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From the blog vault: "Show Us Your Gnomes."
"Blip Festival Cell Phone Call" [690 KB .mp3] (about 30 seconds)
Artist and artMovingProjects gallerist Aron Namenwirth called me on his cell phone while he was attending the recent Blip Festival of 8-bit music in NY; I was w*rking and missed the call, but I kept his phone message and made it into an .mp3. This is what the recorder picked up--it conveys a little of what you missed if you didn't catch the Festival.
Sitepal TM avatars (or rather "personal virtual characters"). The idea is that reading a blog is too tiring and we need a little cartoon character that looks sort of like the blogger to read the text to us in a synthetic voice. The reviews:
72 neutral-to-favorable del.icio.us links (with one or two hints of mild sarcasm)
vs
1 solid "creepy" from Guthrie Lonergan
Elsewhere Lonergan weighs in on the fake 3-D version of the Sitepal avatar: "wait till she talks twice and then she watches your cursor...creepsville." It's a fact--her eyes look like frozen horror movie eyes swiveling around inside a fright mask.
DJ Spooky said of the Net, back when it had a mystique: "the Net mirrors the street; as above, so below." This is still true, if by street we mean "place of rampant herd-like conformity." Case in point: 72 people accepting these goofy-ass personal avatars at face value, no pun intended, vs one person willing to suggest that the gimmick is flat-out macabre. (And that therefore, by implication, the creators should go back to the drawing board because they FAILED.)
From "Maya in the Thunderdome," by Marcello A. Canuto, about the inaccuracies in Mad Mel's Mayan movie (Salon, prob. subscription only):
In an action scene that springs entirely from Gibson's imagination, our [Mayan peasant] hero is able to escape the city. [...]. He flees through the jungle, and with only two pursuers remaining, he bursts out of the forest onto a beach. There, where the land ends and the water begins, both he and his tormentors witness Spanish galleons and rowboats ferrying Spaniards and Christianity to the lands of the Maya. His pursuers, as if in a trance, walk weakly toward the arriving Spaniards. Their pursuit is now irrelevant, as their world is about to end.
Again, the historical facts tell a different and more compelling story. Several accounts exist of Spanish expeditions in the early 1500s, sailing from Cuba and making stops along the Yucatan coast for provisions. Invariably these encounters ended badly for the Spaniards. So fierce was the Maya defense of their lands that Cortes avoided much of this coast, choosing to land farther west along what is known today as the coast of Veracruz. The Maya, at the time of the conquest, were intractable and fiercely autonomous. Most villages resisted the Spaniards. In fact, the Spanish conquest of the Maya was a long protracted campaign that some claim goes on to this very day.
In Apocalypto, the arrival of the Spanish signals "a new beginning." Remarkably, the event is portrayed as tranquil, as if the Spaniards are the adults who have finally come to rescue the "littleuns" stranded on the island of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. In reality, the arrival was anything but serene.
Within decades of the first contact with the Spaniards, the Maya would die in the hundreds of thousands as European diseases, colonial exploitation and cruelty took root. In 1552, in the name of Christian piety, Fray Diego de Landa ordered that hundreds of Maya codices, carrying sacred knowledge accumulated over centuries, be burned as works of the devil. If there were ever an apocalypse in the history of the Maya -- and herein lies the ultimate demoralizing irony of the movie -- it would be because of European contact. But in the movie, after two hours of excess, hyperbole and hysteria, the Spaniards represent the arrival of sanity to the Maya world. The tacit paternalism is devastating.
After many centuries of misguided and simplistic views of the Maya, recent scholarship has shown the complexity and historical depth of their civilization. In Maya society, as in all civilizations, violence, surfeit and disparity were balanced by accomplishment, restraint and illumination. Gibson's feverish vision of a childish Maya society sacrificing itself to extinction is more than inaccurate, it works against the progress of decades of diligent scholarship to restore to present-day Maya people a heritage of which they are proud, and from which we have much to learn. I can only hope that audiences seeing this movie will be motivated to learn about the Maya -- present and past -- rather than be sated by Gibson's sacrificial offering at the altar of entertainment.