Someone asked Mark Zuckerberg if he was a reptilian during a worldwide Facebook streaming Q&A whatever. All signs point to yes but he denied it.
Update: Also, be sure to check out this photo of Zuckerberg's laptop, showing tape over the webcam and audio port (he wants your picture but you can't have his), and his lordship out jogging with his five-person security team (hat tip mbm).
@ to concerned artists
i see alex bacon as court stenographer-in-waiting for various galleries showing post internet-style abstract painting. he had a group of favorite artists (jacob kassay, parker ito, etc) and when invited to do the brushes panel at the newmu he clearly wasn't very conversant with michael connor's chosen artists (laura brothers, michael manning). so he adapted and expanded his boilerplate theoretical essay about painting in the digital age to include brothers, beef up his discussion of manning, and add some newbies. his theory is ultimately elastic, but not elastic enough to include outsiders/outliers from the gaming or geek spheres, such as andrej ujhazy, a brushes panel artist bacon omits from his rhizome essay
^Written a few weeks ago -- to flesh it out a bit:
Bacon's modus operandi seems to be roping standard gallery abstraction styles into "digital" discourse, or vice versa. During Bacon's slide talk for the Brushes panel, you could almost feel the collective wince when he described some window-mounted panels as "physical jpegs." His defense of 303 Gallery hot artist du jour Jacob Kassay is similarly "off." Kassay's paintings have a reflective silver surface; some discussion could be had about the materials -- paint vs plated silver, support vs surface, "presence," etc -- but there is nothing intrinsically "cyber" about this work.
Yet in a 2014 interview, Bacon trowels on the digital metaphors to make the work seem relevant to the Facebook era:
They are about the fragmentary and contingent nature of vision and, insofar as this relates to our forging of identity through the endless stream of images we seamlessly upload and download, they have a contemporary valence. We expect for the Kassay to mirror us back, but instead we are faced with a caesura of vision, a literal blurring out. A Kassay constructs a complex visual system, because you want to move around them to resolve the image, but it’s an impossibility. Nor can the autofocus of a camera map one of these paintings, which is radical considering the sinister potential of technologized forms of spatial mapping and image profiling. The work is not “about” that technology, but it has that valence.
The au courant techno-connections -- autofocus, uploading -- offer flimsy, ex post facto justifications for material work. When Georg Herold used a mirrored surface back in the dot com era, it was in the context of a show called "compu.comp.virtual visualities.equivacs.bitmapdyes," so a critic could sort of legitimately talk about mirrors as "screens."
For his Brushes panel essay for Rhizome.org, Bacon recycles the same Kassay apologetics:
Jacob Kassay’s silver paintings, which are canvases coated in acrylic that the artist sends to be commercially plated with silver, are about our expectations of how vision operates—what we see, and our engagement with our own image. People talk about how they absorb their surroundings, but of course they are not mirrors, they are plated silver. You have to burnish the silver to make it reflective and Kassay doesn’t do that, he just takes them as they’re made in the plating process, which gives them very interesting surfaces. Up close the reflection is hazy, but as you go back it gets clearer, and if someone walks by you see them very clearly, while they see themselves as a blur. They are a very concrete commentary on a certain type of perception. These paintings are a suggestion about the fragmentary and contingent nature of vision and, insofar as this relates to our forging of identity through the endless stream of images we seamlessly upload and download, they have a contemporary valence. This is embedded in the functioning of Kassay’s surfaces, which solicit our desire to see ourselves, which has found the apogee of its contemporary expression in the obsession with taking and sharing of selfies. Indeed, people love to try to take their picture as it appears in a Kassay painting, but they find that their individuality is all but melted by the distortions of the plated metal. We expect for the Kassay to mirror us back, but instead we are faced with a caesura of vision, a literal blurring out. A Kassay painting is a construction of a complex visual system, because a viewer wants to move around them to resolve the image, but it’s impossible. Nor can the autofocus of a camera map one of these paintings, which is radical considering the sinister potential of technologized forms of spatial mapping and image profiling. The work is not “about” that technology, but it nonetheless speaks to it obliquely.
Wrote the following post in 2012 after seeing the film version of John Ajvide Lindqvist's book Let the Right One In. After reading the book I'm not so sure of this. More after the blockquote. [Spoilers]
Let the Right One In [the film] is a perfect loop that spins out more even metafiction than the main story contains.
Several mysteries of the clumsy Father, surrogate Father, or captor seen in the first half are explained in the second.
The Father, we learn, is the boy at the end of the next cycle of serving as keeper/guardian for the ageless vampire girl.
What strikes us initially as the Father's slow-witted ineptitude is in fact burn-out and grief after a lifetime of murdering for her and covering up her crimes. He still loves her, because she once seduced him just as convincingly and decisively as she does the Boy in this film. Yet he longs for death, wants to get caught, and disfigures himself horribly when he sees he is about to be replaced, inevitably, by a younger guardian.
All of this will happen to the Boy, as it happened to unknown other boys before. We are seeing the beginning and the end of his life.
One critic complained about the violence of the revenge in the swimming pool at the end -- was it just a cheap thrill for the audience? Perhaps, but the pleasure is hollowed-out by the scenes of the Boy weeping afterwards. Also the extremity of the event further explains the Boy's willingness to give the girl decades of servitude -- he owes her big time. Prior to this we saw him vacillating over her murders, even losing his taste for his serial killer clipping collection. After this incident, he's hooked for life.
I pondered the gender-bending of the vampire Girl. It explains how/why she offers "guy advice" to the Boy about defending himself from bullies. She asks the Boy to "be me" but also wants to be him.
We see hints of how the power dynamic of this very alike couple will play out over years of the Boy's servitude. The girl bosses the Father around and occasionally offers him a stroke on the cheek. The Boy, feeling his oats after shellacking his first bully, plays games with the girl's weakness of not being able to enter a room uninvited. She must give him a bloody demonstration of where such games will lead.
Most the reviews I skimmed talked about the coming of age/romance aspects of the story but not its exposition of the roots of a lifetime co-dependent relationship.
Reading Lindqvist's novel, source of the film, several years later, lowers the above interpretation a few notches. [More spoilers] In the book, the "father" is an alcoholic with a jones for boys, picked up by the vampire late in the alcoholic's life, and the vampire is in fact a boy, missing genitalia since his transformation to bloodsucker instigated by a sadistic vampire aristocrat in centuries past. (The purpose and mechanics of the de-sexing are a bit murky in the book.) Although Lindqvist wrote the script for the film version, the decision was made to downplay the sexual elements. Those changes certainly still leave open the interpretation above -- that in the film, the Father was once a Boy to the vampire, and the story hinges on the acquisition of a new Boy. Nevertheless, this spin was not in the author's mind. I still like my "loop of doom" version but it may have to be reclassified as fan fiction.]
Update: A.V. Club critic Scott Tobias had a take similar to mine:
And then the coda -- which finds Oskar on a train during the daytime, tapping Morse code to Eli, who’s curled up in a box by his side -- feels remarkably bittersweet. Their destinies are now entwined, and they aren’t alone any more, but for how long? Someday, Oskar will also be a middle-aged man, trudging out in the snow with a funnel and a jug, collecting sustenance for his beloved.
Belgian writer Georges Simenon penned two types of tales: detective stories featuring police inspector Maigret, and "hard" novels, as Simenon called them, which were less formulaic, such as the grimly existentialist Dirty Snow. There is crossover among these genre types, however. Snow is an oddly inverted form of police procedural, written from the point of view of the criminal, where the "police" comprise a shadowy network of regular cops, military cops, and Occupation cops, all engaged in a bureaucratic warfare of "sections" (as one criminal advises another: "they have several sections, and no matter how good you're in with one, you shouldn't mess with the other one"). Neither the criminal protagonist nor the reader comes close to grasping this power structure, a state of fearful confusion that presumably mirrored the uncertainties of Simenon's life as an author in Vichy France. A slow process of good cop/bad cop interrogation (intentional or just inept? we're never sure) and stalker-like research into the criminal's pre-incarceration activities (what you might expect from a secret police, however sectionalized) gradually turns the wrongdoer's mind inside out and upside down, triggering a defiant ... well, read the book.
My favorite so far of the Maigret novels explores the vanished "barge culture" of the French canal system in the early 1930s, with an attention to politics and class nuance that elevates it above a mere thriller. This was published under several titles, the worst of which, Maigret Meets a Milord (uggh), is the one under which it was reviewed (excellently) by "darragh o'donoghue" in 2002, on on the website of God Emperor Bezos:
This title is an English invention, unhappily signaling a facetiousness absent from a sombre Simenon story about double murder, decadence, broken lives and betrayal. A literal translation from the French is The Carter of the 'Providence', but perhaps that was seen as too leading, even if it was Simenon's choice; another alternative, The Crime At Lock 14, is the most satisfying, centering on the important aspect of the novel: place. Milord is set in that strange, marginal, now obsolete inter-war world of canal barges, perhaps most familiar from contemporary films of the period, such as Boudu Saved From Drowning or L'Atalante. Indeed, the star of those films, Michel Simon, would have been an obvious choice to play the main non-Maigret character in any film of this book, the carter Jean, a taciturn giant whose face and tattooed body are buried in a mass of hirsute overgrowth, a man who sleeps in dumb animal warmth with his horses in the barge stable, and into whose eyes Maigret can't decide whether to read imbecility or the keenest intelligence.
A beautiful, rich, well-dressed woman is found strangled between two sleeping carters in the tavern stable at Dizy, Lock 14. She is the wife of an elderly English aristocrat, disgraced Colonel Lampson, who is sailing along the canal tributary of the Marne on his luxury yacht The Southern Cross with his sleazy but charming companion Willy Marco, and his fat Chilean mistress. Despite his bearing and stiff-upper-lip, the Colonel conducts regular drunken orgies on board his yacht, and tolerated his wife's affair with Marco. The other principal boat in the story is the huge barge The Providence, run by a small, timid skipper, his garrulous, kindly wife and the carter Jean.
Simenon characterises barge-life as a kind of shadow-world adjacent to, but unknown to, normal life around it, with its own codes, customs and language. Although these are floating homes, not tied to any one place and potentially unstable, their slow, regular movements up and down the river, and the rules they must abide by are as rigid, claustrophobic and monotonous as any settler's. But Simenon brilliantly captures the sense of a shifting communal life, competitive (the dense traffic on a small stretch of water means much jostling for pole position), but full of cameraderie and good humour, helping out friends in trouble, carrying messages from relatives, tipping canal-side officials.
For a rooted outsider like Maigret, this world seems enchanted, his inability to crack the case matched by a terrible sense of suspension hanging over the twilit realm -- it is only by breaking out of it, asserting his mobility by bicycle, that he can regain his detective prowess. Before that, he learns many fascinating facts about the mechanics of barge life, as well as its drabness and colour, its hierarchies of boats and petty bendings of the law, the land men, women and buildings who service it (lock-keepers, tavern- and shop-owners); a group world of work and routine in which transgressive individual desire can have the direst consequences.
The way Simenon himself, like a narrative elastic band, suspends the tension, allowing us to soak in the character and atmosphere, before accelerating the suspense and action, is so gripping, this must count as an exceptional early Maigret.
The version I read was a recent Penguin reprint under the title The Carter of La Providence. The translation by David Coward uses some modern idioms but seems very attuned to Simenon's sense of humor. Highly recommended.
