Apocalypse-schmockalypse

I guarantee you I'll still be here in January of 2013.
See, if I really thought that the world was going to end at a predetermined date like December of 2012, I wouldn't be here right now. I would have long ago taken Jeanne and Daisy with me to live it up on a beach in Hawaii. Why not wait out the apocalypse in place that's nice, right?
But since I have lived long enough to see several prophecies of global doom not come to pass (like Y2K), I really doubt that this one is true, either.
And if I'm wrong, then nobody will be around to point it out, anyway. If there are no people left to read a blog, then does it really even exist? No! These words will have lost all meaning.

Hooray! I love everybody!

Hi folks!

Some really nasty things have been said on WoofOink over the last couple of months or so, and I just wanted the whole wide world to know that I've decided to turn over a new leaf and - bygummit- be a happy camper from now on! :D

The following things will no longer be done on WoofOink:
- talking about waving my shriveled testicles in peoples' faces.
- using a blog to decry the internet.
- declaring myself pope.
- whining about the economy and how I don't have a job (especially since I now have one.)
- generally being a Negative-Nelly in sector 2.

Life is too short for pissy blogposts! Especially since the world offers so many wonderful things like baby ducks, sunsets, and instant oatmeal!



So cute...


Well, before I start to think about all of the BULLSHIT THAT REALLY PISSES ME OFF, I'll just sign off for now and wish you all a happy Tuesday night, and a wonderful Wednesday to come!

Life is good!

1982: A Star is Born!

The year is 1982 AD: Michael Jackson's Thriller is released. Compact disks are first introduced to an eager public in Germany. The 1982 World's Fair is held in Knoxville Tennessee (which was revisited in the Simpsons episode "Bart on the Road" back in 1996 when the show was still funny.). And most importantly, Jeanne Cassanova is born!
Jeanne shares a birthday with the following celebrities: Cher, Busta Rhymes, Joe Cocker, and the late Jimmy Stewart. Also, she is the day after: Grace Jones, Andre The Giant, Joey Ramone, Pete Townshend, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh and the day before: Mr T., Notorious B.I.G., Raymond Burr, and Fats Waller.
But I want to wish Jeanne an even happier birthday than they will have, for she is the greatest superstar of all where I am concerned! It has been my pleasure to have known Jeanne for more than six years now, and I am very thankful for all 27 years of her life because they made her into the person who I know and love today!
Happy birthday, Jeanne!

YAM

Happy mayday, whatever the fuck that is.
Yes, I am the cranky old fart who swings his shriveled nutsack in your face every month bitching about how the world is not to his liking! You can expect nothing else but this out of WoofOink for the duration of its existence.
In fact, that is my new mission statement. Fuck this "Web 2.0" networking bullshit! I am going to be as inept and as socially awkward in this pitiful excuse for a pseudo-society as I possibly can be. Fuck Twitter, fuck Facebook, and fuck stupid Myspace all to Hell!
GYARRGH!!!

SELLCRAPY MEET

Being unemployed means that I am on craigslist everyday looking for a job. The up-side to this is that I occasionally happen upon little gems like the following (the misspellings and poor grammar are not mine, I copied and pasted these as they are.):


"PLESE DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME DRIVING OUT TO SLIDELL!!!!THIS IS NOT A DELIVERY ROUTE!! THIS IS A GUY IN A CUT OFF SHIRT AN HIS GIRL FRIEND FROM OUT OF TOWN TRYING TO GET YOU TO DRIVE AROUND NEIGHBORHOODS TO CATCH
PEOPLE OUTSIDE THEIR HOMES AND SELLCRAPY MEET OF A PICKUP TRUCK. COULD BE A SCAMM TO GET YOUR SS # OFF APPLACATION!!BEWARE

THIS IS THE SAME GUY UNDER GENERAL LABOR. TRANSPORTATION .UNDER 'DELIVERIE' 'SALES ROUTE' SILDELL. HIM AN HIS GIRLFRIEND ARE FROM OUT OF TOWN TRYING TO SCAM PEOPLE. PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY LOOKING FOR JOBSAND DRIVING ALL THE WAY OUT TO SLIDELL SPENDING GAS MONEY AND THEIR TIME TO WALK IN AN SEE A GUY IN A CUT OFF TSHIRT AN HIS FAT OLE LADY FOR NOTHING!!!!COULD BE A SCAMM TO GET PEOPLE S.S.# OFF THE APPLACATION!!!I'VE ALREADY CALL THE S.S. DEPT ON THEM. THE POLICE ARE NEXT. SOME BODYS GOING TO RIP A NEW ASSHOLE AN HIS FATASS OLE LADY FOR DOING THIS SHIT TO GOOD PEOPLE!!

HE OWE'S ME AND ALOT OF PEOPLE GAS MONEY..I WILL GET IT "


"It may not be a scam, but it certainly is a joke. The 'girlfriend' doesn't even like being here. PLEASE, If you've even considered working for these clowns, re-consider. The U.S.D.A. & B.B.B. are being notified of the situation. I strongly recommend that if anyone comes to you in a truck with meat in New Orleans/Slidell temperatures, tell them to send the hillbillies home. and take their meat with them. If it were a great product they'd be selling to stores in New Orleans East.

Compensation: Head aches and risk"

Fuck it.

Self-promotion gets me nowhere. Fuck this shit. Who cares?

lirpA

So March went by without a post.
It was a good month.
I don't really have anything to say, I just wanted to touch base with all of you.

We're okay.

Cheers!

Why do you hate me, my future biographer?

It's dangerous for me to post stuff that I write because in only two short sentences, I can totally make an ass of myself, stripping away whatever facade of social respectability I might have once had. Quotations from famous people and random soap box rants from me embellished with the occasional pretty picture seem to be the direction that WoofOink has taken in early 2009. This is all just my time capsule anyway, so that in case I ever become a famous artist 80 years after I'm dead, my future biographers will have more material about me.
"He was so incredibly egotistical, that he anticipated we would be writing a biography about him," they will write, "and the sheer arrogance with which he bandied about his digital monstrosities, as if he were the first to ever do them, surely seals Rachuba's fate as the first great buffoon of 21st century art."
Why do you hate me, my future biographer? Why will you waste so much of your time expressing your utter disdain for my work and for my life? Is it because I hate my own work, and I write self-deprecatory blog posts in the hopes of someday proving myself wrong? Is this why you will find me so loathsome, or is it perhaps because my grandson will be beating up your grandson on the schoolyard, and you'll be trying to figure out if he gets his tyrannical streak from me?
Well, I will simplify it for you as best I can. Sometimes I do hate my work. But regardless of my dissatisfaction with it, I am still glad that I did it. If you get nothing else out of my time capsule blog posts, then get this: it is better to make one really bad painting in your lifetime, than to never have painted at all. Everyone should at least try it and no matter what happens, I can say that I tried.
Worse than a bad review or negative criticism, the thing that is really painful to experience is for your work to be ignored. Apathy is the most brutal critique imaginable. I confess to you my weakness and my poverty of character: that several times a day, I check my Flickr page to see how many people have looked at, favorited, or commented on my work. The numbers are often rather disheartening, especially when I compare myself to all of the other artists who upload photos of their work to Flickr.
A thousand artists who truly have talent are there in this great on line realm. There they were, a thousand egos leaving behind a thousand fingerprints, as if these images would be arresting enough to grab the typical net surfer from his daily dosage of midget porn and fantasy football and make him say, "now that is fine art."
We are all just little kids, attaching our creations to the refrigerator door in the hopes of winning a complement from mommy or daddy. Why should I give a fuck? What does the opinion of somebody I don't even know really mean to me?
Because they ignore it, and in doing so they speak volumes. My reaction is twofold: part of me wishes to simply disengage from it all and delete my accounts with Flickr, Blogspot, Bluecanvas, etc. and the other part wants to try harder, to put more work into it, to reinvent myself each and every time. Maybe it is better to sum up the relationship I have with my own work as love-hate instead of just one or the other.

Behind The Cleaners

"Behind The Cleaners"
Digital collage, 2009

"Spiritual Circuit Board"
Digitally colored drawing, 2009.

"The Phantasmic Phourr"
Digitally colored drawing, 2009

Quote of the day: Carl Jung

"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense— he is 'collective man' — one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind."

"We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions."

- Carl Jung

Quote of the day: Federico Fellini

"I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it."

- Federico Fellini

Hot Gruel For You!

"Hot Gruel For You"
Digitally re-vamped sketchbook page, 2009.

"The Psychedelic Adventures of Danny DeVito's Stunt Double "
Digitally re-vamped sketchbook page, 2009.
(a collaborative drawing between me and Jeanne)

My goal in life is basically twofold: one day, I hope to make something so awesome that people won't even be able to fucking believe it. I mean so totally and completely bad-ass that nobody can ignore it, and everybody will love it and want to have sex with it. People will just be going about, minding their own business, when suddenly they'll see it, and it will stop them in their tracks! They'll collapse then and there, right on the street, quivering in the fetal position because it will completely blow their minds!
Oh sure, there'll eventually be a backlash against it - but the pungent opinions of all of the nay-sayers will only pique the curiosity of others even more! The raging debate over its artistic worth will ascertain that plenty of people will be talking about it for many years to come. All publicity is good publicity.
As for me I'll be laughing: "ha ha ha!" Every evening, I will wallow naked in the filthy money that my creation has made for me. I'll light a cigar with a $100 bill and blow smoke in the face of my biographer as I dictate the story of my amazing life to him. "Oh sure, I was down on my luck for a while," I will say, "But I didn't realize at the time that not getting strapped down with some stupid day job was the best thing that could have happened to my career. I mean really, how could I have thought of something like this if I were sweating my balls off in a Chuck E Cheese costume, serving sub par pizza to ungrateful brats every day?"
My other great ambition, which will take place because of the unbelievable success of the first, is to digitally encode the consciousnesses of me, Jeanne, and Daisy so that they can be uploaded into indestructible android bodies after we die. We will even be able to merge into one super android, and a little robot Daisy will be able to "eject" from our chest, just like Soundwave from Transformers.
We'll say, "Daisy! Eject! Operation: defecation" And she'll shit on whoever we want her to (and yes, it has been proven that feces can be artificially created- look up "The Cloaca" if you don't believe me). Then and there, all mysteries of existence will be solved. We will all move on to immortal android bodies, colonize outer space, and lock arms and sing Queen's "We are the champions" in one big, jubilant celebration.

Quote of the day: Penn Jillette

"Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision."

- Penn Jillette

Two For Tuesday!

"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth."

- John F. Kennedy

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it."

- Frank Zappa

Quote of the day: Eugene Delacroix

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."

- Eugene Delacroix

Quote of the day: Marshall McLuhan

"The artist is the only person; his antennae pick up these messages before anybody. So he is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present."

"The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy." (From Cliche to Archetype, 1970)

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."

- Marshall McLuhan

Quote of the day: Leo Tolstoy

"Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them."

"In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people."

- Leo Tolstoy from 'What is Art?"

Quote of the day: Oscar Wilde

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless."

- Oscar Wilde

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!

Nobody knows what the future has in store for us, but we are certainly on the cusp of great change. Over the next few years we will see a different America. I will be a bit more optimistic than usual and say that it will be better than what we experienced over the last eight years.
This nation is stirring, waking from a nightmare and coming to its senses. For this beautiful moment, people have come together. People seem to care again. A better world might manifest, and it might not, but right now there is potential.
I know that only two or three people are going to read this post, but this is really meant for all of America, and even for all of the world: remember how this feels. Remember how it feels to want change and to make it happen. For so long, we chose pessimism and mistrust over optimism and the common good. For this shining moment that has the potential to be undone. Remember how this feels.

"Went To Church Where The Blinking Light Was"

Digital collage, 2008

Observations

2009 sketchbook pages
Greasy gray graphite

I don't get out much. Especially not with the sketchbook, which is shameful because that's what people who draw should do, right?
Now that it's a new year, and resolutions are to be made, I promised myself that I would be more artistically active in 2009. That means not only drawing everyday, but making more drawings based on observation, not just silly doodles from my head.
If you look at my output from 2008, it's really pretty pathetic. I only made three paintings, and they were all 9"x12" in size. This habit needs to change. 2009 will be a year of many more paintings of respectable size and content.
No more cartoon lines. No more goofy characters. I want my work to get as far away from "low brow" as it possibly can. I will keep the fusion of dry and wet media, and I will keep the weird textural elements, but everything else will change.
This year, I'm going to do something with my life and with my work. I'm on a path. My five year plan is to marry Jeanne, get an MFA, and devote myself to painting once more. I can and I will accomplish this.

Numero Uno!

"The Reign of Ash"
Digital collage, 2008

"Before the Horse"
Digital collage, 2008.

First day of 2009, first post! Nothing to say but happy new year, and may it be a good one for everybody!