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may 8 2022
recently i have been trying to get a job. i just forgot that i was writing this (to apply for a job). i remember listening to the people that i knew who graduated from college last year and thinking that this state of almost having a job was very glamorous, and i felt mostly jealous because they were free to do or not do anything and i was not free to do nothing. but now that i find myself in the same situation, i think i misunderstood last year.
to be fair, dan has been a big help in this arena. he has been pushing me to work in tech. i think i could be very glamorous as an underling in a big tech company. i think that would be very uncanny valley of me (in a good way). but i’ve also been wondering about what it might mean to work somewhere that i find really gross and not really aligned with my personal ways of thinking. well what i mean is that there are a lot of workplaces in the digital art + new tech industry that are really corny and i really don’t agree with. even NFTs in general. i really don’t believe in the lasting value of NFTs. maybe i shouldn’t commit that to word. but it’s true right now. and so i wonder why i am applying to jobs where the entire thing that they do is like, sell different layers of a photoshop picture. like you can own the background color to the mona lisa and change it pink if you want, that’s the idea. i really don’t believe in that.
i’ve been reading a novel again, which is good. i stopped reading novels for a long time. i’ve also been reading a lot of articles to avoid reading the articles that i actually do need to read. i’ve been reading articles and watching films about the state of the digital world. it’s strange because even though my thesis is over and completed, i still feel compelled to add things to my little document where i think about everything like that. i’ve also been going on the treadmill again, and wearing little t-shirts while i go on the treadmill again. that’s nice.
jack sent me this article about the egyptian revolution, which i thought was really cool. i’m also halfway through this article about how novelists are responding to the digital age, and it has made me a little bit angry. i think a lot of people in the humanities tend to deal with our shifting environment by denying that the internet is heavy, that it will have lasting effects that will sometimes make people’s jobs obsolete, maybe. i also think that things that try to tweet-ify prose are super cringe. to be fair, i haven’t read no one is talking about this, but i really don’t care to… i like to read novels that are novels and tweets that are tweets. maybe that’s a luddite way of thinking. i don’t know i think in terms of contemporary fiction, this tweet gets it right– i’m not sure we can digitize the novel, but i do think that the internet can live in novels and people will still read them. but maybe the publishing world just won’t be as sexy. has it been sexy in a while? i wouldn’t know.
if you are reading this, please help me get a job. <3
may 10 2022
“When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art.”
may 11 2022
may 24 2022
from jack: whole earth catalog (1968)
rebecca recommends: an impossible breakfast (2022)
rebecca recommends: the player (1992)
june 1 2022
i just moved to brooklyn yesterday, and wanted to clean up the tabs of my computer. i shared a link to Tony Smith’s interview (which I now think of every time I go through a tunnel or race out of the E-Z pass lane… something mapped out but not socially recognized…), but this whole website seems like a class in the art criticism canon, which is kind of a nice resource, i think. some of the ones i pulled out to read and then didn’t, and am now closing the tab:
maybe i’m exposing myself for not having read as much art criticism as i should have…
june 7 2022
we moved! while this diary used to be on a google site, i moved it to mirror. i think the site has some cool potential with the blockchain element, and i’m excited to see how it changes while i’m on here. on the topic of NFTs, i think something like mirror is going to be more like what the blockchain and NFTs are used for in web3. i also like that there’s no gas fee. i think that’s good.