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"The demon has materialized over Tokyo Bay!"
"Use the gamma beam--now!"
"It's not stopping--it seems to be eating the gamma radiation."
"We'll have to lure it back into the wormhole, using the gamma cannon as a decoy--move the ship into position, and on my signal..."
Great post from collision detection, re-re-blogged from Eyebeam:
Apparently Glad has scored a bit hit with its new ForceFlex garbage bags -- which can stretch to seemingly impossible dimensions, and thus contain the ever-greater volumes of nonrecyclable carcinogens the average American family craps out every day. ("Hey honey, Johnny doesn't like his Jungle Gym anymore!" "No problem, sweetie -- we'll just shove it inside a single ForceFlex garbage bag and send it off to the dump so Johnny's grandchildren can drink the entire goddamn thing 80 years from now when it leaches into the water table.")
Regarding the '90s pieces I just posted, Paul asks if x-eleven, the old school Dallas techno outfit that recently put its entire catalog up on the Net, got me inspired to go through my older work. The answer is not directly, I usually put up older things when I stumble across them looking for something else and they jibe with whatever I'm thinking about now, or possibly because they have nothing to do with that. I consider any painted pieces to be hopelessly retrograde and superseded and if I post them it's because I'm, well, let's just say proud of them for the time I made them.
A show recently opened in Brooklyn called "Decipher: Hand Painted Digital" that my work was considered for and...I don't know if rejected is the right word because the curator said all the artists had to live or have studios in Brooklyn. Oy. He added that subheading "hand painted digital" after the time of our discussions and I gotta say it's a bit unfair to the artists in the show who abandoned the security blanket of paint to paint in a new medium. Many of the included painters do use the computer in one or more steps of their work--to generate imagery, photo-process, possibly check out color combinations, I don't know--but there's nothing particularly "cyber" on the face of it. At its worst, "hand painted digital" suggests a painter trying to stay current or "hep" by painting digital, or digital-looking imagery, in his or her old style.
Back to x-eleven: I consider it to be J. S. Bach, not a period piece, though some of the technology and much of the motivation (make cool music for a rave, expand minds, get out of Arlington, TX) no longer exists per se. I'm just amazed by how complex and intense it is, and I suppose I mentally subtract out anything cheesy or dated. I do that with a lot of prog rock as well.
I think was done in '95--it's a transition between my painted and computer pieces.
A friend says he can't believe I paid money to see Assault on Precinct 13 (discussed in an earlier post). I told him what I really wanted to do was talk about the John Carpenter version, from 1976. I had actually written a "preReview" of the Ethan Hawke remake, but felt it was lame not to actually see it if I was going to bitch so much. So I sucked it up and paid. Anyway, my compare-and-contrast has been rewritten somewhat, beefing up the Carpenter tribute.