Roach Spray, Batteries, Water Mellon
I haven’t really managed to understand MySpace yet, despite participating. It has the benefit of attracting a whole lot of people who otherwise don’t have an internet presence, but what mystifies me is why it attracted all those people in the first place. It’s poorly designed, has too many—and too poorly targeted—advertisements (compare Last.fm), the interface is unintuitive, the features are poorly implemented (a messaging system that only retains old messages for a small amount of time, for instance), and so on. Nevertheless, social networking is obviously a domain where whichever platform attracts the most the earliest automatically wins out, and the sheer number of people there does seem to outweigh some of the many negatives. So, today I received a friend request from Found, a magazine that collects found objects, mostly notes and photographs, and publishes them in a serial, in books, and on their website (there’s also Dirty Found). There’s some lovely stuff there.
As Zbigniew Herbert said, in Nothing Special,
mr artist
builds a world
not from atoms
but from remnants
May 14th, 2007 at 3:19 am
Roach spray…batteries…water melon…I swear that dude has forgotten something. Hang on, I know – nappies (or should that be diapers?).
May 14th, 2007 at 3:41 am
J. J. Mackintosh, “Primary and Secondary Qualities”, in Studia Leibnitiana, Vol. 8, 1976, p. 101.
May 28th, 2007 at 6:50 am
This reminds me of a Spanish poetry lecture I went to where the lecturer began: ‘Poetry is not like shopping lists.’
By which he meant that poetry is deliberately and carefully organised in a particular order, not just slapped down in any old order. But you’re right. There is something artistically pleasing about a shopping list. Thanks for alerting me to this obvious truth!