art diva studios visuals and verbiage by Rachelle Díaz
books
Convenience Store Theory?
After reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory and attending the slideshow presentation for Bill Mackey’s newly released Field Guide to Tucson Convenience Stores at MOCA, I’m wondering if there’s not a cigarette-smoking monkey sitting at a typewriter somewhere out there writing Convenience Store Theory. The presentation and book were excellent, and – in hopes there will [...]
Image – Text – Image – Text
Two books I’ve read recently, in a sort of home audit of my husband’s grad school creative writing classes, have inspired me to think about works of literature as works of visual art. Not just they way they’re laid out in a graphic design sense where the layout works with the content, but the content [...]
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
I woke up at 3:49 a.m. last night, unable to fall asleep again. So I finished reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by 5:30. It’s definitely my favorite novel of his, so far – I’ve also read Identity, Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’m 4 generations removed from my Bohemian [...]
The Books of MMVII
Falling Angels Tracy Chevalier Jan 2007 (re-read) There’s nothing like coming down from the Holidays on some gothic fluff. It’s a little on the sappy side, but I don’t think most people would see it that way. I just have a very low tolerance for sappiness and will stop reading if it goes too far, [...]
Historical Correlations
I finally found what I was looking for in Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790: the connection between the Postmodern and the Post-Renaissance (may be my own coinage). The Counter-Reformation was a conservative backlash against the Humanists and the Protestants in which the Church machine sought to regain control of the people through art, music [...]
The Greater Good and the Lesser Evil
The more art web- and paper-based publications I read, the less I want to read. Such a polarized landscape. The dumbing-down, super-mass audience camp has been reporting on the same type of subjects over and over for years. Then there are the upper-crust writers that because they self-publish their own blog or magazine feel entitled [...]