Roto-blog

there's always a wind-up

Friday, November 19, 2004

Blogging Hell


 It's the next round in the struggle againt unholy blogness. I retreat under siege. It's clear that in a battle between me and the format, the format wins. At least for the moment. So instead of trying to drive it into a more compliant shape, I am just going with the flow for a while. That means I 'm abandoning any pretense at thematic coherence. There's no way to set up a theme and stick to it. Not with my eclectic and short attention span. Plus, this thing is a tube. A short one. Things keep falling out the end. There's no way to make the thing longer, no way to hold onto stuff that's still entertaining. There's no way to keep things in the tube long enough to compare them side by side, establish some sort of unity, or develop a recurring theme. I might as well be picking up bits of fluff off the carpet and tossing them to one side once I know what they are. Here's a rubber band. Here's a flyer that someone handed me on the street. See this? It's the thing I set my coffee mug on. Do you detect an interesting similarity among them all, and that a compositional coherence is beginning to emerge? No? Oh.


 I know it could be more interesting than that, but I want it to be more easily organised, so that I can group certain entries together. Little aggregates of composition. If I can't do that, it seems pointless to do anything other than make random comments to the universe.


 Fortunately, that has its charms too. So, while it ain't blogging Heaven, it's not exactly blogging hell.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Picture This

What made Palmer Paint a success was the high quality of Robbins's and his staff's work. The other half of the equation was Klein's genius for marketing. Paint by numbers débuted at the Macy's Toy Fair. Robbins has this story about how before the fair, Klein passed out some petty cash to strangers to come in and purchase sets. The sets flew off the shelf and Macy's was impressed but Robbins never knew whether the sales were all part of Klein's gimmick, if people had actually purchased them on their own, or a little bit of both.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/15/paintbynumbers.php



 Ah, a little bit of Payola. The way things got done in the 50s. But WTF? If someone gave me ten bucks to buy a kit, I'd take the money and go treat some dame to a beer. Definitely a higher calling!



 Paint by number. It makes me want a Paint-by-Number background for my blog! But I'll settle for a nice image. I also want to know: do they still do those copper foil things in Junior High? Where you get a reverse lithograph of sorts, and use some awls and hammers to poke and pound a piece of copper foil over it until it looks like a scene of a square-rigger on the high seas? I did that once. I'm not sure why. But then, I'd have to ask that question about a lot of things in junior high.



Monday, November 15, 2004

I Don't Wana Blog,

I want to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie.

And this is a pickle.

The blog format doesn't suit me now. I'm trying it and finding that consecutively and temporally ordered posts are antithetical to my way of thinking. I want parallelism! I want display groups! I want a front page like The National Enquirer! A corner for my Google poems! Another corner for my photos! A third, fourth, fifth and sixth corner for curios, knicknacks, gewgaws and trophies! Big, horrifyingly bold text headlines! Psychedelic Pandemonium! Captain Lou! And the motorcycle.*

But don't fret, I'll be here for a while yet.


 *Don't forget to play Alice's Restaurant this Thanksgiving!