wordcrush

As I sit here biting into my dissertation progress one post at a time, I ponder the possibility that, with my ever-crashing PC, someday my computer too might self-destruct in order to save the world from my rambling, masturbatory blathering. Today in the news, The Onion mourns the tragedy of a English grad's thesis, gone horribly right. Ah, sweet onion.

I'd never heard of French Enlightenment painter Jean-Étienne Liotard before I read this NY Times article (reg.req.), but apparently no one else has either. In contrast with many other more conventional paintings from his time, the slideshow of his work hints at just how jarringly honest his realism was. Liotard's work can in no way be classified as "shitart" like some of the other artists' featured on wordcrush today.

I also love the way that the accompanying article is, in true NYT fashion, shamelessly and unapologetically pompous: "his kind of realism was veracity, not verismo." Well played old chap! Touché! Even when they're trying to talk about a gritty, stripped-down guy who rebellled against the pretentions of his times, they make it clear that they, themselves are miles above such behaviour.

A long title, perhaps, but worth it. I particularly like the way that this article uses hip new langauge to interest the young kids today in the maybe less-than-hip field of archaeology. Whassah. How you like m'bling cave-dog? This approach reminds me of the superhappenin CBC show The Hour, yo, which also shows that nooz can be cool. It's not all like, Mansbridge shit'n'shit because there's more clippy editing and that homeboy of hippidy hipness, George "Strombo" Stroumboulopoulos, is all like "yo, this is the nooz, dig? I got ear and nose bling, check it." Oh no you di'int G-Stromb! In honour of this trend in the media, I've decided to change my dissertation name to Apocalypse Yo: Da Bombz on the West Side, Yo. I think there's a name for this, but I'm not sure... pandering maybe?

Golden Quote of the Day: "All news shows cover the issues of the day. The Hour covers them in an unconventional way. Whether it’s interviewing Canadians in The Hour’s dubious panel van, setting up the current climate in a political hot zone, or interviewing a past-his-prime rock star in all his spandexed glory, George is there, guiding you seamlessly between politics and pop."

Here is a link to the scariest thing you will see today. If you can't get enough of it, then you can also look here. As you scroll down, imagine if everyone in the world wore these on a casual day-to-day basis. What would that world be like? Once again, this post confirms what I've been saying all along: Swapatorium is sweet.

At what point does art become shit? You could take the literal tack, which would draw the line somewhere around the painting Afrodizzia, which actually incorporates elephant dung into its richly colored surface. You might slide a little further along the scale and decide that the subject matter itself, when brought too low, makes for figuratively crappy art. Here you might find the likes of Koons or Warhol, or a guy I featured awhile back, Chris Johanson. Then there's this guy, Bill Barminski, who charges big bucks for what are some of the crappiest drawings I've ever seen. I love them. In each of these cases, I think, brilliance emerges precisely where you'd least excpect it -- in the transformation of the truly grotesque into the truly sublime.

"Stratford’s Shakespearean festival is one of Canada’s oldest and most distinguished theatrical institutions. It’s also about as multicoloured as a loaf of Wonder Bread." That's the cue for Djanet Sears' entrance into the Stratford festival this year, as the first black director of the first black work to grace the festival's 54 year tradition of cracker-osity. Harlem Duet rewrites Othello into a modern New York setting, where his love is divided between his pasty white colleague, Mona, and his his black wife of nine years, Billie. Though the script itself is highly entertaining and accessible (I read it while TAing for a second year class), the characters' actions are underpinned by a dizzying awareness of the endless problematics created by class and integration, African-American history, and the places where gender politics intersect with racial. According to Sears and the article this particular production is so "sexy and racy" that it has left the actors eating salads and swearing off beer...

Thus forming an internet of computers! A couple of days ago I posted an article by Timothy Taylor which discussed the soullessness of the corporate body. Then yesterday I talked briefly about Miru Kim, who photographs herself naked in NYC to participate in nature's reclamation of manmade detritus. I'd have never have put the two together without having seen this Salon article on the conceptual artist/activist/professor Natalie Jeremijenko (Ad.Req.). She fuses art and science in an effort to help species recover.

Phase one of her latest project involves floating buoys in the Hudson river that light up every time a fish swims by so that you can feed them special food that cleans the PCBs from their bloodstream. Like Miru Kim's work, this links the human and nature; as Jeremijenko says, "by scripting a work where we share the same kind of food with fish, I'm scripting our interrelationship with them." Phase Two involves selling these buoys to start a corporation, and this is where Timothy Taylor comes in: "Jeremijenko is selling the buoys to collectors. With the money, she plans to form a corporation called Ooz Inc. -- zoo spelled backward -- and put the fish on the board. That way the fish, as shareholders, will acquire personhood, and have a say in the preservation of their grungy habitat." There's lots more of this innovative and loopy logic in the Salon article if you're interested.

I never meant it to happen this way, but this blog is actually helping me make more sense of the mad mad world. It's all finally happening for me!

Reading this short piece from the Onion was like looking into a crystal ball. It features Sandy Bellman, a young aspiring novelist who has just sold her first book (at the Barnes & Noble where she has just been hired.) Congratulations imaginary Sandy!

Though I usually avoid discussion of governmental politics here, I couldn't resist this gem, which is a quotation guessing game pitting dictator-from-hell Adolf Hitler versus uber-nasty American Republican lapdog Ann Coulter. Though the fad of turning everyone and everything into a nazi is stupidly ahistorical, these characters are tougher to pull apart than you'd think (I passed, but barely). I wonder what would happen if you had a guessing game between Nader and Coulter...

UPDATE! Here's the Nader vs. Coulter quiz you've all been waiting for!

Awhile ago I linked to the bizarre and amazing online art of Jason Nelson, but what I didn't mention is that I also developed an addiction to his stuff. After a lot of messing around with one of my favourites, a piece called Uncontrollable Semantics, I discovered a secret page! When I followed the instructions on that page he sent me an email that linked to two more secret works, one of which is Top Top Secret (not linked anywhere), and he said I could share them here. So turn on the sound and deal with Hermeticon: Pop Spell Maker and An Introduction to the Study of Hypnotism.

I'm one of the many who read Paul Gilroy's "book with nerd buzz" -- Postcolonial Melancholia -- last year, where he basically uses a quasi-psychoanalytic model to diagnose a national problem. It was a good read, though some claim that using an highly personal and intersubjective theory to describe an entire culture is a stupid idea (others just claim psychoanalysis in general is a stupid idea).

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, I think that once again the Onion has shown us the true path. Rather than using an obscurist academic model to explain America's national troubles, they use easy to understand and palatably pulpy pop-psychology (five times fast: GO!). The theory is that America's "difficulty forming lasting foreign relationships" and other woes result from an abusive parent: ""Because of trust issues stemming from the abuse, America has become withdrawn, has not made an ally in years, and often resents the few nations that are willing to lend support—most countries outgrow this kind of behavior after 230 years." When I read this sad story it just breaks the cockles of my heart.

...all men are slimy fuckheads that deserve to die in a fire and I'm quitting my life to join a lesbian colony. In the past couple of days I've encountered a whole whack of articles discussing the shifting sexual realities of teenage girls "these days." Though the pieces are actually quite divergent in approach, they all ulitmately seek to blame something or somebody (advertising, peer pressure, low self-esteem, class background, intelligence levels, acceptance from boys, free money). I'd like to shift the grounds for debate -- a la Foucault -- and blame the articles themselves because they are providing a legitimizing forum for the development of discursive strategies which can then be put into legal, medical and cultural practices. The articles' open questions are all formulated as "why is this happening?" and never seem to ask "why are we asking these questions instead of other more challenging ones, such as 'how these various places of blame become the ones where we agree to put stock in the answers?'?"

Asking that question may actually give some insight into why the articles, while taking different stances, always lead to the same tired places. They essentially reveal themselves to be tautological, because they begin by assuming that "the problem of teenage girls" is a coherent, approachable problem. You can see where it goes from there. You can't go wrong when you're proving the existence of what you already think to be true. On the other hand, have you ever noticed just how little blaming things like "the media" actually accomplishes? That is, unless your goal is to lament the degradation of society, or sit back with a self-satisfied smirk and ponder the world's idiocy. Idiots...

Listen to the way that psychological and academic discourses slip into the journalist's observations and the article simultaneously offers new directions for these discourses to expand:

"These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the 'post-gay' generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, 'just sexual.'" (Cuddle Puddle)

GAH! It's like, "the shrinks have it wrong, so here is the way for them to get it right." "These teenagers" may not have to define their sexuality, but we sure do, because it's a problem... Who knows? We might even be able to invent some new prescription medication to solve this problem. Maybe we coult start a "sexual identity therapy" field, or alrternately a "de-identification" field. Perhaps we could drum up a few new laws proscribing what the media can and cannot do. Yeah, that'd be sweet. The more I hear media stories focus on such things, the more suspicious I become of the efficacy and goals of the discussions. There is only one clear solution: blame the man. GOD DAMN THE GOD DAMN FUCKING MAN!!!!

Actually the new Cohen documentary (reg.req.) by Lian Lunson is called "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man," but my title could equally apply. The perennial brat-god is back again, seducing young impressionable minds with soft spoken charm, causing the most highly intelligent critics to gush things like "Even his plainest sentences are phrased like poetry." OOh Len Len. What truly amazes me about Cohen is that his charmer persona has never become a bad joke. It's fine to hate him, it's common to lust for him, but I don't think it's possible to satirize him: such an approach will only send people to his defence, because he's the ultimate wounded man. Poor Len Len.

UPDATE 06/21/06: I also just found this NYT article on the man.

I've managed to accumulate a bunch of cool miscellany in my "unposted" folder, so I thought I'd share the links a few really spectacular (ha!) photographers that I've come across. The first is Margot Quan Knight (seen right), whose often disturbing "photographs use fantasy to trim away the fat of reality, to expose possibilities." The second is Phillip Toledano, who claims "that a photograph should be like an unfinished sentence. There should be space for questions." And last is the unsettling and compelling work of Miru Kim, who photographs herself naked in settings of urban wreckage "to become one with the sprouting nature that engulfs... decaying man-made structures."

To make this post truly miscellaneous, I'll also include the following random photo, which was described on Fark.com as a "flaming rainbow of doom."

Besides offering a classic case of a poorly chosen title, this article describes the surveillance of American playwright Arthur Miller during the McCarthy era. The article explains that "the FBI kept records of Miller's political statements and his affiliation with organizations such as the American Labor Party ("a communist front") and the "communist-infiltrated" American Civil Liberties Union" and that his wedding to Marilyn Monroe was attended by an FBI informer. Why, oh why, can't they bring back the days when the pinkos were pinkos and the cars were ten feet wide?

P.S. Click on the pretty car pictures for a trip down nostalgia lane.

BLOOEGH! That's the correct transcription of the sound of vomiting that my friends and I decided on in high school. This sound is not only appropriate to the twenty beers I drank last night, but also to the feeling produced by the new "corporate storytelling" marketing trend I just read about, "where the consultants tease out the narrative strands that may be woven together into a compelling company or product 'story.'" Among other interesting things, the article explains that "In promising a product-driven transformation, corporate storytelling invariably deploys the language of spiritualism." Freaky deaky.

It's nifty the way the essay's author Timothy Taylor traces out his own personal narrative strands because this rhetorically drives a wedge between the production of the personal and the corporate bodies. If you wanted to get deconstructive about it, and I don't, you could even say that Taylor's narrative sells him as a loveable, corporate-resisting, Vancouverite, which in turn spins around to offer an alternative, palatable mode of being in the face of the literally soulless corporate body. You could do that, but you drank too much beer last night and BLOOEGH!

Lord, that title makes me puke, but it's appropriate for the following Folger's video, posted on Boingboing earlier today. Get your zany sunny freak on!

I can't get over the weirdness of this Globe and Mail article(reg.req.) entitled "Bombshell with Brains." It features -- sort of -- Candian-born crime-fiction author Tara Moss, who's currently promoting her second novel Split. Alexandra Gill, the Globe journalist reporting the story, fixates on Moss' former model status, along with a host of other stereotypes, and the side panel reproduces an enormous photo of Moss. Gill goes into great depth about how "the statuesque blond author and former fashion model confidently strides into the lobby bar at Vancouver's Pan Pacific Hotel, men (and several women) swivel to take a second look at this mysterious, long-legged creature." abouthalfwaydownittalksaboutMoss'story. The article takes its potshots at chauvanistic boys who question Moss's ability to write novels, but simultaneously offers up all of these ingratiating gestures to the gazing gods of glamour.

Perhaps the whole thing is meant to reproduce a person's reaction to Moss, to work its way down through the surface, which may be kind of clever, but the way that the story is capped with these ridiculously uncritical pro-feminist stereotypes (which are really antifeminist) hurts its credibility: all this and brains too! (but the "all this" comes first and foremost.) In comparison, yesterday I featured an article about the top Canadian editor, who also happens to be a woman, but when I searched I couldn't find a single picture of her to grace my post. Other than a single comment on her "broad smile" the article makes no mention of her appearance. Instead it focuses on the way that, "When she talks, two brains are at work." Comparing the two articles it's as if Ellen Seligman is a brain in a jar and Tara Moss is a beautiful doll body that was freakishly graced with a head. I'm not saying that a story can't take a certain focus, but if you're going to take the horribly clichéd "brains and beauty" tack, then at least be aware that that's what you're doing.

I'm elbeato, and if you listen to anything I say, you're making a big mistake.

I don't know where or why they dug this chestnut up, but its contents go to prove the old saying, "Conservatives are always exactly wrong." Or at least that's what the smug-ass lefty Guardian would like people to think. On the cutting edge of the 1953 public vs. commercial television debate, one Mr. E. S. T. Johnson of the Conservative Party argues letter that "Most of the opponents of commercial television appear to assume that its programmes will appeal to the lowest tastes and will be bad and even dangerous. That point of view is only justifiable if those who hold it say that the British people are not fit to choose their own entertainment." I LOVE how conservatives do that: make a highly debatable claim and then back it up using the grounds of their opponents' evils. It's like, "I think this, and if you don't agree with me then you're clearly an totalitarian person-hater." "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists."

On the other hand, I think the Guardian posted the old letter counting on its current readers' wholesale disgust with the state of commercial television. I, for one, enjoy it in a qualified kind of way. Feeling unheimlich yet? I've tricked you -- this article has nothing to do with TeeVee. My point is this: the party-line approach is so outdated it hurts. And I don't mean hurts like a hangover, I mean it actually hurts political debate. Here's the real left vs. right debate: the smug self-satisfaction approach vs. the alarmist asshole approach. The solution? Vote green motherfuckers.

Golden quote from the letter: "There is general agreement that the outside [B.B.C.] programmes are done extremely well, but that those which originate in the studios leave a great deal to be desired."

In a precedent setting case, young Jerome Charasse has shown us all the way. Thanks Jerome! He scored an impressive 6 out of 20 on his baccalaureat exams and his response to the teacher who often failed to show up for class was simple: suck it. Turns out Jerome will have his have his wish after all, because the jury is in, and he's going to college. The most surprising element of this whole case, I would say, is that it happened in France, not the USA. A question that will become increasingly important as the years progress is when do I get to start suing students for shoddy work.

I double dog dare you to hand in your next essay or work report in one of these fonts. "Teh fancy" picture to the right was created using Calligraft, an online participatory art project which turns your pounding of the keys into delicate, dynamic pictures. The artist, Ricard Marxer Piñón, sounds something like a cross between a robot and a poet (maybe like Derrida?): "The main idea behind this work is to explore a new dimension of textual representation. I try to consider the different possibilities of glyph, words and text representation and distribution in space and time... This is motivated by the large amount of abstract generative work created with the apparition of computing. Thus I try to approach the figurative generative field, by the use of calculus and computation." He's found it! The signified! I'll be at the bar celebrating.

Usually I make up some unclever pun or over-exaggerated synopsis for my post-titles, but this one pretty much sells itself. On the cutting edge of Zieglermania, and in keeping with the fine, ten-day wordcrush tradition of reporting important developments in the humanities, I think it's critical that you take a look at the following.

My friends, "because there is danger that it is involved in a dolphin, please do not grow a hand in a fence." "Devour and we shall be your addiction for many years to come." "I think that square is top of cool shape in the world." And don't forget to bring your "Master of Life Juicer." If you're having a tough time following me "Do not use mental tools for prolonging the life of the pan." "Re-seal bag after use to pervert from desiccation." "And shock the toast." "Pure candy taste of sweet candy bring a pleasure." "I wish that my hair mind and the way of living may be beautiful." Give up yet? Perhaps it's time you hit Engrish.com.

"Well, I have to stay sober all day because there's a dinner this evening ... so I'll start drinking about 11 o'clock tonight and I don't know when I'll stop." Those are the words of a true litterateur, Colm Tóibín, who just won the €100,000 (141,909.59 CAD) International Impac Dublin Literary Award. According to the Amazon editorial review Tóibín's prize-winning novel, The Master, is "a fictionalized study [of Henry James], based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde." Hey! He totally stole my idea! Again this raises the question of when they are going to give me one of these things.

My reaction when I saw this video by performance artist Neal Medlyn was something like, "wow. i don't know what i just saw." Then I realized that he calls himself "The Paris Hilton of Performance Art." That helped a bit, but I still feel kind of dirty and uncomfortable. If Neal could invite three guests to a party they would be "Paris Hilton, Elaine Stritch and Monica Lewinsky. We could sit around and braid each others hair and complain about how people have dicked us over. There would be a lot of high fives and laughter." Still feeling uncomfortable. For some more info on Medlyn check out this Metafilter post.

I'm curious, who would your guests be? (Neal Medlyn would definitely be one of mine).

I got great pleasure reading this NYT article about the bickering and griping of New York artists and dealers (reg. req.). At first the article represents the artists as perpetrating "defections," being "contagious" and "scampering," and spreading the love like "money-whores" (actually that last one was mine). The dealers fare much better with their "bidding goodbye," "wooing," and one particularly heart-rendering story about "an enclosed note [to a defective artist] saying the dealer was thinking of him." Sadly, "For some dealers a breakup can therefore be as painful as divorce." Oh the humanity! The article actually provides a fun kind of inside-scoop on the gutworks of a remarkable industry.

P.S. The painting is Ofili's Afrodizzia mentioned in the article. I can see the poo!

That's a job I could handle. Unfortunately -- well actually fortunately for her -- the honours go to Ellen Seligman, publisher of fiction and vice-president of McClelland & Stewart. Atwood, Ondaatje, Cohen, Melsom, Mistry -- she's worked with them all. Read on for a portrait of an obsessive and wacky person whose neuroses ended up being the perfect career move (reg. req.). She gives hope to all of us.