Welcome to Gaia! ::

Following some suggestions, here is my 2012 Krampus. It is higher contrast, hairier, and more wild-man-like.

Hard day when all is said and done.

It's 5:30AM now... And I stumbled across this again.

It's something of a salve for the artistic soul I guess. I see it, I feel better, more potent and energized.

I will make good art.

http://vimeo.com/42372767

Did you all hear bout the school shooting in Connecticut? The f***er killed 26 people 20 of which were little kids between 5 and 10 years old! What kind of monster does this. Unbelievable.

The type of monster that should have got mental help and that this country will keep pumping out because we don't do anything to fix it. Just put feel good band-aids on the problems so people are hurt more next time.

I read a really great article yesterday that talked about the issue from a similar angle. I can't find it, so I'll have to sum it up.

It talked about the different knee-jerk reactions that always come about after these types of tragedies. You'll see people calling for tighter gun control, and people defending the right to bear arms. Then when more information on the shooter will surface and it will be revealed that he was really into heavy metal, or violent video games, or some such and that will get blamed. And so on and so forth.

But you're right Exxos, about the mental health aspect of the issue. Not all people who are mentally ill are violent, and not all violent people are mentally ill. But there are so many people who aren't able to get the help they need, either in a timely fashion, or good quality help, or at all.

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about Basketball Diaries?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

What's a Krampus??