has transformed, exploded, transmogrified!  it used to give me a slideshow of the pictures on my hard drive, right there in the google sidebar so i would get continual random but guided visual stimulation and reminder.  now, however, it apparently has leapt over my deliberate acts of salvation and has expanded itself to include any picture i’ve ever even looked at, no matter how briefly, including others’ flickr streams and any website i happen to visit, mixed in among my own hard drived specimania. it is become a Random Deja Vu Generator!  who the hell is THAT?? he looks familiar, but…wait! isn’t that..???  liz?  mikey? jack. moomin! how the hell did moomin get in there???? st. joseph.  that lovely young frenchman who looks a bit like danny, he seems particularly sticky… miami.

ahh, juxtaposition.  O, the richness!

he’s a leprechaun! (but he has my father’s nose.)

WOOLFCAMP!

(i can’t remember sam’s last name) once said, upon looking at some endeavor of mine in his class, that I was “still” in the recording my world place.  i wondered then how this was a pejorative.  not that he meant that it was, but that it was a place that I would no longer inhabit in future.

i didn’t think so then, but i didn’t say so, it wasn’t something i could know since i hadn’t a clue.  but i was right.

besides the injunction against it, i just never liked the way it looked.  too techie clunky.  too “amateur” a surface.  on the other hand, the digital surface allows even the amateur to “look” (as if there were anything more; it’s art, after all) polished, and the technology is so elegant.  that’s the entire thing, i think, that dvd looks more “like” film, smoother, more effortless, no so revealing-of-the-process, more subverting-of-the-process. at least to me. it allows one to relegate the “original” artwork to mere prop status with greater ease than ever before.  i was/am always making props.  digital technology allows one to convert one’s world to slickness and light. pictures of pictures.

here is the warhorse, the potboiler.  here is the ur-painting, the ordinary portfolio piece i drag out whenever i need a vanilla portfolio piece to show.  when arnold mesches told us that we would be doing the same thing at 50 that we were doing at 20, i doubt if the actual painting i did to get into art school to study with him is exactly what he had in mind, but it has proven to be the case, nonetheless.

the truth is, i find that when looking for jobs it is this kind of thing i need.  what i’m doing presently is less substantial, more digitally-oriented, less “craftsmanlike”.  a sturdy oil painting, that’s the ticket.  what do you paint?  flowers. see?