Caterina.net

We're in an internet cafe in Maui, mostly to get out of the debilitating sun. The conference ended last night and we have the day today to tour around before our redeye back to Vancouver tonight at 11. I'm sun-dazed.

Congratulations to Corey who ran the Vancouver Marathon today, her first! It was total mayhem at the finish line, but there she was, and so happy. 26.2 miles? I can't even conceive of such a thing. My motto: no pain, no pain.

Animal Preserve Originally uploaded by striatic.

Posted by caterina from Flickr.

(via Worldchanging.)

• I'm talking tomorrow on a panel at the CAJ conference on weblogs and online publishing. I had said I'd post the info and address if it was open to the public, but it's not, alas. No worries, you didn't want to get up that early anyway. Here's the conference web site.
• "Lunatics tend to gravitate towards bookshops." -- George Orwell
• I found an old copy of BookForum (Spring 1999) in which there is a great review of Original Bliss by A.L. Kennedy. Also, Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto recommends this:
  The Third Lie by Agota Kristo -- a very strong story written in the simplest language. It gets into you very easily, then forms this vast emotional landscape little by little, as if all the words were tiny parts of a giant sculpture that is both beautiful and painful. Kristof never says, "He love the chicken" or "He enjoyed the chicken" he just says "He ate the whole chicken." so there is this sense that you are closely watching these people's lives, just over their shoulder, but that you are always an observer.

  Sounds great, doesn't it?

• First meeting of the Vancouver Art Magazine went very well -- smart people, good ideas, lots of past experience, and enthusiasm.

Posting has been relatively light here lately since our internet connection at home has been down for the past 5 or 6 days and so I can only post at work. Which is frustrating, since on 5 or 6 occasions I've had something to write but couldn't.

• It only took 6 days and 9 phonecalls to get the internet connection restored at our house. We are so relieved that it is on again.
• After a year, Sylloge is back up again at its old address, inspired mostly by the new version of Blogger, which looks really lovely, has a raft of new features and appears to be as easy to use as before. Bravo Blogger!

• I've been reading a lot of Lacan and psychoanalytic feminist film theory lately, neither of which really lend themselves to blog entries.
• Let us hope and pray that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo gets re-elected in the Philippines.

Just back from KQED studio where we were doing a recording for CBC Radio in Canada, for the Sounds like Canada show hosted by Sheila Rogers. It was a surprisingly long show, 20 minutes or so, with Tod Maffin, broadcaster and futurologist and Jim Elves, who created a site called Blogs Canada. We talked about Tod's moblogging, and Jim's site, which is an attempt to organize the blogosphere for Canada. I said that in the beginning there was a lot of backlash against blogging because people thought the internet was getting "polluted" by all these people writing about what they had for breakfast, but I pointed out that the intended audience for those blogs was probably just that person's friends and family. I also said that one of the things that we had discussed at the CAJ conference on Friday was the difference between bloggers as "citizen reporters" and journalists. Journalists actually have some accountability, the reputation of the paper to uphold, and a phalanx of fact checkers employed by their paper. Bloggers, Jim said, are more like "Letters to the Editor" or the Op-Ed page fo the newspaper. And I think the future of weblogging is what you see over on the right hand side there: photoblogging. And photoblogging just for your friends and family.

It was fun, and now I'm glad to get back to bed. I'm almost never up this early. *Yawn*.

From NQPAOFU, a definition of art:

I have to admit that I laughed when I saw the homepage announcing Redesign. Sagmeister/Butterfield! I was like: Famous Designer/Some Schmo!

I know, I should be more supportive (slaps own wrist).

Anyhow, he's doing this talk tonight, which will be great, and I'm sitting at home thinking about how great it was to be in San Francisco (again!) and scheming how to move back.

Tomorrow I am going to buy paper for the new drawings. You will love the new drawings, I promise. I love them and I haven't even started them yet. I see them in my mind.

For no reason at all, perhaps the best reason of all, I was thinking about one time when I went to dinner at the Argos Diner on 90th and Broadway with a friend to meet his grandmother. We took a booth and ordered some coffee and pretty soon a 6-ft-tall 89-year-old woman came in wearing an enormous hat replete with ostrich feathers, gesticulating operatically. You know those women whose hair doesn't match their faces? Her hair was long and black and wrong.

She ate every night at the Argos Diner, and ordered what she always ordered: a side of peas. She didn't eat them and paid barely any attention to us, becuase she was too busy watching a certain waiter, with whom she told us she was in love. He was this horrible-looking fellow with greasy curly hair in a bad waiter's uniform. Whenever he came by she fluttered her eyelashes at him, and winked and laughed, and laid her hand on his wrist, and called him by name. He treated her with barely concealed contempt. Wherever he walked, her eyes followed.

She had a reputation as a trollop, my friend told me. She slept with everyone, her husband's brothers, the meter reader, members of parliament...and it was because she was such a tramp that he even existed, he said, because she was one of the jews that was on a boat escaping from Belgium in the 1940s when a Nazis boarded the ship, captured all the jews, and took them back to Germany to die in the camps. His grandmother survived only because she'd been in bed with the captain at the time, and hid in his cabin. The ship, manned only by a skeleton crew, was permitted to continue on to America.

Having children didn't slow her down, she slept with the doctor who delivered her daughter, my friend's mother, and now, in the Argos Diner in her 90th year, she was sure she was going to seduce the greasy-haired waiter, take him home with her and make sweet love.

I admired this. I admired her tenacity in the face of assured failure. The strength of her self-delusion with which she maintained this hope.

I also remembered a story another friend had told me, a well known writer, who said that he'd run away from home but that his high school gym teacher had picked him up when he was walking along the highway hitchhiking a ride to the next state. The gym teacher brought him back to his house, where my friend realized the most popular girl at school, the gym teacher's daughter, lived and that he was going to see her house. A nerd like him would never have dreamed of being so close to her. He was nervous. But he was angry with his parents and insisted that they gym teacher not force him to go home. The gym teacher called them and told them he had found their son, and had brought him back to his house where he was going to stay the night. He ended up sleeping in the bedroom of the gym teacher's daughter. In her bed. And in her room every single surface was covered with horses, pictures of horses, models of horses, big horses, little horses, plastic, wooden, pewter horses. Books about horses, posters of horses, paint-by-number horses. Jewelry boxes shaped like horses, piggy banks and stuffed animals in the form of horses...

All these stories have been surfacing from deep in my unconscious lately, messages from myself. If I were a psychoanalyst, I would probably have to do something with them, strip them of their incantatory power, attach them to some kind of understanding. Nah. I think it goes back to what I posted the other day: What is art? These stories. Privacy lit by radiant light, that rarest of things: seeing, if only for a moment, another human being.

I miss Alamut. I think he's been using DEVONthink to organize his thoughts these days. One day I'll have a chance to investigate it. He says it is the thing we always wanted: a software program that makes a personal, searchable and cross-referenceable encyclopedia. I wrote one in Hypercard a long time ago.

• The most delicious salad I've had recently was the Radicchio, Escarole, Anchovy with Shaved Egg and Parmesan salad at The Last Supper Club in San Francisco. Yum! I am going to try to reproduce it now.
• I have a terminal case of Monkey Mind.
• I want to go to Venice.
• They are filming an episode of Stargate outside of my house, as you can see from the photos on the right. There are a lot of cops around too. I was sitting here mulling over the marketing plan for Flickr when I heard a woman scream "STOP THAT MAN!" and there was the patter of running feet. I don't know if that was part of the script or not. Answer: it was. They've done it three more times now.

Unbeknownst to me, Alex Pang has been posting over at Red Herring. One of the posts there that caught my eye was Freedom from the Past, about the human right to "allow parts of our history to become inactive, to fade."

People who think they're writing to Maury Povich:

All of it is just so awful and tragic and stupid and sad. (via sylloge)

If someone told you that I was sick, they were telling you the truth. I am still sick. Nonetheless we managed to get out to see Valparaiso, a play by Don Delillo that was being performed on Granville Island. It was about a man who became a media sensation because he took a plane to Valparaiso, Chile, instead of Valparaiso, Indiana, appearing in documentary films and talk shows. It was brilliant. It was also the last night.

I feel like crap and am going to lie down now.

We are all very relieved that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will be the next president of the Philippines. Shouldn't there be a law or something that requires that presidential candidates must have at least finished high school and have at least some political experience?

Paint me aghast that anyone even considered voting for Fernando Poe.

I hate being sick.
I love sharp soap shards that you can dull so easily on wet skin.

Thank god for Stewart Butterfield and Kleenex with Lotion.

Still sick.

Homer Simpson and his "lovable irresponsibility" wearies me. I don't find it lovable at all. We watched some of the third season on DVD last night, and it turns out I like The Simpsons less than I thought I did. If there is one show on TV they could shuffle off all those deadend stereotypes and 50s nuclear family tropes, it is in an animation as groundbreaking as The Simpsons. But they don't. Marge is the June Cleaver of the 90s. It is really depressing.

A little while later, I was rereading the introductory essays of Fresh Cream, the unofficial yearbook of the art world. And there was this, by Marina Warner, who writes on mythical figures, monsters and society. I agreed with it so strongly I'll type in the whole thing:

This subject is also addressed in Dorothy Dinnerstein's classic The Mermaid and the Minotaur, which emphasizes that until men's roles are broadened to include caregiving and childraising, a culture of sexism, self-hatred, exploitation, domination and oppression will persist.