Blogocaster: The Working, The Working, Just the Working Life

From Etsy's Blog

Does This Help?

Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

By: Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

SNL Digital Short

About A Dead Man

Last Friday, I hosted my 6th show at Harvest Records. It was called About A Dead Man — and it was about that.

Three years ago, I made a choice to dictate myself beneath the reign of one simple rule — bow thy head and draw. Employ only that of the subconscious to mute said action. Exhaust. At the present vantage, I feel genuinely weathered — and since, both nervously serious and seriously nervous. I would prefer to challenge last Friday's Opening with a new title: Closing — A Sloth in Destruction.

At the show, I introduced a series of small books intended to mature more dependently active directions.

Beady Eye 'Bring The Light'

Blogosophy: The Entitled

"You're down to the bedrock. A boolean or integer value is the digital equivalent of a grunt. You can't get any more basic than a like, or a thumbs-up, or a favorite. "

This is following in the trail of Net-Neutrality, the Chuck Klosterman article, and the Tumblr outage...

Happy New Year!

2010 - not a terrible year for ye posting on this blog, relatively speaking of course... I'd like to take a minute to say that I'm very proud of those who recorded and album, threw an art show, improvised comedy, shot videos, etc... I feel lucky to have friends that all have their own thing going on. Thank you also for contributing to the blog. I was going to say, "Without you, this blog would be nothing," and then I got to thinking, well, I guess it's already something. I mean 900 something posts, you know? But I don't consider webpages tangible objects, so maybe it's nothing after all. If all the lights went out, where would the site go? Luckily for us it seems more inevitable that our future masters, The Robots, will use this site against us (depending on who is in power).

Today I was perusing the Boston.com's "The Big Picture" site, particularly the 2010 round-up pics. I was really captivated by several pictures mostly involving big, global news stories from the past year. Some were easy to see and soak in their beauty; others extremely hard to look at. Pictures. Moments in time, you know... This world is pretty nutso, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. I was definably shocked by the more apocalyptic photos. Natural Disasters came hardcore in 2010 (so did unnatural disasters), and luckily none of us where physically harmed (which is what I was referring to by the "relatively speaking" comment earlier).

I wish everyone a Happy New Year.

THE BIG PICTURE

part 1
part 2
part 3

Blogournalism: Knee-Slapper

I don't think this is funny and not because I live in Brooklyn. I do appreciate it as a response to JoeScough (the idea of the iPad being the biggest media story of 2010 illustrates the distance some media figures have from important things - though I guess I am glad to hear that media figures' lives are changing).

I have some questions. Is Brian Williams jabbing just the NYT or media in general? Is he poking young culture's interpretation of capitalism? Did he have this written out before-hand? Why is JoeScough laughing so hard? Does Brian Williams think he can write a real piece of journalism about changes in the economy? Does his pronunciation of "borough" and "artisanal" reflect any form of classicism? When was the last time any of these people were not in a controlled climate? Are there hints of jealousy and insecurity in his longing to primitively sit and build a fire? Is it meta for him to sarcastically talk about people ironically wearing glasses? Why Marrakesh?

Merry Christmas

As many of you know I'm somewhat a sucker for the 90's. Now that it is almost 2011 it is time to reminisce, so decided to collect images and songs on a new Tumblr blog I started, THE LAST GREAT DECADE. This is your Christmas present, enjoy!

Return of the Lincoln: A Net Neutrality Parable

This is a PSA promoting net neutrality for the Writer's Guild. My job was to move the action figures ever so slightly while my buddy, Axel, would snap a pictures to later pull together creating "animation." Novel! I think it turned out pretty damn well. To see more of Axel's production work check out www.ag-bk.com.

Thank You Milton

A couple of months ago, I was talking with a colleague and friend of mine about the complexities of combining work and play; takin' your job home, bringin' your passions to work, etc. We began to talk about the Etsy Blog and she was telling me about a series called Saved from the Fire. She was personally unsure about what she would keep and we began to talk inversely about getting rid of things.

I've collected and gotten rid of many things since graduating high school. The majority of them have been clothes, media and various family heirlooms. She led on that she was thinking of starting her own series called Into the Great Beyond and asked if I'd like to participate.

After some thinking, I came to this.

Rich People Still Got It!

No Smoking

source

I tweeted and now my Tumbie huwts

READ ME

If you hadn't noticed, Tumblr has had some site outages. So I couldn't look at a blog for a day or two. I was pretty devastated. No nudie pics. No ironic messages. No waxing anything.

This is just why I posted the Chuck Klosterman article. I think there's something to be said for the type of expectations present in Ehrenberg's argument. Ok, so I understand that he's a VC that taps the blogging world as his podium. Good for him. However, this logic of "public" humiliation seems trivial, no? I'm referring to:

"I tell my Twitter followers and Facebook friends about the new post, and watch (and participate) in the conversation over the ensuing hours. Unfortunately, when people can’t read the post, it is hard to have a timely conversation about the post."

I think truly this type of situation exploits our perception of time & the expectations we're building regarding our individual voice. The immediacy of conversation and subsequent desire to garner a reaction is a very interesting possibility in today's world (with the technology we all have available to us). To me though, these types of posts are one in the same with any other posts, albethem(?) disguised as thoughtful perception pieces as opposed to bits of whining. There's a hidden devaluation in general. It's not really about an individual post, but rather an individual blog, wall, page, etc and it's ability to maintain a popular conversation. The frustration to remain timely on a micro level is a symptom of the macro environment of blogging.

"the President of the Company, in my Twitter stream, informed me that my musings about switching platforms in the wake of the outage was “reactionary.” Reactionary? Really? Is it reactionary if you are in an information vacuum for an entire day? Is it reactionary if your social contract is broken? I don’t think so."

It's interesting that Ehrenberg goes against the very nature of the thing that so inspires him to conceptualize text.

"I appreciated that my friend @bijan informed me that he, as a Board member, was involved and engaged in, problem resolution."

And here we truly see the separation between "church" and "state."

I Wanna Be Your Dog

I Wanna Be Your Dog from LEGS MEDIA on Vimeo.

Blogspective: Chuck On the Snowballing Weight of Technology

Great article from Chuck Klosterman in the NYT. Though I've never felt like I see eye to eye with Chuck (he's a bit older), I do deeply appreciate this perspective and metaphor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html

I was really intrigued by this phrase:

“It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the Internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me.” - Alice Gregory

It also kind of puts this soundtrack in my head:

Lucas and The Lovelys

Blogousand: Podium

Thousand times we've dragged ourselves to this here ... podium. This is a reject design from a project I was working on recently... The images are tile flooring taken at various NYC location via my cell phone camera. The podium is a sketch.

Sucking in the Seventies