Crooks, Liars, and Love

My daily routine usually begins with a quick look at the news and then a tour of few blogs. This before I have even brushed my teeth. Pitiful (but I know you probably do it too!)

Crooks and Liars is currently my favorite political blog (man, there are a lot of good left-leaning blogs these days). I like C&L for three simple reasons:

• the entries are concise roundups of other stuff from all over the web

• many entries include video (in both wmp and quicktime formats) that really often makes the point

and most importantly

• John Amato, C&L's creator, posts an eclectic mix of music videos at the end of each evening

The night before last, Amato put up a link to George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps from the infamous Concert for Bangladesh. He also posted an alternative version performed by Tom Petty, Dhani Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Prince that really is good.

I prefer Harrison's acoustic version (see embedded video below). The video is both heart-tugging tribute to Harrison as well as a reminder of all that we've lost since the 60s (although I am certainly glad fashion has changed).



The music embedded in C&L is a nice respite from the complete disintegration documented in the other posts. But somehow While My Guitar really struck accord and forced a lump in my throat.

Harrison's message is painfully simple and dead on: Love. In the era of grandly stupid and selfish control and violence, reinvesting in love is the only way out. The paradox is (and I think the Beatles got a lot of shit for this) it is hard to turn love into political action. Fear and anger are better motivators perhaps.

Needless to say, Amato's music choices recently have grounded me and got me to think about the bigger picture. As Kurt Vonnegut explained (in describing his epitaph):

The only proof he needed for the existence of god was music

Better than Snails!

Incredible balloon creations.

You thought you had a rough day...

I just got back from California and a visit with my Grandmother. One of my jobs was to pack her numerous lawn ornaments (you'll be happy to know that the Frog and the Cow made the journey to Washington safely). While doing so I found a veritable platoon of snails. I couldn't help but watch them in fascination - there were so many.

It is not like snails are exciting. But I couldn't get over how many were just hanging out. So, I did what any PhD would do: I pried them from their locations and set up a giant snail traffic jam so that when they had settled and figured the coast was clear they'd start moving and peak out of their shells only to find they were smack dab in bumper-to-bumper, er, shell-to-shell mega-traffic.

Anyway, here is my homage to those snails still trying to find their way home after my exploits.

Topographical Typologies and the Porcelain Future

Back in March, the renewed College of Art and Architecture at the University of Idaho presented a lecture series with a number of well-known architects as guest speakers. Of those architects, Ali Rahim seemed to inspire my students the most.

Students and faculty alike found Rahim's work to be the perfect symbol of progress and of technological possibility. Rahim's gift to architecture, I think, is his compartmentalization of structure. With the aid of the computer he creates forms that can be broken down into smaller components and manufactured offsite. The architects role, under the guidance of the machine, becomes one more akin to industrial designer. This often affords spectacular forms but what results in Rahim's work, I feel, is form that gives too much to the computer-aided process and manufacturing and not to the scale and human dimensions of good architectural space.

Rahim, at one point in the lecture, claimed that this methodological approach removes his work from existing architectural typologies but that is pure bunk. If anything Rahim is well entrenched in the language of computer-generated aesthetics. The work also references not only space-race high modernism and even the virtual architecture of the early 90s (see the earlier work of Marcos Novak for instance) but it also plays with the current visual dialogue of technological devices.

Rahim's use of white comes from the long history of shorthand for the technology-driven form that is often uber-sterile and, well, cold and inhuman. George Lucas' first sci-fi filmTHX 1138 uses white in this way but perhaps the best example is the iPod. The stainless, highly polished silver and porcelain-like white of the iPod speak of cleanliness by referencing, believe it or not, bathrooms. The tub, tiles, and fixtures - everything comes across as clean and somewhat sterile. Rahim takes this to exaggeration. The undulating forms of his spaces also read as bathroom fixtures that have grown to such a scale they have consumed the building.

What is more interesting perhaps is that the blob, arguably the preeminent form both referencing and derived from the technological apparatus, is now an obstacle and human memory and scale are sacrificed. The phenomenological aspects of being in space often overrule any system to derive form. But Rahim's work puts up a good fight. The vacuum molded forms create a bloblike topography that makes the spaces hard to personalize and even decorate. The topography also forces the space to be not about the persons within but about the building itself. It is techno-scenography. It is a technological topographical typology.

Illustration Friday: Sorry

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(Click on image for larger - more readable - version.)

1 Year Anniversary

I almost let it pass. Metasurface, the silly blog with the serious name, is now officially 1 year old.

The Eye of the Beholder

The My Heritage site offers a test run of a nifty tool that scans your uploaded photos with a bazillion microderm doubleflux modulators in order to compare your facial features with well-known personalities and celebrities.

I tried it yesterday morning and think it might have been on the fritz because my results (on numerous tries with different photos) came back with the following celebrities:

- Sean Lennon
- Elvis Costello
- Larry King
- Rin Tin Tin

I actually made up that last one (does anyone even know who Rin Tin Tin was anymore?) but it doesn't matter.

My wife supposedly looks like Toni Morrison or Spike Lee. My offspring look like Whitney Houston and David Beckham.

Anyway, it was sort of fun (in a self-deprecating way). For those who want to know, I really look like this:



(from Gizmodo)

Wednesday Lovin': All Dolled Up

I love this suit but am very afraid to ask about a matching tie.

Illustration Friday: Angel and Devil

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Monday Lovin': #27 is a fire hazard

Michael Wolf's 100x100 is a photographic documentation of flats and their owners in one of Hong Kong's oldest housing estates.

It is strange how I find the more spartan rooms cozier than those quite stuffed with possessions. I think I'd be worried about fire hazards. I love the couple in Image #50.

Each room is a book to be read.

(from Kottke.org)

Spent

I have officially started summer and have, frankly, had trouble keeping awake. It was, as always, a taxing semester and I am completely spent - emotionally, physically, and mentally. But summer, of course, allows some freedoms and part of my mornings, I hope, can be spent translating ideas into writings, drawings, or whatever.

This summer involves traveling to San Jose, California and then a trip to England in June and part of July. There will be plenty to share, I am sure.

The problem that I had in making new posts last semester seems, in retrospect, to be more existential than, say, time-driven. I have been writing about creative production and, implicitly, the need for everyone to play/explore/express themselves. The trouble I have is that I am at once over- and underwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the volume of what I find and underwhelmed by the inanity of the chatter. It almost doesn't make sense to me anymore.

Why talk if everyone else is speaking at the same time?

Speaking Out

From retired Generals to the Pearl Jam, there are so many voices rising in a cacophony to protest. Never before has such a sentiment seemed to bubbling up from the collective unconscious. Every thinking person feels it, that mass of uneasiness, and people are acting on it. It will be interesting to see how this manifests itself in both the artist's project and in the broader public discourse.

My question, then, is the media tone deaf? Why haven't they grabbed on to this and started doing their job? I listened to public radio yesterday and had to endure a diatribe by a conservative pundit. This gentleman went unchallenged. Come on, folks, it's time to speak out.

The Pleasure Principle

SEED has an article by Goeffrey Miller that posits the reason why we have yet to make alien contact is that they, like us, find the stimulation of media far too engaging to take on such tasks as space exploration and colonization.

The discussion about our fascination with media is interesting. We are finishing up the initial offering of new course, New Media Aesthetics, and one of the key themes, it seems to me, is the question of where our bodies fit into the hypermediated lives. The last book we've had the students read, Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media, borrows from Bergson to make the argument that the role of making meaning of new media texts is re-centered on the body.

While Hansen's argument is compelling, I am worried that in our recentering we are still, even in the exploratory new media object, succumbing to the seductive, yet ultimately vapid pleasures of the technological artifact. Simply put, we love the sheen of the digital image, the novelty, or we marvel merely at the method of production.

Miller tells us the dangers in this: when we fall to far into a mediated world we do not exercise our evolutionary biological fitness (there are holes in this position, I know). The pleasure we seek - the pleasure that assists us in finding suitable mates and ample food for survival - are faked in new media enterprises.

In thinking about this, however, I still come back to this point that tells me that, in some ways, this is alright. If Miller's position is that we, in the media-seduced West, are not reproducing and, therefore, falling behind radical fundamentalists, I find that argument so problematic on several levels. There is a certain opposition inherent in that and a belief that the media systems that feed fundamentalist beliefs aren't as illusory and prevalent.

Needless to say, Miller's Great Temptation can have many shapes and flavors.

Peace Takes Courage

Ava Lowrey is a 15 year old peace activist from Alabama that creates simple yet hardhitting animations about the war in Iraq. She comes at the issue, in the different films, from different perspectives ultimately showing the affect of war.

The images are graphic.

(from Crooks and Liars)