"Shortwave Spectacle" [mp3 removed -- some of this got incorporated into Shortwave Spectacle (Electropercussion) on Bandcamp]
Autopanning tremelo sequences pile on top of each other, then a "bolero" type rhythm enters, then a confectionary piano-ish tune comes in to rescue the track from the noisy mounting textures.
"Indoor Skeleton" [mp3 removed]
Growly analogue synth bit with echoing e-piano and a flanged breakbeat.
Paddy Johnson quotes Ryder Ripps:
“Art lives within society, and society by definition is social,” he says. “So if you’re not making an impact on many people, you’re not going to be a known artist. There’s the folk model, the Henry Dargers of the world who get discovered after the fact, but to me that’s really bleak and not glamorous at all.”
If the choice is between (a) schmoozer, attention junkie, and starter-of-a-million-projects and (b) Henry Darger, I'll take "(b)," minus the sexual kinks and closet serial killer accusations, if possible. Darger created a world to escape into because he could barely function in "(a)" mode--that's not depressing, it's kind of beautiful.
As for Ripps' work, his GIFs are great and co-creating a website (dump.fm) where they could be part of a common pictorial language is enough to earn him canonical status, whatever the value of all the later bonding and site creation might be. Even outsiders could "shut up and dump."
A: Stopped reading Andrew O'Hehir's Salon review of the The Thing prequel at the words "tough female protagonist."
B: Why, are you a sexist?
A: Per a theory floated in Anne Billson's thoughtful BFI paperback on John Carpenter's Thing, the tough female protagonist is...the Thing. All the rest of the cast, every hairy one of them, is male, and the movie is about 12 men being ripped open, torn in half, chomped and suffocated by a shape-shifting Will to Chaos that would make Luce Irigaray proud--a "true femme fatale," in Billson's phrase. The mutual suspicion and macho Lack of Community among this crew is ultimately as devastating as the monster. Billson notes that after 1982 no Hollywood movie would be cast entirely with men, and The Thing's political incorrectness is ultimately a strength. (Reservoir Dogs is a later exception but it is an "indie" and its director famously admires Carpenter's Thing.)
B: Huh, well, not everyone likes Irigaray.
A: And besides, the movie about the tough female protagonist going up against the Iragarayan Will to Chaos has already been made, once by Ridley Scott and once by the hack James Cameron. We don't need to see those again.
B: Huh.
Computer art pioneer Manfred Mohr has a show up at Bitforms in NYC. Haven't seen it but I did talk about his work a couple of times when he showed there in '04.
Mohr himself commented on the first post (speaking of fighting in comments). Am a little embarrassed for going nuclear on a canonical figure, but he was correcting something that doesn't matter much: who was the first artist to do "variations of incomplete open cubes"? The drift of the post was that, as Rosalind Krauss explained in her essay "LeWitt in Progress," such supposedly ratiocinative extrapolations as working through dozens or hundreds of variations of a geometric form are more about filling an existential vacuum a la Samuel Beckett that limning the "look of thought" (a phrase Donald Kuspit had applied to Sol LeWitt in the early '70s). Science and logic exist to avoid redundancy, not to celebrate it, she explained in that essay.
I was sort of complimenting Mohr for (i) having the good sense to do his exhaustive variations with a machine rather than by hand and (ii) admitting his aim was "visual invention" rather than conceptual pedantry. To quibble over whether he or LeWitt "did it first," then, seemed to rather miss the point.
edits for clarity, tone
