Five Easy Pieces

Eryn squinted at the tremulous, skittering screen. Valor's moon hovered above the drooping grid drawn by her outdated Planet-Scanner; even-older Supplemental Informational Interfaces (SIIs) strained to superimpose themselves atop the raw feed, adding a ghostly, distracting laciness to an exosphere already laden with gaudy satellites and derelict space stations.

In addition to their towering physical archives, moons typically housed the digital repositories of their host planet's cultural emanations. Eryn lazed through her nagging SIIs, bypassing opportunities to scour volumes of "Middle-Southern Valorian Prose Poetry" or plunge into the annals of "Traditional Squash-Malt Revelries." She nearly set her Planet-Scanner on another moon before noticing "Quasi-Symmetrical Devotionals," a category intriguing enough to earn a few more moments of Eryn's interplanetary browsing.

The screen of anemic, wilting grids became suddenly populated with hundreds of tiny pictures. Some were moving, others were still; a few were equipped with explanatory text (though none of this could be trusted). Eryn selected one of the footnoted pictures, and her screen became mercifully focused on a single image and its curious entry:

Windless windmill,
Durga-armed rainbow-spindle.
Vitruvian Man,
Spectrum fan,
With a psychotropic brindle.

Valor was an old planet. And like all old planets, it had grown to become thoroughly rationalized, industrialized, and blighted. Any remaining esoteric clutter had been beamed to one of its storage-moons, more or less abandoned (save to occasionally serve as some inscrutable, infinite tarot deck to be perused by a bored, drifting traveler). Eryn chose her next card: a bloated icon, a picture-licker, a faceless equilibrist...

Naturally, Eryn's subsequent choices became influenced by her previous ones -- she fixed on a picture that seemed similar to her first selection: a flower-armed, peacocking daisy; seemingly hoofed, eternally lurching beneath its burden of telescoping limbs -- or maybe tails? A ribbon-harnessed cat o' nine tails?

An abrasive buzz coupled with an irritating strobe alerted Eryn that a ship was nearing hers. She had been idling; one of Valor's monitoring drones would soon interrupt her wanderings to inundate her with lengthy legal garble, and she'd have to move on. This was routine; you could never truly plumb a planet's moons -- in a matter of minutes, you'd be ushered out of orbit, signal lost.

"One last picture," Eryn thought. She felt strangely homesick, unmoored. A final specter filled her screen, its cycling effects weirdly synced with the warning sounds triggered by the policing drone. Eryn imagined an oracle, a cloaked maiden, benevolent, staid, but shimmering, giggling --

(linked images via hypothete, mirrrroring, noisia, tommoody, & mirrrroring, respectively)

Where the Turds Have No Name

Though he mostly recaps his recaps and continues to justify, elevate, sentimentalize, rhapsodize, etc., his WANGA participation, it was brought to my attention that Jerry Saltz quoted me (though without accreditation) in his recent New York Magazine article (thanks to Molly Porter for the tip!). I told my parents and they were nonplussed.

Actually, he took part of my quote from one of my responses to William Powhida's "rant," though he took it completely out of context. I clearly said "since watching it (WANGA) is like biting into a glitter-dipped, shellacked turd," which is, I think, more nuanced, evocative, and synethesic than how Saltz quoted - or rather, didn't quote - me.

Either way, I like how my rather coprophagic comment compliments the awful Abdi-made clay Saltz-head that accompanies the article. The head looks like it's made of poop, and that Saltz is deeply inhaling his own poop-formed head (hence the flaring nostrils) - and loving it. And what has WANGA been but a platform on which Saltz has taken to repeatedly luxuriate in his own exhalations? Since Saltz likened my shit-simile to Chris Ofili's work, I prefer to imagine Abdi's shitty clay homage as what would happen if the Sensation artists Ofili and Quinn joined forces to cast a head in the critic's own feces (rather than in blood). I believe that such an artwork would've won the "shocking art" challenge and made a nice addition to my disembodied head collection.

Despite Saltz's continued championing of the "populist" art world - and denigration of the "insider" one - only "somebodies" like Linda Yablonsky and Powhida get proper citations in his article (he also makes a point to re-mention all of WANGA's judges), whereas I'm lumped into the faceless-angry-blogger category. Which I am. I'm angry and I have no face. I'm surprised at how many GIFs fit this description.

Saltz keeps praising the magical polyphony of the internet and how it's paradigmatically changing art criticism, but he has a habit of referring to writing/writers on the web as if they're some kind of wild, free-floating energy untethered by bodies or identities. From Saltz's descriptions of these sentient astral forces, you'd think that all that mattered was quantity: "over a quarter-million words had been generated," "together we were crumbs and butter of a mysterious madeleine," "there were many voices speaking to me - and one another," "criticism contains multitudes." Saltz writes about the groovy benevolent Borg vibes of the web's quintillions, but he's really just abstracting, mystifying, flattering, and anonymizing everyone who, to him, isn't a name worth mentioning.

UPDATE: HYSTERICAL. New York Magazine quoted my blog in their "Comments" section and refers to me only as "the blogger at Purple Links." Given that I was writing about how the magazine didn't accredit me for my quote they used in last week's issue, you'd think they would've made an effort to get it right this time. Is someone over there being an asshole or are they just an incompetent rag?

UPDATE UPDATE: So, turns out they do link to the "Comments" section on their website: http://bit.ly/ayw9Mm

Hard to find, but there it is!