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5 March 2025

No. 2,258 (cartoon)

Can one word be a complete sentence?

No.

Really?!

6 March 2025

Swindled?

I rarely attend day-long events, but I made an exception for a photography symposium at the University of California since it’s an opportunity to catch up with Ken Light, Richard Misrach, Bill Owens, and others I haven’t since I presented my last—and final—photography festival in 1993 before devolving back into my bubble. (I can’t argue with the calendar, but it’s still hard to believe that was almost a third of a century ago ...)

I Internetted the organizers twenty-five dollars, then got a response thanking me for my credit card purchase. Now here’s the scary and/or amusing part: it was signed, “Lia Swindle, Public Events, UC Berkeley.” Hmmm ...

If I was out to swindle people, I might use the name “Lia Swindle” to put people at ease, since a swindler would never do that. Unless one just did. I’d be skeptical if the note was signed, “Tina Trustworthy.” Perhaps that’s “Lia’s” real name. Or maybe ...

All this speculation is making my brain hurt, especially since I’m not going to have a problem in either case. If I was swindled, I can always talk my way in for free with my fake press pass; that works every time.

7 March 2025

Missing the Twenty-Seven Club

Dr. Cooper discovered Blind Melon the same way I learn about new bands: thirty years after everyone else has. She was incredulous that she’d never heard the ensemble’s music, but I wasn’t.

Richard Shannon Hoon is mostly responsible for the group’s obscurity. The frontman got it sorta right: he died from a drug overdose on the band’s tour bus in New Orleans. Rock and role over!

His timing was way off, though: he died a couple dozen weeks after his twenty-eighth birthday, and, like Bix Beiderbecke, The Big Bopper, Tim Buckley, Gram Parsons, and Otis Redding, missed being in the Twenty-Seven Club by less than a year.

Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Janice Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, et al all died when they were twenty-seven; they’re all in the pantheon of Twenty-Seven Club luminaries. Had Hoon planned ahead, he might have joined the premiere list and lifted Blind Melon out of undeserved obscurity.

8 March 2025

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

“Eleven years ago today, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 shot into the air, it fell to earth, everyone knows not where,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow never said. “For, so swiftly it flew, the sight could not follow it in its flight.”

There’s nothing in the news headlines about the missing plane, but that’s not surprising, almost by definition, since there’s been no substantive news about the vanished jet. And although the blathering idiots that have hijacked broadcasting about current events would certainly deny it, conjecture ain’t news. I think the few remaining real editors gave up on writing about the unsolved mystery after the tenth anniversary last year.

I have nothing to add either, so I too should stop observing the anniversary of the puzzling disappearance. But I won’t. I enjoy revisiting the enigma once a year and pondering the imponderable.

9 March 2025

Daylight Savings Time Casualty

Today is the first day of Daylight Saving Time, and thus only twenty-three hours long. Unfortunately, I’d planned on writing something to go in here during the missing hour, so this is all I got for today. Maybe I’ll make up for it on 2 November, a twenty-five-hour day. I’ll of course have forgotten about today long before then, but it’s nice to pair a facetious excuse with a lofty aspiration.

10 March 2025

Meat Grinders for Mothers

Russia has been attacking Ukraine for over a thousand days using the same basic “meat grinder” tactic: send waves and waves of soldiers to attack enemy lines knowing that a large percentage of them will be wounded, maimed, or killed.

Recently, representatives from Putin’s United Russia party decided to comfort the grieving mothers of the dead cannon fodder with special gifts: meat grinders! That strikes me as an appropriate gift, something that will always remind the sorrowful mothers of their dead sons.

11 March 2025

Art Practice

I ducked into a building to get out of the rain and was pleased to discover Art Practice, several cardboard rectangles arranged in a glass cage with dramatic lighting. The ambiguous title left everything to my imagination: was the piece art in practice, or student work practicing for art? Or maybe the title was the piece, and could be attached to anything.

Art Practice was so good that I’ll probably plagiarize it in the improbable event that I ever reread this entry when I’m not so busy working at nothing all day.

12 March 2025

Drawing a Blank (media and dimensions variable)

It’s been several decades since I heard about a conceptual art piece called Oak, so I don’t know if it’s a true story, a joke, or something I imagined. Oak was simply the word “acorn” typed in the middle of a piece of paper. I’d like the idea more if it didn’t seem like a parody of conceptual art.

And that’s why I’m uncomfortable with my latest piece, Drawing a Blank (media and dimensions variable). It seems like another spoof, but it’s not. I marvel that all the works I love that are part of my personal landscape simply didn’t exist before someone created them. I made Drawing a Blank to remind myself—and probably no one else—of the mystery and miracle of creating something wonderful and memorable from nothing.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart