the tenth late friday night eclectic buffet

hey friday night and it's a holiday week here in ontario so there's a bit of a festive air about the golden fish headquarters!

there’s a little bit of an adventure thread appearing through the golden fish blog these days and so this next piece might tickle the interest of those of you inclined towards experiencing the incredible from the security of a comfortable seat.

the cougar ace was just another car carrier when she was launched in june of 1993. capable of delivering over 5,000 cars - yes you read that correctly - more than five thousand cars! - the cougar ace made her way into the history books when she ran into a series of misfortunes beginning with the emptying of her ballast tanks.

here is the cougar ace upright:

here’s the cougar ace listing:

here’s what 55,328 tons of floating steel looks like when it’s on its side:


the process of righting her was not without trial and tribulation - and death. the good folks over at wired have put together a terrific account of the whole story.

speaking of stories . . . i think that mcluhan would have loved the net. when he states . . . “i think of art, at its most significant, as a dew line, a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”. i wonder, what is the ‘net telling us? why do we need it? why have we allowed ourselves to need it? why have we encouraged it to need us? what is it creating?
here's marshall tucking into an early paper edition of the golden fish . . .

here's one of marshall's quintessential and essential works . . . .

among other things, mcluhan famously stated:
“the nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money.” (or blogging!!)

“the answers are always inside the problem, not outside.”

“i may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

more wonderfully inventive mcluhanesque thoughts can be found right here.

here’s a clever and sometimes inadvertently hilarious interview with mcluhan from the today show in 1976 . . .


all things mcluhan find a nexus point here.

i came across the art of dan ryan recently and had one of those experiences where i felt at one and the same time that while i could fluff off his work as just another landscape painter i also couldn’t help recognizing that there was an essential “something other” about his work that drew me to look closer and further and deeper.

i looked at a number of his paintings and concluded that it is his willingness to stretch the emotional canvas to overlay the physicality of his painting that brings that certain something unique into his work. while nominally depicting quintessentially stark canadian settings, ryan brings emotional referents into play through his rough juxtaposition of bold daubs of colour and rough swirls of form, choppy renderings of detail and and his aggressive management of contrast.
creemore hill . . .

mesa cloud . . .

storm cloud . . .

time passing . . .

to see more of his work visit dan ryan fine art.