Painting at Ackland

So then it is at Asheville (AVL) airport that they have a small art gallery. The whole story isn’t fully clear. Art is submitted and then put in the gallery and sold from the airport gallery. 20 percent commission is given to the gallery.

In Greensboro (GSO) they show art that has a card credit nearby. If someone wants to buy something they can contact the artist and make an arrangement. They do not take a commission. Just now they are creating an Art Master Plan.

I looked for information about this sort of thing because of the local community airport I live near where I was told the University wouldn’t want to show my art, or the art of anyone at the little FBO shack because that would mean someone would make a profit. The first time I visited Horace Williams, I found it oddly unpleasant. Even thinking about it is unpleasant anymore. I thought about it when I thought I personally ought not think about it because it was hard to think about. Then I did a painting about thinking and throwing up your hands. There is that expression about throwing up your hands.

“I throw up my hands.” The idea is that you give up.

When I thought about it there was an ethical component involved. Ethically is is bad to give up, when the cause is right. The determination of right and wrong is at what benefit does it do for others. it would do other artists besides myself good if people with money to spend on art were to see it. Some of my reasoning about the art at the airport of any size is that people with money to spend on art come through. Art is a sign of civilization, like good plumbing.

There is some good use of the old doublewide that was where AHEC or Med Air had offices. Some people are teaching people who are autistic? I don’t have details. It is a better use than the original plan to use the place to store lawn mowers. That plan I’d heard of caused me to lose my temper.

A couple of few times I have tried to get through to the Freelancers Union. To replace Tareel Temps with a Freelancers Union Hall for Chapel Hill represents futuristic movement. During my working life I was most successful, happiest and respected when operating the lighting and grip truck. That was freelance really. I got a union card and worked freelance for about the next 15 years. The NYC procures lockout of the early 90s, and the migration of film and television out of NC caused me to drift into what I did when I was young, strong and very inexperienced, carpentry.

We recognize now that carpentry, or building, was a growth industry in NC if not lots of the nation until 2008. This represented a full circle for me. I had been a willing worker. Alan Greenspan indicated that people like myself, the American worker, needed to be retrained. It is my ambition to become an economist now. Now that Henry Petroski puts Finances into the discipline of Engineering, I am made happy. I was looking for another word for happy besides happy, but happy seems best now.

The essence of financial engineering seems to be that banking and insurance and stocks and bonds need to have proper fencing. They really are not the same, and just because you have some control of some money, don’t try to do everything with it. The proper role of the government now, or in case of disaster as now is to invest in shared infrastructure and the people. Government is not a business.

War and corruption keep the people poor. There are the people and people. Too much fracturing of the economy is just as bad as too much central control as they evolve towards themselves. Someone needs to be paying attention and have a goal that guides them.

Einstein says you can’t really go wrong if you have the right goal.

The point I got out of William Faulkner’s Abasolam, Absolam!, was that you wasted your life if you served the ideals of the Confederacy. Then by the time it was done it was ok if you ended up stabbed to death in front of everybody. That means to me it is a tragedy to serve overly self-serving elitist unreasonable ideals. If your ideals serve no one but yourself, then good enough, fine if you get strung up like Mussolini.

Too bad about Tony Soprano. He went just a little too far kicking that guys teeth out. I think that is what got him killed, not robbing everybody in town. It for that fictional mobster was kicking a guys teeth out after he had made his point.

I lust to knock over Silent Sam.

Silent Sam was put up as propaganda for the cause of the South. The cause of the South as to maintain the wealth of plantation owners through the ownership of slaves who on their books were wealth. These landowners were re-empowered, after the American Civil War by politicians who were of the same sort as the landowners in relation to their view of the working classes who were made into wage slaves.

The lineman at Horace Williams Airport gets Nine dollars and thirty 5 cents an hour.