general

An earlier post compared two Star Trek episodes (aired vs pilot) from the perspective of a secondary character, who happened to be female. Why do this? As I explained in an email,

My reading from Vina's point of view was mostly because The Cage/Menagerie is Pike's story and I thought she needed some attention.
In "The Cage" ending she gets to live life with a VR doll - I don't think Roddenberry cared about her end of the bargain.
I had a similar reaction on first seeing Groundhog Day - it's all about Bill Murray's maturation and development.
Within the logic of the story Andy McDowell essentially sleeps with him on the first date. Only we see all the steps it took for him to become a superhuman sexy beast.

These could be feminist readings but even an insensitive guy knows casually sexist plotting when he sees it.

Dump.fm user Kalan sent this message to a list of about 150 more-or-less active users of dump.fm:

so i've been hearing all these different perceptions of what dump is from/to the outside world recently: dump as a community of art fakers who want to have something they can use to say they 'do' as artists when they go to parties, a sort of superficial fascia to front the careers of a few prime members, a hip-star meme parasite, etc.... and im interested ethnographically in these perspectives. can people please send (email or w/e would be more surefire? - it's on my website) their or other overheard 'meta'-analyses of dump.fm-ing , what it signifies and suggests etc. i'ma gonna try to synthesize something.

My two cents:

who are all these people saying these terrible things? I guess it's nice to hear that the "outside world" has opinions about dump.fm. Registration has been open and closed depending on how much trolling is going on (not sure the status at the moment) but there's actually no reason for there to be an "outside world" as long as anyone can log on. As a logged-in person, assuming you can figure out some basic navigation on your own, you can speak your mind in the main chat room and you have as good a chance of anyone else of (i) "getting" what it means to "talk with pictures" in a real-time chat situation, either for yourself or others, (ii) making yourself into a "prime member" or person who can brag about dumping at parties. Anyone who hasn't attempted this only makes a half-baked insult; anyone who attempts it and fails to connect is just a disappointed backbiter. As for "meme parasite" what website isn't doing that? The web is a vast unruly organism of content-sucking and content-delivery (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, as Marx would say) and it's not fair to draw lines just at one locale. I'd say dump is "content-positive" if only because I get so many blog post ideas and pics from there.

LOL

Will Brand's L Magazine post frets over the lack of internet tags for art world terms. "Nobody today thinks to use 'painterliness,' 'theatricality,' or 'openness' as tumblr tags," he notes, as if that is a real issue.

Quoting Hernando de Soto, Brand says capitalism doesn't work in countries where it can't name things accurately, such as property descriptions in home deeds, and therefore, I think he is saying, art will die as a popular medium for lack of proper tagging. Except, most of the art he mentions was never popular.

Check out the website of Gerhard Richter, perhaps the best-respected artist since Andy Warhol: you can sort through dozens of categories of figurative painting, from "cars" to "apples", "flowers" to "rural landscapes", but his huge body of abstract work is simply broken down by date. If you like a painting, and want to find similar ones, your best bet might be searching by color; if you want to find other artists making similar work, you'll have to ask your neighborhood art critic-or, if you're a collector, a dealer.

The problem there might be "cars," "apples," "flowers," and "rural landscapes" for Richter paintings.

Commenter "Hill"'s reply to Brand on the L Magazine website amuses:

I'm not sure what your problem is here, the early Wittgenstein's 'what cannot be said, ...' from the Tractatus or the Whorf hypothesis that a given language precludes a priori thoughts, expressions found in another language. If we dont have a word for house, then we dont have houses we have woodies. Maybe translation is the issue, the public just hasn't or won't learn to translate Abstractionese, though you don't really define if you mean abstract in the non objective sense (Stella), formal (Louis), literal (late Poons) or traditional (spiritual klang, Symbolist colored musical notes of the soul). This would be later naive Wittgenstein's family resemblances and language games. Maybe the public should get degrees in art history.

More

The Discovery Channel's news blog featured this headline yesterday:

Rodents Pass Huge Seeds Like Olympic Torches

Common understanding of how the Olympic torch pass-off works may need to be revised. According to the Discovery article:

The study found that the rainforest-dwelling agoutis hoard [a] palm tree's seeds like squirrels. Such huge seeds provide a lot of bang for the food buck, so the rodents often visit each other's caches and steal the coveted seeds. Each theft moves the seed around, which benefits the tree. The movement happens far enough away from the mother tree to create favorable conditions for germination.

In a similar manner, an Olympic torch-bearer buries her torch somewhere it can't be found. Weeks or months go by and another torch-bearer stumbles on the cache, steals the torch, and buries it again, hoping it will not be found by another torch-bearer. The flame miraculously keeps burning until eventually, months or years later, the Olympics begin. Who knew?