this is not a pipe

Yesterday i fixed a toilet. As a new homeowner i had my first minor freakout because the toilet was leaking... I started imagining the inevitable call to the plumber and the visit where he would find pipe after pipe that was suspect, eventually having to tear out and overhaul the entire system...

But, with a little encouragement from Brooke's dad, i took the project on myself, turned off the water to the entire house and removed a pipe from the wall & the toilet. I took said pipe to the hardware store where i found a piece that looked kind of similar, though not close enough to put my mind at ease, then reconnected the piece to the entire system. Very scary.

In the process of doing all this i purchased a pipe wrench (which it turned out i did not need) and a really big crescent wrench (which was much more expensive that i expected it to be). This is, in fact, the second DIY-y thing i've done to the house... Last weekend, again with Jim's help, i uninstalled & installed 2 light fixtures in the bedroom & bathroom. Touching electric wires, twisting them around each other, and screwing things into the ceiling. Very exciting.

After my repair project, i continued the ManDay theme by going outside and trying to move approximately 1000lbs of ice & water that had collected on my driveway. My efforts were barely enough to put a dent in the glacier that is the front walk, but it's a start and becoming a real man, man.

Toward a Poetic Culture

David Halperin came to speak at UW-M on Friday about Gay Male Culture and it's struggle with finding authenticity in "real" hetero-normaitive emotions... to that i say... this?

Constructive Games

I’m interested in the gamesmanship (game-iness) of the Oulipo movement and have come to questions about using this idea of games in a positive, constructive way. This is something that I’ve been working out over the last several months, and this seems like a useful place to try to get it down. First, I’d like to think a little about art-in-a-box or ‘gaming art’ and games in general, then see if we can’t find a way to apply it to theory.

One of the primary concerns of Oulipo is this idea of creating a set of arbitrary rules around your art. With If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler you’ve got a single sentence/poem that will make up the chapter titles and a host of other constrictions cataloged elsewhere. Stephen King says about writing fiction that a lot of great storytelling comes from the question, “What If?” and Oulipo must have anticipatorily plagiarized this idea, creating art that says, “what if we make a _________ that only _________?”

In my introductory creative writing class in college, an introduction of the textbook suggested that writing (and I would say just art generally) should be something akin to playing tennis, rather than solely the realm of ‘professionals.’ “I write” (or make art) wouldn’t mean you necessarily do so well (in the same way that “I play tennis” in no way gives me delusions that I could be a professional tennis player {though I’m sure I could have, had my high school had a team}). I wonder if this isn’t somewhat what Oulipo is after, democratizing art creation, making art creation possible for everyone (by doing creative writing exercises as a jumping off point). That being said, those in the actual Oulipo movement likely don’t want everyone to necessarily display all of their Oulipian art (just as my backhand slice should remain largely unseen).

What this notion of democratizing art might do, though, is create a lot of ‘potential art’. The more bad art being made out there and the more our culture becomes one that encourages participation in art creation, the more opportunity there is for great outside art to actually be discovered.

I feel as though I have strayed somewhat from my initial thought with this post… I was going to say something about the idea of the difference between rules and laws, rules being arbitrary and artificial, while laws theoretically come from moral or ethical considerations. Also the difference that you can’t actually break a rule (this notion is one of Baudrillard’s, I think), because once you do, you’re no longer playing the game, strictly speaking. Whereas a law can be broken (ethical and moral standards can change, which should force laws to change), and sometimes should be broken in order to line them up with the changing moral/ethical standards. You can change the rules of the game (say, you get to use doubles lines when we play tennis), but then you’re playing a slightly different game (so you still didn’t beat me at tennis, really).

do you ever get the feeling... the sensation... the painful memory, where you're sitting at a table, standing against a wall, lying in bed, and you wonder... Where was i when i was picking my nose? Not the half-hearted scratch, but the FULL ASS, wrist deep pick. I'm pretty sure I was in a toilet stall, but suddenly i wonder was i in class? Was I sitting in my office? Alone? That sick sensation of embarrassing yourself everywhere you go...

Someone Who actually posts...

Presenting the blog of my office-mate Sarah (also added to my list of friends). For those of you dying for more blog action... someone who actually regularly writes on her blog...

It's about sundry academic-y things...

enjoy

Sleeping Men Don't Sneeze

For much of the last few weeks i've been agog and slightly in shock... appalled into silence, in fact. I saw I Am Legend, with Will Smith playing Robert Neville, a book that i truly love, and whose previous movie versions (The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston & The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price) i found pleasing, if a bit disappointing. And then i saw this newest version...

And... at first i was pleased. Re-locating the film to New York (because of course, New York is the center of the universe) was slightly problematic, but overall a useful and interesting choice. It did give us a break from possibly the most tiresome (but ultimately crucial) plot element of the original novel where the Vampires stand outside Neville's house each night trying to coax him out.

Ultimately the movie comes to precisely the opposite conclusion than that of Matheson's original novel, which is, i suppose, a useful mistake...

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...