What is it That Must Be Said?

 I've just finished an obscure essay of Walter Benjamin's about art history, and approaches to the study of art (but also the study of literature and also history and even, somehow, botany) that may turn out to be among the most profound, and, at our current moment in history, among the most important of all of his writings.

At first glance, he seems just to be in the weeds of an argument about whether a new 'modern' interpretation of how to do art history has replaced the 'classical approach' of antiquity in the early 20th Century, but I think he is more gesturing toward his eventual theories of conceptualizing history and the great potential of the fragment, which are already in his mind, but he hasn't clearly articulated in 1932 when he's writing this essay.

"So began a train of thought that I am no longer able to pursue.  But its last link was certainly much less banal than its first..."

"..., and led on perhaps to images of animals." (is perhaps less than the conclusion for the pull quote that I was hoping for, but there it is).  This quote is actually not from the essay I was talking about, rather from the subsequent one in the collection I'm reading, "Hashish in Marseilles", but it hits on (or is at least adjacent to) what I am finding here (here in this post, and all around the whole blog generally).  That is, that when I start to write a post that is trying to get across an idea (rather than one that's just a response to something or a compilation), I begin a train of thought that turns in to a (compelling) black hole of ideas that starts to connect to and pull in whole bunches of texts and ideas that I'm reading now or have done in the distant or recent past, and the connections and rhymes and implications become bigger (and yes, less banal), and better, but begin bouncing beyond my basis from back at the beginning of the post.  And so I pull up short in all of these begun, and possibly one day done posts, which I occasionally open up, and ask myself, "what was this one going to be about again, really?"

But maybe not this time - if I just decided to say what I meant to say, instead of going back and being sure I was saying the best way I could or should - 

And so, Walter Benjamin was writing in the early days of an era of crisis, 1932 in Germany, and he was of a generation of artists (and of Artists, if you subscribe to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, which I do for the moment, having recently finished The Fourth Turning is Here, by Neil Howe) who had thought to shake up and change the world with their avant-garde art and politics and thoughts only to watch it all seem to begin to unravel as they were entering middle age and the crisis era was ramping up and threatening to destroy the whole world. 

That generation of, not just artists, but all walks of life, came of age just in time to witness (and largely participate in) the horrors of World War I, and then bask in the wonders of the Roaring Twenties, and seemed to be living through a time that would see things on the upswing and a world forever changed (in this case, cured of war) while at the same time harboring deep divisions and animosities that were being largely glossed over (rural poverty versus Flapper culture; Teetotalers getting Prohibition passed in America... versus Flapper culture {and mobster culture!}; race stuff...).

That era of the 1930s is having a moment, not just because it's the Nazis and World War II, and it's always what our stories turn to.  Rather, Neil Howe would suggest that we are in a parallel historical moment of crisis now, starting with the 2008 Great Recession (he marks that previous crisis era starting with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and through to the Great Depression, and through the conclusion of WWII).  As Benjamin, a Jew writing in 1932 Germany, he's in the midst of the crisis, but seemingly doesn't know it yet.  So too we, here in 2024, can't tell what the nature of the real disaster we are about to experience will be.

We feel like we know who some of the main characters of the coming disaster might be: Vlad Putin seems a good candidate for a villain on that side of the pond, and we have our own possible seat filler over here, oranger and dumber to be sure, but not that much less menacing.  But we don't have any idea, yet, how this one turns out over the next decade or so... whether it's another world war, like (and very much unlike) the last one that ended the last crisis cycle (for the record, Star Trek future history records World War III {or 3, as we may have progressed beyond a time when we can rely on most people to be able to read Roman Numerals...} as starting in 2026, and 2024 is among the most tumultuous years in all of Star Trek history), or perhaps this cycle will end in another American Civil War of some kind, like the one that ended the cycle prior.  Or perhaps it's something wholly new, that we haven't even considered before that results from improved AI or Quantum Computing or ____________.

But we're here for it, and if history rhyming (or repeating itself) is indeed a thing, better days are ahead (but after a big terrible thing first... sorry.) 

Vengeance, Naked

Tonight we had the rare opportunity for An Uncorrupted Double Feature (viewing two new {to me} movies, one after the other, thereby linking them forever in my mind and creating thematic linkage).  

As an unchilded human, this might seem on offer more often than to others, but it is, truly, a real rarity...  The first offering was Vengeance - a 2022 dark comedy by B.J. Novak, who quite possibly might turn out to be the most talented person to have been on The Office.  Vengeance is Novak's directorial debut, and in addition to being highly entertaining, it's possible that it may also turn out to be a defining film of the era.  It's the best kind of lowkey potentially great movie where it is surface level charmingly clever, spreading some sort of message that feels sort of important and profound (in the case of Vengeance there are 3 or 4 of these differing, but related messages), but nothing too scathing or cynical; and then on further reflection and examination it starts to dawn on you that this movie may in fact be not only deeply meaningful and great, but, in fact, important.

"Important" works of art are ones that are not just elegant or profound or even sublime, but I think most importantly they are the ones that are exceptionally timely.  What the world needs now, is aptness, sweet aptness.  Very often the messages that are needed at any given time are political (which is why so many "important" movies or "important" art generally is often political), but I think just now the messages we might most need are cultural and critical (in the academic sense) in nature.  

At one point in Vengeance, Ashton Kutcher's character (Quentin Sellers) says by way of critique of our current moment we find ourselves in: "Everything means everything, so nothing means anything."  The quote diagnoses the extent to which we have entered, just in the past few years, a postmodern cultural era.  Postmodernity is a complicated thing to define (just ask Fred Jameson who spent 500 pages or so in an attempt to do just that).  Possibly my favorite attempt at a definition is in Jameson's introduction to his book (and in postmodern studies, you only ever have to read introductions to books... or even just the marketing blurbs!).  He offers it somewhat glibly, but I think we can retrospectively now take it somewhat seriously...  He says something like:

"the Postmodern is thinking about the present historically in a world that has forgotten its history"

We are living in an era of supreme subjectivity where everyone's thoughts and identity have become significant and actual meaning and complexity and depth have become tertiary.  We have fully blown past Colbert's Era of Truthiness, briefly paused at the moment of "alternative facts", and now exist in a time when claims of "I feel that ____" and "I know the __{insert expert here}___ says ________, but I believe that ___________" have equal epistemological standing to previously 'absolute' truths like 3 + 3 = 6 and "water is made up of 2 parts hydrogen to 1 part oxygen".  And this, I think, is closer to a postmodern sensibility:

"Nothing means anything, so everything means anything"

That mentality is perhaps more akin to a less thought about branch of postmodernity called supermodernity (which itself is thought of as a branch of hypermodernity) which I think of as the notion that the meaning of the whole of anything can be ascertained by closely examining and understanding any part of it.  It's what Walter Benjamin was on about in his unfinished master work The Arcades Project, but I think it's also what's going on, in a satirical way, in Vengeance. In the movie, one of the Shaw daughters primary aspiration in life is to be famous - when this gets interrogated, and she is asked what she wants to be famous for - does she want to be a famous singer, or a famous actor, she decides she wants "to be a famous celebrity" - and this pretty well encapsulates the thesis of the movie, but is a throwaway joke line, soon forgotten.

And so (i haven't forgotten) we come on to Juliet, Naked, a bizarrely un-timely movie that came out in 2018, but is about email - in a moment after "email is over". It's based on a book by Nick Hornby from 2009, a time when email ruled - and the adaptation took the material straight (which is generally the best choice when adapting Hornby - who has kinda always already gotten it...), but that makes for a weird unmoored feel to the movie.

Given its excessive untimeliness, Juliet, Naked is anything but important, but as is so often the case with Nick Hornby, it captures aspects of the modern human experience, and interrogates them from a myriad of angles.  Here we find an investigation of highly curated fandom - questions of who owns a work of art, the artist or the appreciator of the art.  The movie is about the fraught-ness of an artist putting themselves out there, but also the fraught-ness of putting yourself out there - committing yourself to someone despite all their foibles and obsessions and insecurities.

As with Horby's best works - really all of his work that I've encountered, whether in writing, film, or song - the central question being asked is, "what is a life?" or maybe, "what should I do in my life?"  What to do with your life feels all-encompassing, and final, but what to do in your life feels like a good question to ask - where to spend your energies, what (and who) to give your attention to.

Life is like a weird dry run where only at the end of it we realize it was practice for a performance that's never going to happen

"do you like puzzles?"

As the Great Quarantine of 2020 was about to get underway, my brilliant wife bought a jigsaw puzzle on a whim during a Target run (back when Target runs felt normal and less like "missions").

Her choice of images on that (first, as it turned out) puzzle was absurd - and also perfect, as it turned out.  Killer whales, a diverse underwater scene along with a sky full of skies and fireworks and two sailing (pirate, right, they've got to be pirates) ships passing by a coastline lit by a rising full moon.

Some years ago, JP asked me the simple question: "Do you like puzzles?"

My mind went straight to jigsaw puzzles, and, never having been too fond of them (or probably never completing one beyond the toy versions of 10 or 50 or 100 pieces of my youth), I told JP, "not really."

He was disappointed, I could see it - and shortly thereafter, I discovered why.  JP had created an elaborate and immersive experience for us in our home and neighborhood.  It started with a message - I think it was a long letter, and contained the name (an old-timey name, which i do not recall) of an early code (16th or 17th Century?) written in letters from a prisoner.

Using this code, we discovered a message: Tippecanoe ISBN 9780452275003 with each number spelled out fully (or some number, which led me to the book Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates).  This brought the search to a temporary stand-still, because Tippecanoe is the name of my neighborhood, and I happened to own the book in question (i suspect JP may not have realized this, or was increasing the challenge).  At the same time, we had begun to discover a number of odd items around our house - a plastic pencil sharpener & a Bierdeckel that we weren't familiar with.

Once I had solved it (perhaps with a hint!), i went to our local library (the Tippecanoe branch!), and pulled their copy of Oates' novel from the shelves.  Slipped under the cover, was a receipt - a Walgreen's Photo receipt, which was pre-paid.  I took it to our local Walgreen's, and turned it over for a roll of photos - 24 (remember when pics came in sets of 24!?) pictures of items that had been hidden around our house.

And so it goes... I do love puzzles.  I love to play the game, and the total immersion game - where you literally walk around the earth and un-earth it is the ultimate iteration.  Jason Segel has created for us - i think in part from his own struggle - Dispatches from Elsewhere, which at its core is an immersive game experience.  Dispatches is a team game, and a game played outside in the world.  It unlocks a narrative, and you get to choose how deeply you want to play (just dancing with Bigfoot & along for the ride or taking the deeper game behind the game approach that our heroes take).

I was a late adopter of Myst but loved puzzling through it once i had discovered it after starting college.  But i wasn't able to defeat it (not in the Arfives*!), because many of the puzzles in the game are ones that require patience.  My preference for a long time had been the "riddle of the sphinx" type game where a lot of folks had perished at it, but once you came to the answer it was immediate.

As i become old (or perhaps as we are becoming more familiar with the art of passing time, because we're in quarantine!), I have come to appreciate the slow boil puzzles.  Nick Bantock was an author who I adore(d^), and read most of his work in the early Aughts.  Among the collection of books I owned was The Egyptian Jukebox, which was one i had never finished.  It's described as "A Conundrum" on the cover, and it's as beautiful as all of Bantock's works, but one meant to be worked at.

As we have now started here at home on our 4th puzzle, I have become comfortable with the idea that yes, indeed, i do like puzzles and the satisfaction of completion that goes with them.  Jigsaw puzzles are fine, but I enjoy even more immersive the better... 

On another visit to Milwaukee, JP left at our house a deck of cards, and some mode of giving us a specific sequence of cards.  Each of the cards had a small hole poked in it, and there was one outlier card, which had (i think random) letters over all of it.  With the sequence, we were able to decode the following message:

"At the centroid of _________, _____________, ____________ in the sculpture in park."  The blanks were three locations in Milwaukee, and at their centroid was a park in the 5th Ward.  I Bublr biked there one day on a lunch break, and tucked in to the sculpture in a park was an envelope with a gift card to Milwaukee's Public Market that JP had hidden there a week earlier.

Magical.

I don't think Dispatches from Elsewhere could have come out at a better time in history.  While the scenes of sitting in diners, or large gatherings in public parks or old timey theaters feels a bit like porn just now, it's more fringy questioning at the corners of reality that I think is so vital.  Was that all just a game, as the end party contends, or is there something real that the game is a cover for.  The concept / device isn't new (see 1997's The Game or 2018's Game Night), but the idea feels important now, whereas it might earlier have seemed merely fun - a welcome distraction - a bit of whimsy.

As we all going to be re-evaluating (sooner or later) the structures of the systems in place that surround our lives, I would like to recommend that we create some space and some infrastructure for these kinds of immersive experiences, either irl or virtually, a la Ready Player One or "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale".  I'm talking about a major company or companies that begin to work on this.  It will be the next Facebook - i am quite sure of it...

is this what you were picturing? (Source: Amazon.com)

* this is also a time to consider the place of video games (as opposed to other games) in the Arfives, which I have never really included in my listings, because to complete a video game I have always felt that i had to "beat it".  Unfortunately, I've never been all that good at video games and also not very diligent, so it's possible that i've never in all my life actually completed a game (actually, I do distinctly remember defeating Contra - after using the upUpDownDown... trick).  I may revise this going forward.

^ I would like to contend, that we no longer should be held to a standard of loving everything today that we once loved in our past, and yet at the same time need to couch that love in a past-time-i-ness...  I loved Nick Bantock's works for a time in my life, and while i don't find them as compelling today, we should embrace the moments that we loved things... unconditionally. 

6 of May

We peddle a lot of nostalgia these days.

A few years ago, Facebook stole my idea and began telling me about things that had happened on the same calendar date in previous years.

We enjoy the synchronicity of same dates. Although cosmically comically meaningless, humans seem to enjoy calendrics (autocorrected to “cake drive” = 🥮🚗)

On this notable day in Milwaukee sports, when the Bucks have taken a solid 3-1 lead in the Eastern conference semifinals (and at a time when people are actually paying attention to the Bucks!), and the Brewers are poised to beat Max Scherzer, I look back on my May 6th.

Arcia and Gamel each with 2 hits tonight, Giannis was a monster tonight (becoming only the second Milwaukee Buck in history to score 35+ points and get 15+ rebounds in a playoff game - and the only person not named Kareem to do that.)

It’s heady times here. 

Double Feature Challenge!

I'd like to issue the first ever Roman Numeral J Double Feature Challenge. 

The concept occurred to me yesterday evening as I was waiting for the bus, checking my long-lost Facebook news feed.  Jeff had posted a link to a movie imagining of moving through our solar system at light speed called "Riding Light" (by way of Huff Po).

I watched the first 10 minutes or so, loving it (though perhaps not the soundtrack), but it reminded me of something. 

Of course (once you've watched a bit of "Riding Light"), I was thinking of Michael Snow's 1967 Wavelength, which would make an excellent companion piece.  I'm not sure of the preferred order, and would accept suggestions and also highly recommend trying a side-by-side comparison.

 

Terror and Horror

While re-reading I Am Legend, the great precursor novel to most modern zombie films and fiction by Richard Matheson, the following passage gave me pause:

"'It's horrible,' she said. 

He looked at her in surprise.  Horrible?  Wasn't that odd?  He hadn't thought that for years.  For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.  A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliche.  To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact.  It had no adjectives."

It was not

*   *   * 

August 2018


This


*  *  *

May 2019

I was going to revisit this last year it seems - it's a concept that I am fond of.  The Matheson quote seems to conflate the two terms, and I think that was why I was interested in it.

I'm interested in what the difference between terror and horror in literature and film and art:

Terror - The literary fear.  A sublime experience of the darker sides of humanity.  An experience of something that scares us, but one which we value - that we take something away from and grow from.

Horror -  The gross out fear.  A scariness that (historically) is assigned no redeeming value.  A 'cheap thrill' of a scary text.  An exploitation of human drives, appealing to the lowest common denominator.

We might think of the distinction of these two as the difference between Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  M. Night Shylaman's oeuvre versus George Romero's zombie movies.

In my former academic life, I was much interested in that lower form of existence and what we might learn about ourselves by looking carefully at it.  I took a course called "Art History and the Value of Being Disturbed" and found myself an outsider who some of the others in the class.  They wanted to look at artists like Maplethorpe, Serrano and Ofili and claim disturbance from something that aligned strongly with their political views.  I was looking at Eduardo Kac and Brakhage's Pittsburgh Trilogy and Bodyworlds and trying to look straight at things that I'd rather not.

a response...

I explored several of the various links in the “Chance, Reason and Dreams” section with varying degrees of frustration. I started with (before last class) the Wikipedia entries on Locus Solus and Raymond Roussel, which were both utterly new to me. And then dug around in the visual/interactive links for some time.

Starting with “Waxweb”, an online film by David Blair, which I watched only part of. The first section was an elongated title of the film called “Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees”. This got me started thinking along a line entirely separate from the rest of the film (which is why I abandoned it after 6 more snippets).

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot of Marshall McLuhan lately, and one of the ideas I kept coming back to was his classification of television as a cool medium, a participatory medium. His ‘evidence’ for this is the low quality of the image compared to film (a hot medium), so it seems reasonable that television is becoming less and less a cool medium as the image gets better and better and with the advent of HD television has become a fully ‘hot’ medium.

I think, though, that McLuhan maybe missed what was really ‘cool’ about television, namely its immediacy. The fact that it is shared, simultaneously by everyone who watches it, makes it ‘cooler’. As you sit and watch The Daily Show on your couch and laugh along with it there’s something simultaneously comforting and (maybe) engaging about the fact that it is being broadcast simultaneously to millions of others, that you are ‘getting it’ at the very same moment everyone else is ‘getting it’. There’s, I think, something like an implication of participation in this.

I then went on to check out some of the Flash projects in “Dreaming Methods”, interactive, game-like environments where you can move about, pick things up, read documents, and even add your own writing. While the concept feels more participatory than a medium like television, the limitations of the coding, what you can and can’t interact with end up making it feel like a Scott Adams game.

... and now for some cool stuff to check out...

Section 1: Chance, Reason and Dreams

DADA Online

The site is crudely designed, but has great links to lots of pictures, poems and manifestos!

Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp is one of the most significant artists and philosophers of our times. This is an elegant site with great content, though the interface gets a bit frustrating!

El Lissitzky

The Getty has a great collection of this amazing graphic designer's artifacts.

International DADA Archive

This is an excellent resource! The "Digital DADA Library" is particularly useful.

Brief History of Photomontage

DADA invented collage... read a bit of light background about it here.

Background on Wikipedia

Good background on this great Belgian Surrealist painter.

Dreaming Methods

Fantastic Flash-based projects centered upon dream states and dream narratives.

David Blair's "Waxweb"

Complex hypertextual structure using film snippets to create a narrative about bee keeping. Worth digging in to!

Locus Solus

Wikipedia entry on Locus Solus

Raymond Roussel

Wikipedia entry on Raymond Roussel.

Essay on Roussel

Excellent essay on Roussel's work and good general introduction to labyrinthine style.

More on Roussel

More on this curious author...

Post of (many) posts

While operating this blog, i've run into a lot of 'ideas' for entries that never came to fruition. Most of these idly floated away into nothingness, but a few got started as new entries... and i'd like to collect those here -


Wiki-Wiki-Wa-Wa
(20 April 2006)
I am a wiki-maniac.

*this was obviously a brilliant idea for a post... it was going to be all about how i was (momentarily) obsessed with posting on wikipedia... which didn't end up being totally true...



review of "The Walking Dead"
(6 June 2006)

The Walking Dead (Vol. #1-4)
Image Comics
Reviewed by : Seeger
Reviewer’s Grade : C-

When my set of all four volumes (thus far) of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead first arrived from amazon.com I was positively giddy… I’d heard nothing but good things (from reviews that evidently were written by his mother) and was thinking I was coming into a world of Romero-level zombie thought in this exciting new series.

BUT, instead, what I found was a cliché-ridden work of zombie survivor fiction that’s been told too many times, and always in the same way. Kirkman does not help his cause in the introduction to Volume 1 when he writes:

“To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy character and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.”[1]

Even casual fans of zombie films and literature see such societal critiques at work, but for Kirkman to explicitly make such a blatant statement in the introduction to his first volume bodes ill for the whole run and is a sign of what’s to come. Kirkman suffers from over-writing and an often painful lack of subtlety, a trait shared by artists Tony Moore (Vol 1.) and Charlie Adlard (Vols. 2-4).

The story traces police officer Rick Grimes who awakens from a coma in an empty hospital some days (28 perhaps?) after the zombie necropalypse has hit earth. We follow Grimes as he heads home, discovering his old neighborhood mostly abandoned and slowly discovering the new world order. Through contrived conversations with another survivor and a horse we learn about his wife and child (which we also found out about several panels earlier in the artwork), who he leaves town to try and find.

Kirkman shows disrespect to his readers by having to spell out every notion in words. He seems to not trust his artists, who in turn seem not to trust him (using the most extreme ‘surprised’, ‘angry’, ‘sad’ looks in any frame they want to express emotion). Some of his frames are so full of words there’s almost no room for characters to walk around in them. When his characters fight, their dialogue feels like an 8-year-old at play: “I’m going to blow your head off” says one survivor to another at one point, presumably before she is about to blow someone’s head off.

With all its negatives, though, the most frustrating thing about The Walking Dead is its amazing potential. The artwork, when it’s not painfully obvious, is quality black and white, which adds to the bleakness of the world the characters inhabit. The covers, all done by Tony Moore are beautiful, if a bit repetitive and the splash pages, few and far between are used very effectively. Walking Dead is at its best when Grimes is wandering alone and there are two or three wordless pages in a row, capturing the voiceless zombie threat more perfectly than any conversation can, but Kirkman again finds a way to spoil many of these with a speech bubble filled only with “…”.

Kirkman is asking very interesting questions about humans living in extreme circumstances, I just wish he could sometimes avoid asking them right out loud.

[1] Kirkman, Robert. The Walking Dead: Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye. Introduction. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2005.

*this post may actually have been posted... but it's listed as a draft. Regardless it first appeared on fourcolor.org, a now defunct awesome comic blog.



Michaels or Sorkin
(30 September 2006)

Sitting here this evening watching (what i think is) the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, i am quickly realizing that the fake SNL on Monday nights this season is a hell of a lot more entertaining than the actual SNL. It's all part of the recent TV phenomenon of to create shows about what folks wish their real work was like. To my knowledge, the tradition started with Ally McBeal & on with David E. Kelly's other shows, where he made shows about what we all wish our lives were like. Boston Public tried to show what teachers wished their lives were like. The Practice was a dreamy lawyer's life & shows like The West Wing and Gray's Anatomy follow the same model, where we watch every week and see people doing what we wish people in their positions were doing, were being. More real.

The first episode of Studio 60 had Judd Hirsh, essentially as Lorne Michaels apologizing for the past years of network cowardice and selling out the material for political correct-ness and sponsor friendliness. The question, though, is whether SNL (or any show) was ever any kind of idyllic challenging, comic programming that we like to imagine once existed (and has been since lost.) And i think the easy answer is no.

*i vaguely remember thinking of this tv commentary... Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, woo-hoo!



Line Up
(25 December 2006)

The American Spirit of Christmas is alive and well this year and i would like to take this opportunity to try and educate us all how we can make a slightly better world.

We Americans have an abysmal habit for forming a line. Everyone is so interested in winning the line lottery, sneaking into the new register that just opened up, beating a total stranger to the check-out & we all suffer for it. While i'm surely not the first person to point this deficiency out, i was so struck yesterday at the liquor store by how uncivilized we all are, that i feel it's my Christmas duty to try and fix this.

Step 1:
Everybody chill out. You are not that important & an extra 45 seconds out of your day is a small price to ask for universal harmony. Don't be so discontent with where you are in lif(n)e that you are constantly looking at other lines to see who's going faster or slower than you are. Line envy is just where the trouble starts.

Step 2:
(this is the hardest step) - we need to work toward a more civilized queue.

*oh yeah... here was when my blog was going to change the world, on Christmas Day, no less)


Turn my pants into shorts
(30 March 2007)

It's March in Omaha, which means the sun is shining (onto the sun porch), it's occasionally uncomfortably hot both here and outside, and despite the idyllic weather, none of the bars in town have their outdoor seating set up yet.

Early on in our tenure here in Omaha, brooke heard a statistic on the radio (almost certainly false, but nonetheless exceptionally compelling) that Omaha had as many sunny days per year as Fort Lauderdale (or Fort Knox, or perhaps Miami Beach... i can't remember any more). On first moving to Omaha this seemed like an apollionic blessing. Omaha seems to have a lot less of the heavy, bleak, gray season that i remember growing up in southern Wisconsin, and later in Iowa and Minneapolis. Almost every memory i have of Clinton is gray-colored

*this was before i lived in milwaukee again...


Total Sell-Out
(31 May 2007)




Due to the fact that i don't actually have any fans, or anyone really who pays that close of attention to what i do i am officially announcing that i am (or would be, rather) a total sellOut. If ever, any of my future work is of any value to any one with more money than me i will sell it...

But, moreso, over the last few weeks i've been desperately trying to whore out every bit of my life... With a looming move floating overhead, we've been trying to sell as much of our stuff as possible.

*think i covered this one



your time is almost up
(16 October 2007)

While i should be reading Gloria Anzaldua's i'm sure glorious essay "Entering into the Serpent", i find myself instead updating my facebook page. This isn't to say that facebook is to blame for the eventual failure of my students... Colbert's exciting announcement

* Here i was trying to get out of teaching... which i think i've done admirably since...


Bowl Prospector
(21 November 2007)

Evidently, i'm now a fine art collector.

*I was totally going to blog about this... a few weeks ago brooke & i went to a non-profit event called Feed Your Soul, put on by Brigette's company, America's Second Harvest... At this event there was a silent auction on pieces of art shaped like bowls... We won two. Evidently, the Milwaukee Art scene is full of cheap bastards...

Who's Keeper?

I am pleased to tell you all that Sparkle Motion, MAPH's IM Soccer team, is now 2-0 after a big win today... For a second week in a row, i was put in as Keeper because nobody else wanted to do it. The Keeper is a position i do not enjoy, but, unfortunately for me, i seem to be pretty good at it (allowing 1 goal in 3 halves of play thus far this season). Unfortunately, the better my performance, the more likely it is i am to remain in goal, and the more my teammates will begin to think of me as 'the keeper'. To keep things interesting, i find myself 'accidentally' kicking the ball straight to opposing team members while i'm out of goal or admiring particularly well-placed shots, instead of actually trying to stop them, only to have them glance off the post. I have no actual skill at keeping, but my luck has kept me in goal, and looks like it will for the remainder of the season...

& Now for something Completely Different...

Last night (i know a two-topic blog entry... very confusing) I went to a screening of some short films by avant-garde filmmaker Jennifer Reeves. Particularly of interest were two of her hand-painted films, very much in the tradition of Stan Brakhage & then she showed 2 Brakhage films that she had accrued in a trade (trading 2 of her films for 4 of Brakhages, frankly, i think she got the better deal)... Neither of the films are on the By Brakahge DVD, so they were both entirely new to me... "Coupling" was particularly amazing, consisting, mainly, of two fleshy-colored squiggles moving about & seeming to shake the frame... Hmm... good stuff.