Archive for the ‘reading’ tag
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, readingRelated posts
Twenty is as does…
Why does it seem like some alarm is going off over and over?
Spent way too much time entering urls, because I got obsessed when I should have just delegated.
That was a good salad I made my way through this evening; spinach, avocado, beans, greens.
Creativity is frightening, overwhelming; the best art instruction should strive not to domesticate that information.
Frightening because it is the engine of change.
The way to handle such change is to make it habitual, to internalize and observe it daily.
That’s the way I’d do it if I were superhuman.
Here are the pleasures of comic book narrative: the continuing opening and stitching up of narrative loops; the greater distance encompassed by the stitch, the greater the pleasure.
We enjoy seeing a pattern emerge from a great distance.
It’s reassuring.
The TV tells me “The snow is already falling” and I look out of the window to see that it’s true.
Yes, the streets are dusted.
I miss snuggling with Lehigh who is being well looked after by my Mom.
In the space between lines, between sentences, between all too stolid thoughts is a challenge to what I know.
Step into that challenge.
This morning I read Toni Bentley’s review of Catherine Millet’s book Jealousy in the New York Times and while I haven’t read the book in question, I found the smirking triumphalism if the review repulsive.
It looks like I’m going to be doing a show in New Zealand, and if so I’ll be heading there to install it.
Yes, I’ll check beneath every sheep for hobbits.
And now to clear more floor space.
Tags: art, daily photo, reading, twenty sentencesRelated posts
Twenty sentences that won’t change your life.
There’s a little something around my sinuses that feels like it could be a cold.
Last night’s flight home was smooth and undersold, which meant that I had two seats to slump into while I read a copy of The Age of American Unreason that I had picked up at the Nashville Airport.
It turns out I really did lose my Panasonic Lumix somewhere around the Austin Peay campus Tuesday night, so I can’t show you any pictures of the polaroids of hot hunters from the Bar B Q shack’s “Brag Wall”, because those pictures were on the SD card in the camera.
Coming back to work after being in such a different environment is always like taking a leap onto a moving train.
These days, one of the only constants in my life is my tumblr account.
It was snowing pretty seriously around my block this morning but I bet it’s all gone now.
I worry that I’m losing the capacity for sustained thought, but then I’ve been having that worry for the past twenty years or so.
In his book David Antin told an excellent story of how Herbert Marcuse ended up not teaching at my alma mater, CalArts.
Simply because someone has progressive political views, it does not automatically follow that they will have progressive views about art making or how art functions in society.
If as a student, you work hard, I’m not worried about whether or not you share my opinions or already know a lot; I know you’ll get to something interesting.
Right now, much of the art infrastructure that I knew in my youth is simply not producing much of interest.
Yes, I’m getting old: the cycles of excitement no longer seem unique to me.
The most interesting thing so far in Susan Jacoby’s book is her quick history of the American Lyceum movement, the TED lectures of the late 19th century.
I’m only a third of the way through the book.
I don’t have a business plan, or much of a plan plan for that matter.
I’m getting tired of my office knick-knacks, meaning it may be time for some redecorating.
“Never enough coffee” is not a sentence, unfortunately.
Right now, making art is, for me, like licking the contacts on a nine volt battery: tantalizing, a little painful, always calling me back and yet producing the smallest flop of sickness in my stomach’s pit, a sensation that feels like a warning.
Hey, I know some sexy people.
My back-up camera is nice and does some things very well, but I’ve been spoilt.
Tags: art, camera, daily photo, musings, readingRelated posts
Trash and Blur…
If you have time and 75.00 this weekend you should come and spend them both at Postcards from the edge VisualAIDS’s annual benefit, that allows you to buy great art inexpensively and support the practices and legacies of HIV+ artists at the same time. I have something in there as well as many more talented people.
I’m also going to have a few pieces up on display around town this month, which should be fun.
I left my David Antin book in the office, so that has meant that in the interim I’m reading other things: I finished The Best Sex Writing 2010 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. A mixed bag, but generally a good quick read. I can think of any number of people here on LJ whose posts would make excellent, thoughtful contributions. And I’m just starting in on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. So far I’m unimpressed, but it’s early days yet. At this rate I should have no trouble getting through those 52 books this year.
A few years back, someone asked me about what they perceived as my nostalgia for a lost time in San Francisco and I explained that my real yen was for New York at the time of my teen age years. Yesterday I stumbled across the home site of Allan Tannenbaum and through it an amazing gallery of photographs of New York in the Seventies much of it shot for the late, lamented Soho Weekly News. If you ignore the shockingly bad web design and look under the section called “Mondo Art” – you get a glimpse of the kinds of events and people that I so desperately wanted to be part of growing up. Is it any wonder I take so many black and white pictures?
And here is something else I ran into on-line this morning:
Let’s hope Latawnya learns her lesson!
Tags: a book a week, art world, big link friday, books, daily photo, new york in black and white, night, photography, readingRelated posts
And on to David Antin and The Prisoner
A glimpse of my stroll west last night.
It was way way cold, and when I returned home I didn’t want to do anything but finish up my viewing of the Prisoner and my reading of A Book of One’s Own. I’m toying with the idea of trying to read at least a book a week this year. But no resolutions, especially with so many things in flux. I’m just happy that I can get pictures taken and a bit of writing.
Home wifi is still no-go, which is a bit of a blessing in that I have fallen into a bad habit of continual image skimming in recent months. With only my iPhone to rely upon this morning, I did a bit of Tumblr posting and then quickly got my nose back in a book. The current one is i never knew what time it was by david antin. (If you noticed, the link is to St. Marks Bookstore, where I bought my copy, since I’m going to try to link to independent media sellers these days, as much as I use Amazon).
Antin is someone worth looking into, if you’ve never encountered him before: a verbal essayist/performance artist/teacher/thinker, who does something not quite like any one else. I’ve seen his work in person a few times and each time it taught me volumes about ways of making art. Watching him deliver one of his talks one can never be sure how much is premeditated and how much is occurring to him on the wing. He takes apart the notion of the artist making something art simply by paying attention to it by making you ask what exactly is paying attention.
Mallon’s book proved to be inspiring as well – pointing me to dozens of diaries I’d love to read. My favorite books are those that expose my own blindspots, and few diaries that I have been able to make it all the way through.
As for The Prisoner, this was my first truly end to end viewing of it. Previously I’ve caught episodes in various PBS marathons, and while familiar with most of it, I’d never seen the full arc before. Its subsequent influence is so great that I have to keep reminding myself of how different is was in its time. Taken piece by piece you’d have to say that there was not much special about it, but taken all together it constitutes an almost perfect cult object: detailed enough to suggest the possibility if completeness, but fragmentary enough to provide space for the fan’s interpolations. The supposed rule for show biz success is to “leave ‘em wanting more”, but the cult success relies on leaving them wanting a specific kind of more: the tantalizing missing bits that fans can exercise their imaginations in fleshing out. It’s doubtful that one can really go about doing this deliberately, although the current generation of artists seems hell bent on trying over and over again. But people love OZ in the way they do in spite of what Baum was trying to do in his books and not because of it. Any number of tv shows have suffered the wrath of fans at the moment of conlclusion or payoff. That is because most complete works of art give us what the creator decided was ultimately the point of their invention, and in doing so shoulder aside our ideas about what it would be neat to see happen. Cult works need to be both episodic to give us a wealth of moments and yet ultimately shapeless so as not to preclude our sense of how they should go.
In other works of art, what we as viewers do with the complete or incomplete is very different. I don’t expect A Dostoevsky novel to be fully resolved, but neither do I desire to “spend more time in its universe”. I look to the kinds of experiences it generates and the way it’s made as being sufficient unto itself without embellishments from me.
Tags: daily photo, David Antin, making art, night, reading, The Prisoner, tvRelated posts
Whither Whether Wither Weather…
Buzzing distractions once again. And it’s gone back to cold, which tends to make me pensive.
I did have a lovely Monday shopping trip with Lolita, after an initial communication breakdown. Twitter saved us from missing each other entirely.
I’ve been making my way through Thomas Mallon’s A Book of One’s Own, which offers the pleasures of Mallon’s commentary alongside a choice selection of morsels from dozens of diaries. Over and over again it gives me good reasons for writing here, even as I’ve been neglecting it. I wish I could say that it was because I was doing all this other writing some where else, but the truth is that my output is all of a bundle: either I’m in making mode or I’m shut down utterly.
This is as close as I’m going to come to a New Year’s resolution: Going forward, I’d like a steadier, more sustained (and sustaining) flow.
Now I’m off to the second of two unexpected meetings of the day.
Tags: blogging, daily photo, readingRelated posts
Who said what now?
This morning I woke to the fragment of a dream about an interview with Patti Smith, who was about to play “People Have the Power.”
My head has been buzzing with website ideas: more so content than formatting. I can tell that I still think about the stuff as a species of print publication more than as a dynamic system of information. Last night I took in Tati’s “My Uncle” with Thor and Jeff. A screening at the modern and it looked like it was the same exact print I had run through the 16millimete projector at Bard in 1980. In other words, a faded mess. I can only think that this was because it was the English version rather than the subtitled French one. So maybe no one has been looking after the prints?
Tati is the kind of director that makes you so attuned to nuance that after you leave his films everything around you looks like one of his artfully choreographed jokes. After the film, the way we all lined up up at MoMA’s urinals looked suspiciously silly. Mon Oncle is a movie where very little happens, but everything is closely observed: the charm of a street that never gets swept, a fight that never comes off, or a couple of dogs peeing.
This afternoon I picked up a book that I put down a couple of months ago, intending to finish it and had the odd experience of feeling that I had lost the author’s voice. It made me aware that I build up a narrator for everything I read, each with different intonations and having abandoned this one in the middle of a page, and having heard any number of additional voices in the intervening weeks, I couldn’t find the one I’d laid aside. So the reading seemed oddly flat and disjointed, muddled with other voices. When I’m reading, I’m relating to an author, a presence made in the warp of the writing that is distinct from the voice of a character (Pace Roland Barthes). I don’t need that author to be the ultimate producer of meaning for me, but I do let myself be wooed by their skills. Here’s why I’ve come to dislike Stephen King: I feel bullied by his italics, which seem like the equivalent of someone you’re close too very carefully and loudly drawing your attention to a really cool thing they just found, when the two fo you are alone in a room. The presumption that I’d feel his emphasis as naturally my own causes me to draw back in protest, so I end up trusting him less.
It makes me sad, because I used to gobble his stuff down until I got to the point where I felt like he was nudging me in the ribs over and over. He curses good, but it ain’t enough.
In any event, I’m going to have to settle back into the voice of my abandoned author. And speaking of culture, I’ve been eating an awful lot of yogurt these days. Hold over from being on Sylt. It doesn’t seem to be doing me much harm.
Tags: daily photo, friends, movies, readingRelated posts
Reasons to be cheerful…
Time to take a break from the troubling world of organizational mayhem for yours truly. The world is a big place with many very nice things in it. So in the spirit of Ian Drury, here are some of the things that bring a smile to my mug.
Reason one: El Rey Gnomo is staying with me and last night he took me to an incredible dinner at Mombar. I had rabbit, he had duck, oh and lamb cheeks, which are served hot with a lightly poached egg on top. At the table the server folded the egg into the rest of the dish, cooking it further. They were incredible. We finished up with the best baklava I’ve ever had. Then we came home and watched adult entertainment and were entertained.
Next reason: An excellent artist from San Francisco, Vincent Fecteau is having an opening tonight at my gallery. Vince and I used to work together, and I’ve seen his work develop from very early on. Aside from that he’s a great soul. I really look forward to seeing him, and the work he’s been doing.
Also: I use Firefox and I use Google Reader as a feed aggregator for keeping up on blogs. If you do also, you might do the following: use Feedly. Which formats your Google reader page into a simple magazine-like layout. It’s clean, easy to use and has become my daily newspaper. I’m much more likely to follow the big political blogs now that I can get them in a format that’s quick to get through.
And I just added this site to feedly: http://midtownlunch.com/ which I can’t believe I’ve never looked at before. The down and dirty and longing world of New York street food.
What else? I found out this past weekend that there are many people who have absolutely no trouble tormenting me given half of chance to do so. I mean that in the best possible way.
I’m in the midst of my sixth of Elizabeth Bear’s books, which I’m reading via the Kindle app on my iPhone. That app saved my hash on my trip to Sylt, because I was able to read and buy books without having to increase the size of my luggage. So the bounty of the iPhone, which brings me Elizabeth Bear’s books, which have in turn made me feel interested in scifi and fantasy again, gives me cheer.
Following John Larroquette on twitter makes me cheerful.
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s enough for now.
Oh yes, one more, as Ian reminds us: a bit of slap and tickle.
Tags: cheer, daily photo, good news, reading, softwareRelated posts
Both very gutteral the two of them…
A mostly inward weekend. During much of it I was working my way through the backlog of podcasts from the New York Review of Books. I’d subscribed on iTunes and made the mistake of adding all of my missed ones to my iPhone at once. They took up a lot of room so I determined to plow through them. while there was a lot of blather, I was also rewarded by the experience of listening to John Ashbery read as series of poems, and making an easy way through what has always seemed to be spiky and bewildering on the page. So much so that I began to get the jokes, and found myself laughing out loud on the subway a couple of times.
The most recent p-cast reminded me of a writer who has meant a lot to me since I first encountered him in college: Flann O’Brian, or more precisely Myles na Gopaleen, author of the column The Cruiskeen Lawn, which with the writings of S.J. Perelman marked the alpha and omega of my idealized post-adolescent snark. Consider this example.
Our current time is so saturated with the trappings of satire that real satire cannot gain purchase; we don’t need the satirist to kick over the sandcastle of our beliefs because we’ve already demolished them ourselves. But both of these men knew how to write funny, to think aslant and be willing to leave their readers puffing along behind them, without dropping breadcrumbs like “Why is it that when ever I go to the DMV…” Their humor is work fueled by devastating invention and assumes a level of conversance at least as high as that demanded of the reader by Ashbery.Tough to imagine the mind of of the editor of the Irish Times when faced by the latest piece of Cruiskeen Lawn copy, especially since it often required special illustrations or typographic arrangements that would have played hell with the page layout.
In the podcast that put me back in mind of na Gopaleen, the idea was tossed out that the column, taken as a whole, was a work that stood alongside the best of O’Brian’s novels and made me think further about what could be the experience of this blog, were I to apply myself to it with some devotion.
www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/25
www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/27
Oh by the way: Dalkey Archive Press (named after a Flann O’Brian novel) is one of the best presses out there. So why not buy stuff from them directly? Also I think it was my friend David Henderson who introduced me to O’Brian.
Tags: books, daily photo, humor, Myles na Gopaleen, NYRB, podcasts, readingRelated posts
Yes…
There is some sort of water park here.
Overcast today, in the way that doesn’t portend breaking up later. I’ll make the walk into town after lunch anyway. The usual confused dreams about relocating studio, looking at possible rooms to rent, etc. The location shifting between San Francisco and Brooklyn.
The things I thought I’d get done here and those I have done. I’ve read eight books. I expected to edit and repost most of the pictures of my work from my old website. No such luck. I’ve done more bike riding than I have in the past ten years, which is not to say much, but still. I returned the rental bike rather than renewing it for the final week, without regret. I enjoy the long walks. I’ve spent very little time hanging out on the beach. Silly because it’s only fifteen minutes away. I thought I would wade through all the podcasts backed up on my iPhone: nope.
And I didn’t think that I’d post so regularly here. It’s proved very easy to get online, perhaps a little too. And I’ve come to have the habit of daily photographing and posting. And I’m very happy with the little eeepc. It has exceeded my expectations in the past year. Last week in the cafe, it was one of three petite Asus models in operation. I haven’t felt it as limited in any way. Little more than a year of use, so we’ll see how it does on durability.
And I’ve drawn a bunch. Not quite as much as I’d hoped initially, but there it is. There’s still a few days left, and I’ve the feeling that I may have some developed some momentum to carry me into the next month.
And boy have I missed folks!
Tags: daily photo, eeepc, reading, Sylt, travel