Backyard Firefighting - California Wildfires

From the LA Times — Firefighters work in the backyard of a home in Stevenson Ranch. (Anne Cusack / LAT / October 29, 2003):

L.A. fire back yard

Wednesday, October 29th, 2003 - 9:19pm | disasters + news photos | Comments (0)

Southern California Wildfires

“See the latest images from the Southern California wildfires, taken by people on the ground with camera phones and digital cameras. The fires are taking property and lives in San Diego and San Bernadino.”

Wednesday, October 29th, 2003 - 12:48pm | disasters | Comments (0)

Yahoo! News Search via RSS

This is cool. Jeremy Zawodny has created a tool for generating Yahoo! RSS feed URLs for specific keywords: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Yahoo! News Search via RSS. Or take this link ride directly to his Yahoo! News Search RSS URL Generator.

Tuesday, October 28th, 2003 - 5:15pm | technobabble | Comments (0)

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

Danny Hillis: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

Tuesday, October 28th, 2003 - 5:07pm | science | Comments (0)

Dave Hickey Interview

Great Dave Hickey interview in zingmagazine #14. Here’s a snippet:

The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the ’50s and the ’60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made — from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late ’60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy — you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the ’60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society — the society of contemporaries.

And more a little later:

The main thing is Americans don’t like art, they won’t pay for art, they don’t deserve art. That’s just a fact. This is a Puritan republic in which nobody gives a shit about art. When I came to the art world, there were maybe 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they got payed or not. Today there are about 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they get paid or not. That’s fine, those 2000 people created Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism in its early days. There have been now for 30 years people working for salaries administering the art world, and what have they done? Art can have public consequences, but it’s not very educational.

I keep challenging people, “Tell me one thing that you’ve learned from art.” It is not an educational activity. But we like education, and we like things that go away. You don’t need to know anything to understand good art.

OK, one last quote before I go / one last cup of words ‘fore I go / to the valley below:

I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning. If we still had to think about a Pollock the way he thought about it, we would hate it. He was crazy, he was an asshole. He thought he was doing Jungian Expression or something. Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that’s very difficult. Works of art don’t have messages. They don’t have determinate meanings. They’re not just formal objects.

Deleuze has a book about Lewis Carroll, The Logic of Sense, which is exactly about the way we perceive and sense things. Lewis Carroll has lines that don’t mean anything, but they have meaning. And that’s how art works. A Pollock doesn’t mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It’s totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don’t know what it meant, I know that the story doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. Artists don’t know what they’re doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.

I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That’s not meant to discount the artist. It’s meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don’t know anyway.

Monday, October 27th, 2003 - 4:03pm | art + criticism + dada | Comments (0)

California Wildfire News Photos

Welcome to scenic Simi Valley, where California wildfires wreak havoc:

burned Simi Valley sign

From an LA Times story:

Socal fire statue

“A statue is about all that is left of one of the homes destroyed in the Skyland Track area near Crestline. About 25 structures were lost in the areas of Skyland, Great View and Arrowhead Highlands.”

Monday, October 27th, 2003 - 10:41am | disasters + news photos | Comments (0)