Quotes To Take Seriously. (Internet = Death)

People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working
Paul Graham

It’s hard not to think “death drive” every time I go on the internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember.
Alice Gregory

I dont generally go in for hysterical visions of technology, but when you start to think about it, the ubiquity of screens, the incessant escape from one place into another, the secret passageway of iPhones and BlackBerries, the glazed, ubiquitous expression, I-am-here-but-I-am-not-here, is a little unseemly. Say your train of thought, as you are reading to your baby, goes something like this: Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. J.Crew summer sale 20% off, can you turn in the piece by Friday? Apologies, xx, should we meet at 6:00 at your place? Goodnight bears. Goodnight chairs. This moment suddenly seems to contain within it the entire decline and fall of civilisation...
Katie Roiphe

Myself, I’ve set up a second computer, devoid of internet, for my fiction-writing. That’s to say, I took an expensive Mac and turned it back into a typewriter. (You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the internet function out of the thing entirely. “I can just hide it from you,” he said. “No,” I told him, “I don’t want to know it’s in there somewhere.”)
Jonathan Lethem

"What you have to do," he explained, "is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw the little head off it."
Jonathan Franzen

If you forget what you’re doing with your mind, almost inevitably you also forget what you’re doing with your body.
Sakyong Mipham

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.

Cosmo Kramer Tutorial On Relationships

More Documentary Footage of Union Square Obama Victory

I am sure I am not the only one posting this documentary video of the celebrations in NYC following Obama's decisive victory, but it's worth looking at in the calm of Sunday morning.