town, like the DUMBO festival, this one seems to have a higher proportion of artists over 30 who didn’t just graduate from art school, which gives a lot of the work a maturity that isn’t available to younger artists. Some of the older artists were dull daubers — there were, here and there, sailboats in the sunset — but their presence gave the show an inclusive feel, steering it away from art-school pretention. And I enjoyed the intermingling of craft and art. The tour included a stained-glass shop, several pottery workshops, even some jewelry and knitted wool. The feeling was similar to that of small arty towns, places like Point Reyes Station in California or certain little towns in the Hudson Valley.

I will definitely be back next year if I can make it.

Yesterday was the first day of the Gowanus Artists Open Studio Tour, which continues today. Joined by a couple of friends, I wandered the northern section of the tour, close to where I live, and saw many of the same studios and artists that I visited last year. I was pleased to see so much good art, and one of the nice things about the Gowanus scene is how unpretentious it is. It’s very craft-oriented, to the extent that in some studios, sweaters and jewelry hung right next to paintings.

My absolute favorite artist on the tour by far is Elyse Taylor, whose fantastic ongoing work, Growing, covers one wall of her studio. I can’t say enough good things about this work, or the rest of her work, so instead I’ll just point out that A) she’s an incredibly sweet lady who will welcome you to her studio if you email her at taylorgrowing@aol.com, and B) she sells at least some of her artwork for cheap. I bought an actual honest-to-goodness painting of about a foot square for twenty bucks. Beat that!

There’s much more than just Elyse Taylor on the tour. Today I hope to make it down to some of the far-flung studios that I didn’t visit last year.

This is not usually the sort of conspiracy thinking I go in for, but this video (Quicktime required) makes the case, now percolating through the blogosphere, that Dubya is suffering from early dementia, a degenerative condition. Try to ignore the embarrassingly peppy music and think about this for yourself. I’m not sure I believe it, but I’m not sure I don’t.

On Tuesday night, Jenny and I went to the first part of a two-lecture series on the Metropolitan Museum’s special exhibition on the art of the Han and Tang dynasties in China. James C.Y. Watt, the Brooke Russell Astor Chairman of Asian Art at the museum, described the Chinese culture of that time (200 to 750 A.D.) as a cosmopolitan blend of northern nomadic “barbarian,” indigenous Chinese, and Bactrian influences. (Bactria was the Greek province in what is today Afghanistan; it was created by Alexander the Great.) Showing different works of art, he demonstrated how they related to work from other regions. Jade cups had stems, an emulation of the Roman style of making glasses and a form that’s much more natural to extruded material than stone. Amphora jars were copied, blending Greek and Chinese motifs.

This all relates to my ongoing question of what happened to Buddhism in the West. We know that it originated in India spread throughout East and Southeast Asia, and also that it was prominent in Afghanistan. What happened next? Why are the Japanese Buddhist, while the Iranians and Arabians and Greeks never seem to have been? According to a Wikipedia article on Greco-Buddhism, Buddhism was a major cultural force in Greek Afghanistan until the invasion of the White Huns in the 5th century. Indeed, some scholars believe that the standard iconographic portrayals of the Buddha may have originated in the Greek Buddhist world, influenced by Greek naturalism. Bactria was also where Mahayana and Pure Land Buddhism may have gotten their starts. It seems Buddhist ideas may have been known in the Roman world — certainly they knew about silk, anyway — but the trail seems to go colder in that direction.

An article by Andrew Skilton, excerpted from his Concise History of Buddhism, explores the Buddhist interaction with Persia. There seems to be evidence for Buddhist ideas circulating and even moving further west: