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.

Whoa, wikipedia’s bracket illustration totally brought to mind de Kooning’s Woman series, in which the female figure is broken into a kind of provocatively aggressive male syntax. This post is not an invitation to the feminist angle, however called for, as the gestural implications are obvious; this just got me thinking about “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” (1953) by Robert Rauschenberg, who, then a young artist, asked the patriarch if he could erase one of the latter’s drawings, who, in the spirit that marks a great man, said yes. The result is beautiful on all counts, and proves that ego is never destroyed, only transferred from one artist to another. I see my surname in his, so in the spirit of self-abnegation, Mr. Rauschenberg, I ask if I may erase you?

"Unerased de Kooning Drawing" (2010)

I feel better already. I hope Bill and Bob do too.

Brian Dettmer, "Key Monuments #4," Altered Book (2009)

I really enjoy Brian Dettmer’s altered books, in which cut-out negative spaces inside books are layered together in their original binding to create, or more accurately, excavate, hidden visual and physical worlds. Gladly, the postmodern reflex of facetious appropriation is not the fancy here, but rather, a austere “classical” sense of intricate sculptural negation which brings to mind Michelangelo’s La Pietà or David, whose manifestation were through an aggregate of chronic and gentle subtractive layers. This idea of god or man buried under marble is similar to the newly discovered compositions buried, incidentally or arbitrarily, between the pages of encyclopedias and historical books. Put simply, the truth is in there. To see more, visit his flickr or website.

“It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness.”

– Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena

I suspect by “letters” he means, generically, the written word, though he could also be referring to letters, the medium with which he is writing to Milena — or, and this is my fancy, he could mean the letters which make up words themselves, thus dramatically altering exactly what is “[in]between the lines” and their respective “corroborations,” a funny yet telling invocation which hints at some complicity, as if writing is a shameful lie. His “intercourse with ghosts,” short of necrophilia, simply tells of a man who replaced love with words. (One should see desire in the pulp of paper.) Think about Kafka long enough, and you enter a dark tunnel. Don’t think about him, and your world too perfect, untouched.