Learning lessens
Lamont Library, Harvard
Instead of ivy, mold crawls on the walls of my education. Of the eight Ivy League universities’ mottos, Harvard and Yale’s include “truth,” and Brown and Princeton employ “God.” My favorite is Darmouth’s, which speaks of a crying voice in the wilderness (probably referring to freshmen year in the dorms). In addition to Statistics 101, kids returning library books at Harvard are met with a lesson in the highly improbable. Graduating from where I did with the degree I did was my own lesson in the highly improbable, namely, a good career. I masochistically look forward to The Social Network, which partially takes place at Harvard. The first google suggestion for facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, besides his name, is “Mark Zuckerberg Girlfriend” — for success is not just measured at the bank, but by the lady next to you, her breasts and your eyes ideally pointing towards the same bright future.
Photo Booth Mask by Mark Pernice
“Photo Booth Mask” is an actual mask rendered from a distorted image using Apple’s photo booth application; that he documents himself wearing the mask adds to the disembodied simulacra. The project may point to the absurd narcissism of the affected expressions usually made with the distortion effects, a kind of reverse aesthetic of trying to look grotesque. One is reminded of Francis Bacon, who fucked with faces way back; true, the camera changed painting, and now it changes sculpture, and with the latter, there’s an eerie leap from what ought to be two-dimensional to an actualized object, a transgression of mimesis.
Two little pieces
Literature is a college party: throw in enough depressed people with personality disorders, and someone is bound to get laid. At around 11PM, the bad boys enter, high on red-bull and vodka. I miss the days of Hemingway or Bukowski, where manly self-destruction came from self-hatred and happened before the photo shoot. If James Frey, per the constant middle-fingered vector of his “fuck you,” is today’s “bad boy” (sorry Bret Easton Ellis, your suit’s too good), then we have lost the battle of soul grasping. Of course, he’s just operating off of the fake memoir public image disaster — but I just worry about someone, anyone, who engages with the world, a world in which one has acquired moderate success and comfort, with such affected and insincere hostility. I find Sartre’s 1964 Nobel Prize decline a much more compelling “fuck you”; that, or a gunshot to the head. Frey will be just fine. I’d like to think, save those two little fleshy spears, he’s just reaching out for a hug.
Haruki Murakami has a lot of issues (not talking about his various extra copies of The New Yorker in which he published) and being alienated in Tokyo with a hard-on is not one of them. Does thinking you have hypochondria make you a hypochondriac? What if you really suffer from thinking you suffer? I suspect Murakami, during and in between writing novels and their respective advances, has a handful of time on his hands — and should those hands be populated with parts of his failing body, then we are not to judge. Everyone loves a sensitive man, but lay off the Bengay.
Meta Book Covers
I. Surrogate Book as Book
One is given not just a hypothetical cover of the book, but an entire surrogate book as a manifested object residing in space. This may point to modern painting’s preoccupation with the represented vs. the actual, or it may be some self-reflexive fetishism of books themselves, as if to congratulate the reader for picking one — that one — up.
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Jimmy Chen—
Typographical Mustaches (detail) by Tor Weeks
What a wonderful use of brackets! Full size/original post here. Buy it here.
Grow a spine
Artist Jane Mount paints other people’s bookshelves in her wonderfully playful and strikingly accurate “Ideal Bookshelf” series. That they are (I presume) actual collections and not imaginings, augments the idea of what is “ideal.” A quick click through is very enjoyable. Book designers may find it very instructive how identifiable a book’s spine is, a condensed version of the cover’s visual syntax.
Dick in a box
With the new iPhone’s video chat, a second built-in camera faces the user, whose image is shown in the interface as a kind of tiny self-portrait. Of the many narratives instilled in their recent advertising campaign, a women tells her husband that she’s expecting (expectation being Apple’s entire marketing ethos). We the consumer become the husband, experiencing a half-life of their fantasy. In the ad, a perfect hand holds the phone — a model’s, though we accept it as the husband’s, faithful of the narrative.