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argosy

paul. Sun, 28 July 2002 11:00

My Sister, Niece and Nephew have taken it upon themselves to drive across the country this summer (my brother-in-law has signed on to assorted portions of this summer sized junket).niece and baby gator That desire to put a car on the road and aim it along a cardinal point is a peculiar - I'd like to say uniquely American - trait but it isn't just an American taste. It's pan cultural, like recipes for bread or dough fried in oil; An insight of my brother-in-law Al - we live in a world united not by love of justice beauty or freedom, but by variations of the doughnut. If the motor tour is not uniquely American it does unite many different types of American. Trail-blazing drummers thrashing across the Midwest and west outward from the rail lines in model-T's full of brushes and cheap vacuums in search of the previous generations of wanderer/homesteader now in need of household accessories. The airstream contingent twentieth century sun gleaming off their polished aluminum westering hulls. Ernest Bourgnine at the wheel of the converted Greyhound Motor home, his Boswell of the interstate, Jeff Krulik, in close formation. Jack Keroac, I read that book - borrowed it from a friend who warned me it wasn't as good as it is talked about - I read it anyway. There was some talk about driving, some talk about benzedrine, a lot of talk about other stuff. I can't remember more than that. My Father, saturated with the mid century love of the day trip delivered our family to most places that could be gotten to in a five hour drive from Boston - and that didn't cost anything once you got there.

A cross country trip is a different animal altogether. It takes an singular spontaneity to put small children in a car and set out for America. The thread of spontaneity does not run through the cloth my sister and I were cut from. Mind , I have three sisters, the weave is a similar fabric for all, but different in small telling ways. Ann's and Mine is most near -notwithstanding the purple border on hers. To me this is a beautiful thing, a grand gesture, optimistic, and romantic. Granted A lot of people find reason to drive across the country. Some do it regularly, but in a country of 260 or so million many never do. They don't because the bug never bites, because it never occurs to them that there is anything to see beyond their own little world. That time and opportunity is never right The children too young or too old, but never the right age what ever that could possibly be.

My Grandfather had friends with an airstream trailer, and they drove it around. His dream was to do the same when he retired. He was a methodist preacher and never allowed himself any long vacations, he fixed himself up with a cottage on the Cape in '47, but after twenty summers of buzzard bay idyll the dream of the roads across America burned bright within him. My Grandmother thought it should wait until his retirement. He never made that trip. Something to observe about life generally, maybe. I won't stop it from going there. But the only point I intended to make was one can only understood this culture through direct investigation. Television, books, magazines, movies can only let you know its out there - you've got to go to it, see it, smell it, touch it, to really know anything about it. You may have to invent or borrow a reason to embark on the enterprise and It will probably seem a little artificial or hokey - until you get on the road. Lewis and Clark needed a letter from the President to set off, but it would have required more than that to make them turn back once they were on their way.

Garden. a poem

sailing ship paul. Wed, 24 July 2002 23:45

Garden
Numero deus impare gaudet -Virgil

On the left
in the corner sod - the persistent annual
Hymenocallis Narrcissiflora
newnamed Ismene - holds out holds down
diffident desiccated - truculent timid
by turns - by days breeze blown
in left right twists turn - heft of heavy bulb
held in hand - dropt down again
into dark ground
attached turns towards light
away.
Broad and bending leaves - trimmed into narrow space
protected
shoots encroaching culled
unmoved by surrounding plan or profit
fruit or flower Watchful distant
on single faced stalk
silent

!weblog

bicycle Paul. Sun 14 July 2002 23:59

The subject came up recently -whether it's necessary to read in order to write. The notion I had, unexamined and only partly thought out, was that this meant continuously and concurrently. I affirmed this offhand to the consternation of the person I was speaking with. Who made clear she had read enough, at least for a while. Further reading could only be a distraction to writing she stated. Now I have two advantages in this. The first is that I have never been an English lit major; and so know very little about books and literature. I've read very few books, and I've read them as a tourist in their country when I have. The second is that I work as a clerk in the cataloging dept of a university library where I see many books. Shiny new books with provocative and enticing titles -I see these same books reviewed in the pages of my local big city newspaper on that or the previous weekend. I am endlessly fascinated by books. And I feel that they should all be read. But I could be mistaken.

It's not books I want to talk about right now, but rather web site writing. I read two things a couple of weeks ago which have stuck in my mind. Being somewhat slow witted it usually takes a few weeks or (often) months or years before anything comes of this. The first thing was an article in the current American Journalism Review on Blogging. (Seipp, "Online uprising" 42-47). Oh you want a link you say; you expect a link. Well, bite me junior! I'll let it speak for itself. I've seen it slagged elsewhere and feel no need to do the same, a vague "ballad of a thin man" air hangs about it. But, this can only be the case when one who does not maintain a weblog writes about them. Its strength lies in its summary of the attitudes of professional journalists who do and do not run weblogs. Both over-estimate their virtues while remaining blind to their faults. Weblogs are news aggregators not news gathers, what its 'about' is what people think about the news.

I would rather not always throw up a link vs a citation or footnote simply because I can

I don't run a weblog here. It looks a little like one until you look close, and then you see this is actually a 1997-style home page. Or as I like to think of it - My own personal chapbook. The differences were clarified for me by the other thing I read a column by Meg Hourihan. Meg was part of Pyra Corp. and was a developer of Blogger( see her piece in Boxes and Arrows on this) She knows a few things about the phenomenon of weblogs. Also there's your link to the Siepp piece in the O'Reilly article. Happy now? Megan takes the position that what makes a weblog is the adherence of the many myriad webloggers to a format. A format that is driven by a particular set of technologies leading to a similar result across products in the field. Further, she says that this has produced a new element to the web at large: a move from the page to the post [entry |article] as the essential atomistic particle of web-meaning, and its future object-of analysis. I can't resist pointing out that in Library work -for series and serials, content has been analyzed and controlled (made citeable, retrievable) to article level for forty years now. And at no little intellectual or monetary expense. Her point is taken; though, it's part of the larger content & knowledge management movement. The stylistic properties of weblogs I follow here stylistically.These elements include: chronologically reverse-ordered entries dated to the day hour and minutes, provision for feedback comments returning to the page as subsequent entries. And signally the use of links over citations for content referrals. Underlying these is a technical refinement I can only approximate. Archives running off databases and SQL scripts, and automated assignment of permanent URL's for individual post level content. These innovations lie at the heart of the self referential web. Bloggers wear their links like hearts on their sleeves - or chips on their shoulders. I find myself more attracted to the more ambitious weblog engines that allow e-zine formats to be assembled, essentially compact content management systems. I would rather not always throw up a link vs a citation or footnote simply because I can, when I think it to parenthetic to my theme. I see this tendency also in the transition from weblog to e-zine. My instinct runs more to commenting and examining beyond the simple pointing behavior of many weblogs. And to admit to a world beyond the electronic, or at least prior to it being made electronic by some other party.

I followed punk rock 'zines once: Conflict, killer, Flipside, Maximum RnR, Truly Needy, Factsheet Five, and of course the transcendent 'Op" ( only later - OPtion) magazine. I valued the do-it-yourself ethic, without making a prejudicial virtue of the amateur aesthetic. I equated it to the "little magazines" phenomenon, and I see e-zines in the same way. You write, you post it, you make it readable in its medium. You make observations, you consider properties, aggregate relationships to the bare thing itself, and in so doing you add value to the observed. That is the invitation for others to read what you write.

A voice in my ear ( imagined but sounding much like the voice of my friend whose phone call started this reverie) adds "and if they come back for more a second time; ask 'em for money"

Some changes to the page

program note Paul. Sun, 14 July 2002 13:00

A few minor changes to the look of the front page. Mostly to bring it in line to the way I see it in my mind when I look at it. I've been trying to finish a book, and will return from this pre-occupation to finishing a few pieces for placing here soon.

A Movie Review by my Niece

movies Paul / ("Nicole"). Mon, 01 July 2002 23:00

Movement on other parts of this site~ Which now that I recall, does have other parts, other...unfinished parts. Well, on my Nieces page we have a review of the movie Monsters inc. Which, she actually wrote for me several months ago, but which has only recently (yesterday) come into my hands. It was on their kitchen counter under a weight of papers and what-not so heavy that that counter's molecular structure was compressed to miniture and it is now used as furniture in their dollhouse. True story.

Spiders are Insane

AK47 paul. Sat, 15 June 2002 15:30

Spiders are insane. They are, the jumping ones I mean. They are completely nuts. I have a number of spiders sharing my apartment with me. I tolerate them, particularly the ones around the periphery. No matter how large they are, or how large they get. They eat the ants; they eat the little bugs that eat my clothes. They earn their keep. After a while I start to recognize some of them as individuals. I do not give them names. The little jumping spiders are curious creatures. Territorial and aggressive beyond all reason they will challenge all intentions on their space. One such octpedal fuzzy pretender has set himself up on my magazine table. A sadly dusty surface with a rarely disturbed chessboard set up on it. The other day while reaching for a book on this table. The spider came tearing out from among the chess pieces a small dot of a thing covered in a handsome coat of fine white brown and black hairs. In a few hops he placed himself between me and the book and started a series of faints at my fingers. I noted the light layer of soft gray on the cover of the book. It had lain there for a bit, and it was his now. I reached around and took the book away from the other side. "Spider" descended into a paralaxcysm of indignation and hopped madly about this way and that for a moment. Then he settled down on the corner of the chessboard and stared at me for several minutes. He could see me sitting there about two feet from him. If I moved or shifted he would take tiny steps to keep his body and eyes aimed directly at me. This tiny aggrieved creature, one ten thousandth my size, was willing to take me on in the name of that lost part of his world. Spider psyches, I reflected, have much devoted to a sense of what's theirs and very little dedicated (or cross-wired) to adjudging relative sizes.

Territorial and aggressive beyond all reason they will challenge all intentions on their space.

I was reminded of a similar incident a few months previous I had forgotten. Another jumping spider appeared on my bar of soap which lay in a casement window sill while I was taking a shower. I went to pick up the soap expecting this spider would hop off and return to what ever dark corner it came from. It did not and reared up on its back four legs and waved its front legs at me in a distinctly threatening fashion. I could see its little mouth parts moving. I took another bar of soap from the sink and left the spider to its own devices, marching back and forth across the edge of the soap. Presently as the air steamed up and all surfaces grew moister I could see a faint bit of lather build up around the spiders legs. Gradually, as the spider never stopped moving and reacting to my movements, this built up to a film that engulfed its whole body. I watched this and noted that air does not move through a soap film. If this spider needs air this will not play out well for it. At that point a notion of this sort must have come to the spider which began a number of hops straight up into the air, a little higher each time. These did nothing to dislodge the film from around its body. On the final hop it jumped clear of the bar of soap altogether and landed on its back with its legs extended in the air. I poked it with my finger. It was quite rigid and never moved again.

Sweepers Sweepers man your brooms...

cycling Paul. Mon, 6 May 2002 23:00

NBC ran a show last Wednesday (17 April 02) a slice-of-life piece on the military. Particularly life aboard the Aircraft Carrier John C. Stennis CV 74. It seems to me every five to ten years somebody runs a piece like this - one of the networks, Frontline, Nova, somebody - and I usually watch it. I watch because I lived on one of those things once. It was home for the better part of a year. This time around: though I found it hard to watch. I was surprised by the discomfort I felt and the difficulty I had giving myself to the show. Too many things had changed. Too many things were being remembered, rather than reinforced or causally recollected. It has been a long time, and my life on the ship belongs to a past era by any way of reckoning.
My ship was the USS Ranger. It's being cut up now I believe. Built in 1954 it didnÕt even make it to its fiftieth birthday. The Forrestals' are gone, all of them: Forrestal, Saratoga, Ranger, and Independence. The Stennis is not only some twenty percent bigger with more planes and more bombs, but all the fuels tanks of the nuclear-powered Stennis carry jet-fuel. Oil-burners such as the Ranger could spare the jets less than half it's fuel tanks. In truth the Stennis is probably twice the ship the Forrestals were. I remember seeing four Carriers in a row at North Island (San Diego) once, all veterans of the Vietnam war and past at least one refit. They all looked equally enormous from were I stood. I couldnÕt conceive of anything bigger. Now tin shears and acetylene torches eat away the real matter of a memory.

The way people live aboard those things has changed too. Not so much that all recognition is gone; Everyone still seems to sleep in "Northampton Racks." This is a foot locker with a mattress on the lid, some curtains and a small fluorescent light, stacked three or four high. They are the only space on a ship that is truly yours. There is still the One-MC, the Shipwide intercom. Still, the cycle of bells, one through eight four times a day. There is still setting the ships material condition at dusk. Still Alert 15's, Firepartys etc. Naval vessels impose themselves on their inhabitants thoroughly, without apology and the template varies only slowly. Brokow stuck his head in the division which had been my old unit. The place was bulkhead to bulkhead PC's half of them connected to the internet. We had a water cooled Univac and a punch card loader to program it. A minor difference. Women; though, there were no women on the Ranger. Not while underway at least. Four week, six week, at sea periods, no women. We checked, we asked-specifically, they answered, they said no, apparently there were rules. Those rules have changed. This difference was the hardest to get a feel for. The tremendous artifiality of living and working without women around was never lost on us at the time. It marked the break and exceptionalness of military life for us. It underscored the age and weight of accumulated culture -subculture really. That weight came down upon us and molded us - I can only really speak for myself - to its imprint. Even then women were serving aboard the noncombatants. I remember, during an picnic outing for our task force to Grandee Island (a very lovely little island that sits in the entrance to Subic Bay in the Phillipines), watching some boys and girls together from our assigned oil tanker take hold of their Captain carry him down the beach and toss him in the surf. "This is so very different from the ship we serve on," I observed to my friend Mark (IS3 Edmunds), gesturing towards them with a bottle of San Miguel. "Yes," he replied nodding, "yes it is."

Writing!
cycling Paul. Wed, 10 April 2002 23:30

Writing is generally the last thing I want to do. Its too introspective an undertaking and it takes up too much time, requires too much effort and focus. So I've been casting about for an approach and motivation that speaks to a point of order without a big penalty of energy. Because, after all, there is TV to watch, and hot dogs to microwave. Macaroni and cheese doesn't make itself. I find rambling pointlessly works for me- gets a lot on paper with hardly any cognitive damage at all. Motivation must be pried out of the embedded portions of the day. I was looking at a page in my local paper the other day (02 April). The "Kid's Post" it calls itself. Its the back page of the Washington Posts Style section. The topic of the day was kids and their pets. Some kids got to write little stories, and their pets got their photos in the paper. One youngster held onto her pet and so got herself in the picture. I could use a kid like that as my agent I thought. It's not as though I've ever had anything published in the Post. Sigh, I don't suppose I'd get a reduced rate being her uncle and all.

Writing.
I think it helps if you don't yourself too seriously. Maybe serious helps some folk, I don't know. It puts me in mind of that old Jon Lovitz sketch: ACTING! Writing! behold. Watch how its done. Look up, its the sky. Over there - the horizon. These could be, umm, metaphors, conceivably. Or how about this: blue. Note how suddenly you were put in mind of color maybe even color shaded blue. How is this done, you cry. The answer: writing. Now this. Green. Yes green. Mercy, its just like being in Fenway Park in June it is . By what means is the thing accomplished, you demand dumbfounded. Technology? A certain sympathetic magic? Ancient Ionian Mystery Ceremony? Mirrors perhaps? No not at all. Simply I. I alone. Twas writing is all, that spoke for the lot. Writing!

Hey is this thing still turned on?

cycling Paul. Tue, 09 April 2002 01:04

Well perhaps a little more time has gone by since the last I wrote anything here than I would have liked. Can't trace all the things that might account for that. Wrong background music perhaps. Or an unhelpful habit of continually getting up on the wrong side of the bed. A crumb, unseen not understood, laying across the path larger than any new england glacial-strewn boulder. Only one part in ten broaching the surface; like an iceberg, or a camels nose under the tent flap. Still, a number of things have gotten written in draft or sketched out, at least, in simple text or bare bones edit.

These things were supposed to end up here, but elsewhere also. The elsewhere in question is an as yet nascent Web 'zine being put together by friends. Its intrinsic being tied to a Content Management System - also perched on the edge of being and not yet being. The CMS is to be a commerical product the sales from which will render money they will use to feed their darling innocent child. The 'zine in being will be a house project, a manafestation and a showcase of the CM system. With this in mind, I turned my attention from shorts asides (like this) to several article length notions. Deliberately leaving them unfinished until it was time for them to be on their way so I could send them off reletively fresh and not worked and reworked until there was little left but dry worried dust.

So I balanced these things upon my nose like a midget performing bear in the outer ring of a three ring circus and could think of no way of getting back to my own neglected web page, shabby in its static non dynamicness. (I could throw in some javascripting, you know, just for the heck of it.) When my Niece (age 9) recently mentioned that she could possibly supply me with a review of "Ice Age." I was shamed again into scribbling incomprehensible notes on little tiny pieces of paper. Which, jammed into various pockets, exist not so much as reminders of some point of inspiration as they do a mojo of sorts.

Something new

notes Paul. Mon, 8 Apr 2002 20:30

Replacing the nested tables with CSS elements, can't remember why I didn't do this before. musta been a reason.


Auxilary Name for the Site
Paul. Sat, 10 Nov 2001 14:00

Spent the bulk of the morning on this and haven't accomplished much except to draw the new logo. And so there it is, up top there. Some daisys, a couple of types, and a name "Atomized" which is now the semi-official name for this site. Now all I have to do is fix the URL of this page so that it behaves as the index page for this site. And sprinkle a little dublin core metadata over the whole thing

Those highly stylized daisys of the flower power era always disturbed me. They just seemed so unrelated to anything. Vaugely metaphoric in a plastic kind of way and symbolic in the same degraded signal manner of the larger culture. I spent my childhood in a permanent state of unease unable to fully appreciate the ironic sincerity of 60's pop culture. After that; though, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
"Book 'em Dano; murder one."


Confession
Paul. Fri, 02 Nov 2001 08:00

I cannot respond, definitely, to my own current question quite yet, because, you see, well some of those pieces I might not have gotten all the way through. Plus at the moment for school purposes I am trying to make a particular sense out of Augustine's "City of God". I should have put Augustine's "Confessions" down for the question. At the moment I'm leaning towards Lem's Kris Kelvin. It's leading the list from the "Books I've actually read subset". I'd like throw in an extra teaser on the Billy Childesh thing. Billy Childesh late of thee Mighty Caesars, thee Headcoats, thee Milkshakes etc. etc. etc. a series of lovely rock and roll combos dedicated to the art of the untuned electric guitar. Mr. Childesh has formed an adhoc group to attack/revolt against modern art. "Whats up with that?", I thought to myself as I struggled through layers of cognitive dissonance. Thee Billy Childesh. I don't know whats up there - yet. Which is why I haven't written anything. But I think it may have had something to do with his ex-girlfriend.


A Viewer Response
Robert Zero, Sat, 20 Oct 2001

Narrator= De Selby Expert ~the Third Policeman
comments= Greetings! I vote for the unnamed narrator in Flann O’Brien’s wonderful novel The Third Policeman. All hail Flann! While the narrator is a very odd fellow, and a thief and murderer to boot, everything that he relates to us, he himself believes to be true, and in a sense is true.

I find him sympathetic despite his crime because he only commits it so that he may publish his brilliant scholarly work on the neglected savant, de Selby. You have to feel for the struggling scholar, stuck out there on the farm with the likes of John Divney - the very man who puts our narrator up to the crime in the first place.


A few notes
Paul. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 21:00

Mongoose asks why my list of political affinitys for the first question of the day was so sparse. Well it was not meant to be exhaustive of course and I recognize that in that it violated a main tenant of statistical sampling. It was intended to demonstrate a gentle arc through various scenic way stops of the political spectrum. It did not include Italian fascists true - those people scare me - has the Mongoose every read Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician"? It did not include some personal favorites like the luckless Jacobites, John Brown abolisionists , or the late celebrated clam shell alliance of my sweet home New England. John Brown abolisionist Malcontented ghosts of history all . When dealing with the politicized, of any variety, always draw carefull distinctions between the tree-huggers and the tree-spikers, and between those with reasoned positions on their opinions and those who feed and breathe off their opinions.

His flashing eyes, his foating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honey dew hath fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.

I am; however, toying with the notion of forming a national political party around Aaron MacGruder. Further, at some point we must (as promised) look into whats eating Billy Childish


A Viewer Response
The Mongoose, (at some point between) Sat, 06 Oct and Fri 12 Oct 2001

comments: [in regard to question-of-the-day #1] What about
-Italian Fascist,
-Communitarian,
-Libertarian,
-Menshevik,
-Bolshevik,
etc. ?


World of Flash Sites or White Punks on Dope

Paul Mon 29 July 2001 1039


Followed a link the other day, which I had collected at some point and added to my bookmarks file. It was a link for an artsy craftsy weblog of the Flash afficiando sub-genre (goes by the name Factory 512). I guess I don't get around much, even on the internet. I've seen Flash used in sites but was taken aback by the notion of "flash sites". Here was a man whose site's strongest feature were links to a hundred or more flash inflicted sites. So I took an evening and followed them. Yikes! I come back from beyond to tell to you this tale. The sites while determinedly arty as a point of definition were all over the map otherwise. Literally - sites from every corner of the globe are listed among Factory 512's list of the approved. And stylistically. There are sites hacked out by precocious high schoolers (or their indo european equivilants) as well as sites put up by professional design shops. And all art school and graphic design undergrads in between.

My litmous test for web aesthetic stylings is, first, that it not invoke claustophobia.
I took the clamoring host of impressions I had gathered in a sieve frame and rocked it back and forth, to see what would shake out. Flash. Folks, just because you can make a purty site with lots n' lots of colors. Colors that move and run around like a young republican with a case of cold Mountain Dew in the fridge, and explain it all with a small gray cloud of six point type. That don't mean you should. The easiest way to get a quick feel for the age of person behind a site is the presence of unreadable text in a portfolio. It's wonderful that people got the big monitors to handle large screen resolutions they draw all this stuff up with (and the bandwidth to push all that flash and java up the pipe), but it shouldn't be so easy to spot people who don't give a damn about anyone who doesn't have these things. The person who actually seemed to have given their index page the filename "get_the_f***_out.html" summed up that whole spirit of monocromatic petulance.
The better sites made me wonder why I don't care about art anymore. Layers: transparent, translucent, or opaque; collages and montages. Draw program watercolors, autocad 3D. I forgot myself and took up idly wondering how many different material styles could be evoked by these processes and whether any of it was gaining on a new distinct and recognizable hypertext style beyond just an adobe or macromedia style. For a moment I gave up my antipathy of modern art and was almost persuded to stop the hating, but then I remembered installation art.
At the other end of the spectrum were the sites by simple illustrators of various stripes. I encounterd one that left me with distinct feeling that the creator had owned and listened to at least one Uriah Heep album, perhaps several. May have had the habit of hanging out at the local Spencers Gifts over at the mall, at least before discovering the head shop downtown. Bought or borrowed every issue of Heavy Metal that came out; and not least, lots of acid. The site gave me the feeling of living a life in an unlit catacomb filled with dark and spiky things with no disernable exit. My litmous test for web aesthetic stylings is, first, that it not invoke claustophobia. That site didn't pass. The merely incomprhensible doesn't bother me, and there were a lot of those. I don't have any prejudicing notion that everything has to make sense to me right off. I've got no problem with sites whose imagery seems unrelated to content. I've got no basic problem with unpredictable, unfathomable or even undiscernable widgets. Anti-aliased.com? the second splash page, that multicolored bar? Those are buttons. I'm less fond of site navigation being at the mercy of tourtored java scripting. Heck even that fake Tate Hack had a back button. To be fair it probably wasn't their idea to include it.

Next week potenially unrelated questions: Whats eating Billy Childish? and why has some Garageband called the Insomniacs named a new song after one my favorite pieces of sculpture? Meantime here's another; energy void


Ow ! - can't look - hurts eyes

Paul Mon 15 July 2001 1107


Why yes. It is my ambition for this site to have as many facelifts as a Hollywood 'A' list party. Most of the changes this week are stuctural, the end result of which (next week) will be a slightly simpler cleaner look along lines suggested. My only regret this week is not having written any thing for the log. I'm on vacation this week and am moving at preicisly one seventh normal speed. Which was none too fast to start with.
For now Let me just add a link to this Webzines event in New York City. for next Saturday 21 July. Don't know anything about it, apparently it was held on the west coast in previous years . Sure looks like fun though, too bad I can't go.


Reading Comics has done as much for me as anything else.

Paul Sun 08 July 2001 14:00

Here's an object. An ordinary object, modest by any circumstance. The physical orignal of this particular instantation is just a small piece of card board with a two color print on one side. The image deliniated from line and color fields. is constructed of such a detrmined minimalism as to led one to wonder at the intent of the artist. The parts retreat into the whole leaving simply an object. An impenetrable specific unified whole. Such concreteness may have been related to the artists recorded musings that the densely stylized embedded scarely seperable figure within was a representastion of the child he could imagine being his own. Which could account for its iconographic starkness and isolation. Set through a four panel narrative this hardly changes. And yet any idea must have some potential to be manifest as a physical object so too this figure. Therefore I argue Nancy exists.


Program Note

Paul Sun 08 July 2001 11:59

Main Item today is a sideways link to a CSS layout version of this very page that I put together yesterday. However simple in idea, things like that turn out more complicated in practice. I made a model of the page just to test proof-of-concept. It looked ok, so I copied over all the elements in this page and arranged it in mostly the same colors. Then it didn't look right, it wasn't right and, I spent a great deal of time after that pulling "weeds" to fix things. And using Mac tidy on anything which has been touched by Adobe page mill is bad, those two just can't get along.

Note also that since I haven't been working on the resume bio page my - curriculum moribundus - the repeated paragraph toward the end hasn't been fixed yet.


Program Note

Paul Sun 01 July 2001 22:44

A new day, A new look


Wither Web?

Paul Sat 30 June 2001 23:40

I've seen a number of articles recently- the one by Scott Rosenburg in Salon at the head of the pack. which have been going a round of hand wringing for the World Wide Web if not the internet (a good distinction between the two terms is offered by Jackob Nielsen.) A lot of this to have been brought about by Microsoft's smart tags idea. There is an excellent article over at A List Apart on the technical considerations of this. The sheer hostility, and arrogance of which appears to have escaped the folks at Redmond. Well probably not, the greater context of this story is Microsoft's attempt to turn the web at large into something as proprietary as AOL's interface. This leaves people wondering not about the commercial internet which is clearly heading boldly off into the future, but of the informational web and the collateral damage done to it in the process. Smart tags as Microsoft is clearly dying to use them - across the board, on their browser as well as MS office, generating revenue for MS is as inappropriate and destructive for a "http://www.earthlink com/...here's my kitty.htm" site like mine as it is to a .Org or .Edu site like The Dublin Core project or my libraries main page. The commercial internet is what made the web truly universal I don't mind them, but I don't feel small personal sites, or small commercial sites like friends of mine operate need to be forced by the wayside for the interests of a conglomerating industrial web and their revenue expectations.


G'day

Mon 25 June 2001 1045 EST

Impatience has got the better of me, and I'm putting up these pages unfinished. Sometimes a work-in-progress is more fun with that aspect of having people look over your shoulder. One thing particularly stuck me the other day. Regarding the Term papers I have up here - after all the helpful and - how can I put this - intensive advice and blue pencil work my teachers laid on to these papers. I've gone ahead and just put the original versions up. Well that ain't right. At some point I'll to dig out the paper copies and make corrections. The Biographical essay is continuing, but I've had go out and buy a bigger hammer. The viewer feedback section may work may not - seems to depend on the browser.


A poem

by Paul wed 20 June 2001 2300 est

To Polly Jean Harvey
Shrink wrapped Burton your lieca flex reflex
The waters of your blue Nile your tourists pose
reveal
Gift wrapped Byron rolled up trousers
pegged teddy boy I'm not rid of you
I never wanted to be
{ Seami, Kenko : Gentlemen please
just a roll, a roll on your drum }
three months only in mourning black
Child, rapt attending
fingers brush absently smooth stones, pebbles
questions fallen on hard ground
"three fish for every seed of corn"
Daughter, stay a while walk with me


Light at the end of the tunnel

paul, Wed 20 June 2001 1900

I'm beginning to feel the thrill of anticipation now. My best guess is that at least half of this circus bear is put together now. I even got the blank page for my nine year old niece done. It will be blank until a suitable idea strikes her. Some things - like that and the Biography will simply have to be works in progress

Tom's penny I like this picture reminds me of what its like to get anything done. Forget exactly where i clipped it from, a German gallery's site I think. Its by Tom Otterness, who has done a number of public sculptures in the US.