This Blog Has Officially Gone Fishing

Tweeted this today:

Going on a social media break til after 5771/Rosh Hashanah. Reach out to me via email/ /www.stevensolo.com

Of course, I haven't used this blog in months. Social media killed it. The whole notion of documenting my responses to art and life here seemed so long-winded and archaic--and the immediacy of Twitter seemed to enbolden me to carry on in some less artificial voice. At first, at least.

This blog is a pretty solid archive/catalogue of my obsessive interests. Perhaps in 5771, post Rosh Hashanah it will make sense to continue it in this or another form.

For now, there's more than enough to last through the end of 5770.

Here's one of my first entries to go out on:

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Rant on Rebuilding my Studio

I want to be like Hokusai, who changed his name & moved to a fresh new studio & took up a new artistic identity at the same time. Instead I would buy cats (if I weren't so allergic) so that the police could find something living in my apt. among the newspaper clippings when I die here.

I am engaged in a project I call "rebuilding my studio". Once I named it, the physical difficulties all seemed to make sense. I am supposedly purging my supplies, reference material, decoration and equipment. Each category of CRAP has its own box with a LARGE BLACK MARKERED description so I can wrap my head around it. Like "DRAWING MATERIALS" "BIKE STUFF".

Considering that after 8 years of living here, I can't find the kind of erasers I use in a shelf containing boxes of bicycle supplies that I fantasized using, mixed with a kind ofpaint I used for a project 5 years ago this is probably a good idea.

Most of what I need I can fit into a decent sized backpack. What IS all this STUFF?

Anyway the "desired outcome" is "A functional studio workspace I enjoy working in with adequate and clear storage for supplies I need, archive completed work, accessible storage for related and front burner work-in-progress." (My mission statement on this motherfucker.)

This is all a delusion. At some point I will just get fed up with interior decorating my soul and just flail out and make new stuff again until I find myself backed up against the wall of all the old crap (some of which is the stuff I have been making) and, gasping for air, begin to repeat the whole activity again.

Twitter Ate My Blog, Then Had My Mind For Dessert

Twitter is reenacting the development of tech & communication but at jump cut speed. We, the participants, are experiencing this meta evolution in dizzying fashion. Even Google and Facebook's respective arcs of development seem normal and measured by comparison.

The history of film was an accelerated version of the history of painting--and with painting as a model that medium accelerated pretty wildly. But even with Eisenstein, Riefenstal and other formal innovators it still took a few decades to get to Godard. There may have been other formalists I am not thinking of but JL Godard seems to represent the meta-moment, when narrative conventions are well enough understood to be truncated. The editing form also becomes part of the content. Literally "cut to the chase".

The evolution from the days of your Geocities site to your carefully designed & manicured Home page to a blog like this one to, to, to: 140 characters and being at a benzedrine fueled cocktail party 24/7 seems to have happened in the space between the frames.

I haven't posted to this blog for awhile and honestly it seemed like a kind of (outmoded)scrapbooking activity which might or might not address the question of "what am I looking at or thinking about" but it was never clear if I was really communicating or just writing a Dear Diary in public.

The nutty-as-a-fruitcake feedback loop of Twitter lets me know my ideas were heard in some fashion. Perhaps closer to brainstorming at a fun party with a lot of slightly drunk & hyped up smart people. I also think years of working in restaurants prepared me for the multithreaded bullshit sessions, sparring, goofing off and, lately, pretty interesting moments of connection with others.

At the same time, is it intoxication that leads to further insight or am I just turning into a drunk? #Infohaulism. Hrrm.

The metaphor of alcohol seems appropriate in many ways. Infohaulism is much like alcholism. As an occasional purveyor of webstuff for clients I have felt like an Alcoholic Sommelier of Information (tm). It's the hard stuff and I not only give out a tasting glass of the latest toys, tools and concepts. I am hitting my own private stock but my vices are not limited to boutiques. Infowise, I gleefully devour Sterno as well as Burgundy for breakfast often side by side. Twitter gave me a place to put all of that monkey-minded surfing, reading, clicking. Even worse, I got sugar pellets of approval at irregular intervals to reinforce my shitty habits. (Not my insight, I will attribute when I remember)

Am I preparing a yummy meal that will also sustain or (as Merlin The Mann said recently) am I just manufacturing potato chips all day and all night? Not even the cool kind, it often feels like we are mechanically, obsessively forcefeeding one another car trunkfuls of rotten Pringles.

The "We Were Promised Jetpacks" side of this: all the cool toys have been appropriated by businessman douchebag types. Is the ecology of Twitter somehow resistant to being digested this way b/c it empowers Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions graduates of Al Jaffee University? Or are we doing Satan's work for him by developing such advanced Weapons Of Mass Distraction?

Enough for the moment.

Shake. Some. Action.

Saturday night/Sunday morning, Rainy Spring night. Perfect weather to powerpop. 

What is the connection these deceptively cheery sounds have to melancholy? This stuff, The Raspberries, The Records... all these upbeat songs have a kind of yearning jangling feeling somehow... 

Awards... Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering, Pinky?

"I don't wanna be a poet
'Cuz I don't wanna blow it
I don't care 2 win awards "

D.M.S.R. Prince
I usually quote Prince, I don't care to win awards... but let's be real here. My nomination from the James Beard House for Best Restaurant Graphics is cool.

My Mom has something nice to tell her friends for a change & this is a good thing.

A friend had a good point: an award from your client base is more meaningful in design than one from your design peers in that one is being acknowledged for the utility and relevance of the design. Rationalizations abound.

It's clear to me that Terroir is a unique project, and that Paul Grieco, David Flaherty and Jared Friedman are each respectively responsible for being part of the band--using Stephen Levy's comparison of the iPod team to a rock band in The Perfect Thing as a jumping off point. You can't be a shredding guitarist or turntablist without an ensemble.

No matter what, we will pimp the tshirts at the event. Stickers! Too!

Jared modelling the pink number.

Matt Stinton, male model

Sample misprints are cool