thanks to stage for the collage and Dadayumn for the TV
November 2010
This Heaven Gives Me Migraine
Simon Reynolds has spotted a Gang of Four song ("Natural's Not In It") used in an X-Box commercial. It's just the guitar intro--they had to cut away from lyrics that say:
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal love, a new purchase
A market of the senses
Dream of the perfect life
Economic circumstances
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest
Remember Lot's wife
Renounce all sin and vice
Dream of the perfect life
This heaven gives me migraine
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
...which seems especially relevant for a Wii type game ("a new purchase - the body is good business"). The advertisement transposes the gritty lower class "punk" milieu of Gang of Four to nicely dressed people spazzing out in upscale suburban living rooms as they run in place and kick virtual soccer balls. You really have to admire the high-paid advertising "Mad Man" who came up with the line "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." This person probably has, like, an English major.
More Facebook Anxiety
Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz:
Given all of the information that has leaked out about private info on Facebook well, leaking out, I decided to get aggressive with the settings:
I removed all applications that accessed my data;
I turned almost every privacy setting to maximum;
I deleted nearly all page, group, game, and application requests
This was overdue. Maybe I am being paranoid, but Facebook is starting to get a bit creepy . . .
This inspired some comments, mostly from people bugged by Facebook ("Facebook is STARTING to get a bit creepy?").This comment from "spridgets" is unfortunate if it's typical:
As much as I agree with you that the privacy fails are a problem, I’ve found that Facebook is become much like a RSS feed, and there are several media outlets and bloggers that post their updates there, without which I would be checking their sites far less often.
I shouldn't care about someone who uses "fail" as a noun but suspect spridgets is the typical lazy person who trusts ZuckerBorg to aggregate his/her news and won't go looking for it outside of that comforting gated news community. This is why a good, independent (non-Apple, non-Facebook) newsreader would be nice to have. Bloglines appears to be continuing but no idea what will happen to it when the new owner, MerchantCircle, takes over from Ask.com. The word Merchant in the name suggests that Bloglines will soon be trying to sell me stuff.
Buoys (GIFs, html)
Buoys is an HTML page I made from a couple of animated GIFs posted to dump.fm. I enlarged one of them (which I assume is a buoy), "broke" the layering of transparency of the frames, saved it as a color and black and white version, layered the B&W version over another GIF (a spinning rainbow cylinder), and made the two resulting images into a diptych. These may be buoys but they are definitely not Beuys.
Am calling this series "html pages" because they are individual pages in the HTML 4.01 "medium" (requiring a browser and computer or mobile device to complete). I made them using an open source (Mozilla) program called Seamonkey, modeled on the old Netscape Composer. I notice the spec has changed and html tags now include CSS instructions for rendering tables and images. I kind of hate this because it makes designing a page less idiot-friendly. But I notice that if you type an old HTML command such as "bgcolor" (background color) into the html editor, Seamonkey converts that into CSS-speak.
[This is an issue for me mainly because I am self-taught web designer. About 10 years ago I decided that web pages were going to be the next paint and canvas (and gallery) and felt I needed to empower myself. Unfortunately web weenies keep upping the stakes ("you need to pay us to design pages, a-hole, so how about a little...CSS! muah hah hah") and only the most simple "paintings" are still within my grasp.
Update: And yes, I know "CSS isn't that hard" and many self-taught creators of the present are learning to do interesting things with it. I did manage to manhandle this blog into the shape I wanted by "poking" the CSS. If I could think of something I wanted to do creatively with CSS I would roll up my sleeves, I guess. Right now CSS manipulation seems a tad too artificial for me, for "art." The same way I'm suspicious of paintings that rely too much on hidden techniques.]
