ESCALATING HORIZONS

PUNCH-OUT OFFSPRING

DEPARTMENT: Graphic/Visual Arts, 15th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

CAPTION: “DNA test results indicate a tainted specimen from the sperm donor clinic. He is a son to both of you Glass Joe and Von Kaiser”.

courtesy of Bobby Vilt

WATER COOLER QUOTES

LETTUCE FEAR

DEPARTMENT: Graphic/Visual Arts, 15th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

CAPTION: “Is it internal rumination or the external world that creates the fear that holds us back”?

DEPARTMENT: Music, 20th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

SOUNDS LIKE: A frozen moment of contemplation among the stars while residing with others in a space station and celebrating a friends birthday by enjoying space cake.

DEPARTMENT: Music, 20th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

SOUNDS LIKE: A frozen moment of contemplation from the second floor balcony of a hotel room in Port Sudan, Sudan.

DEPARTMENT: Writing, 35th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

Caption: “Welcome to Escalating Horizons, featuring 35 floors of original content live from the Nakatomi Tower”.

Good day. We warmly welcome your undivided attention to Escalating Horizons, a blog like no other. It’s gonna get weird, but you might like it. Imagine two friends working through their mental wanderings by making art, exchanging ideas, offering humor, asking questions, noting hypocrisy, and engaging uncertainty through original content.

Now conceive of these wanderings being conceptually housed in a flat circle (return/recurring theory) metaphor; and literally confined to the original Die Hard film with our corporate offices located within the Nakatomi Tower in the midst of a terrorist/hostage crisis playing over and over on an endless loop. This is the conceptual world of Escalating Horizons; a world that offers the audience 35 floors of art and entertainment live from the Nakatomi Plaza.

Why would something like this need to exist? We’re sure it doesn’t; but we’re not sure what else to do with the madness running roughshod through our minds, so why not share it with others out there who are tuned in and turned on by this brand of outsider art, amateur philosophy, and Tom Foolery? Consider this space to be a beacon that invites you to somewhere else and provides the opportunity to find those detonators!

As the name suggests this blog is an Escalating of our and your Horizons, providing a collective adventure toward stretching out imaginations and rapidly increasing the limits of an individual’s mental perception(s), experience(s), and interest(s). By working within the mediums of quotes paired with found pics, photography/photo-manipulation, drawing/painting, music, and writing we hope to make your mind think, to make your heart laugh, to stir your soul, and to inspire your own creativity. In the spirit of John McClane, Yippie Ki-yay Mother Sucker.

DEPARTMENT: Music, 20th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

SOUNDS LIKE: Making love to two special lady friends on an alright Saturday night!

DEPARTMENT: Music, 20th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

SOUNDS LIKE: Making love to your special lady friend on an easy Sunday morning.

courtesy of Bobby Vilt

WATER COOLER QUOTES

DEPARTMENT: Graphic/Visual Arts, 15th floor of the Nakatomi Tower. Writing, 35th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

CAPTION: “To alter our surroundings is to fly free above unexplored territory”.   

Behind the wheel. Barreling down unknown road. There is no destination of certainty and no significant consequences for arriving anywhere. The trip (fueled by excitement, coffee, gasoline, and guile) is. Experience is the only defined terrain. The conversation is ocean deep for stretches at a time, then silence falls, comfortably anchored by a perfectly plotted mix; always moving in the right direction like the music in a done-well movie montage. 

The scenery is unique and flying by. The camera’s life has been put at-risk several times from ill-advised forays outside the car window at speeds exceeding seventy-five miles per hour. Inside the cabin resides a small band of wonderment wanderers, long-odd optimists regarding life’s prospects, but only when traveling. Their interdependence is rooted in the varied behaviors of their collective: the driver, the navigator, the DJ, the documentarian, the historian, and the pure passenger. 

The driver, cool and calm, in control of nothing-in-particular and everything all at once, hypnotized by the lines in the road and always holding a wayward forty-yard stare. Looking forward into the distance. 

The navigator, focused and alert, enraptured with keeping the mission continuing always in the right direction holding every ounce of responsibility toward any miscue or wrong turn. Conferring with maps, digital, paper, and imagined.

The DJ, focused, brash, and confident about the rich musical selection inspired by and solely purposed for this particular adventure. Moving from mood to mood like a sonic energy ninja building cities of sound.  

The documentarian, concentrated, quick, astute, seeing the world through the narrow portal of the camera’s viewfinder and taking picture after picture, each one serving to capture a solitary moment in time and uniting as a collective to tell the tale of the journey a thousand years and images from now. 

The historian, well-meaning, well-read, well-researched, and providing local legends and tall tales. Tidbits, factoids, and like-minutiae fall out of their face nearly every turn. It’s only a matter of time before strong threats of timely violence are levied against the historian, in-sync with the stories of the road, but unaware of the restlessness of the car’s confines.

The pure passenger, distant, aloof, and holding no specific expertise; it is the passenger that becomes the peanut butter and Swiss army knife of a crew holding them together and doing what must be done in order to keep morale high and to provide adept perspective at the most pivotal of moments. Settling inevitable conflicts in an effort to preserve strength and energy for future negotiations. 

As the miles on the odometer roll like a steamship paddle-wheel, the travelers live on, engaged in the moment somewhere between here and there; a single dot somewhere in the past and the future. Lost in time, space, and the cosmos.  

Graphic/Visual Art courtesy of Clyde Teleport.

TWO DOORS

DEPARTMENT: Photography, 10th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

CAPTION: “I got two doors”.

DEPARTMENT: Quotes, 5th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

QUOTE: “There are everywhere crowds of people not worth talking to”.

Courtesy of Bobby Vilt

WATER COOLER QUOTES

DEPARTMENT: Graphic/Visual Arts, 15th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

CAPTION: “How much dog you get in relation to how much a dog you have”.

Courtesy of Bobby Vilt

WATER COOLER QUOTES

DEPARTMENT: Writing, 35th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

There is nothing more necessary than truth; in comparison with it, everything else has only secondary value. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The advertisement is a consistent arrow pointing toward what is false and disingenuous.  It is a meticulously crafted professional lie and a direct opponent of the truth.  That the advertisement is such a perfect demonstration of the false should give us hope.  The truth is within our grasp, it is hidden right in the advertisements that travel with us throughout our days.  By presenting the polar opposite of the truth every commercial is an excellent map that can be used to lead us to the truth.    

Lies are much easier to develop and enhance than the truth so many millions of people have spent their entire lives fine tuning the lies in advertisements and honing them to perfection.  Once again, the polar of the ad and whatever the ad proposes, is the truth.  This means the advertisement has become an arrow to the truth by pointing directly away from it.  What we are looking for can be found by following the back end of the arrow’s head.

I beg you to waste no time and begin using advertisements as the most powerful man made tool for finding out the truth.  It is best to start with the most base of advertising, I recommend the following:

Advertisements on the radio, especially AM, especially during talk shows.

Advertisements on gym televisions.

Advertisements on bar televisions shown between the hours of 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM.

Everything you hear and see in the above advertisements is a precise and unfailing arrow toward the lie.  You need only to turn your back on where the ad is directing you to see the truth.

DEPARTMENT: Music, 20th floor of the Nakatomi Tower

SOUNDS LIKE: A medium stroll with some peacock strut.