December 2008

inside wildchatster's apartment (YouTube apartment tour with voiceover by Guthrie Lonergan)

...more 2008 offerings on Lonergan's recently revised web page, including the collection of depressing self-published book covers (now in 3d!), Google 3d warehouse drawings, a popular locution you might be aware of but at the same time not, and other gems.

Paddy Johnson is having a year-end fundraiser for her blog. Please consider contributing (here), even though times are lean. I concur with her self-assessment that her blog "represents a strong presence in an otherwise thin field of art world professionals working on the web. Considering how traditional media is currently gutting arts coverage, sites such as [hers] are not only important, but essential to the field of art criticism."

Johnson's blog is a necessary counterweight to the institutional writing that constitutes current criticism: magazines chasing ad dollars, 501c(3) organizations that have to say nice things about everyone, and museum curators at the beck and call of powerful board members. Johnson produces a staggering amount of original content each year, including interviews, essay series, and reportage. Her comment boards are moderated in a civilized fashion and are a good place to hash out issues that aren't being discussed elsewhere. Plus she is that rare writer that can cover both the art gallery scene and the online scene with equal knowledge and confidence.

If that's not enough reason, she has upset her commenter "Lisa":

I think highly of your site and wish you all the best with your fundraiser, but there’s still an underlying problem:

Newspapers have cut back on their coverage precisely because bloggers (many of them former newspaper writers or top freelancers) have been giving away the same kind of coverage for free. Now readers expect this content to be free. The idea that writers ought to be paid for their expertise seems to have vanished.

Dear Lisa, the demise of certain print writers' cults of power and personality and concomitant elevation of articulate but previously voiceless commoners is one of the best things that's happened in my lifetime. It's worth $25 to see that bloggers keep giving away content.

hippos by ricky at double happiness

found abstraction with arms, legs and tops of heads; polyrhythmic clicking soundtrack; chaos gradually resolving into order; observable and individual styles of game play; rigorous symmetry challenged by bobbing, rocking movement; play of light and shadow; unusual, severe camera angle; overt pop culture reference; mesh of nostalgia and aesthetic disassociation; medium that works across media (photography, flash video, social networking, "found object art," color field painting, amateur video).

From wikipedia:

In a 1990 short story published in The New Yorker (and sarcastically named after the game), Edward Allen wrote, "The object of the game [is essentially] to press your handle down again and again as fast as you can, with no rhythm, no timing, just slam-slam-slam as your hippo surges out to grab marble after marble from the game surface...."
[...]
In the episode of The Simpsons entitled "Mr. Plow", Homer says, "Now we play the waiting game... Eh, the waiting game sucks, lets play Hungry Hungry Hippos." Another Simpsons episode, Hungry, Hungry Homer is a reference to the game (as well as Homer being one of the four hippos). It also has a mention in Donnie Darko when Donnie informs his psychiatrist that he always wanted Hungry Hungry Hippos for Christmas but he never got any. The Futurama episode "300 Big Boys" features some homeless men who refer to themselves as "hungry hungry hobos."

Re: Milton Bradley dropping one of the "hungrys" in the game's name in 2008, that's corporate thinking in microcosm, "if it ain't broke, bland it down."

"Medium that works across media" is Damon Zucconi's phrase.