August 10, 2008

The Decisive Moment in the Garden of Good and Evil

My Strategy to win the Presidency

So, how do you get it going at such a late stage in the race?

The first part is to pick my Vice Precedent. Eventually, I’ll get caught for something, right? and why not just tell people what it is in advance, especially if it's something that's just more me? Thanks to the internet, people are confused... there’s no longer any sense of priorities amongst most of the self-indulgences that actually get us from Monday to Tuesday and from Tuesday to …

…. oh, you meant vice “president”… hmm, in that case, it would have to be the guy from truTV, Marc Juris, executive vice president and general manager, who showed me that if you can’t be the head, at least keep it on straight. For example, the other day he was saying, "Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony… We felt that because (our programming) was real, we couldn't call it reality." There aren’t that many people running around with that kind of clarity now.

The second part is I’m going to play the gender card.

How does that make sense? Wouldn’t you be running against two men?

Well, what difference does that make? The point is, I accuse them of being guys, and then they both screw up their responses to that more than I screw up mine. That’s what voters care about.

What’s the third part of your strategy?

It’s very simple, a call to action, but it might be hard because it calls for breaking a tough habit. When you’re president, you should have a limited number of Stupid Points to work with, not term limits. If you spend up all your Stupid Points too fast, you’re out! and someone with fewer Stupid Points should take over. This might not be the other person from your party who is hanging out in the other wing of your big white house. Think about it, if it’s your party at your house, and your party gets seriously boring, people need to be able to go to another party at somebody else’s house, right? Really, it’s not such a new idea, but we can’t be wimps about it.

Is that it? Any other parts?

Well, aside from the challenge of getting enough ME-dia attention, I’m working on getting an additional line added to the list of nominee names on the ballot, right below the third party candidates. If I’m successful, it should just say “Surprise Me: __________________”

(Happy Birthday Diana! xo - M)

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August 2, 2008

Antiquity in the Garden of Good and Evil

Scientists unlock mystery of 2,000-year-old computer

As reported in 2006 by the CBC (i.e., Canada, yesterday) a then-recent study in the journal Nature had revealed the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism to be actually a complex means of tracking the movements of astronomical bodies for use in navigation.

As reported in 2008 by the American newspapers (i.e., USA TODAY), the same device, known as The Mean Sun Wheel, held 30 bronze gearwheels marked with instructions, allowing the user to link the cycles of the heavens to "the very mundane Greek games" (i.e., the Olympics).

Tthat particular usage, scholars believe, was primarily by wealthy sponsors of the games, for scheduling purposes -- putting the wheel in the same class of "information technology" as satellites, but not in the same class as television broadcasting, with which advertising spawned the Olympics Hype Cycle -- used for tracking the movements of earthly bodies -- nowadays far more important than a mundane thing like weather.

The only question here is already asked and answered: whether the 2,100 year old Mean Sun Wheel, given that it still works and all and doesn't even need batteries, can hold its own against a much bigger machine: marketers. Marketing's vanguard, the American press, took two years to find something in it that rated worth mentioning again. Maybe it's time to move to Canada.

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April 26, 2008

Time Out in the Garden of Good and Evil

The problem with the media is all in the mediating.

Credits: thanks, or maybe not, to Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:26 PM

October 6, 2007

Sundown in the Garden of Good and Evil

Or, to put it more plainly, The Shrinking Tool.

Gotta admit, these triple entendres are hard to come by.

Item credit: some guys from The Wall Street Journal. Possibly some women too, but how on earth would we know?

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August 29, 2007

What is Art?

Art is simply work in which the aesthetics of the labor is the objective of the production's expression and the subject of the production's continuity.

Because of that, we can understand that the development in the production is a performance that is characterized by decisions which, skewing consistently towards the qualities of the labor itself, pursue an overall coherence and continuity of "presence" and "character" but not necessarily an endpoint of any other kind.

Just as a river runs to come into being but need not ever stop running in order to become "complete", the work of art is said to never finish but merely at some point to stop.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 28, 2007

Style - the Content of the Mark

After doing recent readings on the discipline of visual arts criticism, and on photography criticism in particular, I was struck by how much critics express certainty about what they are critiquing, yet how much thinkers about criticism express uncertainty about the legitimacy of critics.

I felt overwhelmed by the ongoing inability of some very hard thinkers to get away from debates over conventional art-historical frameworks or the psychologies of aesthetics, almost invariably spending their time arguing either for or against the usefulness or correctness of intellectual idiosyncracy in demonstrating "artistic meaning" or "artistic value" in a still-image visual work.

What's lost in the general shuffle is the attention to investigation of how meaning in images is finally "authoritative" in the image itself, not just in whatever context the critic finally agrees to be associated with as an authority. Regardless of the observer's perspective, the image has its own terms on which to project significance with its organization of information -- and the key to discussing that organization is in the rhetoric of the decisions that it displays in its construction. At the deepest conceptual level, every premeditated image is simply a "mark", one which was not there before and which has an intentionality of expressing a distinction -- and for which the significance of the distinction is the inherent value of the image. Style is the rhetoric of the mark's ability to express the distinction it is intending, and so style becomes synonymous with the essential "content" of the mark.

To avoid and counterpoint those approaches that dwell on the critic's rhetoric instead of the image's own, this article cuts to the chase by presenting the diagram below.

In this diagram, the key assumption is that all images produced by human construction as premeditated images are driven by a predisposition towards one of two basic motives: to imagine real things, or to present imagined things as if they were real. Produced images can always be positioned somewhere along the span between these two poles, which are more specifically identified as two presentational "intentions", namely the invention of evidence or the evidence of invention. But the imaging is also driven by an essential "referent" that sits closer to either a concept or an observation.

This double axis of concerns results (as below) in being able to detect four essential styles of imaging, each one of which indicates the inherent content of the mark.

It follows from this diagram that a given image (which can span more than one quadrant of the area displayed) may have a complexity originating in more than one dimension, and so there may also be more than the two dimensions (axes) cross-referenced here. But we already have a standardized framework broad enough to manage most of the images we can remember, regardless of place on the historical timeline or geopolitical neighborhoods within the academies of art theory. If an additional dimension emerges as proof to better explain the inherent diversity of image originality, then we'll add it to this diagram. Meanwhile, for the most part, the diagram allows the peripheral (para-image) discussion about why the image producer leaned towards a particular position in the diagram's space, without attempting to reposition the mode of expression that the image itself has as an independent matter of fact during encounter with any unsuspecting viewer.

Carry on from here, distributing your fashion photos, crime scene photos, war correspondent photojournalism, movie freeze-frames, family snapshots, landscapes, portraits, pictorial bios or what have you, it doesn't matter, within the diagram.

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March 17, 2007

Coffee Break in the Garden of Good and Evil

It's been only a week since Hassan Fattah broke the news in the NY Times that should break the back of popular publically traded Bay Area upstart coffee purveyor "Peets". Although Peets has far nicer gizmos and stylish vessels to manage your coffee from the bean to the belly, the chemically faithful amongst its rival Starbucks crowd will no longer have to choose which of 27,615 directions to face when its time for another fix. Starbucks will now, as we all really knew was inevitable, be opening in Mecca in about a year's time. "This is the end of Mecca," said Dr. Irfan Ahmed in London.

So. Who cares.

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March 10, 2007

Retro Chic in the Garden of Good and Evil

This just in: Analysts this week have discovered the first circumstantial evidence of a disturbing pop conspiracy involving the now infamous Britney Spears. Pop aficionados remember the sensational moment when Spears smooched the Material Girl, Madonna, on television during an otherwise presumably harmless awards show. It now appears that Madonna's kiss was more of a kiss off -- just the beginning of an intricate plan to ultimately drop Spears in the airwave standings and reclaim her own preeminence during Spears' downtime. Observers noted that Spears, during her current anxieties, received no support whatsoever from Madonna, and tipsters amongst them became suspicious. Detectives, speaking anonymously about previously unrevealed investigative findings, now believe that Madonna framed Spears for the murder of Anna Nicole Smith, the occasionally zoftig ersatz Marilyn Monroe. In the wake of the misdeed, Spears' sales and airplay have not enjoyed the Insanity Exemption presumed by all erratically behaving pop stars since Michael Jackson, and Madonna cuts have rushed in to fill the void. However, magazine ad rates and volume have both quadrupled in the celebrity softcore newstand segment, and Smith's lawyer, Howard Stern, is rumored to be in negotiations with Spears to become her publishing agent.

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February 20, 2007

All News All The Time in the Garden of Good and Evil

Britney Spears killed Anna Nicole.

When she realized she likely left hair strands at the scene of the crime, she shaved her head.

"What? That's not my hair."

Kevin Federline will get custody of Anna's baby.

This just in: Zsa Zsa will hire the judge to handle her divorce. In an unexpected move, MTV will handle the coverage.

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January 26, 2007

Disruptive Innovation in the Garden of Good and Evil

21st century cultural inflections have a funny way of surfacing through business. On the way to Enron, white-collar crime ("Success means never having to say you got caught") eclipsed bit-headedness to sprout the dreaded Y2K. And at this point, in the breadbasket of the world, more people in America work at Starbucks than on farms. In the wake of these shifts, almost completely overlooked has been what may prove to be the biggest inflection point of all -- the ascendancy of jibber jabber over mumbo jumo.

For more than a century, mumbo jumbo has been a staple of corporate and political thinking, establishing some of the key beachheads on which blockheads could land en masse to seize the day. The old school combined jumbo and mumbo with power, relying on confidence in wrapping things that don't really go together with things that only briefly make sense, and forcefully delivering them. Most prominent in election campaigns and I.T. vendor marketing, mumbo jumbo remains a headliner; but the polls show that fewer and fewer people buy it each year.

In its place, the new dynamic of jibber jabber relies on something other than power to create the liberating stupidity navigated by ersatz leaders. The effective combination of jabber and jibber relies on persistence, not power, to numb its audience into cooperation -- by bundling an indifferently unwavering delivery of a party line, any party line, to a captive audience.

For the purveyor, jibber jabber ultimately craves the strategic advantage of being the only game in town, which can make it pretty mean sometimes; and yet, the polls show that public tolerance for this meanness has never been greater -- except of course regarding broadcast network television programming. Viewers routinely say "Up Yours!" to the programmers, and they've come to enjoy saying it.

Ironically, for the victim, er...consumer, of jibber jabber, a nostalgia for simplicity might be the key to its rise: the relief of having only three channels, in black and white, instead of 600 in color. Or of having parents who will use "because I said so". No wonder jibber jabber is so important in the commodity market for consulting, where the invoice is increasingly about having a decision on time when anxiety is too high about not having the time to decide. That is, there is an actual need for jibber jabber, akin to over-the-counter self-medication for insecurity.

Otherwise, reflecting on your own experience, you'll observe that jibber jabber is most often seemingly free, and it often becomes annoying only when you suddenly realize that you don't have to listen to it, and you change the channel or end the date. Thanks to telemarketing, we can learn from experience to actively shun jibber jabber -- both by blocking it and hanging up; but it doesn't really bother us that we know it will just show up somewhere else.

Finally though, having the trickery of mumbo jumbo's chutzpah lose out to the neurotic frontin' of jibber jabber's dogma is both disturbing and fun -- the aesthetic of horror movies and recreational psychotherapy... It's not really clear why we'd want things this way. But objectively noting the change as a sign of the times, there it is.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 3:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 17, 2007

Capitalist Tools in the Garden of Good and Evil

Jan 15, 2007 -- Malcolmation, Inc. finally announced today the commercial release of the iMalcolm -- a fully interactive, nearly all-weather, First Life device that can automatically respond to audio or visual stimuli across a vast range of distances and situations including art, greed, work, envy, sports, sloth, thrift, etc., etc.

The rechargeable iMalcolm runs on bioenergy and can go a full 40 hours without new fuel, although its built-in monitoring system will make it complain with increasing persistence after the first 24, and old fuel seems to do the trick, too.

The iMalcolm is probably not for everyone; to begin with, its protective covers are often much more expensive than expected if durable, despite the huge array of available styles. Without the covers, the device is often fully functional but not entirely practical in many environments. And it lacks the now-customary out-of-the-box Chicklets aesthetic that a well-known market leader has pushed to the front of almost every product line. Furthermore, steady users of iMalcolm say that it is probably more interesting than it is reliable.

Yet many say that having an iMalcolm around is almost as good as hanging out with a completely sentient person.

Malcolmation's product managers claim that the original idea for the iMalcolm cropped up in the 1950's but that it took nearly all the time until now for a critical mass of consumers to care enough about the current feature mix.

"Well," they said, "plenty of users have cared, actually; but not enough, until now, to be sure we should keep the name."

Fired-up senior management at Malcolmation also claim that by the time they have to defend the rights to the name, their full family of peer devices including iKiki, iCampbell and iXia will already be in circulation as well. They're even passing out shirts and cartes-des-visite to the first 3000 new users, that say "iKnow Who iAm"

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 27, 2006

Theory of Speed

Conventional wisdom is that speed is for making sure you won't be late arriving. But the best purpose of speed is to get away.

And the best reason to get away is to leave the crowd. This is how we know that what speed is about, essentially, is not movement from power but rather from position.

Highway driving makes this more or less obvious. What, after all, are the two biggest problems with "speed limits"? Not the posted rates, and not the cops. Instead it is the matter of driving amongst the dumb and the blind. This simple observation immediately gives the two most basic rules of driving: don't drive behind anything you can't see around, and don't drive behind idiots. Combined, it's the difference between the presumed speed limit and the real speed limit.

For one thing, driving behind either the dumb or the blind involves a transitive property: you will become effectively dumb or blind yourself. (One further complication is that driving behind something you can't see around might make you drive idiotically, and so forth. Riff amongst yourselves.)

For another, empirical evidence will show that the dumb and the blind rarely catch up to the crowd in front of them while getting away from the crowd that they create.

So, most importantly, these obstacles mean that all traffic not likewise stuck are more probably going to get ahead.

[Sidebar: now just taking a moment to enjoy the nuance of using "traffic" as a plural.]

On a multi-lane highway, the "fast lane" is the one you make by maneuvering first of all to avoid the dumb and the blind. This is a prerequisite. As a result, you have the further opportunity to capitalize on speed. That is, in trafficking, speed is the effect of routinely being in the best place before the other guy is.

That final elaboration of our definition leaves us with the main task in designing speed. Namely, we have to determine who are:
- the dumb,
- the blind, and...
- the "other guy".

As for knowing what makes a place "the best" -- well, if you don't know that, then you don't need speed.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 25, 2006

Oh Dark Thirty in the Garden of Good and Evil

Robert Altman Checks Out.

My cinema hero, Robert Altman, still has his latest movie in the video store racks, "A Prarie Home Companion". I haven't seen it yet, and he won't be seeing it again. But considering it's an Altman movie and all, my resistance to grabbing it when it was hot off the press still lacks explanation.

That despite the fact that for me, no one other than Altman or perhaps Wim Wenders could be expected to derive value from balancing the neurotic quirkiness that I dislike about Prarie Homes with the globally waning general interest in popporn queen Lindsay Lohan. I mean She Is You Know So Over.

More or less.

Popporn -- inhabited mainly by Tara Reid, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lohan herself, Christine Aguilera, and Scarlett Johannson -- prominently features a drastically diverse spread of talent, from Johannson (whose group membership is just skinnydipping) to Reid (who co-opted the space thought previously to have belonged, through manifest destiny, to real porn swinger Tracy Lords. Inexplicably, both parties, Reid and Lords, have dropped the ball, but it's probably a good thing.)

Comparing again the great to lame in this bunch, Aguilera, whose superiority to Spears is nearly blinding in its intensity, is just slumming; however, where the media is involved, she may be suffering from true independence. For example, regarding her involvement, we can easily imagine that Hollywood is actually looking the other way just to promote its belief that she, like anyone, can be replaced and that it won't need her. But she would be the way she is even if all the others in popporn or Hollywood were gone.

Meanwhile, the importance of popporn is that it is illegimate. It's not real porn, it's fake porn done through real acting instead of real porn done through fake acting. We see that the girls want to play the role -- otherwise, why would anyone care.

So -- what about Altman and Lohan? (Whattaya mean 'Altman "and" Lohan'...?) He was interested?

No chance he was only cradle-robbing, because he wouldn't put his name on the film if the film wasn't working. No, I think maybe it's more like him paddling the boat that could carry Lohan across the river Styx from a looming hell to some uncertain but preferable promised land. But why would he bother? Well, there's the punchline: could anyone other than Altman actually discover someone who had already been discovered, and get full credit for it? (Possibly Wim Wenders.)

Having not seen the film yet, I get to think there's still a chance that this might be obviously and truly the case on the screen. And if it turns out not to be, there will still be plenty of Altman flicks to watch again, and of course popporn will remain alive and well even through significant attritions, extractions and graduations.

It's just that now we won't have an authentic Altman extravaganza on YouTube featuring popporners. This was the necessary next step -- getting the mass media icons to slum on the alternate network under the direction of an iconic Hollywood heretic.

Oh well. Who's our daddy now?

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 30, 2006

Nitwits and Nitpicks in the Garden of Good and Evil

In the rankings of the safest and most dangerous American cities compiled by Morgan Quitno Press, St. Louis ranked as the most dangerous city in the country.

The ranking, being released Monday, came as the city was still celebrating Friday's World Series victory at the new Busch Stadium.

The second most dangerous city was... Detroit.

Of course.

Scott Morgan, president of Morgan Quitno Press, a private research and publishing company specializing in state and city reference books, said he was "not surprised."

Aside from Morgan failing to show any evidence that he'd been on the planet for the last week, say for example, in St. Louis, as were a bunch of guys from Detroit, just what in the hell did he mean by that? Bitch.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061030/ap_on_re_us/city_crime_list_4

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October 28, 2006

Execution as Strategy in the Garden of Good and Evil

And that's how you do that trick.

.
.
Now, for those of you with short attention spans:

Widely cited as the greatest defensive player of all time, it's The Wizard of Oz.
Talking points:
- In the matter of winning games, Ozzie Smith generally accounted for a greater differential in his team's runs and the opponent's runs than did his numerous teamates who were paid mainly to swing.
- For the opponent, playing against Ozzie, which meant letting your fat payroll spend a lot of time being ineffective, was one of the most expensive things they had to do each year.
- Ozzie was so good that his salary could have been composed mainly of a fixed number of dollars per percentage points that he lowered his own pitcher's ERA and the opposing hitter's batting average, and he still would have usually been a multimillionaire.
- If you feel compelled to determine the exact number of dollars, get a life.

Concept: Walt Jockety, more or less.
Photos: Google Images thumbnailed these, and I copied them here. Who took the pictures? Beats me. If you know, send me the name and proof, and I'll market them with proper copyright. On the other hand, if you can't tell me who is the actual photographer, regardless of who owns the copyright, then don't bug me.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 21, 2006

Death, Taxes, and the Sure Thing in the Garden of Good and Evil

For St. Louis, clearly it was all over just two days before the end of the regular season. Then it was all over again, the day before the first round. Every one knew it. And it was really all over heading into New York. A complete certainty.

But the worst team good enough to make the baseball playoffs is in the World Series, because it kept beating teams that were better but not good enough.

The Cards have played every single pitch as if anything can happen. Leads are not leads, whether runs or games, except in the moment before the next pitch. The only thing that can absolutely go wrong, they believe, is that you're behind when the rules say there will be no more pitches. Baseball's beautiful certainty is that the reason a team wins a game is because they actually played it.

Concept: Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "I'm not dead yet."
Photo: moi.

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September 3, 2006

3am In the Garden of Good and Evil

And now, a quick peek into the abyss.

Credits:
some trade mag, like InformationWeek, but you'll have to put in the googletime yourself to confirm that. I merely disavow any ownership of the original publication's content.
Bonus beats:
- Add your own disavowals regarding any use of the bespoke theory.
- Enjoy using the word "bespoke", though; come up with your own excuse, particularly if you're American, as that's what Americans do best. Why waste it.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 7, 2006

Read once, Write many

Gil Grissom of Las Vegas CSI drills into the remains of Archimede's diary, featuring lots of smack about various Greek colleagues and babes, written during any of a series of famous bubble baths by which Archimedes is said to have discovered both buoyancy and the principle that ink smears.

According to story, jealous Christian scribes drained the tubs and wrote retaliatory remarks right on top of the original texts, thus inventing "tagging" and setting the stage for the South Bronx grafitti wars hundreds of years later.

Credits
Gil Grissom: Uwe Bermann, Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center physicist, points to ...
Words: from a manuscript by Greek mathematician Archimedes at SLAC in Stanford, Calif.,
Gizmo: a high-power particle accelerator, set on "tickle", not "stun" or "kill"
Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 5, 2006

Fear and Loathing, well, Mainly Fear, in the Garden of Good and Evil

(filed under "Customer Relationship Management")

Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, GA - Duane Allman -- who in the 1970's made the south rise again by, more or less in this order, sliding an empty glass Coricidin bottle around on skinny metal cables, becoming a god, and dying under his motorcycle at age 24 -- spit out his peach last month at the news that the hit southern country classic "Blue Sky", by his not-dead-yet bandmate Dicky Betts, has become the national television theme song for Menopause.com.

Duane has turned over and spit once before, when to start the new millenium the Allman brothers fired Betts, who, oh that's right, wrote stuff that ranks Number Two on the Country Music Television's poll of the top twenty Greatest Southern Rock Songs of all time.

But this new coffin flipping level of distress can be matched only by that which accompanied Ingmar Bergmann's Swedish goddess of Agony Liv Ullman dancing on tabletops in the worst movie of all time, Ross Hunter's 1973 musical atrocity "Lost Horizon", readily available through eBay "on DVD with Deleted Scenes. "

Let's hope the DVD is blank. And, the Allman Bros were way stupid after Duane died. But who do we hold responsible for the TV theme song assignment? Is no one safe?

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 29, 2006

Mid-Life in the Garden of Good and Evil

As if dating wasn't enough pressure, so that we have to turn it into TV shows, we also note from Landon Jones Class of '66 the Fall of the Haves.

But wait -- the numbers are mixed. What the heck should we make of this?
In the spirit of number crunching, they say "statistics don't lie; statisticians lie." Let's fib:
- The 40th Reunion survey population was only 58% of the 25th Reunion's.
- If we assume that everyone had shown up and given exactly the same answers they had before, we'd have gotten the same numbers the second time as the first -- 100% sameness.
- But instead, there was only a 58% chance of getting the same numbers, because 42% of the respondents didn't make the second shot.
- If we take the 47% Depression/Anxiety rate from the 25th, and reduce it to 58% of that rate, the 40th Reunion rate would have been 27%. Wonderfully, the recorded Depression/Anxiety rate for the 40th was only 19%, a much more attractive outcome!
- By that same artifice, Resetting Priorities, Loneliness and Kid's Problems all fared better than expected.
- Sadly, Separation/Divorce, Health Concern, and Parents' Health all did worse than expected.

Is this ridiculous? Hope so! But if we could find the 42% of earlier respondents that didn't show up this time, and poll them separately as a group, would their numbers look like the numbers for this 58% that did show up? The correct answer is, "why the heck would they?"

But what the hell. Let's pretend. If we take the numbers from the 40th anniversary group in the chart, reduce them all by 8%, (to be 50% of the earlier anniversay group), and then double all those response rates, you get this result for a fictional 100% repeat participation:
- Depression/Anxiety only dropped to 35%
- Separation/Divorce skyrocketed worse: 31%
- Resetting Priorities tried but failed to stay the same: 59%
- Loneliness got a lot less better: 24%
- Health Concerns went nuts: 33%
- Parents' Health went nuts: 85%
- and Children's Problems got out of hand too: 26%.

The highlights: Separation/Divorce; Health, and Kids. Gee, sounds like middle age!
On the other hand, if you think this math was sound, please don't handle any of your own money.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 2:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 25, 2006

Happy Hour in the Garden of Good and Evil

The top single superpower adults would most like to have.
.

28% - Read minds
15% - fly
11% - be invisible
9% - possess super strength
1% - walk through walls

Clearly, dating is still the most important experience of the 21st century.

(Source: Caravan phone survey of 1,018 adults for Activision Publishing (Feb 9-12). Margin of error give or take 3.2 percentage points.)

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 14, 2006

High Noon in the Garden of Good and Evil

.
WHEW! Close one.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 10, 2006

Seeing versus Looking

Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company The New York Times
November 28, 1982, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section II; New Jersey; Page 40, Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

ART; PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCUPTURE IN NEWARK
By JOHN CALDWELL

NEWARK - AT THE City Without Walls gallery here are two photography exhibitions of much more than usual interest. And a few blocks away, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is an opportunity to see the recent metal sculpture of Paul Sisko, one of the best-known artists from this area.

The exhibition at City Without Walls will continue through Thursday, and that at the institute through Friday. Of the photographers, Malcolm Ryder is perhaps the most accomplished, although at first glance he seems dedicated to recording the most ordinary and meaningless scenes.

All of his photographs on view here -they are in color - were made in Arlington, Va. Yet, they are remarkably unspecific, so much so that even someone who has spent his entire life in that suburb of Washington would be hard-pressed to recognize his hometown.

These pictures, in fact, could have been taken almost anywhere in the United States, and that is an important aspect of Mr. Ryder's vision.

What he is trying to show us - with conspicuous success, I think - is most apparent in a series of three untitled shots of parked panel trucks.

At first, after noticing the formal skill with which Mr. Ryder selected his images and his well-nigh perfect technique in making the prints, we are at a loss to understand just why be has chosen to record these particular images.

Then we notice the overwhelming blankness of the scene, the vast blue of the sky and the rental-agency markings on some of the trucks, and we begin to suspect the artist of making a point.

Yet, there is no conspicuous message anywhere, no particular beauty or tawdriness. There is just exquisite color, the total absence of human beings and an odd stillness.

Mr. Ryder could have made some trite point about the emptiness of life; however, judging from his other works, he is much too subtle for that. Rather, in the most laconic and specific fashion, he is celebrating the textures and feel of the real, ordinary world around us.

In another example, we see a slightly rusty Dodge Dart parked against a fence on an empty street, an inexplicably moving scene. Again, we see the most ordinary suburban house with flower beds in front

However, Mr. Ryder refuses to emphasize the banality of the scene. In a sense, he is too serious for that; instead, he forces us to bring our own messages to his work, to take our own readings of the reality that he records and we inhabit.

One of the photographs seems to focus on meaningless street signs, another on pruned rose bushes and a child's abandoned toys. The message here is that there is no message, no easy poetry, no sentiment What we do have is a surprising vision from an artist who celebrates things for what they really are and how they actually look.

As we study Mr. Ryder's photographs, we discover that he has renewed our connection with the visual world around us, which is a considerable achievement indeed.

David William Riccardi's black-and-white photographs, which also are on view at City Without Walls, seem less conventional than Mr. Ryder's, both in terms of form and subject matter. Many of them are beachfront scenes of boardwalks and amusement arcades, including some at the Jersey Shore.

Mr. Riccardi is not afraid to experiment with his camera, even to the point of moving it as he takes the photographs or adopting odd points of view. Sometimes this works very well, as in a picture of an overweight, middle-aged woman wearing a rather ugly print dress.

The woman was photographed from the waist down as she walked along a sidewalk. The hem of her skirt is coming loose, with the string hanging from it serving as the focus of the picture.

This detail is telling, and without seeing the woman's face we know something about a lifetime of small failures. Another time, we see a young, poorly dressed couple walking along a boardwalk under threatening skies. Beside them is an even younger girl, perhaps the young woman's sister.

Again, the artist's vision is poignant, and with a single image he bas managed to suggest a world of little hope and closed-off possibilities.

Other photographers have used similar subjects for equivalent ends. Mr. Riccardi is by no means as original as Mr. Ryder; yet, he is a good artist and almost magical in his ability to imbue his images with power.

City Without Walls is at 140 Halsey Street, in downtown Newark-It is open Tuesday through Friday from 11 AM. to 6 P.M. and Saturdays from noon to 4 P.M.

The New York Times, November 28, 1982

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March 31, 2006

CA, Inc. -- a.k.a. Computer Associates

Please see the entry "Articles about IT on Archestra", posted March 31, 2006.

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January 6, 2005

Xia's 5th Birthday

CLICK HERE

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