no subtext here, nope
Saturday was the sort of grey rainy day that called for first meals in dark bars named after barfly poets, for muted, eye squinting, not enough sleep conversations, for fried foods and low volume music. Not that we picked the bar because of the weather, mind you, that's just the way it worked out. A few of us made plans to check out some of the exhibitions that were part of the Boston Cyberarts festival, and lunch at Bukowski's seemed like a sensible preamble; a straightforward, low-rent counterpoint to the rest of our afternoon.
We staggered in by ones and twos, and compared notes over our Friday night. You go to Throwing Muses? No, saw Better Luck Tomorrow with a friend ... cultural obligation, y'know. Think mishak will show? Wasn't he in a performance at the B&D Ball1, last night? Think he'll get up? Don't know ... hey isn't this "Bloodletting" playing on the stereo? Yeah, and I can't listen to it here, context is all wrong.
We'd been in the bar for a little more than an hour and a half before settling our tab, just as Mishak showed up, shaking water out of his hair and looking pretty good for five hours of sleep and a night of drinking, though looking pretty good is one of Mishak's mutant superpowers, and it's probably related to his ability to absorb crazy volumes of alcohol and convert it into fabulous hair. He needed coffee, but figured we could grab something on the way, as we headed into a damp spring weekend.
I should've read the fine print on the Copley Society's Manifest 2003 exhibition, which was about Visual Art in Digital Media -- it's the "in Digital Media" bit that was sneaky. Lots of digital collage work on high-end inkjets, photoshop wizardry of the nth degree and questions to photogeek friends about what an iris print was. Everything was "fine" but I was feeling a little underwhelmed. It's still old media on new paper. What's it say about someone's aesthetics when this sort of thing fails to impress because they're so accustomed to seeing alpha channeled collage work during irregular quests for new computer wallpaper?
That they're a jaded, pretentious twit, I suppose.
The storm had picked up as we walked outside. We went from the Back Bay south towards Tremont St., bracing ourselves against heavy wet winds that whipped our coats and umbrellas as we neared the Mass Turnpike, conversations failing us as rain and highway traffic drowned our voices out, then feeling everything quiet down after we got to the tree lined streets and shuttered brownstones of the South End. Next to me, rojagato said, "funneling" as her one word explanation of the wind tunnels that raged between the skyscrapers north of us, and it made me wonder what it would look like if you could tint the air and see the current flowing between buildings like rapids and rocks.
The press release copy for info@blah is all high concept, Mcluhan-esque expositions on information overload and postmodern society. Though, that's just all a cover for an opportunity to play with some cool2 Flash installations and decipher the binary messages on a table of chocolates. It struck a nice balance between pretense and play, and I was a sucker for the themes on artful representations of data. I felt bad for dragging my friends out, but we had a bit of a walk to Mobius, and fewer hours remaining.
The first time I ever went to Mobius, it was for an event called MobiusRave. This was back in '94 or so, when the rave scene was still seen as the sort of underground movement that attracted bohemian artists prospecting the zeitgeist for inspiration. A friend of ours was doing door and told us we could get in for free, and it was only after we arrived, that we realized that Mobius was filled with aging baby boomers whose idea of a 'rave' was to have a DJ spin music next to the wine and cheese while performance artists worked some awful freeform audio collage. Mingling in this crowd, it was very apparent that we were the imported street cred, and it was all so wrong and surreal, but there wasn't much sense in complaining. Just take advantage of the free food and try to score acid from folks who probably approach their drug habits with a sense of serious connoisseurship.
This time was a little different. The Book Reconsidered exhibit was a series of experiments in re-imagining the role of the book as a repository of knowledge. What does a "book" signify? what of the words? the binding? What do we mean when we talk of "text?" What is embedded in the "narrative?" Does all this postmoden theorizing with "quotes" sound really annoying?
It probably does, but the exhibit was far from that -- probably helped again by a liberal dose of interactivity. There were iMacs with hypertext poems and odd ideas in leather and typography that you can page through with little cloth gloves. There were little statements on book burning involving Dante's Inferno and while looking around, jasonlizard looked over my shoulder and asked, "This book looks like prose ... wasn't The Inferno written in verse?" I sort of shrugged and said I wasn't sure. Perhaps it was beside the "point" and the "idea" was that the "book" was supposed to be The Inferno, but it didn't have to be.
yeah, all those quotes are annoying.
Afterwards, while waiting for our friends to finish browsing through Italian designed furniture, I sat on a door step with Paisley, compared notes and swapped sentences that we'd use in our journal entries. All the while, I kept on looking at the bridge in front of us, at the cars that passed over and underneath it, the old brick buildings that flanked it, the rain coming down and the sole streetlamp, and I wished that I could see in black and white, with a bit of film grain when I blinked.
As we walked back to South Station to catch the T, one by one we talked about ditching the MIT Visual Arts Center trip and just call it a day and head home. Arted out. Rest. Make some soup. Rent a movie -- something straightforward, no subtext. Aliens, yeah, 'cos there's no subtext in that film. Sure.
I suppose this is the balance that we strike as the ironically hip audience, simultaneously appreciative of new art while consciously avoiding the black-clad art fag cliche (particularly difficult when you're already wearing a lot of black). There's the need to interrupt ourselves and make some detached meta-statement to undercut ourselves lest we take things too seriously. Or perhaps a statement's just a statement, and we really were just that tired, and soup seemed like a good idea. Something warm and filling to close up a day of hanging out with good friends, sharing jokes, telling stories, clustering close in the face of cold rain. That seems fitting.
And, no, no subtext there either.
1 Mishak's entry about the ball is a fun read, btw. Though I'm not sure what a sexy water balloon might feel like.
2 The Dextro pieces are quite awesome, btw.
3 oh, and fwiw, I wound up renting Brotherhood of The Wolf.
We staggered in by ones and twos, and compared notes over our Friday night. You go to Throwing Muses? No, saw Better Luck Tomorrow with a friend ... cultural obligation, y'know. Think mishak will show? Wasn't he in a performance at the B&D Ball1, last night? Think he'll get up? Don't know ... hey isn't this "Bloodletting" playing on the stereo? Yeah, and I can't listen to it here, context is all wrong.
We'd been in the bar for a little more than an hour and a half before settling our tab, just as Mishak showed up, shaking water out of his hair and looking pretty good for five hours of sleep and a night of drinking, though looking pretty good is one of Mishak's mutant superpowers, and it's probably related to his ability to absorb crazy volumes of alcohol and convert it into fabulous hair. He needed coffee, but figured we could grab something on the way, as we headed into a damp spring weekend.
I should've read the fine print on the Copley Society's Manifest 2003 exhibition, which was about Visual Art in Digital Media -- it's the "in Digital Media" bit that was sneaky. Lots of digital collage work on high-end inkjets, photoshop wizardry of the nth degree and questions to photogeek friends about what an iris print was. Everything was "fine" but I was feeling a little underwhelmed. It's still old media on new paper. What's it say about someone's aesthetics when this sort of thing fails to impress because they're so accustomed to seeing alpha channeled collage work during irregular quests for new computer wallpaper?
That they're a jaded, pretentious twit, I suppose.
The storm had picked up as we walked outside. We went from the Back Bay south towards Tremont St., bracing ourselves against heavy wet winds that whipped our coats and umbrellas as we neared the Mass Turnpike, conversations failing us as rain and highway traffic drowned our voices out, then feeling everything quiet down after we got to the tree lined streets and shuttered brownstones of the South End. Next to me, rojagato said, "funneling" as her one word explanation of the wind tunnels that raged between the skyscrapers north of us, and it made me wonder what it would look like if you could tint the air and see the current flowing between buildings like rapids and rocks.
The press release copy for info@blah is all high concept, Mcluhan-esque expositions on information overload and postmodern society. Though, that's just all a cover for an opportunity to play with some cool2 Flash installations and decipher the binary messages on a table of chocolates. It struck a nice balance between pretense and play, and I was a sucker for the themes on artful representations of data. I felt bad for dragging my friends out, but we had a bit of a walk to Mobius, and fewer hours remaining.
The first time I ever went to Mobius, it was for an event called MobiusRave. This was back in '94 or so, when the rave scene was still seen as the sort of underground movement that attracted bohemian artists prospecting the zeitgeist for inspiration. A friend of ours was doing door and told us we could get in for free, and it was only after we arrived, that we realized that Mobius was filled with aging baby boomers whose idea of a 'rave' was to have a DJ spin music next to the wine and cheese while performance artists worked some awful freeform audio collage. Mingling in this crowd, it was very apparent that we were the imported street cred, and it was all so wrong and surreal, but there wasn't much sense in complaining. Just take advantage of the free food and try to score acid from folks who probably approach their drug habits with a sense of serious connoisseurship.
This time was a little different. The Book Reconsidered exhibit was a series of experiments in re-imagining the role of the book as a repository of knowledge. What does a "book" signify? what of the words? the binding? What do we mean when we talk of "text?" What is embedded in the "narrative?" Does all this postmoden theorizing with "quotes" sound really annoying?
It probably does, but the exhibit was far from that -- probably helped again by a liberal dose of interactivity. There were iMacs with hypertext poems and odd ideas in leather and typography that you can page through with little cloth gloves. There were little statements on book burning involving Dante's Inferno and while looking around, jasonlizard looked over my shoulder and asked, "This book looks like prose ... wasn't The Inferno written in verse?" I sort of shrugged and said I wasn't sure. Perhaps it was beside the "point" and the "idea" was that the "book" was supposed to be The Inferno, but it didn't have to be.
yeah, all those quotes are annoying.
Afterwards, while waiting for our friends to finish browsing through Italian designed furniture, I sat on a door step with Paisley, compared notes and swapped sentences that we'd use in our journal entries. All the while, I kept on looking at the bridge in front of us, at the cars that passed over and underneath it, the old brick buildings that flanked it, the rain coming down and the sole streetlamp, and I wished that I could see in black and white, with a bit of film grain when I blinked.
As we walked back to South Station to catch the T, one by one we talked about ditching the MIT Visual Arts Center trip and just call it a day and head home. Arted out. Rest. Make some soup. Rent a movie -- something straightforward, no subtext. Aliens, yeah, 'cos there's no subtext in that film. Sure.
I suppose this is the balance that we strike as the ironically hip audience, simultaneously appreciative of new art while consciously avoiding the black-clad art fag cliche (particularly difficult when you're already wearing a lot of black). There's the need to interrupt ourselves and make some detached meta-statement to undercut ourselves lest we take things too seriously. Or perhaps a statement's just a statement, and we really were just that tired, and soup seemed like a good idea. Something warm and filling to close up a day of hanging out with good friends, sharing jokes, telling stories, clustering close in the face of cold rain. That seems fitting.
And, no, no subtext there either.
1 Mishak's entry about the ball is a fun read, btw. Though I'm not sure what a sexy water balloon might feel like.
2 The Dextro pieces are quite awesome, btw.
3 oh, and fwiw, I wound up renting Brotherhood of The Wolf.