Deciding Who Your Art is For

I've been doing a lot of book browsing and Web browsing, searching for information about blind people who create art. This is part of
my 2011 resolution to add more art to my life
http://kestrell.livejournal.com/622032.html .

So far, I have come up with four blind artists:
John Bramblitt http://www.bramblitt.net/ ,
Lisa Fittipaldi, author of _A Brush with Darkness_ http://www.lisafittipaldi.com/ ,
Gary Sergeant (an artist from England), and
Esref Armagan http://www.esrefarmagan.blogspot.com/ .

This last artist is probably the most video-recorded and written-about, as he is the main subject of many mainstream articles which have appeared in The New York Times, numerous science magazines and journals, and many videos which can be found on the Internet,such as the following titled
"Extraordinary People: The Artist with No Eyes"
http://www.armagan.com/paintings.asp .

All of these blind artists are painters, which I initially found kind of confusing. It was not that I couldn't figure out how they could develop techniques for creating images with paint on canvas, because in my experience a blind person who really wants to do something can usually figure out a way to do it. What confused me was how the art these blind artists produced could later be appreciated by other blind people, or even by the blind artists themselves after the paint had dried.
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Alexx and Kestrell and The Books

So, Alexx and I often make serious jokes about how we have this menage a trois, he and I and the books. I thought I would add just a little bit more kink to that relationship by letting other people voyeuristically listen to a recording of Alexx reading to me.
The book is one which I gave to Alexx for Christmas, but which I think I turned out to be a bigger fan of than he was: _Little.com_ by Ralph Steadman.

If you like Daniel Pinkwater or James Thurber you may like this book also, as it is a similar sort of strange. It's very short, and is about the dot that lives in your computer. This dot is another shapechanger character like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman's Delirium, but the dot is waaay more, uh, manic. And not so downbeat. It looks different in every picture, sometimes being a black puddle of ink with little splatters around it, other times it is a brightly-colored birdlike being, and most of the time it has abstract blue slashes for a mouth or an extra eyeball or two on stalks, or whatever else expresses it's emotions during that nanosecond. Mercurial--I like that about shapechangers. Also, like Thurber and Pinkwater, the art is not particularly sophisticated--there's lots of zig-zaggy lines and bright splashes of trippy colors (Steadman is the artist who illustrated many of Hunter S. Thompson's books).

Here is the link to download the mp3
http://www.sendspace.com/file/zitm7j

The new accessible Kindle for PC

I saw this link posted to an accessible tech list yesterday and spent a few hours trying to get it to run, but no luck for me--I get an infinite loop re Microsoft Journal Viewer not being fully installed. I mentioned this glitch on the list and one of the people had the same issue on one of his machines, although it installed and ran fine on another machine of his. Other issues are coming to light, but you can't break it till you've tried it, so try the free download at http://www.amazon.com/kindle/accessibility