First off, my host seems to be having issues on how to correctly configure MySQL, so you’ll see occasional ‘can not connect to database messages’ for awhile until they fix it. I keep emailing them. Then again, when you pay $5 a month for all I get, I guess you can’t be to picky, eh? Anyway…..

Leonardo da Vinci is a name everyone is familiar with. The original hacker and Renaissance man, he’s done it all - math, engineering, invention, painting, sculpting, etc etc¹.
The guy was arguably a bit of a crackpot as well, crudely encrypting his notes by writing them backwards via a mirror - protecting his words to all but the very vain.. apparently.

Anyway.

There’s an Italian group that calls itself the Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings World Foundation. They seem to think da Vinci and his contemporaries did much much more with mirrors then anyone could have imagined - and it’s been right in front of us the entire time.

The conventions found in classical art are theorized to actually be cues as to how to via these images via a mirror. The outstretched hands, characters staring off into space and the Leonardesque gesture are all examples of literal pointers on how to interpret the works.
An article in Snarfd² has reproduced four of these ’secret images’ found in da Vinci’s paintings. Take a look.

My Take: I would love for this to be true, but the skeptic in me just doesn’t think it’s true. Although Leonardo is known to be a bit of a trickster and as a universal genius we’re still attempting to interpret his work I just don’t think he intended for this. I’m certain that if you ‘truly believed’ you could see these types of images in anything. Never the less, it’s still pretty slick.

1. And don’t forget sodomy. Then again, he is Italian [↩]
2. Reproduced from la Repubblica [↩]

This poem appears in The Wormwood Review vol 26 no. 2 Issue 102 and now resides on my fridge. Enjoy.

It’s time for the Pavleck.Com Weekend edition. A lot is going on and I’ll make you privy to it all!

First up, it’s that time once again - the St. Paul Art Crawl kicks off tonight at 6pm. I’ll be walking around my building checking out (and buying) some of the art the incredibly talented people in Twin Town can put together - will I see you there? I’m really hoping to!
See if you can find me or my work called “All my exes live on canvas” (A play on an old country song). It may or may not be there. The fun is figuring it out!

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It’s been a few days, and I apologize. Normally I steal some time away from work with which to write but time has been fairly short - not to mention, we’ve been taken things easy lately - beginning to wind down.

I may head to the Minnesota Music Festival today - it’s a mile away, well within walking distance. Not sure though, tickets are $30 a pop and there’s the 2 of us.

Today marks my month anniversary of not smoking. I’ve gained some weight - though I’m not sure if it’s because I’m eating more or because I no longer take the 5+ minute walk to the smoking area several times a day. It doesn’t matter, I’m taking care of it - need to exercise more, but the eating side is under control - a lot more water and a lot less soda. In fact, except for coffee I’m slowing down on the caffeine consumption as well.

I bought Mishka a couple dozen roses last week and a balloon. She’s spent a lot of money on me for my birthday, I can just tell, and I feel so guilty about it - no one ever really spends money on me, girlfriends included. So I had to ‘give something back’.

This is going to be a long post, so I’ll cut it short here - click to read the rest of it.

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But right now I’m winning an auction for a wholesale lot of 1,440 6″ glow sticks.

What I do for a living: (Click to make bigger)

What I want to do:

So I will. But I’ll do it smart.

I’m building a place to do all that, and more, in one place. The Pavleck Artist Consortium. I’ve been doing the research, I’m in contact with state and federal reps, I have a lovely girlfriend who will be designing - lets see if I can’t make the transition. I want to learn how to do so many different things, why not build a center and have the people come and teach me?

Our windows are 8 feet high by 3 and a half feet wide. There are 5 of them (Well, 7 total, but 5 connected to each other), and each window is separated by 15 squares. That’s 140 square feet of space that’s visible to the street. So, self, here’s the deal - build us a clock that stretches up the entire window.

Then, expand on that and make it scroll messages.

Then, set an alarm set and snooze button that’s wireless, and put it them in the street next art crawl.

Then, be awesome.

Don’t forget future self.

Oh, and you guys out there, come see me Friday before 6pm in the Education building at the State Fair - I’ll be working the MNArtists.org booth, as usual.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has so far grossed over $44.8 million in the US alone. And sadly, $19 of that is out of my pocket.

Yes, I took Mishka there yesterday. To sit in a crowded theater. With children. To watch Harry Potter.

And I actually liked it.

Ok, maybe like is to strong of a word - but it definitely had it’s strong points.  The end fight was pretty cool, a lot of sweet special effects and all. It was 2 hours and 18 minutes I don’t regret, so there’s that.

To redeem myself, I might have to go see the Mendicats in Broadway Bound…… and gagged! at the Bryant Lake Bowl tomorrow. Nothing like a pre-opera house of whores to really wash away the Harry Potter fanaticism going on. And then seeing Transformers again, too.

Though, truth be told, we’re severely behind on packing, so the weekend might end up being all about that - but we’ll see.

We also temporarily have a new cat. Yesterday, while we were walking into the building, I heard this soft meow and looked over at the flower garden. There sat this big friendly orange tom cat, filthy and covered in dirt. I mean he was diiiirrrrtttyyyy. Holding him, he felt ‘gritty’. That’s how bad he was.
Anyway, we bring him, and introduce him to Ebbie. She’s insanely curious as to who this stranger is, but he’s not having any of it and  proceeds to extended periods of hissing and meowing. We break them up, Ebbie sleeps in the Mishka, this new cat gets to roam the rest of the place - in the morning we were going to take him to the vet for a checkup and/or the humane society - not sure which, hopefully I win and we keep him though. We wake up and… he’s gone. We can’t find him anywhere. It’s as if he just vanished into thin air. So now there’s some strange orange tom cat wandering the house hiding out somewhere, and our smaller sweet Ebbie has to put up with it. I’m fairly sure she can handle herself though, she has all her claws, and tom doesn’t. So the most serious thing that could happen is he could make a move, get swiped by the fast and furious wolverine like claws Ebbie has, and then runs away tail between his legs.

At least I hope that’s the worst that could happen.

Well, Saturday I got to the Dinkytowner at 8:30pm with all my gear, as the Unknown Prophets were supposed to go on at 9. Nine came and went. So did 10. Then 10:30. Then 10:45 I said screw it, lets get outta here - we have a big weekend and can’t be out so friggin late. So I sent them an email apologizing, hopefully they will allow me to reschedule and that they understood.

Sunday, that was Father’s Day. We went to go see Mishka’s parents, and gave him our gift - an elite Mork and Mindy Board Game, circa 1979. I was originally looking for some Bob Dylan screen printed gig posters, but didn’t really find anything I liked - not to mention we weren’t able to get her mom anything for mother’s day, and I didn’t want to make it seem like we were favoring her dad, which we aren’t, we just have the means this time.

New lease is almost finished and ready to be signed, 60 day notice is given - there will be a month were I am paying rent for 2 places, but that’s actually not a bad thing - lets us move on the weekend instead of Wednesday the 1st and lets us really spend some time cleaning the apartment - I’ve only been at this one for a year, and hadn’t really hung anything on the walls, so there isn’t much except some broken blinds due to the dang cat. Oh, and a Washer/Dryer combo unit I need to reassemble after a failed attempt to really really clean it. Oh, and the overlap allows Mishka to get to the new place and paint it - she’s got the color scheme all picked out and her mother to help her do it, so I’m quite happy. No way I was about to climb up 13 feet to paint pfffft.

Yesterday, In The Loop had a private show at the Dorothy Day center in St. Paul, and I was on hand as usual to take photos. I think this is possibly one of my favorite episodes thus far, and the people were great. There was even this homeless musician that played a mean jazz harmonica, with Jeff and The Smarts joining in - made of the most soulful shows to say the least. It was originally going to run from 2pm to 3:30pm, but ran until after 4 - and that’s with a lot of the pre-recorded pieces (all but 1!) removed. There was that much audience participation, everyone had something to say.

Sadly, there won’t be an episode of ‘In The Loop’ next month, and he’s really not sure if they will be given another season - so why don’t you voice your opinion and tell them that WE WANT MORE! I’d hate to see the younger, hipper version of the Prairie Home Companion laid to waste, cast of as if another animated FOX comedy.

All in all I took over 200 photos, and haven’t edited a single one. I’m quite happy with my new lens, though I forgot the lens hood turns, then ‘clicks’ into place. I forgot the ‘click’ part, so some of these have vignetting on the corners, which sucks but I’ll make I suppose. Though I think I’ll end up still buying Nikon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 lens for shows like this - it seems to pull in a significant amount of more light, even though it’s the same aperture. If you’d like to see the slide show, then feel free - or check out my photo set on Flickr - and comment on it damn it!

Oh, it also looks like I’ll be manning the MNArtists.Org booth at the State Fair again this year, come by and say hi! Other then that, not a whole lot more going on. Still trying to decide whether to chill all weekend, the first time in months, or to swing by the large pride parade in Minneapolis and take some shots. We shall see. Anyway, until next time!

As you can see from this picture, my new camera & lens is significantly larger then my previous one. And after only using the D200 for less then a week, I don’t know how I ever got along without it. Everything is designed to be able to access and change it quickly, in the dark, without moving my eyes from the viewfinder. It’s an absolute dream. I’m really looking forward to using it in next month’s “In The Loop“, since it’s going to (tentatively) be shot from a nearby homeless shelter - should lend to some interesting and powerful shots.

So, it seems like ever since I got the check, I’ve been spending roughly $500/day on.. I don’t really on what, exactly, but it’s been some quality stuff! An example of that quality stuff would be this pic of the tin of tea we purchased yesterday from Teavana. It’s a mix of 2 blends ; one is “Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearls” and the other is “Roobios Tropica” - it smells (and tastes) simply amazing - I might just be going off coffee for awhile. I like it so much so that the same night I went and made a big order from Stash Tea - a coffee cup infuser and several hundred grams of fine tea - including Earl Grey (Learn about Earl Grey tea here!)!

Saturday was Bobstock, Mishka’s Father’s yearly celebration of the life and music of Bob Dylan. It was a great time with a lot of interesting people, made even more interesting since we brought the Wii along. So it was more like Celebrate the life and time of Bob Dylan…. and kick the crap out of each other in bowling & boxing. At least the kids had something to do!

During Bobstock I was talking to Mishka’s mother for a bit, she’s a wise over-achieving IT nerd like myself, and was lamenting to her about the current state of my life, how I’m at a crossroads and need to dedicate several years of college aside for my art and so on and so forth and she said “No you don’t, you simply need to get the information you’re missing”. That’s a simple statement, but damn it all, she’s right. So to help improve my photography, I’m trying to learn how to draw. On Sunday I picked up the book “How to Draw What You See” and a sketchpad and I seem to be picking it up. Though to be honest, my picture taking abilities have greatly increased, especially when you throw in the confidence boost that is carrying around a professional camera - it gives you more of that ‘I belong here’ cred that when combined with an NPPA badge affords you more access then you think you’d get. It’s a wonderful little secret I tend to exploit as much as possible!

I don’t know if I’ll ever photograph professionally, I have my writing and art to pursue in that vein, though I do think I’ll keep at it for the rest of my life.
Mishka graduates this year (For her second degree - overachiever like her mother) with her Interior Design degree. There’s a lot of places in the Twin Cities that she could go to, and I know she’ll do amazingly well - she’s found her niche, her calling, and it’ll net her cash. Hell, she completely amazes me with what she can accomplish in a day - like her new job, the first week, she’s already organizing events and talking to places to do co-op deals - she’ll go far. Hopefully, she’ll go far enough so that I can stop working IT full time some day and do it part time (Even though she says that even doing it part time, I’ll still make more money then her for a few more years hehe), then using the rest of it for writing, art, and photography. Hell, writing is already paying off.

I’m really starting to like how my life is panning out. I’m in love with a wonderful woman I’m sure I’ll marry (She doesn’t read the blog, and no one tip her off, eh, even though I think she knows), I’m contracting at a place the is paying me really well and where I really fit in, I’ve setup some personal goals for myself (save up money for a nice ring + wedding, then for a loft/house, then work on art skills), am working hard to broaden my abilities, and generally growing as a human being.

And sometimes, I wonder, if it is all thanks to a broken Maneki Neko.
A Maneki Neko, literally meaning ‘beckoning cat’, is a Japanese good luck symbol from the 1800s. It’s told that the cat holds one paw upwards, inviting money, good will, customers, etc into the owners world. I bought one. I had it on top of a CD tower for the longest time.

One night, the CD tower fell, probably due to the fault of Ebbie, my very real cat. And with it, the beckoning arm fell off as well. And after that, things started to happen.
Perhaps it was a sign that I no longer needed a lucky charm, I made my own. Maybe it was a sign from above telling me to get moving. Or maybe it is just a bad idea to put stuff on top of CD towers - either way, I’m doing better now.

Anyway, this post has taken me, literally, 4 hours to write - as I did it in between work assignments. And now I’ve totally lost my train of thought due to a little fire, so I’ll just end it here. Ciao!