Mike Dressel

FourFour is the place to go to service all your kooky Kate Bush gif needs.

Maybe the most unpleasant aspect of the durian is what the flesh looks like once the hard outer shell is cracked open. “Flesh” has never been a more accurate descriptor: The plump, oddly shaped, grayish pods have an unsettling sheen and malleability that seems natural yet extraterrestrial at the same time. Think of it this way: Durian flesh would make an excellent stand-in for an alien fetus in a low-budget science-fiction thriller. Even if the durian smelled like some otherworldly combination of puppy’s breath and unicorn farts, putting it in your mouth would be an unpleasant proposition.

— The intrepid eaters at the A.V. Club sample a durian, the rotting diaper of the fruit world.

It is unfortunate that some are resistant to the cinematic poetry that is Gymkata. There was once a time when it haunted my dreams.

'Question Your Tea Spoons'

I was at the ICP this weekend to see Twilight Visions,  but I also spent some time with the Miroslav Tichý exhibition.  He is a Czech photographer/flâneur, and that idea, the going out and capturing these everyday images which when viewed later are not so commonplace after all, is a method which produces some of my favorite art.  (I seem drawn to work—no matter what medium—with an element of the imperfect to it.)

One of the wall texts, when discussing Tichý’s work, referenced the French writer Georges Perec’s idea of the infra-ordinary (as opposed to the extraordinary).  It is the practice of that idea that I enjoy most in the blogs I currently read/follow. (Not that I don’t LOL @ a good cat video. I am not made of stone.) These blogs-as-art-projects live somewhere above “I ate a bran muffin for breakfast”-type lists, and are the opposite of the curated web, or agit-blogging. From Perec’s essay:

How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.

What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.

To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us.

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.

It is not an easy feat to accomplish with artistry, this examination of the infra-ordinary via the medium of blogging, but when it succeeds it can be revelatory, and vital.