Start again….
Still from Starting Over, 2000 Video installation.
Welcome. Once I had this website, see, through AOL, with a couple of sad pages on it and I never did anything with it. Then I tried to register a domain in my name and someone was squatting it (they still are, for all I know). Then I registered this other domain and never did anything with that. Then I built a site on it using the cheesy tools the host provided, which was up for a year or so until the hosting agreement ran out ( I wasn’t paying attention) and the site was taken down. That was so long ago that I’m embarrassed to tell you. Now finally I’ve been able to reactivate this site that you’re looking at. It’s still being built out, and there is a lot more to come, including, hopefully, an archive of any and all of my work that I have documentation of, craft projects, and visitor forums. For now, you can scroll down to see the blog I’ve been maintaining for the past six years. To the right you’ll find pages that detail my professional life, and below that, links to what I find interesting. Please poke around and let me know what you think of things so far. I can be contacted via gmail, the name being of course naylandblake . I look forward to hearing from you.
What’s new:
07.10.2009: Added the year 1988 to the Selected Works page.
07.25.2009: Added three new items to the online bibliography page.
09.18.2009: Changed appearance, and made new index page.
09.19.2009: Added gallery of self pictures to the about Nayland Blake page.
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Oh those hot contents
Dear, dear self,
This is a gentle reminder that if you read the style section of the Times, it is very likely that you will want to go on a killing spree. Killing sprees will result in less time to draw or do other things, and would limit the your contact with friends. Killing sprees don’t clean your apartment or walk Lehigh. So it’s probably best to avoid the the whole thing by refusing to read the style section. Try “Personal Tech” instead.
Toodles,
You know who
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Eye of the dragon…
Back in the air
My trip to the West Coast was cut even shorter by New York snows, but was quite pleasurable;e all the same. Now I’m making use of in-Air wifi. I should have written an elaborate post before logging on so I could just cut and paste, but it didn’t happen. And now the person in front of me is in full recline, which means that my keyboard is shoved into my gut, and a lot of typing isn’t going to happen. So, LA peeps, I would have let you know I was on my way in to your fair town but as I had less than 48 hours to spend, and some special business to attend to, we’ll just have to mark it down for next time.
Tags: daily photo, los angeles, travelRelated posts
Adressed to the day that just passed…
Yesterday, you were not my favorite day, combining as you did crushing deadlines, bad news, missed chances and cascading data loss. Oh, and I got fatter. And I didn’t get home until way too late. And things got misplaced.
All in all a day of bad communication and ouchiness.
Today, you’ve been just marginally better, but I’m still struggling under the confusion engendered by your predecessor.
(after a breath)
I don’t like the current fuzziness that has taken up residence between my ears, because it feels like my life is sliding out of my grasp. That may seem a little harsh, but after this summer’s experience with quiet and contemplation, I’m sorrowful that I seem to have lost the knack for bringing my attention to bear on things and moving forward.
Tags: daily photo, eeyore, emotionsRelated posts
The last screen of the day
Another glut of screens, and hopefully with the writing of this entry, an end to it for the day. The garbage has been taken out, my clothes have been somewhat arranged into a neater configuration and on thee streets, the rain is removing the last of the snow (although I’m told there’s more on the way).
It was too wet to really take out my camera today, so I mostly processed pictures from last night, taken on my way to and from a low-key TES member’s meeting. I’d love to get my house in better shape before my departure out west this weekend, but there’s not a lot of free time before now and then. I sent off a group of original drawings for a show in Davis, California, and it reminded me how lax I’ve been in updating my website. So here it is: I need an intern or assistant. I’ve got to start looking around in earnest. I need someone who can handle scheduling and digital work, someone who can pitch in with me to take care of decluttering the workspace (which is my home these days) and who I can trust with some of my privacy. In the past, I’ve had some fantastic people helping me but it’s really been to long since I’ve consistantly kept up with all that good work they put in.
So I’m putting this out to the universe, and I think I’m going to make a couple of calls to people I know. The real problem is that I can’t really pay much of anything at this point, a situation I’m hoping to rectify in the coming months. Until I can, the intern approach seems most likely.
Tags: assistant, clutter, daily photoRelated posts
There’s probably a peanut in there somewhere…
I’m trying to work up interest for my current book It Didn’t Happen Here, an analysis of the failures of American Socialism. It’s got all the hallmarks of “doctoral thesis turned to book”, and you may have guessed that that doesn’t translate to “gripping prose style”. Thing is, I have a very hard time just scanning: usually once I crack the cover on a book I tend to go all the way through.
But I think I know the answer to this already: Marxism, while providing a compelling analysis of societies where capital is aligned with fixed class structures, it has not proved to be a useful predictive tool in any meaningful sense. It combines the rationalism of the enlightenment with the mechanistic world view of the nineteenth, and as such has a hard time imagining situations where groups of people act in irrational ways. For example: the church in Europe has been for the most part an agent of class conservatism, even after the reformation. In the US, religious vitality has more often than not been the result of class resentment and anti-authoritarianism. Thus it was much easier to organize a proletariat in Europe by attacking organized religion.
So perhaps the question shouldn’t be why didn’t Socialism succeed in America, but rather why should we expect it to? In any event, unless something unexpected interrupts the assertion-proof-citation-conclusion cycle, I may have to make an exception and just move along to another volume.
Tags: books, daily photo, politicsRelated posts
Picture and an unrelated thought…
You know, there is nothing about any sort of Jedi that I find even remotely interesting.
Tags: daily photo, fandomRelated posts
This is food…
On the ground, or why this post doesn’t have a snappy title…
More time mucking about with the Nikon. I’m beginning to warm to it, although I hate using the view finder. It irritates me always having the camera lens identified with the eye.
I’ve just finished Jaron Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget, a driven critique of online life and current trends in computing. Jaron was a Bard while I was there, and gained a reputation as a “cyber-visionary” in the late 80’s, so he’s not coming at this from an anti-tech perspective. He understands the ways that the architecture of the internet and especially what has been touted at Web 2.0 information structures can diminish the possibilities for social conciousness not to mention social change. He’s particularly savage about structures build on information aggregation such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia.
There’s a lot in the book that mirrors recent thoughts I’ve been having, and I’m happy to see how forcefully he argues for the individual quirks of each of us as being the most valuable. Some of it is meandering, but it’s core thesis, that the advocates of computer convergence and transcendence are leading us down a path of moral philosophical and fiscal collapse, is bitingly apt.
I was thinking about this last night when discussing the ways that online interactions can drive out nuanced communication between people: say you have a profile somewhere online, like a dating site. When you fill it out, you have a a space restriction. You are tempted to be terse and in doing so reach for those words that will have the most impact. You are also driven by the language of those around you: saying you enjoy something seems tepid compared to saying IT RULEZ!!!!!. The temptation to grab for the most attention in the shortest time echoes throughout our current media. In essence we are all being encouraged to think like advertisers, the field that has had the most experience with shocking imagery and punchy slogans. Advertising is all about stopping the thought process and starting the purchase process. It tries to avoid ambiguity, deploying it only in certain situations as an enticement to find resolution by identifying what’s for sale. It revels in repetition, regularity.
I think that as communication vehicles become more and more condensed, the temptation is to make each utterance louder and more aggressive. There are people who’s blogs I read online who seem to describe themselves in only two states of consciousness: utter ecstasy, or dire peril. Either they are orgamsing over a cupcake they ate or they are going to commit suicide because a lightbulb burned out. These are not shallow people, but they have adopted a rhetorical structure to represent their experience that makes them seem shallow. And certain aspects of online communities reward that rhetoric by normalizing it.
Over the past year I’ve been reading a number of blogs about blogging, sites like problogger or copyblogger or writetodone. I got started with them by chance, thinking that they were about “productivity” in some way, but now I see that they are about trying to monetize the online experience. There are endless posts about SEO (for and against), about “passion” in your writing, about “storytelling” and message delivery. It’s a weird mix of hucksterism and self actualization and the more I’ve read it the more I’ve worried about my own blog, whether I could be upping my page rankings and so on.
I don’t need to point out to you that this is ludicrous, but it’s the subtle pressure of groupthink combined with technology structures that tempts me down that path. Because the web offers something that I have come to think of as response, I become habituated to and desirous of that response. On livejournal it’s the number of comments. On twitter it’s chat and retweets, on tumblr it’s “likes” and new “followers”. “Friends” on Facebook. Google analytics shows me how many people looked at my website daily, how long they stayed and what they looked at. But it tells me nothing about the individual nature of those “visits”, turning all of them into the same interchangeable units of time and click. And I think in doing so, it has encouraged me to devalue them.
I’m going to risk a formulation here: Social structures that rely on interchangeability inevitably produce cheapness, creating junk. Making food stuffs interchangeable in their production and distribution produces junk food. Interchangeable bits produce junk thought and junk emotion. When you have one unit of currency, you think you know the value of everything because you have a convenient way to measure it. But ultimately, such measuring devices are zombies, killing off every thing that doesn’t fit to their standard, and making all else the same. Once everyone is screaming at the same pitch, anything we might meaningfully call communication ceases. Sure, everyone speaks, everyone is heard, but “hearing” and “speaking” no longer mean anything.
I’m not yet sure where I’m going with this, in terms of what it might mean for my own practices. But I do know that I’m going to take a close look at what I choose to do online, and where I choose to do it.
Jaron’s book is well worth the read – I’d urge you to pick it up.
Tags: advertising, books, daily photo, Jaron Lanier, online life, rantlet, reading
