In the continuation of my personal “street art history” quest, I’ve been spending some time following French street artists, like Invader. His M.O. is — no surprise — invasion…by Atari sprites. Basically, if you’ve ever seen little mosaics of Space Invaders and other 8bit characters posted around a major city near you, you’ve witnessed Invader’s “invasion.” (He counts his installations of little sprites as points and records his tags on maps that you can dig up online. How many points does it take to win an invasion? Don’t know, but looks like he’s already taken over Montpellier…)
Yep…Montpellier is under control of a big blue Invader now.
Anyway, the point of bringing up Invader isn’t to wax about enormous 8bit sprites. It isn’t even to chew over my surprise that he’s never encountered any problems using Space Invader sprites in his work. (Fair use? Not quite.)
Nope, I want to share some of Invader’s other work: rubix cubism.
It’s novel pop art that, like a lot of pop art, just replicates other pop art and icons — but using Rubix cubes. And I think that is awesome.
You can check out the full swath of ‘Vader’s Rubix-8bitified creations here, but if you scroll down, you’ll see a few of my favorites.
Sad times, nerds. This year, we could have had our hands on Kurasawa (Seven Samurai), Tolkein (books 1 & 2 LOTR), some Dr. Seuss, some C.S. Lewis, some Hitchcock (Rear Window!!???), Creature from the Black Lagoon — classic works that all should have been released into the public domain (and thus in the hands of you and me!) … if not for anti-competitive, anti-creative extensions of copyright laws.
Mourning losses to the public domain doesn’t translate as whining about not being able to “steal” or make it big off the work of others. It’s about paying attention to restrictions on cultural dialogue and innovation — for not only are creative works withheld, but scientific and historical documents also — and about making good on the public’s right to access information (the compromise for granting exclusive rights in the first place).
Copyright is by no means “evil,” but it’s crucial that we choose to stay aware and critical regarding its societal role and, at times, its excesses.
Online communication is such an endless form of frustration…especially in relationships. If I’m not knitting my brows over him, it’s over me.
So much can be read into a phrase (taking it too lightly, not paying attention, wrong mood), a silence (read and ignored, hurt, physically hurt (“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”), unread and ignored), a (stupid) emoticon, punctuation, word choice…
Of course, it doesn’t take much reflection on the above to see how not new these problems are — textual (mis?)interpretation is part of the glory and terror of written communication for as long as we bipeds have been able to write. To me, this places more emphasis (or, perhaps some would say “obsession”) on the quality most “unique” to e-communication: timeliness.
Now, assuming that everyone I know reads this blog (hardly a reality), in taking in that last line a good deal of you are rolling your eyes. So, yes: I’ll admit that I myself am not always the most timely correspondent in personal matters…I (like you, I bet) have varying degrees of responsiveness. And I’m willing to raise my bet by saying that we both posses hierarchies of responsiveness – whether created consciously or unconsciously. So, Good Friend Who Will Forgive My Lateness, Friend I Haven’t Spoken To In A While And Feel Awkward About the Silence, Steam Tech Support, MOTHER, and Significant Other all experience my emailitude differently. At the same time, I respond to emails (and lack of emails) from these (and other) groups differently…just as I do for gchats, text messages, FB posts, and so on.
Ideally, this would be the part of the post where I judiciously draw my reflection to a close, perhaps with some grand, reasonable statement about “the Influence of Attachment” that artfully dodged the foaming, owl-eyed creature within me — er, you know, the one who (armed with an hourglass and Oxford comma-counter) can lapse into temporary fixations on the S.O.’s “habits” of written correspondence, denying all reality of communication, character, and quality of the relationship. Unfortunately, the Owl Lady is pretty scrappy, and just as her love for Boyfriend makes mine even stronger, her obsession with Boyfriend’s timing in textual communication makes mine…a little more crazy.
“Crazy” isn’t the right word…but “sensitive” probably is, and that sensitivity is definitely driven by “the Influence of Attachment.” Heck, screw Attachment. We’re talking about Intimacy — intimacy in an age where the delay between thought and conveyance to another person has shrunk to seconds. That’s the power of text and typing, and though that’s not always a great power — “foot in mouth” has a whole new meaning on a Net filled with quick typists and the comfort of Anonymous — the pseudo “open door” access to the mind/heart it creates must impact modern relationships. After all, an expansion of Intimacy bears with it increases of the assumptions and expectations that go along with normal — er, non e-enhanced Intimacy.
I’m sure there’s a larger dialogue to have here about the nuances of these e-expectations and how exactly such “instant” Intimacy would/could/will continue to play into partnerships going forward (perhaps there will be an Intimacy Evolution…or, for you naysayers, an Intimacy Dissolution) – but I’ll leave the matter here for now. With it, I shall also my rest knitted brows, my frustration with non-existent problems, my sensitivity to all the words and non-words lurking between lines, and my fear of the long, dark, quiet of the Tubes. In their places, a song:
I am so inspired by this type of art. It reminds me of a short piece once played on This American Life: an uncle (I believe) documents his niece from age 0 to 10, using sounds of course. It’s brilliant…and, not so secretly, something I hope to emulate with my own future progeny.
(Perhaps this stop motion video, too…although, in the meanwhile, I rather hope someone remixes this piece with audio. A mash-up (possibly blending TAL) is definitely in order…)
Taking the time to troubleshoot my way into my old blog was totally worth it. There’s 90 days between me and the option to undo what I’ve done, but I think I’m down with my decision to DELETE. Plus, I scored some sweet old pictures out of the deal:
an adult stands in little girl shoes
smaller than the tree she long out grew…
a new tree, a new age, a new view –
now both she and her father must look up at the branches,
after staring down upon them for so long
no longer does the girlchild help put the tree up,
the woman comes home to it
stands besides the lights
looks on and clings to her father what is this feeling?
and we watch it together
she, i, and he
because we’re all a part of each other
and the lights shine different colors over those same cheekbones
that same curvy forehead
that can be wrinkled for
planting
and scrunched up against wind
wild and cold
next to city streets
and on mountain tops
under hazy distant sun
just like the old brothers who sowed their
land and gave blood and love and sweat
so that one day we could
walk and talk
and remember them as though we
knew them, stood with them on the battlefield
sat around sacrificial fires
how smoke and fire in our faces
spoke with curve sliding tongues
and actually knew the thing which we (he) desperately
emulate(s)
and instead of searching the treeline for their figures
we would stand among our ancestors
under the trees
in the black
knowing their waters and lands
and this is what he thinks about when
he asks me if i’m embarrassed
about what I did
and she says no
and wonders about it
curled against him
in the yellow of their artifical lights
in the black of new england night
in the warmth of his house,
the one she grew up in,
girlchild running around putting up the stockings
that were already up when the woman came home
– she admires them
without pinching the toes as she once did
and admires her house
instead of raging against it as she once did
and she stands beside her father
and they feel equal under the mass of that new
fake plastic tree
with its candy lights and bare branches
that they plan to fill together
and they turn off the rest of the lights
twist the candles off
flick switches and pull plugs
stand together,
feel settled.
the women bends to unplug
the tree lights
(a different plug than last year)
and the house is taken with darkness.
she is so tired and the black is so warm.
my father turns to her
and touches my back.
we walk up the stairs, parting
into the light of our bedrooms
where we douse our lights separately
and sleep in a house
stained with our footprints
echoing our fantasy
our history
chronicling our pain,
our remembrance
our movement
our progress
with little notches in the walls
and little bookmarks in the chapters of our hearts.
There is a kind of defeat that comes with evening.
A settled silence: when the wind takes my hair back
off of my forehead, it’s like the cool lips of my mother
soothing but with no pretense of solution,
conclusion,
Just, “Hush now. No more to be thought about it for today.”
And so I remain quiet.
**
My senior year of college, I longed to leave My Secret behind
to write one of those beautiful Joan Didion confessions
one of those stick-to-your-ribs memoir pieces
something that would package up my mess so that I could
hand it off to my English professor, sneak it under her desk, Could you watch this for me?
It was the wrong motive to write; like the time in middle school when
I tried to work the awkward slant rhymes of my awkward, awkward poetry
into a story about war.
Got called in to the principal (my ‘pal’!)
– Lauren, are you feeling suicidal?
– Missed the point.
**
What are you supposed to say about the person you used to be?
Or do you say anything?
We often sit in the same room together, looking over the same things
She’s pretty quiet these days, but I remember her younger
– rowdy, asking me all these questions. Did she
look fat
sound stupid
still matter?
Could she
live to 21 (22, 23…)
run away
have a glass of water?
That kind of thing.
I’m not your mother, I’d say.
She was such a whiny bitch: I know, but who else am I supposed to ask?
**
Tonight I’m grateful for the breeze
that carries ash away from skirts and smoke from faces.
I’ve heard so many smokers say that the taste of smoke is really like peanut butter
Which is weird, because the real taste is too ashy hot
to be anything like peanut butter.
But I get what they’re talking about: The aftertaste. The taste aftertaste.
It’s a trick of the mind, I think,
this peanut butter phenomenon.
Another way of justifying burned taste buds, like the way I justify black coffee.
Don’t get me wrong: black coffee is superior
but to enjoy it you have learn to love the flattened feel of your tongue after three sips
The char.
Then, after that, you get the smell of the roast.
It’s something you create, almost out of thin air.
And so, while you sip
you get to think, you can tell yourself,
that black coffee tastes roasted. Not charred.
Peanut butter is comfort food; cigarettes are comfort sticks.
Burn your tongue flat with a cigarette
and let the smoky smells come to you
Then, remember: the picnic sandwiches that stuck to the back of your throat,
younger hands rubbing bloody knees, PB and saltines for the nights
when my stomached locked and the world turned fever black
and I thought that I would never make it to the morning.
Astro Girl
