Feeling Andy Warhol
The shelf life of any good artist isn’t measured in minutes, but years and decades. Then there are those who aren’t forgotten. Those whose creations live long beyond the creators themselves. Those worthy enough to have their lives be required learning as part of school curriculum. If only this were possible for all of us.
The term “flash in the pan” means everything and nothing to me. Yeah, I know. Fucking cliche as ever. Stating that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame is a regret simply because of irony. Campbell’s soup can paintings and various silk-screen portraits of dead celebrities are original. But good? I’m not so sure.
It’s said that the only real destroyer of a piece of art is its creator. This rings true for me in many ways. Many pieces were nearly on the receiving end of knifes, scissors, various bodily fluids and of course, fire. Otherwise coming close to never seeing the light of day. Really though, is there no better way to purge and cleanse one’s bad ideas than fire? Seriously.
I think of it like this: it’s one thing to be picked apart by so called experts but it’s another to be your own worst critic. It’s easy to shake off the words of people you could really care less about, but looking back and realizing that you’ve become a hack is something entirely different. In my mind, destroying one’s art should also destroy one’s career at the same time. Two birds with one stone. Call it quits, throw in the towel, salt the Earth. Whatever.
I’ve always believed that the best artists aren’t prolific ones. Some deserve much more than 15 minutes of fame even if they’re only known for one or two great pieces of art. Nostradamus often gets credit as being some sort of fucking prophet when in reality he made thousands of predictions. Some predictions were bound to happen or be vaguely close. That’s how chance works I’m afraid. The same happens with art and creation. Anyone can churn out pieces of art assembly line style and have a select few be seen as great. But to come along, create one or two great pieces out of lets say, five pieces in total, is something else. Something that won’t be accomplished for years to come.
I’m hoping this is found and read by someone, anyone, long after my death. I say long after because I don’t want to come off as some whiny prick who had it good, befriended celebrities and other socialites then complained about how much my life sucked. This isn’t so much a suicide note as it is the beginning of the end of my creative life.
Spamming Will Not Get My Vote
Miscounts, slander and other acts of sabotage are all realities in the world of voting. Add spamming to that list. I’ve recently discovered that this seems to be a new tactic in the delegation process. Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten countless emails coming from barackobama.com. I’m not entirely sure that this is a mistake at the hands of a wrong email address (mine), but all of these messages are sent straight to the spam folder. Spam is troublesome and annoying, this really isn’t the best way to get support for a cause. Not that my say really matters in this upcoming election (I’m Canadian), but I’m making the assumption that being bombarded with messages about election candidates would be ignored by most people. I can’t really say for sure whether I’d vote for Barack Obama or not if I was American, but filling up my spam folder with this garbage isn’t weighing favourably in my opinion of him and his people.
May 14, 2008 - late evening
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Tags:
obama,
vote spam
Duplicity
One of the decisions I fought with when reviving Av was which direction to take with content. I didn’t want this to be a typical blog but I wanted to focus more on articles and overall well written content. This is quite limiting because for a number of reasons I can’t and don’t write here on any sort of regular schedule.
Back before I ever considered of bringing Av back from the dead I maintained a Tumblr. Think of it as a sort of online scrapbook (if of course you’re unfamiliar with tumblelogging). I’d sort of abandoned my Tumblr back in October and recently started using it again.
Things will remain normal and/or somewhat stagnant here as I only really write when I have something worth writing. But for day to day stuff, you can check my Tumblr here, subscribe to the feed if you’d like.
May 9, 2008 - early evening
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Tags:
abandonment,
slacking,
tumblr
Guilty
When this site was in its previous incarnation, I’d written an article about how I believed that Hans Reiser was responsible for the disappearance of his wife. I was basing this on the fact that I believed no body would be found and that the circumstantial evidence would be enough to bury him. I’d taken a lot of shit from people about this because of how I was treating him more as a criminal than someone who was simply “misunderstood because of his genius”. A jury seems to agree with me.
So lets take another look at the key factors that I’d pointed out:
- He acted very suspicious for an “innocent” man who was being investigated for the disappearance of his wife.
- The carpet and passenger seat were removed from his car.
- Traces of her blood were found in his home.
It could easily be argued that there’s no evidence directly tying him to this but an endless list of circumstantial evidence can be just as, if not more damaging.
Now unless Nina Reiser turns up alive somewhere, this is the bed that Mr. Reiser made and now he has to lie in it — in a jail cell.
Representatives
After watching this video, I don’t even know where to begin to take this one apart. I’ve watched this a few times and each time it gives the same general impression — “What the fuck is wrong with people?”.
Scientologists are really no different than anyone else who’s so devout in their beliefs that the idea of anyone questioning those beliefs puts them over the edge. “What are you afraid of?”, “What are your crimes?”. Yes, good questions indeed. It’s my personal belief that to follow any religion you need to be willing to give up some level of rational, independent thought in favour obeying the rules of your faith and letting that faith fill in the blanks without so much as questioning any of it.
As an Atheist, I’ve been hassled for my beliefs (or lack of them) as much as people who are religious get questioned about theirs. What’s sad is that it happens in the same way that Mark Bunker experienced in the above linked video. I’ve been questioned about what I’m hiding and what crimes I’m afraid to fess up to. People feel that my reasoning for steering clear of religion is because of what I’m afraid to reveal about myself. In reality, it’s quite the opposite. A person who takes enough time to get to know me will learn the good, the bad, and the ugly about me. When the ability to connect with a person on that level arises I feel that it’s important that these things are known as they greatly effect who I am as a person right now.
Religion has no bearing on what I’m willing to put out in the open to another person. Just as religion has nothing to do with defining what type of person you are. The holier than thou crowd seem to miss this one. To some degree, I think people of any religion assume that belonging to said religion makes you a good person regardless of the demons a person may be hiding in their closet. This is really just deceiving and gives people a false sense of belonging to a greater good.
I really don’t have too much of a problem with religion. What I do have a problem with are its representatives.
Out of Commission
Av and myself will be out of commission for a while. We will be back when the present situation allows for it. Cheers.
April 11, 2008 - the wee hours
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Tags:
down,
out,
repair
Unnecessary Computing
I find that “Unnecessary Computing” is a phrase that I’m unfortunately having to use more and more. As someone that generally likes to have modern computer hardware, I’d rather put my CPU cycles to better use than eye candy. As many of you know, I’m an OSS advocate and Linux user. I won’t go into all of the reasons why but I’ll just say that I like feeling like I’m getting every bit of use and freedom from my system that I can. Whereas other operating systems tend to lock you into what they feel you should and shouldn’t be able to do with the hardware that you spent your hard earned money on. Things that I see as unnecessary computing are things that I feel hinder the computer experience rather than improve it.
The first example of this is Compiz. In theory, the ideas behind Compiz are cool, but after using it many times over its development cycle, it never felt like it added anything to my computing experience. Sure, it’s eye candy done right where the GPU handles much of the animation and compositing, but it failed to impress me.
My second and last example is one that is talked about here. That’s right, the Lightbox. I’ve been a front end developer of sorts for roughly 8 years and aside from a single design for a friend, in all of my experience I’ve had no use for it. It provides nothing to the browsing experience aside from slowing down page and image load time for people who use older systems. I know what you’re thinking — “But… what are Web 2.0 websites without Flash and AJAX animations all over the place?”. I’ll tell you what they are — efficient.
April 6, 2008 - mid-afternoon
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Tags:
ajax,
compiz,
flash,
lightbox,
linux,
oss
Quote of the Day: April 4, 2008 Edition
Via Flip Flop Flying
“Ach, one of the downsides of not being good at Spanish is not being able to make your point in an argument/discussion. I got fleeced by a crook of a cab driver. The meter said UR$54 (less than a couple of quid) and when I handed him $60, he asked for $100. He was bigger than me, and looked like he was more than willing to beat me to a pulp and drive over my head, so I paid him and said thank you. One day, though, we’ll meet again, on a beach, and I’ll have been to the gym LOADS, so I’ll kick sand in his face, cough on his ice cream, and steal his girlfriend and make love to her with greater panache, élan, and éclat than she had ever known with him. And while he is prostrate in the sand (not the syrup) getting sand all on his tongue, recovering from the smackdown I’ve delivered, I’ll move the bookmark further along in the book he’s reading, so when he resumes reading he’ll be a bit confused about the plot.”
Reading this has made my day.
In Repair
In an attempt to make the Av experience a more enjoyable one, I’ve been working out some bugs. The last few were more about making sure everything checked out and validated by W3C standards. It appears that I have things in order but I did run into a few problems.
1. I had to change 2 instances of
header(“Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8”);
to
header(“Content-type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8”);
in textpattern/publish.php in order to make the
XHTML validate without errors about incorrect content-type.
2. By changing the content type, it seems to make validation more strict and caused the Flickr Badge code on the Lifestream page bring up an error page. After some research it looks as though the ampersand characters in the script were causing the error. Since changing all instances of “&” their proper entity codes I no longer get the error but now my photostream doesn’t display at all. I’ll have to look into this more.
3. Originally, I was using the nifty rss_livearchive plugin to power the Archives page. Some of the CSS this script uses causes the CSS to not validate. By removing the CSS code that causes this problem, that in turn causes some things on the page to misalign. For the time being I’ve decided to go with a more traditional archives page.
If anyone has any suggestions on the issues I ran into using rss_livearchive or why my Flickr photostream no longer displays on the Lifestream page, contact me.
April 2, 2008 - mid-afternoon
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Tags:
css,
w3c,
xhtml