How many "refreshes" until this color-coordinated ad combo?

Poor Garfunkel, always behind, and misunderstood.

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II. BLOWS

A 6th grade teacher who marked 20% off a student’s assignment “for being a loser” says he was joking, that it was some kind of informal ingratiation used to relate to the student. Herein lies the trouble with rhetoric, or purposeful irony, because intent is something earned in the reader, never intrinsic to the inception of the writing. In reading random articles’ comments about this story, I was struck by the abundance of caps. Of the passionate folk:

– You’d be surprised at how much ONE WORD can DESTROY a child’s esteem and cause failure to strive.

– I be DAMNED if ANYONE will call my child names!

– FORGIVE ME sometimes, I say “retard.” Im am truly and deeply NOT sorry if this offends you.

– The part that IS relevant, is this man is a TEACHER.

– I would be right there with you after school EVERY DAY to beat his ass down

It seems that caps is the “poor man’s italics,” which is the “poor man’s intent,” for the most effective writers use nothing and the punctuated points ring clearly, loudly. It’s odd how the teacher himself wrote LOSER in caps. When editing my writing, I often remove certain words in italics, almost embarrassed at how little I trusted the reader. To have faith in the reading of the writing is to have faith in the writing. Doesn’t “I would be right there with you after school every day to beat his ass down” seem more restrained, thus more believable? Hyperbole evokes skepticism.

I’ll spare you specific quotes, but there’s also many many mentions of hell as a destination and who is or isn’t acting Christian. To launch into the blogosphere of domestic discourse is to discover what is truly at stake for most Americans. I once read a church marquee which read “Your attitude determines your altitude,” namely “Your [faith] determines your [ascension].”

In typography, the “ascender height” is the upper-case line above the median lower-case line. Letters have their own altitude, as if stretching towards the heavens. I’m reminded of the Zen koan “A man who tip toes cannot stand.” Morality these days is just so LOUD with the territorial politics of words. All writing is graffiti, even the headlines at New York Times — lonely for corroborators, a nod between gangs. I am no different.

FUCK ME.

Whatever. If there is a god, I do believe he has good hearing.

"Vimeo Waiting," Microsoft Excel, 2010

In 1963 Josef Albers published a book on color theory, and since then color — “pure” color, the mathematical hue — has been the rage in abstract painting and design. In the old (c. ‘70 – ’80s) days, painters spent months covering a canvas monochrome, blending, blending away the brush marks. The human hand was a horrible thing, corrupted with subjectively. An MFA in Painting student today is still prone to sit hours in front of their canvas, lamenting over which color to juxtapose another color with, and while I respect that solemn responsibility, I prefer the quick MS excel fix, take Vimeo’s default ‘no signal’ screen.

Now I know many of you impulsively clicked on the arrow, a natural gut reaction, as internet’s interface has turned us all into Pavlov’s dogs (and depending on what porn sites you’re visiting, saliva may not just be a metaphor). It’s strange how a simple sequence of color can cue the brain into thinking there’s more to come — another 5:17 minutes of some “creative” person doing some creative thing with their Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, or, if you can’t afford the software, iMovie. Cobain’s now distant “here we are now entertain us” still has its prophetic ring, as you click, as I click, click for something more.

Color, Cezanne said, “is the place where our brain and the universe meet.” He was talking about the sculptural trajectory of a color’s note in context to the other colors, like how four dashes of different blues become a mountain. He was an old man when he started painting, with obtuse hands and no genius on his side. He changed the western idea of color, and died on a dirt path, leaving his peaches to mold. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but until I’m transported somewhere, and not via an orgy of clicks to a place called nowhere, or at the office fucking with excel, I’ll take dramatic.

I smiled when I read “the man,” because it was written so long ago. Seems like “the man” has been bringing us down since the 16th century, the most current manifestation being Comcast (host of my internet, cable, and landline) without whom I would only exist in vivo, and how lame is that?

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Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953) is a 100-ft. print of, um, a tire. He created it with John Cage, who no doubt was mumbling 4′3″ to himself while driving the car. In museums it’s displayed horizontally, mostly in part due to ceiling clearances probably, though this strikes me as a “western” way of seeing things: we read and write from left to right, and stuck on this earth without notions of above, we walk and drive horizontally. Rauschenberg is a more playful and earnest Warhol; his tire print traces the volition of our time — driving nowhere, from left to right.

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I don’t know much about the Torah, except that it’s rules of Judaism. I don’t understand why Jews are the only white people who aren’t white; what the hell happened? I once looked up a list of common Jewish surnames and was like “holy shit I know a lot of Jews!” even including girls I had crushes on. I recently learned that Jews only date Jews; where was wikipedia when I was 17?

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Okay, let’s talk about Asians. I feel like I can freely talk about Asians because I am. Asians read up and down in columns, as it’s easier to pivot your neck up and down as supposed to left and right. I may seem biased, but Asian ways are usually more logical than western ways. If you take a Chinese character written in calligraphy and zoom in, it looks like a Franz Kline. (I had a Greek friend who would argue with me about who invented what first, the Greeks or the Chinese. Stupid ass dunno that Gorillas invented everything.) Do you know what the Chinese character for “patience” is? A knife forever suspended above a heart. The heart looks like a heart; the knife a knife. And the character for “good”? A mother next to her child. I will admit the alphabet is more useful, but Chinese breaks my heart.

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HTMLGIANT contributors have been instructed to insert “READ MORE >” breaks within a 1/3 of screen space out of consideration for the other posts; thus, a sort of “politics of page breaks,” where the longer it takes for a contributor to place a break, the more selfish he or she is deemed. It’s funny how so much time later, devoid of past sacred ties, we use the word “scroll” to describe the act of descending deep and deeper into a website page. Most mouse’s have a “scroll wheel” to help with our profane endeavors. My finger often gets so tired, running across the wheel blindly like a hairless guinea pig. If you’ve made it this far, I think you know what I mean. I worry about this post, for hogging so much “front page,” but I hope you understand the vertiginous verticality of this post is simply in aid to the point offered by its title.

Sorry but I wrote a haiku between Cornel West’s front teeth, seemed like a good place for one.