Power Quote Quartet
You know who wears sunglasses inside? Blind people and assholes. — Larry David
It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision. — Helen Keller
I’m into the girls fancying me and stuff, mad for it. — Liam Gallagher
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. — James Joyce
Jimmy Chen—
Dzanc Best of the Web 2010 contents have been announced, congrats to all the writers and editors; looks like a great issue. Matt Bell is series editor, with Kathy Fish as guest editor this year.
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Jimmy Chen—
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[via The Millions] Jonathan Franzen’s long awaited novel’s cover is out. I’m actually pretty excited about this. Hungry to get in on the pastoral rage, we’ve mocked a similar cover, with a little birdie of our own. Sorry, symbolism is so [18]80’s.
To Air is Human
Air
In 1987 Nike introduced the Nike Air brand, making billions of dollars selling air. A small pocket of air in one’s sole promises levity; this perhaps is even more genius than Coke selling carbonated sugar water. A year later in 1988, Metallica released …And Justice For All, and while air-guitar and air-drums had long since been funneled through the flailing limbs of certain hopeless yet hopeful youth, never before had one had to do it with such precision, a mark of that outstanding album. It has been argued that heavy metal shares many musical properties with classical music, in terms of difficult time signatures and syncopated patterns, so it is not a huge stretch to suggest that when a conductor waves his arms in the air in an exaggerated manner, he is doing the air-symphony. “Airing” is the self-promise of all the notes matching up, a fantasy of mastery we afford ourselves. Guitar Hero and Rock Band‘s commericalization of such intuition provides the nth death of punk.
Jimmy Chen—
As part of his “North American Hamsters” series, a forthcoming iPhone app, Tao Lin creates “HTMLGIANT Hamster.” [Previously posted with comment restrictions, but evidently people needed to comment — even if on the preceding post — and Tao himself expressed interest in comments; I respect both sentiments, so here.]
Who made who?
The “art as nature” vs. “nature as art” quandary may not be something we’ll solve today, which is fine, though artist Tim Knowles seems a little closer to the answer, or at least more keen on being the provocateur of such disparity. Is it harmony in entropy, or just taping pens to trees in a some sublime post-MFA bong hit? I don’t know, but I was immediately reminded of Monet’s waterlilies, whose tendrils of weeping willows seem to dance the surface of water in some attempt at recording their presence. Modernism was far less self-conscious, so we’ll leave it to Knowles to beg the question: What if trees, inherent with nature from soil up, were given the chance to flay their mark upon a most glorious human enterprise? What if the tireless human transcript of culture were merely incidental, just some random wind?
Multicultural Spellcheck
Folks at Charlie Rose are calling Salman “Salmon”; looks like “Deepa Mehta” and “Ehud Barak” completely fried their spell-checker. Even this WordPress platform can’t handle this post; ha ha, WordPress thinks they are a misspelling. READ MORE >
Welcome to the working weak
[from Lapham’s Quarterly] If you’re reading this at work, congratulations, you are not alone.
Perchance of a lifetime
Chatroulette screenshot
I want to see this image as a sad reminder of our past, of how divided we are — but, at the gross risk of being insensitive, I see the humor. The humor is not aimed at Jews, Nazis, or the Holocaust, but at the contemporary absurdity of Chatroulette, which has grown more into a role-playing forum than an actual place for strangers to meet, the latter perhaps being most absurd.
Of the many “best of” or “top” Chatroulette screenshots securing their meta-web presences, my favorite is this WWW take on WWII. Here, “Israelite” and “Nazi” (I use quotes because I wonder how much they themselves believe their roles) seem both happily complicit in self-consciously acting out the obvious narrative of their political history, giving a thumbs-up either in solidarity with their respective alliances, or, with an irony only possible in a virtual world, to each other.
The Jew even ducks away from camera, either facetiously, or more solemnly, with a visceral intuition which brings to mind the true horror of hate. Anybody with a flag on their wall is asking to get into a conversation (just like any male in college with an acoustic guitar in his room secretly wants a record deal or to get laid). The Nazi (or, skinhead) has a wonderful smile, which is very out of character, key word being “character,” as that is all we are, and can be, online. If “all the world’s a stage,” then the internet is where we rehearse our lines, sharpening our tongues for a chance at real life.