Okay, I kinda really hate to do this, but I have admit I’m sold on Windows Live Writer. 

 

The Window’s Live Suite (of course it’s a suite, this is Microsoft, have they ever made anything standalone?) is mostly stuff that’s useless for me (messenger, hotmail, other stuff I haven’t touched since 1999).  I’m also not much of a desktop webapp user (with the exception of Twirl, which I use when the update du jour plays nicely with the rest of my system).

But, on a lark, I took a look at Live Writer.  And I’m surprisingly sold on several intelligent decisions from installation to implementation.

First off, yeah, it’s a suite, but MS has finally figured out that it shouldn’t be a goddamned chore to just install one bit.  I don’t need or want integration with a mail client, messenger, photo gallery (sure would like Flicker integration, but I understand), or “family” blocking functionality.  Instead of forcing a full install and making you remove bits later, or slipping in a custom option halfway through the install, the Live Suite installer has tickboxes at the very beginning of the process.  It’s a small change, but one that saves about 10 microseconds of time and, more importantly, shows some real understanding on the part of Microsoft that modular installs should, in fact, be modular.

Install depends on the .NET framework, which you’ve probably already got if you’re running windows, or will install itself if not.  If your running Mac or Linux, I’ve got no idea what the install looks like, or even if there’s an option for you – but there are about 8 billion Mac-only options out there, and you Linux users made the conscious decision to opt out of corporate software when you picked your system.  Go see what Opera’s got for you or something.

For BlogThis functionality, IE is of course automatic – there’s a whole toolbar thingie if you want all the other suite stuff jacked in, too. But, on the dealmaker end (for me) there’s a working (and working well!!) Firefox plugin, too.  I’m running it on FF3.0.3, and the highlight or full page functionality work equally well.

So onto the actual Live Writer interface thinga.

It does precisely what it’s supposed to.  I don’t imagine it’s anything but perfect for Windows Live blogs, but I’m obviously running Wordpress.  There are many other desktop blogging apps that jack into WP installs out there, of course, with varying degrees of success.  If you’re already using one of those, and it’s working for you, there’s probably little reason to change. But setup for Live Writer on WP requires no fussing with settings or extra plugins – the first time you start the app, you simply choose “another weblog service” from the setup window, enter the url of the top of your blog, your username and password for admin, and hit enter.

You’ll immediately be taken to a wysiwyg compose window.  And, usually, I really hate those.  I’d rather get at the html, especially in Wordpress, because WP wysiwyg has classically been a buggy POS if you’re embedding anything from tables to YouTube.  Live Writer’s wysiwyg, on the other hand, goes one step++ and grabs the CSS off your blog install so what you see really is exactly what you get – font size, color, spacing, padding, headers – everything displays in real time precisely as it’s going to show up when you hit post.  No need to preview to make sure the image you’ve just added will be wider than your blog column width, WLW not only autoscales to fit whatever your CSS says the column width is, you can see it working right from the compose window.  Ditto with blockquotes or, if you switch to and back from html view, any div or style tags.  I’ve seen this functionality in other desktop blog apps, but I’m pleasantly surprised at how nicely it’s implemented, here.

All the extra nonsense you’ve got access to from a Wordpress compose panel is available bottom of screen, too. Tags, cats, author, slug, password, optional excerpt, trackbacks, custom date, save as draft turn on/off comments and pings – it’s all there and works flawlessly.

Insert Table also works.  If you’ve ever spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what the fuck WP did to the table you know should be working, let me repeat that – Insert Table actually works.

(As do, obviously, hotkeys ctrl+I, B, C, P, Z, etc, as in Word.)

So, there you go.  Not the greatest app of all time, not amazingly revolutionary, but if you’re looking for a “Holy Crap it just works” desktop app for making blog posts that you can use from your browser and has a relatively small footprint (if you’re not installing all the other bits, the largest part of the install is the .NET framework, and if you’ve just purchased a new computer, it’s all likely already installed), I’ve got no cautionary tales for Live Writer.

What I don’t know, I just wanna see how well it works (if), really…

 

(EDIT: Holy shit.)

• notebook: nowhere - a set on Flickr
  NTS: flickr comp for tag. Link for quick access btw pages.
  (tags:notebook+nowhere )

• On Teaching Children the Importance of SCIENCE
  Irukandji syndrome is a condition induced by envenomization through the sting of Carukia barnesi, the Irukandji jellyfish, and other cubozoans. It is seldom fatal, but is nevertheless one of the most painful experiences a human can endure.[. . .]In 1964, Dr. Jack Barnes confirmed the cause of the syndrome to be due to a small box jelly, the Irukandji jellyfish (Carukia barnesi). In order to prove that the jellyfish was the cause of the syndrome, he captured one and deliberately stung himself, his son, and a local lifeguard, and observed the symptoms.
  (tags:notebook+nowhere )

Just pushed Warren’s new theme live:

New skin for the autumn of doom, fire, sorrow and weeping.

(Shit, I think I gave away the end there.)

Thanks, Ariana.

(That’s been the easiest of projects I’ve been working on lately–and not the end of it, either. Radio silence continues just a little bit longer while I wrestle with work, etc.)

no brain. busy weeks. back soon. see right side of page for content–them’s good smart people. with brains.

So much of this life has been unsettled. Running, waiting, running again. But no complaints, not really. The good outweighs the bad.

So much running, it teaches you to look sharp. When the world is road and a series of rest stops, you start to see the differences as sharply as the similarities. This hotel looks just like the last, but look here: the pictures on the wall are different. That stretch of highway has gone on for years, but there’s a new mile marker, same as the last, but just a little higher. You learn to look forward, count the ground you gained, remember the things you’ve seen, and that everything moves in circles, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t gone anywhere.

And the waiting, well. Everyone needs to learn how to wait, sometimes. Take moments of peace and patience, and never forget what it’s like to move. Always be ready to go, but don’t forget to live, now. You don’t have to unpack, but don’t sedate yourself to get to your flight.

Those are things I learned a little later than reading, but a little before I started school.

Mom and I ran to Scottsdale, Arizona, before I was old enough to know what we were doing. I don’t remember much of the drive through California, but I can conjure images of the desert, the highway, the radio — not the car radio but a giant boombox with a tape player and Disney readalong tapes I’d well memorized. I only had normal child remembering, then, or I think I would have tried to catch more of the scenery as we tore south. I knew we were going, but it wasn’t until we got there that I think I started to understand we were Gone.

We ran a lot, while we were there. Mom was a nurse, swing shift, and we ran to daycare so she could get to her shift. And we hightailed it out of there at the end of the day, when the sun was down and no one else was running anywhere. But then, in between the running, we took our time in empty grocery stores, deserted donut shops, quiet parks, and just us matinees on days off in scorched strip malls.

The world was perfect, in between the running — but we were always running out of time.

Scottsdale was rotting and molding and dying from the inside out. Every time a new development went up, it tore up the festering soil, and spread the disease into the air. And the air was often still, but the desert wind would pick up at the worst of moments, and spread that fungus through the city like a plague. The thing about Valley Fever is that, although it generally manifests no worse than a flu, if you happen to weigh nothing at all already, you might have a worse time.

So I took a breath, one day, and the dying city of a dying summer spread to my body.

And it all sounds very romantic when I put it like that, but what bluntly happened is I inhaled a fuckton of mold and I started losing weight I didn’t have.

That’s when I started to understand running and waiting, for the first time.

Wait, maybe I’ll get better. We’re still running, just wait. Wait, it’s almost over. We’re running out of time.

And I started… understanding. I started paying closer attention to everything, because I knew I’d have to leave soon, one way or another. I started noticing how tired mom looked, sometimes. I started seeing how worried she really was. I started trying to figure out why we’d come here in the first place, and why I didn’t want to leave, even though I didn’t like everything. If I close my eyes and flip back through the album of my mind, the world pulls sharply into focus, those months, as details became important — filed away forever.

And that’s why I remember, so perfectly, so sharply, the rain.

I remember the feeling inside the apartment, the air getting sharper but fuzzier at the same time. The sky outside was a hazy violet of sundown, the inside was a brown and yellow mess from the kitchen light. My giant boombox was on the floor, where sometimes I recorded letters to send to my grandparents, songs and letters, and sometimes I recorded nothing at all just to listen to it played back. But mom and I gathered up the big metal bowl and some pots and went outside to the concrete sidewalk outside the door and waited for the rain.

We could see the storm coming from miles away. The sky was a flat and sparking mirror of the desert below. And we put the pots and bowls down to catch the warm rain and waited. I think the world was quiet, but I remember the sounds of traffic below, so it may just be that I don’t recall what we said while we waited. There may have been some soft sounds first, but soon enough came the roar of the storm, the singing of the metal catching the water. I danced, and laughed, and knew what perfect moments can come if you just pay attention. The good always, always outweighs the bad, if you let it.

Sometimes you have to wait, sometimes you have to run for it, and sometimes, if you’re ready for it, you can catch a bit in some battered pans to water the plants after.

Okay, that last bit’s rain, but the metaphor holds.

The problem with writing really long meandering memory posts is that, about 70% of the time, I’ve got to be using the other half of my brain bits for work (and the occasional hobby). So I’ve got three posts in varying stages of completion in queue, and no way in hell am I going to be able to fill in the blanks for any of them before tomorrow. And, since I strongly doubt that anyone is going to get terribly excited about my rousing tales of css pixel adjustment or the hunt for the missing PHP semi-colon, that’s just how long it’s going to be before I post again.

I think we might start calling it “updates two to three times per week” — which, honestly, is about as often as I’d expect anyone to come by. At the most. If they were really bored.

You know those Sundays, the ones that you’d kinda like to do something productive, only nothing worth going to is anything closer than a boring drive away, and god, you could call someone, but what would you really do, and hell, before you know it it’s getting late and you’ve got to get up early tomorrow and what the fuck was today even FOR?

That’s what life is like in Northern Virginia. Every. Single. Day.

There are few places in the US, possibly the world, that I could say less about than NoVa.

If you’re there: I’m so sorry.
If you’ve never been there: Thank god.
If you’re thinking of moving there: What’s wrong with you?
If you got away from there: High five.

D found the Overlook.

No, we weren’t the first — the Roanoke Valley Overlook is mile marker 130 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, just about the most visited National Park in the States. But from the lack of bottles, cigarette butts, or even tire tracks, we might just have been the first people to find it that spring. And it was the first time either of us had stood in the dark on the side of that mountain, looking down at the valley that held us both in different ways. And it was D that got us there, and that was something special, too.

There was no real reason to D and I driving, that spring. We just started one day, and didn’t stop for a while. I remember the day, just after the chains came off the tires, just a the snow was turning into something a little more manageable and far more miserable, sitting at a coffee shop and watching her fidgeting with something no one else could see. I remember saying, “Let’s go somewhere,” and the grown-up part of me wants to think some conversation followed — but I’m pretty sure we just took our coffee to go, walked out to her little blue car, and headed out of town.

D drove, and I navigated, lit cigarettes, kept the music high to drown out everything but the sound of our real voices. Navigation’s a pretty easy job when you’re not on a schedule, and you’re not heading anywhere in particular. We’d see an intersection on any one of a million stretches of Virginia highway and I’d call left, right, or gun it until the sun went down. On the good days I’d get us back home again before dark. On the bad days I knew better.

There were a lot of bad days.

I was along for the ride, but she was running away.

She swore she heard voices. Pretty much everywhere, none of them friendly. And maybe, you know, maybe she did. Could be she was born crazy. Could also be that coming out to her loving and supportive parents at 16 and being swiftly met with hugs and tears and a year of the best drugs money could buy to fix her fast did it. Like I said, D was running away. Problem was, she wasn’t running from a place, so there was no where to run to. Except away. Except hours on the road with no one but the woman in the passenger seat that kept the music high, lit cigarettes, called directions, made conversation, and let her go into auto-pilot and away from the world.

She didn’t take her drugs when we went out. She and I weren’t dating, nothing close, so I was no threat to her fragile heterosexuality. It was safe to go clean, and her parents didn’t know but they were pretty okay with me. Just praise Jesus their daughter was making straight friends, y’know? The healing could begin.

And man, did we have some adventures, anyway — good, clean fun. It was me that found the giant bridge in the middle of nowhere, the haunted schoolbus embedded halfway down a hill with books still under the benches. I navigated by the sun and kept a mental list of rest stops for food and gas, made sure we ate and didn’t break down on the side of a mountain. We covered some of the same ground sometimes, but mostly we aimed for roads we’d never seen. The straighter and longer, the better. Anything that went with driving music, anything empty for speeding, anything far and away.

The music was important. I wasn’t much past a kid, myself, and sometimes I couldn’t talk her off the angry ledge. But the music, that always worked. On the worst days it just needed to scream. NIN worked in the afternoons, For Love Not Lisa in the mornings. I hated Tori but she had a place, too. Ani and Soul Coughing could even the motor out when it started to pass. It was another sort of navigation, picking the playlist. Shining the right CD to keep the car moving, keep the anger down, keep the world flat, keep the wheels on the road. Sometimes she’d aim for the fences for a just a second, and I’d light us two cigarettes to remind her a suicide would be a murder, and the wheel would level out.

Easy does it, we’re on the road and everything’s going to be just fine. A million miles from everything, and no one expecting us back any time soon.

D found the Overlook on her birthday. 18 years old and no party, just another drive. We hit an intersection on our way out of town and I hadn’t said a word. The car slowed to a stop and she looked at me, confused and a little scared.

“Not today, birthday girl,” I said, “today you get to pick where you go.”

“What? No, you…” She paused, looking for the right words, “… that’s not… C’mon. You find the good stuff. And you’re the only one that ever knows how to get us home. I’m always lost after ten minutes. Getting lost and eaten by wolves isn’t a birthday present.”

“I’ll still get us home. You pick where to go. And then, y’know, maybe we’ll have sex or something. You know it wouldn’t be statutory anymore.”

She laughed, and we were still pulled over on the side of the road. “You’re not gay,” she said.

“Nah, I’m not. And you’re not my type, anyway.”

She looked at me, asked for a cigarette, and the car was still idling.

“I’m gay,” she said, letting out the smoke. “Even when I’m on my medication, and can’t think straight — oh my god I never said that out loud before ‘I can’t think straight’ but that’s the problem…” and she started laughing so hard I knew she was about to cry. “Fuck,” she said, “Just fuck.”

“I know. Pick a road, kid,” I said. “It’s your birthday, and we’re burning gas just sitting here.”

“Yeah,” she said, and pulled her sunglasses down of the sun visor. Mine were already on, she hadn’t seen my eyes all morning.

“Yeah,” she said, and turned the car to the East.

We drove all day, ate in the car, and were on the Blue Ridge Parkway when the sun went down. It wasn’t a bad day, but we drove into the evening. The music was low, and we talked louder than usual, laughed more than was strictly necessary. She picked the roads, and I still lit the smokes and kept an eye on where we were. I could feel home burning in the background, and we never got too far away. Out of sight, but not quite out of mind. A safe distance, I knew, even though she was lost as anything.

She was taking the turns on the Parkway too tight after dark, and we weren’t talking anymore. She knew the next turnoff I’d pick the way home. But she didn’t expect me to say “Slow down” when I did, and we almost veered into the side of the mountain when she slammed on the brakes.

I laughed, it was all right, no one dead.

“Nah, it’s all right,” I answered, to no question in particular, “just no rush, you know?”

So we were turning the curve at a reasonable speed, and I was scrabbling under the seat for the dropped pack of smokes when D saw the pull-off for the overlook.

“What was that?” she asked, and I hadn’t seen and didn’t know. She pulled us around and into the U-shaped pull-off, a dim and unmarked thing, there across the road from the granite wall of the mountain. She turned off the car and got out into the pitch, and I shoved the pack of cigarettes into my back pocket and joined her.

From the Overlook, in the darkness, there’s a sheer drop down to the bowl of the Roanoke Valley. Far in the distance the city glows weakly — it’s no stunning panorama. It’s a dim smattering of lights beating back the darkness that crawls over everything. As our eyes adjusted it got no more impressive. If anything, the darkness got deeper, and the smallness of the city more apparent. A puny outpost with scrawny veins stretching out to smaller and smaller towns down the line.

From way up there, all we could see was how big the world was, and how little of it was home.

And that’s when she finally cried.

She wasn’t going home, that night, not to her parents house. She was going to crash with someone again, but she’d been kicked out last week. I’d had no idea, hadn’t seen her in a couple of days and we never really talked about Now or Parents, anyway. We weren’t that sort of friends. But I wasn’t surprised, and I lit a couple of smokes, and she cried for a while.

“Where the hell are we, anyway?” she finally asked.

“We’re up the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yeah, but what city is that, I mean? Is it Roanoke, it’s gotta be, right?”

And I knew it was, but what fun was that? So I answered, “God, I hope so, or we’re totally lost.”

“You’re never lost,” she laughed.

“Yeah, true. But that’s just because I’m not worried about where I’m going.”

“Oh, that’s real deep,” she said, and flicked her butt out into the abyss. “Whatever. You can get us back.”

“Yeah,” I said, and crushed my own dying cigarette underfoot, residual California-mind screaming about forest fires. “We’re all right.”

We were a half an hour away from town, music low and gentle, the Overlook miles and miles behind us, when she turned and said, “That place was pretty. Not as cool as the bridge, but really pretty.”

“Yeah. You did good.”

“Think you could find it again?”

“Sure. We didn’t go that far.”

“Felt like it.”

“We took the long way,” I admitted. “It’s just a few miles from where we started.”

And she laughed. “Figures,” she said.

And then, “Thanks.”

“Yep,” I said. “Left, here.”

This is the future, you know. This is the sort of faith-based initiative they’ll have in America in a few years. Sarah bloody Palin will be standing in the middle of Main Street America with a hockey stick just itching to beat Satan out of…smokers?

Oh yes. In Kuala Lumpur last week, an entire family beat a couple to death in a ritual apparently intended to make the man stop smoking.

This "ritual" appears to have involved little more than repeatedly smacking the couple in the head with a mixture of religious instruments — broomsticks and motorcycle helmets.

And someone is reading this right now and thinking to themselves: well, he’s not smoking any more, is he? Huge Success.

I’m telling you. Three years from now it’s going to be Sarah Palin with a sharpened hockey stick up your bumhole with a cackling "you doggone Lung Terrorists just hate America, don’cha?"

Vote Obama: he inhaled.

* Mer Yayanos has lost her mind. I don’t know what to say.

* Eliza’s at Maschinenfest.

* House Of Zo:

* Matt (D’Israeli) Brooker records the sketches he did for fans at the Birmingham comics do over the weekend:

* Condolences to Melissa Gira on getting laid off from Valleywag. She seems to be taking the opportunity to clear the remains of previous lives out from her apartment, hence the image entitled "Stripper Trash":

* Steven Shaviro on a peculiar literary hoax called ISSUE 1:

This e-text is 3785 pages long (!); each page contains a ?poem? attributed to
one of 3785 writers. The names of the writers range from Silliman himself and
other language poets, through a number of (now dead) poets and writers, onto
various bloggers (especially ones who appear in Silliman’s blogroll, it would
seem). In point of fact, none of the writers have actually written the pieces
attributed to them. My name appears among the list of authors, together with the
names of several people I know…

Tiffany & Co Pink Sterling Cupcake Charm

Originally uploaded by mkecupcakequeen

No, it’s not mine. Yet.

The fine Moon Wiring Club have a new CD coming out shortly, according to Ian at Blank Workshop. The preview piece they’re releasing, "The Wrong Kind Of Wildlife," sounds, as ever, like a gang of mad people were put in charge of a time machine. The accompanying promotional video appears to have been made by the same horrible old men who made British TV children’s drama in the 1970s:

Full disclosure: the guy behind LEVERAGE, John Rogers, is a good friend of mine who made the pilot for GLOBAL FREQUENCY. However, because he loves his good friends insufficiently, he hasn’t sent me a copy and I therefore had to find the first episode of his new show LEVERAGE on a place for Nefarious Types on The Internets.

LEVERAGE is a Caper Show. The first episode introduces us to The Best Insurance Investigator Ever, who’s now on the skids after the insurance company wouldn’t pay for his dying kid’s treatment. The excellent Saul Rubinek (in, I have to say, a slightly underwritten role) plays an aircraft designer who wants The Best Insurance Investigator Ever to oversee a gang of criminals engaged to steal back his designs from a ruthless competitor. He’s got the thieves, he says: all he needs now is one honest man. And the designer uses the memory of his dead son to emotionally blackmail the last honest man into the gig.

The team are a Web 2.0-age scammer who wants to be cool but is caught using his ill-gotten cash to enact his Slave Girl Leia fantasies, a soft-spoken and bespectacled young guy who is actually The Most Violent Man Ever, and a pretty young thief whose main character trait is that she’s utterly insane. Later on, the wonderful Gina Bellman is introduced as the Queen of the Grifters — there’s a terrific short flashback showing how they first met, possibly the first “meet cute” scene involving the principals shooting each other.

(And the flashback scene introducing Parker, as a child, is funny as hell and reminiscent to me of the flashback-to-childhood scenes I did in NEXTWAVE.)

The trick to this sort of story is in the reversal, which is deceptively hard to write. The first big reversal comes when this team, put together for one night only, is brought back together by the designer, ostensibly to get paid, but in actuality to be killed. And so the one-night-only team has to stick together long enough to get paid and get out from under the police interest put on them when they survived the murder attempt. But that’s barely the first fifteen minutes of the hour-long show, and a clever script keeps them coming, to a climax that is scam, counter-scam and re-scam. The hour sags once at most — in all other respects, the pace is up, the lines are funny and the situations are smart. And Steve Jobs owes them money for the tricks they pull with an iPhone.

It’s all pretty tongue-in-cheek stuff — although I think the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE-inspired theme music is maybe one put-on too far — but it never loses sight of its simple aim, which is to entertain the shit out of you for an hour. It doesn’t sentimentalise, it doesn’t fall into the usual American tv trope of making it all about family, it doesn’t treat you like you’re stupid and it offers you no platitudes. It just asks you to go along with the ride. And the funniest thing, to me, is that the ending sets up the cast as a team of criminal Equalizers. Hence the title. “We provide… leverage.”

It airs on TNT in the US in December, I think. It’s a lot of fun. You should watch it.

Melissa Gira posted a photo:

Melissa Gira Grant
melissagira.com
Sent from my vibrator

Ron Silliman reports on a new publication, modestly entitled Issue 1. (I was first alerted to this by The Mumpsimus). This e-text is 3785 pages long (!); each page contains a “poem” attributed to one of 3785 writers. The names of the writers range from Silliman himself and other language poets, through a number of (now dead) poets and writers, onto various bloggers (especially ones who appear in Silliman’s blogroll, it would seem). In point of fact, none of the writers have actually written the pieces attributed to them. My name appears among the list of authors, together with the names of several people I know, including some who read (and sometimes comment on) this blog. My own “poem” appears on page 1893; for what it’s worth, it doesn’t strike me as being very good, nor is it like anything that I could ever imagine myself writing, either in style or in sentiment.

I kind of wonder how other “victims” of this hoax (if that’s what it is) respond to it. Silliman seems kind of pissed off, as do many (but not all) of the commenters on his blog entry. Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus blog) seems more or less amused:

The whole thing strikes me as a stunt pulled by someone who desperately wants attention. (And now I’m giving it to ‘em. So it goes.) I’m still amazed that anyone would put the time into creating something like this, but the amazement now is the sort of amazement one has when watching the totally insane rather than watching the harmlessly obsessive.

Me, I think that the stunt raises all sorts of interesting questions (or perhaps I should say, in Palin-speak, that lots of interesting questions “rear their heads”). Early-20th-century Dadaist stunts raised meta-questions about art, about what could be considered art, etc. But such meta-questions have long since been so well assimilated into our culture (both artistic culture and commercial culture) that they scarcely raise an eyebrow any longer. Today, we can only be blase about self-referentiality, conceptual art, and so on.

In such a context, Issue 1 attempts to up the ante, by asking meta-meta-questions, as it were. Most notably, there’s the difficulty of deciding whether the publication actually is some sort of interesting conceptual art, or whether it is rather just a dumb prank, or a malicious hoax. Then there is the issue of obsessiveness that Matthew Cheney raises. Certainly a lot of modernist and post-modernist art is quite obsessive (I am thinking of everything from Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots to Henry Darger’s weather chronicles). But Issue 1 might well only be pseudo-obsessive; it seems to be something that would have required an insane amount of time and energy (if only to collect all those author names and write all those poems), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was all generated by a computer program in just a few hours. Even insanity isn’t what it used to be, in our age of digital simulation.

Finally, given all the questions about the status of the author that have been raised in the last half-century or so, it only makes sense that I should be credited with the authorship of something that I had nothing to do with writing. Remember, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” more than forty years ago, in 1967. And even well before that, in 1940, Borges proposed a literary criticism that would “take two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, for instance — attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres…” (from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Issue 1 is a logical outgrowth of the situation in which such ideas no longer seem new, or radical, or outrageously counterintuitive, but have instead been entirely assimilated into our “common sense.”

In short, Issue 1 makes sense to me as a conceptual art project precisely to the extent that it marks the utter banalization, routinization, and digitization of any sort of conceptualism and experimentalism in art, and of all supposedly “avant-garde” gestures. There is something melancholy in coming to this conclusion; but perhaps something liberating as well, since it suggests that the whole strain of avant-gardism that starts in the 19th century, goes through dadaism and other forms of radical modernism, and moves through conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s to the supposedly oppositional political art of the last few decades, has finally outlived its relevance and its usefulness. We have finally reached the point where we can shake off the dead weight of the anti-traditionalist tradition, and perhaps move on to something else. This doesn’t mean rejecting all the art of the avant-garde tradition, much of which I still very much love. But it does mean seeing that art historically, just as we see the art of the Baroque historically, or as we see the science fiction of the “Golden Age” of the early-to-mid 20th century historically. It’s still there to be tapped (or looted) for clever ideas, formal approaches, and so on. But modernist experimentation and avant-gardism is no longer a living resource; in an age of arcane financial instruments capable at one moment of generating huge quantities of fictitious wealth, and at another moment of sending shockwaves through the entire society, wiping out retirement accounts, causing businesses to go bankrupt and jobs to disappear, etc, etc — in such a climate, modernist avant-gardism fails to be “as radical as reality itself.” (I am fully aware that financial panics with real effects upon people’s lives are as old as capitalism itself; what’s new in the present situation comes from the way that new technologies have a multiplier effect, as well as adding additional layers of meta-referentiality and meta-feedback into the system).

I am sorely tempted to add the “poem” of mine which appears in Issue 1, and which I had absolutely nothing to do with producing, to my CV.

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

true romance consists of progress being made towards a union of some sort.

and trips to Europe.

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

• Sweaty and ash-streaked from clearing out the fireplace and then building big fires. Time for beer, and more fire. #

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

This home had a great palette.

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Apparently their 2 year old plays in there. (Like Harry Potter.)

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

The carriage house was either added or expanded when the homeowner inherited a classic Bentley that wouldn't fit in the garage.

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Kelly Sue posted a photo: