The end of the year has come, which means it's time for reflecting back and imagining what's to come. I feel comfortable making this bold prediction: 2005 will go down in history as The Year That Sucked. I won't rehearse my reasons, as it's still a little early here in Pacific Standard Time to be breaking out the traditional New year's Eve alcohol. Instead I shall pass on to you this hopeful sign of the future. While perusing my favorite Judy Garland fan site, The Judy Room, I saw in the latest news section that the U.S. post office is issuing a Judy Garland stamp for 2006. Indeed, we can expect a bumper crop of excellent commemoratives from the U.S. post office in 2006, with Favorite Children's Book Animals and DC Comic Super Heroes scheduled for issue in the year ahead.

While stumbling around on the Internet last night I happened across an exhibit called, The Pony Project. The exhibit is sponsored by Hasbro, maker of My Little Pony. For the show, Hasbro gave blanks of the My Little Pony statuette to female artists from "the fields of fashion, fine arts, illustration, photography and grafitti" and asked them to customize the figures.

Among the participating artists there are several that have been discussed here at In Sequence, including Dame Darcy and Isabel Samaras. As I look at the Pony Project's online gallery I am reminded of the famous question posed by Sigmund Freud, "What do women want?" At long last it can be answered: they want My Little Pony, in as many styles and color options as possible.

Francie Prose has written an interactive essay on the connection between madness and drawing. It's based on her viewing of an exhibit called Obsessive Drawing at New York's American Folk Art Museum. Her essay is nicely produced and nicely written, and manages to steer clear of some of the more cliched takes on outsider art. Instead of focusing on the psychology of the artists, Prose examines why art by non-professionals rose to the forefront at the same time that unabashedly commercial artists were being lionized by the art world. I found the drawing samples interesting, too, since most of the outsider art I've seen has been representational in some way or another, and this collection is mostly non-representational art.

I think doves are beautiful birds, but for the most part, the white dove as a symbol of peace is too saccharine for my tastes. I think I've seen too many "peace" holiday cards, too many white dove ornaments perched on towering white wedding cakes, too many birds on the wing in celebration of Michael Jackson's not guilty verdict. I think it's the white-on-white or white-on-pastel color scheme that gets to me.

Picasso made several line drawings of doves on white backgrounds. They seem like quick drawings, and some even have a cartoonish look to them. The drawing pictured here is my favorite among Picasso's dove pictures. The black background makes the white dove, and the promise of peace that it symbolizes, appear fragile and endangered. The dove is not flying joyously, but stands still and distant against the dark smudges of background.

In times of war, I think this is what peace looks like.

I've written before about the fantastic artwork on Magic: The Gathering Cards. Now someone's mocked up an amazing parody set of Magic cards based on U.S. politics. I've checked the site over the last few days and, as is the case with authentic Magic cards, the size of the deck just seems to keep growing. What's incredible about this deck is how well matched the play rules are to the graphic in each card. It seems like you could actually play a game with this deck.

I chose to show the Rumsfeld monster here because he's the one member of the Bush line-up who elicits a "person you ove to hate" feeling in me. The rest of them I just hate. I don't know if it's Rummy's ties to the Nixon administration, his poetic leanings, or his eerie typological resemblance to Robert McNamara, but at least he's an interesting villain.

I was flipping through this month's copy of Westways, the Southern California AAA member magazine, of all things, when I ran across a feature on vintage automobile stamps. I was attracted to the images from my favorite period in U.S. automotive design, the 50s, but then I saw a link to something called the Postal Art Gallery. This site, operated in conjunction with the U.S. Postal Service, offers framed display-size images of U.S. stamps.

There's some pretty damn cool stuff there. Like check out the train, man, or the retroid Space Fantasy, or the suggestively titled Space Exploration: Probing the Vastness II. I searched to see if they offered framed displays of the Richard Nixon stamp, but it was nowhere to be found.

If you like stamp art, you may be interested to known that John Lennon was a philatelist. I heard a news report just this week stating that John Lennon's stamp collection is going to be on display at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

I love DIY stuff generally and DIY art stuff in particular. Lately, I've found a lot of DIY comics links for the artistically impaired. For example, there's a new Mac program called Comic Life that lets you easily create comics from photographs. Over at Mac Merc, there's a tutorial on achieving a "comics art look" from photographs using Photoshop. Via Boing-Boing, I found two interesting community-oriented web sites: one allows you to create and share comic strips online and another uses game screenshots to create comics.

The game site seems like an interesting extension of the "fan media" movement, in which fans use a commercial property such as a TV series as a jumping-off point for fiction, movies, songs, and now comics based on but extending the original premise. I just read through the archive of The L Ward, a site that uses comic strips based on screen shots from The L Word to comment on the series. I imagine programs like Comic Life are going to make this type of fan media much more prevalent.

While perusing the most recent issue of Wired, I came across a reference to an interesting exhibit on display at the Japan Society Gallery in New York. The exhibit is called Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, and it explores the roots of the kawaii or cute aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.

According to the gallery site, the name "Little Boy" refers to a nickname given to the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima as well as to the innocence of a traumatized child, an emblem of post-war Japan typified in the oversized eyes of manga and anime characters. I noticed this show is a follow-up to the Superflat exhibit, also curated by Takashi Murakami, that I saw here in Los Angeles several years ago.

The Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend surprised me with a gift of the original Candyland board game, which has a wonderful graphic map at the core of its gameplay. It was such a relief to know that the original version was still being made, even if it's being marketed as a "vintage" item to oldsters like me.

I first became aware that the Candyland board had changed after a child asked me to play the game and I eagerly responded "yes." Only then did I discover that the game board I fondly remembered, with its lollypops and gumdrops, had been licensed to include name brand candies like Reeses' pieces and Mars bars.

It never ends does it? I mean the colonization of living--oops, I mean unbranded-- spaces. Just the other day I believe I mentioned my gravestone and what I would write on it. Now there's a space that is ripe for branding. If I'm ever really hard up for cash I'll have to remember that--maybe I could auction off the area in advance to some company, like 1-800-Flowers.com. That would be what the advertisers call a good fit.

I just caught my first glimpse of the Wisconsin state-designed quarter and it has become my new favorite in the state quarter series. Just looking at the cow makes me happy enough, but then there's that cheese wheel and the husk of corn and that makes it even better. It's like a miniature state fair right there on the coin.

I also really love that their state motto is simply "Forward." That has such a wonderful retro feel to it--like that's going to solve everything. Forward.

I was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently and went to see a retrospective exhibit of work by photographer Robbert Flick. I had seen some of his work before and was curious about its visual resemblance to comic book or story board layouts.

According to the curator's notes, Flick found single image photographs to be dissatisfying and started to develop different techniques to illustrate context through multiple images. As I walked through the show, it was interesting to view the chronological development of Flick's worlds.

An early selection of photos was called "Sequential Views," and showed how Flick used the urban street grid to develop a path for taking multiple photographs of an area from different vantage points. Having mapped his path, he would then follow it, taking photographs at given geographic and temporal points.

Los Angeles is the subject of many of Flick's photographs. I liked his colorful images of downtown Los Angeles, as seen in this small selection from a series of photos taken along Central Avenue.

Interestingly, the same technique applied to a rural setting has a completely different effect. In work documenting waves hitting a beach, in one instance, and a long stretch of empty highway in another, the consecutive photographs convey temporal steadiness or repetition. However, in the L.A. series, the images give a sense of constant motion and activity.

As I was driving the busy 405 freeway the other day, I was taken by surprise by the work of the freeway blogger, whom I've written about before. To the side of the highway, there was a huge reproduction of the infamous hooded figure from the Abu Ghraib prison, an ominous reminder of the war.
Later that same day, I picked up the new issue of L.A. Weekly with this soulful portrait of a young John Kerry on the cover. By visiting the web site, I discovered it was one of two alternate covers, the other being a graphic representation of the Abu Ghraib photo.

Even if you're not a gamer, you might want to check out the opening animation sequence for the Anti-Bush Game. Click "Play" to load the animation, then, since it's interactive, you'll need to click some more to keep it moving.

After you've seen the animated intro, you can take on the Bush baddies yourself by playing online or downloading the game for free. But beware! You will have to fight against the Toxic Cheney Robeast, pictured here in all his fearsome awfulness. I've heard this is what Cheney actually looks like after you've called his daughter a lesbian.

The latest newsletter from Aeclectic Tarot announced several new decks worth taking a look at, especially if you're a fan of fantasy art. The Tarot of Dreams deck boasts rich jewel tones as well as symbols and imagery that will be familiar to fantasy fans. The deck also comes with 40 "digital cards" in addition to the traditional card deck. It appears that you can use the digital card images in various ways, including as screen savers. Sounds like a nice addition.

The Baroque Bohemian Cat's Tarot won't be to everyone's taste, but I admit I thought it was pretty cute. It shows lots of fun "cat-centric" riffs on familiar Western paintings. The Gay Deck looks like a great choice for gay male tarot fans. It offers a same-sex visual interpretation of the cards, including the key "lovers" card. I like the contemporary look the artist has chosen. There are a few lesbian images, too, but it looks like the imagery is mostly male.

On a recent Saturday, the Cute-Little-Red-Headed Girlfriend and I were stumbling out for breakfast at a local restaurant when I spied a mark on the sidewalk that looked familiar. It only took me a few seconds to recognize the blue 5 stenciled on the ground as the logo for 5., listed on my blogroll. (Incidentally, if you visit 5, check out Federico's hilarious photo essay documenting his work environment.)

I had just read Federico's post on making stencils, so I had a weird sense of deja vu, or perhaps virtual deja vu, about seeing this sign on the ground. His post had introduced me to Stencil Archive. This participatory site lets you browse stencil graffitti from around the world, including my hometown. From there I explored Beautiful Decay, which is about "Interior/Exterior Subculture," or street art. I was happy to find it online. I had once seen a 'zine with this intriguing title at my local newsstand and wanted to check it out, but I didn't pick it up at the time and then I could never find it again.