the bird summoner

I’ve been mucking around with my pencils this evening and came up with this drawing.

Two more reviews for Write Away: That’s How I See Things and King Ocean’s Flute

Pet peeve for the new year: I’ve been getting lots of forwarded e-mails lately from friends and relatives with long lists of attached images by artists whose work they admire. But these e-mails almost always neglect to mention the name of the artist or give a link to the artist’s website. Usually these images are lifted directly off the artist’s own website, where they were originally put into artist’s chosen context. Instead, I get to read them with the (often inane or misspelled) comments or who-knows-what-person who put together their own amateur format fifteen forwarded e-mails or so ago.

I’m sure the creatives on the Livejournal community wouldn’t do this, but everyone else, this is rude! Respect the photographer or artist for all the hard work they’ve put into it. If someone sends you an in-box-crashingly large e-mail with pictures you like, try to find the artist’s own website; then dispense with the huge files and send a nice clean e-mail to your friends with the name and website link.

A couple days ago I got e-mails from two separate people with photos showing families from around the world posing next to all the food they ate in the week. The two people who sent it to me both saw passing on these images as a good thing, highlighting how little food some people in the world manage to live on while those in other countries eat extravagantly, and with so much more packaging and processed food. But the amateur presentations of these photos gave no no thought to the unnamed people who took these photos, who might be struggling themselves because their work circulates in embarrassing formats, in a way that gives them no money or credit. Perhaps these photographers will still benefit somehow from the grassroots publicity, but it’s not right to assume that. This goes for poetry, too. Wendy Cope just had a big rant about how many people see no problem in illegally reproducing her poetry.

Here are some people whose work has recently crashed into my inbox and who I’ve managed to match up with their names:
Hungry Planet:a book by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. The work is perfectly viewable in an online slideshow at Time.
Eric Grohe The e-mails were kind enough to mention him as ‘Eric’, which is folksy and intimate and made his work slightly easier to look up, but it’s still not good enough.
Julian Beever and his pavement drawings

Sorry to rant, but this has been bugging me…