http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:25:33 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/28/132533.php Brian WeaverHow will we know that we have read the last blog, in a strangled aftermath of wasted prose?The curve of interest on the Internet follows an exponential curve into the ever-widening maw of the universal bit bucket that swallows abandoned sites and rotted links kept barely alive by google and a few wild-eyed historians or undergrads at Stanford.But right now, breathless, we read that blogs are hot! Scalding hot! The marketers are panting, drooling and want to spend money! Targeted by spamers each blogger can get more vicodin as a free trail, more penis enlargers, more images of buffy nude than any normal blogless clueless Internet newbie could imagine. Articles are screaming it's a goldmine or a fad and what's the difference? After all in infomercial America we are high on entertainment, fame, and the latest scandal about drug induced radio announcers cramming diet pills, and painkillers into their ears so we have to ask what's so hot about blogs really? Aren't they just text? What would Mcluhan think? Isn't it just another diary entry?At this point I'd like to gratuitously use the word meme: meme.Blogs are indistinguishable from what used to be called personal web sites. There is no difference! Actually stand back and marvel at the wonder of it all. Marketing blather and rampant stupidity aside a blog is just a web site that's updated! So what! An online diary BFD! It usually covers the daily toilet trained activity and conspicuous consumption of the mindless waste of barely renewable resources in the obsessive detail of the blogger. Perhaps, blogging is just logorrhea by another name.Perseus found that of the four million or so blogs created using the eight major blog-hosting services at least 66 per cent had not been updated in more than two months. Over a quarter of the blogs were not touched after the day they were created.Headlines should read More Dead Than Alive! It's just all subject to the Power Law and we shouldn't really be surprised traffic to blogs is governed by power law distribution. This means that a tiny number of bloggers get read by an awful lot of people, while the vast majority of other blogs get hardly any visitors let alone readers.I count myself lucky that I get any visitors at all, so it is with any web site. Most are floundering under the sheer weight of numbers that the mathematics of the Power Law generates than by any actually curious occasional visitor.Hot indeed. Will the last blogger please turn out the Internet? Culture9577@blogcritics.org Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:25:33 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/14/180604.php Brian WeaverThe problems that computer mediated art poses hark back to the problems that Descartes posed for us in the 16th century. Therefore what computer art presents us is a crisis in epistemology. [Click on your grant writing processors here!]For Descartes only one kind of true knowledge existed, that was certain knowledge. For us there is only uncertain knowledge as the foundation stones of our civilization transform under our nervous feet.What Descartes sought was truth, by the application of a right method to a search that would result in a well-ordered philosophical system.While he doubted, he did not doubt all things. We doubt even our own senses, paradoxing ourselves on our uncertain on our alters of uncertainty and living in the trance state that results from it.For Descartes philosophy was a system of connected scientific truths organized in such a way that no one in their right mind could avoid the progression of truths self evident in other truths so that the only knowledge there is certain and evident knowledge provided by the one scientific method provided by the one science.Juxtaposed to the above are the increased abstraction of art and work and the increase in mediation knowledge and more importantly the underlying implication of what constitutes knowledge.What increasingly constitutes knowledge is no longer sensually based and is context less. Increasingly knowledge is contextualized only with great effort. In precomputerized knowledge, belief was a seamless extension of sensory experience.Now the body no longer acts on the world directly and relationships become mediated by information systems and the body is separated from the phenomenal by the data interface.The mediational nature of computer art is that the image is perceived through a data interface, a symbolic medium through which effects are produced and on the basis of which one derives an interpretation of what is seen. These symbols are abstractions experienced as remote form sensory reality. This remoteness in the new media means the produced image for which the computer artist has claims, as an aesthetic object is not felt to be legitimate, in terms of the classic art historical view. Computer art lifts the image from meaningful context where the image must be regarded as in-itself where meaning is problematic.Significance is not a transparent feature of the data from the system; rather, significance is a construction that emerges from the application of intellectual skill to the available data.The computer is an interpolator between artist and action; it represents to the artist his effects on the world.But the execution is indirect and the question nags at the gut. Has the artist really done anything? Perhaps the artist did something perhaps not. It mirrors the brittle relationships between cause and effect. It is an epistemological distress and computer art and the computer artist is cut off from the context of action in which there is certain knowledge.The reference system has changed, as the image is not linked to reality. There is no paint, canvas, film, marble, or "physical aesthetic object". Just bits.Computer art occurs in an encapsulated formal space, usually, at this time at least, on a screen unrelated to the general knowledge of art production. Computer art then is intellectually centered not action centered. What computer art suggest is an all-encompassing sensorium of simulation. A virtual abstract space, governed by an underlying AI, or rule based system in an interactive syntharium, such as in the computer game Unreal. Ultimately this suggests that the artist, as we have come to know him, is in fact no longer necessary, and will in the future be replaced by the technical requirements of an interactive environment and teams of programmers. Art then is becoming a collective endeavor much like film, special effects, a computer game, or interactive theme park ride. Culture9190@blogcritics.org Tue, 14 Oct 2003 18:06:04 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/08/183405.php Brian WeaverI've been thinking about teaching art lately. In my experience when people ask you to teach them drawing or art they usually preface it with a tentative apology or preface what they say with sad explanations. One of the most common is; "I can't draw but..." Usually when you ask them where they got their information it turns out some teacher or adult told them that in kindergarten or grade school. Rather than be encouraged they were discouraged. Probably by people who were told the same thing when they were eight or so.I think most people just want permission. They want to be told that it's all right to want to learn something such as drawing for whatever reason, even if they don't plan on becoming a world famous artist.I was wondering about this conspiracy of discouragement that seems to permeate the culture in America and wonder where it's from and why it exists?Now art is the only thing I'm passably good at, so not being able to do it, or listening to folks that attempt to tell someone else they can't draw is a kind of mystery to me. Why anyone would want to listen to someone tell them that what they did was stupid or lame if the speaker give no evidence of being able to do it themselves? I suppose there is a certain contingent of serious academically trained art critics that think such trash talk is merely proof that I am some kind of uneducated lower class buffoon for suggesting that a cook shouldn't be able to say something about a recently baked croissant if they can't bake one.Safe to say that art is not a theoretical exercise but actually involves eye hand coordination with a set of special tools used with special knowledge and if one can't actually make a painting say, then one shouldn't bad mouth those who do or make up psudo-philosophical/psychological reasons as to why it doesn't meet some kind of suddenly officially recognized set of aesthetic criteria that the critic copied out of a book for a test when they were in school.I think secretly that many art critics actually think of themselves as artists, and imagine that they are actually part of a mystic process by which art is brought into the world by other people who actually do the real work, and that somehow by the critics "participation" in that process that they think they become artists too. They think of themselves from that point on as actually responsible for the work.The fact that I took a large number of philosophy courses and then studied the history of art doesn't make me an expert if I can't draw something more recognizable than a stick figure. In point of fact being able to draw well proves that one can observe the world and knows a bit about how it works as well as knowing how the process of doing art works. Like I said, art is not a theoretical exercise despite what a professor said.In America people would rather read about art than make it or look at it and form their own opinions about it. We love received ideas. TV, for example is one great big received set of ideas, mostly about selling stuff. Universities specialize in received ideas and are greatly responsible for fostering this amazingly idiotic way of looking at received things and calling them important and academic. They do this by studying texts that have been written by others. Thereby assuring that, as a rule, schools exist as a place where one can go to see art reduced to desiccated husk and made into an adjunct category in the philosophic study of texts. Sadly some of the graduates of these schools go on to become art critics or even teachers themselves.So when I do teach art, it is in this critical atmosphere where learning art is hard and filled with emotional danger for the folks that are interested in doing it. That's why they ask so carefully. They have become afraid. It's that fear they have to unlearn in order to learn to draw or paint as adults. Culture9015@blogcritics.org Wed, 8 Oct 2003 18:34:05 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/29/125311.php Brian WeaverIn the morning the weather from this table is obscured by clouds, cool wafts of Pacific air gust along the sidewalk. Overcast threatens rain. Leaves nod. There is a Radio Flyer wagon in a second story apartment window across the street that is being used as a planter. In Zokas Café watching traffic, reading. I note an article on technology company spread sheets. I try to draw, my pencil, lead number 3B hesitates. Schubert is on; a quartet drifts down in the café. Across the way there's this guy, animated pointing to his sandwich talking to his wife. He's going over the sandwich like an engineer goes over a new bridge. An amazing series of frowns cross his face, there is a puffed explosion of gray beard on his chin, above them lips too large for his face, rubbery and mobile, his forehead furrows and unfurrows as he talks in an odd rhythm disconnected from what he might be saying.He is a man whose idea of conversation is a series of pronouncements and prescriptions for everything; the sound of his voice is insistent and stressed, slightly pressured. I imagine he is someone's father, his offspring are fat and very calculating, easily accused of being slow witted, they are probably very smart having been brought up in a house with faded prints on the walls, paper blinds pulled, so the light is very yellow, the floor groaning from bookshelves filled with heavy books, and the scratchy sound of a operas played on an old record player. One chooses love or not. "I fell down." Is not the same thing as "I fell in love." As love always involves an "other" that one easily blames for the state of "love". It makes the fallen a victim. Absolving one from responsibility, as if an accident happened. One does not "fall in love." it is an act of will, a choice, in a culture that denies the will and makes victims of us all. If I choose love it is a conscious act as much as not choosing it. No two loves are the same; they are fingerprints on the way to a larger target destination. Our radar's amber in the half light of the control room, LEDs red and dim, shapes bent over silently watching the approach of meaning, trying to decipher the epistemology of the universe. Wittgenstein said that the world is everything that is the case, and the Tractates led the reader from there to the conclusion that in the end there are things which defy understanding and cannot be contained in a logically formal structure. Godel built on that to the point where no formally logical structure can contain all possible cases, and that there are cases that are logically indefinable. Thus no formal logical system can be complete as much as we wish to have certainty in all things, such as love, and desire, and the color of sunsets. We journey through the world. The light that passes us streams into space, voices on the radio pass beyond us, pass out into the great deeps of the galaxy and nebula. The signals faint and almost lost in the general background hiss of the hydrogen spectra, a dull soft reminder of the singularity that ruptured and bore the universe itself into being. So we send signals, wondering if we are reaching the other, wondering if the bandwidth is heard and can be tuned. So I send to you a message through the recent static of the passing storms that have rent our lives. The sun falls down the well of Earth's shadow. The cloud tops and mountains stretch across the sky as dark arrows pointing towards the deeps of night where unbidden dreams rise as partial payment for being human. Embracing an instant of possibility arising out of action, a confirmation of cause and effect, the stars wink on. The heavens shot spatter the deep bowl of night above the rind of the afterglow that edges the rim of the world. In Golden Gardens Park, on late summer cliffs, the wind whispers through the yellow grasses and gusts small sand dunes into being. Over the Sound, in a hammered instant of times ascendancy, a ferry moves through times matrix, hazed with the distance, a green hull and white superstructure ripple across vibrating water. Bainbridge, the Peninsula, the Olympics, the color of blue slate. Above the snow line the airglows a superrational light fringed by blinding white. The face of the Brothers on the Olympic Range an enigma floating in the sky. Sea gulls wheel, cormorants dive and hunt, seals bark among the rocks below. The shore is strewn with the wreckage of storms, and the rusted evidence of ships, and the remains of human contact with the sea, a shoe, and a soda can. Crabs wander randomly, waving across pigtailed kelp. Leaves whisper fluttering, their pale undersides exposed, stoma closing in the afternoon light, still white and summery, the sun drifting down. The soft sand of these cliffs, glacial silt, lain down 15,000 years before, sculpted since by wind and rain. Ice once overlay here 5,000 feet deep. Once the cold of the arctic filled the air and there was the subsilence of eternal winter, at least until the next millennial thaw. The sunlight slant splashes a tide of light into cooling air. The orthogonal matrix of space and time insure another rotation into Evenings Empire and I am sitting here, this moment, this time wanting to kiss your lovely mouth. It is the evening now of another day. It is another decent of night. The small unobtrusive clouds and weathers come out. Behind them the stars blink in surprise, spread out across the sky as the sun settles down in a bed of mountains for the evening. The sun god moans as he lies back, shoves a noisy thunder head aside and shushes it to quiet. It is yesterday and now today. The cats are sleeping on sheepskin, dark pools of soft fur, ears aflutter, eyes half open, they groom each other then curl together once more whiskers quivering. Today it is cloudier and actually rains most of the morning. It is cool and gray. I imagine you in a meeting, head tilting, listening to your heart resonate as you relate the context of this life, as you try to weave and nit the lost contexts together of grief and loss, love and forgiveness, sorrow and joy. I can see you slender and quiet, weighing the moments that slip past in the narrative of moment-by-moment, re-written as contract with the earth, the wind, the light that swirls through the clouds. Seattle stretches out in the background, beyond the walls, the traffic whines and thuds pierced by sirens and cries. On the coast, out to sea the light is white on the edge of things, white and still. Shadows creep out from under the cliffs, it is past noon, and dust is stirred by stray breezes, the sun white and knowing runs the great elliptic course constructed out of its celestial mechanics. The highways move past San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver all at the same time, co-existing in time in the stillness just past noon. There are motels and beaches from which no one stirs; there is a silence in the heart of light. Shadows begin to lengthen once more The weather gathers itself into a great swirl and threatens to rain, broken by patches of gleaming sunlight traveling slowly across the hills, the windows of the little houses glinting on Seattle's hills. Culture8762@blogcritics.org Mon, 29 Sep 2003 12:53:11 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/28/100224.php Brian WeaverYou know do it yourself home decorating is a wonderful idea. Look at all that ugly furniture you own that you could improve. You start reading about woods and fabric. Look at the spectacular pictures of before and after. Before you know it you're an expert in home interior design. Do not let the lack of experience with real world objects deter you or the fact that you failed Wood and Metal Shop. In fact you were the only one in your High School to fail it, ever. This is of no importance when it comes to home interior aesthetics.For a start look at that Yugoslavian rocking chair from the 60's you'd like to improve, and paint up a little. All it takes is a little imagination and lots and lots of new materials. Materials are amazing things. Did you know that most things are made from materials? Oddly most articles on home improvement are about materials but not how to find them. They never describe them as expensive as they assume you have a yearly income of at least $150,000 and an automated GIS set up in your imported luxury touring car so you can keep track of where you are as you look for them. Regardless, you are exhorted to go forth and remodel, re-design, and paint just like the lovely models do in the magazine photographs. Smile please. Wear nice cloths and never have any paint, stripping, or wood chips on your designer clothes.Home Depot will not carry the small expensive hard to find items you will need that the nice decorating magazine forgot to discuss. The helpful people in Mighty Big Corporation Of America MegaHardware will not be able to direct you to an isle in the store that has it, nor do they know who might carry it. Staff shrugs and smiles weakly and sadly turn away from your questions.Certain critical home interior design materials are found at tiny special out of the way stores hidden in the industrial sector. To find these stores call a lot of phone numbers, leave plenty of phone messages. Do not expect results right away. I have found a three or four-day wait for a response is typical. Eventually you are directed to go south past the clashing rail yards, and the piles of rusted car sized post-industrial machinery, over the rusting draw bridge that spans the brackish slough to drive carefully by the reeking column of smoke, that smells like burnt dog fur and horse turds. Now turn left down an unmarked Side Street past the burned out warehouse and the bullet riddled sign. There is a woodworking store there with a small hand made cardboard sign in a small dirty window. A family of wood working Central European home improvement geniuses runs the store. They are hard to understand. Maybe they are Bulgarian? The item you want but don't know the name of looks like a small hand made NASA microtome with an extinct exotic hard wood handle. You can never touch the blade you are told, as the acids in your sweat will cause the entire item to self-destruct suddenly. There is a Manuel, written in what appears to be Sanskrit without illustrations on how to use it. Monthly Interior Design Miracle Magazine recommended it, what choice do you have?Buy it, cash only, as the store does not have phone lines connected to a major credit card company. The owner doesn't believe in banks. The tottering assistant wraps the tool carefully in wax paper as the owner's wife mutters in the background making the sign of the cross.Next on the list is paint. The colors are unavailable to anyone who doesn't have access to a building sized color-mixing machine made in 1936 in Birmingham England by a moderately famous but reclusive craftsman who was part of a major movement to return to the roots of spiritual aesthetic wonderment or something. You need three colors, and have to buy them from the store specializing in rare woods and exotic stains located in apart of town that the police refuse to patrol or recognize as existing.The people in the wood craftsman supply store are very helpful with your halting questions and have an easy manner as they steer you to the most expensive supplies they have.Next are some very small-specialized items that look like they might be brass wood screws and a pair of gold trimmed hinges that might as well be earrings. It takes three more days to find them.You finally realize you don't really know what you are doing. The magazines never tell the reader that most of their subscribers don't know what they are doing either. That's why they subscribe to the magazine in order to find that out. Humility is a wonderful thing.Notice that most of the people that work in the wood and metal craft stores are older balding men. They are overweight, wear thick reading glasses and huge overalls that could hold a small country and they have, with the help of their short quiet wives, made strong big strapping offspring, who have lots of muscle, who are graduates of Stanford with PhDs in mathematical physics who do most of the work. There is a reason for that. This is Home Improvement after all.Coming Soon: Part II, Actually Working on The Rocking Chair. Culture8730@blogcritics.org Sun, 28 Sep 2003 10:02:24 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/23/152934.php Brian WeaverI have had vast pretensions to being a writer, as well as other pretensions almost too numerous to list here or mention. Being a famous movie star, a famous artist, and a famous New York talk show host have been among other pretensions I have held at one time or another. There are pretensions I would never admit to, ever. Those are the ones that make folks uncomfortable. I leave it up to you to think of your own and then realize we've probably all had them. Scary isn't it? What's even more scary is how vary mundane they are.It's sad to think that it makes us completely normal, after growing up on a steady diet of TV based fantasy, game shows, action movies, and advertising for top quality meats or hair gel. What do we expect?Imagine a person in a society that didn't grow up in a cultural mêlée of product endorsements? What would such a person who grew up in something like that be like to talk to? It might be a total shock. I'm wondering if such a person would be legal in our culture? They would have to be from another planet, totally alien. They'd have a value structure that wasn't dependent on competition or reciprocity; it might be based on other more wholesome values. Or not. We always hear about accepting ourselves as we are. So go ahead. You probably are a jealous and spiteful person filled with envy and a disturbing tendency toward petty theft when in large department stores. Embrace your inner blighted self and be accepting.I always laugh at the various movements out there that assume that just because you've attained enlightenment and you've gotten in touch with your own true self it would be peaceful and blissful. Suppose your true self is in fact a cheaply dressed serial killer? You're in touch with it, you've accepted calmly the inner light and you actually enjoy pulling the feet off kittens? What then?We always think that if a person is more advanced spiritually than us they are better than the rest of us.For instance at this very moment I'm in touch with my inner poet. I want to share my thoughts with you on this topic on the form of an epic poem. Makes you cringe doesn't it? I can see you all just jerking your head down at the word "poet". You know what bad poetry sounds like, it sounds like all the poetry you've ever heard in grade school and high school. Well I'm in touch with that. One never knows what will happen when you free your inner monster.It's not a pretty thing being enlightened. Culture8614@blogcritics.org Tue, 23 Sep 2003 15:29:34 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/22/180503.php Brian WeaverI understood that I had many important things to say. I wanted to say them. I had to say them. I was sure I could put it all together into a carefully controlled rant that lead to a masterful crescendo of rage and a call to action. On something, I was not sure what, maybe something political might catch my eye. I realize now that a few days have passed and I still can't think of anything important enough to write about. I know many will scoff at this, pointing out that writing about not having anything to say is just silly. You're probably correct. Topics could have been: American Education, Medical care, Employment, President Bush, The Iraq War, stuff like that. Notice I'm only talking about myself? I'm sitting here now, filled with a smooth lackadaisical attitude that bodes ill for political action. Philosophically I'm just slightly to the behind of laid-back hot tub. That simply means I'm lazy, for those who are curious. I know many of my friends have argued that being invited to write on Blogcritics was a major opening to a new career move to becoming some kind of person who could sway others to action while at the same time not being able to sway myself into action. I guess that's ironic? "You can do this, you can make this a way to influence others!" Dan paced the room arms flailing with each sentence. "You know you want to become well known, famous, even, this might be an opportunity to even get my name out there!" He panted from the exertion of being so excited. His eyes were wild. Jill thought I could be a force for good, suggesting actions that could cause the downfall of nations. She was trying to think up a radical program for subversion, and was calling on all her mall-shopping friends for better suggestions. I can only sigh at this, as you can well imagine, such talk is exceedingly tedious and fills me with a fear of doing something, anything that might result in something happening somewhere. How horrid would that be? I'd really like to go back to sitting on a beach on Kauai, Hawaii. There are some Japanese Pines there that make as nice calming whisper when you sit under them. The view is perfect for watching the surfers off the Waialua River. The breeze is perfect and you never get to hot under the shade of the trees. Which unaccountably got me thinking about the demands that are made on artists in America. You can play music on the radio, if it's classical music you can play only a movement if you want, but if it's a painting by Monet you cannot cut the canvas and keep only the part you really like. All writing has to have a purpose, no visual art does, but movies must have a plot and be understandable unless they are experimental in which case the camera work is jiggly. Art must fit into a category, which has been devised for marketing, and has no aesthetic or philosophical justification except that it's easier to sell music in a labeled remaindered bin. Culture8583@blogcritics.org Mon, 22 Sep 2003 18:05:03 EDT