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An earlier thread on Christopher Ashley's html drawings got sidetracked into other issues, such as browser and display technology and whether web designers are artists (I'd say they're designers, but that's not to say design can't be artistic). Ashley's abstractions are consistently inspiring and imaginative, accomplished with the most minimal and available of means. New patterns, color relationships, and strategic approaches to that Modernist mainstay, the grid, just seem to pour out of him.
A painter friend of mine was over recently and really responded to Ashley's works onscreen. We agreed they (html drawings) were the type of thing Peter Halley would be doing if his work wasn't "stuck." Halley talks a good cyber-game but he's never made the leap to actually composing with or for the computer. Usually he uses it to illustrate or document ideas in his paintings, or as digital window dressing to make his art seem more "now," while he continues producing traditionally-fabricated canvases.* His biggest problem, though, is being a prisoner of his own cells and conduits. Ashley, on the other hand, working only with the computer, shows a wide range of places the "Halley-type painting" could go: intriguing figure-ground play, simulated transparency, flirtation with applied design (logos, pictograms, game boards).
I think on some level, though, my friend still thinks of Ashley's work as reproductions of paintings, and is critiquing them imagining them "in the flesh," with smooth surfaces and crisp-but-not-brittle edges like, say, Cary Smith's. But such paintings don't exist, it's all illumination in your browser. Somehow people with an eye for traditional abstraction are going to have to subtract out that extra step they're taking of imagining the reified image and just enjoy the fleeting thing they're seeing on the screen. This is true anti-materialist practice: what conceptualism promised thirty-five years ago but never delivered, at least in a visually compelling form.
*See for example, this jacket illustration for a recent Halley book. Behind the all the naked models you can see a Halley painting fuzzed out with some kind Gaussian filter. The inside of the book features More Wacky Photoshop Fun With Halley Paintings. Oh, and I guess I should say I generally like Halley's work but find his recent forays into installation and trying to position himself as a Warholian media maven unconvincing.
The following list of online videos (with commentary) was found on Singe's Journal. Eventually I'll annotate the list, remove items, etc. Kid's Show I wrote about here, and it's great, but it's about a 23 MB file. The other ones I've seen and enjoyed were the octopus, stupid cat tricks, the exploding "firemelon", and the second stinger test, which looks digitally enhanced. (Regarding that last item, the soldiers probably aren't yucking it up so much now that those weapons are knocking our helicopters out of the sky.)
octopus.mpeg - Octopus camouflage
funnyCats.wmv - Video montage of various cats being silly.
hummer.mpg - Hummer-fired antitank missile live fire test.
JavelinLiveFireVsT72.mpeg - Javelin shoulder-mounted antitank missile live fire test. (Even better!)
desertBikeCrash.avi - Awesome bike crash.1short.mpeg - "Alright, are you ready?" "Damn skippy I'm ready!" (higher-rez than the more common firemelon.mpg)
kidshow2.wmv - A "TV Funhouse"-like fake twisted kids TV show pilot. Beat kids! [23 MB]
Course de Pikes Peak (Ari Vatanen).mpeg - And finally, to wind down, "Climb Dance". Goin' up Pike's Peak in a rally car. [66 MB!]
Jonathan Yardley revisits author John D. McDonald in the Washington Post (there may be a few questionnaire questions at the Post website--just lie). McDonald's most famous book is probably The Executioners, filmed twice as Cape Fear. I would say he's a brilliant writer but not a good writer. He could produce some stinker lines, sometimes in the same paragraph with the most cutting social observations. Even some of the sentences Yardley quotes are kind of overdone (the Meyer excerpt is first rate, though). I recently reread McDonald's two science fiction novels from the 1950s, and found Wine of the Dreamers dated but Ballroom of the Skies unbeatable. A conspiracy of alien telepaths keeps Earth in a constant state of war and economic strife to produce "Earthlings," titanium-tough administrators who prevent a decadent galactic civilization from declining further. I believe it's all true and the telepaths heavily influenced the 2000 Presidential election (Bush being not the Earthling but a catalyst for war).
Here's a sample McDonald passage, from Pale Gray for Guilt, a Travis McGee book from '68. Readers are invited to put more choice quotes in the comments to this post.
It had been a fine hot lazy summer, a drifting time of good fish, old friends, new girls, of talk and laughter.Cold beer, good music and a place to go.
That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happymeter, so every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope. When it happens so often, wouldn't you think I'd be more ready for it?
Excellent Mike Davis piece connecting the marauding, raping protagonists of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with the recently revealed Tiger Force atrocities no on is talking about (from the Vietnam era), and by implication, atrocities we may yet discover if the Government keeps pouring on the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. Good question he raises: How the fzck is Bob Kerrey still president of the New School after it came out that his unit was a bunch of throat slashers in Vietnam? That was then, this is now, right.