April 2015

particularly grim jim thompson quote

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From his novel Pop. 1280:

I’d been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it. But this was the first time I’d seen what they really were. Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin’. Just pine-board walls locking in the emptiness. No pictures, no books—nothing to look at or think about. Just the emptiness that was soakin’ in on me here.

And then suddenly it wasn’t here, it was everywhere, every place like this one. And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought people to… Because that’s the emptiness thinkin’ and you’re already dead inside, and all you’ll do is spread the stink and the terror, the weepin’ and wailin’, the torture, the starvation, the shame of your deadness. Your emptiness.

via High Priest of the Godless

interview re: surf clubs

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A graduate student doing research about appropriation and authorship sent me some questions about the surf club era. She put the Q&A together into a nice interview [pdf] with illustrations and footnotes.

She felt the Surfing Club scene/period was difficult to grasp because:

(a) With the exception of VVORK, it was more an American phenomenon; “Old skool” net.art is actually more known and discussed in Europe (even today); (b) there is actually little literature available (Ramocki, Olson, Cloninger, Bewersdorf; I ended up reading all your blog entries from 2008 onwards, and chaotic discussions from the Rhizome archive of June 2008), and everybody seems to disagree on some general level and (c) With the meteoric rise of interest in Post Internet, it seems to me that Surfing Clubs have been forgotten.

In our back-and-forth discussion it became clear that current students are getting an, how can this be said diplomatically?, incorrect slant about the scene from later writers who weren't part of it, and welcomed a chance to put in (more of my) two cents.

Meta Dance Classic (new Bandcamp release)

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Am pleased to announce a new Bandcamp release titled Meta Dance Classic.

Some LP notes:

Continuing to cannibalize older tunes for beats and riffs. The track "Meta Dance Classic" is 100% new but all the others are reworked so extensively they are essentially new. Almost all these songs have melodies or textures produced with Eurorack modular gear, but integrated with softsynths and "packaged" beats. The presets get a tweak, too, so there is almost nothing here that hasn't been massaged to fit the main idea. Am continuing to experiment with timestretching tempos (mostly to speed up songs that were sounding sluggish). In the older versions of some of these tunes, the structure consisted of allowing a beat to develop and then putting some cake icing in at the end in the form of a catchy synth riff. What I'm doing here is moving the "icing" to the beginning of the song, adding counterpoint melodies, choruses, bridges and the rest of that traditional songwriting stuff, so the beat is almost not heard at all (maybe a couple of bars as a "drum solo").

Your support in the form of buying the LPs or songs is very encouraging, but all the material can be streamed. A cassette version is available: it looked so "meta" I decided to use an image of it for the cover.

[embedded player removed]

more on surf club revisionism

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The following is an only slightly exaggerated version of online conversations I had about Tuesday's post follower privilege, access privilege, and other things to be bitter about. A couple of interrogators are combined here as "RASG" (recent art school graduate):

RASG: You made a good critique yesterday of the Brad Troemel/Jennifer Chan position on the so-called internet surf clubs of '06-'08. You say the clubs' primary attributes weren't exclusivity and a career vehicle for members.

TM: Right.

RASG: It's personal with you, isn't it? That really weakens your argument.

TM: I don't know them. I met Troemel once. My post was basically fact-checking what I consider wrong assumptions, since I was in one of the surf clubs (Nasty Nets) and those authors are viewing the clubs with what seems to be 20/20 incorrect hindsight.

RASG: Possibly your position inside one of the clubs blinds you to what recent art school graduates face, in terms of current options. For us, it's mainly Tumblr and Facebook and you are making fun of that. That's kind of well, arrogant and hypocritical.

TM: Privilege shaming is always a good rhetorical tactic but you're assuming I had some advantage that you currently don't have. If it was 2006 you could have started a group blog and built an audience. I believe you still could, just using search traffic, word of mouth, hyperlinks from respected sites, RSS, and even social media -- without actually situating your group blog on tumblr or FB.

RASG: Oh, yeah, sure, and that's going to just get archived on Rhizome, just like that.

TM: Well, Rhizome archived Nasty Nets, but then their conservator left, so it's a half-finished project. But assuming that NN is laureled to the extent you're saying, no, there is no guarantee that an interesting group blog is going to be recognized. You have to build an audience. That was true for NN as well.

RASG: (scoffs) You already had a career before you joined NN. You can't really talk.

TM: Again, you are privilege shaming. And no, it took years of being online, blogging, before anyone thought about inviting me to be in stuff.

RASG: But you had an art career before that.

TM: That exposure didn't carry over in 2001, when I started blogging. The art world wasn't following blogs. I basically had to start over.

RASG: OK, maybe, but it takes money and tech savvy to start a blog. You had a leg up that we don't have now.

TM: I started blogging on a site called Digital Media Tree. They were hosting a small collection of blogs (still are). The webmaster was very generous with time and skill but there was no gaming the system, a la Buzzfeed. All I did was sign up and start posting -- and built a "rep," such as it is, over time. You could do that, as well. Starting a group blog outside the social media continuum isn't that hard or expensive.

RASG: You are overly romantic. Your story sounds like every one of these startups that claim to have begun penniless.

TM: I like you, as well.