“Don’t let the sun blast your shadow
Don’t let the milk float ride your mind”
– Ziggy Stardust, “Rock & Roll Suicide”

I’ve been increasingly uncertain about the role of this blog and yesterday I wrote a long tirade about how microblogging via Facebook status updates and Twitter have seemingly supplanted a lot of the blogging activity that I used to participate in and how that seems a lot more like microwavable meals on wheels than actual interaction, but by the end of the long winded tirade, I’d bored myself with how tedious it sounded and I didn’t post it.

Then this morning I clicked over to Technorati.com, the site that tracks all of the thousands of blogs online, and saw that it lifted my ranking from 1 to 103 and listed the following tags as descriptive of what this blog is all about: “blotter art, blotter, merry pranksters, ken kesey, lsd, acid, psychedelic art, art, jerry garcia, grateful dead, deadheads, burning man,”

Granted, I probably put those tags in there. In fact, I’m nearly certain I did when I submitted the blog for inclusion on their site, but what I’m noticing this morning is nowhere in there did I include “curmudgeonly rants about how facebook and twitter and microblogging are superficial and deteriorating discourse in the modern world,” so I decided this morning that I need to get over my grumpy old man tendency and get back to the meat of the matter, which is cheerleading this weird little art world that I’ve found myself in and that I’m spending my time trying to promote as an alternative to venturing out into the cold scary world of employment to earn my rent and groceries.

Kesey once used the term The Intrepid Trips Society for Artistic Revolutionary Training (ITSART) as the umbrella under which he threw parties. I’d like to see the ITSART faction of the Grateful Dead scene have a second life. In that vein, I should say it does look like our afterparty is going to happen. At least that still seems to be the hope… Furthurmore is still the working name… Two days, May 31st & June 1st, a continuation of the Memorial weekend event at Mountain Aire…

I’ll post more here and to ATFurthur.com when some contracts get signed and announcements are ready to be made.

And in the meantime, I’m creating some new blotter art designs, tweaking some old ones into new variations, working on scanning images to the Shakedown Gallery website, and still plodding along with Google Page Ranking.