bob ross the joy of painting livestream marathon (every weekend)

[Dekalb_Blues]

BOB LIVES
Or, It's Bobs All The Way Down
(If You Want To Frame It That Way)



 ◖( ͡° ʖ ͡°)◗ ♪ ♫


Above, we see Bob helpfully illustrating the infinite regress problem in the philosophy of ontology, or Higher Lower Whateverness-iosity.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
-- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988)

Below, we see Bob satirizing (again, in a profoundly metaphorical, teaching-story-vignette kind of way) the essentially uninformed, provincial controversy between the Western World's tabula rasa faction and its innatism faction (who merrily symbiotically feud to no formal philosophical conclusion as Rome burns) whilst elsewhere others have taken a somewhat bigger-picture view of the matter which could enlighten both factions about a possible state of collegial unity concerning a more realistic effort at seeking further truth (if they cared to be streamlined as one, instead of perpetually impedimentally two -- especially when the supposed "two" are merely a dysfunctional codependent false-dichotomy splitting of one-half of one thing to begin with):
 O Exploitable!

If only I had the magical Fhotoshoop® powers to put alchemically-potent, kundalini-catalytic cortex-qualitizing images like, say, the phantasmagorical mystery-clad design (below) into the blank-slate template's canvas (above), I'd be well on my way in my spare time (inside) to achieving Infinite Creatorship (beyond).


An antique article from Forbes magazine's website follows. Forbes is a billionaire-owned-&-intended, iconically top-tier champion of Better Capitalism Through Cryptocommunist Globalism, as it were. It is very positive about following the Mystical Way of Technocratically Corporatistical Service-to-Self (known amongst the deep-pocketed and deeply-closeted Social Darwinian "realists" who compose the 1% by the euphemism "Stakeholder Capitalism") for its expeditious evolutionary effects on individuals and groups willing to go along with its horribly efficient and obscenely lucrative Grand Ponzi Scheme of Destructive Exploitation To Build Your Now-Ruined Civilization Back Better. (It's a great mystery just why this should be so attractive even to those it ruins.   ) No wonder that at some point, it would have to contend with the Bob Ross phenomenon, even if only to gauge the investment potential implicit in his persona as the unexpectedly valuable mass-audience-fascinating commodity it has become. But perhaps, as with the evergreen Pepe meme, the essential simple goodness of it blithely defeats all attempts at censoring, demonization, co-option, and exploitation:

Nov 2, 2015
How Dead Painter Bob Ross Is Bringing Positivity To The Internet's Most Cynical Community
by Lauren Orsini
Senior Contributor--Games
I write about the business of fandom.
I'm a professional journalist and avid student of fan culture. My reporting has appeared on CNN, PBS, the Daily Dot, and numerous other outlets. My blog, Otaku Journalist, is a resource for geek and fandom reporters. My latest book, Cosplay: The Fantasy World of Role Play, was published in May 2015.


It’s after midnight and Bob Ross is painting a fir tree.

“That little son of a gun, he lives right there in that brush,” Ross is saying. “Sometimes you just gotta shake him out. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Meanwhile, the peanut gallery churns out rapid-fire commentary. “RUINED,” reads one impression. “Bob Ross have my babies,” reads another.

Ross died in 1995 of lymphoma, late enough to establish his standing as America’s gentlest painting instructor, but too soon to witness the Internet age. Now, 20 years after his death, the soft-spoken cultural icon is engaged in a sort of dialogue with the most cynical of communities—the gamers who hang out on streaming site Twitch TV.

Twitch is an Amazon-acquired online community for people who like to watch people play video games. If it sounds strange that anyone would want to kick back and relax while somebody else plays a game, consider televised football. As it stands, Twitch gets 1 hundred million visitors every month, tens of thousands of whom are watching Bob Ross paint right now.

(“I bet you’re thinking, ‘what is this rascal doing making a mess of the canvas there?’” Ross asks rhetorically as he coats the bottom quadrant of the canvas with Van Dyke Brown.

A steady stream of Twitch comments march in from the future: “HE KNOWS.”)

Twitch is welcoming the launch of Twitch Creative, the platform’s new channel for makers, with an eight-and-a-half-day marathon of The Joy of Painting, Ross’s public broadcasting show that aired between 1984 and 1994. The marathon has become surprisingly popular, with over a million total viewers and 40,000 watching live at the time of this writing.

Viewers chat along with Ross’s mild-mannered “you can do it” narrative, peppering in their own gamer speech while turning Ross’s colloquialisms into memes. “Let’s add some yellow ochre,” Ross intones, while the chat lights up with cries of “YELLOW OGRE.” When Ross finishes a painting, viewers type “GG,” which stands for “good game,” a typical sign-off for Twitch streamers who have concluded video gaming sequence.

You could make the argument that the Twitch chat stream, complete with its expletives and 9/11 trolling, pollutes the natural innocence of Ross’s happy little trees. On the contrary, I can’t stop watching the stream because of this unintentionally revealing multi-generational dialogue. “is bob reading chat?” one Twitch comment reads, and it’s hard to tell if it’s a troll or a truly hopeful sentiment from someone born after Ross’s time. “my screen can’t handle these graphics,” another quips, and jokes like this one add a new dimension of entertainment to Ross’s.

Even in Ross’s own time, viewers commented on the artist’s relentless positivity. To quote the artist from season five of The Joy of Painting, Ross said: "I got a letter from somebody here a while back, and they said, 'Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy.' That's for sure. That's why I paint. It's because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news."

Twitch itself can be a very negative place, where a trending and potentially dangerous prank called “swatting” has commenters deploying actual SWAT teams to the homes of streaming gamers. On the milder end, there are insults, slurs, and threats. The Bob Ross channel, which consists entirely of reruns, is not only immune to hurt feelings, but injects a relentless force of positivity into one of the Internet’s most hardened and cynical communities.

I can’t imagine why any living painter would want to put their work on Twitch Creative. I know I don’t paint better while hundreds of people are screaming “YOU RUINED IT” at me. But in the meantime before the launch, there’s only the joy of painting. And it’s beautiful.




The Ross original-art market is still pretty tightly controlled by Bob Ross, Inc., with chances remaining slim-to-none in scoring a suitably cerulean specimen (keeping in mind that the rare full-size paintings available for purchase command prices hovering about the $100K mark) to hang beside that Mediterranean-idyll Dufy in the rumpus room overlooking the piranha-filled reflecting pool in the sunken-garden pleasaunce behind your rustic get-away Shaque d'Amour. 
If only there was a way you could, say, learn to paint one yourself . . .