A Gilded Planet

A few days ago on the way to work, I had a more visceral reaction to literature than I have ever had before. I am currently reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. The reaction was caused by a scene in which the scholars Pelletier and Espinoza (a twentieth century Bouvard and Pécuchet to be sure) attack a Pakistani cab driver in London over an insult. The cabbie had called the two of them pimps and their mutual ex-girlfriend a whore. As best as I can tell, this is actually a quite realistic depiction about how much senseless violence gets started in this world. How crude and how ridiculous. Before the attack happens at the very end of the scene, I had identified quite deeply with the jealousy that Pelletier and Espinoza felt due to the unraveling of their relationship with Liz Norton due to recent events in my own life. I identified even more with Pelletier and Espinoza's self-mockery of their own jealousy. But when the sequence took a turn for the bizarre with the cabbie's untowa...

Last Friday, I went to Oakland Art Murmur and saw a terrific exhibit at Johansson Projects that matches up perfectly with the technomystification I am encountering in my research on time in Victorian Britain. The exhibit was multimedia and included text, imagery and video. Some of the components were styled as old-timey advertisements (or perhaps disclaimers would be the better word) while others were paintings, prints or comic strips. The exhibit's theme explored an imagined historical fear of electricity transforming and bedeviling the human body and spirit. These poorly captured screenshots of the free program that I picked up at the gallery do not begin to do the exhibit justice. It's difficult to describe the curious excitement I felt in viewing the gleeful antiquarian anachronism of the work. I highly recommend checking out Follies of the Digital Arcade . PS - Here's some better images I grabbed from their website:

Art is anything you do with your hands. For example, as a species, we have built so many dams that 50% of all river flow on Earth is regulated by human whims. We have transformed the planet. This is the most grandiose artistic project that has come to fruition in human history. If sculpture is an art, than sculpting the land is an art. If writing is an art, than rewriting the genetic code of the plant kingdom is an art. If painting is an art, than painting the view of our planet from space with a Great Wall is an art. Art is anything you do with your hands. If fixing a motorcycle or performing heart surgery is not artistic, but fixing the narrative structure of a novel-in-progress or performing an avant-garde dance piece is artistic, we do not wish to have anything to do with that idea of art. If fixing a motorcycle or performing heart surgery cannot be artistic, but well-designed representations of such actions can be artistic, there is a serious imbalance of priorities that fetishi...