alienated.net

On November 19, Microsoft relaunched the XBox Live Network with a brand-new (bearing in mind that with Microsoft, new is always a relative state of mind) avatar-based interface, and the XBox-based portion of my online identity received an extreme makeover.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

On the way to theanyspacewhatever, the Guggenheim Relational Aesthetics show, I meet mariachis on the subway between 77th and 86th.

Maurizio Cattelan's "Daddy Daddy" -- drowned yet floating (because wooden? Then how'd he drown?) Pinocchio -- makes it all worthwhile immediately. Father of 4-year-old girl turns it into an object lesson about the importance of lifejackets.

The Guggenheim is a lot of things, but it is pretty clearly not anyspacewhatever. Whatever.

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On November 20th, I was the happy guest of the students of UPenn Kelly Writers House during TAPEWORM: a collaborative exhibition based on Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination), curated by Kaegan Sparks. Full details are here.

Marshall McLuhan was fond of observing that the content of a new medium is always an older medium. He would likely have taken a certain amount of satisfaction out of the notion that the job of popular music in 2008 is largely to serve as the content for cell phones and video game consoles. Legal downloads of digital songs from the iTunes Store alone outsell most traditional record stores. Downloads of ring tones for cellular phones regularly outsell the singles on which they're based. (Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

David Foster Wallace died on September 12, 2008. Something I wrote years ago seemed appropriate, so I added a dedication:

jungle
(after David Foster Wallace)

the music was incomprehensible until they realized that at each beat, the instruments were playing every note on the chromatic scale save one, and that the melody consisted entirely of its own delicate absence.

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We all know it but someone has to say it: zombies are the new vampires.

Vampires had a lovely sort of fin-de-siècle decadence about them that perfectly suited the mood of the late 20th century. Rising gas prices, the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, neo-liberal pundits running the world markets into the ground with all of their dot-com bullshit about a "weightless economy," 9/11 looming on the horizon, boy bands ... the party was coming to an end, and, deep down inside, everyone knew it. So why not emulate the monster most likely to eat the other guests (and do so with a modicum of style, at that)?

Style exacts a stiff price, though, even among the undead. Pancake makeup takes a long-ass time to apply smoothly, and all of that black leather, velvet and lace is expensive, heavy and difficult to launder. This is the real reason that the only people interested in dating vampires and their gloomy kissing cousins, the goths, were other vampires and goths: vampires are the ultimate in high-maintenance girlfriends. By the time the beautiful and spooky actually finish dressing and are ready for a night on the town, most of us are pretty much looking for breakfast.

Enter the zombie: the ultimate low-maintenance monster. Crumbling, shambling, moaning, driven only by the neverending search for more brains to consume, the zombie has become the cultural mascot of the early 21st century.