Hello World,
It’s been a long time again since I’ve posted anything to this blog but I hope that the quality makes up for the lack of quantity. I know I should be posting something every week or even more than that, if I follow some other posts that are seemingly so prolific and verbose. I guess I don’t have that much to say that I feel is either important or interesting enough to take the time out to put down on paper, or in this case screen space. I wish I had the kind of time some of these people seem to have. I can’t seem to find enough time to do the bookkeeping, marketing, design, bidding, and still be able to take time out to eat, let alone spend an hour writing my opinion of someone Else’s work, or my own.
The king of hams
Opinions are as common as spam which is what I’m really trying to get to in this article… Spam. Where in the world does it all come from? Who does all this work? I just spent almost an hour filtering through the spam on this very blog. Yes, it’s not enough that it has to come constantly in my email, on my phone, but now it comes as a comment on my blog too. I mean how much work must go into writing these things, emails, blog comments, text messages, you name it. It has to be such a waste of time as well, I mean… who buys these drugs? Here we are in this shitstorm of a world and what we are selling most is drugs. Now don’t get me wrong a pain killer at the right time is one of the finest things in the world, right next to a good constitutional first thing in the morning after your coffee. I grew up in the sixties, I dropped acid and smoked pot like a broken stove all through the seventies, I lived through the coke era which seems like it never ends at this point, just keeps getting handed down from generation to generation, also a huge waste of time. At the time it always felt like it was the counter-cultural, reactionary thing to do. It was all part of the anti-war, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-establishment movement that has in fact changed the world we live in. But, back to the point, is the cost of that the mass distribution of drugs for everything from growing eyelashes to growing a larger or more erect penis?
Hardy Spam
What is wrong with us? Have we all gone mad or have we taken so many drugs that we, and all of our children and their children, are stupid? Who falls for those million dollar transfers from Nairobi or Kenya? I must get about four or five of those a day. Your ATM card with eight hundred thousand dollars on it is just waiting for you to pick it up? I know there are people out there that fall for that, but who? Anybody that is using a computer and getting email must at least be semi-literate, in order to use the tools.
Part of the fallout from all of this is that I’d like to be able to contact people that might actually need my services through their email but how could I possibly wade through the slime of the overflowing sewer of spam that is constantly being generated by someone somewhere. I want to know who though. I don’t know anybody, at least nobody that admits to this. In a party perhaps or a gallery opening you’re chatting with someone, “What do you do?” … “Oh, I spam. I’m working for an online casino that steals people’s money in a very organized way, it’s really very satisfying and rewarding work. I got into it right out of prison.”
Years ago when this all started and generated an entire industry of protection against spam and virus attacks, (another huge waste of precious time that somebody must have too much of that I wish I could trade them for) I thought it would fade, that people would stop flailing madly about trying to sell things to people that don’t need or want them. I thought that the anti-spam software would make spam obsolete. But it hasn’t, if anything it has made it more aggressive like the strains of bacteria that have grown resistant to all the drugs, that we must have a huge surplus of if the spam that I get everyday is any indication. If that is true why in the world do prescriptions that my doctor, who is putting his kids through Harvard on the commissions that he must get, why do they cost so much money? Maybe we don’t need a health care plan maybe we just need more spam. God help us, we can’t seem to help ourselves.
No animals were harmed in the making of this blog.
Just a sample of the kind of work goes into a presentation.
Then with only two hours left on the permit which expires at eleven o’clock we’re walking this truck around the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenune and moving it into position right on Times Square at the base of the ticker where the ball comes down every New Year’s eve. I look down the avenue below and this is the shot that I know he wanted all along. It’s what is the true heart of New York City, the center of all that’s truly the city, and a lot of what’s American. The advertising, the people, the traffic, even at 10 AM on a Saturday morning we are attracting a crowd of tourists on the sidewalk. About fifty people have gathered already, taking pictures and watching these guys jump over the photographer’s head while he shoots to catch them mid-air. I took about ten shots or so just to get this one and I saw the Polaroids, it seemed like he never missed. I guess that’s why he’s the photographer and I’m the draftsmen. At eleven o’clock on the dot the cop steps up and stops it. The meter has run out and the permit has expired. So, we’re packing it back up to move the truck over to Fifth Avenue where we have the rest of the day to shoot; but no extra copies of the permit to put in the window of the truck so we get a parking ticket. It’s the life we lead – moving trucks, stacking platforms, explaining to the cop that they were just trying to see if they could shoot in the middle of Fifth Avenue on Saturday, or trying not to break the branches of the trees along the street while we pull a U-Turn to get the truck set up again for another shot. It’s art, that’s what we live for isn’t it, to make art.
