general

Everyone was talking today about "the bridge, the bridge." My stock response was "You mean the one in Baghdad?" The Minnesota bridge collapse is horrible but it's a local story, amped up for the 24 hour cable cycle for maximum tragedy value. We Americans only care about our shit, not the shit we initiated half a world away. The media offers very little perspective regarding these two almost simultaneous major urban bridge collapses, with comparable death tolls. Here's a possible link: Republicans cause bridge collapses in the US because lowering taxes is their insane religion, and maintaining bridges costs money*; they cause them abroad by instigating civil wars in countries that pose no threat to us. The Republicans are, in fact, agents of chaos and darkness. (With assistance from wormy Democrats.)

* digby's take

Unofficial installation shot of my exhibition last year, "Room-Sized Animated GIFs"--artMovingProjects gallery director Aron Namenwirth talks to unidentified foot. These two GIFs aren't room-sized, obviously. I hate to pat myself on the back too hard but you gotta give us credit for having the balls to use the words "animated GIFs" in a New York exhibition title. Most writers, curators, and collectors here are very, very elderly and think GIFs are something you give each other for Christmas. Of course, these 2 were burned to DVD rather than appearing on their native Internet, so I'm at least as guilty of fogey-ism as MOMA, which recently did a "Web 2.0 show" despite a museum policy barring use of the Net in the galleries--that is to say, there is no actual Web art in the show. The guards might be tempted to surf porn during those long, lonely hours of standing.

Just got my first candid inquiry asking why I switched to a worse-looking page when I moved to the new domain.

This is a Word Press template--they call it their "classic."

At the Tree the design was minimal CSS; Jim came up with it to be functional and beauty followed functionality, I believe.

The Word Press is more elegant in some ways, and way easier to use--I no longer have to type a-h-r-e-f to make a link.

But trust me, I know it's not as nice.

Part of the CSS conspiracy is you have to pay a designer megabucks to make a page that doesn't look designed. Or be a designer yourself, or make something slacker or dirt style.

I'm weighing how far down the design road I want to go with this blog. But I am thinking about it. Since I am an artist type, I'm even thinking in terms of content that clashes with the corporate look of the template (like the gnarly collage a few posts back).

Thanks to furtherfield for its nice write-up on BLOG, the exhibition where I showed my Digital Media Tree blog in a gallery for a month, and for the thoughts on my art and blogging overall. The author Palo Fabuš even discusses my signature molecules (usually a topic of resounding silence) and identifies those meshworks of orbs as "a crossing point of latent inner structures and omnipresent superficiality." I like that--I often think of them as a non-subject, "artist fodder" that both hints at and derides a conspiracy underlying everything. Also appreciated is his comment on BLOG, the exhibit: "Truly, the tongue-in-cheek situation stems here from Moody’s decision to make public something that is already public in a full-fledged way." He likes the recursiveness of the project: unfortunately just as I can no longer blog about BLOG during BLOG (since the show closed last month) I can't blog about it afterwards either, at least on the page itself, since it's officially ended after six plus years. Ideally the present blog will also create some opportunities for dizzying self-reference.

"Anyone who makes emotional dramas or what might be called 'serious' comedies about parents and children, men and women, is operating on Bergman's turf."

--Andrew O'Hehir, "Remembering Bergman," Salon, July 31, 2007