MySpace


J. D. Hastings



Last Updated: 6/12/2009

Send Message
Instant Message
Email to a Friend
Subscribe

Gender: Male
Status: In a Relationship
Age: 33
Sign: Aries

City: Berkeley
State: CALIFORNIA
Country: US
Signup Date: 8/7/2006

Blog Archive
[Older      Newer]
 /  / 
Tuesday, May 26, 2009 

Category: Art and Photography
New post on d'Arteboard featuring this piece I just finished for a friend:


 

There's a detail and comments on the piece in the blog.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009 
Today on d'Arte Board I posted this piece, as a sort of tribute to Spring, which has suddenly disappeared again from Berkeley.

 

The darteboard post has details, another, related piece, and a classic soul video. Go look!
Currently listening:
Sunny
By Bobby Hebb
Release date: 2006-12-01
Tuesday, April 07, 2009 

Category: Art and Photography
New post at d'Arte Board featuring some of the selected individual scraps I've collected over the years.  Click on the photo to be transported there magically.

Currently listening:
1999
By Prince
Release date: 1990-10-25
Tuesday, March 03, 2009 

Category: Art and Photography
For my weekly post on www.darteboard.com">d'Arte board I posted a triptych I made for some friends' wedding that I call synthesis. 

Here is an MS Paint rendition of the final piece, which is viewable at the blog (click the image to go there).


Thanks for looking!
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 

Category: Art and Photography
Shake your booty down to the ground.
There's 5 more over at d'arteboard

.

Click on the link to visit the d'arte board
Currently listening:
Bedrock
By Uri Caine
Release date: 2006-04-03
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 

Category: Art and Photography
Today at d'Arteboard I've posted the masking tape piece that launched the srest of my recent masking tape explorations.
Click the image to be redirected



(There's a detail shot at the blog too) .
Let me know what you think!
Currently watching:
Twilight Zone: The Complete Definitive Collection
Release date: 2006-10-03
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 
Over at http://darteboard.com/ I am revisiting my portrait of jazz trumpeter Booker Little that I once posted here, God knows how long ago.  It is accompanies by a verbose description of the process and history of that process. 

Check it out (click on the thumbnail to be redirected):

Booker Little
Currently listening:
Out Front
By Booker Little
Release date: 1987-10-01
Tuesday, January 06, 2009 

Category: Art and Photography

I am giving away all my leftover Christmas Cards over at d'Arteboard.com. No Shipping & Handling or other commitments required.

As they say, however, supplies are limited.  I will make as many more as I can to satisfy demand, but the earlier you respond the more likely you'll get one. 

Here's a sample of one of the additional pieces I'm giving away (others can be seen at the blog linked above):

(Da-Do, I'll save one for you since you already mentioned it).

Wednesday, December 31, 2008 

Category: Art and Photography

Over at www.darteboard.com I've posted one of my earliest large safety pin pieces, "In A Silent Way," along with a brief discussion as to its origins.

Click on the image to vew the bigger version at the blog.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008 

Current mood:  mellow
Category: Art and Photography

Today at the d'Arteboard Blog I posted all 60 of the Holiday Cards I made for people this year. Here's a few free samples, click over to the blog for more:

 

Thursday, December 18, 2008 

Category: Art and Photography

As of a few weeks ago, some artist friends and I begun a new blog collectively to show off our wares, talk shop, and showcase some other art related things we're interested.  The idea is that, while each of us might struggle to come up with enough posts to keep a blog active enough to be worth visiting regularly, all of us together can provide enough content to entertain more regularly. 

The result is http://www.darteboard.com.

Or, if you'd like the banner version:

Each of us 6 members is required to post once a week, but any of us can post as often as we like or have time for.  The lineup is as follows:

Monday: Daniel Allyn "Happy Cloud" Lee

Tuesday: Me

Wednesday: Toni "Bunnie" Tiller

Thursday: Tom "Bats" Bennett

Friday: Jason "Jason" Grey

Saturday: Steph "My last name is hard to spell" Gerolimatos

Sunday: A day of rest and reflection

Anyways, because I am required to post more frequently over there than I have managed here, my attention will be shifting there.  Please visit the new site, comment and let us know if there's anything else we can provide to improve it. 

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 

Marlo- Heroes, Apparently he's in Max Payne too

Bubbles- Heroes

Lt. Daniels- Fringe (had a stupid role in Lost for a while), also previously in some weird car ad

Beadie- The Office

Ziggie- Generation Kill

Frank Sobotka- True Blood

Michael- 90210 The Next Generation or whatever

Bunny's voice is used in a Spiderman Cartoon.

D'Angelo's Mom: A hypno-regression therapist in the Terminator Chronicles

You're welcome.

Saturday, October 18, 2008 

Category: News and Politics

But I have yet to find anybody else to marvel at it with me.  (With the possible exception of Paul Krugman)

This is a story about an anonymous investor throwing 100s of thousands of dollars trying to affect the Intrade President's Race "stock" markets.

When I posted this elsewhere, someone said they didn't care but that I could explain why I found it interesting if I wanted.  I don't think anybody was interested enough to read my description of that, either, but I'm putting it here anyways.  If you would like to discuss, I'm open.

My interest stems from related points:

1- The Intrade system itself, whereby people can by "stocks" on just about anything, in this case the winner of the presidential election
-This is a novel occurence in and of itself
-This is more interesting because such markets have consistenly proven more accurate predictors of the events they cover than polls and other measurements.
-Interesting Discussion: Why is that?

2- The article in question presents a case study related to the above issues. Namely, some unknown investor repeatedly sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Intrade presidential markets for seemingly no other reason than to make them appear more favorable to John McCain.
-That's a fascinating decision for the anonymous investor to make, isn't it? Spending several hundreds of thousands of dollars to affect something that is ultimately non-binding. Like spending money to affect an espn poll asking people which baseball team would win the game that night.
-Related to this, how much effect DO the apparent odds of your candidate winning an election have on the results of that election
-Related to this is Obama's growing concern that complacency among his supproters will weaken turnout.
-How rich must this motherfucker be? Was it worth it?

3- The ultimate ability of the person to affect the markets is a great example of well functioning capitalism.
- The guy's efforts were worthless. All he managed to do was lower the price of the Obama shares, which other investors quickly picked up at their deflated prices. The result is those investors made a quick buck as the prices returned to the appropriate market levels
-The notion of "Appropriate market values" here helps answer the question in point 1- why are these markets good predictors?
-These markets are based on simple "commodities." Everybody involved understands exactly what they're buying- basically betting on one candidate or the other. Because of the simplicity of the commodity, everybody has the same information. Even if you work for one or the other campaigns inside info doesn't help. This level playing field means that the values of the traded assets will be more or less absolutely defined by the market.
-Whereas an individual would have a hard time handicapping the election with complete objectivity, using a large body of investors who are using their own money (therefore are less likely to delude themselves or cause chaos for its own sake), the "noise" of individual bias is cancelled out, meaning that the average of the human intelligences involved end up processing all the information in what turns out to be an objective manner. The collection of minds is able to assign an actual, factual value to individual pieces of information as well as entire swaths of information
-The self-regulations of this market are as close as you will find to an example of a Perfect Market Economy. Such a system willwork perfectly, everybody will have perfect information, and acting in bad faith is all but impossible (the guy trying to affect the results ended up losing a shitload of the money invested).
-The differences between this example and what happens in the stock market can be used to show why the stock markets as a whole do not behave as this ideal, and can be an introduction into a discussion about how to improve our systems.

 

Currently listening:
Burnin'
By Bob Marley & The Wailers
Release date: 2001-06-12
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 

Category: Art and Photography

I made this to see what a bunch of these circles things I made would look like together.

Each actual square is a about 8" across and is made of masking tape I used to paint designs on canvas. Once the paint is dry, I take the tape off the canvas and stick it to bristol. This bristol is then cut into forms and collaged together. In this instance I did circles because my printer is as broken as my camera so my compass was the best stencil I had.

I like how this looks but think it looks better here than it would in real life. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these. Frankly, I'm not sure why I spent so much time on them, but that's what passes for my "method."

Currently listening:
Passing Ships
By Andrew Hill
Release date: 2003-10-07
Friday, September 19, 2008 

Category: Art and Photography

This isn't even a to do list as much as a list of projects I am working on or would like to work on.  I've had it for a little while, but since I haven't posted anything in a while I thought it might be of limited interest to people to see into the compounding idiocy I call my "process." 

Some of these things are barely conceived.  Some have been near completion for around a year, I just never get around to the final stage.  Some I hope to finish very soon, others I may never bother with. Some things are more maintenance to allow me to work on other stuff, but most are their own pieces.  Some day I'll be able to post real art again, but also some day the sun will expand and boil off the Earth's oceans.

Anyways, my current projects list:

..TR style="HEIGHT: 43.25pt; mso-yfti-irow: 0; mso-yfti-firstrow: yes">..TR> ..TR> ..TABLE>;

..P>

..P>

1...:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O /> 

Tommy's wedding gift

·        Finish White re-up

·        Pin white strands

·        Find suitable underlayers for white and multi-color 2

·        Put together multi-color 2 hole

·        Put together white hole

·        Decide whether to join or leave separate

2. 

Scott Commissioned 1:

·        Finish Tommy's wedding gift

·        Calculate number of rings possible

·        Figure layout

·        Put it together (using preexisting strands)

3. 

Woven Weaves:

·        Decide whether to replace red square with white

4. 

9 "Flat" Paintings

·        Buy 36 eight inch light weight frames to create nine 8 x 8 frames

·        Paint or locate/salvage paintings to attach

·        Construct frame for all of them

5. 

Pope for Bats

·        Skirt

·        Additional components?

6. 

Collages

·        Stock up on Gloss Medium

·        Stock up on images to use and made scraps

·        Create one solitary collage scraps piece

·        Use with other pieces.

7. 

4 Quadrant Masked Dropcloth

·        Add inner circle

·        Don't work on Parallel Ribbons

8. 

Jay Dilla

·        Finalize design

·        Cut circles into squares

·        Make collage elements as necessary

·        Put together

9. 

Antigone

·        Finalize design

·        Make necessary masking tape squares

·        Draw necessary parts

·        Put together

10.   

Rope/Wire

·        Take stock of what is already pinned

·        Figure out what the desired result is meant to be

·        Finish pinning and make the damned thing

11.   

Blue Pinned Scraps

·        Figure out what the hell I spent the time pinning these for

·        Then do that

12.   

Large Orange Scraps

·        Figure out what the final layout will be

·        Finish pinning

·        Construct

13.   

Kareem v. Wilt

·        Figure out the proper template size

·        Finish it

14.   

Min[[[[[[[[iframe]]]]]]]]s, several pieces

·        Buy more wood, make more min[[[[[[[[iframe]]]]]]]]s

·        Pin scraps and make more min[[[[[[[[iframe]]]]]]]]s

·        Once you have a large enough pool, start identifying good designs

·        Construct those designs

15.   

4 Flowers

·        Uh, start.

·        Determine colors (Cream, white, black, ultramarine + med. Orange?)

·        Paint as necessary

·        Determine sizes, buy frames, cons

16.   

Parallel Ribbons dropcloth

·        Stop painting according to need and just focus on the bits that need to be finished here (AKA put everything else on hold)

·        Touch up until it looks like it merited the time it took

17.   

Nested Squares

·        Disassemble current state

·        Finish adding necessary woven touch ups to each piece

·        Figure out proper configuration and put it together

18.   

Victoria Secret figure Drawing

·        Start

·        Finish

19.   

Scott Commissioned 2:

·        Get size requirements

·        Finalize pricing

·        Start planning for long haul depending how big it is

20.   

Aaron's Wedding Gift

21.   

Loud:

Currently listening:
Stakes Is High
By De La Soul
Release date: 1996-07-02