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Shoutbacks--Thanks for the shouts this week from:
Tim at Travelers Diagram, whose lists of books spotted on New York subways I always enjoy, along with the other diverse and entertaining finds on his weblog, such as this story about war criminal Henry Kissinger reading about his own outrageously advanced pot belly in the New York Post. Congratulations on your wedding, Tim!
paul at dataisnature, who talked about my molecule-cum-product-box installations (been thinking about doing more of them). I look forward to perusing his archives and looking at more pieces like this one, speaking of fanciful molecular forms.
Rob Myers for his post on Swarm (but there's no scanning or retouching in that work--just printing and overprinting, and cutting with an X-acto). In this interview he talks about his admiration for the conceptualist outfit Art & Language and his fondness for remixing others' work. Yet the pieces in his San Jose series and the Smileys series are quite joyful and individualistic, not just an illustration of theory--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they're their own semiotic theory in a tangible, pleasurable form. Examples from "San Jose" are below--he thinks it's his "weakest work" because it's not directly influenced by anyone else, but maybe he's just being modest or ironic. I would describe these as biomorphic tags done corporate logo style, and would like to see them in a show with Ryan McGinness and Anton Vidokle, who have also done hard-edged logo-like imagery. They're really nice:
Posting (also email) has been crimped this weekend due to a surprise outage by Comcast Cable Co. They made a long-planned switch to a new, company-owned server and told everyone about it but their customers. 48 hours with no service and they can't send an email? I was so angry I decided to switch to another cable co-- oh, right, there is no other cable company. DSL is also not available on my block, due, I'm assuming, to the rotting phone lines Verizon has been planning to fix for about 10 years. A repairman told me a few months back that in last corporate reshuffle, a several-million-dollar figure allotted for infrastructure repairs, which the company elected to postpone, exactly equaled the executive bonuses that changed hands at the closing--and hey, I believe it!
I expect a big shitstorm of self-congratulatory hype from Comcast once they get their new internet pipes in place. The fact is their content is the worst, lowest common denominator cheese. Whenever I check my webmail, their front page always has the latest celebrity news, pictures of two-headed kittens, and verbatim press releases from the White House saying how well things are going in Iraq.