In my view, there have been no masterpieces yet in the online world, my own work included… With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said.
Jonathan Harris from a recent talk
The Desperate Travels of Francis Muscle, Panel 6
Hey. The sixth panel of The Desperate Travels of Francis Muscle the First is now live over at the Francis Muscle website. Sorry if this guy is unraveling a little slowly. Life in this project seems to be stuck in some kind of unanticipated sex loop. Yikes.
Polyfarm #38
→ Above: the most divisive image from our last project. I’m conflicted about it too. I think it’s pretty, and the interplay between line drawing and photograph sort of works for me, which is rare. But there’s probably something too literal about the damn thing. Oh well.
→ Just started work on a new series of 7 paintings. If all goes as planned, we’ll be showing the series next March at Pushdot.
→ I’ve been thinking about how certain specific intimate acts can on occasion lend form to one’s ambient awareness of horrible world events. Something about how big ideas crammed into a small space can make that small space feel huge, worldly, infinite. I think the pictures I’m making right now are sort of aware of that tension. Sorry to be vague.
→ One of the pictures will be called Brown Sunday.
→ What sounds good right now: All Gregory Isaacs, all Etta James, Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Starfucker, Bob Dylan’s Desire, the song Nowhere Near by Yo La Tengo, Gang Starr, Spank Rock’s Coke & Wet.
→ What feels good right now: falling into a kind of softness.
Nowhere Near by Yo La Tengo
Bob Dylan, Man of Constant Sorrow, 1964. Via Constant Siege.
Mountain sketch
I keep seeing this when I close my eyes. Call it something I ate.
Studio
“The board will nod and you will go, and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Step into the skin and disappear.”
DFW, from Forever Overhead
The weird unexpected thing is how easy it’s been for me to work today. Weird, spacey, beautiful feeling. Anyway, here’s a passage from IJ that someone on the wallace-l listserv excerpted last night…
Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life…. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life’s mother. This is how it works: didn’t he know? …This is why Moms are so obsessively loving… they’re trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death’s explanation goes on…, the more unfocused and wobbly becomes his vision of the Death’s Joelle…, until near the end it’s as if he’s seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that’s the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait.
David Foster Wallace, from Infinite Jest (via Washington Canard)
Good night.
Sierpinski gasket. Apparently, IJ’s original structure was based on it.
I am really sad about my favorite writer dying. All I can think to do is quote one of my favorite passages at length…
All right, now we’re coming to what I promised and led you through the whole dull synopsis of what led up to this in hopes of. Meaning what it’s like to die, what happens. Right? This is what everyone wants to know. And you do, trust me. Whether you decide to go through with it or not, whether I somehow talk you out of it the way you think I’m going to try to do or not. It’s not what anyone thinks, for one thing. The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob of older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.
But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. But what if you could? Think for a second—what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? …so listen: What exactly do you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories, juxtapositions—even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking—that flash through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these? Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the RESPICEM watch hanging from the rear view and seeing the time, 9:17? What are you looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all? The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.
So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.
David Foster Wallace, from Good Old Neon
