Technologically Relevant, for once



Oops, way to post consistently and in an intellectually stimulating manner. Go me.

Anyway, I've been paying attention to how I use the internet recently, and man, I'm a bit addicted. Not to blog posting, as you've probably noticed, but to being able to find fairly useless and obscure information easily. A few days ago, for example, I needed to know whether John Irving was dead or alive, how many calories were in a serving of chicken with mushrooms in a red wine sauce, and what color oyster eggs were available in the mega-dorky online turn-based game I play. Seriously, what would I do without the internet?

I'd probably read more of my summer reading books, but that's beyond the point.

Reading books on video art makes me feel really really boring, or at the very least uncultured. When I read about Nam June Paik painting a stripe in ink and tomato juice with his head and tie or Yoko Ono filming just one eye blinking, I have a hard time visualizing how I can express myself in video art. I'm hoping this will come to me. Video art is something new, intimidating, and weird to me. Right now, mostly weird. I guess I don't come from a very high art background, so I need to kind of develop a reference frame in which to appreciate this. Workin' on it.

Speaking of references, I was watching the World Series of Pop Culture, and man, was that awesome. I ended up yelling "Burt Reynolds. BURT REYNOLDS!!" at the screen, which didn't work as well as I hoped. I'm a bit of a sucker for game shows, particularly ones where I know the answer and they don't. (This was not always true in the World Series of Pop Culture, as not all of the questions pertained to SNL Celebrity Jeopardy). It's the interactivity that's appealing, along with the smug satisfaction of being right and the schadenfreude of someone else being wrong. A major tv favorite of mine right now is Project Runway. It's a family thing, tv's always been a family thing in my house, and we judge along with the contestants. I feel only a modicum of guilt at enjoying a reality show, because this features creative people showing their work instead of, say, trading spouses (which was totally a Chapelle's Show sketch parodying the extremity of reality programming before it became a real program. Weird).

I don't usually yell at movies, at least not in the theaters. There's a certain amount of respect one needs to pay to the big screen. After all, the characters are bigger than you are, they could probably eat you. Well, that's not quite it, but in my film class there was a correlation between the size of the images and the viewer's emotional interaction with them. In fact, human faces are closest to life size on a television screen, which probably contributes to the intimacy one associates with television characters, such as the need to yell at them. It makes me wonder how we then react to internet figures. There seems to be an appreciation of simplicity, perhaps due to the simplicity of the technology widely available or trying to communicate with such a small canvas. I give this as an example of simplicity in story telling.

As I said, I don't have too much of a high art background.

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