Blog About Photography

oh la dee da they must have made some mis­take I mean don’t they know who i am?

Once a year, the New Yorker descends into self-​​parody in order to sell expen­sive real estate to high-​​end adver­tis­ers and bump up issue sales. They call this the style issue, and I car­ried it around for a week befor I even opened it and man oh man is it a waste of time. They con­front such com­plex prob­lems as coun­ter­feit hand­bags and where to shop in Dal­las, TX while throw­ing in a cou­ple of extra reviews of art and archi­tec­ture. Not even the first 30 or so pages are free of com­mer­cial blight; music critic Sasha Fere-​​Jones pens a few words for ‘critic’s note­book’ review­ing the viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign for the forth­com­ing Nine Inch Nails album, which he refers to as an artform.

I don’t mean to be closed minded here. My art is all about scav­eng­ing the pop cul­ture waste­land, pre­sent­ing what I find quth a mix­ture of rev­er­ence and dis­gust — that’s what I do. But where’s the disgust?

I will say though that when­ever the New Yorker does a dou­ble issue, they run some pretty hilar­i­ous cartoons.

This has noth­ing to do with art, but, man, the inter­net is get­ting so good. I just read this Times arti­cle about Grand­Cen­tral, and imme­di­ately signed up for it. What it does it pretty rad. It lets you sign up for a phone num­ber (you can pick your area code — I picked 917 — and then it let’s you choose from like 30 num­bers) that, when called, will ring all of your other num­bers at once (work, cell, home, etc.) It’s in beta test­ing right now so it’s free. After beta is over, it’s free for two num­bers. A pre­muim plan is a lit­tle pricey for the casual user — $15 per month.

I only have one phone num­ber, but I signed up any­way because of the other use­ful bit of fun­tion­al­ity this ser­vice pro­vides. Pretty soon I’m going to be mov­ing from DC to New York, and I sup­pose I could change my phone num­ber and it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But it would obvi­ously be a pain and I still get oppor­tu­ni­ties from time to time that would stop com­ing if I were to change my phone num­ber. Grand­Cen­tral let’s me link my cur­rent num­ber to a 917 num­ber. Prob­lem solved.

The other cool thing is that when peo­ple leave you voice­mail when they’ve called you using the Grand­Cen­tral num­ber, you can man­age all the mes­sages from an email-​​style inbox on the Grand­Cen­tral web­site. I have a real prob­lem check­ing my mes­sages because I get really fuck­ing bored going through them one by one. This kind of func­tion­al­ity is long over­due and it’ll be good for those of us who can’t afford an iPhone.

The New York Times has two arti­cles about the future of movies, specif­i­cally of the down­load­able vari­ety, in the Arts sec­tion today. Here and Here. Are they just find­ing out about this?

Pretty pre­dictable, prob­a­bly. But I can’t help who I am. Ha. I went with Bladessari over Gursky because, I mean, some­one in my final four had to be a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the other three. Click it to enlarge.