Connected

I just started reading this cool book called Tubes about the physical internet.  It starts with a subject that is close to my heart since I am way more enamored with the physical than the cloud: the author going to a printshop in Milwakee to see a monster printing machine made in Germany print a map of the internet.  I wish I could have seen that.  The author was inspired to follow the "internet" one day when his modem stopped working because a squirrel chewed through the rubber coating of the wiring that brought the internet into his house.

For a few months now, Curtis and I have been experiencing intermittent problems with our internet connection.  The darn thing keeps blinking in and out.  We have called our internet provider several times; and I imagine that sometimes we actually speak to someone in America.  But judging from the wonderful accent (and I'm not being ironic here, I love accents) of some of the people we have talked to, a lot of the time we get connected to "Jason" or "Kelly" in India, where parts of the physical internet look like this:

As an aside, I would much rather that the web technicians answering my calls tell me their names are Satish or Padmani, Mohandas or even Mohammed; but I digress...

Our calls and their solutions have yielded no results thus far.  The answers the technicians have given us on the phone, because god forbid in this day and age they send a physical person, American or not, to diagnose our problem, has had to do with our filters or modem; all things we can change by buying new ones.  I don't mind buying new equipment if the equipment is actually the problem; but I hate buying new stuff blindly if that is not going to solve the problem.  It's a waste of... well, of everything: copper, plastic, energy, money, time... everything.  As it is, the last technician we spoke to, an American woman called Marie, pinpointed our problems to our filters.  After Curtis yelled at her on the phone, asked to talk to her supervisor, and finally handed the phone to me so I could talk to both women, I acquiesced to buying new filters.  We changed the filters and "voila": nothing happened, we still have intermittent problems.  At this point they want us to buy a new modem.  And at that, I put my foot down and asked for a wire technician to come here and touch my physical internet before I buy anything else.

You see, last year at this time, our sewer line made in the 70's of tar impregnated paper finally gave up the ghost and we had to have the plumbers install a new, this time PVC, sewer line. And as we were inspecting our backyard to find out what the best way to lay the line was, we found our phone line; the one through which our internet connection also comes through.

Yesterday after talking to one more internet technician somewhere in the world, I braved my mosquito infested woods to go take a picture of my "tube", my very own little physical connection to the Big Cloud.  A connection in a little woodland creature paradise, where everybody loves to gnaw on wires and plastic coating, that has looked like the pictures below and has been out there for more than a year through sweltering heat, freezing cold and an unusually rainy season.

I, personally, with no training whatsoever, think that maybe, just maybe, my connectivity problems might, just might, have something to do with the way the fiber optic tubes are coming into my house.  Hey, I'm not ruling out the modem, mind you, but the following pictures give me pause.  Forgive their quality as I was taking them while standing on a patch of poison ivy, in a hot and humid day, while being consumed by those little black and white mosquitos we inadvertently imported from Asia in water collecting in the wells of old tires being transported from there to here on some ship.  Yes we are all very much connected...

1 is the phone company box

2 are the flags the technicians put out signifying something

3 is my favorite, I call it my "al fresco connection", close ups follow

The arrow points to the cable snaking around the tree and disappearing underground once more

first world country my ass

fragment of the day

Reading a review of an artist I did not know of, Roman Ondák, I ran into a sentence containing a fragment that explains human behavior, if not from the beginning of time, certainly in this time in which we exist in what seems to be the eternal present.  It went like this (I quote and I rip from its context, a good article by someone called Ina Bloom in this month’s issue of Artforum):

...evoking the kind of gung ho spirit that actually covers a chasm of cluelessness...

And I thought of the creation of the Euro.

on a personal note on representation

Ziggy Primavera

Two years or more ago, a friend asked me to paint a portrait of her dog; I acquiesced and did it. Ever since, I have painted a few more pet portraits for others.

Liz and Burt

I am not trained as a portrait painter.  Fuck, when you go to art school, as I did, you actually get trained to do fuck all.*  What, too many “fucks”?  I am “The Raving” after all...  Anyway, when you go to art school, you don’t necessarily learn to make anything; and if you are lucky, you learn to think about the nature of representation and cultural production, and you learn to talk about it.  You learn to read things like this by Carlyn Christov-Bakargiev who was appointed Artistic Director of this year’s thirteenth edition of documenta, dOCUMENTA (13):

I think that right now there is an urgent need for what I call a wordly alliance among so-called cognitive laborers of every sort, artists and scientists and fiction writers and so on.  It is very urgent to speak together and to work together and to be in a state of the propositional together. And here is the interesting part, to me, as far as choosing to go to art school in this day and age goes: The notion of “the artist” is a very limited notion historically.  The ancient Greeks did not even have a word for “art” as we understand it today.  They had the word techné, which did not mean “art” as we understand it today but instead something like “craftsmanship” or “craft”.  So whether or not art will even continue to be defined as a discrete field for much longer is an open question.  (Artforum, May 2012. p. 750)

Did I say “lucky”?  Well, maybe you’d be luckier actually learning techné.  But I digress… 

...So I started doing these pets.  And doing them always gives me heartburn because I know the owners want the paintings to resemble their pets.  My “art self” gets into making these, and all I want to do is break all the rules and just “play”.  Like I said, I get the heartburn and procrastinate doing them until I eventually succumb to getting down to the business of translating snapshots of animals into paintings of loved ones.  In order to get into it, I start manipulating things so that the context in which I place the pet starts functioning more abstractly and more like “paintings of my own”.  

this is no longer a working numbuh

In other words, I start having fun; but eventually there comes a point when I have to reign myself in and curb my impulses in order to start getting a facsimile of the animal in question down in paint. 

This is where the heartburn and procrastination really takes hold.  It entails a real internal fight: my wanting to paint more freely while having to reproduce what I see in the photograph used as reference.  In this struggle, there often comes a point when I find myself losing to the act of copying.  I start getting frustrated because the photograph keeps winning; and nothing I do in paint seems to be able to compete with the seduction of a photographic image.  This is the main pitfall of working from photographs in a world where photographic reproductions are ubiquitous and, to my eyes, have become our main mode of communication.

It is always at this maximum point of frustration that my unconscious kicks in and frees me from the bonds of the photographic.  It’s when my being remembers that painting is not photography, and that its rules of representation are very different.  Even though I need to make the animal resemble, in paint, the animal in the photograph, I am free to do it differently than the way the camera does it.  In fact, not only am I free, I am required to do it differently.  This totally mundane realization that I keep forgetting and shouldn’t, given that I’ve taught hundreds of students to be aware of it, is always such a rush.  It is most certainly not an original insight, or a profound one; but it is one that happens over and over again when I am in front of a “canvas”, and it is what keeps me going.

Wiley Spot

...off to paint cats...

* upon reading this a couple of weeks later, I realize I must have been in one of my bad moods, because I did learn a lot in art school; I learned to make prints and books and some other stuff.  I also learned to see, really see, and I met people for whom I still have great love and respect.  What you don't learn about in art school is markets and how to make a living in them when you get out; but then that's not what art is about...


cats:

Stimulus

I recently drove to Georgia after having spent too long before going back there to visit with loved ones.  The minute I crossed the border between SC and GA on the interstate, I noticed something odd: the road markers.  They had multiplied and seemed to be on steroids.

As long as I can remember, after coming to this country and noticing them, road markers have been small inconspicuous signs on the side of the road marking each mile of interstate and state roads from one boarder to another, be it state to state or county to county.  In the past, they were helpful to drivers who wanted to gauge where they were in relation to their destination. And now, they’re still helpful to people like me who have not yet been convinced that they need to be tied to a “smart” phone or a GPS system that can track me on a computer/satellite network at all times, and in turn allow me to know where I am physically at all times. I don't mind being a little lost...

These new markers on Interstate 85 are skinnier and placed lower than speed limit signs, but are as tall, or maybe taller.  They are big, and to my eye, cluttered green signs.  Unlike mile markers of old which straightforwardly tell you the mile you are on, these have the Interstate symbol with interstate number printed on them under the word “Highway” or maybe “South”, I don’t remember and can't make out on my crappy pictures (scroll to end); I just know that the “coat of arms” symbol makes them look very official.  Below the official looking interstate symbol, these signs then have the word “mile”, with the mile number printed under that.  Also, most surprising of all, they don’t just mark miles, they also mark half miles in this new, big, and conspicuous way.  

Disturbingly, to those of us interested in good design and annoyed by bad design, the “.5” on the half mile markers does not fit on the same line with the main mile number, and is placed underneath it in a bigger font.  Something like this:

Truthfully, I found these new signs horribly distracting as they zipped by on an average of every 28 seconds or faster depending on what speed I was driving.  I also wondered why the state had spent so much money on these things, about 400 new signs since there is about 200 miles of interstate 85 in the state of Georgia, in an age when most people do have GPS and “smart” phones that tell them exactly where they are.  Those of us who are still electronically somewhat untethered were doing just fine with the old small inconspicuous signs once every mile and paper maps.

It seems as if that quick and dirty, first and maybe only, spate of Obama stimulus money went to Georgia to be spent on new interstate signs for an old interstate in serious need of real infrastructure repair.  Contemporary politics moves too quickly to allow for slow and thoughtful disbursement of funds on big long-term projects with real effects.  These days, everything is window dressing.  I wonder what Obama got in exchange for his stimulating of Georgia signs since the place still voted for Newt Gingrich in the primaries and probably would elect him president if “it” could.  Let's remember that Newt was promising to build a colony on the moon; a very loooonnng-teeeerm project indeed.

Here are some crappy phone pictures, obviously not taken with an Iphone, of our tax dollars at work:

mile 163

28 seconds later

mile 163.5

wow

...opening my Art in America, looking at contributors and what they would be writing within the pages that would be following, I saw something about a memorial to Mike Kelley... My mind did a double take since memorials are for dead people and last I read of Kelley he was alive, vibrant and making good stuff.  So I googled him and death and: wow.  He committed suicide!  Of all the personas out there, I would never have guessed but maybe should have: so much abjection...

just a passing thought

...on reading art criticism: it seems, sometimes, that these people, who clearly love art, but clearly love words better, seem to try to explain art away, perhaps without being aware that that's what they are clearly doing...

Curt and My Reading Habits

Curt and I now do one incredibly large and annoying food shopping circle which includes going to Whole Foods in Greenville to get meat from humanely treated animals and foreign crap, and then driving to the Anderson Publix

subtext

  

to get more mundane crap like (hopefully) American-made cat food... Anyway, in Greenville, there is this guitar store Curt wanted to stop by the other day and where he ended up buying this awesome beat-up Epiphone Something guitar cum new amp he fell in love with.

home

subtext

Though this is nor here nor there, it means we spent a lot of time in the area the store is located in.  He tried a new guitar one week (and trying guitars in Curt's book, or maybe anyone's, means hours spent noodling), did not fall in love with it, and we eventually left to buy food.  Then we went back on another week, and while I was at the dollar store picking up dollar things, he tried this second hand guitar and just fell in love.  We left without it, but he couldn't get “her” out of his mind, so we had to go back and get it, thus making our food shopping trip take even more time than the usual 4 hours. 

Anyway anyway: the store is located in one of these defunct old outdoor malls; and, weirdly for me, I love these defunct old outdoor malls because of how they feel and because of the marginal businesses that seem to inhabit these places after mainstream businesses who used to thrive there have abandoned them for bigger concrete bunkers.   In this particular defunct outdoor mall whose karma and Feng Shui totally suit me and where the Guitar Center has located, there is also a Books-a-Million. 

home

home

subtext

subtext

home

No, not a marginal store per se, but of the big retail bookstores, it feels marginal; and this particular one feels particularly marginal.  It feels like the corner bookstore, and hey, it’s Podunk America, we have no real choice; it’s as good as it gets...  And, just as he did with his guitar, Curt fell in love with this particular Books-a-Million. He much prefers driving out of his way to go there, rather than go to the brand spankin’ new Barnes and Noble, in a brand spankin' new kind of outdoor mall, full of brand spankin new retail outlets, right across from the Whole Foods we drive 40 miles out of our way to shop in.  And on our food shopping trip yesterday, Curt decided, once again, to take us out of our already out of the way trip in order to stop at his favorite big retail bookstore in search of magazines. 

subtext

home

home

home

subtext

As I was wallowing away the time waiting for him while he first looked for the ideal music magazine he never seems to find, and then while he ran off to the guitar store, a place he does not seem to get enough of, I noticed that among the bad art magazines, mostly geared towards amateurs and lovers of kitsch, they also carry, as if it were the physical embodiment of an antidote to all the other magazines, Cabinet (!)  So heck, I picked it up, started reading, and decided “what the hell, I’ll buy it.”  The surprise here is that Cabinet used to annoy me... My reading habits seem to be a-changin'...

Addendum: Having read this, Curt asked me about "subtext": it's the visual thread that refers to the American built environment: click on pictures to view one ugly experiment in living...

Addendum 2: pictures captioned "home" came 2 weeks later- we were back in Curtis' favorite outdoor mall and I had the camera...