Some commentary by yours truly on other people's pages.
The thread at Paddy Johnson's concerns "art about the art world," on the occasion of a show on that subject at Momenta Art.
The thread at Nasty Nets is a response to a Joel Holmberg revisitation of a conceptual work from the '60s. I have a fondness too for pictures of hippies drawing lines in space, etc.
The critics who've now decided to approve of the Coens have to find a way to justify the violence they so deplore. Here's Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times giving it a try: "But as the story unfolds with the awful inevitability of a modern myth, it’s clear that the Coen brothers and [novelist Cormac] McCarthy are not interested in violence for its own sake but for what it says about the world we happen to live in."
Yeah, right. The Coens aren't interested in violence for its own sake like the Japanese makers of samurai films aren't interested in violence for its own sake. There’s no beauty or artistry or pleasure or kick or significance in representations of violence qua violence. Heavens no, Priscilla.
More:
Anyway, the story here is not that the Coens are great—we know—it’s the fact that a mere two-decades-plus into their feature filmmaking careers, the Coens have found broad acceptance with American critics. Now they tell us, based on seeing No Country for Old Men, that the Coens typically "combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos" (A.O. Scott, New York Times). All right, then! Even the Village Voice, that malignant foe of all that is good, especially Coen films, has come around a bit, with Scott Foundas opining that No Country is the Coens' "most measured, classical film of their 23-year career, and maybe their best."
Getting uneasy yet, true Coen admirers? You should be. Something very wrong here. Who the hell watches Coen films for measured classicism? Nobody who really likes them, that's who. The Coens mastered film classicism with their ABCs and zoomed on from there. No, what we have here, instead of critics damning the Coens with faint praise, is critics damning them with loud praise. You keep reading these reviews and you realize the damning part is indeed woven into the praise itself. ("Mischievous high spirits"? What are they, elves?) Or else it’s just about to emerge in the next sentence...
Donna Dennis, Tourist Cabins on Park Avenue, 2007. This is not as cool as the kids who lived in a furnished squat inside the Providence Mall, or the J. G. Ballard story about the man who eked out a Robinson Crusoe-like existence in a gap between freeways, but it does qualify as an example of interstitial architecture. When I was a kid I used to drive by a real estate office in a vacant lot that looked like this cabin. I always used to imagine living in it. As an adult I've spent some time in oversized closets--but not on traffic medians. (Photo-Peter Mauss/ESTO)
Update: Ha, guess I should have clarified that the cabins are artworks. Simon Sellars at Ballardian has more thoughts on them in the context of urban slippage zones: "In an over-commodified, all-seeing, all devouring age in which every point on the map seems to have been articulated, colonised and claimed, the inarticulate nature of these ‘blurred zones’ generates a readymade, real-world wormhole, one foot within reality, the other foot without."
From Of a Fire on the Moon, 1970:
All the while we had been composing our songs to the moon and driving the Indian on to the reservation, had we also been getting ready to go to the moon out of some deep recognition that we had already killed the nerve which gave life to the earth? Yet the moon by every appearance knew more about disease and the emanations of disease than the oldest leper on earth. "Of what can you dream?" said the moon. "I am battered beyond belief and you think to violate me now?"
Matt Smear noted the latest bloglines* (mis)interpretation of a GIF post of mine, and was kind enough to email this image--it's two alternating screenshots showing the post "as it was intended" on Firefox and the "Xtreme stretched" version generated by bloglines. It's so thoughtful of the bloglines designers to help lowly bloggers by regularizing the spacing of GIFs. We just don't know what we're doing and are dying for a CSS whiz to show us the beauty of a well-designed post. That said, I kind of like the vibrating picket fence. But I like Smear's GIF best of all.
Be sure to check out Smear's blog. He is obsessed with Michael McDonald and Russ Tamblyn (in a good way) and takes their multicolored, low-res visages through hundreds of pixelated, psychedelic iterations. Really trippy, ambitious use of animated GIFS, spatially exciting because they take up a large part of the browser window and really work that real estate. Like painting, but on your computer instead of a canvas with a guard watching you stare at it. Here's a comparatively muted image that I like a lot (about 1.33 MB).
*RSS newsreader that reformats blog posts and allows subscribers to follow a lot of different people's content without clicking through to the original blogs. One reason I switched to a generic design is what's the point of having a "unique" page if newsreaders convert every blog to the same format?
