Driving While Tripping...

The trippy colors of fall are upon us.

Every year it's the same. I complain bitterly about the fall equinox, all the while marveling at the beauty of sunny fall days, and then disbelieving my eyes when trees, which to my tropical mind should always remain green, start turning bright yellow, orange and red.  

For as long as I can remember around here, this chromatic reversal has happened at the same time that certain species of trees, such as oaks, have turned to the brown that I associate with the horror of winter.  However, for the past two years, the wild colors have come before the brown, coexisting with the green, and giving rise to a short-lived dream that these colors might indeed be permanent without signifying the yearly shutting down of photosynthesis that announces the coming of winter.  In the past few days, the air itself has given the impression of being tinted with yellow, and nothing seems real. 

This year, coincidentally, the LSD colors of fall have peaked on October 31^st, just in time for Halloween: a holiday celebrating the unknown, and a festival with pagan origins to which, just as with Carnaval in Brazil, I don’t feel much of a connection.  Children will come to our door dressed in what they think are scary costumes, and we will give them commercial candy because it is easier and safer than giving them apples; because the kids would hate to get anything else; and because the candy industry has happily reinforced the idea that this is the norm.  And barring a natural or man-made catastrophe, the night will pass on like any other. 

In the morning, leaves will start turning brown, and more and more of them will start falling.  And while nature goes dormant, a season of outdoor chores will be upon us.  ...And I will start counting the days to the solstice.  I was, like every other living thing, indeed born on a specific day, though I feel unable to count years by that date.  It is only during this season, this harbinger of shorter and shorter days to come, of darkness and of death, that I understand the meaning of a year gone by.  It is not a very profound feeling. Happy Birthday nonetheless.

2 fucking thousand pages

Pelosi's healthcare reform bill is two thousand pages long.  Now, you know those fuckers in the house can barely read this shit, much less understand it and it's implications.  I guess it's time for more bending over....

End of Empire

If every congressional decision (health care, bailouts, Vietnamistan, I mean, Afghanistan)  is based on skewing biennial elections, we be fucked...  ...and every decision is; and, oh yeah, we are well fucked... It's been nice, America.

phone pic of the day

I despise what the American Industrial Complex has done to food; which is to take its raw materials and turn them into waste without even stopping at edible...and the world keeps lapping it up...

saving is not "forgetting to forget"- holy fuck this guy was at Harvard!

Dear The World:

It was with interest that I listened to your report on Viktor Meyer Shöenberger’s Book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting etc.”, for I too think that there is a cultural problem brewing due to the ease and low cost of saving information digitally.  I do however completely disagree with his premise that equates this act of “automatic digital saving” with “remembering”.  In fact, I think it results in quite the opposite.  By virtue of the ease of saving information digitally, we basically put information into what amounts to one big electronic drawer where we proceed to immediately forget it.  

Shöenberger’s equating of “saving” with “remembering” is fallacious; they are not the same thing.  Saving everything electronically is a crutch that precisely allows us to stop actively remembering things; it makes us lazy and forgetful.  Ask any teacher what has happened to their students’ ability to remember things with the advent of easy digital storage. I am a teacher, and sometimes I think my students have Alzheimer’s. Way I see it, “digital saving” can more easily be equated with “forgetting” than with “remembering”.

The story from the book that your reporter related about the woman that did not get a job because of a picture of her with a drink on Facebook has nothing to do with the act of “remembering”.  In fact, in a moment of charity, I would call it an act of “forgetting”: she forgot to remove the picture from her page when she applied for the job.  In my more uncharitable moments, I call her original posting of the picture an act of “stupidity”;  but that is a whole different category of activity that has also been made easier with the advent of easy digital access.

Sincerely,

Katya Cohen

ahhh, what images can do for you

For the best part of two years I have been working on a self-masturbatory project that might or not turn out to be the 541 page personal deconstruction of the 2007 summer edition of Art Forum that I envision.  While working on it today, I decided I wanted to include on one of its pages the image of a boxcar that transported Jews to their demise in concentration camps during WWII.  My decision to do so started more tongue and cheek than the subject might call for....

I found a picture of a boxcar on a Google image search and manipulated it to look as it does above.  I then began to draw it in pen and ink onto a piece of graph paper that will eventually be scanned onto the computer and further manipulated.  Whether this now iconic and terrifying image will carry its iconic and terrifying message within the pages of my project remains to be seen; partly because I am taking it to a bare bones pen and ink, very handmade, almost cartoon-like form, and partly because the impetus for searching the image in the first place came in the form of irony.

What will eventually happen in the pages of my project is something for me, and whomever comes upon it, to ponder in the future.  All I know now is what I am feeling after spending some intimate time with this image of an occurrence that predates me but still resonates. I know that I will never forget this thing that I have not experienced personally; but worse, I will never forgive.

Tim Nohe @ Clemson

As with all Visual Arts departments in universities, the one in Clemson has a visiting artist lecture series I like to attend whenever possible.  Regardless of whether I like what I might see in these, seeing what other artists do and listening to them speak about their  practice is always thought provoking.

Yesterday I was able to attend Tim Nohe’s lecture about his work.  It was stimulating and punctuated by moments of beauty.   Nohe is an image and sound artist, with sound playing a, if not the, major role in his work. The lecture consisted of video snippets of some of his pieces, as well as, of him in the process of producing his work.  All of these, without exception, were accompanied by the sound tracks that are so important to his practice.

Imagine my surprise then when, as I listened and watched in semi-darkness, I noticed a woman standing to one side, signing to what obviously was a deaf student sitting in the audience.  I was reminded of one of the things I do love about America; the fact that disabled persons have rights, and that they are not institutionally invisible as  happens in so many countries.  That being said, I had to smile at the irony of having a deaf person come see a lecture by a man whose primary medium seems to be sound.  And I wondered how one signed the wonks, wheees, shhhhhhs, buzzes, wouuaaas, tenk tenk tenks, and whirs I was hearing...