March 2008

I was working on a painting and it was not going well. This must have been a flashback to art school because I was sitting at a table with other people while I was working. Part of the painting was abstract but I was trying to do this illustrational thing up in one corner. Someone showed me a book of cartoony drawings done in gouache or acrylic that looked like a cross of Robert Williams and David Sandlin. They were really good and just made me frustrated that my own piece wasn't going well. I started heaping paint on my canvas, giant crinkly wads of it, so that it was sliding off the sides and getting all over the table and my hands.

Just then, a college friend of mine walked in and sat down at the table. He was a heavy set individual, and brought with him a breakfast tray groaning with food. Three or four stacks of pancakes, each stack about 8 or 10 pancakes high, giant heaps of bacon strips, everyone at the table was staring in awe at the food, which looked like an art installation (and was certainly more interesting than my painting).

Update: Freudian explanation: my landlord has been varnishing the floor outside my apt. and my downstairs neighbor likes to cook bacon and eggs.

ABC interviewed Dick Cheney, the VP too good to impeach, during his recent Middle East junket.

When asked about the toll multiple deployments have taken on U.S. military members, Cheney sarcastically asked the reporter how she would deal with it. Meaning he didn't know how he should.

A week earlier the same reporter asked Cheney about polls showing that "two-thirds of Americans say the fight in Iraq is not worth it."

Cheney's reply was "So?" The new meme the Administration is putting out is that Lincoln, like Bush, was also unpopular and weighed down heavily by a war. The countermeme is Honest Abe was re-elected in 1864 at the bottom of his popularity. Also an elective war in Iraq isn't the same as a war of national unification where a key issue was slavery.

Cheney's views on the world and politics are roughly at the level of old guys you see sitting on courthouse steps in small towns, whittling and hawking phlegm onto the sidewalk. It's disturbing he's still being given a respectful forum to air them and inflict them on others.

Update: Evidently the Lincoln analogy wasn't going too well so now Cheney's saying the Iraq War is like Ford's pardon of Nixon (i.e., reviled at the time but best for all in the long run). Whatever, Dick.

A Nasty Nets DVD has been sponsored by Rhizome.org and is or will be sold in the New Museum bookstore. It consists of a "data" part and a "video" part. The data part is files uploaded by NN members (audio, images, videos, web pages, "other") to a group page and burned to DVD in folders; the video plays in a DVD player and is a continuous narrative of member content edited by NN member Joel Holmberg.

Have been perusing the Data part and wanted to give some (non-exclusive) shout outs. Many of the folders appear to be image file collections taken straight off members' hard drives, which is excellent.

Camille Paloque-Berges: thanks for the math and science GIFs, great archive! Clicking through it while listening to Travis Hallenbeck's sndrec (Windows sound recorder) piece made this blog's day.

Javier Morales' collection of images shows a discerning eye for web junk. On the website Morales's posts were difficult and off-putting but one kept thinking about them; his were the only contributions to deal consistently with sexual or taboo content. But he's not on the video part of the DVD! It's Holmberg's call 'cause he did the work but that seems like omission (repression?) of a key part of the site. It's true Morales did the DVD cover but that's not as rewarding as letting him "wreck the flow" of the video.

For the sake of nerdy listmaking/remembering made some notes re: Morales' contributions to Nasty Nets; unfortunately some of the YouTubes he linked to no longer exist. The image above (cropped at the sides) is his, as well.

Daxflame
Most Aggressive Use of Marquee Tag
Changing Artwork Constantly After It is Posted
Master Ryker
YouTube of kid doing bong hit in car, commenter hitting on him: I, SMOKING, MY PIPES TOBACCOS, SINCE THE 18 YEARS, WITH TOBACCOS AROMATICS VAINILLA, AND MY BLUE JEANS LEVI’S 501.
Multiple Manimal YouTubes
Cum Cult
Clown Sex
What's Your Prison Name?

Posting the above list of hot button terms promises a year of unwanted hits but the sacrifice must be made.

guthrie has been narrating Vvork on Twitter. He's having a hard time keeping up with the site that has more art than there are people on Earth so I added some captions today. Some of these are his and some are mine. I realize this defeats the "presentness" of Twitter, oh well:

Apollo 11 on a scale of 1:1 made of wood
sculpture reconstruction of the "oldest piece on earth" rock
photogrid of blue collar Asian males
two email programs out of office autoreply each other
web page where page can be turned like physical page
pretty ethno-geographic photos of unidentifed nature and ruins
3d architectural model art
black and white flavinlike installations that look like graphics
solid grey smashed car
various materials stuffed into freestanding cabinet like Tetris
ordinary objects piled to create art in ordinary settings (photographed and blanked out)
bright light spins around room
2000 white books installed in public libraries
photos taken in russia by westerner
art with two motorcycle helmets connected back to back
astronaut on knees (sculpture)
photos of people holding signs with text photoshopped out
metallic mushroom cloud (sculpture) about 6 hours ago from web
sculpture of man standing, metal, headless, with bumps on back and lower left leg
black sculptures of woman standing, different levels of polygon simplification, shiny
bus with funhouse mirror sides, party inside
reflective sculpture, abstract
artist raises floor in hallway
wall projection of ants (green)
photographic reproductions of works by internationally known artists, downloaded from the internet, printed at original size and sold
artist arranged library books with "modern" in the title
artist hung library books with faded covers on wall
things hung from ceiling, lights
art with dudes walking on beach (black and white)
log cabin installed in gallery (with figure)
giant LED clock shows only "beautiful times"
backwards running clock hangs above mirroring water surface, appears to run forward
trip sequence from "2001" ten times, offset by a frame

This list will be supplemented if there is any spare time today.