Artopium.com Newsletter
http://www.artopium.com
Issue 1, Vol. 1

Contents

1. Introduction to Artopium.com Services (We're a brand new site!)
2. I Question Reality, part I: Rafu (A short story by Chris Minley)
3. This Week In History...
4. Creative Trivia
5. A Call to All Writers!

Introduction

What is Artopium.com? We're a brand new site dedicated to
evolving and marketing unknown painters, musicians, writers,
independent film makers, and fashion designers. We've been called
the "Ebay for artists", but we're more than that. As Artopium grows,
it will contain information on anything from art/music history to
how to articles on painting/filming techniques or vintage guitar
resurection. Even more than that we are dedicated to the
struggling artist. We want to see you, the artist, take your wears
and make a decent living on your own terms. We want to see the
fall of giant conglomerate coperations that have dominated the music
and art industry alike and put the power back into your hands! This
newsletter serves as a call to all artists to join us, and help make
a thriving global community that can't be ignored! If you haven't
signed up to sell your art, music, fashion, book, film, video, or
anything else art related, click here to see why you should:

http://www.artopium.com/sell_now.html

I Question Reality, part I: Rafu
(A Short Story/Essay by Chris Minley)

I question reality. I suggest that this is my obligation and
my only sensible response to being. I also accuse it of being in
adverse opposition to my fruition, despite the knowledge that I am a
component of that overall universal state of being, reality, that I
claim opposes me. This is to say that the purpose of creation is
its own destruction. That most ridiculous conclusion being drawn,
I continue now in the exercise of thought in pursuit of resolution(s).
At the outset, there are two resolutions that I perceive as
attainable:

1) The aforementioned assertion is, for the most part, true, and in
evaluating its terms I may come, after a wrestling, to a treaty
resembling a peaceable surrender and an acceptable continuance.
2) The ascendance of things learned and nuggets of knowledge
discerned before in the negative or unprofitable; an arrival at
a position of thought worthy of positive growth and movement.

That second is almost entirely in the abstract, as its premises
seem to have no answerable actualities. The amassment of wealth, the
entertaining of the flesh, these are the human constructs of privilege
and prosperity, i.e. success. What are the keys to these prospects? It
is in the combination of action, knowledge, and experience, learning what
satisfies the yearning, remembering the path through the maze to retrieve
the prize. It is the animal instinct perpetuating the discerning soul
through the universe, and it is the human conscience that navigates and
applies restraint, a tether to secure the man on the brink of depravity.
Here is a preconceived notion: abandoning conscience leads to
destruction. What is conscience but the enforcement and instilment of
learned behavior subject to society, the accepted tolerances of tribes,
clans, villages, towns, states, and world governments handed down over a
handful of centuries during which man has risen to this level of
civilization that separates him from the beast? Some of that teaching is
tried and proves itself to be a good rule of thumb for daily living.
These practices that lead us from harm, from poisoned roots and berries,
from dangerous precipices and pitfalls, and from the dens of deadly
animals are well and good I will submit for the time being. But what of
myth and religion?
Religion instills temperance. It seems that when there are several
assembled in one place, in order to avoid anarchy and placate the mob
mentality, man has, even before he created government, created religion,
the instatement of a higher authority to appeal to man’s ability to take
pause and consider the consequences of his otherwise rash and selfish
behavior. Not unlike myth, the major tool used here is fear.

Let us begin our story...

Mako, the clan leader and local shaman, lives on the outskirts of
a honeycomb of mud-brick homes on the highest hill overlooking the lives
of his people. They are busy making fishing nets, nestled in an alcove
behind a reef, from beyond which comes all their sustenance.
It occurs to him that Sali, the lead fisherman has a larger adobe
than his, and the ropes and traps that adorn its walls make it
mysteriously beautiful; the most attractive building in the village.
He also notices Sali’s beautiful wife and daughter and is filled with
covetousness, greed, and jealousy, yet he is the shaman. He is made
complete by his union with the spirits, his communion with the dead,
and his communication with the animals. He has heretofore dismissed
physical entrapments such as beauty, resisted hunger, and has denied base
and coarse attributes of men such as hatred and self serving ambition,
yet now he is haunted ever more so by his humanity than any ghoul or
ghastly presence.
Turning to his pipe he seeks to entreat his teachers for wisdom
as his father and his father’s father has done before. He needs to know
how to restore himself to the purity, the oneness attained through a life
of meditation, living off the meager offerings of the people. He attains,
through a haze of sleep and enlightenment, the vision of a new temple.
One cut of stone, and not made of mud. One adorned with the images of
homage to the holy creatures of his netherworld, paying tribute to the
guiding voices of the forefathers who light the path to the other side.
One with a new message in the encrypted language of Moon, Star and Sun.
The walls, the windows, the floors would be so set as to determine
the time and the season, and thus the rhyme and the reason for the
subsequent feasts and sacrifices. The vision labors on through the night
depicting in minute, vivid details, each aspect of the new service,
and finally, near the end of the revelation, the new God announces his
name. He is the Thunder, the Earthquake, the Dark Cloud billowing from
the mouth, the entrance to the place of death and the Womb of destruction.
When Mako awakes the whole earth is trembling and the sky is on fire.
It is Rafu, destroyer of the earth, and he is in the distant mountain
erupting in his anger on the puny villages that speckled his breasts.
“What impudence to place your homes so near to that which is holy!
I am untouchable, and I will ignite the dark stained souls within you
to disintegrate your pride. You will bow or I will bow you
beyond the flex, splinter and fuel for my fire.”

Click here to read the rest of this story
http://www.artopium.com/space/library/stories/minley1.html

This Week In History...

1968 - John Lennon makes his first solo TV appearance, singing
""Yer Blues.""

1967 - Otis Redding dies in a plane crash near Madison, Wis., at age 26.
His biggest hit, ""(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay,"" was
released just three days earlier.

Did you know...

...that the oldest known art to date are the cave paintings of
the Chauvet Cave in southern France, discovered by Jean-Marie Chauvet,
Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire. The paintings depict
various wildlife of the time such as horses, wooly mammoths and owls
and are thought to be over 31,000 years old.

Creative Trivia

1. What was the first year the Oscar Film Award was awarded?
A. 1926
B. 1927
C. 1928
D. 1929

2. Which of the following bands was formerly known as Sharp Young Men?
A. ZZ Top
B. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
C. Faith No More

3. Where was Andy Warhol born?
A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
B. Prague, Czechoslovakia
C. Toledo, Ohio
D. Toronto, Ontario

4. Who wrote the popular science fiction book "Stranger In A Strange Land"?
A. Arthur C. Clarke
B. Robert A. Heinlein
C. Frank Herbert
D. Douglas Adams

5. In what year did Christian Dior launch the first line of clothing
bearing his name?
A. 1921
B. 1947
C. 1959
d. 1970

Answers will be in the next issue of the Artopium.com Newsletter!

A Call To All Writers!

Do you have an article, essay or short story you would like to see
published in the Artopium.com Newsletter? Please send all submissions to
newsletter\@artopium.com. This is your chance to be read by hundreds
of subscribers! Of course, if we decide to publish your work you will
see and have a chance to approve all final edits before publication.