My Big Fat Opinion

Blackie Ocean Has Moved

2009-04-22T00:00:00.003-04:00

Blackie Ocean has moved her opinions to a new blogger account. Please update your feed or bookmarks. Thank you!

If Joel-Peter Witkin Was a Nursery Rhyme

2009-03-30T22:26:00.010-04:00

Joel-Peter Witkin
Was standing on a curb
A girlie's head bounced up to him
Her fault he is a perv

Joel-Peter Witkin
Likes to stage tableaux
Scratchy prints of body parts
Dwarves and scenes by Giotto

Joel-Peter Witkin
Went peeping down a lane
And bought a horse to crucify
Convinced he is humane

Joel-Peter Witkin
Has a lot to say
Hermaphrodites and Jesus
The studio of Courbet

Joel-Peter Witkin
Is he just a naughty boy
Who likes a dirty picture
And has a camera for a toy?

More about Joel-Peter Witkin:
On ArtNet
Wikipedia Entry
Edelman Gallery

A Beautiful, Claustrophobic Dream

2009-01-27T22:19:00.011-05:00

Reese Street

Jeremiah Zagar has taken refuge behind the camera in this award-winning documentary about his father, Isaiah Zagar, an obsessive post-hippie mosaicist and occasional manic; his mother Julia, a grounded muse, enabler, and entrepreneur; and his brother, a troubled, addicted foil to the family drama. The film is itself a mosaic: family films and photographs, produced as part of the relentless documentation in multiple media of their lives from the mid-sixties forward, animations of Isaiah's drawings, footage of the glittering, mosaic-crusted Philadelphia buildings that Isaiah has transformed, and reality-TV-style depiction of their transitions and ups and downs. Colorful, inspirational, and insightful, the film poses questions about the relationship between art, sanity, family, stability, money, loyalty, and perseverence. Most of all, the relentlessly mosaic-ed interior of the family home overwhelms any possible individuation; the horror vacui of the art work oppressively dominates all who dwell within, as the personality of Isaiah does his family. Bless the families of artists!

All the Leaves are Brown

2009-01-18T18:38:00.011-05:00

Andrew Wyeth, 1964 (Baltimore Sun story by Patrick Walters, The Associated Press)

Andrew Wyeth, lover of gray and brown, the sere and the lonely, master of alone-ness, as well as lover of models, has joined the great tempera painting in the sky, a curtain blowing in from an open window.

Wind from the Sea, 1948

At 91, he straddled the uncomfortable gap between low-critical and high-popular acclaim with a certain amount of "whatever," and like many other male artists, did exactly what he wanted to the tune of financial success. His wife took care of the details and didn't sweat the secrecy. In the end, the work exhibits peerless technique in the service of subject matter that veers at times towards the reproducible, and yet still strikes a transcendent chord at least part of the time.

Winter, 1946

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape -- the loneliness of it -- the dead feeling of winter."

Vampires Shmampires

2009-01-15T21:49:00.006-05:00

Le Manoir Diable, Georges Méliès

The vampire has been fanging on our collective necks since 1896 with the first appearance of a man transforming into a bat in Méliès two minute fantasy-comedy Le Manoir Diable, followed shortly thereafter by the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. One hundred and twelve years later we are still being stalked by the pallid, otherworldly creatures. Is it a coincidence that as the world seems to becoming a darker and more unpredictable place that the vampire is once again reasserting his hold on our attention? Twilight, True Blood, and Let the Right One In all depict vampires as not only having the savage unquenchable need to drink human blood, but also as having an irresistable charismatic appeal. Why are we feeling the need to fall in love with something that wants to kill us?

The Wikipedia entry on Stoker's Dracula cites themes of imperialism, xenophobia and use of technology to achieve results. Hmm. Sound familiar?

The First Emperor Now at Fascist DisneyWorld

2009-01-07T23:19:00.007-05:00

Soldier and Horse by Robin Chen, Not from Exhibit

Imagine standing in the longest line ever, only it never ends. Like being at WalMart, but not only does your hair look really good, so does everybody elses. And WalMart kills your hairdresser. This is something like what it must have been like to be an actual terracotta soldier as currently represented by the exhibit at the High Museum, The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army. The story of the seven thousand uniquely sculpted soldiers that were buried forgotten on a plain for 2,000 years is truly amazing, and the brilliant and systematic efficiency of the ruler Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China, produced powerful, lasting effects on the country, and yet, this traveling exhibit which originated at the British Museum manages to summarize, pre-digest, and commodify the complex history without mentioning words like slave, mass murder, or forced labor. But first, you have to pay 18 dollars for admission plus five dollars for the audio tour, which does briefly admit in passing the possibility that the "conscripted workers" could be considered to have been, well, slaves. The extremely minimal content that is imparted in text and on tape would together fill up one side of a cereal box. Why not just charge an even 25 dollars and throw in a pamphlet? By the time you are released into the gift shop of overpriced Chinese knick knacks, you are either programmed to purchase the complete set of miniature replica terracotta soliders, a must-have at the post-Christmas bargain price of $25.00, or worse, you will convince yourself that you need to get a full-size version.

The amount of money that is being made from this exhibit does not seem to be reflected in the content or cultural scholarship that surrounds it. From an article about the terracotta soldiers in Wikipedia:

"According to The Times, many people had to be turned away from the exhibition, despite viewings until midnight, and during the day of events to mark the Chinese new year, the crush was so intense that the gates to the museum had to be shut. The Terracotta Army has been described as the only other set of historic artifacts (along with the remnants of ruins of the Titanic) which can draw a crowd simply on the back of the name alone."

People are deeply interested in these artifacts. Is their attention span sufficient to stand in line to look, but not to think deeply about all of the facts surrounding their creation? It's as if an exhibit in 2000 years focused primarily on Hitler's development of the autobahns and didn't mention the Holocaust. DisneyWorld charges admission for an experience that entertains and diverts, while providing opportunities to separate you from your money for every little thing. Aren't museums supposed to do more than that?

The period of Qin Shi Huang's unification of China is also known as the "burning of the books and burial of the scholars," which sounds just like it was. Perhaps the not-quite-yet-to-materialize Shanghai Disney will offer a thrilling adventure ride modeled on the Cultural Revolution. Great fun for the family!

Heavy Weather Or Not

2008-12-09T22:32:00.018-05:00

Still Images from "The Road to Mount Weather" -- See Selection of Video Online
Three-Channel Moving Image Installation/Projection, Stereo Sound, 15 minute loop/Dimensions Variable, 2006

Cliff Evans is a nice young man with a fertile imagination and a liquid capacity for ominous visual storytelling. Coupled with the endless options for digital appropriation, manipulation, and conspiracy theories available on the Internet, he has produced "The Road to Mount Weather," an epic three channel video hallucination/dream/cartoon/nightmare about the government agenda to control the populace from an underground bunker once life above ground becomes too toxic or demented. Those left up in the cold will be blinded by the media and not realize the truth. Obviously, this is already happening. While not willing to completely commit to being conspiracy minded, he speaks knowledgeably about Mount Weather, describing it as a training facility and bomb shelter for the executive branch, located in West Virginia. He can also allude to conspiracy theories, martial law, and Rex 84, a civil unrest containment exercise in the 1970's that continues to spark paranoia in civil libertarians. But overall, the sound and imagery are more satirical than frightening, acting as a sort of fun house mirror of our culture, our government, and our self-absorption.

A scratch-the-surface, stream-of-media-transcription of the work's layered and sequential imagery:

Your future starts here, drive-in, rockets, halo people in city, planes, smoke, bombs, destruction, Dorothy & yellow brick road trio, refugees, trailers, FEMA, spraying down people, press wearing 3D goggles while blinded to decimation, shooting, birds flying away, football players, canyons, corporate logos, stadium, screaming, cheering, clapping, beatific faces, nude female riot cops, destruction, blank sign holders, soldiers, blue eyed child getting eye scanned, mood change, halo, stewardess, devil, church, tree tops and cell towers, elephant, mat chem warriors, bombers, paisley, tires, bunkers, business men with machine legs, balloons on penis daisy (?), pretty couple, haloed, descends below ground, machines, video monitors, command center, watching, staging media, water park, White House, temples, satellite dishes, U.S. seal, Roman senate, fat women, chickens, banquet tables, butt heads, smiling royalty, devil cupid babies, fly by Reagan with dove.

Whew. As you can see, it covers a lot of bases. Evans spent a year and a half building the piece in PhotoShop and AfterEffects and has been exhibiting it in various settings since 2006. Available for purchase for $25,000, two of the edition have already sold. Technically, although it appears film-like, it is a collection of still images that are rendered in 2D, and sequenced for display in real time. Evans reports that 99.5% of the images are acquired off the Internet, and in his artist's statement elaborates:

"I immersed myself in image-gathering and reconstruction, allowing obsessions and paranoiac deviations to bring in tangential elements. At times, believing myself to be a co-conspirator with the powers presented, I abused my access to information, assimilating data from unknown persons' databases of images and photographs, rending subjects from their context and converting their initial intent or purpose towards my own ends. At other times, I found myself becoming a paranoid heretic attempting to subvert the powers of control, yet under suspicion, fearful of being tracked, monitored, and forced in directions that were beyond my knowledge or will. [...] However much a slippery slope, my intent is not to propagate such emotions, but to bring them closer to a singularity of absurdity, reversing the fear and anxiety towards a (albeit limited) sense of control with a sense of humor.

While much of the imagery is funny, satirical, and plain bent, he confesses that the subject matter of the project did bring him down at times. So it was nice to see that he let himself out of the bunker for awhile to come with his project to Scope Miami this week with his gallery, Curator's Office.

Caught in a Trap

2008-12-08T22:41:00.011-05:00

Turkysh Bath, Edition of 6, List $24,000, Sold 5 @ $17,000 at Scope

This guy Marck from Zurich put us in a box and we can't get out. Over and over we try. We are extremely uncomfortable from the spikes, the water is cold, and we are banging our head on the table. The Licht Feld gallery exhibit space where we were displayed is actually Basel-ian, unlike most of what was present at Miami Basel. Gallerist and member Fredy Hadorn reported that Marck goes by Marck from Zurich and the three video, iron, and glass LCD works that were drawing crowds and making us feel claustrophobic in reality and in empathy are all untitled. In spite of the labels with titles. Whatever. A trend at Scope seemed to be that the German and Swiss galleries don't label their art at all, either titles or artists. You have to ask. And even then they won't tell you the whole name. Which is too bad, because then you really have a hard time finding the guy on the Internet. But you can't help but try, because this work is out of the box, a trip, and unforgettable.

Thorns, Edition of 5, Sold Out, Scope

To remember more about Marck from Zurich:
http://www.marck.ch
http://www.marck.tv

Fairly Fairey at the Fair

2008-12-06T23:04:00.011-05:00

Detail, Site-Specific Mural, 29th Street, Miami, December 2008

It seems like Shepard Fairey is all over Miami Basel. With good reason, because he has somehow managed to do the impossible: capture the zeitgeist of the nation's political and cultural mood while producing visually and intellectually rich imagery. He blew into town and created a fantastic mural on the side of a building on 29th Street only five days ago, while his work is a virtual sell-out at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery exhibit space at the Scope alternative art fair. With prices topping out at $25,ooo for the largest pieces and overall multi-fair-wide sales reportedly dampened by the economic downturn, his success is a pleasant testament to talent and ubiquity. When asked about the impact of Fairey's Obama poster on buyer interest, the gallery rep pointed to his pre-existing, ongoing popularity with collectors, as well as the common first-impression that his work might be that of an Asian artist. Nonetheless, a number of first-time collectors have joined the ranks during the Miami event. With limited edition prints going for $1100 and up, the appeal is clear. Buy now and feel good about it.

Detail, Site-Specific Mural, 29th Street, Miami, December 2008

Shepard Fairey at Jonathan LeVine
Obey Giant: Worldwide Propaganda Delivery

Faves and Raves: Miami Basel Alt-Fairs

2008-12-05T23:04:00.062-05:00

Some favorite work from three of the Miami Basel alternative fairs: Pulse, Nada, and Aqua -- sprinkled around the Wynnwood area of Miami. These choices are just a small squadron of mostly digital media work among the thousands of artists and artworks. More about more artists to come. The whole experience is fun, fascinating, and fabulous.

***********Pulse***********
Rave:
Lincoln Schatz: Esquire's Portrait of the 21st Century 2008 / CUBE Portraits. Bitforms Gallery

Shatz was standing with a beautiful multi-screen installation of his portrait series and spoke with enthusiasm about the use of his CUBE digital portrait environment and the software he uses to randomize 24 different video streams that he compiles into digital portraits, generating effects and layering them programmatically in real time. When asked about working with the different subjects and the things they chose to do while sitting, Shatz said, "I ask them what they do with their free time, relaxing, and almost everybody says they're on their laptop." While some subjects need to be encouraged, others are naturally inspired to bring a more personal metaphor to the table. Shatz cited Georgie Clooney's decision to dance with ten women to ten different Frank Sinatra songs, one of whom was Shatz's own mother; LeBron James' choice to play a basketball video game in which he himself is animated as the lead player; and Craig Newmark, founder and sole operator of Craig's List, who alone was depicted sitting with a computer.

Portrait of George Clooney

Masami Teraoka, Catharine Clark Gallery

Teraoka mixes traditional Japanese woodblock and painting techniques with commentary about AIDS, gender, sex, consumption, religion, and the hypocrisy of Western cultural, religious, and political life, like a sexy and sardonic pillow book.

Two of his works had sold during the fair, including Adam and Eve / Surge Protector (1995), for $85,000 and Confessional Series (1994) for $65,000.

Although primarily represented by Catharine Clark, Teroka also was on display in the Samuel Freeman Gallery exhibit at Aqua Winwood.

Sarah Anne Johnson, Julie Saul Gallery
Johnson's work has centered around photographed real and recreated scenes in nature. The piece that stood out at the Julie Saul Gallery exhibit was a lenticular print of a pine forest, composed of sequential images of the pines moving in the wind. Part of a series about tree planting, the trees had an affecting hyper-reality. Other work, in which the artist's nature projects are re-staged with tiny sculptural figures standing in for the original humans and re-photographed, is quite different.

Brandon Morse, Conner Contemporary Art
Morse's framed digital animation depicted two three dimensional wire cubes pulling each other in different directions. Simple and timeless, like a zen koan, it showed the inevitable dynamic of all human relationships, reduced to a formula. Available as one of an edition of 6, the the high-resolution work sells for $2500 and can be displayed at any size or on any screen.

John Gerrard, Grow/Finish Unit (Eva, Oklahoma), Hilger Contemporary
Silvery and mesmerizing 3D digital video animation revolves slowly around modern farm buildings in the wide open space of Oklahoma. This Irish-born artist travels the U.S. taking photographs of various scenes that he then recreates in 3D animation software.

Rave:
Ori Gersht, Falling Bird, Angles Gallery
Named one of Alistair Hicks' "Ten Talents to Watch," Gersht's digital painting loops from a hypnotic meditation on water splashing to a digital trompe l'oeil à la William Harnett, in which a dead pheasant is dropped in the water. Packaged complete with frame, screen, computer, and DVD for $45,000. Edition of 8.

Hell'o Monsters, Untitled, Think 21
The collective of four Belgian graffiti artists worked together to produce this piece, their second animated painting. Gallery rep Christel Tsilibieris reports that they are interested in monsters and anatomy books, and the intersection of eastern and western popular culture. The obvious reference to Hello Kitty is played out in the colorful wall painting, which they came and applied personally. The animation is projected onto the painting, and playfully comments on the functions of the body. The piece is unique, and will be destroyed unless bought. The artists will recreate on site. 3000 eu for the work alone, or 4000 with projector.

***********Nada***********
Marcus Coates, Dawn Chorus (2007), Workplace Gallery
This video installation is probably more staid than Coates' typical work. The project involved recording morning birdsong in Northumberland and northern England, and then video taping various trained amateur singers singing the songs much more slowly. (Similar to Nina Katchadourian's Please, Please, Pleased to Meet 'Cha?) The installation features each of the singers on separate video screens, sped up so that they sound like the normal bird song. Lovely and funny. Ha ha, not peculiar, like this picture of Coates in performance:

Still, Journey to the Lower World, Workplace Gallery

***********Aqua Wynnwood***********

Jim Campbell, Home Movies, 1040-1 (2008), Hosfelt Gallery
LED lights hang in a grid against a large screen, flickering a ghostly black and white home movie to life, barely, like a whisper. Like Shatz, he's got a programmer's mind. See his slide talk on computer-generated art.

Rave:
David Fried, Self-Organizing Still Life, Sara Tecchia Roma New York

Impossibly analog sculpture that moves in reaction to sound, adding motion as the balls click and clack into each other. Wonderful and mysterious, a perpetual motion machine that can be put to sleep by silence.

Uncomfortable Art Positions

2008-12-04T22:42:00.010-05:00

Art Positions

In the shadow of the ever-renovating South Beach hotels, Art Basel Miami hosts 20 young galleries in converted orange shipping containers in the outdoor exhibition "Art Positions." Each container has been provided with a rampway, a door, and a shelf space for information about the galleries. Each container is attended by a young woman with bangs, wearing a black dress or something oddly shaped, and speaking Dutch or Castillian Spanish. Cognescenti report that these cell-phone wielding mini-models are gallery interns; the market for interns seems to be an unexpectedly strong economic indicator.

The container concept is totally cool, and cries out for better ideas, planning, execution, and professionalism. Overall, the art on display seems amateurish, unintentionally funny, and poorly displayed. Some containers have a handful of bland, forgettable drawings or photographs. Others have quasi-installations that fail to meet the challenges of the space, present coherent ideas, or interesting imagery. Many display video works that seemed to have been pulled out of a VCR from 1986, or a blender from 1960. The Galerie Andreas Huber features a video by Judith Hopf entitled Zahlen! / Counting, ostensibly a tribute to Hans, the famous counting horse of fin de siècle Berlin, in which a horse is taunted by a quartet of people peeping over a fence while wearing mime-like make-up. Coulrophobia, anyone?

Perhaps the effort and expense involved in transporting the work from around the corners of the globe was daunting. The general effect is like a Top Design project in which the contestants get mad at each other and give up, and the rejected contestants from Project Runway all come to take a look.

In addition to the excellent people-watching, a stand-out:

Teresa Margolles' 21, at the Galeria Salvafor Diaz, appears at first glance to be a Miami Beach jeweller's showcase, the 21 pieces of lavish gold and gem-encrusted jewelry displayed and lit as if in a Bal Harbour store window. Margolles' work is preoccupied with the many causes, effects, attributes, and artifacts of death in her native Mexico. This particular collection of pieces was fabricated under her direction by a jeweller from her local market using shards of glass collected from narco grudge-murder sites in place of jewels, with settings similar to those favored by the narco gangsters. These pieces are beautifully rendered, gaudy with excess luxury, and casually horrifying.

Score Settling #5 (Preliminary investigation), Culiacán, October 19, 2007

Bal Harbour Website, Not Margolles

Art Basel Miami

Brando-matic for the People

2008-11-30T22:22:00.012-05:00

Truman Capote went to visit Brando in Kyoto in 1957 while he was filming Sayonara. He describes the Japanese-style hotel room:

"All that he owned seemed to be out in the open. Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow. And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit; a box of the famous Japanese strawberries, each berry the size of an egg. And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing, and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska."

An externalization of all of Brando's interests, aspirations, and failures, this description does more justice to him than any statement that he makes in his monologue about himself under the scrutiny of the tiny, malevolent writer. Capote's piece is like the mirror-image of a recent New Yorker piece by Claudia Pierpont. Capote documents Brando's contradictions, self-involvement, and childlike behavior, casting the actor as shallow, troubled, fragmented, arrogant, and alone. Pierpont turns that around and with the same information, creates a portrait of someone deep, troubled, fragmented, humble, and lonely. She is forgiving and compassionate, while recognizing all of the same issues. Brando in 1957 was already a popular obsession, universal icon, and cultural cliche. Where Capote tries to expose the man behind the curtain, Pierpont brings out the sadness and misery of a person in that position, with a talent that cannot be realized, not only because of the fame and expectations, but also because of emotional imbalance.

Pierpont also gives serious attention to Brando's talent, technique, and hit-0r-miss history. Describing Brando's performance in Streetcar, she conveys the artistry he brought to modulating his performance in order to make the transition from stage to screen. Viewed today, the hashed-over Kowalski tee-shirt rending Streetcar trope is banished by his physical beauty and his rendering of the childlike ignorance and menace that flicker through the movie like a living current of electricity. And yet, Capote quotes Brando himself as saying about the movie, released six years earlier in 1951, "Of course, movies date so quickly. I saw 'Streetcar’ the other day and it was already an old-fashioned picture."

Such a beautiful failure...

Claudia Pierpont Roth, New Yorker, 10/27/2008: Method Man
Truman Capote, New Yorker, 1957: The Duke in His Domain
Street Named Desire in IMDB

Twilight of the Guys

2008-11-23T22:15:00.007-05:00

In case you haven't been watching the media lately, a new craze has taken over the hearts, minds, and tee shirts of the 12-16 year old female. Something like Rudolf Valentino, heroin, Walt Disney's Prince Charming, and NightStalker all mixed together, the Twilight Phenomenon was witnessed first hand this weekend, when some young friends went to the movie wearing Team Edward tee shirts (two store-bought and one home-made with green glitter pen.) Words cannot describe the pent up hysteria that threatened to unleash itself in the car on the way to the theatre. Dogs could not tolerate the frequency of the shrieking that reverberated through the theatre while waiting for the movie to begin. Long hair, tight straight legged jeans, Converse sneakers, and popcorn were de rigueur.

Stephanie Meyer's gothic teenage vampire franchise had its seeds in a dream she couldn't stop writing about, resulting in four books and now a movie about a teenage girl's obsessive relationship with a seventeen year and 100 year old vampire boyfriend. Bella and Edward have inspired the swooning equivalent of the bobby soxers, only these kids are reading. Also texting, IM'ing, Facebooking, and making green glitter pen tee shirts.

What is so bad about all this vampire love?

1. It's actually not the vampire-ness, but the same sort of distorted romantic expectations that were created in the mothers of the Twilight fans by the heaving-bodice-romance novels from the 70's like The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. Of course, rather than a dominance/submission fantasy, the vampire boyfriend is so attentive and devoted that he seems sure to turn into an abuser, as his protectiveness and perfect anticipation of the young heroine's needs begin to seem creepy and controlling to women familiar with the pattern. But not to young readers, who sigh for the brooding passion and mind-meld that emulates the constant connection they maintain with their female friends over their devices and in their giggling cliques. It turns out, fortunately or not, that men and women don't really relate like that, no matter how passionate or soul-matey their communion.

2. The heroine starts out as an extra smart independent girl who is funny and with whom people want to be friends. She ends up totally focussed on an icy cold boy who comes into her room and watches her sleep every night, drives her to school, and then inexplicably rejects her just when she is most vulnerable. All of that is in book one. The result, as you might expect, is not especially becoming or healthy.

3. The couple cannot have sex, although their desire is the engine that keeps the books chugging along. Also the quest for survival. And sometimes both at the same time. The boyfriend tries to protect the heroine from his dangerous desire to drain her of all of her blood, so they endure a forced chastity while spending 24 hours a day together. A more skeptical person might suspect that the boyfriend was really gay. But that's another book.

New York Times: The Vampire of the Shopping Mall
New York Times: Love and Pain and the Teenage Vampire Thing
Vanity Fair: The Twilight Zone

Commoners and Heroes

2008-11-16T23:14:00.011-05:00

NPR's Weekend Edition today had a segment on Tod Machover, the inventor of the video game and cultural phenomenon known as Guitar Hero, composer of digital music, and creator of hyperinstruments and HyperScore, a software application that supports music composition through non-instrumental inputs similar to the Guitar Hero controllers.

Over the past several years, more and more people are playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band at parties, with their kids, and in their living rooms. Many kids are getting their first exposure to classic Rock through the game. According to Wikipedia, many people buy the songs they play in Guitar Hero, and Guitar Hero is replacing Karaoke at the local bar. And many players step into playing actual real guitars as a result of Guitar Hero, and may benefit from the foundation of dexterity, eye-hand coordination, and ear training that the game provides. However, like the mother who said her kids overestimated their ability to actually play real tennis based on their use of the Wii tennis game, players of Guitar Hero have no understanding of music, technique, or the actual mechanics of playing the guitar.

Machover's vision extends far beyond the commercial: he sees a future where the music in a person's mind can pour out unimpeded by the need to coerce sounds out of a balky instrument, made possible through the interface between the computer and the human body. He asserts:

"Imagine if [Guitar Hero] were truly expressive, truly personal, truly creative. The wonderful thing about Guitar Hero is that it opens up the door for everybody to be not just a passive listener but a real active participant in music," Machover says. "I think that is the future of music: music that is a collaboration between what we traditionally think of as composers and performers and the audience."

In a completely unrelated article in the New York Times Magazine today, Lewis Hyde is profiled regarding his work to define the particular landscape of American creativity and the cultural commons on which all creative people should be allowed to draw, re-think, re-assemble, and collaborative re-create into new expressions. His theory is that all creativity is a gift that gains currency and value through being shared. His enemies are the recently expanded copyright laws and growth of intellectual property wars.

Interesting that Guitar Hero provides to its players the opportunity to immerse themselves into the experience of performing the American Rock Canon, a most influential piece of our cultural commons. But Guitar Hero exists at the intersection of the opportunity for the commoner to make music without elitist training and the opportunity for money to be made from their desire to do so. Three chord music that retains the dusty DNA of its Deep South plebian origins, and yet, each and every part of it is licensed in a web of copyrights, clearances, royalties, secondary rights, derivative products, and lawsuits. Gibson has sued the company for copyright infringement on their use of the guitar controller. Aerosmith has made more money from Guitar Hero royalties than they have for any album. What do you think the blues players who played for change on the street corners of Mississippi would make of this?

American Election Idol

2008-11-09T11:46:00.016-05:00

John McCain: 57,434,084 - 46.1%

Barack Obama: 65,431,955 - 52.6%

Sanjaya Malakar, Voted Off in Week 4, Ranked in the Bottom 2

Once again, the American Idol Effect has helped eliminate the obvious losers, as demonstrated by the choices shown above and their respective election results. Even the vote-for-the-worst strategy of the Republican party didn't pan out. Our participative culture actually got off the couch and voted in their local polling places instead of through a cell phone. According to Wikipedia, our touchstone of truthiness, 124,372,419 million voted this year.

"The voter turnout for this election was broadly predicted to be very high. One widely publicized early estimate predicted turnout of 136.6 million people or 64% of the voting population—which would have been the highest rate in 100 years. However, as of 1 p.m. Eastern Time on November 9th, with 99.6% of the precincts reporting, the total number of votes stands at only 124.47 million, just 2.2 million more than in the 2004 election."

While Sniffipedia may think that a 2% increase is just only a little increase, it should be hailed, as in 2004 fewer people voted for the winning candidate George Bush (62,040,610 votes) than voted for the winning American Idol contestant Fantasia Barrino (65 million votes). This year, Idol winner David Cook did not receive more votes than either McCain or Obama, although his 54.2 million votes were an impressive share of the all-time Idol high vote of 97 million.

Imagine Yoko Ono, It's Impossible If You Try

2008-10-08T23:02:00.016-04:00

Yoko Ono: Cut Piece, photo of performance, July 20, 1964 (Kyoto, Yamaichi Hall);
photo courtesy of Lenono Photo Archive ©Yoko Ono ; Oxford Art Online

I pity all those people who don't love Yoko Ono. Not that John Lennon isn't great, and worthy of his acclaim, following, sainthood, biopics, and posthumous merchandising (there's that Yoko again). But Yoko is the coolest, and not just because she eclipsed all those mopheads with her romantic Svengali-like influence on John.

He wisely recognized that the woman was not only smarter, but had more interesting ideas in her pinky than he had in his entire band. Just look at this picture from her 1964 performance work "Cut Piece." Brave, resonant, enduring, original. Extremely annoying to the average yokel at the time and today exhibiting a classicism and simplicity that is unmatched. Compare this with the arrival of Beatlemania in America and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Quaint and corny isn't it?

Tomorrow is the second lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower, erected in John Lennon's honor off of Rekyjavik, and to be lit every year from Lennon's birthday on October 9th to his death day on December 8th. You can still send a wish to be included in the October 9th lighting if you act fast.

From the Imagine Peace Project Website:

"The IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is a work of art conceived by Yoko Ono in memory of John Lennon. It is dedicated to peace and bears the inscription 'IMAGINE PEACE' in 24 languages. Its construction and installation is a collaboration between Yoko Ono, the City of Reykjavik, Reykjavik Art Museum and Reykjavik Energy.The work is in the form of a wishing well from which a very strong and tall tower of light emerges. The strength, intensity and brilliance of the light tower continually changes as the particles in the air fluctuate with the prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions unique to Iceland. Every year it will light up between October 9th (Lennon's birthday) and December 8th (the day of his death). In addition the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will be lit on New Year's Eve, during the first week of spring and on some rare special occasions agreed between the City and Ono.The electricity for the light comes entirely from the Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant."

Today Iceland had to borrow 5.5 billion dollars from Russia because nobody else would help bail them out. Their economy has virtually collapsed due to the credit crisis; their currency has fallen 30% against the euro; the United States couldn't spare 5.5 billion for them. You may say I'm a dreamer, but couldn't we elect Yoko Ono?

Pigs in Versailles, Not in Shanghai

2008-09-14T13:26:00.014-04:00

Noteworthy events this week in the art world included the censoring of the artist Wim Delvoye by the SH Contemporary Art Fair in Shanghai and the opening of an exhibit of Jeff Koons' work at Versailles. Both artists have elements of the pig in their work, and at least one of them has some aspects of the pig about his personality.

Wim Delvoye

Also with a French connection, Delvoye's work consisted of pigs that he had tattoed with the Louis Vuitton logo and Disney imagery. Arguably beautiful, and emminently rejectable on any number of grounds (animal cruelty, grossness, and decadence), the work was determined to be not artistically valid, i.e., "not art." On the other hand, Koons, whose work receives many of the same criticisms (particularly related to his self-pornography with his ex-wife Italian porn star La Cicciolina (aka Ilona Staller), for which the Humane Society could justifiably pursue him for inflicting inhumanity and grossness on both Ilona and the viewing public), has been provided with the most exalted venue imaginable for the display of his kitschy, immense, and amusing sculptures, the symbol of cultural decadence that is Versailles. Press reports indicate that the some visitors to Versailles wish that a similar judgement had been rendered against Koons in order to prevent this exhibition as well.

"Ushering in Banality" by Jeff Koons at the Château de Versailles exhibition.
Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Delvoye and Koons are both multi-dimensional artists who incorporate themes related to society, aesthetics, art history, branding, and consumption into work that takes a wide variety of visual forms, media, and directions, with an emphasis on fabrication of exceptional quality in the service of questionable taste. Provocative, prolific, and never underwhelming, but occasionally annoying. What more could we ask of them than work that is "not art?"

At the Court of the Sun King, Some All American Art (NYT)

Pigs Out, But Artist Sells Tatoo Off Man's Back (NPR)

Jeff Koons Versailles Exhibit

Look Homeward, Angel

2008-08-13T07:50:00.019-04:00

Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Can you go home again? Every artist has peaks and valleys -- more often, troughs of despair. In tagging the recreated Keith Haring mural in NYC is his former collaborator Angel Ortiz (a.k.a. L.A. II a.k.a. Little Angel) looking forward? Or is he clinging to a past moment in order to explain his disappointment in his overall accomplishments? The pathos that seeps through the NYT story could be a product of the reporter's intention to highlight a point of view, or it could be a sad reality that Angel doesn't quite get it. Studying his tags on the Keith Haring image -- are they a contribution, a defacement, a desperate plea for recognition? Do you think they enhance, detract, play homage to Keith, or attempt to stand on his shoulders for another moment?

On the other hand, on whose shoulders did Keith Haring stand? Or does his estate stand now? Is it the artist or the machine that oppresses Mr. Ortiz?

Appropriation, collaboration, exploitation, merchandising. Haring was a very young man when he first began working with Ortiz. At 22, he was barely 9 years older than the teenager. His education may or may not have illuminated all of the ethical implications of collaboration, much less with one so young. Could he have predicted the impact that his meteoric rise would have on someone who came from such disadvantaged circumstances? Would he have approached it differently if he could? In truth, didn't more artists in the 1980's echo Haring's motifs than did Haring echo Angel Ortiz?

An artist has no right to recognition or appreciation, right? Ars gratia artis after all -- tag that!

My Picture Made in the Keith Haring Coloring Book

On another note, it is interesting that the Haring Foundation website warns against access by children, at the same time that their focus is continuing his work with children. So they have a separate kids site, which has some neat features, including this interactive coloring book in which I pay homage to LA II's tagging of the Keith Haring mural. But when you think about it, isn't it strange that Haring's work is childlike and appealing to children, while often being pornographic?

Little Angel Was Here: A Keith Haring Collaborator Makes His Mark

Flickr Slideshow of Pornographic Keith Haring Bathroom Mural

Keith Haring Aztec Artist Kids Flash Projects

Keith Haring Foundation

Louie, Louie, Louie, Louise

2008-07-06T22:32:00.036-04:00

Art21, Inc. 2003

She's having a retrospective of the longest career of a still-living artist ever. She has worked continuously as an artist since 1923, when at 12 years old, she drew tapestry cartoons for her parent's tapestry repair business. She is now 96, and in the last 10 years has made some of the most monumental work of her life. She didn't become well-known until she was in her 60's. She has made work that has mutated through different materials and processes, scales and surfaces, images and shapes, retaining an intellectual, spiritual, and visceral consistency while constantly evolving and changing.

" The Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum includes this untitled 2004 hanging piece. Holland Cotter writes: Spirals abound in Louise Bourgeois’s art. She says they make her think of control and freedom, and of strangling someone. So it’s perfect that her retrospective, seen in London and Paris, is now in the looping rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. It looks great there, clean but organic – fecund, tumid, hands-on -- and unclassically classical. Photo: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times"

Quarantania, I. 1947-53; reassembled by the artist 1981

Articulated Lair, 1986

"A work of art doesn't have to be explained," she says. "If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed."
Art21

Defiance (Le Défi), 1991

"As she wrote in 1988, in an essay on her piece "The Sail," the work speaks for itself: "Whatever the artist says about it is like an apology, it is not necessary." (Then she went on to discuss the motivations behind "The Sail" for four pages.)" Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, February 4, 2002

Untitled from Fugue. 2003 (published 2005)

Mortise, 1950

Amoeba 1963-5, cast 1984

Exhibition at Guggenheim

NYT Review of Guggenheim Retrospective

NYT Slideshow

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine (Documentary)

Art21, PBS (documentary, videos, slideshows, interviews)

The Spider’s Web: Louise Bourgeois and her art. Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, February 4, 2002

Wikipedia Entry

Artcyclopedia

Eliasson Waters NYC

2008-06-26T23:34:00.014-04:00

Oh Olafur. So many people love you and love your work. Does that make you suspect? Some critics have sniffed a bit at the experiential aspects of your installations. Do they have big ideas, or are they just big? Is phenomenology an art idea or an art anti-idea?

The Weather Project caused people to lie down on the floor and bask.

Round Rainbow has a formal elegance and ingenuity that may not have a big idea, but is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Today's debut of your four waterfalls around the New York's East River waterfronts and bridges has inspired a lot of talk. In the New York Times, commentary was running towards the irate: a waste of energy, money, and yet not quite big enough or powerful enough. Some are even alarmed at the thought that it is spreading disease through wafting mists of polluted river water. Still, it seems pretty neat that you got to do it, even though you told the BBC "Waterfalls I love them because everybody has something to say about them."

Photo: Vincent Laforet for The New York Times

New York Times Slideshow
New York Times Art Review: Cascades, Sing the City Energetic
The New York City Waterfalls (Official Site)
New Yorker Profile: Seeing Things: The art of Olafur Eliasson

High Prices for Low Art

2008-06-24T22:18:00.010-04:00

Christy's of London had a record setting auction price for a Monet painting today -- $80.4 million dollars for “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas." It is a pretty painting, but since Monet's work has been reproduced endlessly on everything from shower curtains to umbrellas to trash cans, it just doesn't seem like it's all that special.

Le Bassin aux Nymphéas

The auction of Impressionist and Modern Art included works from Signac, Bonnard, Matisse, Degas, Renoir, Chagall, Picasso, Kandinsky, Lipchitz, Leger, Gaugin, Cezanne, Pissarro, Magritte, Kirchner, and Miro. Another record was set for highest price for a painting by a woman -- $10,870,506 -- for "Les Fleurs" by Natalia Goncharova.

Les Fleurs

Lowest sale: "Environs du Faou" by Eugene Boudin (1824-1898) $61,438. Looks like a comparative bargain.

Environs du Faou

But the most interesting work was by Egon Schiele. A gouache "Liegende Frau mit grünen Hausschuhen" has echoes of Japanese woodblock and pillow book, perverse and beautiful. The bedroom slippers a nice touch. And only $4,264,746.

Christie's Auction Results
NYT: A Monet Sets a Record

Disappearing Polaroids

2008-06-14T15:01:00.018-04:00

The polaroid is disappearing from our lives, fading away like itself in reverse. Another lost medium, becoming a ghost. A tiny blurb in the Times business section back in February, a lot of angst from the artists and devotees, an article here and there, a radio piece. To no avail...

POLAROID QUITS INSTANT FILM The Polaroid Corporation, the company that pioneered instant photography, is exiting the film business and closing plants in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands as it focuses on digital photography and flat-panel televisions. Polaroid will cut 150 jobs in Massachusetts by the end of the quarter, the chief operating officer, Thomas L. Beaudoin, said. Polaroid will make enough instant film to last into 2009, and plans to license its technology to third-party companies for diehard customers. (BLOOMBERG NEWS)
New York Times February 9, 2008

Last Stock Online, June 2008

Pre-digital instant pictures used by artists, anthropologists, teenagers, coroners, architects, designers, police, dermatologists, moms, dads, kids, living room pornographers, photo booths...

Collection of Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Untitled (Patti Smith),” a 1973 Polaroid

Beautiful Polaroid Slide Show On Flickr
Beautiful Polaroid Archive at polonoid.net
Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids at the Whitne y
Coroners, Police, and Artists Hurt: Boston Globe, February 27, 2008
Top Photographers, John Waters Upset: New York Magazine, May 4, 2008
Farewell, My Lovely Polaroid: New York Observer, May 13, 2008
Artists Lament Polaroid's Latest Development: NPR, February 29, 2008
Artist Stefanie Schneider And The End Of Polaroid Film: Huffington Post, March 1, 2008
Sign the Save the Polaroid Petition
Planned Disappearance Dates on polaroid.com
Save Polaroid: collective action

Pictures of Us

2008-05-23T11:04:00.012-04:00

Today is the anniversary of the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde on Mary 23 1934, a little off of what is now Interstate 20, an hour east of Shreveport. They lived their lives expecting to die but kept escaping because Clyde was more experienced at shooting people than the small town cops they ran into. It's hard to believe today, 75 years later, that this little group of folks could move around a five state area for years, committing crimes and living in public places, and never get caught. Described by culturists as the first celebrity criminals, they were also pre-cursors of today's self-referential and -reverential twenty-somethings who used the media to burnish their mystique, took pictures of themselves posed "in character," and turned themselves into american idols that the public followed, supported, and destroyed.

In the Movie About Us, Please Make Us Prettier
Photograph: Kobal Collection

In order to finish them off, the law had to take unprecedented and illegal tactics, including shooting them to pieces with no warning when Bonnie had no warrants for violent crime outstanding. Clyde, however, had shot to death at least nine policeman, and a few others. (See Wikipedia).

That day's story in the New York Times describes Clyde Barrow's body as "a smear of red, wet rags."

New York Times, May 23, 1934

Movie of Death Scene

Is it better to burn out than to fade away? At least if you do so before everybody gets tired of you...

Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them

2008-05-22T17:25:00.022-04:00

To Gawk or not to gawk... is that the question?

Emily Gould, erstwhile editor at Gawker, has a first person narrative in the New York Times magazine this Sunday, titled "Exposed," about her experience as a pseudo celebrity blogger. She's only in her mid-twenties, and had ratcheted up the mediascape from an entrepreneurial self-exposer to join the staff of Gawker, where she got caught up in the catty excitement and traded her personal integrity for comments and attention. The online article had over 800 responses, to which additions apparently at one point were blocked, as of this afternoon. Most of them bemoaned the Times, the customs, and her apparent lack of self-awareness or reflection. In spite of being burned for too much self-disclosure or disclosure about her loved ones, here she was again, using a format that many found too bloggy, soggy, and unworthy of the venue. Armchair psychoanalysts suggested she was a narcissist, a masochist, or in her twenties. Some snarked that naysayers were just out of the loop. Others were truly mean, and felt that she deserved it.

Photo by Elinor Carruci

At first blush, it was hard not to concur with the pitiless commenters, who were also accused of themselves contributing to this circle of shame. But when I watched her visit to Jimmy Kimmel on Larry King posted on YouTube, the vampish egotistical poseur of the Times article became more human. She was genuinely unprepared, naively stepping up to be knocked around by someone who, it was pointed out in the YouTube comments, is himself a mean-spirited jokester who dates the meanest girl in school. As she rolled her eyes and pursed her lips into a tremulous smile, I kept wondering if she was looking at herself on a monitor. It was as if all her energy was consumed with composing her face, and she had no time to compose her thoughts, as she was completely unable to respond effectively. She was up against Kimmel, Mark Geragos, and some other media guy, all of whom have spent thousands of hours in front of the camera. Her naivete was a complete contrast to the character she is playing on the Internet, a tattooed, smarter-than-thou, self-involved, self-promoter.

In the current Columbia Journalism Review cover story Lost Media, Found Media," author Alissa Quart writes ambivalently about the demise of traditional quality journalism and the rise of the fast food, disposable stuff being churned out by people like Emily Gould. Young people. It seems like in some ways we are not so much experiencing the impact of Future Shock from the Internet, but just the expected fin de siècle shock of the new, and the resistence of the old.

From Answers.Com:

fin de siècle [faⁿ dĕ si‐airkl]the French phrase (‘end of century’) often used to refer to the characteristic world‐weary mood of European culture in the 1880s and 1890s, when writers and artists like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the French symbolists, under the slogan ‘ art for art's sake’, adopted a ‘decadent’ rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society.

In a broader sense the expression fin de siècle is used to characterise anything that has an ominous mixture of opulence and/or decadence, combined with a shared prospect of unavoidable radical change or some approaching "end."

Note that it is not necessarily change itself that is implied in the expression fin de siècle, but rather its anticipation. For example, for the 19th-century fin de siècle, the most radical changes to the cultural and social order occurred more than a decade after the new century had started (most notably as a result of World War I).

The behaviors and attitudes of the young people who came of age on the Internet are just beginning to take over the mainstream, close to a decade after the new century started. They are not too different from their forebears, rejecting moral or ethical foundations for their work. Posting endless details about their lives on the web is normal for them. Even posting incomplete epiphanies that they finally have it figured out.

Buy Buy American Idol Pie

2008-05-21T09:52:00.019-04:00

Despite the reminders that it is a fading institution with declining viewership, American Idol continues to attract interest, and in some ways, this season has inspired a renewed volume of comment in mainstream media as it culminates tonight. The New Yorker, NPR, and commercial radio and television news have all been reporting on the showdown of David Archuletta and David Cook, reflecting on the relevance of American Idol, and analyzing its impact on our media culture and its consumers. Noted for its establishment of the judging and elimination model of reality / talent television, Idol has had an unexpected impact of also modeling a critique behavior that mainstream Americans now exhibit in routine conversation about any number of performances.

David Archuletta

David Cook

With its wierd mix of hackneyed music and expectations of pop freshness, American Idol has been most intriguing during the preliminary rounds in which the young singers struggle to either fit into the mold or break out of it. Showstopping-high-note endings are still de rigueur, but the Whitney Houston-esque warblings that dominated in the beginning are less common now. Judge Simon Cowell prefers modern to old fashioned, and will justifiably condemn performances as "cruise ship," "theme park," and "karaoke." And yet the music that is selected is so freighted with anachronism and familiarity that it is difficult for performers to achieve any other effect. The gestalt of the group is often better than any individual performance, and the process of elimination seems to gradually remove any of the idiosyncracies that make performers have lasting resonance.

Mark Harris on NPR this morning pointed out that these two finalists represent the opposite ends of the spectrum -- Archuletta is the bland, consistently perfect pop singer with no real personality of his own, and Cook has sought to establish his own personality and imprint as a rock guy while still working within the Idol pop mold. It has been hard for me to appreciate Archuletta as the season has worn on. His initial fresh, cute optimism seemed to degrade into a stricken, fear-based rigidity, and the polish of his vocals seemed synthetic and boring. The stories about his father being banished from the backstage of the show reinforced my impression that perhaps he was under too much pressure, a little too much control. I appreciated Sasha Frere-Jones comment in the New Yorker that Archuletta had a "creepy inability to become displeased with himself." There is something very sad about David Archuletta. As for David Cook, he started out as a little un-photogenic and has gradually worked his style up to match his other talents as a musician. He really profitted from the "use instruments" innovation this year, and his vocal talents emerged progressively to earn respect as the season went on -- an interest-factor not demonstrated by Archuletta.

So, the show, which should be called "American Money Maker," has capitalized on this by setting up the climactic showdown performances of last night as a "boxing match." I had missed the first 15 minutes, and so didn't realize that they had actually had these poor guys come out in boxing clothes. I think that was probably the moment that David Cooks' personal integrity cracked and he became overwhelmingly depressed. It was bad enough to shill for Ford in faux music videos, which he somehow managed to do with some personality and grace that seemed to be consistent with his actual self, but the boxing robes and gloves were corny beyond Kansas.

Photo by Fox

The judges awarded the evening to Archuletta. Vote for the Worst urged viewers to vote for Archuletta. Dial Idol predicts David Cook will win. It seems like David Cook might be opting for second place as a good bet -- no doubt he will fare better in his life than Archuletta either way. Smart guy, decent musician. I voted for him and against the child star phenomenon.

UPDATE: David Cook wins, by 12 million votes. Was the premature nod to Archuletta a connivance to generate drama and ratings and votes? If so, it worked.

R.I.P. R.R., October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008

2008-05-14T10:34:00.010-04:00

Photograph by Burton Berinsky/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Don't we all owe Robert Rauschenberg? He invented the mash-up, the re-mix, the re-use, and inhabited the cherished notion that art is not one thing but anything, that you can use anything, any media, to express your vision. The New York Times article offers a beautiful but limited summary of his life and work, which embraced so many different opportunities and approaches and yet had a quality of organic evolution and internal consistency. Erasing de Kooning, painting over the only purchased painting from his first show, roller skating on stage, merging sound and still and movement, mixing technologies: all playful, collagist, and reconsiderate.

Bon Voyage R.R. May the next journey be worthy of you!

First Landing Jump, 1961.
Combine painting: cloth, metal, leather, electric fixture, cable and oil paint on composition board; overall, including automobile tire and wooden plank on floor, 7' 5 1/8" x 6' x 8 7/8".
Gift of Philip Johnson. (434.1972)
Location :The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit : Digital Image (c) The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Delft Libraries and Coincidence

2008-05-13T22:32:00.016-04:00

I heard Michael Stephens (http://tametheweb.com) speak last week about technology, users, libraries, web 2.0, and a number of other things, including a reference to Delft public library, which turns the notion of a library upside down sort of like the way the Pompidou Center turned the notion of a museum inside out. Gaming stations, multimedia stations, and the IMac listening pods are especially cool. See the slide show on Flickr for more cool pictures that people have posted.

But he didn't mention the other Delftian library -- the one at the Delft University of Technology. As it turns out, this other Delft library also represents forward-thinking architecture and technology, perhaps like you would expect from an academic university of technology with a school of architecture.

Photo by the Shifted Librarian

Designed by the Dutch architectural and landscape design firm Mecanoo and built during 1993-1997, the building is concealed by a vast sloping grass roof, with a teepee-shaped structure that simultaneously provides vertical presence, functional purpose, and evokes the windmills that symbolize the Holland landscape. Check out the pictures people have posted of it on Flickr, in both the green of summer (people lounging on the roof) and white of winter (people skiing on the roof).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jason_delft/385561339/

Other examples of the Mecanoo group's work are available on their website. I was riveted by a short film of a woman speaking in Dutch about a chapel, carrying the maquette through a cemetary to the build site. I did not understand a word of what she said. Then I found an English version of the site and it said the film was about a Roman Catholic Chapel for Saint Mary of the Angels. The maquette looked like a two coffee cans melded into a kidney shaped spiral and topped with a mortar board.

Most of what is written about Mecanoo and TU Delft is in Dutch, so the subject continues to be mysterious even after looking around on the internet, like a window into an alternate universe where people are thinking about some of the same problems, generating completely progressive, original solutions, and throwing our world into the dustbin like leftover coffee grounds.

Which leads me to today's coincidence: the Wikipedia entry for TU Delft reports that the school of architecture burned this morning, May 13, 2008. According to the site, "The fire soon engulfed several floors of the southern wing of the building. [...] Parts of the northern wing have collapsed and it is feared that the rest of the building may follow. [...] It is believed the fire was started by a ruptured water pipe which short circuited a coffee machine [italics are mine] on the sixth floor of the building."

This picture is from the TU Delft website, where they had posted an update at 1900 hours that said the fire was still burning, or at least that's what my Babelfish translation suggested.

Last Wool and Testament

2008-05-11T22:50:00.008-04:00

Yesterday we wandered through the immense and baffling halls of a faux english manor set in one of our most expensive intown neighborhoods. The collected possessions of the couple that built the house in the 1990's were on display for purchase, although few could afford anything but a soapdish. Tiny china dogs were 85 dollars, sets of silver many times more than that. Paintings, rugs, old books, objets d'art, humidors, writing desks, grand tables... even the mundane objects were pricey. The local football team logo was evident everywhere, suggesting a hospitable connection with the two rooms with wet bars. Collections of figurines of all kinds began to blur together until my companion pointed out the strange pairs of white animals, some with baskets in their mouths, others with smaller offspring.

Were they lions, sheep, lambs? They dated from the 1830's and had funny, kabuki-like expressions with painted arched eyebrows and dotted noses and red lips, their hair falling in two puffy billows on either side of their heads. What could they be?

A herd of them populated every surface of the master bedroom. On the bedside tables they held baskets of baby versions in their mouths while holding up the lampshades. What is the significance of these creatures? What power did their owner endow them with? I would have had a hard time sleeping in the room with them looking at me.

Now that I know they are poodles, Staffordshire poodle figurines, to be exact, I began to feel the tug of their strange magnetism and did a little research. I have now learned that these figurines have what is referred to as "parsley", "spaghetti," or "confetti" style hair, and that the males are distinguished with a mustache. (Note the poodle on the top left, above.) They cost upwards of $180 dollars apiece.

According to www.poodlehistory.org:
Staffordshire (1840-1900) and Rockingham (1826-1842) figurines, and etc. Poodles as well as spaniels were among the favorite subjects for endearingly naive yet vital figurines manufactured for cottage mantlepieces.

Not unlike their chain-linked brethren from Woolworth's, they began as decor for the humbler classes. Perhaps one day 100 years from now, the libraries and master suites of the not-so-landed gentry will display matching mother and baby poodle figurines from the five and ten just as proudly, but will they resonate with such a haunting, impertinent gaze?

Traffic and Surfing

2008-05-09T14:34:00.009-04:00

There is no better time to question your existence than when you are sitting in Atlanta traffic. A bitter Satreian comedy that consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people burning gas as they inch along allees of asphalt, chain restaurants, and car dealerships, the rush hour experience in Atlanta is simultaneously bonding and devolving: you are in this together, and yet you are constantly judging the other drivers and finding them in need of severe punishment. Detachment is difficult to achieve and maintain. While trapped in this exitless inertia yesterday, I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR WABE 90.1. No doubt everyone else was listening to Sean Hannity on WSB AM 750.

Terry Gross was interviewing Jonathan Paskowitz, a producer and subject of the documentary "Surfwise," the story of the surfing Paskowitz clan of 9 children, who along with their mother were taken off the grid by their dad, Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, spending their lives living ascetically in a 24 foot camper and surfing the world. While they experienced deprivations and strange disciplines, their lives seemed magical, innocent, and pure. Paskowitz referred to it as a life of "bold quests, big surf, wild adventures." When asked how he felt about surfing, he said "words cannot describe the euphoria that surfing provides as a human; words cannot describe the absolutely magical and romantic feeling of riding a wave, going up and down on the surface of the water, and feeling just an unlimited power under your feet and to be in harmony with the ocean, perhaps riding along and seeing a dolphin in the face of the wave next to you, or a beautiful rainbow as the spray of the wind is offshore pluming over the back of the wave. And it's just the most beautiful, romantic, organic thing a human can do."

You mean that sitting in a car on Highway 78 in Snellville isn't?

Listen to the segment on Fresh Air

Read the review in NYT

Watch the beautiful trailer in NYT

Tales from the Dark Side

2008-05-03T17:18:00.000-04:00

Since about 12:00 today I have been trying to help Jennifer upload her new website. We share the same webhosting company (I will not name them here but they have the homonymous name of a credit card with the word web post-pended.) She had exchanged 18 emails with them in an effort to get ftp to work from Dreamweaver. Here are some, just some, of the thousand things we have done in the last 5 and a half hours to fix this.

I checked my own website through a browser and discovered that my website had completely disappeared from the web and I was unable to connect using FTP to the webserver of my own site. At length, I was able to connect using FTP and began to upload my site files. At some point, I realized that the default public folder name had been changed on the host side, and that although my files were visible, they were not the ones that would be accessible from the primary domain.
We tried configuring Jennifer's access the same way but it refused to work. We tried everything, even the web-based utility provided by company creditcardnameweb, which only allows you to upload a single file at time and not any folders.
I feel like this isn't sounding bad enough. Let's be sure to say that two hours went by where we looked all over her computer to see if FTP was blocked and we looked all over the admin client for the company creditcardnameweb to see if the FTP account was configured wrong, and we finally sent the support guy another email with the configurations we were using, a trace route to the ftp site, and the error messages we were receiving.
We gave up and had lunch.
Coming back, I began to try again to figure it out. At length, I set up her site in my computer, and was able to FTP her files and everything was great.
At this point, she could no longer access her site in the web browser on her computer.
What the heck? It's 5:37, her files are uploaded, I can see them on my computer, but she can't see them on hers. She has combed through her security and browser settings and can't seem to change this.
My site still has no webpages! I have written to company creditcardnameweb myself and haven't heard back yet.

There is a dark side to the Internet. It's company creditcardnameweb!

Plagiarism is Dead

2007-03-12T13:05:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Lethem was interviewed by Terry Gross Monday on Fresh Air. He has a new book You Don't Love Me Yet in which he recasts plagiarism as "value-neutral." Issues of appropriation and attribution are not new in the arts, but have generally been given a context that allows for societal and legal assessment: students copy other works with the understanding that students are not assessed with the same expectations; "real" artists use appropriation as a means of commenting or elaborating on previous works. In today's mashup and mixdown culture, some are postulating that plagiarism of music and images is kind of over. But writers of scholarly or popular works are still held accountable for using their own original words.

Lathem is interested in creating a more communal approach to writing. His Promiscuous Materials Project puts his words out for others to adapt and adopt as they will. In his overview of this project, he states: "My thinking along these lines has been strongly influenced by Open Source theory and the Free Culture movement, and by Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift."

He points to the Wikipedia entry on Open Source Culture, which in turn points to a "mediography" on Open Source Culture. This list includes content related to Dangermouses' Grey Album, a the internationally-famous mashup of the Beatle's White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album. The battle over the copyright issues related to this groundbreaking musical re-use collage was intense, and involved many heavyweights bound to put a stop to the whole thing. But in the end, all efforts faded under the sheer demand for the re-mixed content. For those who want to mashup, this battle was a triumph. For those who want to guard, is any rock and roll song really original anyway? For everyone else: if you make anything digital today, be prepared to share...

Don't Be an A******

2007-03-11T17:44:00.000-04:00

NPR has been full of stories about Robert Sutton's new book The No A****** Rule. The website Fifty Lesson has a video of him talking about the rule. He says something that seems like a worthy follow-up to avoiding a lighthouse:

"If you start reading management books the message tends to be [...] the more you care the better things are going to be. My argument is actually is very often in life, learning not to care and learning to be indifferent is incredibly important and it's something we don't teach people enough. So if you are in a situation where there is nothing that you can do about changing it, you might as well just ignore it and go on and do what's best for you, maybe hide from your boss a little bit. But indifference and not caring is something I think that we need to teach people to get better at. And it's harder to do that in life, but it's one of my goals as an adult is to start getting better and better at figuring out what doesn't matter to me and ignoring it."

Lighthouse Means Stay Away

2007-03-11T00:06:00.000-05:00

Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology can usually be counted on for a quasi-oracular, semi-poetic, tie-dyed trip through the metaphor. This week, my horoscope asks me to consider what in my life is acting like a lighthouse. And I began to wonder what a lighthouse acts like.

Citing the poem Treasure Island by Keith Althaus, Rob suggests that lighthouses are not just beacons of safety, but beacons of danger.

So, lighthouses aren't really telling you to "come here," they are telling you to stay away from the rocks, get back from the sand bar, stay off the shoals. You don't go to lighthouses. But if you're lost in the fog, don't you want to?

Blogger Dear Elena has something to say about lighthouses, quoting Stephen Covey's story of a ship on unalterable course warning off a smaller boat, only to learn that it is a lighthouse that must be avoided. His point is to avoid those things that can't be changed. As I read through his other posts, I realize that his blog begins immediately following the death of his six year old daughter. It feels unbearably personal. What is this phenomenon where people cast their words out into the world, so small in the vast Internet, like pennies too small to ripple in the ocean? And yet, here I am reading his words, and wondering about his loss and his life, which is thrown into relief by the passing beams of his posts.

Rome Wasn't Built in A Day

2007-03-06T00:40:00.000-05:00

The second season of HBO's Rome has me reading Edith Hamilton's The Roman Way and looking around the Internet to see what people are saying about the veracity and value of the series. There seems to be a consensus on the HBO Rome forum that this season is losing its way, migrating from the historical into the fantastical.

Last season, I was struck by how in spite of how much Latin I had translated about Pompey and Caeser and the Civil War, I had somehow missed the basics of the story. I had struggled with Lucan's Pharsalia, which was written in a florid and lurid mix of ten-year-old boy-style-gore and obscure and digressive poetical allusion. Small events would be engulfed in entire paragraph-long sentences of metaphor: As in the Cyntherian rites, when the hills would ripple with the golden fleece of lambs and young maidens would cry and the wolves would howl on the occasion of seeing the glorious promise of spring, and all of the winds and the heavens would conspire to bring the heavy javelins of Jupiter into the midst of clamour and tumolt, so did the young warriors crest the flank of battle, all too soon their blood boiling on the hard plains of Pharsalia.

Rome depicts the actual events in a straightforward way, with at least as much fidelity as Lucan, if I understand his standing correctly. He is considered a better poet than a historian, and if that is true, his history must be lousy!

Oh, the humiliation I endured in that terrible class from that tiny, antediluvian, misogynistic, seersuckered professor alternatively sneering at the girls, encouraging the boys, and fondly enunciating every syllable of the gore.

Every generation finds its way to the Romans. I recently found out that two of my acquaintances, most unlikely to have an interest in Classics, have become hooked on Rome. Good story, good acting, mediocre history, or perhaps just the usual abuse of history for the sake of art, and proof that sex and drugs and rock and roll are as eternal as Rome itself.

Blog posts on Rome:
Hybernaut Talks about Historical Inaccuracies
Glaukopidos Runs Down the Latest Episode

Rome on HBO

Today is the last day of the first of my life

2005-06-03T14:31:00.000-04:00

Now that Arianna Huffington has invented blogging my old life is over and my new life hasn't started yet. But I am really grateful that she has helped those 500 people with the biggest opinions get them out there, so they are no longer suffering in silence. I can only hope that one day my opinion will be as big and fat as Arianna Huffington's blog's...