We were lucky to have a superb substitute for our "Propulsion of Art in a Viral Age" course last week. Gretchen Bennett and friends were off to Miami for Art Basel (have a cocktail and a stroll on the beach for me).
Nate was the art critic for the stranger for years, he's writing for the P-I now if I remember correctly. Here's a sample of his writing, and its back to working for the final push of the semester :)
Assume the Position
A Critic's Unsentimental Education
BY NATE LIPPENS
"What are your credentials?" the gallery owner asks me. He's smiling. He's jocular, but he's also dead serious. Art-world humor--it's a killer. It's my first official art walk as this paper's art reviewer, not an Eames side chair critic, and it feels a little like speed dating: There's a lot of ground to cover and everything has potential. Are you the one? Or you?
It's also the first Thursday without longtime Stranger art critic Emily Hall. And while I had fully expected scrutiny and the second-best feeling of being the replacement cast for a beloved cultural doyenne, I was a little unprepared for the veiled--and just plain naked--hostility directed my way. When I weakly tell the gallery owner that I've written for this paper in every arts section for the last four years, he snaps, "Not good enough." It's played as a joke but it isn't. Then he adds, "Do you even like art?" I'm flustered and I fumble some lame response; I want to get away from him fast.
This interaction comes directly on the heels of another opening reception for a much buzzed-about show during which I met an artist who said, "Don't you write a country music column?" Yes. "What are you going to review--a quilt show?" Fair enough. That's funny.
While the personal reception hasn't been wonderful, what sticks with me at the end of the night is the feeling that I have trespassed into somewhere I don't belong and have been swiftly reminded of my place. The issue of elitism in the Seattle art community is something Emily Hall wrote about--and tried to debunk--in a farewell essay in last week's paper ["The Road of Good Intentions Is Paved with Painted Pigs," July 8]. "I'm so tired of... this insistence that art is somehow out of the common experience," she wrote, "that the pleasures aren't available to everyone." Her impliction is that elitism doesn't exist, that everyone is welcome at galleries. But based on my experience that simply isn't true. There is a mentality and an attitude about art--perhaps stemming from a protectiveness toward it, since it can be so easily dismissed--whose core conceit is exclusion: You don't have the tools to understand this; you shouldn't be here. Elitism has driven me away from the art world several times over the years--in Chicago, in New York, and, yes, in Seattle. (Curiously, in London of all places, I never encountered such starchiness.) And this has been true for many of my friends--smart, credentialed people. It's the real crisis--more than funding, more than education--that plagues contemporary American art.
Before July's First Thursday, I had never existed on any of these people's radars. I see art all the time, but I've usually avoided openings and gone to galleries on weekdays when no one is around and I don't have to be surrounded by the less-charming aspects of the art world. I'm not an artist and I didn't study art history or criticism. I didn't study anything formally. I cobbled together my own art education like a magpie, pulling from many different sources to find my way, and wandering down a lot of dead ends. I read (and still enjoy reading) Lynne Tillman, Peter Schjeldahl, David Rimanelli, Gary Indiana, Roberta Smith, and Holland Cotter--not to mention the inspiring (and inspired) New York School Poets, who brought their chatty abstraction to art writing. My version of an education, whatever its drawbacks, freed me from being stuck in a rigid theoretical rubric. I don't want to be frozen into a stance that dictates my opinions neatly, where expectation always becomes experience. You can turn yourself into little more than a prop plane of other people's ideas by adhering too closely to theory. It's a great (and sometimes helpful) place to visit, but it's too constraining to live there.
But none of that is the point. Or is it? If pedigree is truly what matters, then admit it once and for all that art is not for everyone--that it's for the rich, the blue-chip collectors, the lavishly educated. And stop asking the rest of us to care, to nurture, fund, and support it. If you think we are beneath understanding art, then don't ask us to revere it.
Last week, Hall, quoting art critic Dave Hickey, wrote that art in this town should be more like cocaine and less like penicillin--more intellectually decadent and less curative. And while I agree with her that art shouldn't be a prescriptive, what she didn't mention is that this town is buried in art cocaine. People are paranoid, they talk all the time, and they have nothing to say.
Just observe the strange parade at First Thursday: bobbleheaded girls, yammering on cell phones, in low-slung jeans with dorsal cleavage showing, standing beside a young man in a Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirt from Urban Outfitters, next to someone having an insular, sibilant art-world conversation (artists say meaner things about other artists than any critic ever would). It's glorious and uncomfortable, communal and fractured, with people oohing over work that I think is crap and whizzing by the stuff I think is transfixing.
I love those moments, especially when they pry open the gap between thought and expression, when the work slips the noose of easy description, when it flatters writers by making them think that it needs them to translate, to capture--but it's only a cock tease. Art doesn't need a writer. It does need a viewer. And that's where I will write from: What does it look like? Why am I looking at it? What is it doing and does it succeed?
I've never articulated it this plainly but I suppose this is my mission statement: I want to go out and report back. My allegiance, as it were, is to the reader, to the layperson. Can I really recommend that show? Separate of connections, pedigree, social life--is it good?
Perhaps this is what I should have conveyed to the gallery owner who took so much delight in deciding I was unqualified to think about the work he had on sale: I don't care if you went to Columbia or grew up in a trailer by the Columbia River, I'm interested in the work. I'm very much aware that an artist's background directly influences their work, but it shouldn't be the only thing supporting it. I don't want to have to see the strings. Everything you need to know should be in the work itself.
At the end of First Thursday I'm exhausted, a little wounded but not too much worse for the wear. Art gives way to a complicated experience; it's one of the few things about which we aren't told directly what to think, and that can be intimidating. What's damning--not to mention disheartening--is when you're told you're not allowed to think about it. Art is also, for me, a source of wonder and mystery, and its seductive pull keeps drawing me back to it, elitism be damned.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Review of Bo Bartlett from ArtDish
Bo Bartlett at Winston Wachter Fine Art
Through January 4, 2007
The Bo Bartlett exhibition at Winston Wachter is a winner of an exhibition, and because it contains so many different kinds of work, it gives us a good overview of the artist’s strengths and weaknesses.
Very much on the plus side of the ledger is the way Bartlett’s fierce intelligence, taste, and painterly virtuosity informs nearly every work. There are few, if any, contemporary American artists who can match Bartlett’s ability to conjure people and places in paint, and the inventiveness and energy of his brushwork is a joy to behold. The faces of his sympathetically-observed subjects gaze out at us with a directness and intensity that is at times almost disconcerting. Everywhere we look, there is a dramatically painted, highly aware person staring back. Few of his subjects glance away, or for that matter, glance at each other. They want very badly to gain our attention and to let us in, albeit obliquely, to their secrets.
Equally striking is the sense of place that informs these realistic, but highly stylized images. Bartlett has long been associated with the sort of landscape setting familiar from the works of Andrew Wyeth (a friend and mentor of the artist), particularly the stark, elemental coastline of Maine, conceived as a place where only the jagged pyramid of crashing waves interrupts the cleaving marriage of rocky land, churning water, and featureless sky. Bartlett uses the starkness of this setting to lend drama and weight to the stories of the people he portrays, life-sized, in the foreground. These coastal narratives are iconic, timeless, and freighted with a sense of significance. Though Bartlett paints the world of today, since the early 90s he has allowed barely a glimpse of the familiar artifacts of contemporary life, things like sprawl, billboards, and television, the better to focus on the human subjects that are the center of his interest.
So linked is Bartlett with the primal Northeast that it comes as something of a shock to come across several walls containing modest-sized images of Seattle landmarks, everything from Mt. Rainier to the Space Needle, with the container docks and the headquarters of amazon.com thrown in for good measure. Several of these paintings contain rather anonymous figures – not looking in our direction, for once - but for the most part they serve as a sort of catalog of regional attractions, observed with the fondness and attentiveness of a new arrival. It’s as though Bartlett is trying on the local landscape for size, considering which elements to use in narrative paintings yet to come. He’s also making nice with the local clientele, something we can well forgive him for when the baubles are as luscious as his amazing, molten-paint depiction of the spotlit Smith Tower, or his close-up of a container of Starbucks coffee, lit and rendered with the attention and reverence we associate with depictions of holy relics. It’s your basic $30 thousand-dollar cup of joe, and it’s sold.
Given the importance Bartlett clearly assigns to the niceties of his physical location, which has changed, it’s no surprise that movement, transition, and change looms large as a theme in the show. His companion Betsy – an artist at the same gallery - figures in several of these images, here seen meditating while voyaging on Puget Sound ferries, there accompanying the artist on a highway voyage to the opposite coast.
In this latter painting, entitled The Good Traveler, Bartlett the driver stares directly at us through his side window (rather than at the road ahead) while his companion examines a map. The featureless landscape they pass through is a slice of nowhere, a place to be gotten by on the way to somewhere else. The neutral green-grey palette used for car, clothing, and land is set against the light on Betsy’s face and the vivid blue of several lakes on her map. An incongruous tiara glitters atop her forehead – is she for real? But she’s clearly the focal point of the painting, for it’s she who is engaged in the moment, taking care of business. He’s conflicted about the journey – why isn’t he watching the road? --and we’re led to wonder how far he would get (and where he would go) if he was left to drive alone, which I take to be the point of the painting.
Other large narratives feature beautiful, solitary figures enigmatically meeting our gaze with theirs, or groups of figures lost in their own thoughts. A bus full of everymen and everywomen metaphorically enacts their individual journeys through life; a gorgeous, nearly nude girl with a baby portrays a modern Madonna; two figures lounge on a couch.
If there’s a weakness to these large narrative paintings, it’s clearest in this last image, attractive and competent, but lacking in narrative tension. In his perfectly controlled sense of design and lighting, and his preference for a particular slim, attractive, and preppy physical type, some of Bartlett’s work inadvertently brings to mind the faux-American scenography of fashion advertising, the perfect WASP universe of Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s one of the curses of contemporary art that the line that separates art from fashion can at times seem so fuzzy, and at times Bartlett seems to veer across that line.
Perhaps it’s also my discomfort with this brittle perfection that make me so enamored of the most interesting and provocative painting in the show, the disturbing Au Matin. While the subject of Au Matin is also transition and displacement, this time the transition is ominous in the extreme, and the imagery is skewed, starting to break up.
Here the Maine coastline of the setting may or may not be a figment of someone’s imagination, since cliff, sea, and waves are seen through a mysterious wall, one which fades in and out of view.
Walking towards the edge of this phantom cliff and away from us are three figures – two identical men in overcoats and fedoras holding a woman in a bloodied straightjacket. Equally unsettling is the posture of the three figures, all of whom lean to one side in a highly choreographed, highly stylized manner, further destabilizing the image. The materiality of the paint shifts in a way that makes us doubt the substance of nearly everything, except for the coagulated blobs that depict the burnt out embers of a fire in the foreground, made of the artist’s palette scrapings. It’s a great picture, and an open-ended one, whatever its place in the artists’ ongoing autobiographical saga.
Au Matin is also interesting in that it represents a new direction for the artist, one in which the dreamlike and the surreal plays a larger role. Already at the top of his game technically, Bartlett clearly aspires to more deeply probe the mysteries just beyond the visible surfaces he has so long, and so skillfully, depicted.
Through January 4, 2007
The Bo Bartlett exhibition at Winston Wachter is a winner of an exhibition, and because it contains so many different kinds of work, it gives us a good overview of the artist’s strengths and weaknesses.
Very much on the plus side of the ledger is the way Bartlett’s fierce intelligence, taste, and painterly virtuosity informs nearly every work. There are few, if any, contemporary American artists who can match Bartlett’s ability to conjure people and places in paint, and the inventiveness and energy of his brushwork is a joy to behold. The faces of his sympathetically-observed subjects gaze out at us with a directness and intensity that is at times almost disconcerting. Everywhere we look, there is a dramatically painted, highly aware person staring back. Few of his subjects glance away, or for that matter, glance at each other. They want very badly to gain our attention and to let us in, albeit obliquely, to their secrets.
Equally striking is the sense of place that informs these realistic, but highly stylized images. Bartlett has long been associated with the sort of landscape setting familiar from the works of Andrew Wyeth (a friend and mentor of the artist), particularly the stark, elemental coastline of Maine, conceived as a place where only the jagged pyramid of crashing waves interrupts the cleaving marriage of rocky land, churning water, and featureless sky. Bartlett uses the starkness of this setting to lend drama and weight to the stories of the people he portrays, life-sized, in the foreground. These coastal narratives are iconic, timeless, and freighted with a sense of significance. Though Bartlett paints the world of today, since the early 90s he has allowed barely a glimpse of the familiar artifacts of contemporary life, things like sprawl, billboards, and television, the better to focus on the human subjects that are the center of his interest.
So linked is Bartlett with the primal Northeast that it comes as something of a shock to come across several walls containing modest-sized images of Seattle landmarks, everything from Mt. Rainier to the Space Needle, with the container docks and the headquarters of amazon.com thrown in for good measure. Several of these paintings contain rather anonymous figures – not looking in our direction, for once - but for the most part they serve as a sort of catalog of regional attractions, observed with the fondness and attentiveness of a new arrival. It’s as though Bartlett is trying on the local landscape for size, considering which elements to use in narrative paintings yet to come. He’s also making nice with the local clientele, something we can well forgive him for when the baubles are as luscious as his amazing, molten-paint depiction of the spotlit Smith Tower, or his close-up of a container of Starbucks coffee, lit and rendered with the attention and reverence we associate with depictions of holy relics. It’s your basic $30 thousand-dollar cup of joe, and it’s sold.
Given the importance Bartlett clearly assigns to the niceties of his physical location, which has changed, it’s no surprise that movement, transition, and change looms large as a theme in the show. His companion Betsy – an artist at the same gallery - figures in several of these images, here seen meditating while voyaging on Puget Sound ferries, there accompanying the artist on a highway voyage to the opposite coast.
In this latter painting, entitled The Good Traveler, Bartlett the driver stares directly at us through his side window (rather than at the road ahead) while his companion examines a map. The featureless landscape they pass through is a slice of nowhere, a place to be gotten by on the way to somewhere else. The neutral green-grey palette used for car, clothing, and land is set against the light on Betsy’s face and the vivid blue of several lakes on her map. An incongruous tiara glitters atop her forehead – is she for real? But she’s clearly the focal point of the painting, for it’s she who is engaged in the moment, taking care of business. He’s conflicted about the journey – why isn’t he watching the road? --and we’re led to wonder how far he would get (and where he would go) if he was left to drive alone, which I take to be the point of the painting.
Other large narratives feature beautiful, solitary figures enigmatically meeting our gaze with theirs, or groups of figures lost in their own thoughts. A bus full of everymen and everywomen metaphorically enacts their individual journeys through life; a gorgeous, nearly nude girl with a baby portrays a modern Madonna; two figures lounge on a couch.
If there’s a weakness to these large narrative paintings, it’s clearest in this last image, attractive and competent, but lacking in narrative tension. In his perfectly controlled sense of design and lighting, and his preference for a particular slim, attractive, and preppy physical type, some of Bartlett’s work inadvertently brings to mind the faux-American scenography of fashion advertising, the perfect WASP universe of Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s one of the curses of contemporary art that the line that separates art from fashion can at times seem so fuzzy, and at times Bartlett seems to veer across that line.
Perhaps it’s also my discomfort with this brittle perfection that make me so enamored of the most interesting and provocative painting in the show, the disturbing Au Matin. While the subject of Au Matin is also transition and displacement, this time the transition is ominous in the extreme, and the imagery is skewed, starting to break up.
Here the Maine coastline of the setting may or may not be a figment of someone’s imagination, since cliff, sea, and waves are seen through a mysterious wall, one which fades in and out of view.
Walking towards the edge of this phantom cliff and away from us are three figures – two identical men in overcoats and fedoras holding a woman in a bloodied straightjacket. Equally unsettling is the posture of the three figures, all of whom lean to one side in a highly choreographed, highly stylized manner, further destabilizing the image. The materiality of the paint shifts in a way that makes us doubt the substance of nearly everything, except for the coagulated blobs that depict the burnt out embers of a fire in the foreground, made of the artist’s palette scrapings. It’s a great picture, and an open-ended one, whatever its place in the artists’ ongoing autobiographical saga.
Au Matin is also interesting in that it represents a new direction for the artist, one in which the dreamlike and the surreal plays a larger role. Already at the top of his game technically, Bartlett clearly aspires to more deeply probe the mysteries just beyond the visible surfaces he has so long, and so skillfully, depicted.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Masi Oka: Coder, Actor, Hero
Masi Oka: Coder, Actor, Hero
Millions of viewers of NBC's Heroes know actor Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, the bored young Japanese office worker who discovers he has the power to alter time and teleport. What they probably don't know is that he's been working behind the scenes for years as one of Industrial Light & Magic's top programmers.
In an ensemble cast that features solid acting all around, Oka steals the show every time he's on the screen. The show literally has his Hiro living out the exploits of his own comic book, 9th Wonders.
Since graduating from Brown University in 1997, Oka has worked on more than 30 big-budget Hollywood films at ILM. During that time he has written more than 20 programs and 100 plug-ins for the leading special-effects house. While audiences might not have known his name or face until Heroes, they've seen his programming magic on the big screen in films like The Perfect Storm, Star Wars: Episode II, Terminator 3 and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
"I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college," said Oka. "ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence."
Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.
"It was also a way for upper management to determine how much drive we had," said Oka. "If we wanted to, we could always start our own projects."
After a year and a half of training, which included some work on Star Wars: Episode I and Rocky and Bullwinkle, Oka got his first big "show" with The Perfect Storm. He worked with John Anderson to create the computer-generated water effects for the film. All of the water effects in that film, as well as water effects in more recent films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, were the result of code written by Oka.
"That allowed me to get my name out in the ILM community and people wanted me to do a lot of particle work, fluid stuff and modeling for different shows," said Oka. "I became more of a firefighter, going around from show to show doing short-term work as a hired gun to solve problems on a very quick basis."
A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.
"The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated," said Oka. "I would simulate viscosity or advection, things that are specific to the way water moves. We'd do a cheap simulated effect for these movements and they were used for things like the spray and wakes in The Perfect Storm."
Oka managed to get his Screen Actors Guild card by performing in a few industrial videos. After working on The Perfect Storm for nearly two full years, Oka moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in 2001. He appeared in a number of TV shows (Scrubs, Reba, Without a Trace) and films (Along Came Polly, Legally Blonde 2, House of the Dead 2) before Heroes thrust him into the spotlight.
Working remotely from ILM's Los Angeles studio, Oka has remained active with movie effects, although now he's limited to one or two days of ILM work a week because of his production schedule.
"I love both acting and programming equally," said Oka, who enjoys challenging both sides of his brain. "I think it enriches me and enhances me as an artist. I have a lot of appreciation for what people do in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. I don't think I could like one without the other. Eventually, I think the road will lead me down to producing or directing, because it's more about problem solving."
Should Heroes' early success continue for NBC, Oka said he would love to be able to direct an episode in season three or four and bring all of his ILM cronies in to help out.
"I'd make use of my employee discount -- buy two effects and get one free," joked Oka.
Millions of viewers of NBC's Heroes know actor Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, the bored young Japanese office worker who discovers he has the power to alter time and teleport. What they probably don't know is that he's been working behind the scenes for years as one of Industrial Light & Magic's top programmers.
In an ensemble cast that features solid acting all around, Oka steals the show every time he's on the screen. The show literally has his Hiro living out the exploits of his own comic book, 9th Wonders.
Since graduating from Brown University in 1997, Oka has worked on more than 30 big-budget Hollywood films at ILM. During that time he has written more than 20 programs and 100 plug-ins for the leading special-effects house. While audiences might not have known his name or face until Heroes, they've seen his programming magic on the big screen in films like The Perfect Storm, Star Wars: Episode II, Terminator 3 and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
"I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college," said Oka. "ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence."
Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.
"It was also a way for upper management to determine how much drive we had," said Oka. "If we wanted to, we could always start our own projects."
After a year and a half of training, which included some work on Star Wars: Episode I and Rocky and Bullwinkle, Oka got his first big "show" with The Perfect Storm. He worked with John Anderson to create the computer-generated water effects for the film. All of the water effects in that film, as well as water effects in more recent films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, were the result of code written by Oka.
"That allowed me to get my name out in the ILM community and people wanted me to do a lot of particle work, fluid stuff and modeling for different shows," said Oka. "I became more of a firefighter, going around from show to show doing short-term work as a hired gun to solve problems on a very quick basis."
A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.
"The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated," said Oka. "I would simulate viscosity or advection, things that are specific to the way water moves. We'd do a cheap simulated effect for these movements and they were used for things like the spray and wakes in The Perfect Storm."
Oka managed to get his Screen Actors Guild card by performing in a few industrial videos. After working on The Perfect Storm for nearly two full years, Oka moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in 2001. He appeared in a number of TV shows (Scrubs, Reba, Without a Trace) and films (Along Came Polly, Legally Blonde 2, House of the Dead 2) before Heroes thrust him into the spotlight.
Working remotely from ILM's Los Angeles studio, Oka has remained active with movie effects, although now he's limited to one or two days of ILM work a week because of his production schedule.
"I love both acting and programming equally," said Oka, who enjoys challenging both sides of his brain. "I think it enriches me and enhances me as an artist. I have a lot of appreciation for what people do in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. I don't think I could like one without the other. Eventually, I think the road will lead me down to producing or directing, because it's more about problem solving."
Should Heroes' early success continue for NBC, Oka said he would love to be able to direct an episode in season three or four and bring all of his ILM cronies in to help out.
"I'd make use of my employee discount -- buy two effects and get one free," joked Oka.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
AHHTV
WASHINGTON, DC—The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-1 Monday to require electronics manufacturers to make all television sets ADHD-compatible within two years.
To adhere to the guidelines, every program, with the exception of The Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi Show, will have to be sped up to meet the new standard frame rate of 120 frames per second.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin characterized the move as "a natural, forward-thinking response to the changing needs of the average American viewer."
"In the media-saturated climate of the modern age, few have the time and energy to sit still for an entire episode of King Of Queens," Martin said. "Although the FCC will leave it up to the television networks to make the necessary programming changes, we are recommending, in accordance with the ADHDTV standard, that all shows be no more than six minutes in length, and that they contain jarring and unpredictable camera cuts to shiny props and detailed background sets."
"We're also advising that intra-episode recaps occur every 45 seconds," he added.
The ruling represents a growing shift toward ADHDTV, a television format designed to meet the needs of an increasingly inattentive and hyperactive audience. The tuner includes a built-in device that automatically changes channels after three minutes of uninterrupted single-station viewing, as well as a picture-in-picture-in-picture-in-picture option.
According to Sony, the leading manufacturer of the ADHD-compatible sets, the new technology will allow viewers to play up to three simultaneous video games while watching television.
"Many of our ADHDTVs will come with a motorized base," Sony spokesperson Richard O'Dell said. "In the event that the viewer turns his attention away from the television, it will begin to rotate and emit sirens and piercing shrieks."
The mandate to conform to the new format has already been met with some resistance, particularly from movie channels like HBO, live programs such as ABC's Monday Night Football, and the History Channel, whose ambitious five-part, 10-hour historical documentary about World War II, slated for completion in late 2007, will have to be shortened to a six-minute montage of the war set to a medley of Ashlee Simpson hits.
Some networks, however, are embracing the change.
"A majority of our shows are only watchable for a few minutes at a time anyway," said Fox president Peter Liguori, whose recently unveiled fall 2007 TV schedule includes over 850 new series. "We're going to roll out an exciting lineup of major sporting-event highlights, late-night yell shows, and a brand-new season of The O.C. that will feature 37 new characters and—well, I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say it will have a lot more guys jumping up and down, saying, 'Hey! Hey! Look over here!'"
On standard 4:3 televisions, ADHDTV programs will be shown in letterbox format, with the top and bottom of the screen alternately filled with bright, flittering butterflies, undulating rainbow-colored patterns, and singing hamsters in top hats.
Skeptics say the switch to ADHDTV will likely be delayed in favor of other projects or even completely forgotten by next week. However, the FDA is fast-tracking approval of the new drug Entertainalin, developed in anticipation of the modified programming. In clinical trials, the drug has been effective in helping viewers concentrate not only on the new TV format, but also on their immediate surroundings, the couch fabric, a dog passing by the window, and pieces of lint floating in the air.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
How to avoid nightmares
Great attention is to be paid to regularity and choice of diet. Intemperance of every kind is hurtful, but nothing is more productive of this disease than drinking bad wine. Of eatables those which are most prejudicial are all fat and greasy meats and pastry. These ought to be avoided, or eaten with caution. The same may be said of salt meats, for which dyspeptic patients have frequently a remarkable predilection, but which are not on that account the less unsuitable.
Moderate exercise contributes in a superior degree to promote the digestion of food and prevent flatulence; those, however, who are necessarily confined to a sedentary occupation, should particularly avoid applying themselves to study or bodily labor immediately after eating. If a strong propensity to sleep should occur after dinner, it will be certainly bettor to indulge it a little, as the process of digestion frequently goes on much better during sleep than when awake.
Going to bed before the usual hour is a frequent cause of night-mare, as it either occasions the patient to sleep too long or to lie long awake in the night. Passing a whole night or part of a night without rest likewise gives birth to the disease, as it occasions the patient, on the succeeding night, to sleep too soundly. Indulging in sleep too late in the morning, is an almost certain method to bring on the paroxysm, and the more frequently it returns, the greater strength it acquires; the propensity to sleep at this time is almost irresistible. Those who are habitually subject to attacks of the night-mare ought never to sleep alone, but should have some person near them, so as to be immediately awakened by their groans and struggles, and the person to whom this office may be entrusted should be instructed to rouse the patient as early as possible, that the paroxysm may not have time to gain strength.
Moderate exercise contributes in a superior degree to promote the digestion of food and prevent flatulence; those, however, who are necessarily confined to a sedentary occupation, should particularly avoid applying themselves to study or bodily labor immediately after eating. If a strong propensity to sleep should occur after dinner, it will be certainly bettor to indulge it a little, as the process of digestion frequently goes on much better during sleep than when awake.
Going to bed before the usual hour is a frequent cause of night-mare, as it either occasions the patient to sleep too long or to lie long awake in the night. Passing a whole night or part of a night without rest likewise gives birth to the disease, as it occasions the patient, on the succeeding night, to sleep too soundly. Indulging in sleep too late in the morning, is an almost certain method to bring on the paroxysm, and the more frequently it returns, the greater strength it acquires; the propensity to sleep at this time is almost irresistible. Those who are habitually subject to attacks of the night-mare ought never to sleep alone, but should have some person near them, so as to be immediately awakened by their groans and struggles, and the person to whom this office may be entrusted should be instructed to rouse the patient as early as possible, that the paroxysm may not have time to gain strength.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Images of delight
Images of delight
This morning Antoinette Ledzian of Stonington, CT wrote:
"Digital art has been my savior. Moments which might have been
blurred have turned into transformational pieces through my use
of Photoshop. I love the instant processing, the ability to
rework my images and go right onto another piece. I could never
do this when I practiced calligraphy or painted. Possibly I've
finally found my medium. What's happening?"
Thanks, Antoinette. It's an epidemic. Creative folks of all
stripes find the making of digital art to be almost
irresistible. Brilliant software--on a constant arc of
improvement--permits ever more speedy and imaginative
manipulation. Through portals like Flickr, images are posted
and feedback is immediate. Communities are born and people are
empowered. Instant gratification is the order of the day.
Worldwide, more than a thousand new images are currently being
posted every second. Like poetry in the last century, more is
being made than seen. And like poetry, the making of it is
absorbing, challenging, life enhancing, and full of beautiful
"aha" epiphanies. Digital manipulation is probably the fastest
way to cross-breed motifs and ideas. Everyone who tries it can
see that it's a creative tool like no other. To get an idea of
current and cutting edge digital art, I've asked Andrew to put
up a collection at the top of the current clickback. See URL
below.
And yep, digital has its problems. While holding out the hand
of democratization to all who would participate, like
photography itself, it also runs counter to the role of art as
commodity--digital is difficult to make rare. Its facile nature
and general proliferation tend to render it less valuable.
Those who would commercialize digital are faced with the
question of what to do with it. Posters, art-cards, gallery
sales, even pay-per-view on the Internet have so far shown only
faint success.
For us, digital is a celebration of looking and seeing, of
delight in what nature has given--and what the human creator
can do with what is seen. Its champions and masters are now
appearing. Digital is a welcome force for human exchange and
universal understanding--a sort of instant handshake that helps
to make real our essential brotherhood and sisterhood.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "A computer is an interface where the mind and body can
connect with the universe and move bits of it about." (Douglas
Adams, 1952-2001)
Esoterica: In Leonardo's time there were few artists and those
few made magic that the wise and privileged desired. Today the
wise and privileged make magic for themselves. We can still
make our mark with brush and canvas, or chisel and stone--but
we are also blessed with the grace of a higher technology. In
the words of Daniel Bell, "Technology, like art, is a soaring
exercise of the human imagination." Can it be that this
technology is a window to a brighter future? "The new
electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of
a global village." (Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980)
This morning Antoinette Ledzian of Stonington, CT wrote:
"Digital art has been my savior. Moments which might have been
blurred have turned into transformational pieces through my use
of Photoshop. I love the instant processing, the ability to
rework my images and go right onto another piece. I could never
do this when I practiced calligraphy or painted. Possibly I've
finally found my medium. What's happening?"
Thanks, Antoinette. It's an epidemic. Creative folks of all
stripes find the making of digital art to be almost
irresistible. Brilliant software--on a constant arc of
improvement--permits ever more speedy and imaginative
manipulation. Through portals like Flickr, images are posted
and feedback is immediate. Communities are born and people are
empowered. Instant gratification is the order of the day.
Worldwide, more than a thousand new images are currently being
posted every second. Like poetry in the last century, more is
being made than seen. And like poetry, the making of it is
absorbing, challenging, life enhancing, and full of beautiful
"aha" epiphanies. Digital manipulation is probably the fastest
way to cross-breed motifs and ideas. Everyone who tries it can
see that it's a creative tool like no other. To get an idea of
current and cutting edge digital art, I've asked Andrew to put
up a collection at the top of the current clickback. See URL
below.
And yep, digital has its problems. While holding out the hand
of democratization to all who would participate, like
photography itself, it also runs counter to the role of art as
commodity--digital is difficult to make rare. Its facile nature
and general proliferation tend to render it less valuable.
Those who would commercialize digital are faced with the
question of what to do with it. Posters, art-cards, gallery
sales, even pay-per-view on the Internet have so far shown only
faint success.
For us, digital is a celebration of looking and seeing, of
delight in what nature has given--and what the human creator
can do with what is seen. Its champions and masters are now
appearing. Digital is a welcome force for human exchange and
universal understanding--a sort of instant handshake that helps
to make real our essential brotherhood and sisterhood.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "A computer is an interface where the mind and body can
connect with the universe and move bits of it about." (Douglas
Adams, 1952-2001)
Esoterica: In Leonardo's time there were few artists and those
few made magic that the wise and privileged desired. Today the
wise and privileged make magic for themselves. We can still
make our mark with brush and canvas, or chisel and stone--but
we are also blessed with the grace of a higher technology. In
the words of Daniel Bell, "Technology, like art, is a soaring
exercise of the human imagination." Can it be that this
technology is a window to a brighter future? "The new
electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of
a global village." (Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980)
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