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Last night vertexList gallery hosted a semi-private screening of the documentary film 8-Bit, directed by the gallery's proprietor Marcin Ramocki (who is also an artist) and produced by Justin Strawhand, who did the cinematography. The subject is art and the video game, but several distinct cultures and subcultures overlap: the big three being conceptual art, gamers, and electronic music but within that the demoscene, chiptunes, gameboy music, and miscellaneous odd hacks. It's a PBS-quality collection of talking head interviews (including yours truly wearing a suit jacket and doing his best critic impersonation), interspersed with concert footage, video clips, and a kaleidoscope of stills that underscore and comment on things being said in the interviews.
Highlights include the stage appearances of Tree Wave and Bodenstandig 2000 at Jeffrey Deitch last spring, Cory Arcangel discoursing on Nintendo cracking and the different types of synthesizer sounds in '80s computers, Alex Galloway's explanation of his Nam Jun Paik-like physical hacks bringing out the inherent flaws and coding errors in console games, footage from Eddo Stern's trippy, deconstructed Vietnam war game landscapes, Joe McKay on Audio Pong and the attempted or presumed realism of early hockey games, and it must be said, my withering putdown of gameboy music followed by Nullsleep telling me to fuck off from the stage at Deitch. A movie with an eternally adolescent pursuit at its core just wouldn't be complete without a good food fight.
Steve Gilliard's wrapup on the transit strike is below. Most New Yorkers supported the strike (at least for the few days it lasted). We're talking about skilled workers who get us around the city safely--it's not the typical McJob where employers pay low wages and constantly flip staff. And Mayor Bloomberg really screwed up by calling the transit workers "thugs." But then we already knew he was an *sshole, for bringing the Republican "thugs" to NY and encouraging mass arrests of innocents.
Roger Toussaint not only got a great deal for his members, but he faced down the city's media without so much as breaking a sweat. The Daily News and Post so miscovered the strike as to be rendered useless to the majority of New Yorkers. They kept looking for a groundswell of anger, when instead, there was a ground swell of support for the union among their public service and private industry peers. Did they think Con Ed and Verizon workers were going to turn on their public sector union brothers and sisters?
It was an amazing miscalculation which walked Bloomberg into a fatal mistake. Calling the union members thugs was an amazing error of judgment, one, the well-connected mayor should have avoided.
What many people, including Jen, didn't understand, was the provenance of that word in black New York culture. First, in the tabs, it's only used to describe two groups of people, mafia goons and black and latino criminals. But that isn't why it blew up on Bloomberg.
It harks back to the the Central Park Jogger case where five teenagers were framed for the rape of a Wall Street banker. Donald Trump took out a full-page ad ranting about how these "thugs" needed to be punished.
When it turned out that all five had been framed, despite the open disbelief of the tabs. Michael Daly, the News lead columnist, and a Yalie, went so far as to try to link the innocent boys, all of whom had unjustly served seven years in prison, to the crime despite DNA evidence to the contrary.
Then, Bloomberg violated the other key rule of New York life. You do not attack working people as criminals. If they work every day, you don't slander them like that.
But once those words flew from his mouth, it was the final card Toussaint needed in outplaying the MTA. Because that solidified minority support for his union. One poll showed 61 percent of black New Yorkers and 44 percent of Latinos supported the strike, along with 38 percent of whites.
Because that threw race on the table in a way Bloomberg didn't expect. But sure found out about when City Hall was deluged with calls from his black supporters.
What Bloomberg and many white New Yorkers forget is that the heart of the city's revival is not the Eurotrash and hipsters of Billyburg, but the working class and middle class union workers of the city's minorities. It is the TWU members and Con Ed and Verizon workers who not only keep this city running, but who also invest in the city's neighborhoods, demand better schools and send their kids to the city's colleges. They make New York work, where so many other cities failed. Unlike Washington DC, they didn't flee to the suburbs, leaving behind only the poor. Even the city's housing projects have large numbers of working people.
So to have the mayor insult the people who helped return him to office, reeked both of arrogance and racial insensitivity on a grand scale.
The fact was that the TWU and specifically, Roger Toussaint, had some pretty large reservoirs of good will going into this. The union had repeatedly asked for safety training, stood with riders on fair increases and opposed the land giveaway for stadiums. Which may not have mattered to some footsore white progressives, who demanded the "overpaid workers" be fired, but it mattered to many other New Yorkers.
But many people, like the racists at the Manhattan Institute, need to consider something: they are no longer relevant. They might have had a hearing in Giuliani's bitterly divided New York, but no future mayor can afford to take them seriously. Why? Because the majority of New Yorkers will not tolerate it.
Steven Malanga proved himself to be an idiot without recompense. Fire the workers? And replace these highly skilled and technically adept workers with whom? What he wanted to say was punish the colored for getting out of line, but political reality has changed. Minorities are the majority in New York, and his advice was suicidal.
The MTA caved on every issue, and offset the fines, something the mayor and governor swore would not happen, with pension payments, because they didn't have the public support and they knew it. Who knew what would happen in Albany with a longer strike? Would the Assembly start an investigation? Who knew? But the MTA calcuated on an angry public and they got one, but angry at them, not the union.
Bloomberg and Pataki not only lost, but look small and petty in the process.
"Stab Array" [mp3 removed]. The idea here was to write two phrases, assign a drum loop to each, "array" the phrases in checkerboard fashion on the piano roll with up to four sample instruments per phrase (three synth "stabs" plus bass) in various combinations, then edit back for maximum timbral variety and surprise--that is, make a song as opposed to a mere minimalist exercise. The result is a sort of "speed jazz" drum and bass that some algorithm could have spit out, but I did the choosing (and phrase writing) myself. Not all that different from what I normally do, just more deliberately arithmetical.
Why did I reBlog...I mean draw this? Just a random party pic from the interweb. I admired the pose because the girl is primping (her hand is fluffing her hair) while she is taking a photo of someone else. And while some of my fellow meatheads of the type that made Jennifer Connelly a household name might be inclined to gawk at her figure, to me the way she has the camera strap wound around her hand is the dead sexiest thing about the pose. Yeah, men are weird, but so are women. Not her, though, she's great.
"Heavy Heavy Hippos" [mp3 removed]. Hey, I had to call it something. Sort of a lite dubby rock and roll tech house thing.
Update: Something I plan to change on this: there's a dropout at the halfway point where the remaining kit is panned too far to one side--sounds too much like you're losing a channel. Update 2: Fixed now.
May your holidays be filled with joy and tensegrity. (Six "basic smileys" were lifted from some dumb google ad on Josh Marshall's site and the rest is MSPaint manipulation to make this festive molecular tree.)
Hope everyone is well, thanks for checking in on Christmas day. Posts will keep coming, or that's the plan, anyway. Signed, Santa.
The deep-rooted accident of the duplicate [Captain] Kirk turns a questioning spotlight on the "essence" of the transporter, which is the absolutist phantasmagoria of total knowledge of a person captured in a digital pattern or "quantum physics" snapshot of [his or her] subatomic particles. ["Evil Kirk's"] appearance brings into relief a deep-seated anxiety about the philosophy of cloning and the "too perfect" operational system of quantum information science and the coming digital-quantum teleporter. Techno-culture's "vision" or fanciful goal of the transporter is the contemporary project of a wholly self-contained scientific system and hyperbolic construction of a fully self-referential human subject without real others. It is the dream of a human being understandable entirely through her formation, identical to herself, and leading a completely knowable existence. "The Enemy Within," as literature, questions this totalizing edifice through the tropes of the accident and the double.More from Alan N. Shapiro on the overt and covert agendas of Star Trek and the "Star Trek industry," this time from his excellent book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance. It's a wised-up, culture-crit antidote to all those Physics of Star Trek type books. An earlier post on Shapiro is here. I hadn't really considered it before: Richard Matheson, writer of I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, and other scary fables of modernity is asked to pen a Star Trek episode, early, early in the series. His dark, sardonic mind begins sifting through the relatively new TV show's available story hooks. "Aha, the transporter," he thinks, going right for the hot button anxiety viewers can't help but feel about this miraculous device, which disassembles the body and forces users to put their trust in some unknown techy in their most ultimately vulnerable, unwhole state. All this assumes Matheson didn't just take over someone else's script treatment, but in any case, what emerges is the Jekyll and Hyde tale of Captain Kirk split into "Evil Kirk and Weak Kirk," each unable to function without being reintegrated with the other. Citing Paul Virilio, Shapiro frames the ingenious tale in terms of what it reveals about technology's "built-in accidents waiting to happen."
"Drat Fink Was Here" [mp3 removed].
I told drat fink that in appreciation of his generous time downloading torrent files of vintage drum machines, I would name a song using the files in his honor. This piece is kind of um--spacious; it's meant to be a shrine to the sounds produced by the 1974 gem above (or something similar from that time period by the Ace Tone company--not sure exactly which unit got sampled). Photo from the Keyboard Museum.
The blog Anaba posted some photos of an "outsider artist" mural done in the employee break room of a chain grocery store in upstate NY. It's beautiful work, but I'll let Anaba tell you its location and the name of the creator. I know we all fantasize about fame and fortune allowing people to quit their day jobs, but employers aren't Medicis (at least for very long). Projects like this usually exist only in the tiniest cracks of the ownership society. So why am I blabbing? Probably the same reason Anaba is: I want you to see those human-sized vampire bats eating that wolf-lizard, and the scrofulous Lovecraftian obscenity on the right engulfing that forest of fleshy pseudopods, which could be prescient glimpses of the future of life on Earth, or a stark allegory of present day emotions. (Not mine, of course!)
My favorite Christmas movie, and the best Frank Capra movie IMHO, was on TCM last night: Meet John Doe (1941). Robert Osborne introduced it as a "delightful comedy"--what has he been smoking? Sure, it's funny, Capra earned his chops doing Mack Sennett one-reelers, and whenever the plot lags, which is never, someone is always falling over a chair or, in one notable bit, messing up a hand painted sign on a new newspaper executive's glass door. But the theme is pure dystopian science fiction: What if the Second Coming of Jesus were a plot engineered by Hitler?
Jesus is Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a down and out minor league baseball player who becomes a love-thy-neighbor speechifying "John Doe" to millions of Americans without hope. Hitler is D.B. Norton, who has his own personal police force (shades of Bush and Blackwater) and owns as much major media as Rupert Murdoch. Norton secretly underwrites the "John Doe Clubs" that spring up around the country in the wake of a popular radio speech by Willoughby (shades of Cindy Sheehan's grassroots appeal), and although the clubs are supposed to be apolitical and anti-politician, the media tycoon plans to have the bought-and-paid-for baseball bum announce the "D.B. Norton for President" campaign at a national "John Doe Convention" (shades of Promise Keepers, Million Man March, etc.).
Willoughby is a media creation, the brainchild of a cynical reporter played by Barbara Stanwyck, who has Rovian instincts for tapping aggrieved populism, while Norton supplies the dirty tricks. According to an interesting Capra bio I read, Willoughby is a stand-in for the director, who became enormously popular after the success of the populist films Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington but as a well paid Hollywood functionary was always uncomfortable with people's expectations that he would "stand up to the system" or be a general champion for socialist causes, particularly as Hollywood's politics started to shift rightward after the Depression. The bio points out that Capra was slightly fixated on suicide. As in It's a Wonderful Life, Meet John Doe's plot hinges on a character about to jump from a high place.
Like the better-known and loved Jimmy Stewart movie, Doe is dark, it's deep, and it's great.
"Crickets" [mp3 removed].
No. 10 in the suite "10 Songs for Analog Drum Machine and Sidstation."
"Curtains for You" [mp3 removed].
Revised and slightly expanded version of a piece previously posted. I essentially made all the changes I said I was going to make: the Farfisa organ now has wah-wah pedal (after the break), the melody has more variations and syncopations than the original placeholder riff, and delay pedal and percussion effects have been added. I'm sure I could keep thinking of little refinements, but it's past the skeletal phase at least.
Juan Downey and Fred Pitts, Against Shadows, 1968
Jude Tallichet, EMPR, 2005, on view in the Superlowrez exhibit at vertexList in Brooklyn.
"Superlowrez" is an editioned series of Jim Campbell-like, or ahem, Downey-and-Pitts-like LED boxes. The 8 invited artists had the next-to-impossible task of distinguishing themselves as unique creative entities with a pallette consisting solely of a 12 X 14 pixel matrix, 8 levels of brightness for each pixel, and 1984 frames of animation (what each lightbox's chip holds). One of the more phallo-logo-ideographically punchy works, Tallichet's EMPR, is based on Warhol's Empire State Building film. The rest tended to blur together in the viewer's mind--in fact the 8 boxes looked like a rather handsome (if derivative) solo show. Lots of Space Invader-y looking stuff, as you might gather.
The sheer insurmountability and inadvertent bubble-popping anti-pretentiousness of the project reminded me of a piece from the '80s--PM Summer's 100 Photographers (Aborted). In that work, Summer gave a polaroid SX-70 camera to a range of different photographers--artists, art directors, photojournalists, product photographers, paparazzi--and asked them to photograph a small locked wooden box with a slot in the top. The polaroid was dropped in the slot and at the end of the project, the photos were removed and exhibited in a grid with no indication of authorship. It was amusing and sad to see how everyone struggled to be "original" with such a limited set of parameters: shooting the box from the ground looking up (check--several), shooting it blurry (bunch of those), extreme closeups (you bet), all black, all white, and not very many more strategems. Sorry to cast the pall of despair on the vertexList project, but I found the sociology, and the way the boxes got fractionally more interesting through learning the anecdotes and back stories about what each one actually was, to be more compelling than the visuals themselves. And since I'm in the "experience trumps narrative" camp--that's a criticism. Now, if I'd done one it would have been kick ass. No it wouldn't.
John Zoller, Shearing Sheep In Nevada, 2005, 48" x 60", acrylic, glitter, pom poms on canvas. From the series United States: Color & Learn.
Some pros and cons on the NY transit strike can be found on the News Blog--Steve and Jen disagree. Jen says it's not about race and this is not the strike to make us think about union solidarity--people's jobs and incomes are at stake. I'm lucky because I just went on Christmas break but just want to say that it *should* be bigger than just the problems of the transit workers. When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers it pretty much broke the clout of unions in this country--gains for workers it had taken decades of folks getting clubbed on the head by company goons to obtain. The flip side could be a major, publicly supported strike that begins to stop the slide of unchecked power accruing to the owner class since the early '80s. Solidarity with the union means you stop pretending that you will eventually join the bosses and admit that you're next in line for the ax while they lead lifestyles of the rich and famous. In theory I'm on the side of the transit workers against their undeniably crooked, or crookedly inept bosses ("Oh, we just found a billion we didn't know we had!"). But ask me after several weeks of no subway. It would be nice if we could all get through this and still send a message to the oink squad.
Update: Fox News, playing in a deli near my apt where I can't avoid it, has their tag line in place: "Capitalism Held Hostage," with clips of Saint Ronnie firing the controllers, and the Mayor threatening jail. Definitely increases sympathy for the striking workers.
"Curtains for You" [mp3 removed]
Sometimes the first draft is the freshest. I don't know if that will be the case here. I can think of a half-dozen other things I can do to this piece, such as adding little syncopated breaks and wah-wah filtering to the organ riff, using sustains or fades to smooth over seams in the rhythm, possibly adding some percussion floating over the drum loops, and I plan to do all of them, but they take time, and there's always the risk that spontaneity will be lost, even in a piece where the "playing" is already all done by the computer. It's pretty catchy as it is, so I'm posting it, with the usual torrent of exculpatory verbiage.
Revised version here.
More items available for reasonably-priced consumption today and tomorrow, Dec. 17 and 18, at La Superette, the annual sale of useful items and artistic gimcracks organized by Tali Hinkis and Susan Agliata. This year the sale's at Exit Art, 475 10th Avenue at 36th Street, New York. Hours are Saturday 2pm-10pm and Sunday 1pm-6pm. Images top to bottom from the online catalog: Jill Killjoy (mini wallets), Jill Killjoy (chart t-shirts), Jonathan Rockford (holiday hand grenades), Lisa Bennett (it).
The blog Asymptote comments here and here about Astra Taylor's film on flamboyant theorist and "public intellectual" Slavoj Žižek (in quotes because we don't have those in America--only think tank bloviators who go on TV a lot).
Taylor's film makes heavy use of extreme closeups to capture the animated, restless, nervously gesticulating philosopher-as-third-base-coach engaging in his characteristic stream of logical reversals and psychoanalytic reflections on political ideology and current affairs, peppered with suggestive illustrations drawn from popular culture -- high, low, and everything in between.Haven't seen the film, it sounds interesting, but wanted to give a shout to Astra, who briefly worked at a gallery where I showed some art. I've been wondering what she's up to and now I know. As the kid said about Paul McCartney, go Astra go!!!!!!!!!!!!!
link via
A friend of mine says no way will he see Chronicles of Narnia, because he is an avowed secularist and doesn't want a heavy Christian message shoved at him by Disney. I read C.S. Lewis's books as a kid and never figured out what the Christian symbolism was supposed to be, even though I knew it was in there. But boy, was this guy right about the movie, it's Christian as hell, I mean...well, you know. (Caution, spoilers ahead.) Consider the heavy Bible allusion in this bit of soothsaying, first mentioned in the film by talking beavers:
It has been prophesied that when four human children appear in Narnia, a giant lion will return to power, and will raise a mighty army of centaurs, fauns, dryads, and hundreds of talking animals of all species, and will train them and equip them with swords, bows, and spears, lead them into an elaborate pitched battle against the White Witch and her army of trolls, dwarves, talking wolves, and chariot-pulling polar bears.This greatly resembles Old Testament scrying about the coming of the Messiah, and indeed recalls Jesus's triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Another painfully uncomfortable Biblical parallel is this bit of Narnian law, spoken aloud by several characters in the movie:
According to the rules of Deep Magic, a traitor belongs to the White Witch to execute, by stabbing him to death on the Stone Tables. However, someone else can offer himself up for execution in the traitor's stead. Yet, as is written on the sides of the Tables themselves in runes the Witch cannot read, or will stupidly misinterpret, if the substitute executee has done no wrong, he will rise from the dead several hours later!This is very much like the story of Jesus. That's exactly the way he was killed and resurrected! Anyway, hopefully you're getting the idea--the movie isn't preachy, it's just wack, and I liked it a lot. As an icy cold, dreadlocked, sword-wielding she-bitch from hell with dilated pupils and dresses with enormous padded collars, Tilda Swindon will give small children nightmares for decades to come. Seriously, she's great. When she rides up in that chariot pulled by polar bears, adults all over the theatre were saying "All right!"
I think it was degenerate gambler Bill Bennett that came up with the idea that conservative types should flash the "purple finger" on the eve of the latest "no really this is the turning point" electoral whatever in Iraq. I redid the picture in Photoshop, and it may seem cynical, but it's not one-tenth as cynical as the racially prejudiced Republicans pretending they give a shit what happens to people in that part of the world. We've spent close to a half trillion dollars that could have gone to help Katrina victims, fund decent health care, improve public schools... All for an "experiment in democracy" that Bush gave us as the reason we invaded Iraq only after weapons of mass destruction failed to turn up. It's about controlling the Middle East, you chumps.
Another great gift item from the best named band in the world, Neg-Fi. On sale this weekend at La Superette, the annual sale of useful items and artistic geegaws organized by Tali Hinkis and Susan Agliata. This year the sale's at Exit Art, Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 17 and 18. More details and pics to follow. The piece above is described as follows:
Neg-Box
$30
Neg-Fi
negfi@excite.com
"Bad connection" sound generator. Turns any sound into static and hiss!
Thanks to Artkrush for including this blog in their current profile on the art blogosphere. I'm told the magazine is being sent to its email subscribers December 14. Introductory paragraph:
The rapid rise of the blog phenomenon has dramatically influenced politics over the past few years, and now blogs are changing how the art world communicates. Interactive sites, which are devoted to contemporary art and offer news, reviews, gossip, and links, have made art openings as easy to follow as the stock market. The freedom of the blog format also allows "citizen critics" to weave social commentary and personal anecdotes with spontaneous photographs, videos, and relevant links."Citizen critics" is good. The first sentence reminds me a bit of something posted here a few years ago, except I said gloomily that I'd "watched in amazement as blogging has transformed the political world (e.g., the demise of Trent Lott), while at the same time having nil effect on the art world." Even as recently as 8 months ago, this page was complaining that art worlders don't google to see what's written about them online, or at least they pretend not to. See "Report from the Slo-o-o-o--o-ow Dimension." Of course one shouldn't pick nits on the occasion of getting some magazine coverage, but I think saying cyberspace is changing the gallery art world is still optimistic. New media art, that's another story, that's the water they swim in.
OK, kidding aside, the sale of delicio.us to Yahoo and the sale of Myspace to Rupert Murdoch both really suck. Selling delicio.us (a system for pooling intriguing links that fosters communities and subcommunities of interest) seems especially painful since that's a very tech-savvy, web-savvy group--focused in their lack of focus, or multiple foci. I know next to nothing about Joshua Schachter, the founder, but is it right that he should personally profit from the sweat and passion of hundreds of folks who thought they were part of a community, as opposed to being part of some venture capitalist's or cool hunter's wet dream? I trust he will be sending checks to all the geeks who put him in clover--yeah, right. Yes, I know bandwidth and storage cost money and no one should be forced to be a benefactor, but seriously--that's a group effort. Maybe Schachter's going to give all the money to Katrina victims. If there's any altruism involved with the sale, please let me know.
With the recent news of Rupert Murdoch's purchase of Myspace and Yahoo's acquisition of del.icio.us (no kidding) still wafting noisomely through the air, I feel I should come clean about some recent corporate machinations regarding my own site. A friend on the "inside" recently sent me an interesting email:
Yes, we're looking at Moody's blog, too, but the numbers aren't up there where I'd like. The guy keeps changing the subject, and thwarts every reasonable attempt at branding, or self-branding. One day he's an artist, the next he's posting his damn plinky techno "compositions." He'll create a perfectly good, catchy animation and then put up some stupid thing from a kid's web page. Then he rails about politics and the system. God knows we'd like to shut him up by buying him, the way we're going to put a cork in those little bastards at Myspace and del.icio.us, but it has to make economic sense. This Moody weirdo just doesn't command a big enough slice of the wild and crazy youth demographic. So fuck him.Sorry for all the bad language, but that's how they talk in big media and advertising corporations! It's nice to know they're thinking about me, I guess. (OK, except for the part about Murdoch and Yahoo, this is all BS. It's how I process disappointing news.)
An interactive computer piece by Marcin Ramocki, still in development, currently on view at artMovingProjects in Brooklyn. A gallery visitor is typing a straight line of text across the top of the screen. As he types the letters fall slowly to the bottom, just like snow, fall leaves, or advancing Space Invaders. When he reaches the right hand side, a carriage return sound cha-chings and he can type no more till all letters have settled to the bottom. After many more left-to-right sweeps the letters pile up, but even after days of straight typing, the pile will never fill more than half the screen because the alphabet "soil" is slowly decaying--again, like leaves on a forest floor. Much hand coding lies behind this deceptively low-tech-looking piece, which melds the naturalism of Thoreau and the futility of Beckett in a medium somewhere between concrete poetry and Intellivision.
Tomorrow, December 11, is the opening of
, aka the O Show ("an homage to all that is round, curvy, and looped"), a group exhibit I'm in. It's at SICA, on the Jersey shore, and is curated by the New York curatorial combine MatCh-Art. A web page about the show, with images of the artists' work, is here, and the press release, in .PDF form, is here. The work I'm showing is the DVD of this animated GIF (still is second from top above). Other artists include Lisa Beck, Louis Cameron, Moriah Carlson, Orly Cogan, Mark Dagley, Joel Edwards, Rob Grunder, Francis Holstrom, Sharon Horvath, Jim Houser, Jasper Johns, Chris Kasper, Laura Ledbetter, Jim Lee (top image, above), Monique Luchetti, Noah Lyon, Andrew Masullo, Rob Matthews, Derick Melander, Matthew Northridge, John Phillips, James Rosenthal (third from top, above), Savako, Randall Sellers, Mark Shetabi, Jordan Tinker, John Torreano, Alice Wu (fourth from top, above), B. Wurtz, and Nami Yamamoto. Unfortunately I'm w*rking and will miss the opening, but hopefully will make the reception at Ramopo College, the next venue the show's traveling to.
Sometime in the '80s it became the mantra that capitalism wasn't the evil thing hippies said it was, that it was the best bad system we had, and so on. I never really bought the program, though. While to some extent it mediates supply and demand, greed and altruism, too much of it is still predicated on waste, and a bogus sense of competition.
Take science fiction books, just as an example. (Or CDs, clothes, art sold in galleries...) Every year there is a crop of "new, hot" titles. Publicists tout the authors as geniuses, young turks who rock our world like it's never been rocked. Yet a book has one shot at prime rack space. If it doesn't sell, it's yanked and becomes landfill, and the hot author joins the thousands of has-beens who had their moment and failed. But what if the book had a crappy cover? What if an idea that didn't resonate this year rang like a gong the next? Too bad, the system must have winners and losers.
Two authors I'm interested in, Doris Piserchia and A. A. Attanasio, both had multi-book contracts with major houses. Piserchia never really rose above the B list of genre writers, her quirky brilliance notwithstanding, but Attanasio was hailed by the LA Times in the '80s as a "towering talent" and he got the full panoply of hype for his ambitious first book, Radix. (Which I am re-reading with rubber-jawed amazement. What a writer, what language, what a sustained high pitch of inventiveness.)
Try finding either on bookstore shelves now. They've been "dropped," the way artists get dropped from galleries and musicians from labels. The shelves are full of newer, presumably more towering talents, and to find the parapets of a few years ago you have to wade into, if not actual landfills, the moldy scrap heap of used booksellers.
You could say, "Ah, that's the way of the world," or as a Republican would say, "Life's tough." I say our way of doing things is suspect. The internet is the first thing that's given me hope that eventually all these novelty-obsessed distributors and gatekeepers will themselves soon be out of jobs, and that independent systems will emerge (such as small, print-on-demand publishers) that allow all titles to be continuously "in print" and all good authors to be found, vetted, and nurtured by their true audiences.
A higher-res version of this GIF is here.
And Thor Johnson takes the molecular blossoming further into hyperspace here.
I'm thinking this piece is in the endgame phase but who knows, I could get mad and attack it again. My plan was to keep filling up the page but I'm kind of liking this double inverted tornado thing. Just saw the movie Twister again (one of my favorites) and I really like the shots at the end where they finally get data from Dorothy going up the F-5 funnel.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
go Paul go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, November 12, 2005A Kid's Review
I loved Paul Mccartney since 2004.
I love this cd my forite songs are: Too much rain, How kind of you, English tea and Jenny Wren
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Chris Ashley, Untitled, 2005, HTML, 420 x 360 pixels
Another nice one from Ashley, whose abstract html paintings make browsers all over the world burn with a hard, gem-like flame.
Interview with Sam Hamm, who wrote the screenplay for Homecoming, Joe Dante's Showtime antiwar zombie movie. Hamm was a year ahead of me at the University of Virginia, making waves even then as a student film critic and festival organizer. His program of Sam Fuller and Don Siegel films, called Shit Fest, had a flyer that got censored by the University--they made him black in the capital "I" so it read SHOT FEST. He got famous with the script for the Tim Burton Batman, and I'm a fan of his Monkeybone (directed by Burton protege Henry Selick), an amusing sleeper* film that happened to be a big critical and box office flop. I don't have Showtime so missed Homecoming, with its dead Iraq war vets rising from the grave to vote against the Republicans, but it's great to hear films like that can get made and distributed in this age of pro-authoritarian media. I like this comment of Hamm's from the interview:
The moment you attempt to address right-wing punditry, you are in a realm beyond parody. How do you top the vaudeville duo of Falwell & Robertson, announcing that 9/11 was God’s retribution for rampant homosexuality? How do you top that necrotic turd Bill O’Reilly, offering Coit Tower in San Francisco to Al Qaeda? A couple of decades ago you would’ve paid fifty cents to see these circus freaks in a tent, with the bearded lady and the dog-faced boy and the India rubber man. Now they’re part of our national political discourse.*heh heh--it's about a cartoonist plagued with sleep disorders.
This hype for the Aeon Flux movie is so full of shit:
"Aeon Flux is set 400 years in the future, in a supposedly utopian society, where a secret rebellion is brewing. In the coming war between the totalitarian government, who impose order with ruthless efficiency, and those who oppose it with ruthless abandon, the one person who may prove that individuals still matter is Aeon Flux. Flux (Charlize Theron) is the top operative in the underground "Monican" rebellion and when her assignment is to assassinate a leading government official she begins to realize that there is more to uncover than even she expected."All Hollywood adaptations now are about normalizing the weird. Find me some sort of moral in the cartoon series on which this movie is based. "Supposedly utopian?" Dystopian from the get-go. Ruthless efficiency vs ruthless abandon? The Breens and Monicans never fell into such neat categories. The amoral Aeon proved that individuals still matter by regularly playing tongue hockey with Trevor, the dictator. Such a bunch of crap comes out of Tinseltown. I don't want to see this one. I did just order the refurbished cartoon on DVD and am curious to see what was restored. Like, will the pool of blood Aeon kept waking up in in "Chronophasia" be returned to the original red color? (MTV freaked and tinted it brown.)
(Illustration from Mike Russell's "Not So Secret History of Aeon Flux"--thanks to the Eyebeam reBlog for spotting it.)
I have been wanting to eat at wd~50 for a while now, since the chef is a friend of friends and I've been hearing so much about the place. This past Thursday, as a sort of belated birthday present to myself, I went, and wow. The chef, Wylie Dufresne, is celebrated for adventurous and artistic cuisine: I missed his appearance on Iron Chef America but as a sometime watcher of the show I know the culinary experts who get invited don't screw around.
His restaurant, at 50 Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, is spacious and comfortable. I went with a party of six and we did the ten-course tasting menu. The staff brings a succession of very small, elegant dishes to the table, and Wylie's father Dewey drops by to discourse knowledgeably on the different wines you're drinking. The experience is folksy and unpretentious even though the food and drink is so ultra-refined it could be caricatured, say, in a Cohn brothers movie. (For some reason I'm thinking of Maude Lebowsky.)
Just a few examples from the tasting. The first dish out is a fig in a perfect cube shape with a slice of anchovy balancing on top. Awesome to look at and a mind-bending combo of flavors. More geometry came in the form of a smooth cylinder of foie gras (yeah I know, tortured ducks--I don't feel good about it), which breaks open to reveal a liquid center with some kind of oozy beet concoction. The taste resided somewhere between Satori and Nirvana. A bowl of fishy consomme with a hint of chocolate (!) came with a tiny squeeze bottle, complete with orange cap like Elmer's. You squeeze thin ropes of yogurt, thickened with some kind of space age enzymes into the broth. A little weird, and the fish and cocoa combo I found discordant, but a lot of great art is offputting. Many of the dishes come on beds of shavings the waiter described as "soil," as in "pea soil" or "chocolate soil," and the small dabs and smears of sauces on the plates jazz up the views and tastes.
Not a place for starving artists, but every artist should save up some money for a once in a lifetime trip. Simply amazing on every level.
I am in a two-person show in Dallas next month at and/or gallery, along with the artist Saskia Jorda. The gallery'll be showing some of my animated gifs, the Guitar Solo vid, a molecule-tagged product box or two, the nine-drawing "wormy abstraction" series, and additionally, I'm working on a new piece in the "layered" style (possibly two, depending on how long they take). I'll be documenting the latter work on the blog as I make it. Above are a couple of early stages.
