The Struggle for Relevance

There is a great deal going on, and there is also very little going on, which is a difficult prospect to explain, as the Great Deal and the Very Little are intimately connected in ways that defy the sort of compartmentalization I usually adhere to regarding this space.

My attempts to finish the conditioning of my new apartment into a workable space have gotten log-jammed at the 75-80% mark. I am physically out of places to put anything else away, barring some sort of creative rearrangement; I have thrown out or removed everything I feel like I can throw or remove (which admittedly, is not quite the same thing as everything I CAN throw out or remove, without the “feel like” qualification), and none of the various vague promises made to me by other people about help in handling the remainder have been acted upon, or even mentioned (by them). The vacuum cleaner is well on its way to achieving the status of an art installation, and there is at least one box I fully expect to have to put a seasonable tablecloth and a lamp on.

Thanks to Your Friend Global Warming, it also continues to be muggy and stuffy up here, too far into September for my tastes and regardless of how many of the windows I open. The kitchen, in particular, is always extra hot and extra stuffy; it has a gas stove with whippin’ hot pilot lights, no ventilation fan, and a single window with no screen (despite my having called the superintendent and requested a screen, and his assurance that the screen was on its way and would be installed promptly– about two weeks ago now, I believe.) I can open that window anyway, of course, and do. When I do, I get flies. And mosquitoes, depending on the time of day. I slapped one dead on my arm while Jack and I were going over his spelling homework, reducing its body to a smear of bug guts and my own red blood that was sufficiently nauseating as to require me to get up and go wash.

I did finally label my mailbox, though, with a cursive design I drew with colored pencils. And the couch is useable, if cluttered. And the two plants that Dragonia helped me pot while she visited Sealand are thriving.

Also, I rigged up the (still cable-less) TV and the Wii and the PS2 and the stereo and the CD player AND the tape deck in the bedroom, in one great mash-up of the set-ups I had in Camille and Widow Heathcliff’s places. The arrangement has its advantages and its disadvantages. It allows Jack and I to do all the game playing and movie watching we used to do again, in relative comfort (we can even stream from Netflix to the Wii, via wireless.) And it gets all of that stuff off the same fuse as Eve. But it puts a TV in the bedroom, which I’ve never been fond of, prevents us from connecting Eve to the stereo and running her music through it, and prevents us from playing any of the stereo music anywhere except the bedroom. (Eve’s own speakers didn’t survive the move, and are awaiting replacement.)

I even plugged in the AM radio antenna, which I’ve had in my toolbox for about a decade, and never used. Just because I could. :)

Outside the apartment, I have discovered a previously uncontemplated side effect of living in a building surrounded by oak trees: acorns. Zillions of ’em. They crunch under my feet as I walk down the sidewalk, crunch under Gloria’s tires as I pull her into and out of parking spots, spang off my head and her windshield, falling from above. An entire circus troupe of squirrels, in turn, busies itself collecting them, chasing each other through the lawns and across the pavement merrily. They skitter up the tree trunks, leap through the leaves. They have mostly defied my attempts to snap pictures of them; on days when I have my camera with me, they’re never around, with such unerring precision that I’m pretty sure they’ve got at least one posted at my window as a scout to sound the alarm if he sees me pick the thing up and head for the door. We’ll see.

I also got over to the library and got my library card, which quite frankly, I’m thrilled about. They have an entire CD collection, different and much bigger than the paltry collection Sealand had, ripe for the burning. And wonderful, wonderful books…

Meanwhile: I have finally spent some time staring into the eyes of the demon Facebook, with a mixture of shock and awe. Being as how I’m kind of late to the game, I’m fairly certain I don’t have any big, global observations to make about it that haven’t already been made by other people, thousands of times. I do feel compelled to make the personal observation that looking at it and using it are changing the way I view this space– or at least making me reevaluate it. I read a commentary once (years ago now, it seems like) that claimed that blogging as a whole was in decline, and in the wake of that decline, long-form essay-like blog posts were making a comeback, because all the people who did short, stream-of-consciousness type posts had moved onto social networking mediums like Twitter. To that, I would tack on the addendum that if you’ve got Something to Say, or wish to Display Art, a site like Interregnum may be your best choice– but if you simply want to demonstrate that you have a life, or put yourself out there and get some kind of validation, a virtual pat on the back to reaffirm that somebody gives a crap that you’re there (and I’m certainly not above that), I imagine you’re going to get that a helluva lot faster, more frequently and from far more sources on Facebook than you ever will doing this.

(As a matter of fact, given that you can post photos and artwork on Facebook, just like you can anything else, and the similar organizational, display and commentary features on sites like Photobucket and Flickr, the Display Art argument doesn’t really stand up too well either.)

It also surprises me how much of the moment by moment flow of Facebook consists of people just quoting or pointing to long-form sources, whether it be text, or music, or art, or video, and then commenting on people’s comments on those sources, in this sort of grand hierarchy of derivatives. I’m not sure why; possibly because (again, because of blogging) I have this bizarre expectation that discourse about electronically-available content generally takes place publicly and at the source of that content, and not in a separate super-heated network under its own flag. But then, is that any different from what people are always doing? Friends (real-life friends, not Facebook friends) give each other books they like, talk about TV shows they dig at parties. The difference Facebook makes is just the scale and the speed. Maybe…

The subject of “derivative” content has also been very much on my mind lately in a parallel context, as I discover that I’m spending most of my art time Photoshopping pictures I take of Second Life and Uru, and none drawing. My disenchantment with drawing is not a terribly well-kept secret; it’s something I’ve discussed privately with friends, and also commented on by turns here. When I want to depict laurel leaves in a drawing of a headpiece, and I can Google “laurel leaves” and come up with 10,000 full color photographs of them in the time it would take me to pick up my Cintiq pen and try to remember what they look like, do I need to spend the extra time redrawing them? And will it look better if I do? When I can take a screen capture of a Second Life avatar, patch the penetration issues in the limbs with pieces removed from photographs of real-life models, level it, saturate it, throw in backgrounds with layers and then create depth of field with focus tricks, all with less stress and in less time than it would take to draw a similar composition by hand, and wind up with a piece of art that’s polished and sophisticated, isn’t that a no-brainer? But there’s a different school of thought that argues that it’s not the same order of artistic endeavour, because ultimately I have no ability to create anything new, or from scratch; I have to get all the raw material from other sources. I’m torn about that. I don’t buy it intellectually; the logical conclusion of such an argument is that photography as a whole isn’t an art form, and it is, obviously. It’s also the same argument that occurred over sampling and mixing audio tracks when that first became prevalent. But I have to admit that it resonates with me emotionally. If I ask myself, “Could I get it to look this good relying solely on my own devices?– using nothing except what I can create myself?”, the answer is, “Almost certainly not.” If I ask myself the questions, “How far can I really go with this? Is this ultimately going to expand me or my skills in any meaningful way? Or get me any recognition?” and, “Do I need it to?”, the answers are largely, “I don’t know.” And all of that stings– if I dwell on it. It doesn’t sting so much that it totally prevents me from liking the art I’m making that way, or prevents the art from making me happy. Which is more important today? Or at the scale of a week? Or a month? Or over my entire life?

It all seems like part of the same puzzle somehow: the struggle to define relevance, to figure out in every moment, What Matters.