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Paula Scher's "Diagram of a Blog" that appeared as a New York Times editorial cartoon is old-media humor at its unfunniest. It reminded me of a cartoon that ran in the 1910s in response to the first Armory Show. Captioned "The Original Cubist" it depicted an elderly woman sewing a large patchwork quilt. A pundit of the day noted in response to the drawing that "you can't spoof what you don't understand."* At the risk of being more boring explaining what Scher doesn't understand, does she mean "comments to a blog"? They don't go like that if someone makes a half assed effort to moderate. Does she mean the "blogosphere"? The idea that everyone agrees to disagree eventually and nothing gets accomplished in the blog world (as opposed to the newspaper "letter to the editor world") is just so much Cubism. Ask, for example, Senator Jim Webb.
*Per Calvin Tomkins, The World of Marcel Duchamp, 1966.
Getty Images. At the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Jerome Basquiat (nephew of the '80s painter) explains his work, a grid of solarized lily pads referencing Claude Monet, to a collector, foreground, while the artist's dealer looks on. Behind them, another work depicts raindrops hitting the surface of a pond. (photo via Nasty Nets)
"Helipad" [mp3 removed]
Loud, fast rudimentary techno stomper.
I had a hard time titling this. Originally I wanted to call it "Planck Worm," because I'm re-reading Greg Egan's book Schild's Ladder and liked the name of the weapon designed to cripple the planet-swallowing "novo-vacuum." (I'm making the book sound more space opera than it is.) But it's Egan's juice and I didn't feel like appropriating it. Then I looked up pad in the urban dictionary because I was thinking of some version of "crash pad vs launch pad" and discovered that helicopter pad had a sexual connotation. That cinched it.