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Rant

• 04.24.08
  8-Bit Street Art Fills My Heart With Love   Rant (1)

  
  

  photo via Nick Gray
  

  I’m a fan of pixel most things 16 bits and below; the closer you get to 8 the happier I am. This lovely moment of 8-bit zen was photographed somewhere on the Lower East Side. A step up from the real life Mario question mark boxes that nearly got a few Ohio folks arrested, this piece of art charmingly integrates itself into the concrete environment.

  I’d always daydreamed of ripping off the idea I’d heard about long ago: making the entire first level of Mario into a stencil.

  I mean, come on…half the work has been done: a full .png of World 1-1.

  Someday.

  I’m always overjoyed at the longevity of the basic Mario iconography. The lasting cultural impression that the 53 color palette of the NES has left on us as a generation never fails to bring me joy. From the evidence of chiptune composing software LSDJ to art collectives like I Am 8-Bit, the cultural resonance of the NES has lasted. I remember the moment I walked into a room at the 2004 Whitney Biennial and saw projections from Arcangel’s hand glitched NES cartridge displaying only SMB’s iconic clouds to the sound of looping chiptunes, I felt a sense of legitimacy.

  
  

  photo via Artlink, though it is not a photo from the ‘04 Whitney Biennial

  There was art distilled from the heart of a working NES, that sat high up on a shelf in a major NY art gallery. The artist had chose to leave the system visible, the heart of the projections left out and visible. Showing that the importance came as much from what was projected as to what created the images.

  I had a similar feeling walking into the Game On exhibit which graced Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry twice (as the popularity demanded it). I visited the first incarnation in 2005, with a friend who had come to town for the week. Both him and I, who had went to high school together, lived as a pretty similar caliber of geeks. We walked the halls of the museum, looking at the original Famicom systems running behind glass, controllers jutting from the wall, like relics on hermetic altars. I poked at the table of ancient hand held systems, which included an array of Nintendo’s Game & Watch systems (crude LCD Gameboy precursors, some of whom share a striking resemblance to their current DS) I went on play Infocom’s text only Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy game on a still breathing Commodore 128. I’d wasted many hours on the same kind of computer, locked away in a self-imposed bedroom isolation on that very agonizing game.

  
  

  cheeky animated gif via the archives of douglas adams dot com

  I looked to my friend and said, “Well, we have to be doing something right…the shit we wasted our childhood on is now in a museum.”

• 04.24.08
  Where Did I Go?   Rant (0)

  Almost a month and a half since the last post at TTM.com, and hell, let’s be honest…that post was written by Dan. So, it’s been ages since I wrote here, and I do think about it often, but time/life has consumed me:

  I’ve begun a new job, working as an assistant editor for Devil’s Due.

  I disappeared to Chicago for a week to celebrate my birthday and catch Why? at the Abbey Pub.

  I returned to LA and caught some kind of chest plague that hurt enough for me to quit smoking and take a sick day from work.

  I’m just realigning my life to a point where hopefully I can write again. We shall see.

  
  When will then be now?

  Soon hopefully…

• 01.26.08
  THANK YOU: …and hello new folks.   Rant, Singles (0)

  

  To the few folks who’ve been visiting lately, a big thank you. Any eyes on the page are a motivation to churn out wore words. I’m going to be focusing on bringing more regular content to the site. I hesitate to put a formal schedule to it, as the day job still holds a grip on the majority of my time, but my goal is to bring updates to you every Monday-Wednesday-Friday. The format is still really being defined, the little stylistic tics still being hunted down and corrected. I’m also daydreaming about expanding the content to other writers down the road, potentially syndicating some things written by folks I know.

  If you are so inclined, I’m always looking to expand my roster of logos. At the moment, I culled the backgrounds for my logo from an assortment of my own photography and am always looking for more. I’m going to create a page to host the full photographs of the ones submitted by readers with link backs and joyous thanks. If you’d like to submit one, please feel free to EMAIL them to me and I’ll add them to the rotating roster. The final image format will be 336×336 with the TTM logo over the top half of the image, so the abstract stuff seems to work best.

  If you happen to be a fantastical designer who’d like to work me up a logo, that’s also awesome. Feel free to EMAIL me as well, you imaginary internet designer person.

  I’ll leave you with a song:

  The Books – Smells Like Content
  (from 2005’s Lost and Safe)

  Click to LISTEN and download.

  Purchase at Insound

  This song, for me, embodies a rainy Chicago day. The bulk of my last days in that city were wrapped in a bizzare cloud of confusion and potential that this song embodies. The skittering percussion and enveloping fragments of guitar feel much like the overarching feeling that permeated my last year in Chicago. I was gripped by a burden of of being simultaneously connected and fundamentally disconnected to the world, so much that I abandoned most every venture. The seeds of my drive and ability to write were hidden away in a long long winter, buried in an abstract comfort with the place I’d stuck myself. It’s a beautiful song none the less; efficiently encapsulating in a way that few other songs have, the calm that comes from recognizing the both the futility and beauty in life.

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