I do not claim to be an American Idol expert, (or even a fan really) but it would be extremely difficult to engage in water cooler and coffee bar conversation without some awareness of, or opinion on the current Idol contestants. But this year is a little different. There seems to be a growing trend towards voting for the underdog and the misfit in the Idol universe.
Last year Taylor Hicks and his less-than-mediocre singing and dad-at-a-wedding performances was catapulted to the top of the Idol heap. Now audiences have set their sights on Sanjaya. For some (young, shy, socially awkward girls across the country) Sanjaya and his slight, soft spoken personality and his boyish looks are reason enough to vote for him. For others Sanjaya represents an opportunity to take control of a major network show with millions of viewers. Howard Stern, Votefortheworst.com and others are all urging America to vote for Sanjaya for the sole purpose of a feeling of power and control over something typically uncontrollable.
The whole premise of Idol is to turn over the vote to the American audience with the idea that they will use their “power” responsibly and vote for the best singer/performer or at least the contestant with the most “star quality”. But what happens if Sanjaya wins? People all over the blogosphere and tv are talking about Idol loosing its credibility. (as if it really had any to begin with— the show is an advertisers wet dream and a marketing monster) But the thing that I find most interesting in all of this is what happens to Sanjaya if he wins? The sweet, innocent, shy, soft spoken Sanjaya is already starting to be changed by his artificially attained position of safety among the remaining contestants. Even Sanjaya is shooting back at the judges with attitude laden comebacks (despite his increasingly absurd hairdos and word-forgetting, whispering performances). His continued presence on the show and the astronomical number of votes he receives are already corrupting Sanjaya.
Despite his lack-luster, passionless performances Sanjaya remains on the show. And by now he and his fellow contestants must be aware of the various movements afoot to keep him on the show. I wonder what affect this kind of “success” has on a person. How do one would deal with knowing that they are getting votes just to piss off a midget (in the case of Howard Stern), or because they are perceived as the worst singer/performer in the competition. If Sanjaya does manage to win, he will always have the knowledge that he did not do so based on his vocal ability. In all likelyhood he will spend the remaining10 minutes of his carrer(unsuccessfully)attemptingto prove that he really can sing. The other (potentially more interestin) option is that he will begin to believe that he truly is deserving of the votes and subsequently the win. Either way these votes, this success has the potential to destroy anything that is truly appealing about Sanjaya— and that is interesting to me.
Is the Sanjaya movement the future of reality television? Is this tv 2.0? This may just be the beginning. As an audience we are manipulating more than just of the results of a tv show. We are manipulating a person’s life and potentially his character. It would seem that we are no longer content to passively watch as the lives of real people unfold before our eyes on the various realty television and competition based shows— we now want to influence and exert control over those shows and indirectly (for now) over someone else’s life. (probably because we feel like we have little control over our own)
Filed under: american idol, life, music, thoughts
This video shows a large touch screen display that is simmilar to the one used in Minority Report.
over at macrumors some useres are already speculating (hoping against hope) that the next version of the imac may be a tablet style machine— It sounds like they are dreaming about a 17 inch— portable-around-the-house computer with an iphone style interface that could be docked on a stand (resembling the current imac) and used as a desktop
come to think of it, that’s what I am dreaming of too…
Filed under: apple, tech-ish.
Karen and I spent last week in NYC— she had to go for the NAEA conference and I went along for the chance to spend a week alone in the city for our 8th anniversary. it felt like going home— we both worked in the city for almost 6 years and spent most of our pre-daughter-free-time there.
We decided to avoid the crowd of art teachers, tourists and parade-goers in mid town and stayed at the Gershwin— in a part of town that is much more our speed.
ood.
For me one of the best things about nyc is the food. We hit— Mesa grill (our favorite [Iron chef] Bobby Flay’s restaurants), Mexican Radio and also tried a new-to-us sushi restaurant- Sushi Twist. This place was amazing, some of the most unusual specialty rolls I’ve ever heard of, quiet, sexy and both the food and drinks were out of this world. We were originally going to go to Morimoto’s newer new york venue but after reading some horrible reviews online we opted to try something new and were pleasantly rewarded— we ended up eating here twice
visual stimulation.
The surprise bonus of the trip was the fact that our event badges gave us free admission to all of the city’s best museums. The conference was being held at the Hilton on 6th and 52nd around the corner from the MoMa so we went together once and I went beck by myself while the St. Patrick’s day parade boomed outside. There was one exhibition at MoMa that we almost didn’t check out—comic abstraction. It actually ended up being one of the highlights of our visit. There was one artist whose enamel on canvas paintings had a really sleek surface that were incredible Inka Essenhigh’s website has some other paintings done around the same time as the ones from the exhibition.
Filed under: food., life, personal., thoughts, travel
Here are a few shots of a small grouping of memory vessels installed my studio wall.
The vessels are made from cut and folded vellum that has been soaked in shellac.
these were the test vessels and still have the ‘cut-lines’ on them
(the finished pieces have clean edges)
Filed under: art+photography, artsy., personal., pics
These images are some of the initial sketches for the memory vessels as well as some studies for other internal memory structures.
My newest body of work is all related to the concept of Intimate architecture+the space of memory. The vessels below represent the internal loci of memory or the site of storage. The shapes are boat-like vessels made of paper and book pages. Paper is not the best designed material for holding anything of substance beyond text and as such it is the perfect material to represent the fragility of memory and its potential to hold large ammounts of emotionally charged information. For me this new work is meant to be an exploration of the errosion and decay of (personal) memory over time; from the moments of perception all the way through long term storage and recall. I am intrigued by the affect of memory bias or atlered encoding of memories—the idea that we store our personal perceptions of events in our lives as memories and not the nuetral or actual events themselves.What impact does this have on the way we use these memories to construct our realities; first in the present and then in the future. I am also interested in paper as a repository for memory in the form of words. This concept of paper as the substrait for memory is slowly degrading infavor of new digital documentation of our lives, experiences, emotions and reactions, designed for consumption rather than preservation.
Filed under: art+photography, artsy., personal., pics, sketch
articulatory loop (studies for memory vessels)
11” x 30” paint, graphite and shellac on paper
articulatory loop, left side detail
Filed under: art+photography, artsy., personal., pics
This was the first painting that my wife and I colaborated on.
It was 1st featured in the Starbucks sponsered exhibition: Avant Grande— at the Chelsea museum in NYC in may of 2005. It was also featured in the View from inside exhibition at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery here in Portland.
Filed under: art+photography, artsy., backstory, pics, sketch
