Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The first track of an album I spent hundreds of childhood hours listening to. I specifically remember one summer afternoon sunbathing on my parents' deck with this playing in my walkman, wearing my first two piece swimsuit and drenched in my mom's Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil. Dug it out of the box just now as I am cleaning my basement.

Monday, September 26, 2011

"Required Reading: The Image Object Post-Internet," by Artie Vierkant

This PDF is to serve as an extended statement of artistic purpose and critique of our contemporary relation to objects and images in Post-Internet culture. More than anything, it poses a survey of contemplations and open questions on contemporary art and culture after the Internet. “Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog “Post Internet” during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh's definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also several references to the idea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001. Specifically within the context of this PDF, Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials. Post-Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with which it is most often associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism. New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image, context, or instruction. Post-Internet art instead exists somewhere between these two poles. Post-Internet objects and images are developed with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination. It is important to also note that “being Post-Internet” is a distinction which carries ramifications beyond the art context as a societal condition at large, and that it would be antithetical to attempt to pinpoint any discrete moment at which the Post-Internet period begins. Any cultural production which has been influenced by a network ideology falls under the rubric of Post-Internet. The term is therefore not discretely tied to a certain event, though it could be argued that the bulk of the cultural shifts described herein come with the introduction of privately-run commercial Internet service providers and the availability of personal computers. My homework for this week

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Sucks/is funny that the most traffic my blog gets is from pervs googling "pre teen bikini." Fucken pervs.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Thursday, September 22, 2011

I'm not mad right now...


but if I ever were, this would be a good song to remember. For those days when you just need something to scream along with at the top of your wine-soaked lungs.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

"You Be The Moon," Amy Leach

There is an altitude above every planet where a moon can orbit forevermore. In millions of miles of ups and downs, there is one narrow passageway of permanence. If a moon can reach this groove, it will never crash down like masonry nor drift away like a mood; it will be inalienable; it will circle its planet at the exact speed that the planet rotates, always over one site, like the Badlands or Brazzaville or the Great Red Spot, so that the planet neither drags the moon faster nor slows it down. Moons not locked into this synchronous orbit are being perturbed either up or down.

The law is stringent about this; there are no clauses; and all moons are dutiful followers of the law. But, as all good followers of the law discover in the end, unless you happen to roll onto a track precisely 18, 254 miles about your planet, the law ejects you or dashes you down. One moon in our solar system has achieved synchronous orbit, being pledged forever to its planet - Pluto's moon Charon. The other 168 moons have not.

Mars has two small moons whose names mean "panic" and "terror". Phobos looks like a potato that experienced one terrible, and many average, concussions. Phobos hurtles around Mars every eight hours, which is three times faster than Mars rotates, which means Mars pulls it back and slows it down. slowing down makes a moon lose height; in the end Phobos will smite its planet, or else get wrenched apart by gravity into a dusty ring of aftermath. Mars's other moon, Demios, is a slow and outer moon; an outer and outer moon; someday it will be a scrap moon, rattling around in the outer darkness, where drift superannuated spacecraft and exhausted starlets.

So fast moons slow down and slow moons speed up, and only during excerpts of time do planetary dalliances appear permanent. Our moon through many excerpts - the Moon - is a slow moon. Thus it is speeding up, this it is falling up, coming off like a wheel, and one and a half inches per year. Let us now reflect upon the Moon; for the Moon has long reflected upon us. To get an idea of the relationship between the Earth and the Moon and the Sun, find two friends and have the self-conscious one with lots of atmosphere be the Earth and the coercive one be the Sun. And you be the Moon, if you are periodically luminous and sometimes unobservable and your inner life has petered out. Then find a large field and take three steps from the Earth, and have the Sun go a quarter mile away.

For an idea of how long your light takes to reach the Earth, sing one line from a song, such as "Sail on, my little firefly," and that is how long moonlight takes. The Earth can sing the same line back to you, to represent earthlight. "Sail on, my little firefly." As for the Sun, he should sing as lustily as sunlight; have him discharge the song "I Gave Her Cakes and I Gave Her Ale," which is eight minutes long, which is how long sunlight takes to reach the Earth. Also the Earth may sing to the Sun and the Sun to the Moon, and the Moon to the Sun, songs of representative lengths.

Now keep singing and everybody spin and the smaller of you two orbit the next largest rotundity. Now as you, the Moon, go around the Earth, do not circle perfectly, as if you were a mill horse, or an idea. You are not an idea; you make the Earth's heavy blue waters heave up and down! Circle asymmetrically, then, like a small coplanet, truly you and the Earth both orbit the center of your combined mass, called the barycenter. Of course, if you and the Earth were equal in bulk, the barycenter would lie exactly between you; you and the Earth would pass your lives in social equilibrium, like the rooster and the pig on the carousel. However, as the Earth is eighty-one times more massive than the Moon, the barycenter is eighty-one times closer to the Earth; thus the barycenter is inside the Earth, though not at its center. This means that the Earth orbits a point inside itself. The Earth is a self-revolver, nodding slightly to the swooping Moon.

Now the Earth does not look eighty-one times as massive as the Moon - in fact it is just four times as wide. To address this perceptual difficulty we will interrupt our lunar reenactment and consult philosophy. Let us refer to our index of philosophies and select one known as Ineriorism, which says that the truth is to be known by introspection. to discover why the Earth acts so central and the Moon so obsequious, let us not measure yards but consider inward differences. The Earth is not gigantic and the Moon is not slight, but the Earth has a core and the Moon does not. Or rather, if the Moon has a core, it is undetectably small and inert, like a frozen mouse.

How do we know the Moon has a mousy core? Who has ever really been a Lunar Interiorist? Here we shall invent a philosophy and call it Imaginative Exteriorism, wherein by looking at the exterior, we imagine the interior; for the face often tattles on the heart, and an empty surface may bespeak an empty center (though this is not true of alligator eggs). The Moon has a stony face, while the Earth's face is a slaphappy burlesque, screaming flocks of peacocks here, and cloudbursts there, and spriggy merriment everywhere. Such an exhibition is possible only if inside itself the Earth has a core whose nickel density enables the planet not only to sport a moon but also to hold on to tiny flighty molecules. For these bouncing shimmying molecules are Earth's genius, and they are harder to keep than moons. Cloudland has a core of adamant.

On behalf of those who feel vacant and uninhabited, to whom nothing occurs, who look up day and night from chalky dust into unrefracted blackness, who watch their plush, blue-headed neighbors yielding splashy gullies and snow devils and excitable vespiaries and backsliding pinnipeds and heady cauliflowers and turtle centuplets and rosy squirrelfish swarming through Rapture Reefs - on behalf of unprofitable individuals everywhere, is the Moon ordained to ever be a shabby waste of rubbled regolith? Could it never scrabble together a genius like the Earth's?

What about molecule trustees, like the Sun? The solar wind blasts a plasma of particles throughout the solar system; could not some of these particles accrue upon the Moon? For not all atoms are wiggle-away; xenon, for example, is heavy and slow. It would make a nicely noncombustible atmosphere, of glowing lavender hue, and would make sound possible, albeit slow, so everyone's voice would drop several octaves and everyone would sound like walruses. And xenon is an anesthetic, so inhabitants would be blithe and amenable to dentistry. But the wind that bringeth the elements taketh them away; the atmosphere on the Moon is thinner than the thinnest vacuum we can contrive.

Haloes cannot be affixed to the head with pins and clips. Maranon forests, hosting spinetail birds and purple-backed sunbeams and gray-bellied comets and velvet-fronted euphonias and longtailed weasels, cannot be administered from without. Glory cannot be administered from without. Glory will only coalesce on a body wherein throbs a fiery, molten, mad-stallion heart so dreadfully dense, so inescapably attractive, that it matters little the circumference of the frame.

Of course, if your heart is too fervent, you will become an attractive incinerator, like the Sun, glorious but no pleasure boat. The glory of the Sun is violent and uninflected; its features are all flames and its sounds are all explosions. The Sun is so loud, like a million bombs all the time, that fine-spun sounds cannot be heard, like birds wading or figs tumbling or the muttering of the mathematicians. On the Sun all private qualities disappear into the main loud yellowness.

Nothing makes a sound on the Moon and nothing ever could: not a harpsichordist, not a shattering tureen of mangel-wurtzel stew, not the pebble-sized meteoroids that whang down at seventy-eight thousand miles an hour and heat the ground so hot it glows like a little piece of star; not the huge meteoroids that fracture the bedrock, forming craters two hundred miles across, creating new rings of mountains, making the Moon tremble on and on - since it doesn't have a sturdy core, the Moon is very convulsable; once atremble, it stays atremble. But it fractures and trembles and glows in absolute silence, for sound is like birds and cannot travel without air.

From looking at its face we had inferred that the Moon's heart is small and dead; but this is not to say that its face has no properties; not even the most stuporous face has no properties. The moonscape is pleated and rumpled, with rills and ridges and craters and crevices and darknesses and brightnesses. Except for some meteor-made bruises, though, its features have not changed for three billion years; they are memorials of an ancient vim. Once the Moon was welling up from inside, jutting into volcanoes from the force of its own melting, cracking at the rind from its deep inner shifts. Now it wears the same glassy expression eon after eon, like a taxidermied antelope. The Moon is a never-brimming eye, a never-whistling teakettle, and it shadows the very flower of planets.

There are several kinds of orbits in the orbit catalogue. One is an interrupted orbit, which describes the path of a dumpling flung from a window, the ground being the interrupter of the dumpling's orbit. Another is known as an open orbit, where an unaffiliated traveling object gets pulled to another body, curves around it, and flies away, never to return, like a minute. It is just a gravitational encounter and it merely redirects the object. The other kind of orbit is where a rock, after ages of streaking obliviously past acquisitive black holes and great gassy moon-catchers like Jupiter, happens to come close to a small motor-hearted globe, close enough to feel its influence, to be drawn closer, to make a circle around it, and another and another and another, and never thereafter stop, not for billions of years. Once it was its own, and now it is a foundling. This wrapping of the one around the other is called a closed orbit.

In truth, the beginning of the Moon is a secret. Maybe a piece of Earth broke off and went into orbit, maybe the Moon was begotten by a terrible collision, or maybe it really was a drifter snatched from its onward way. However the Moon began, here is how the Moon will finish: in a billion years the Earth will have nudged it far enough away that it will look 15 percent smaller; in three billion years it will look smaller still; in five billion years the Sun will become a red giant and swallow its children up. The Earth's involvement with the Moon will not last long enough to end.

The disposition of the universe - that crazy wheelwright - designates that we live on a wheel, with wheels for associates and wheels for luminaries, with days like wheels and years like wheels and shadows that wheel around us night and day; as if by turning and turning, things could come round right. For the moment, if you are still in the field of feathery grass where you were playing the Moon, you might look back at your footprints. The Sun spins in place so his path is just a point; and the Earth leaves a long ellipse around the Sun; but your path is a convoluted zigzag, for you loop around a looping planet. Your trajectory is something like the trajectory of sea ducks. Little harlequin sea ducks swim over the oscillating waves of the sea, diving down into the cold, gray-green waters to unfasten limpets and blue mussels from their rocks, swinging back up into the rough winter waves, the sea itself rolling up and down under the spell of the sailing Moon.

Sail On My Little Honey Bee

Sunday, September 18, 2011

The Dancer

If I were to say that I had any regrets about my life, or if I could do one thing differently if given a second life, I would say that I would choose to become a dancer. Every time I watch this film, or anything related to ballet, I feel as though I could simply die. This would be the one thing I would pursue. Ballet is so beautiful; so controlled, and yet so passionate. This is what I would do if I were not old and fat. Katja Bjorner is now the 1st Soloist Dancer for the Royal Swedish Ballet, and is currently dancing with Zhukov Dance Theatre in San Francisco.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011


"But while Hardy’s Tess at least enjoyed an idyllic and healthy childhood before being annihilated by the patriarchy, Kerry [Jayne Elizabeth Katona] survived an upbringing of almost unfathomable brutality. As she reveals in her mega-bestselling autobiography, Too Much Too Young, her mother Sue was a drug addict and alcoholic who frequently attempted suicide in front of Kerry, whom she subjected to a chaotic, violent existence spent mostly in pubs with criminals. When Kerry was 13, she had to pull a knife out of Sue’s leg after a gangster boyfriend stabbed her; the psychopath then informed Kerry, “I’m going to cut off your tits and chop you into pieces which I’ll put in the fridge so no one can find you.” Sue, considering this forgivable behavior, chose to stay in the relationship, leaving Kerry no choice but to throw herself onto the mercy of the authorities. After living with a series of foster families, she left school at 16 to toil as a lap dancer and pose for topless photos. Not long after, showbiz fate stepped in and Kerry was recruited into a band by Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark."


-Emma Garman, 'There's Something About Kerry'

Medina

I think Medina is the Danish Lady Gaga or something. That's cool.
Dear Paris, please bring my lover back to me...