July 2014

A reason attempts to parody internet content will always fail is the superabundance of effectively self-parodying content. Case in point: "Experience Regina" [YouTube] (hat tip Rising Tensions)

From the irrepressible YouTube commentariat:

Alain Lemay via Google+ 1 year ago

Possibly the worst tourism video ever created. Complete with Seindfeldesk music riffs and an underage girl in a bikini. And what's with that no-uterus pic at 2:23?

ThaReal JmanV 7 months ago
It's supposed to be not vagina. Regina. Get it? I know hilarious, right?

"Elevator Mixtape" by IEJ [Vimeo]
Apparently people posting video footage of escalators on YouTube and elsewhere is a "thing." IEJ made a compilation. Update, from an email from IEJ: "As far as I can tell, the escalator recording community is a subset of the elevator recording community who have their own wikipedia. I linked to the page of dieselducy who took the video you can see in the preview freezeframe (mall in Roanoke VA) [in IEJ's mixtape]. He's big in that scene. ... Maybe they don't have the glamour of bridges and trains but elevators/escalators are ubiquitous anomalies themselves (they aren't everywhere - WY only has two and the riders of the first one in Kurdistan are happy and confused)." Tom here: Documenting escalators is interesting to me in an "all the buildings on the sunset strip" way, only crowdsourced. These are unobserved phenomena that take on an aesthetic dimension through mass recording.

"Wistle While You Twerk" by Ying Yang Twins [YouTube]
America woke up to twerking with Miley Cyrus, but this song, from the album Thug Walkin', released in 2000, shows that it's been around for 14 years, at least! Join Doc, Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, and the rest of the gang with this happy anthem.

Addendum: The German group Trio is considered a one-hit wonder of the '80s (for "Da Da Da - I Don't Love You - You Don't Love Me ") but they were a pretty good band, as seen in a collection of German TV performances assembled by Network Awesome. In fact most '80s one hit wonders are that way because of the music industry's insistence on hits.

cosmicsands has transcribed the text of Kevin Bewersdorf's Issue Project Room reading on Rap Genius, a site for crowdsourcing lyrics, poetry, etc. Based on this, the phrase "Taoist poetry about the internet" in the previous post is a bit confining. There is Eastern influence but also a tone of Walt Whitman-esque celebration, in poems such as "Who is using the internet?" (see below). A poem like this walks a line between being savvy enough to characterize an ocean of data, with ever-shifting codes of hipness and obscurity, while "opening its heart" to that data as if it were Whitman's democratic throngs. Missing is the even more delicate balance of some of the earlier work, before Bewersdorf's road-to-Damascus moment of deleting his website and (ostensibly) going offline, between understandable revulsion at phenomena such as dozens of stock photos of people praying and an attempt to write sincere praise in a tone that mimics both religious awe and corporate sales motivation.

"Who is using the Internet?"

Who is using the Internet?
In my eyes, the sun is.
Dragon dorks.
Shark dorks.
Los Angeles Latinas.
Mystical comedians.
Cable guys.
Credit card registrants.
Grown men in developing countries.
Dream weavers.
Translators.
Native peoples.
Inverse porn stars.
Someone typing randomly.
The descendants of Adam and Eve.
Adam Sandler, and his descendants.
Cranky flowershop owners.
Anyone who's seen the sun.
The employed.
The powerfully obsessed.
The politically ejaculating.
Those committing heinous crimes,
As well as the dying,
Their caregivers,
Your parents
And your lover.
Paleface, my heart goes out to you.

corrections to transcription can be added on Rap Genius

A critic, let's call him Eliot, questioned my criticism of Kevin Bewersdorf's "leaving the web as art," which seems to have become a canonical new media gesture.
The gesture itself had several components.
The artist had a body of work, just a couple of years in duration after he left school, consisting of Church of the Subgenius-like ironic scriptural writings (but on the whole, not as good) where the aims of religion were combined with corporate branding happy talk. This was augmented by art and video.
He was invited to participate in a performance event in connection with the New Museum's Younger Than Jesus show. From the stage, he announced that he was going to remove all his work from the web over a three year period. Gradually the website diminished, until all that remained was a tiny image of a flickering flame.
During this time period he was meditating, and also continued to be involved anonymously with the Spirit Surfers group blog.
This year he "re-emerged" as a sincere follower of the Tao, and now writes Taoist poetry about the internet, a reading of which Rhizome.org recently organized.

My criticism has several components:
There was confusion as to whether the artist's interest in "the spirit," pre-quitting, was ironic or sincere.
There is confusion about whether he really left -- is the art work about leaving the web or just erasing your "brand"?
Does it matter if the brand isn't sincere to begin with?
In response to canonizing quitting, I tossed off on twitter the statement that "the real heroes are the people who kept working while the seeker was off wandering in the wilderness."

Eliot pounced!
He asked if going offline couldn't also be working. And he said that comparing working and non-working was an apples/oranges scenario that he wasn't interested in.
This changed the frame of the discussion from "good vs bad gesture" to the virtues of work vs non-work.
If Eliot believes that Bewerdorf's gesture is good, he is making an evaluation, in the face of an argument to the contrary. But he doesn't have to debate it, he can ascend to the lofty plane of not wishing to weigh a Judeo-Christian or Taylorist notion of work against a Zen-like or Dadaist gesture of denial. That's just not instructive, you understand.

Update: cosmicsands has transcribed the text of Bewersdorf's Issue Project Room reading on Rap Genius, a site for crowdsourcing lyrics, poetry, etc. Based on this, the phrase "Taoist poetry about the internet" above is a bit confining. There is Eastern influence but also a tone of Walt Whitman-esque celebration, in poems such as "Who is using the internet?" Missing is some of the delicate balance of some of the earlier work, between understandable revulsion at phenomena such as dozens of stock photos of people praying and an attempt to write sincere praise in a tone that mimics both religious awe and corporate sales motivation.