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.

No Wonder I Have The Munchies All The Time

This article is a treasure trove of pronouncements on our current predicament. Oh shit, I mean MY predicament, who's kidding who here?

He sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. “People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes,” he says, “in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.”

And:

People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana.

And, And:

The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction.

Sam Anderson, NY Mag

Paul Graham on Disconnecting Distraction

Paul Graham writes great essays. I recommend one of his newest, Disconnecting Distraction.

I remember when computers were, for me at least, exclusively for work. I might occasionally dial up a server to get mail or ftp files, but most of the time I was offline. All I could do was write and program. Now I feel as if someone snuck a television onto my desk. Terribly addictive things are just a click away. Run into an obstacle in what you're working on? Hmm, I wonder what's new online. Better check.

After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn't realize that it evolves. Something that used to be safe, using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some days I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often.

Now, get off the internet!

Get Off the Internet - Le Tigr...

Here Comes The Clutter

I still like Yahoo, and if I had a spare 40 zillion or whatever, maybe I would help them out of this mess. If I were Jerry Yang I would have some kind of poison pill to prevent Microsoft from Hotmailing my simple, usable interface. (Note that the wiki says "see also Pyrrhic victory".)

Here is what I think they should do when Ballmer comes knocking (more ideas here).
For me, it is not about business, it is about a company coming by and ruining some tools that I use everyday. When Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft, it turned almost unusable with crap plastered all over a once simple UI.

And, yeah, I have a Gmail account, but their way of doing things isn't always right. (Try sending yourself a script and having Google decide it might be a virus--hey, I sent the damn thing to ME).

As long as the 6B pencil and blank index cards are still available, I will survive...

Oh Shit, To Be Human Again

"People have too many sexy-looking leather date books in their lives and not enough spaced-out moments in stretched-out T-shirts, listening to the magical emanations of other heads." Cintra Wilson on Daniel Johnston, see here.

Here is a Pere Ubu video (via Alan Partlow) that reminded me of that quote.




"Let's watch the whole world just goin slow/Let's watch the whole world goin slow..."

If They Outlaw Comics Torrents, Then Only Outlaws will have...

Marvel & DC are trying to kill popular comics torrent-linkers, but before they have their own digital comics solution in place.

In short, the parallel with Napster is all in place, but what will be the iTunes type of solution?

I bought New Gods in pulp, in collected book set and then I downloaded the .cbrs. Same with Watchmen (well, I got the book as a gift, but still...). So, I bought 'em legally 2x. The scans are a great format.

Mini rant: The multigig 1960's Kurt Schaffenberger Lois Lanes? Well, I am still waiting for the trade paperback of those, man! (What, DC, too busy killing off Big Barda? Oh, that's another rant and not a pretty one. Suffice to say that Barda will outlive us all.)

Cbrs are the mp3s of online comics, and the scan-and-posting crowd is pretty meticulous about their craft. The reasonable solution is probably DRM free authorized downloads with ads. I don't know what the mainstream comics publishers clear, but a buck a comic is probably alot. Plus they can still publish the collected graphic novels, distribute in bookstores and clean up.

Marvel is doing Rhapsody style subscriptions, but they don't have the newest stuff available. DC is doing an artistically more experimental format actually setup for the computer screen, but, hey, where is Grant Morrison?

Interesting perspectives on this issue:
mightygodking
businessof content

ON THE CREATION MUSEUM or "horseshit, horseshit, horseshit"

"And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum. $27 million has purchased the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see." link here
(via Daring Fireball).

Wait, one more quote, this is too awesome not to echo:

"Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! "

Dilbert on Internet Addiction

Give up TV, Free Speech quotes from Salon

2 quotes from Salon that bear repeating:

"I gave up watching television 25 years ago because I liked it so much even though I couldn't remember what I had watched the day before and could see that if I went on as a viewer my life would become a blank." Garrison Keillor

"The Iranian leader's visit to Columbia provoked outcry, support and a twist on free speech: 'We're glad you're here -- so we can tell you you're an asshole.'" Ellen Miller, a sophomore at Barnard

Link

Robot Fly

"You probably wouldn't notice a fly in the room, but you certainly would notice a hawk"

BAD HOUSES or This Blog Is On Vacation

I will not post for awhile. Or maybe I will redo this blog.I couldn't find a YouTube link for Big Black performing "Bad Houses" or it would be posted here as some lateral reference point for internet addiction.

"I tell myself I will not go/Even as I drive there."

Back in a bit with either more pointers to Reasons To Be Cheerful or a new take on what blog move to make next.

Hitler gets banned from XBox Live

This is so, so awesome that even though everyone is linking to it, I must as well.

"Tofu" text reader

This is neat, I haven't decided whether I will use it regularly. It is helpful for long articles online as well--you can save them as text, strip out line breaks (I use TextWrangler) and then drag and drop into Tofu and you have a much more readable text.

http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/

"Reading: Theres an awful lot of literature worth reading available for free on the web. Very recently I found a program called Tofu; all it does is takes selected text (or html) and puts it into justified columns of adjustable width. The upside of this is that theres no vertical scrolling, and its actually much easier to read long pieces of text. Its infectious; Im starting to wish that every piece of text that I have to read on my computer be formatted into a justified column. The program is a little touchy when it comes to preferences, but its a great tool."

from Apodion.net

YouTube gets ugly but gives you a way out

Embedding your YouTube videos just got alot weirder with an overly busy viewer. You, the embedder, just have to know enough HTML to add "&rel=0" to the tag that embeds the video.





embed src=" http://www.youtube.com/v/dGAL2wWctII", for example, should be changed to:



embed src=" http://www.youtube.com/v/dGAL2wWctII&rel=0"



It just doesn't get any user-friendlier than that!



www.blip.tv anyone?

One more YouTube link, really...

I know, enough with the YouTube. I need to resize a design and of course this is impetus to immediately go websurfing, do errands, anything but the 30 minutes that it would take to get the damn task rolling.

One more, damnit, one more...from the Helvetica documentary, touching on font fetishism, here it is:

NYT Newsriver is baaack! (for awhile anyhow)

Here is a geeky link: http://nytimesriver.com/

This is a revival of Dave Winer's newsriver for the NYT.
If you like it, tell people about it and tell him how cool you think it is
on his comments page, which is at http://scripting.wordpress.com/

All text, in feed order, all links lead to printer friendly versions of the
stories. He just restored it, I have written him like a nut asking for it back after he killed it.

No nonsense and lots of peripheral newsreading. Cool, huh?

It is interesting to see how much more of the paper I check out when it is just a big old text list with links. The NYT podcasts are way more accessible this way as well.

Merlin Redeems TV. Also: The Delmore Effect!

Merlin Mann does a video podcast that is actually good. This is the first interview of The Merlin Show. Mann's interest in creativity and how to get there informs most of his work (with the dark side represented as well).


It is not a coincidence that Paul Sas turned me onto Merlin, since his own work on goal setting and The Delmore Effect is a motherlode of insight.


In his words: "...most people tend to set much more explicit goals for low priority domains than for their most important ambitions. (This lapse is labeled the Delmore Effect, after the failed poet, Delmore Schwartz).


Holy goofing off, Batman, I have to get offline RIGHT NOW!

Reasons to Be Cheerful 2/14/07

Time to clear the decks with a "shopping list" post in no particular order. The nature of this blog is that I might not develop all ideas or lists but part of the experiment is the simple act of posting.

Lots of quotes rambling around my head today...

-The Search by John Battalle - (book) Think of an act we have always been engaged in, now refined to the point where it is a new context for hunting and gathering. The Tesla connection, aka "The lessons of Tesla":

"I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world. I wanted to get them out there, get them into people's hands so they can use them, because that's what really matters." Larry Page p.66

This is another interation of "Real artists ship" (Steve Jobs).

Bill Gross' IdeaLab story is also worth reading.

"...he was fascinated with the way Spielberg ran movie sets. 'He walks around all day long using his brainpower to creatively enhance things around him...

'I'd always thought you had to take the good with the bad. How audacious to think your job could be perfect all day long.' " Bill Gross p. 99

-Bruce Nauman at the Berklee Art Center-What would I be doing today if I had seen this stuff instead of the Giacometti in Dec. 1979?Manipulating the T-Bar, Get Out of My Mind, Abstracting the Shoe, Legal Size all very, very good.

-Guston, Lichtenstein and modern posters at SF MOMA. Guston Red Sea, The Swell, Blue Light. Paintings hung together like comics panels. Man, this is it.

The Lichtensteins look hard and brittle, but just right. Mirror, 1970 hits me now in a way that the Rothko and Giacometti there don't. I feel far away from those masters right now.

Too Much to Take: Cornuto! or How it all feels a little too Fassbinder in here. (If there were a link to Elvis Costello's version of The Specials' "What I Like Most About You Is Your Girlfriend" I would definitely list it here.)

-Shadows and Fog quote, "Like our illusions? No, they NEED our illusions!"

-Steven Shaw Turning The Tables (book). Great critiques and expertise-oriented understanding of the food business. Shaw got turned onto fine dining while being wined and dined by law firms in NYC. (Will cite page when I get my copy back.) Right on critique of the "cult of authenticity". Even though I appreciate Saveur/Slow Food for their contributions, this is a handy bit of sharp thinking from the FatGuy aka eGullet.com guy.

-Tickle Me Almo (dovar):Here is a Pete Townsend quote I would throw at the reverential NYRB reviewer who likes "Cinema master" Almodovar more than "speed freak" Almo. Just substitute "Pedro" for "Pop" in the quote below.

"Pop has become solemn, irrelevant, and boring. What it needs now ismore noise, more size, more sex, more violence, more gimmickry, more vulgarity. Above all it desperately needs a new messiah who will take things right back to the glamour, power, and insanity of the Elvis Presley age."

-Shit testsOK, it is ridiculous to rationalize all clumsy conversational moves as intentional. But hey, being ridiculous is not so bad. I can keep it up for awhile longer.

"Hey baby/I'm out of favor/Can't always be/The right flavor" Graham Parker Nobody Hurts You (Harder Than Yourself)

OTOH, as a waiter I can talk to people, why is it that as ME I cannot? There are a few rules, I am selling something, it is a work interaction. Imagine giving someone free cookies if they don't like your flip comment about feminism, the war, your swearing habit, your love, your hate, your indifference... Maybe I need to carry a few "comps" in my backpack and just treat everyone, everywhere as if they were my "customers".

-Marvelmania, or just mania as an aesthetic. Or an anaesthetic? I notice that many posts are about creating a state of mania. Art that triggers this is GOOD. Everything else is just OK.

Anyhow, I liked that Brice Marden show, didn't I? But even then I was drugging myself on Sweet and ignoring museum guards who were in my face...

iPhone Gadget Lust Letter

Here is a comment I submitted to Scoble that is pretty much a love letter to Apple and its cool new phone design.

(Btw check out Fake Steve Jobs' site -- 1/17/07 Edit: also, check out Tog's article)

Some notes on my own enthusiasm for the iPhone:

If I don't wind up buying an Apple product, I surely will be buying something that the iPhone makes possible because of its critical redesign of the whole smartphone/pda concept.

The iPhone is going to make voicemail usable. Indexed vm is a great idea.

It will be the successor to ALP/Palm as those guys insist on committing a long, public suicide. Palm OS 4 is as black-belt a productivity/communications tool on a small phone as I could currently wish for.

I want Notes, Contacts, Calendar, To Dos and email in my pocket. I want them to sync reliably with my Mac. Am using a great flip phone, Samsung i500, that had no successor in this country. (Mexico and China got the i550).

The iPhone means that by the time I am ready to change phones I will have a well designed tool. Yes, I am looking for a more "Nano" solution than a bulky brick. No Treo in my jeans pocket, maaan! But probably no iPhone v.1 either.