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genuine brushes and tubes of acrylics
Wednesday, July 17 2002
Back in the winter when Fandango Matt and I were developing our site parodying quasi-fascistic public displays of patriotism and the increasingly totalitarian impulses of the George OrWell Bush administration, we had no idea how close a simulation our parody was to the genuine thinking of Bush, Ashcroft, Cheney, and their henchmen of secretive crypto-oligarchs. Back then we thought it was hilarious to label a picture of a homeless man going through the garbage with this caption:
Though many of us would never want to be seen rummaging around through the trash, often this is precisely what needs to be done. Here a SNITCH operative, well respected in his community, is donning shabby clothes and blackface to impersonate a minority indigent as he scours for "AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT" napkins inappropriately discarded outside an Arab-operated deli.
But now we learn that there is an actual plan afoot to make one out of every 24 Americans into a secret informant working behind the scenes and phoning in tips of suspicious behavior to a toll-free hotline. These snitches will be plumbers, cable guys, truck drivers, probably pizza boys too. Are you white and college educated and feel you have nothing to worry about? What do you think the chances are that these snitches will only report on Arabs and other darkies? Once a system like this is set up, it's not inconceivable that the federal government would find it useful for all sorts of totalitarian purposes, especially once the Freedom of Information Act is completely dismantled. So the next time the pizza boy or UPS man comes to the door, you might just want to put that bong away (instead of offering the sweating man a little something for the road).
Awhile back one of my readers told me about a new peer-to-peer client called Soulseek, so I downloaded it and have been using it now for about a week. It contains no advertising or spyware, though people who pay a five dollar monthly fee can bypass unpaying people in the queue (an advantage for the impatient). At first I was dubious, since the main thing you want in your peer to peer network of choice is lots and lots of people with lots and lots of files. But I wouldn't be writing about Soulseek right now if I wasn't impressed with it. It turns out that it's actually better for finding extremely obscure music than even Kazaa because it has an important new feature, one I hypothesized a month ago when discussing a theoretical ad hoc peer-to-peer wireless community. This feature is a "wishlist" - you enter some search terms into it and it pops up with an alert the moment it finds a match. Using the wishlist I managed to find and download some missing songs from the one-off band Deconstruction (a fairly obscure Dave Navarro side project which was something of a "living in California soundtrack" for me three years ago - thanks for the exposure, Bathtubgirl).
I've been painting again this week, particularly today. I found a one by three foot piece of masonite down near 6th Avenue this afternoon and somehow I managed to compose a painting that fit within it.
[REDACTED]
Using a computer interface for most of my creativity, I've become accustomed to the glitches, unresponsiveness, and many failures of "what you see is what you get." And then there's the clunky process of drawing with a mouse and having to click on a palette to change mouse behaviors (yet the mouse never actually feels any different). Painting with genuine brushes and tubes of acrylics reminds me of what interfaces used to be about: predictability, responsiveness, and experiment-at-your-own-peril. I've been thinking of ways to map some of the best features of this interface into the world of computers. I think there's a huge potential for revolutionary new creative interfaces, though I don't think the ones we end up adopting will resemble the conductorial interfaces depicted in Minority Report.
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