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MSPaintbrush vs. MSPaint: A Refresher
Some kid out there on the internet mentioned my artwork and told his readers that I "apparently use MSPaint." In context, the "apparently" reads like a slightly disdainful qualifier, as in, "I can't see it myself, and in any case I don't think it's a particularly great use of MSPaint, but that's what the guy says--I'm just telling you." Of course I don't share the ambivalent feelings but do think it's time to trot out an earlier post where I explained the difference between MSPaintbrush (which rules) and MSPaint (which I use occasionally even though it's inferior).
Regarding the orange things going up in Central Park: The collective vanity of "Christo and Jeanne-Claude" is bottomless. Perhaps their only value as artists is exposing and exploiting weaknesses in "the system" that allows projects such as theirs to happen. It would be nice to think they were ironic, and knew the physical art was just fodder for a Hans Haacke-like provocation. No such luck, though.
Bug7, MSPaintbrush
Surge Drawing (Black Stripes), MSPaintbrush
New York Times Ad Model (2002), MSPaintbrush drawing
Too Much Failure Around Here
Inspired by Gary Wicker's tribute to his "failed" old school techno group x-eleven, Paul Slocum of Tree Wave pulled out his tapes of techno music he made in the '90s and posted some tracks here. The following excerpt from "v tide" is one of my favorite bits from the page: [mp3 removed]. Slocum thinks it's "standard minimal house" but not everyone can make a good track. I give it an "A" for the vocal physics (minced Diana Ross) and the organ stab that kind of drops out in the middle like a sampler memory error even though it probably isn't. This is pretty sublime music, and people need to stop talking about stuff being failed. Slightly off topic, Chris Ashley recently shrank a perfectly good, Stephen Westfall-ish HTML drawing with non-contiguous linear elements because he said it was failed and that's just ridiculous. Below: one of Ashley's HTML compositions installed in a virtual gallery.
The odious Quiz Show ran on Turner Classic Movies last night. (More on why it's odious below.) During a crucial scene a Congressional investigator played by Rob Morrow (wha' happened to him?) interviews Martin Scorsese as the slimy CEO of Geritol. Normally TCM doesn't bleep dialogue but at the scene's climax the actors' voices started cutting out! "Are you saying that [silence] did [silence]?" "Yes [silence] and then NBC [silence]" is how I remember it. Forgive the paranoia but the movie is about how a little-guy prosecutor went up against Big TV and Big Corporate America in the '50s and lost big. The truth supposedly didn't finally come out till '94 when the brave Robert Redford exposed it--is someone sweeping something back under the rug?
The movie is odious because it's Richard Goodwin's cheap revenge. Goodwin is the prosecutor Morrow plays; he also co-produced the film. In real life he had no evidence that NBC bigwigs paid off a quiz show contestant not to blab that the show was rigged. He couldn't legally tie the top brass to the corruption, so 40 years later he has hugely influential movie star and hack director Redford invent a scene where NBC's president asks the contestant to lie (Redford also significantly enlarged Goodwin's role in the investigation, apparently). The movie exudes smug righteousness but of course it's just one arm of the mediatainment monopoly pretending to police the others. "Look at us, we used to be a cesspool but now we're not!"
The direction and high production values suck you in and keep you watching; too bad Redford doesn't trust the audience to interpret what's going on. He packs the mise en scene with reaction shots of Morrow's boyishly handsome face looking skeptical, disappointed, mad--closeup after closeup as the story unfolds. Ron Howard does this too in his movies, and it's just infantile. I know it's the TV influence, but yuck. Also, speaking of Scorsese, The Aviator features a "sitting around the dinner table with pretentious, eccentric old-money Connecticut WASPs" scene almost identical to the one in this movie.