• Have a nagging feeling I’ve linked this before but what-the-hey, it’s a good one. The Magic Mirror of Life an appreciation of the camera obscura.
• The complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart analyzed based on the audio content with the result being a map with different regions showing distinct categories of Mozart’s music: Map of Mozart. Via.
• Interesting. Open-Ended Utopia: The art of Rirkrit Tiravanija.
• Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man. I (or my girlfriend) could have told you that!
• Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness. More and more psychologists and researchers believe they know what makes people happy. But the question is, does a New Yorker want to be happy? Answer: Fuck you.
• The Urban Pantheist catalogues the myriad species in the city. Via.
• Some historic info on the real Deadwood South Dakota.
Mutagen
Updated
You’ve noticed the sound of your questioning voice resonate and echo longer as the depth of the empty space here has grown with each passing day. “Why is The Nonist so quiet?) quiet?)) quiet?)))” In answer I can offer a single word from the back of my lair which ought to go far in explaining my absence: Promotion.
A couple of weeks ago I was promoted at the office
and having to devote more of my mental energies toward work I’ve found I have less to devote to the site. This may be temporary, an adjustment period in which my stress and annoyance gradually return to acceptable levels. And then again it may not. In either case I’ve decided to take the advice of some friends and fellow bloggers and make a small change here at The Nonist.
From here on out, or for the foreseeable future at least, I will be changing to a regular publishing schedule. New content can be expected on Sundays and Thursdays. I hope that by pulling back from the possible 7 to the concrete 2 I’ll be able to stretch out a bit and craft even better content with less filler, and, I guess it goes without saying, less needless stress on yours truly.
Though this need not be anything other than a minor scheduling change I am choosing to consider it a mutagen and as such am feeling compelled to rethink and refocus.
Mutation
As obliquely hinted at in this post I am feeling artistic… stirrings. I find the act of blogging as it stands to be less and less interesting. I feel almost as if it amounts to little more than reportage. “Tonight’s big story- Guy in living room finds something which interests him on internet! A few explanatory paragraphs at 11.” As I hope you’ve noticed I do my best to crosscut all the links and bald reportage with completely off-topic writing and original content. But even this partial retreat from the flow of what’s “topical” does not seem quite enough. After all as more bloggers ensconce themselves in their specialized niches everything begins to fit comfortably into the fold. I always find myself wondering, “How can a blog go beyond what it is, however artistic, and cross-over into the a space where it is itself Art?” I have as of yet not been able to form a satisfactory reply, so I won’t even pretend at having an answer.
What I do know is this: I long ago made the first “mistake” of blogging, which is offering broad and eclectic content. Avoiding a focus and eschewing a niche is a sure fire way to relegate yourself to confused obscurity. You are continually in the act of disappointing people, of failing to meet their expectations, of changing where people seek the familiar. Having chosen right at the outset to do this, to let my online space mimic my own mental state, there is little reason why I shouldn’t at this point just commit total blog-suicide and descend into even more abstract, opaque, complex, and unmarketable forms of expression. In doing so I may alienate yet more of you who stop by simply to see what “neat” things I’ve dug-up and linked, but then that’s a price I am willing to pay. If I never see another referer-log entry for the posts on chindogu, the erotic coloring book, making love in 1975, or any other trifle I did little else but report on, well, all the better.
What changes are coming? I can’t say exactly, perhaps none. Perhaps this mode of simply curating is the natural order and I can not escape it within the confines of the blog form. But then again perhaps I will go months without a single outgoing link? Perhaps I’ll do nothing but write a serialized bit of fiction about an amnesiac autodidact? Perhaps I’ll post… well, as I’ve said, I really don’t know. But I am formally announcing my intent right now to do my best to cast-off the yoke I took up voluntarily and look for something new with the tiny slice of time I have.
Thus freed I feel both giddy and confused, the infusion of possibility enlivening, its uncontrolled flow a chaotic crush. How might I utilize the stretched time? What will I do with the thrice erased surface? I have no idea. My hope, however, is that what follows will satisfy deeper cravings in myself and, terrifically unlikely as it might be, some of yours as well.
So consider this a gentleman’s warning that what The Nonist is may henceforth change.
In Summation
From here on out I will (generally) be posting two days a week only, Sundays and Thursdays. In that my time has become if anything even more valuable to me, and I feel compelled to make a choice between spending that time doing that which satisfies me and that which merely distracts me, what I choose to post on those two days may very well veer away from what we have gotten used to here. Or perhaps not. I may be in the first stages of blog-suicide or blog-rebirth. We shall see. Hope in either case to see you all around.
And rather than being a whiny little douchebag about it I will do my best to continue posting as always. I only mention it so that if I go a few days here and there without updating you will know why without my having to post some longwinded self-involved explanation. Alright? Business as usual commencing now.
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George Wesley Bellows, Forty-two Kids, 1907
For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole. -Anne Sexton
Or
If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back? -Stephen Wright.
• Dig into the Instruments for Science (1800-1914) pages which reproduce for your geeky pleasure the scientific trade catalogs in the Smithsonian collections. Includes, but is by no means limited to: levers, pulleys, manometers, balances, air pumps, barometers, drawing instruments, electric machines, extensometers, telescopes, spectroscopes, photometers, tuning-forks, dissecting instruments, metallurgical equipment, galvanometers, turbines, electromagnets, theodolites, sextants, microscopes, globes, and glass prisms. Pictured above is Amslers Polar Planimeter. Enjoy… you big dork.
• The online world of linguistics is fast, funny, and bears no resemblance to hours spent in a classroom. Linguists and wordsmiths (including Grant Barret from Double Tongued Word Wrester) talk about new words, new blogs and new usage. NPR audio: How the Web Is Changing Language. Via.
• “A picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning. If the people who see a picture cannot grasp its meaning, no matter what a talented artist may have painted it, they cannot say it is a good picture.” -Kim Jong-il. Art in North Korea.
• Card Culture. On the design impact of credit cards and “affinity” cards. Via.
• An interesting paper on: Life (Briefly) Near a Supernova (pdf). Via.
• Proverbial wisdom from around the world in the form of 12,000 proverbs from 300 different countries. Search by keyword or browse by country.
• The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age, circa 1996, and The Olduvai Theory: Energy, Population, and Industrial Civilization (pdf) circa 2006. Can’t wait for post-industrial civilization.
Rembrandt the Quadracentenarian
Today marks the 400th birthday of my homie Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. In celebration I offer a couple of paragraphs from a favorite book of mine, What Painting Is by James Elkins, which happens to touch on the physicality of Rembrandt’s canvas surfaces. See below.
From Chapter 4, How do substances occupy the mind?, in reference to the image which served as thumbnail to this post-
Rembrandt is well-known for the buttery dab of paint that he sometimes puts on the ends of the noses of his portraits, and this nose is certainly greasy and has its little spot of white. But touches like that do not stand alone: when Rembrandt was interested in what he was doing, as he was here, he coated entire faces in a glossy, shining mud-pack of viscid paint. The skin is damp with perspiration, as if he were painting himself in a hot room, and he slowly accumulated a slick sheen of sweat. It is impossible to ignore the strangeness of the paint. If I looked at my face in the mirror and saw this, I would be horrified. The texture is much rougher than skin, as if it is all scar tissue. As a painter works, the shanks of the brushes become repositories for dried paint, and flecks of that paint become dislodged and mix with fresh paint, rolling around on the canvas like sodden tumbleweeds. They are all over this face, forming little pimples or warts wherever they end up. (There is a large one halfway up the nose.) Among contemporary artists, Lucien Freud has made an entire technique out of these rolling flakes and balls, and he lets them congregate in his figures’ armpits and in their crotches. In short, the face is a wreck, much more disturbing than the unnaturally smooth faces that most painters prefer.
Although historians tend to see Rembrandt’s method as an attempt at naturalism, it goes much farther than portrait conventions have ever gone, then or since. Consider what is happening in the paint, aside from the fact that it is supposed to be skin. Paint is a viscous substance, already kin to sweat and fat, and here it represents itself: skin as paint or paint as skin, either way. It’s a self-portrait of the painter, but it is also a self-portrait of paint. The oils are out in force, like the uliginous oozing waters of a swamp bottom. The paint is oily, greasy, and waxy all at once—even though modem chemistry would say that is impossible. It sticks: it is tacky and viscid like flypaper. It has the pull and suction of pine sap. Over the far cheek, it spreads like the mucilage schoolchildren use to glue paper, resisting and rolling back. On the nose—it’s rude, but appropriate—the paint is semi-solid, as if the nose were smeared with phlegm or mucus. On the forehead, it looks curdled, like gelatin that is broken up with a spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes, and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint, troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags, is the imprimatura, and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose, where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course, the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp Black, and it also lies on top of the grey imprimatura. Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments -Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna— covering everything underneath. The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate pupils.
There is no limit to this kind of description, because Rembrandt’s paint covers the full range of organic substances. It is more fully paint, more completely an inventory of what can happen between water and stone, than the other examples in this book. And that means it is also more directly expressive of qualities and properties: it is warm, greasy, oily, waxy, earthy, watery, inspissate. It is not dried rock, like Monet’s cathedral, nor water, like his marine paintings. The thoughts that crowd in on me when I look this paint have very little to do with the underlying triad, or with the named pigments or oils. They are thoughts about qualities: I feel viscid. My body is snared in the glues and emulsions, and I feel the pull of them on my thoughts. I want to wash my face.
-James Elkins.
“I want to wash my face.” Ha. Love it.
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Mimas and Enceladus beside Saturn.
• Looking at this photo taken 4 days ago by the Cassini orbiter It strikes me just what a poor job NASA has done in making actual human space-flight compelling for the Earthbound. We have astronauts up there in the great black yonder at this very moment and yet I find myself more interested in the various other projects (Shooting the moon, Flying over the cloudy world, Out on the Horizon, STEREO, Bigelow’s inflatable habitat, etc.) undertaken from the ground. The only angle represented in the media during the recent trip to the ISS seems to be: “Will the astronauts blow-up?!” which frankly should be the least interesting angle of space-flight as far as I’m concerned. The danger is a given, the risks accepted by all involved. Is it just the media’s omnipresent suckitude or has NASA fumbled the P.R. ball? I should think that by now, in the year 2006, people would be gladly lining up for one-way missions without batting an eyelash, with the rest glued to their 24 hour space network rather than looped footage of falling foam.
• George rounds up a few Links on the recent “rulings” on the SNES Challenge.
• Check out Paul Davies Prayer Antenna (Via) the artists who also brought us, as you may recall, The Curious Furniture of Ned Troide.
• As artificial intelligence research celebrates its 50th birthday Marvin Minsky asks “what makes the minds of three-year-olds tick?” Meanwhile the Times UK touches on the idea of technology dividing us into digital natives and digital immigrants.
• Full pilot episode of Mike Mignola’s quirky The Amazing Screw-on Head.
• Seed offers a short video tour of the underground accelerator at CERN (previously searching for the god particle, finding art.)
• Lastly Monocrom points us toward two interesting nuggets at Nature- Should we flood the air with sulphur? and What shape is a pebble?
07.15. filed under:
City Metaphors from the vaults of the Cooper-Hewitt
What follows are four plates from architect O.M. Ungers’ City Metaphors which were included in a larger exhibit on view in 1976 at the Cooper-Hewitt called MAN transFORMS. It was the kick-off show of the institutions’ rebirth as the Smithsonian Institution’s Nation Museum of Design. I’m lucky enough to have procured the exhibition catalog, which is just chock full of goodies, and the tiny taste which follows are taken from it’s pages.
an organism: bone structure.
a city: street structure.
a mechanism: frame structure.
an organism: digestive system.
a city: sewer system.
a mechanism: exhaust system.
an organism: circulatory system.
a city: subway system.
a mechanism: fluid system.
an organism: nervous system.
a city: power system.
a mechanism: electro system.
More to come…
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What shall we use to fill the empty spaces?
I took this picture what seems a thousand years ago, when I was still a lad and my father was working on the 72nd floor of the Empire State Building. (You could actually just walk over and open the widows like they were the little sliver of a bathroom window in your apartment.) At the time it was just a bad photograph. Not quite perfectly exposed, not quite perfectly framed. A couple of buildings and a shroud of thick fog. Fwap! Onto the pile. But now? Well, with that whole “buildings in heaven” look it got going on perhaps it’s found a new relevance?
Recently something dawned on me. I came out of my office and turned south toward the N/R station. I happened to look up and saw the emptiness which terminated the pinpoint of a horizon, where, as it so happens, the towers used to be. It struck me, looking up casually and unthinking, that what I really wanted to see were those towers. It wasn’t a sad moment, I didn’t crash knee-down on the pavement and (damn them!) launch into a Heston-worthy soliloquy. I simply looked up and realized for the first time, that long after all the sadness and shock and directionless anger, after the promises and grand plans and presentations that what I would most fondly like to see were those two towers again. My opinion suddenly formed solidly on what should be built on that ground.
A few months ago I had to go down to the court building to throw my name into the jury-duty hat, and afterward walking by the site of “ground zero” I was dismayed to see what, after nearly 5 years, all the glitzy competitions, heated debate, and ponderously heavy rhetoric had wrought… exactly nothing. “Ground zero,” suddenly a doubly fitting name, was ground that contained zero. It was a huge fucking hole in the ground; that’s it. I don’t know whether those of you living outside of the Tri-State area realize that. With all that has been said and all that has been done in the reverent name of 9/11, the actual site, the “holy ground” which evidently just radiates with meaning and power, is still, 5 years later, a dirt hole. It seems that in “this post 9/11 world” symbolism and rhetoric are all that can be built-up, with passionate gusto, tall and strong.
When I say what I really want to see when looking south are those towers I mean it literally. You know what I don’t really want to see? A hideous fucking monstrosity, covered in prisms, couched in forgettable hackneyed concept, birthed from the piteous wombs of politics, greed, and compromise.
Message to George Pataki- You and your “Legacy” can suck cock. I can only take heart that your utter failure will impede your using our tragedy to bolster a presidential bid (like a certain Mayor, who everyone seems to forget was widely despised by those he governed before events allowed him to don the hero-mask… oh wait… it’s 2006… that’s a Presidential pedigree today isn’t it?)
Message to Larry A. Silverstein- Kill yourself. Seriously. You are a Scumbag. I’d rather tongue-kiss a lipless leper crack-addict than even look at you.
Message to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation- Fire yourselves.
Message to George W. Bush, his cabinet members, and the sycophantic House and Senate- Get the term “9/11” out of your filthy fucking mouths. I don’t want to hear another tangential argument given weight by your use of September 11th as ballast until the “ground zero” of those events is afforded the same weight, in physical reality, as it is in your “stirring” words.
You know that primary construction on the original Twin Towers only took about 5 years? That means that if our leaders were not so full-of-shit, if our business-men were not so totally devoid of social conscience, and our citizens were not so listless, that we New Yorkers could look south and see, if not this September then one very soon, two reassuringly familiar (albeit structurally improved) towers rising to fill the empty spaces? How “right” would that feel? As things stand symbolism is threatening to usurp reality completely. If the incompetence continues much longer the symbol itself might be threatened with transformation. Anyone who says “Think of 9-11” will be saying “Think of how utterly full-of-shit we are.”
This is another photograph I took years ago. For some reason this image of a classic (Milton Glaser designed) “I heart N Y” coffee cup substituted with the word “V O I D” had a vitality and meaning to me. I made the cup and shot a whole role of it. I think I even had a t-shirt. Today, if I’m being honest, I have no idea what it meant to me exactly, or why it resonated. But again, as with the “towers in heaven” image, it seems to have found a new relevance, resonating for more obvious reasons. It’s an accidental protest image I suppose and I would like to offer it to you.
If anyone out there finds themselves similarly dismayed and upset by the void which still occupies what is ostensibly one of our countries most important sites, one which seems to symbolically initial all manner of political blank-check, then take it and use it.
Here is another:
Fuck it. What else is there for me to say? I’m tired.
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Dottie Lux sketched by Fred Harper
• The Village Voice offers: Model Behavior. A short interview with Molly Crabapple, founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School. I, for one, love the idea and yet it seems slightly inadequate somehow. Can it avoid the stain of hipster trendiness which ultimately relegates so many good ideas to fad-status in short order? I would prefer a noon to 4 a.m. establishment with continuous model-sitting and booze. A sort of dive bar for life-drawing. Imagine the monday afternoon crowd at such a place!
• Related to the above: Uwe Scheid’s 1000 historical Nudes in 13 categories.
• Non-Errors: Those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English. Highly interesting for the “language-minded.” Via.
• Regrets Only. On the curious political statement of 6 graphic designers honored by the National Design Awards, and the dissenting voice of Chip Kidd.
• Some vids of Mark Jenkins’ most recent pieces.
• CSICOP on The Tautology Objection.
• “A curious, exciting sight greeted my eyes. Lines, circles and squares in a geometrical, abstract arrangement of symbols. If I were an alien, I’d land here!” Over Roswell - 2002. Via.