Leave your name and number

No, not really, unless you just want to. The title will explain itself later in the post.

Okay, visceral, spontaneous, I can do this. Hmm, I've got it! I'll look up spontaneous in the dictionary, yeah. Plan ahead. That way, when I'm being spontaneous, I'll be prepared.

[thumbing through internet pages at high speed]

Here we go... let's see... "spontaneous"... "acting, reacting, or happening without apparent forethought or prompting"... Well, that can't be right. Who writes this crap!? Like I'm supposed to believe some asshole named "Webster"... I saw that show when I was a kid, and the guy's about two feet tall! He'd have to stand on twenty dictionaries just to make the fight fair. Well, anyone of you see him first, tell him I'm gonna "spontaneously" kick his ass from a to z.
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Where was I?

Alright. To begin: I work in a commercial interiors architecture firm. We specialize in deceiving ourselves into believing that what we do really constitutes "architecture". We also, as a side job, stump for leasing agencies that rent space in existing office buildings, both large and small. Typically, the bottom line is a basic, no-frills build-out for whatever the prospective tenant might desire. Hell, they could just be running around in those spaces naked as jaybirds all day long. Whatever, as long as its legal, I don't care. If it's illegal, you know, leave your name and number.

Anyway, when it rains it pours and work is plentiful. Work has not been plentiful lately, and I am on reduced hours.

Without getting into the messy details of what it takes to get registered as an architect, you could basically say I am still in training pants and, thus, low man on the totem pole at my office. Job security, you say? Never heard of him. My job title is merely a euphemism for "CAD monkey". I can build you a house, but it wouldn't be out of stacks of hundred dollar bills, if you know what I mean. If you have stacks of hundred dollar bills laying around, again, leave your name and number.

Anyway, I walk into work this morning fashionably late. On time but late compared to you because I'm on reduced hours. And fashionably because I have to wear slacks and a tie to sit in front of a computer most days. The boss has been frantically trying to reach me, they say. Really? Did someone drop a multi-million dollar design project in our laps? Oh, I can take the day off. Not much work, I see. Hmm... boy, do I feel like an asshole standing here in this monkey suit. They claimed to have called me, to which I replied, "Did you leave your name and number!?!?!?!?"

:D

In a strange way, it reminds me of joke from The Simpsons. Marge rounds the corner into the living room to find Homer sacked out in front of the TV, presumably letting the waves wash over him. His one daily bath, perhaps?

Anyway, she says (and I paraphrase), "Homer, that was your boss on the phone. He said, if you don't come in to work tomorrow, don't bother coming in on Monday either."

Homer, without hesitation, raises his fist in the air and exclaims, "Woohoo! Four day weekend!"

Matisse vs. Picasso

Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were towering figures in the world of avant-garde painting in the early twentieth century. It might interest afficionados of the arts to know that color was not simply restricted to the canvases they graced. There was, in fact, a dynamic off-canvas relationship between these two contemporaries.

Though it began without a common ground and was fueled at first by rivalry, uncomplementary personalites, a discrepancy in age, and the clash of two very different approaches to art, it would be Picasso's re-interpretations of Matisse's works in his own preferred style that would help to buoy Matisse's flagging career and encourage him to rediscover his creative direction. In the end, the relationship would grow beyond all hint of petty competition, even the comfortable detachment of mutual respect, into genuine friendship.

To know the ego that accompanied Picasso's genius is not any great talent in it's own right. That arrogance and superciliousness went hand in hand with his artistry is widely accepted. It is this fact, however, that makes his rare regard for Matisse that much more fascinating.

Stylistically-speaking, they could not be much further apart. Picasso excelled in the tenets of cubism: geometry, rectilinearity, statics and bounded space, three-dimensional simultaneity, transparency, and so on. There is a draftsman-like quality to his use of line. Though he did not limit himself to the style he helped create, he has nonetheless become synonymous with it.

Matisse, in contrast, explored a world that tended toward a relative lack of depth and a use of perspective that tended to flatten out the image. He had an exceptional understanding of how color affects emotion, a voluptuous, sensual fluidity that relegated line to that of secondary consideration, a love of arabesques and amorphous space where objects appeared to float unbounded in a dreamlike ganzfeld of homogeneous color, and a tendency toward a warmer palette and themes in his more noteable works.

Their personalities and their separate journeys to the canvas again juxtapose and offset one another elegantly, and they would ultimately intertwine in a relationship that would transcend the base desires to achieve a superiority of style. It was the acquiesence that art is art, regardless of style.

Bold as it was, though, it was perhaps even an ominous gesture, both symbolic and foreboding of an impending artistic dystopia. Pluralism would continue to liberate the stylistic pallete, defy artistic definition, and divorce art from all notion of tradition, formalism, content, and representational conventions. It would also continue to widen the floodgates through which could then flow an unebbing tide of art of, by, and for the people. But would the democratization of the medium serve its masters well?

I will touch on that subject in a future post, but for anyone interested enough to press on, here are several links on the relationship between Matisse and Picasso: http://www.matisse-picasso.com & http://www.matissepicasso.com

MASER! ....That's a nice name.

Cheers to anyone who can guess from what movie I've taken the title. I'll give the answer at the end of the post for the movie buffs out there.

I've come home to a commenter and a pushy one at that. Only kidding :) Ms. Token, you just made my day. Cheers to you whether you get the movie title or not. And I thought I was just talking to myself here :) In honor of the occasion I thought I would put aside precision-crafting a post on the lost highways of modern art, and just be ruby_maser for a post.

For the record, there is no great mystery to the pseudonym "ruby_maser". It actually comes from a quote in the movie Contact. John Hurt's character (S.R.Hadden), in reference to Jodie Foster's character (Ellie Arroway), states that "[she] did breakthrough work on the lanthanide-doped ruby maser, dramatically increasing the sensitivity of radio telescopes". MASER is an acronym for Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation. A maser is basically a laser that operates outside the bounds of the visible or ultraviolet spectrum of light.

Ruby is just one of a host of material mediums through which a maser can... well, mase.

Maser is the red-headed stepchild of the family. Laser is the class clown, getting all the laughs, probably getting all the chicks as well. Everyone's watching Laser because its oh-so "visible". Its mesmerizing, and it might just blind you -- similar to some of the train-wreck style reality shows on nowadays.

Meantime, Maser is oh-so "invisible". He's out there in the trenches, handling the bulk of the electromagnetic spectrum, getting no thanks, no credit, bills are piling up, probably doing crack and smokin' them tweeds just to keep from snapping from the knowledge that Laser is all things to all people.

It's a sad story but a cool name nonetheless. Hi-tech sibling rivalries never help; they always hurt. If you're still not convinced that I've gone too far in defining this ridiculous nom de plume, have I got a link for you. http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/faqs/maser.html Knock yourselves out.

And I'm spent.

While I'm all done for now, I might be coaxed into lifting the travel ban on some of my poetry, etc. at a later date. We'll see, but I think that, until then, it is a very nice suggestion that I force myself to post more often and with less deliberation. Mental calesthentics gets me breathless quick though as this post has revealed.

In other news, the movie (among many, many others) that attached itself to the ragged shirttales of my memory and won't let go and also spawned this post's title is... Finding Nemo. I slightly modified it to fit my name, kind of like I slightly stole a movie still from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the previous post. And I'm gonna do it again, dagnabit...

Get in...

As savage journeys go, this one is no different than its prototype with the notable exception that it is not seeking to merely tap the semi-collective unconscious desires of the American Dream but also plays at the more exhaustive theory as it exists across the full spectrum of human boundaries and delimitors. We cannot rationlize and compartmentalize the concepts that span and encapsulate the sum total of humanity.

Certainly, Raul Duke would agree that his odyssey was no less potent though it be limited by and situated around a distinctly American phenomenon that emerged in the wake of the 60s and towards the end of the Vietnam war. Ulysses Everett McGill would be no different for traveling the rural backroads of the deep south. Neo (aka Thomas Anderson) was speeding down that same digital highway before he was detoured into the realm of gratuitous, yet eminently marketable, pastiche by two unnecessary sequels bent on spectacle and straining for but, nonetheless, short on substance -- a moot point in some circles, I must concede.

The list does not stop there, I'm sure. Odysseus, Tetsuo Shima, Randolph Jaffe are examples I can mention offhand. We are all tripping across time in search of the same unattainable answers. It may very well be the hanging questions that keep us moving forward as a species toward our ultimate ends (a la Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey). If you care to comment, please name some others.

This blog is on that road as well. It may detour at times down forbidden byways and re-emerge on the other side of all reason, not transcending the attainment of knowledge but, rather, missing the boat entirely. That is the adventure of it all; it is, afterall, the journey and not the destination that I live for.

Blog-jectivity

To begin... Isn't that always the hardest part? A blank page can be intimidating. As an amateur poet and screenwriter, I know a thing or two about procrastination as a way of delaying the onset of reality, as if the walls of a meticulously-constructed dream world will come crashing in on themselves if I fail in the endeavor and must face harsh truths.

Self-doubt has always been the most difficult aspect of the process for me. The passage of time has been the only and best remedy for such maddening inertia. Staring at a lifetime of blank pages, like some physical or digital embodiment of regret, can be just enough of a purpose to transcend an otherwise interminable delay in action.

However, there are other, more complex problems in blogging effectively. It is not merely enough to write. I'm sure most all bloggers nurture some unspoken, unwritten desire to be read by others. Color and controversy are two ways of provoking a response, achieving a reaction, initiating a dialogue, yet what is sacrificed in the trade-off is a dispassionate discourse.

Some people would claim it to be an inevitability, that objectivity (or "blog"jectivity in this case) does not truly exist. So, assuming that objectivity truly is an illusion, knowing that I must alienate some to attract others is a tough proposition for someone like myself (and I don't necessarily mean taking sides or feigning exclusivity or revealing my biases). There is, in fact, a far more subtle means of removing the chaff, so to speak. I would propose that a simple declaration of purpose might serve the same function.

Thus far, I have managed not to do this (one might think), and believe me, the irony is not lost on me that, by not doing so, I have still sent the less-inclined among you to greener fields (or at least the promise of them made by the "Next Blog" link). Even so, maybe I have exposed my fascination with understanding mediums, in this instance: blogging as a cross-cultural phenomenon. It's a good thing because:

• I haven't the desire to sell a product (though I do take donations)
• I cherish my anonymity far too much at this point to part with it, but that, of course, is subject to what is at stake or at risk. Nevertheless, I am certain the enlightened reader could probably discern a great deal about me by deconstructing this blog to determine what makes me tick, in general.
• I won't post poetry or writing samples because copyright protection and anonymity do not play well together.
• I cannot bring myself to thrust my politics or opinions upon you.... much! :)
• I have learned the futility of persuasion as a means of overcoming individual perceptions of what is plausible.
• I do not believe the Socratic or dialectic method (http://www.str.org/free/studies/socratic.htm) of exchange exists in the common tongue any more and certainly not with the untenable and finite reality of online posts. (A poem that might relate a little of why I think this to be true is "The Silver Swan". It's very brief. You can take a look here: http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem874.html)

Nonetheless, I love to write, and I do not begrudge others the freedom to engage in these activities. Hell, I think that's what makes blog-hopping so darned interesting. Variety is the spice of life, right?

An interesting movie on the subject of factual reporting versus color pieces in journalism is Shattered Glass. It tells the true account of a young, ambitious journalist who began to deliberately invent stories (either in part or on a whole) for his magazine, The New Republic, in an attempt to spice up what would have otherwise been standard, slightly-stale reporting. Even if the conflict of the story never moves beyond the office politics surrounding his ultimate downfall, it still paints a stirring portrait of an individual caught in the spiralling web of their own lies. It is the third act of a tragedy. He is a study of facades where, in a superficial sense, he is confident and charismatic, but beneath this is a deeply troubled individual masking a host of insecurities and desperate to hold sway over the tenuous, self-gratifying acclaim that his pseudo-journalistic fabrications provided for him. Good story, and if not, at least positive proof that Anakin Skywalker (aka Darth Vader, aka Hayden Christensen) can act.