I hung out a lot this past weekend more than I usually hang out - which is still not that much or as much as I wanted to - but walking around downtown with friends … it just looks like someplace to be able to afford to hang out. I know I couldn’t afford it. Overbuilt, uninteresting and boring - the people made it fun. Or maybe I’m just an old fart.
At first I was going to title this post “The End of Technology” or “Technology Kills Art” or something equally ominous, but (obviously) decided against it. We’re living during what feels like the end of something, but I can’t quite place my finger on it. So I won’t.
There are many artists from the 80’s due to release albums/CDs/(whatever you call a thematic collection of songs now) this year. I’ll probably post either a series of reviews or a birds-eye view of many of them later this year. I mention the 80’s because that’s the decade when many artists became much more comfortable with using technology to create their art - especially musicians. Just imagine Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” without its famous synth line (discovered by Dave Stewart accidentally playing it backwards) or Prince with a real drummer and without a Linn drum machine. And what would the 80’s be without the advent of the promotional music video? I’ve been watching Grace Jones’ (and Jean-Paul Goude’s) masterpiece video “A One Man Show” on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) for the past week. (Yes, it’s been on my list of Videos That Should Be DVDs along with Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ The Times” for a while now.) You might also want to check out Miriam Kershaw’s article “Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones” for a more scholarly analysis of that period of Grace’s art.
Some people use the word ‘mecca’ to mean an occasional hotbed of visibility (and debauchery). I’m talking about a neighborhood where we could greet each other walking down the street and actually talk to each other. Atlanta? I’m not so sure about that anymore. For one, everything’s so spread out and isolated. And every time I’ve visited, the other Black gay men I noticed were either scurrying home to their own cul-de-sacs or drunk at a bar. Or drunk at the mall. Um, not quite what I had in mind …
Yes, it does, even though it’s been about a year, it still hurts. The completely different interface. All the new template tags and templates, so many more templates. All those plugins of yesteryear, rendered utterly useless. And the more you customized any of it - ouch - the more you felt the loss. Many bloggers I know that used it either stayed with the version they had or chose to start over with other software instead of upgrading to Movable Type 4. Or if you were like me, you stopped blogging altogether. Playing around with Tumblr and Vox and ranting from time to time on MySpace just wasn’t cuttin’ it anymore, so it’s time to bite the bullet.
I came across this post from Patrick Beeson and decided to give it a try. I’m really impressed; it makes a tremendous difference in how fast Movable Type runs. Too bad Dreamhost’s MT support is, well, a bit archaic - but oh well …
This might just be the thing that inspires me to get back to it …
I’m getting used to it.
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