Snippy

I just lost a post reflecting that I've been a little snippy recently. It's too late to try to repeat it. One thing I will type again is that I hope my snippiness hasn't been reflected in my reference service. No one likes a snippy librarian.

Anyway, everything's still really busy. Now I'm trying to write a paper and give a presentation. Thankfully, the presentation is an extra that I can set aside after tomorrow.

Still on pins and needles. I can't decide if that's helping me keep a certain edge right now or if it's just distracting.

Snippy

With the increased pace of being, I've noticed I've gotten a little bit snippy. Hopefully that hasn't been reflected in answering questions at the reference desk. Nothing worse than a snippy librarian interacting with the public.

There also hasn't been much room for subtlety. In some interactions, I find myself just disgorging information--really, as if I'm vomitting it up. "I can't take the time to formulate a careful, well reasoned answer, so I'm just going to assume you know nothing and spit out the whole explanation without context, metaphor, stopping to see if you're getting it."

Boy, I really hope it didn't come out that way during certain very important career discussions I've had recently.

I'm horribly tired of the campaigns. One advantage for having voted Green, Socialist, and Farm Labor in the last 3 elections is that I was able to wash my hands of the process each time. Now, I see things that can do real damage to real people (who knows where Shrub will invade next) and the level of discourse falling to downright hatefulness (if we let them gays get married, we'll have to demonstrate butt sex in schools).

Oh, and the MoveOn 'Do you feel a draft' ad in campus newspapers this week is just pitiful scare mongering. Which side is complaining about a politics of fear?

I guess we're just not allowed to talk about issues during the last month.

So I guess the conclusion is that if nobody else is being subtle or issuing well crafted arguments recently, why should I?

(Shout outs to boingboing.net this past week for distracting me. I'd make a linky blog, but really--they're saying it all for me.)

Impromptu

Getting ready for a quick trip to New York. It's been incredibly busy with school and work and getting ready for this. A bit of a whirlwind actually.

Events are shaping up to be very exciting over the next month or so. Actually, that's not quite true. They've been very exciting for two weeks already. Now I'm sitting around the house waiting for air traffic to clear around San Fransisco.

Speaking of the house, with both of us in school, our tidiness has fallen dramatically by the wayside. The fur balls are approaching the size of the cat. The darkroom door has remained half painted for a week. Some things have simply been dropped. I can't imagine how it could get much busier.

So it's probably pretty obvious that I am in job interview mode. It's also not much of a secret, so I thought I would go ahead and state it publicly. For as short a time that I've been in this job, I also keep thinking that in almost every other job I've ever held, after two years I have been asked to take on more responsibility and been rewarded for it. I have been going back and forth in my head about whether this is because I have peaked or because I have found my natural niche in the system.

Stay tuned.

Final word on debates

Not that I've talked about them all that much. But I commented to a colleague this morning that it sounded like Bush did pretty well, and I feared that he's going to win. She responded that on TV, he still came off as a jerk.

That said, perhaps this is the best summary available. Well, ok it's not all that good, but this quote is priceless:

More unsettling were the three different personas Bush exhibited during the debate series. There was the stammering, indecisive leader insisting that what America needed was "firm leadership" throughout the first debate. Then there was the folksy, testy Texan who spent most of the town hall debate screaming at the audience ("YOU'LL GET YOUR CANADIAN PRESCRIPTION DRUGS, JUST AS SOON AS WE KNOW THEY'RE SAFE!! NOW FUCK OFF!!") and pandering to their deepest fears. Last night we got the classic "smirking chimp" Bush, who apparently found humor in every question posed to him. At one point he was smirking so much I wondered if the the satellite feed was acting up.

Forgotten NYC nuggets.

I know one of my valued readers' is planning a trip to New York, so I thought I'd mention a couple nuggets that I forgot about New York.

We found out about a play a little too late to attend. The audience meets at a Lower East Side park and are led to an undisclosed theatrical location. During the one man show, a phone call is placed from a random audience member's cell phone to the White House switchboard and all shout in unison: "I'm gonna kill the president!" Federal offense as theater. Yeah!

There is also a bakery in the East Village that specializes in cupcakes. The park across the street from the Magnolia Bakery is filled with happy people eating cupcakes. (I've discovered, while looking for a url, that the bakery was also featured in Sex in the City. The question is: if we had known that beforehand, would we still have gone?)

Throat singing = Tom Waits?

Saw a Khakassian band on Saturday night. Khakass being the oblast to the northwest of Tuva, the ethnic groups being close cousins to one another. It was a trio, two men and a woman. The men would alternate between a mid-range singing voice and the gravely anti-falsetto that serves as the base tone for throat singing. About every third song included a refrain or passage in which the voice would split into multiple tones.

It was haunting. Not just the throat singing, but the music itself. Sometimes you think of Asian music as dissonant or jarring in some other way. Not this. This was downright pleasant.

www.sabjilar.com


That and a nice dinner on Sunday served as this year's anniversary. I remain head of heels smitten, and am looking forward to many more years of joint decision making, cohabitating, and daily sharing of all the little joys that make up marriage.

Morbid and beautifully fascinating.

I think I've seen these before. These dollhouses were made in the 1940s(?) to teach detectives forensics. I'm not sure if these are the first 'serious' photographs taken of them, or if they get revisited periodically.

I'm glad I don't do networking

This story talks about this fall's technology surprise at the University of Texas: students setting up their own hotspots. At first, I thought it was mostly a technology surprise, and interference with the sanctioned wi-fi network. So I imagined students getting their own hotspots and plugging them into their dorm rooms' ethernet jacks. But the ZD story mentions that:

In the University of Texas case, some students signed up for fast cable modem or DSL (digital subscriber line) service instead of using the slower campus wireless network. To defray those costs, they share their connections with other students by setting up private Wi-Fi based networks.

So the real issue is the students are dis-satisfied with the service they're getting from the campus network. Whether it's a problem with the wired or wireless network, I won't speculate. Either way, if campus officials speed up their network, the problem would probably go away.

I remember being at a small school in Seattle where file sharing traffic in the dorms was crushing the rest of campus. At the time I was trying to download a Linux distribution and it was taking several days. The network folks' solution was to throttle the dorm traffic and preserve bandwidth for the 'business' part of campus. It must not have been good enough, because shortly after I left the department divorced itself from the campus IT folks and bought their own bandwidth to share among 35 student workstations.

It was about this time that I learned an axiom of campus computing: No matter how fast we add bandwidth, students will learn new and exciting ways to play games, steal media, and look at porn.

New York Summary

We some some true classics, as well as some great contemporary art during our stay in New York. Here are some highlights:

A dual show at the ICP and the Asia Society (with titular colinicity):
Between Past and Future: new photography from China left us scratching our heads at the wall cards. An obviously digital monumental work was based on the scroll tradition (an all-seeing citic hovers over a number of different scenes all in one image). Another piece on the same scale showed a crowd of humans observing an artfully arranged colony of monkeys in a zoo. The monkeys kept us guessing: is it life or photoshop? The wall cards were no help: nothing was identified as a 'digital image.' The narrative content of this work was so strong that I don’t think it makes a difference. (note: if you visit the site, keep in mind that they picked perhaps the weakest bits of the show(s) to put on the web.)


The Met was showing a big portion of August Sander's ‘German people’ series. It was couched in terms that he was attempting to show examples of every type of person in Germany, ie: he was working out a classification scheme. From the website: “classified into seven groups by social “type”: the Farmer; the Skilled Tradesman; the Woman; Classes and Professions; the Artists; the City; and the Last People.”

Along with this was a small show that showed visual classification thru photo history. Including a sculptor, Karl Blossfeldt, who shot specimins for (if I remember correctly) decorative wrought iron. The wall text called it the ‘typological approach’ to photography. There was also a selection of video discs that contained every scene in Starsky and Hutch, except they were divided by type. There was a disc for come-on lines. A disc for every wide pan. One for every dead body. Every Huggy Bear scene. I’d call it visual classification, but then, I’m a librarian.

We missed Andy Goldsworthy on the roof, because it was raining that day. Some day we’ll see some in real life. (We saw some of his prints at the Berlin Art Expo, but L and I both agreed—the movie was better than the prints.)

L didn’t make it to PS 1 (http://www.ps1.org/exhibits/current.php), but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to head out to Queens. I’ve always wanted to go, but for some reason, previous trips to NYC didn’t include the trip.

Anyway, I actually took notes at PS 1:

Ryan McGinley had some interesting photos of pretty young people nude in nature (the people were pretty and young, not pretty young). I seem to remember a New Yorker article from a few years back that described a ‘new kid on the block’, young, boy, not-so-scary, Nan Goldin-type photographer, but I'm not sure if this is the same person.

Walead Beshty had photos of dead malls and ad hoc performances in stores (on the link, #6 is one of the store performances—the small jpegs don’t do them justice). I think there’s actually a dead mall website somewhere (why yes, there is: http://www.deadmalls.com/)

Mika Rottenberg had a great installation with video of women turning fingernails into maraschino cherries. Says the description:

Israeli artist Mika Rottenberg's work comments on global themes such as cultural identity, economy and bodily perception. For P.S.1, Mika Rottenberg presents Mary’s Cherries, a new site-specific video installation. The video depicts three female wrestlers performing a series of bodily actions in a three-floor factory. Two women on the bottom floor rapidly pedal at a stationary table triggering a UV light that promotes red nail growth. The nail falls through a hole onto the second floor and another laborer massages and rubs it to stimulate its next stage of development. When it finally lands on the bottom floor, the nail metamorphoses into the end product: a maraschino cherry.

That doesn’t really capture the essence of this entertaining installation, which had a creepy vibe of sweatshop factory work, Vietnamese nail salons, and a John Waters film.

Doug Aitkin showed 4 videos simulaneously on 3 screens, with overlapping soundtracks that all worked together. A handball game, a tapdancing aerospace worker, and a company man having a primal scream all blended together seemlessly. Again, you had to be there.

Finally, did I mention I got to see Ken Vandermark? Even better, he was playing with Peter Brotzman. K I C K A S S ! Don't know Ken Vandermark? Read the bio. And note how he slips in the MacArthur 'genius grant' like it's just another Tuesday night at the Empty fucking Bottle.

We will find them, and we will kill them.

I know I'm supposed to be toeing the Demo line, but I have a hard time supporting anyone who says they're going to hunt down criminals and summarily kill them. Very few people have said much about the casualness with which our government now travels overseas and executes foreign nationals. (Hell, we don't say much when we kill Americans abroad.)

So now I've hear both Edwards and Kerry said they'll hunt down and kill terrorists wherever they are. I'm a litle sickened by the macho bullshit being tossed around on both sides of the political equation.

Woostah?

Why does Worcester Massachusetts have an indymedia center and not Eugene? They aren't bigger than we are. (Throw in Springfield and we're bigger.)

Dang.

Bagging

One of my two souvenirs from Holland now allows me to say that I have the most kick-ass bike bag in Eugene. It's a nice addition to my professorial look. L even wanted me to wear my tweed jacket the other day--next thing you know I'll be smoking a pipe.

Anyone know where I can get some elbow patches?

Writing

I've started pulling together the highlights from the trip. I think I'll provide readers with a detailed look at the art--that was, again, the highlight of the tour for me. I'm sure I'll relate some anecdotes along the way, but you'll just have to be patient.

Zining

Saw a nice documentary last night and met three zinesters from Portland. See if you are on their tour itinerary. I spent a few bucks and am already enjoying On Subbing.