Shooting Wide Open

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Another handful of songs.

1. Neil Young – “Guitar Solo I” from the Dead Man soundtrack
2. Nico Muhly – “The Only Tune I: The Two Sisters”
2. Nico Muhly – “The Only Tune II: The Old Mill Pond”
2. Nico Muhly – “The Only Tune III: The Only Tune”
3. Faun Fables – “House Carpenter”

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

- Steve Jobs

A hilariously brilliant idea – film an entire episodic mini soap opera inside an IKEA store, where there are sets galore and plenty of props, under the noses of the employees.

Who knew Justin Bieber could be so damn… peaceful? Today is the day you begin to associate the words “Justin Bieber” and “new age.”

(Thanks Mike!)

Mammals need attention, but only humans need acknowledgement – they need to be recognized.

Everyone’s famous in the tribe. By tribe I mean small scale face-to-face communities where you don’t know anybody else, cuz there’s nobody else to know. You have to think of the evolution of the development of media of all kinds in larger scale societies as taking the fame, the acknowledgement, that used to be everybody’s and reassigning it to only a few people.

Attention is a scarce resource and in a mediated society like this one, it’s getting scarcer and scarcer. Everywhere there’s competition for attention. When you think about fans, what those people are really doing is pursuing themselves, celebrating themselves, paying attention to themselves through the ways in which they pay attention to the celebrities that they really care about, the movies they really like, popular music. Why are performers heroes and not statesmen and scientist? Cuz when I first heard Bob Dylan, I went, “that’s me!”

Thomas de Zongotita in Teenage Paparazzo

Well, it ended up in my hands, so too bad for S/L/J/F/Toh…

”I guess you have to take a lot of risks to be famous in any field,” [Damian] said, and then, turning around to look at me, she added: “For instance, to be an artist.”

She was being so serious, but it was just like a bad movie. I love bad movies. I was starting to remember why I liked Damian.

I guestured toward the gift-wrapped salami that was sticking out of my Pan Am flight bag and said, “Any time you slice a salami, you take a risk.”

“No, but I mean for an artist-”

“An artist!!” I interrupted. “What do you mean, an ‘artist’? An artist can slice a salami, too! Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.”

Damian wouldn’t let me disillusion her. Some people have deep-rooted long-standing art fantasies… “But to become a famous artist you had to do something that was ‘different.’ And if it was ‘different,’ then it means you took a risk, because the critics could have said that it was bad instead of good.”

“In the first place,” I said, “they usually did say it was bad. And in the second place, if you say that artists take ‘risks,’ it’s insulting to the men who landed on D-Day, to stunt men, to baby-sitters, to Evel Knievel, to stepdaughters, to coal miners, and to hitch-hikers, because they’re the ones who really know what ‘risks’ are.” She didn’t even hear me, she was still thinking about what glamorous “risks” artists take.

If you haven’t read The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, you are missing a heck of a lot of hilarity. His writing style is so simple and earnest that it reads either as an endearing and funny confession by a quirky personality or are pissed off by the obvious tongue-in-cheek put-on. Maybe people who knew him would be able to read his tone more clearly, but personally I think it’s better not to know whether he’s celebrating mass produced culture or criticizing it. It’s interesting that he’s cited by both sides – I’ve heard serious art historians mention him, as well as fashionistas. You gotta love that. It’s the sort of thing people into which people read what they will.

For some reason he reminds me of Richard Brautigan. Can you like “Winter Sunset”* without liking The Philosophy of Andy Warhol? (Please perform empirical tests.)

Speaking of poetry, in The Anthologist Nicholson Baker brings up an interesting point: why is prose separated into non-fiction and fiction while poetry is not? The answer seems obvious, but still, the division is instructive. Clump paintings and music in with poetry, and film and photography with prose. Maybe in all cases the division is more ambiguous than our classifications suggest, but that we make the distinction about some media and not others indicates the different ways we ingest and perceive these media.

And back again to photography.

*
Winter Sunset

A slash of scarlet
On the black hair
Of a wounded bear.

Now is the time. The time to get rid of real singers in favor of holographic projections. Of course this has to happen in Japan… We can only hope that motivational speakers and politicians are next. Maybe even CEOs.

I just had to post this after I saw android actors on Conscientious Redux