E R I K V I D A L

Real Life BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD (PICS)

By makeup artist Kevin Kirkpatrick.

Jaume Plensa's ECHO Sculpture at Madison Square Park (PIC)

Drew McWeeny: Why RIDLEY SCOTT returning to BLADE RUNNER really is the beginning of the end

It is easy to get worked up over remakes and prequels and sequels these days, but it's also not terribly productive.  This is the modern Hollywood film industry in the year 2011, and you can either accept that or you can rail against it, but either way, they're going to keep on doing business this way until there is a compelling reason for them to not do business this way.

I wrote about my experience at Comic-Con this summer with the "Prometheus" panel, and certainly I hope that film delivers something special when it is released next year.  I am willing to walk into it open-minded, especially since it's not like the "Alien" franchise is this untouched, pristine thing.  Any time your iconic creation has already been roughed up behind the bleachers by Paul "Show me on the teddy bear where he touched your favorite movie" W.S. Anderson, it's fair game for anyone.  Besides, having Ridley Scott back in the world that he helped create in the original 1979 film is interesting, no doubt about it.

But that "helped create" is important, and something to consider today as the news breaks that once again, Ridley Scott is planning to revisit one of the SF worlds he was part of with a "follow-up" to "Blade Runner" being announced this morning.  And while I'm a big fan of the 1982 film, I think the notion of any sequel or prequel in that world is a terrible one.  Awful.  Catastrophically bad.

The simple truth is that not all films are franchises, and not every narrative can support a sequel or a prequel.  This disturbing idea that has taken hold that we need to wring every drop of creative juice out of any film that has ever attracted any audience of any size is, quite honestly, death.  This is what the death throes of studio filmmaking look like, folks, and the only real or substantial thing that film fans can do is grab a bag of marshmallows to roast as the whole thing goes up in flames.  People love to point at the occasional fluke like "Inception" as proof that the system isn't broken beyond repair, but the only reason that film happened was because Christopher Nolan made a remake, which convinced the studio he was responsible enough for them to trust him with a reboot, and then he made a sequel to his reboot that made a billion dollars.  And for that, finally, they "rewarded" him with the opportunity to make something he wrote.  That ended up making the studio some $800 million, which is great, and which guarantees him more freedom.  So far, he's used that freedom to sign on to direct another sequel while producing, yes, another reboot.  This is the guy film fans love to hold up as an example for how to do it right in Hollywood, but so far, what I see is a very good filmmaker who is still having to navigate the same blood-filled waters as everyone else.  He does it well, certainly, but he's still stuck in the same box that other filmmakers are, and his work hasn't changed the system at all.  If anything, he's given the studios more ammunition to prove that what they are doing is right.  It works.  It's the correct model to follow.

Ridley Scott may never set foot on a set for a "Blade Runner" follow-up.  Signing a deal is one thing, while making the actual film is something totally different.  There's a long way to go before that film is a real and tangible thing.  And in that time, they may end up deciding not to ever roll film, something that's happened with plenty of in-development projects, particularly with things Ridley Scott has been attached to over the years.  After all, I'm not sitting down this summer to a big-screen giant-budget version of "The Forever War," so just because he says he's going to direct something, that doesn't mean it will really get a greenlight.

With "Blade Runner," though, there is a special level of anxiety that the announcement brings.  I've said before that the real problem with filmmakers who go back to continue screwing around with a film after it's been in release is that filmmakers often have no understanding of what it is that an audience loves about a film.  Once you've released it, you have to stop touching it, because further adjustments could well erase the thing that made it important to someone.  You could screw up a character or the timing of a sequence or a thematic point, and the various versions of "Blade Runner" perfectly highlight that problem.  When I first got Internet access in 1994, I was amazed to find people in newsgroups debating ideas like "Was Deckard a replicant in 'Blade Runner'?," especially since I know from firsthand experience in 1982 that general audiences totally rejected the film.  That ambiguity, and the way the film left room for interpretation, was one of the reasons it lingered so well.  When Ridley Scott started playing around with the movie and adding new effects and tinkering with it after the brief release of the Workprint version, all of a sudden that ambiguity started getting a lot less ambiguous, and Scott seemed determined to answer the question for us.  I found it infuriating, but at least I knew I still had the original version of the film to go back to.  If Scott's planning to return to the world of the movie, I'm afraid of him creating something which will not just rob that first movie of any and all ambiguity, but which will make me wonder if what I saw in the original film was ever really there at all.  He can't erase the original from existence, but he can absolutely destroy my interest in the narrative, and I'm afraid that when it comes to "Blade Runner," he's the last person I want to see playing around with that property.

Let's assume, though, that it will be brilliant and awesome and just as good as the first film.  It still worries me deeply that this is the best job we can find for Sir Ridley Scott at this point in his career.  He's created iconic images and characters and movies for 30-plus years, and the best Hollywood can come up with is, "Hey, want to do the exact same thing AGAIN?"  It is a failure on every level.  It would be one thing if some young filmmaker who grew up in love with "Blade Runner" managed to get into a position where he had a shot at adding something to that property, something substantial, and took it out of a genuine creative drive to play with this thing that inspired him.  If Duncan Jones was the name attached this morning, my interest level would be higher because I know that Jones holds the first movie sacred and that he's had years to let it rattle around inside of him.  I'm willing to bet that anything he made in that universe would feel organic and motivated by a genuine desire to tell a new story.  The piece that ran on the LA Times today about how Ridley Scott ended up in the director's chair again pays lip service to the idea of Ridley as a storyteller, but the word that is the real subtext here is "BRANDING."  And it doesn't even matter if "Blade Runner" was a box-office disaster in 1982, which it was.  After all, there's a prequel to "The Thing" coming out this year, and last Christmas saw a sequel to "TRON" on the bigscreen, so obviously box-office failures in one decade are catnip to studio executives in another, all because of the legwork that real fans did in the decades in-between.

Maybe that's the real reason this rubs me so wrong.  "Blade Runner" failed by every standard of business measurement.  It was beaten senseless by critics at the time.  But I was twelve years old, and I didn't care what critics said.  I knew when I sat in that theater and saw that film that I loved it, and for years afterwards, any time it came up in conversation, I would find myself defending it to people who only knew it as a failure.  The film's long ancillary life was driven by genuine love, by fans who passed it along, by people who refused to have their opinion determined by opening weekend numbers or by toy sales.  And now, because of that love, because we kept the film alive long after even its own studio gave up on it, it has become this asset, a valuable widget, and Hollywood wants to make some money with it.  And they are counting on those of us who love the original to carry the word.  They hired Ridley Scott because they figure that makes them bulletproof.  "You can't get upset! We got Ridley Scott back!"

But we can.  And we are.  And we don't want it.  I am fatigued from all of this, and like everyone else, I've gotten to the point where I almost don't notice it.  This past week, I had a meeting at a studio, and they brought up a film that they want to remake, a film I (A) love and (B) acknowledge isn't as good as I wish it was, and right away, I started thinking about what a great opportunity it is and how much fun it would be to get my hands on it and pull it apart and rebuild it the way I always wanted to see it done.  And I acknowledge that having that meeting and writing this article in the same week makes me a rotten, rotten hypocrite.  I'll chase that job, too.  I want that job.  And if I get it, I'm sure there will be many editorials about what a sell-out piece of crap I am for doing so.  And you'll be right.  It is blatantly hypocritical, and I know it.  And even so, I still say I don't want Ridley Scott to return to "Blade Runner" for a prequel or a sequel or a requel or a reboot or a remagining or, frankly, anything.  I just don't want him to do it.  I don't want to see it. I don't want to cover it.  I don't want to know it's out there.

I don't blame Alcon Entertainment for buying the rights.  I'm sure they were able to produce numbers on a spreadsheet that justify the purchase.  But this craven age is burning down my love of movies in general, and it is starting to get terrifying.  I don't want to spend the next decade of my life feeling this way, but I don't get a vote.  All I can do is spend my money to support the things that are genuinely fresh or new or motivated by more than market share, and that's all you can do, as well.

With that in mind, are you for or against this one?  Would you or would you not happily hand over your ticket price?

Answer wisely, because Hollywood is listening, and they are more than happy to ruin any property you can name.

via www.hitfix.com

Saw this tagged poster of LANG LANG in the subway today... (PIC)

Play THE GREAT GATSBY adapted for 8-Bit NINTENDO (FREE FLASH GAME)

Instructions: space jumps, z shoots (in fullscreen mode, tab shoots), arrow keys move right and left. Hit the f key to full-screen! Click on the game once if the keyboard isn't working.

via greatgatsbygame.com

GEHRY NEW YORK Building (Finally lost the scaffolding, lookin' pretty good) (PIC)

Are You...?

Austin Kleon: How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)

Note: This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave yesterday at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York. It’s a simple list of 10 things I wish I’d heard when I was in college.

 

All advice is autobiographical.

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past. This list is me talking to a previous version of myself.

Your mileage may vary.

1. Steal like an artist.

Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”

The honest artist answers, “I steal them.”

I drew this cartoon a few years ago. There are two panels. Figure out what’s worth stealing. Move on to the next thing.

That’s about all there is to it.

Here’s what artists understand. It’s the a three-word sentence that fills me with hope every time I read it:

It says it right there in the Bible. Ecclesiastes:

That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of previous ideas.

Here’s a trick they teach you in art school. Draw two parallel lines on a piece of paper:

How many lines are there? There’s the first line, the second line, but then there’s a line of negative space that runs between them. See it?

1 + 1 = 3.

Speaking of lines, here’s a good example of what I’m talking about: genetics. You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. You’re a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.

You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see.

Jay-Z talks about this in his book, Decoded:

We were kids without fathers…so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves…Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”

An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

My mom used to say to me, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

It used to drive me nuts. But now I know what she means.

Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.

Identify one writer you really love. Find everything they’ve ever written. Then find out what they read. And read all of that. Climb up your own family tree of writers.

Steal things and save them for later. Carry around a sketchpad. Write in your books. Tear things out of magazines and collage them in your scrapbook.

Steal like an artist.

2. Don’t wait until you know who you are to start making things.

There was a video going around the internet last year of Rainn Wilson, the guy who plays Dwight on The Office. He was talking about creative block, and he said this thing that drove me nuts, because I feel like it’s a license for so many people to put off making things: “If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative.”

If I waited to know “who I was” or “what I was about” before I started “being creative”, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

You’re ready. Start making stuff.

You might be scared. That’s natural.

There’s this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called imposter syndrome. The clinical definition is a “psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments.” It means that you feel like a phony, like you’re just winging it, that you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing.

Guess what?

None of us do. I had no idea what I was doing when I started blacking out newspaper columns. All I knew was that it felt good. It didn’t feel like work. It felt like play.

Ask any real artist, and they’ll tell you the truth: they don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.

Have you ever heard of dramaturgy? It’s a fancy sociological term for something this guy in England said about 400 years ago:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…

Another way to say this:

I love this phrase. There’s two ways to read it: Fake it ‘til you make it, as in, fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want, etc. Or, fake it til’ you make it, as in, pretend to be making something until you actually make something. I love that idea.

I also love the book Just Kids by Patti Smith. I love it because it’s a story about how two friends moved to New York and learned to be artists. You know how they learned to be artists? They pretended to be artists. I’ll spoil the book for you and describe my favorite scene, the turning scene in the book: Patti Smith and her friend Robert Maplethorpe dress up in all their gypsy gear and they go to Washington Square, where everybody’s hanging out, and this old couple kind of gawks at them, and the woman says to her husband, “Oh, take their picture. I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”

The point is: all the world’s a stage. You need a stage and you need a costume and you need a script. The stage is your workspace. It can be a studio, a desk, or a sketchbook. The costume is your outfit, your painting pants, or your writing slippers, or your funny hat that gives you ideas. The script is just plain old time. An hour here, or an hour there. A script for a play is just time measured out for things to happen.

Fake it ’til you make it.

3. Write the book you want to read.

Quick story:

Jurassic Park came out on my 10th birthday. I loved it. I was kind of obsessed with it. I mean, what 10-year-old wasn’t obsessed with that movie? The minute I left my little small-town theater, I was dying for a sequel.

I sat down the next day at our old green-screen PC and typed out a sequel. In my treatment, the son of the game warden eaten by velociraptors goes back to the island with the granddaughter of the guy who built the park. See, one wants to destroy the rest of the park, the other wants to save it. Of course, they fall in love and adventures ensue.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing what we now call fan fiction—fictional stories based on characters that already exist.

10-year-old me saved the story to the hard drive.

Then, a few years later, Jurassic Park 2 came out.

And it sucked.

The sequel *always* sucks compared to the sequel in our heads.

The question every young writer asks is: “What should I write?”

And the cliched answer is, “Write what you know.”

This advice always leads to terrible stories in which nothing interesting happens.

The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s write what you *like*.

Write the kind of story you like best.

We make art because we like art.

All fiction, in fact, is fan fiction.

The best way to find the work you should be doing is to think about the work you want to see done that isn’t being done, and then go do it.

Draw the art you want to see, make the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read.

4. Use your hands.

My favorite cartoonist, Lynda Barry, she has this saying: “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits! Your hands are the original digital devices.”

When I was in creative writing workshops in college, all manuscripts had to be in double-spaced, Times New Roman font. And my stuff was just terrible. It wasn’t until I started making writing with my hands that writing became fun and my work started to improve.

The more I stay away from the computer, the better my ideas get. Microsoft Word is my enemy. I use it all the time at work. I try to stay away from it the rest of my life.

I think the more that writing is made into a physical process, the better it is. You can feel the ink on paper. You can spread writing all over your desk and sort through it. You can lay it all out where you can look at it.

People ask me why I don’t develop an iPhone or iPad Newspaper Blackout app, and I tell them  because I think there is magic in feeling the newsprint in your hand and the words disappearing under that marker line. A lot of your senses are engaged–even the smell of the fumes add to the experience.

Art that only comes from the head isn’t any good. Watch any good musician and you’ll see what I mean.

When I’m making the poems, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like play.

So my advice is to find a way to bring your body into your work. Draw on the walls. Stand up when you’re working. Spread things around the table.

Use your hands.

5. Side projects and hobbies are important.

Speaking of play — one thing I’ve learned in my brief tenure as an artist: it’s the side projects that blow up.

By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that’s just play. That’s actually the good stuff. That’s when the magic happens.

The blackout poems were a side project. Had I been focused only on my goal of writing short fiction, had I not allowed myself the room to experiment, I’d never be where I am now.

It’s also important to have a hobby. Something that’s just for you. Music is my hobby. (That’s me at Guitar Center.)

While my art is for the world to see, music is for me and my friends. We get together every Sunday and make noise for a couple of hours. It’s wonderful.

So the lesson is: take time to mess around. Have a hobby. It’s good for you, and you never know where it may lead you…

6. The secret: do good work and put it where people can see it.

I get a lot of e-mails from young artists who ask how they can find an audience. “How do I get discovered?”

I sympathize with them. There was a kind of fallout that happened when I left college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial place: your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas.

Never in your life will you have such a captive audience.

Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. As Steven Pressfield said, “It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy.”

If there was a secret formula for getting an audience, or gaining a following, I would give it to you. But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: “Do good work and put it where people can see it.”

It’s a two step process.

Step one, “do good work,” is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Fail. Get better.

Step two, “put it where people can see it,” was really hard up until about 10 years ago. Now, it’s very simple: “put your stuff on the internet.”

I tell people this, and then they ask me, “What’s the secret of the internet?”

Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.

You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about. If everybody’s wondering about apples, go wonder about oranges.

One of the things I’ve learned as an artist is that the more open you are about sharing your passions, the more people love your art.

Artists aren’t magicians. There’s no penalty for revealing your secrets.

Believe it or not, I get a lot of inspiration from people like Bob Ross and Martha Stewart. Bob Ross taught people how to paint. He gave his secrets away. Martha Stewart teaches you how to make your house and your life awesome. She gives her secrets away.

People love it when you give your secrets away, and sometimes, if you’re smart about it, they’ll reward you by buying the things you’re selling.

When you open up your process and invite people in, you learn. I’ve learned so much from the folks who submit poems to the Newspaper Blackout site. I find a lot of things to steal, too. It benefits me as much as it does them.

So my advice: learn to code. Figure out how to make a website. Figure out blogging. Figure out Twitter and all that other stuff. Find people on the internet who love the same things as you and connect with them. Share things with them.

7. Geography is no longer our master.

I’m so glad I’m alive right now.

I grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Southern Ohio. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hang out with artists. All I wanted to do was get the heck out of southern Ohio and get someplace where something was happening.

Now I live in Austin, Texas. A pretty hip place. Tons of artists and creative types everywhere.

And you know what? I’d say that 90% of my mentors and peers don’t live in Austin, Texas. They live on the internet.

Which is to say, most of my thinking and talking and art-related fellowship is online.

Instead of a geographical art scene, I have Twitter buddies and Google Reader.

Life is weird.

8. Be nice. The world is a small town.

I’ll keep this short. There’s only one reason I’m here. I’m here to make friends.

Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “There’s only one rule I know of: goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

The golden rule is even more golden in our hyper-connected world.

An important lesson to learn: if you talk about someone on the internet, they will find out. Everybody has a Google alert on their name.

The best way to vanquish your enemies on the internet? Ignore them.

The best way to make friends on the internet? Say nice things about them.

9. Be boring. It’s the only way to get work done.

As Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

I’m a boring guy with a 9-5 job who lives in a quiet neighborhood with his wife and his dog.

That whole romantic image of the bohemian artist doing drugs and running around and sleeping with everyone is played out. It’s for the superhuman and the people who want to die young.

The thing is: art takes a lot of energy to make. You don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

Some things that have worked for me:

Take care of yourself.

Eat breakfast, do some pushups, get some sleep. Remember what I said earlier about good art coming from the body?

Stay out of debt.

Live on the cheap. Pinch pennies. Freedom from monetary stress means freedom in your art.

Get a day job and keep it.

A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time allotted. I work a 9-5 and I get about as as much art done now as I did when I worked part-time.

Get yourself a calendar. (And a logbook.)

You need a chart of future events, and you need a chart of past events.

Art is all about the slow accumulation over time. Writing a page one day doesn’t seem like much. Do it for 365 days and you have a big novel.

A calendar helps you plan work. This is the calendar I used for my book:

A calendar gives you concrete goals, keeps you on track,  and the nice reward of crossing things off and watching the boxes fill up.

Any goal you want to accomplish: get yourself a calendar. Break the task down into little bits of time. Make it a game.

For past events, I suggest a logbook. It’s not a regular journal, it’s just a little book in which you list the things you do every day. You’d be amazed at how helpful having a daily record like this can be, especially over several years.

Marry well.

It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.

And marry well doesn’t just mean your life partner — it also means who you do business with, who you befriend, who you choose to be around.

10. Creativity is subtraction.

It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is.

In this age of information overload and abundance, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s important to them.

Devoting yourself to something means shutting out other things.

What makes you interesting isn’t just what you’ve experienced, but also what you haven’t experienced.

The same is true when you make art: you must embrace your limitations and keep moving.

Creativity isn’t just the things we chose to put in, it’s also the things we chose to leave out. Or black out.

And that’s all I think I have.

Thanks, y’all.

via www.austinkleon.com

The Single Greatest Desktop Wallpaper EVER

>> DOWNLOAD THE FULL HD VERSION HERE

via Orioto's Gallery

David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve

Roger Ebert: The quest for frisson

The French word frisson describes something English has no better word for: a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror. It's often accompanied by a physical shudder, but not so much when you're web surfing.

You know how it happens. You're clicking here or clicking there, and suddenly you have the OMG moment. In recent days, for example, I felt frissons when learning that Gary Coleman had died, that most of the spilled oil was underwater, that Joe McGinness had moved in next to the Palins, that a group of priests' mistresses had started their own Facebook group, and that Bill Nye the Science Guy says "to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome, every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking 20 feet away."

Oh, there were many more. A frisson can be quite a delight. The problem is, I seem to be spending way too much time these days in search of them. In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears.

Twitter is an enabler for this behavior. It provides a quiet, subtle pressure to tweet frissons, and be tweeted in return. A good tweet can involve a funny comment, a snarky one, or one so poetic I read it and marvel. It can contain breaking news. It can be a small autobiographical revelation. I enjoy this. Deprived of speech, I chatter all day on Twitter, and have virtual relationships with the carefully chosen Tweeters I follow. Some are great writers. Some are deep thinkers. Some keep me updated on American Idol. Some persist in updating the scores of sporting events. I hate that, except in a situation like the Blackhawks' winning season. I care about the Blackhawks, but not enough to watch. All I require is the frisson.

This is not in praise of Twitter. It has to do with the possibility that my brain--and yours too, since you are here--has been rewired by the internet. There's an article by Nicholas Carr in the new issue of Wired magazine about a UCLA professor who used an MRI scan to observe the brain activity of six volunteers. Three were web veterans, three were not. He found that veteran Web users had developed "distinctive neural pathways."

He asked his newbies to surf the web for six days, and then he repeated the experiment: "The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers." The article suggests this possibility: "When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

In other words, instead of seeking substance, we're distractedly scurrying hither and yon, seeking frisson.

I recognize this happening in myself. I've been a lifelong heavy reader, and I've particularly loved the great 19th century novelists: Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Dostoyevsky, Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, Thackeray, Tolstoy. Their books take some time. Not long before my illness I re-read with great pleasure all the Barsetshire novels of Trollope, which stand at the center of Victorian literature like a great fictional Stonehenge.

Adjusting to the loss of speech, I turned with eagerness to the Internet, where we all speak in the same way. I began this blog, and started the practice of sometimes replying to comments not so much to be a nice guy, but because it was a way to have a conversation. I was told about Twitter. I vowed I would never be a Twit, and now I am one. At this moment I have nearly 156,000 Followers. That's not because I'm famous like Britney Spears or Ashton Kucher, but because I am a very good Tweeter. I took to it naturally; it entertains me.

Facebook has no charms for me. It looks inward. Twitter looks outward, and I've found remarkable people to follow. Check my Lists if you care. There's a kind of Degrees of Separation thing going on; I see people retweeting each other, and I know they met through me. I found one great Tweeter from India, and that led to two, and now I'm following a dozen Indians and actually met one of them at Cannes. And people in Toronto and Malaysia and Egypt are following them. Some very smart people are twits. I follow such interesting people as Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Joan Walsh. Some of you blog regulars are among my favorites.

But how is my reading of long 19th century novels coming along? Not very well. Sometime late last year I began Dombey and Son, one of the few Dickens novels I'd never read. I was delighted. I think I tweeted a link to the first pages and urged people to share my joy. Then...I dunno...I got swept up. Sundance, the Oscars, Ebertfest, deadlines. Tweeting. Blogging. Surfing.

I took the novel on the flight to Cannes,. I was up to page 60-something. I started reading, and was drawn in and delighted. Didn't pick it up again until the flight home. Again, entranced. Page 372. Plus all the London newspapers, of course. Dickens is surely one of the greatest storytellers, and an astonishing stylist. We returned home, let's see, a week ago today. I put the book right on the table. It stayed there until today. Someone tweeted a link to the Wired article. I retweeted it, saying I was afraid that sort of brain alteration was happening to me. I glanced over at Dombey and Son.

For years I would read during breakfast, the coffee stirring my pleasure in the prose. You can't surf during breakfast. Well, maybe you can. Now I don't have coffee and I don't eat breakfast. I get up and check my e-mail, blog comments and Twitter.

This morning I got up, and before I did anything else I opened the novel, and started to read. It's a very good book. Thackeray read it and said that Dickens, confound him, was just better than anyone else. I read with pleasure. Then I got some work done. Wrote an obituary for Dennis Hopper. In the middle of the afternoon, I got up, left the room that held the computer, and sat in a window seat in our library. I read for another hour. Our Wi-Fi for some reason doesn't work in the library. Just saying'.

As I fell into the rhythm of the words, as I savored the way Dickens was planting his signposts for the development of the plot, as I watched him create unforgettable characters in a page or two, I felt a kind of peace. This wasn't hectic. I wasn't skittering around here and there. I wasn't scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was reading.

What I am going to do, is take some time every day to read. I believe I'll make it a practice to read in the room without the computer and the Wi-Fi. I'm eying my next book: de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It's been on my To Read list since I bought it in, let's see, 1982. Maybe I can rewire my brain, budge it back a little in the old direction.

I wonder about something. With the invention of channel surfing, and then web surfing, have we all become rewired? Has the national attention span dropped? Is that why kids like shallow action pictures and why episodic television is losing to reality shows? And why sports, which offer a frisson every few seconds, are more popular than ever? Is that why slogans are replacing reasoning in our political arena? Is an addiction to video games the ultimate expression of this erosion of our attention span?

I've taken a lot of grief over saying video games could never be Art, and then admitting I'd hardly played one. I considered my statement self-evident, but man, was it not. I made a vow to myself that I would never return to the subject unless I had played a game. One of my fellow Chicago film critics, Capone of Ain't It Cool News, even volunteered to set me up with a game machine. But now, I dunno. The danger is, what if I like it? We all know I have an addictive personality. What if I became a gamer? I'm so busy right now that my work would be shot to hell.

Gamers have assured me in something like 4,000 comments that video games can/will be/are Art. Only a few have said they can't wait for that day. None have said they don't enjoy playing a game that isn't Art. Maybe my whole argument was beside the point. A video game that was Art would, I assume, require an ordered and measured emotional experience. A certain contemplation. What are video games (or so I have heard) but a series of frissons? Is it possible that only a few Gamers would want to play a game that was Art?

There's such a skitterish impatience in our society right now. The national debate is all over the place. Talking points take the place of arguments. Think up a snarky name for someone, and you don't have to explain any further. The oil spill is in Day 40 and enough, already. We've been there, done that. In some circles it has become Obama's fault, not for any good reason but perhaps because that breaks the monotony.

Something has happened. Do we even know it has happened? We look out from inside our brains. We notice differences in things. But how can we notice a difference in the brains that are noticing them? One reason meaningless celebrities dominate all of our national media is that they are meaningless. They require no study, no reading, no thought. OMG! Heidi is leaving Spencer! OMG! Russell Brand is a sex addict! OMG! Matt Lauer never dated or slept with Alexis Houston, and all that time he didn't know Alexis was a man! OMG! Top Kill has failed! WTF. ROFL.

via blogs.suntimes.com

"No! YOU Listen!!"

IFC: Exploring the Lines Between Art, Hype and Biz

"I had reservations about making art a business," the famous art collector Mary Boone once said. "But I got over it."

Such is the tension within all artistic industries -- film, painting, theater or music, the idea of selling-out dogs them all. Are the high prices that paintings go for at Sotheby's or films sell for at Sundance indicative of their success, or their impurity? And how do you distinguish the "true" art from the art that's just hyped? Do the two have to be mutually exclusive?

The recent documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" takes up these questions and then some. Ever since its "surprise" Sundance premiere in January, the film has generated a considerable amount of attention. Supposedly directed by British street-art provocateur Banksy -- famous for his political and controversial acts of graffiti, such as painting on Israel's West Bank Barrier -- much of the buzz has circled around questions of the film's veracity: Was the film's protagonist, a French videomaker-turned-artist named Thierry Guetta, just a fabrication? Was the entire project yet another infamous Banksy prank?

But whether the film is real or staged or somewhere in between misses the point: "Exit Through the Gift Shop" -- as its title suggests -- is ultimately a lacerating critique on the commercialization of art, making it the latest in a new wave of documentaries that focus on the struggles of artists and art aficionados to define the value of art in a world dominated by profit motives and capitalist enterprise. As the recently released "The Art of The Steal" makes strikingly apparent in its chronicle of Philadelphia's power grab of a private collection of impressionist masterworks, art is big business.

It's no surprise that Banksy also raises the ugly specter of art's commodification in his debut film. After his works sold at Sotheby's in 2007 for record-breaking amounts for a young artist, he posted a painting of an auction house on his website with the caption, "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

One could pose a similar question to the patrons of abstract expressionist artist Marla Olmstead, the four-year-old painter at the center of Amir Bar-Lev's 2007 documentary "My Kid Could Paint That." Like "Exit Through the Gift Shop," which contrasts art that's heralded as legitimate (from Banksy) with work that is depicted as a rip-off (by Guetta), Bar-Lev's film addresses a similar conflict. Are Olmstead's paintings true expressions of childhood genius, or is her art guided by her father, an amateur painter, and then exploited for profit as the work of a prodigy?

2006's "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?" starts with a matching quandary. The film opens with an image of an abstract expressionist painting and the voiceover: "Is this a genuine honest-to-god no-doubt-about-it American masterpiece, possibly worth up to $50 million? Maybe." In a former female truck driver's quest to make millions off an alleged Pollock she bought at a thrift shop, the film explores the ambiguities inherent in the validation of a piece of art. While art experts claim the painting is a cheap knock-off, the woman and her family hire forensic scientists to prove the work to be Pollock's based on fingerprint analysis. Despite the high-brow art world's unwavering refusal to acknowledge the art as legitimate, bids for the drip painting go from $2 million to $9 million. (As of last reporting, the painting was still awaiting higher offers.)

Ultimately, "Exit," "Kid" and "Pollock" leave the question of their art's authenticity up for the audience to decide -- it's actually this ambiguity that helps construct the films' central conflicts and mysteries. But by the movies' final frames, a few things become clear: quality art is difficult to define, the people who buy it (and buy into it) are often ignorant about what makes it worthwhile, and the background of the artists may be more important to observers and consumers than the artwork itself. There may be no more ironic display of such misguided celebrification and misunderstanding of art than the array of young L.A. hipster-fashionistas in "Exit" captured on camera declaring brand-new art-star Guetta's laughably derivative debut show "a revelation."

These issues are nothing new in the art world, of course. "It's always been there," says arts journalist David D'Arcy. "You're not just selling a work of art for what it is; you're selling it as an abstract painting by a child. It's not so different from selling a painting by a serial killer. You're selling an autograph," continues D'Arcy. "When Basquiat died of an overdose in 1988, it had to be his shrewdest career move. Modigliani, Frida Kahlo, same thing. You can sell martyrdom. Would these pictures mean anything if we didn't have the biography? It's almost like having the footnotes."

If personality has supplanted quality, who gets to determinate art's "quality" in the first place? Or to borrow the title of another recent doc, about Henry Geldzahler, the Met's first curator of contemporary art, "Who Gets to Call It Art?"

"Who gets to call it art is still a relevant question," says art-world and museum veteran Karl Katz, who is also an executive producer on "Who Gets To Call it Art?" and another recent art-doc, "Herb and Dorothy," which looks at two unlikely art collectors, a retired postal worker and librarian, who humbly amassed a multi-million-dollar collection of minimalist and conceptual art. "There is such a proliferation of art now that you have to turn to a museum or their chief curator. Who the hell knows what art is," adds Katz. "But if a curator wants to call it art, then it's art."

There's also the quick-rich American Dream-like appeal to the art world that these films address. Will the artists make it big, the collectors hit upon a multi-millionaire-dollar discovery? "I think it's like the Antique Road Show," explains Katz. "It's like someone who is buying bottlecaps or Civil War memorabilia and then they hit the jackpot."

In another new indie art documentary "Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same," out on DVD in late June, the titular New York conceptual artist is shown preparing for his first solo show at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery -- with his livelihood depending on it. And like Guetta or Olmstead, by film's end, it's unclear whether Enright is a budding master or a sham, a new way forward for art, or a hack wack-job looking for a payday. While the film is after some different targets than its brethren -- namely, conflicts between an artist's commitment to his work and those he loves -- "Enright" remains an enigmatic figure ("Is he punking us?" asks critic Karina Longworth in a review). But more to the point, it's the commodification of his art, like any avant-garde artist's, that is put into question. At one point in the film, after Enright defecates in front of his recording video camera, Enright's girlfriend and collaborator Kirsten Deirup echoes Banksy's own sentiment: "People pay to see this shit!"

But unlike Banksy (or Guetta, for that matter), Enright pushes the boundaries of art even further. "Brock's work is so difficult that most people can't even recognize it as art," says the film's director Jody Lee Lipes. "There's just nothing for people to put their finger on and say... that's a Brock and I want to buy it."

Although, perhaps, that might come with time and notoriety. Like the mid-century abstract expressionists or the Pop Art and minimalist practitioners that followed, many of today's artists are blazing similarly unprecedented terrain. While it was once hard to judge the worth of art by Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt and so on, their works now hang in museums and are deemed highly valuable by the ever-changing, ever-fickle art establishment. Who's to say who will be validated in the future?

So whether Pollock or Banksy, LeWitt or Enright, these documentaries all excavate that precariousness state -- between pretentious crap and groundbreaking masterpiece -- and the billions of dollars that hang in the balance.

via www.ifc.com

Steven Johnson: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.  Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s an excerpt from his “instructions for use”:

When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations. In a certain sense, this is a search algorithm, a defined series of steps that allows the user to index the text in a way that makes it easier to query. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. The historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings.

But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.

Since the heyday of the commonplace book, there have been a few isolated attempts to turn these textual remixes into a finished product, into a standalone work of collage. The most famous is probably Jefferson’s bible, his controversial “remix” of the New Testament. There’s also Walter Benjamin’s unfinished, and ultimately unpublishable Passagenwerk, or “Arcades Project,” his rumination on the early shopping malls of Paris built out of photos, quotes, and aphoristic musings. Just this year, David Shields published a book, Reality Hunger, built out of quotes from a wide variety of sources. And of course, there are parallel works in music, painting, and architecture that are constructed out of “quotes” lifted from original sources and remixed in imaginative ways.

***

NOW, BEFORE I TAKE the next step in the argument, I want to pause for a brief autobiographical confession. Exactly twenty years ago I arrived here at Columbia as a grad student, holding an undergraduate degree in Semiotics, much to the bafflement of my parents. I was here to study literary theory, to work with giants like Edward Said and Giyatri Spivak. I took a seminar on Jacques Derrida my second year here, and Derrida actually showed up in person for the first class, the silent, white-haired dude in the corner who didn’t introduce himself until the professor arrived. I could talk about the open text and deconstruction and the death of the author with the best of them. Technically I was enrolled in the English Department, but even that was misleading. All of my writing read like it had been translated from the French.

I tell you this story because I think 22-year-old Morningside Heights Steven would have listened to those opening remarks and nodded enthusiastically at where I was going. The idea of a purely linear text is a myth; readers stitch together meanings in much more complex ways than we have traditionally imagined; the true text is more of a network than a single, fixed document. These were all the defining beliefs of postmodern theory. I still think all of these things are true, though I choose to say them slightly differently.

But I think 22-year-old Steven would have had a more difficult time wrapping his head around this next image. This is what happens when you search Google for the ostensible topic of our discussion tonight: “journalism.”

What I want to suggest to you is that, in some improbable way, this page is as much of an heir to the structure of a commonplace book as the most avant-garde textual collage. Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page. And then we have the text in the search field, created by me, which summons this entire network of text together in a fraction of a second.

What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of. But what separates it from the textual play that I was earnestly studying twenty years ago is the fact that it has engendered a two hundred billion dollar business.

***

WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created. Value for consumers searching for information, value for advertisers trying to share their messages with consumers searching for related topics, value for content creators who want an audience. And of course, value to the entity that serves as the middleman between all those different groups. This is in part what Jeff Jarvis has called the “link economy,” but as Jarvis has himself observed, it is not just a matter of links. What is crucial to this system is that text can be easily moved and re-contextualized and analyzed, sometimes by humans and sometimes by machines.

Ecologists talk about the “productivity” of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.

The overall increase in textual productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years. Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cultivating a page of “hot links” to interesting discoveries on the Web. You find an article about a Columbia journalism lecture and you link to it on your page. The information value you have created is useful exclusively to two groups: people interested in journalism who happen to visit your page, and the people maintaining the Columbia page, who benefit from the increased traffic. Fast forward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lecture tonight, and tweet a link to a description of the talk. What happens to that information? For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twitter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embedded in the link alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts advertisers interested in your location or the topic of journalism itself. Because that tiny little snippet of information is free to make new connections, by checking in here you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight; you’re helping the Journalism school in promoting this venue; you’re helping the bar across Broadway attract more customers, you’re helping Google organize the web; you’re helping people searching google for information about journalism; you’re helping journalism schools advertising on Google to attract new students. Not bad for 140 characters.

When text is free to flow and combine, new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases. But of course, when text is free, value is sometimes subtracted for the publishers who used to charge for that text. So let me make one point clear: recognizing the value creation of open textual networks is not argument against paywalls. I happen to think it is perfectly reasonable for online publishers to ask people to pay for the privilege of reading their journalism. If people are willing to buy virtual tractors on Farmville, or cough up two bucks for the Flight Control app on the iPhone, a meaningful number of people are going to be willing to pay for a well reported and edited newspaper or magazine. I don’t think erecting paywalls is some kind of magic cure that will instantly restore the newspaper business to the forty-percent margins they commanded back in the day when they had a virtual monopoly on local ads and classifieds. But there is nothing in the idea of charging for content that is in conflict with the value of textual networks. Search engines can still index the paywalled content, and there are a number of clever schemes out there —including the metered usage model that the Times is apparently going to roll out — that allow publishers to charge for content while still allowing that content to be linked to, excerpted, and remixed in new ways.

But there are worse things than paywalls. Take a look at this screen. This, as you all probably know, is Apple’s new iBook application for the iPad.  What I’ve done here is shown you what happens when you try to copy a paragraph of text. You get the familiar iPhone-style clipping handles, and you get two options “Highlight” and “Bookmark.” But you can’t actually copy the text, to paste it into your own private commonplace book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to it. What’s worse: the book in question is Penguin's edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the public domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them.

Interestingly, the Kindle – even the Kindle app for the iPad – does allow you to clip passages and automatically store them on a file that can be downloaded to your computer, where you can post, archive, forward, tweet to your heart’s content. You are apparently limited to a certain percentage of the overall text of the book, which is perfectly reasonable in my mind. The process of actually getting your hands on the text is a little complicated, probably deliberately so, but I can live with it.

But it gets worse. This is a page from the NY Times Editor’s Choice iPad app, showing what happens when you try simply to select text from an article. You can't do it. Just so you know that I am an equal opportunity critic, this is what happens when you try to copy text on the WSJ’s app.  You can’t do anything with the words. They’re frozen there, uncopyable, unlinkable, like some beautiful ice sculpture. Frozen is the right word, because we’re so used to selecting and copying digital text, encountering text on a screen that can’t be selected leaves you with a strange initial assumption: that the application has crashed, and the screen is frozen.

Now, it may well be true that Apple, and The Times, and The Journal intend to add extensive tools that encourage the textual productivity of their apps. If that happens, I will be delighted. The iPad is only about two weeks old, after all, and it famously took Apple two years to introduce copy-and-paste to the iPhone OS. But there are plenty of first generation iPad apps that facilitate new textual networks, like Twitterific or Evernote or Instapaper. Apple itself has made it incredibly easy for developers to build rich connections to the Web into their apps through their Webkit framework. And so I get worried when I look at iBook, and the Journal and Times apps. In part because these are both extremely thoughtfully designed apps. I happily purchased both of them, and use them both. They have a lot of elements that I like. It’s precisely the skill and care with which they have been built that scares me, because that makes the frozen nature of the text seem more like a feature than a bug, something they’ve deliberated chosen, rather than a flaw that they didn’t have time to correct.

The contrast here suggests to me that we have two potential futures ahead of us, where digital text is concerned, or that the future is going to involve a battle between two contradictory impulses. We can try to put a protective layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don’t want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad’s beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.

As with paywalls, I am not dogmatic about these things. I don’t think it’s incumbent upon the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to allow all their content to flow freely through the infosphere with no restrictions. I do not pull out my crucifix when people use the phrase “Digital Rights Management.” If publishers want to put reasonable limits on what their audience can do with their words, I’m totally fine with that. As I said, I think the Kindle has a workable compromise, though I would like to see it improved in a few key areas. But I also don’t want to mince words. When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.

***

I SAID THERE were two potential futures—the glass box and the commonplace book—and the good news is that I think the commonplace book model has a number of trends on its side. The web is bursting with organizations that recognize the importance of textual productivity, many of them explicitly trying to imagine what journalism is going to look like in this new world. Here’s one: ProPublica, the nonprofit news org which won a Pulitzer Prize last week for its collaboration with the NY Times. I draw your attention to the bar that runs along the top of every page on the site. “Steal Our Stories.”   This is playful but important: Propublica has licensed its content under creative commons, so that anyone who wants to publish their articles can do so, as long as they credit (and link to) ProPublica and include all links in the original story. Instead of putting their journalism under glass, they’re effectively saying to their text: go forth and multiply.

One of the reasons Propublica can do this, of course, is because they are a non-profit whose mission is to be influential and not to make money. It seems to me that this is one area that has been under-analyzed in the vast, sprawling conversation about the future of journalism over the past year or so. A number of commentators have discussed the role of non-profits in filling the hole created by the decline of print newspapers. But they have underestimated the textual productivity of organizations that are incentivized to connect, not protect, their words. A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box. And ProPublica, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of organizations – some of the focused on journalism, some of the government-based, some of them new creatures indigenous to the web – that create information that can be freely recombined into private commonplace books or Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalism. A journalist today can get the idea for an investigation from a document on Wikileaks, get background information from Wikipedia, download government statistics or transcripts from open.gov or the Sunlight Foundation. You cannot measure the health of journalism simply by looking at the number of editors and reporters on the payroll of newspapers. There are undoubtedly going to be fewer of them. The question is whether that loss is going to be offset by the tremendous increase in textual productivity we get from a connected web. Presuming, of course, that we don’t replace that web with glass boxes.

There is an additional civic value here, one that goes beyond simply preserving professional journalism. For about ten years now, a few of us have been waging a sometimes lonely battle against the premise that the internet leads to political echo chambers, where like-minded partisans reinforce their beliefs by filtering out dissenting views, an argument associated with the legal scholar and now Obama administration official Cass Sunstein. This is Sunstein’s description of the phenomenon:

If Republicans are talking only with Republicans, if Democrats are talking primarily with Democrats, if members of the religious right speak mostly to each other, and if radical feminists talk largely to radical feminists, there is a potential for the development of different forms of extremism, and for profound mutual misunderstandings with individuals outside the group.

My argument has been that the connective power of the web is stronger than its filtering, that even the most partisan blogs are usually only one click away from the political opposites, whereas in the old world of print magazines or face-to-face groups, the opportunity to stumble across an opposing point of view was much rarer. Some of you might have seen a David Brooks column this week that reported on a new study that actually looked an exposure to differing points of view in various forms of media, and in real-world encounters. It turns out that the web, at least according to this study, actually reduces
the echo-chamber effect, compared to real-world civic space. People who spend a lot of time on political sites are far more likely to encounter diverse perspectives than people who hang out with their friends and colleagues at the bar or the watercooler. As Brooks described it, “This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal.”

This is just one study, of course, and these are complicated social realities. I think it is fair to say that our pundits and social critics can no longer make the easy assumption that the web and the blogosphere are echo-chamber amplifiers. But whether or not this study proves to be accurate, one thing is certain. The force that enables these unlikely encounters between people of different persuasions, the force that makes the web a space of serendipity and discovery, is precisely the open, combinatorial, connective nature of the medium. So when we choose to take our text out of that medium, when we keep our words from being copied, linked, indexed, that’s a choice with real civic consequences that are not to be taken lightly.

The reason the web works as wonderfully as it does is because the medium leads us, sometimes against our will, into common places, not glass boxes. It’s our job—as journalists, as educators, as publishers, as software developers, and maybe most importantly, as readers—to keep those connections alive.

via www.stevenberlinjohnson.com

IGN: Rebutting Roger Ebert's "Video Games Can Never Be Art"

One of the great thrills of being wrong comes during the moments after having made a demonstrably false assertion. You can begin to feel the adrenaline flow as you try and defend your position while your claimed territory constricts around you. I remember one night on the eve of a friend's wedding when I'd made an off-hand remark about Charlemagne having played a crucial role in the American Revolution. My friend, now a tax attorney in Texas, spat out a mouthful of beer in disbelief. I could see the gathering relish in his eyes as he realized he had me pinned to a wall. Charlemagne obviously had nothing to do with the American Revolution. I had been thinking of Lafayette, but the difference between Charlemagne and Lafayette had, after five hours of celebratory drinking, passed me by. As I saw his coming antagonism, I didn't stop to think about what I'd said, I simply entrenched myself in the idea that I was right. After having my stupidity corroborated by literally every person invited to comment on the matter I was left to embrace the awful idea that I had been wrong, even while trying to say something positive about the long history of Franco-American cooperation.

In recent years, Roger Ebert has become a significant critic of videogames. Not of the industry or the aesthetics of any particular game, rather he has disavowed the medium itself. Videogames can never be art. Ebert recently reconsidered the question after a reader forwarded him Kellee Santiago's recent TED presentation arguing that games are art. Five years ago, Ebert made his original assertion that games could never be art in the same way as "serious" film and literature can. He has now revisited the subject by issuing a decree, in part, on my behalf, "no video gamers now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."

Consider me Exhibit A in the case against Ebert's assertion. I experienced the medium as an art form from the very first moment I played a videogame almost thirty years ago. Ebert says no critic has ever forwarded a videogame that could be compared to the great works of the old, canonized art. At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, he's wrong on this count as well. I did just that six months ago when I described my experience playing Metroid Prime as of equivalent emotional and thematic value as my time watching Citizen Kane. I invoked the moral anarchy of Richard III when I wrote about Haze. I wrote about Mirror's Edge as a sublime memento mori, comparing its self-directed sensoria to the novel's shift from plot to internal narrative with writers like Knut Hamsun and Virginia Woolf.

If you're unwilling to take my arguments, consider Tom Bissell the award-winning contributor to the New Yorker who wrote of Grand Theft Auto IV, "There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years." Or else you might consider Steve Poole, author of Unspeak and Trigger Happy, who described his experience with Shadow of the Colossus. "For me, the aesthetic pleasures weren't enough to outweigh the powerful regret the game so astonishingly succeeded in engendering. If a game of violence is so effective in its message of anti-violence that you actually stop playing, does that mean it was a success or a failure?"

Or consider Brenda Brathwaite, the game design veteran who is now working on a series of games intended for play in art galleries. I saw her standing at a podium at the Art History of Games conference in Atlanta and break down in tears describing her experience with Tale of Tales' The Path while recovering from an attack in real life. She pointed out Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey who were in the audience as her voice wavered and her eyes filled. "Thank you," she told them.

Is there a purpose in not allowing these experiences, ideas, and feelings to be considered alongside those provoked by Nabakov, Dostevsky, Stravinsky, Joyce, Lang, Bergman, Kurosawa, Beethoven, or whomever you'd like to include as an emissary of great art? Does it enrich us to exclude Smerdyakov from a conversation about violence and Colossus? Are we better for having bucked at the suggestion that Prime's ethereal isolation could have the same human fingerprints as Kane's loneliness?

At the end of his essay, Ebert asks a pointed question. "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves?"

The answer is simple. Videogames are not games, and there is more in them than winning and enjoyment. The reason football is not art is because its rules were designed with the primary goal of competition. Competition is only one of a great many different experiences that a videogame can create. Games can also be about losing, and not competing at all. They can be about love, the impossibility of relationships, the beautiful indifference to our individual life choices, urgent intimacy in the shadow of death, sexual anxiety, and confrontation with life choices to which there are no right answers. There are games that, using the language of authored interaction, invoke all of these ideas, and many more beyond.

What's most ironic about Ebert's latest round of criticism is that it's based on an invalid reading of the works he's arguing against. After watching a video of "Waco Resurrection," Ebert concludes that it is a "brainless shooting gallery." Of Braid, he says the time reversal mechanic breaks the "discipline of the game," and doubts that "I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game." Ebert concludes by addressing Flower: "Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card." He reaches these conclusions by virtue of having streamed clips of each work online. This would be the equivalent of dismissing a film after having read a dismissive essay about it.

"Videogames by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control," he wrote in 2005. Videogames are art precisely because their interactions—player choices, as he puts it—necessitate authorial engagement. When Ebert criticizes the aesthetics and general concepts of a game based on a recorded excerpt, he is experiencing them as film. A videogame is not a videogame on YouTube. The language a creator uses to express her heart or mind is discovered through a firsthand experience of the allowable actions and their consequent significance. To criticize an individual work on those grounds, let alone an entire medium, is invalid, a fine exemplar of how stupid even our most curious and articulate minds can be.

Videogames are a part of a new medium defined by virtual interaction. They are a subset of this medium in the same way that cinema is a subset of film. Film contains both The Silence and the instructional video that I had to watch on the first day of my job at McDonald's fifteen years ago. There is a great similarity in the ways film and videogames evolved. Early cinema was fixated on superficial frisson, the elicitation of goose bumps and quickened heart rates in the dark. There is no more emotional subtlety in The Great Train Robbery than there is in Donkey Kong.

Both of them present exaggerated worlds that invoke basic icons of evil, desire, modernity, and the imminent threat of death. There is no nuance in either work, but their creative elements are so nearly universal they invite extrapolation and personalization. I don't play Donkey Kong to "win," I play it to survive a surreal assault by a higher power in service of rescuing a woman I presume to love. I feel anxiety in the prospect of being hit by a barrel not because it would mean the computer had beaten me, but because of what that defeat would mean.

While I cannot tell you definitively what videogames are, I know for historical fact that games have been art. Yoko Ono's white chessboard is a game with a clear emotional expression that can only come from an experience of rules. It's most distinctive quality emerges from obscuring chess rules, whose warlike implications we often take for granted. You might consider it solely as an objet d'art, but it has a more immediate power when actually played. The experience of trying to account for all of the pieces, rules, and the loaded tactical implications of a chessboard with a minimum of visual cues is game art. It uses the language of rules, consequences, and objectives to create a deeply personal and emotional experience.

The reason Ebert needs rebuffing is that so many people assume he's right. The most damning implications of his criticism are not against games themselves. All great works of creativity outlive the critical droppings scattered at their feet. Instead, Ebert's assertion flies in my face and the faces of my colleagues who punctuate articles on the subject with limpid apathy. "Why do we even care if games are art?" Because without art, our understanding of what games are, how they move us, and where they have yet to go is diminished. It makes it so Terry Cavanagh can't use the language of collection and 2 dimensional obstacle jumping to find a painful metaphor for a failing relationship. Will Wright can't draw from the evolutionary corners of science fiction a deterministic fable about the meaning of existence. Peter Molyneux can't end Fable 2 with a simple, non-competitive question about what in my fifteen hours of play I'd be willing to discard forever.

I played Fable 2 in the months before I quit my job, abandoned health insurance, cashed out my savings, left my family, and moved to New York for a woman I was in love with. When I reached the end of Fable 2 and was told to choose between love, wealth, or community. I set the controller down and stared at the screen in silence for almost twenty minutes. It was a systemic echo of a decision whose terrible weight I had been grappling with for months. Each choice required double as much sacrifice. The accumulation of game objects, interactions, and character personalization had all been in preparation for that final moment. I was allowed to collect as much as I wanted in the short term, but completing the experience would require that most of it be let go again. And it pierced in a way that no movie has ever done. What would Dick Butkus do in that moment? How about Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan, or Hua Shi Chen?

At the Cannes Film Festival in 1991, after half a century making films, Akira Kurosawa confessed he knew less about what a movie was at the end of his career than at the beginning. When Ebert says games will not be art in the lifetime of any living gamer, he is writing only for himself. He will die having never experienced the art of games. He will die having grouped Braid together with Mahjong, Metroid Prime with the NFL. I don't deny they have many elements in common, but I wouldn't put them in the same category anymore than I would say Stroszek is like the Nightly News because they both involve cinematography, editing, performance, and music.

This is destructive thinking because it reduces complexity and narrows the scope of something, by nature, unquantifiable. There's little use in arguing for what something isn't. Citizen Kane is, by Ebert's assessment of consensus, the greatest movie ever made. It also contains a great impoverishment of language that stands as a blight against the entire medium of film. Joseph Mankiewicz's chatty Americana cannot be considered any kind of an improvement on the timeless blank verse of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Would you want to dismiss Kane on the grounds that its sense of poetic language is hollow in comparison to works that had to make do without cinematography and editing?

Ebert is asking us to turn away from everything beautiful and irreplaceable in videogames on terms that ignore the things that can only be accomplished through interaction. He does not even appear to be conversant in how expressive interactive rules really are. I can't say with any greater authority that I know the full extent of what videogames are, but I am happy to be a voice in the spectrum of people regularly discovering, praising, and advocating for their artistic expressions. For thirty-two years I have lived in a world where videogames have been art. Discovering how and why is the future. Eventually that future won't include Roger Ebert. What will we be able to say for ourselves then?

via pc.ign.com

The Technium: 1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly.  Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don't need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.

This small circle of diehard fans, which can provide you with a living, is surrounded by concentric circles of Lesser Fans. These folks will not purchase everything you do, and may not seek out direct contact, but they will buy much of what you produce. The processes you develop to feed your True Fans will also nurture Lesser Fans. As you acquire new True Fans, you can also add many more Lesser Fans. If you keep going, you may indeed end up with millions of fans and reach a hit. I don't know of any creator who is not interested in having a million fans.

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive.  You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another path other than stardom, a path made possible by the very technology that creates the long tail. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It's a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

A few caveats. This formula - one thousand direct True Fans --  is crafted for one person, the solo artist. What happens in a duet, or quartet, or movie crew? Obviously, you'll need more fans. But the additional fans you'll need are in direct geometric proportion to the increase of your creative group. In other words, if you increase your group size by 33%, you need add only 33% more fans. This linear growth is in contrast to the exponential growth by which many things in the digital domain inflate. I would not be surprise to find that the value of your True Fans network follows the standard network effects rule, and increases as the square of the number of Fans. As your True Fans connect with each other, they will more readily increase their average spending on your works. So while increasing the numbers of artists involved in creation increases the number of True Fans needed, the increase does not explode, but rises gently and in proportion.

A more important caution: Not every artist is cut out, or willing, to be a nurturer of fans. Many musicians just want to play music, or photographers just want to shoot, or painters paint, and they temperamentally don't want to deal with fans, especially True Fans. For these creatives, they need a mediator, a manager, a handler, an agent, a galleryist -- someone to manage their fans.  Nonetheless, they can still aim for the same middle destination of 1,000 True Fans. They are just working in a duet.

Third distinction. Direct fans are best. The number of True Fans needed to make a living indirectly inflates fast, but not infinitely. Take blogging as an example. Because fan support for a blogger routes through advertising clicks (except in the occasional tip-jar), more fans are needed for a blogger to make a living. But while this moves the destination towards the left on the long tail curve, it is still far short of blockbuster territory. Same is true in book publishing. When you have corporations involved in taking the majority of the revenue for your work, then it takes many times more True Fans to support you. To the degree an author cultivates direct contact with his/her fans, the smaller the number needed.

Lastly, the actual number may vary depending on the media. Maybe it is 500 True Fans for a painter and 5,000 True Fans for a videomaker. The numbers must surely vary around the world. But in fact the actual number is not critical, because it cannot be determined except by attempting it. Once you are in that mode, the actual number will become evident. That will be the True Fan number that works for you. My formula may be off by an order of magnitude, but even so, its far less than a million.

I've been scouring the literature for any references to the True Fan number. Suck.com co-founder Carl Steadman had theory about microcelebrities. By his count, a microcelebrity was someone famous to 1,500 people. So those fifteen hundred would rave about you. As quoted by Danny O'Brien, "One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That's enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year."

Others call this microcelebrity support micro-patronage, or distributed patronage.

In 1999 John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier published a model for this in First Monday, an online journal. They called it the Street Performer Protocol.

Using the logic of a street performer, the author goes directly to the readers before the book is published; perhaps even before the book is written. The author bypasses the publisher and makes a public statement on the order of: "When I get $100,000 in donations, I will release the next novel in this series."

Readers can go to the author's Web site, see how much money has already been donated, and donate money to the cause of getting his novel out. Note that the author doesn't care who pays to get the next chapter out; nor does he care how many people read the book that didn't pay for it. He just cares that his $100,000 pot gets filled. When it does, he publishes the next book. In this case "publish" simply means "make available," not "bind and distribute through bookstores." The book is made available, free of charge, to everyone: those who paid for it and those who did not.

In 2004 author Lawrence Watt-Evans used this model to publish his newest novel. He asked his True Fans to collectively pay $100 per month. When he got $100 he posted the next chapter of the novel. The entire book was published online for his True Fans, and then later in paper for all his fans. He is now writing a second novel this way. He gets by on an estimated 200 True Fans because he also publishes in the traditional manner -- with advances from a publisher supported by thousands of Lesser Fans.  Other authors who use fans to directly support their work are Diane Duane, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and Don Sakers. Game designer Greg Stolze employed a similar True Fan model to launch two pre-financed games. Fifty of his True Fans contributed seed money for his development costs.

The genius of the True Fan model is that the fans are able to move an artist away from the edges of the long tail to a degree larger than their numbers indicate. They can do this in three ways: by purchasing more per person, by spending directly so the creator keeps more per sale, and by enabling new models of support.

New models of support include micro-patronage. Another model is pre-financing the startup costs. Digital technology enables this fan support to take many shapes. Fundable is a web-based enterprise which allows anyone to raise a fixed amount of money for a project, while reassuring the backers the project will happen. Fundable withholds the money until the full amount is collected. They return the money if the minimum is not reached.

Here's an example from Fundable's site;

Amelia, a twenty-year-old classical soprano singer, pre-sold her first CD before entering a recording studio. "If I get $400 in pre-orders, I will be able to afford the rest [of the studio costs]," she told potential contributors. Fundable's all-or-nothing model ensured that none of her customers would lose money if she fell short of her goal. Amelia sold over $940 in albums.

A thousand dollars won't keep even a starving artist alive long, but with serious attention, a dedicated artist can do better with their True Fans. Jill Sobule, a musician who has nurtured a sizable following over many years of touring and recording, is doing well relying on her True Fans. Recently she decided to go to her fans to finance the $75,000 professional recording fees she needed for her next album. She has raised close to $50,000 so far. By directly supporting her via their patronage, the fans gain intimacy with their artist. According to the Associated Press:

Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing - we can fix that on our end." For a $5,000 contribution, Sobule said she'll perform a concert in the donor's house. The lower levels are more popular, where donors can earn things like an advanced copy of the CD, a mention in the liner notes and a T-shirt identifying them as a "junior executive producer" of the CD.

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty.  A study as recently as 1995 showed that the accepted price of being an artist was large. Sociologist Ruth Towse surveyed artists in Britian and determined that on average they earned below poverty subsistence levels.

I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don't know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.  I'd love to hear from anyone who might have settled on such a path.

Updates:

One artist who partially relies on True Fans responds with a disclosure of his finances: The Reality of Depending on True Fans

I report the results of my survey of artists supported by True Fans: The Case Against 1000 True Fans

via www.kk.org

Andrew Wyeth does Missile Defense

What a still mashup should be. I love it.

What the '90s should've looked like but didn't (Elke Hesser's Paris)

One of my favorite photographs, having been blown up, framed, and hanging on my kitchen wall for years. Makes me think: coming from the standpoint of the late '80s, this is what I always thought the mid '90s might look like, with this kind of meta-glamour, but never did... (A pity we got grunge instead.) Ah well--with the new decade upon us, always the new possibilities...

"Art Day" (with Rockefeller Tree)

Ah yes, another successful Art Day, come and gone...

You see, the concept behind the "Art Day" is a simple one: when one writes for a living, one slowly but surely goes stark raving mad unless one makes an actual appointment (and here, I mean an iron-clad obligation to oneself which absolutely must be met), once a week, to get out of the house--preferably, for an entire day, though a single afternoon is acceptable--this in order to consume the work of other artists who, surely, are also and at the same time going stark raving mad in their own very quietly acceptable fashions... The procedure is simplicity itself: one books, first thing in the morning, an appointment at a spa (for me, this is Eden Day Spa, in Soho), this for a 90 minute session of deep tissue massage. One leaves two hours later feeling refreshed, renewed, revitalized, and, perhaps most importantly, re-ready to consider that, indeed, there just might be some new works of art out there, some MODERN works, that are actually worth consuming (trust me on this one--you skip the massage, and you're going to be about half as willing to consider the validity of any new series you come across that day. Considering that I'm willing to give my time to less than 1% of what's out there, these days... Well, you can easily see how getting the stress knocked out of me by a small Asian women with hands of steel becomes, not a luxury, but a necessity when pondering all that is new in the art scene here...) One then takes a long and leisurely lunch, at which time one flips through a copy of the current week's "Time Out New York"--you hit the Art section, and simply go through the listings, gallery-by-gallery. Stick to anything in Chelsea, and then from there, mark-up whatever may be going on at the Met, the MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim (you'll be probably get about half a dozen interesting hooks from the former set, and one or two from the latter, depending). One tears out the relevant info, pays the bill, gets up, takes a stretch, cracks his knuckles, gazes off at the horizon line with a sort of dreamy, half-lost "I'm-ready-to-see-something-NEW-so-bring-it-on..." look...

And off you go for your inspiration.

As for me, on this fine and sun-drenched day, I opted to walk everywhere, and as a result said Art Day did take a bit longer than planned (five hours total--and I only worked in about half the items I'd intended to), but being outdoors and taking in the air more than made up for anything I might have missed (and which I can always get to later). My itinerary, below:

-- Araki's "Painting Flowers and Diaries" at Anton Kern, 532 W 20th and 10th

-- "Breaking and Entering: Art and the Video Game" at Pace Wildenstein, 545 W 22nd Str and 10th

-- "Dialogue: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock" at the Robert Miller Gallery, 524 W 26th Str and 10th

-- Gerard Richter at the Marion Goodman Gallery, 24 W 57th and 5th

Here I took a break at Rockefeller Center, admiring the tree (in all its excess--I swear the star atop it would feed and house NYC's entire homeless population for a month...), along with the ice-skaters in the rink just below. Heading back downtown, I popped into a church (St. Patrick's, which I'd never been inside of before--quite nice), browsed a few boutiques, suddenly found myself more than a little tired (getting up at 4am is still a relatively new thing, for me), and took the subway the rest of the way back down to Soho, where I stopped by the Open Center to pick up a new catalogue (5-day intensive on Aromatherapy--think I'm going to quite enjoy that one). So, yes, still to come, on my next Art Day next week:

-- David LaChapelle's "Pictures for Italian Vogue 2001 - 2005" at Staley Wise, 560 Broadway and Prince

-- Richard Tuttle at the Whitney, 945 Madison and 75th

-- Fra Angelico at the Met, 1000 5th Ave and 82nd

-- Klimt at the Neue Galerie, 1048 5th Ave and 86th Str

(Oh, and speaking of Art--do I have the most fantastic surprise for Polina on her birthday this coming Friday evening...!! Can hardly wait myself, but of course, I wouldn't think to spoil the mystery here just yet. Never fear, tireless Readers, a full report will come first thing Saturday morning...)