Wouldn’t this be a great name for a last-people-on-earth Apocalypse film? After a nuclear holocaust has wiped out most of the world’s population, only two small bands of freakish circus performers are left to determine the fate of the world. It’s clowns vs. mimes. I’d pay to see that on the big screen.
My post has nothing to do with Twitter, although I have wondered if Melville would have been able to write Moby Dick if Twitter had been around. You certainly don’t write a tome like that without a healthy attention span.
My thoughts after having read the first six chapters of Moby Dick:
I have too many Web sites. Okay. There, I’ve said it. That, and I’ve been spending wasting too much time on Twitter trying to build a “readership,” so I can then point people to my sites whenever I post something new. This strategy, however, becomes a problem when you don’t write anything new to point at. (Not to mention the fact that a goodly number of Twitterers–if not a majority–are more interested in talking about how great Twitter is than having an intellectually stimulating discussion.) I have an excuse for being unprolific (Don’t bother looking that word up–it doesn’t exist) this past week. My wife and I drove up to Redwood City when we thought her sister had gone into labor. (She hadn’t.) We left South Pasadena after midnight on Tuesday morning and got in around six, which effectively meant that I spent the last three days walking around in a sort of waking dream, somewhere in the gray area between lucidity and REM sleep.
In other news, I’ve started reading Moby Dick. I thought about committing to post a response after each new chapter I read. But this guy seems to have that base covered. Besides writing insightful responses and crafting cerebral songs in response to each chapter of the book, he was also mentioned in the New York Times. I think I could definitely best him in the musicianship category, though. Not that it’s a contest or anything. Now, to sharpen my spear…
Sometimes tumbleweeds carry the seeds of roses.
I just made that up.
As much as I appreciate and enjoy art, there are times when I walk perfunctorily through a museum or exhibit and leave without having had any new thoughts, feelings or inspirations. Perhaps this is due more to laziness on my part than anything else. However, there are other times when I leave a museum having been touched by a piece or an exhibit and carry it with me long afterward. One such installation is Mineko Grimmer’s Remembering Plato, which I saw at the Menil Collection in Houston in either 2001 or 2002. Two upside-down cones of ice, embedded with small stones and pebbles, hung above two wooden boxes full of water. If I remember correctly, one box had a piano string pulled across the top of it, and the other box had a brass bar that ran across its top. As the ice melted, every minute or so a pebble would drop from above into the water below. Lights inside above the box were angled so that the shadows of the water were projected on the wall next to the box; the gently moving water rippled across the wall, and you could see the disturbance when a new pebble entered the water. Occasionally, a pebble would strike the piano string or brass bar, creating a plunky sound that reverberated through the darkened room. (There was an unspoken understanding among everyone who entered the room that it should remain quiet.) The installation was a relatively simple, low-tech setup, and yet I cannot think of another piece of art that has ever created such a distinct sense of space for me. It seemed as though even the rules of time were being bent as I sat on a wooden bench next to the installation.
Here is a picture of the installation from absolutearts.com:
Remembering Plato