The Singleness of the Eye
—a sculpture by Paul Friesen, 1981
Matthew 6:22
The eyes don’t face north. All three face up on their limestone pillars of optic nerve. Two also face east into rebirth, one also south into the prevailing wind.
Cobwebs glisten between the pillars.
Gash marks denote the flecks of iris radiating into half-moons of [...]
We want to be influenced by tradition, but not bound by it.
Digital watches, such as they are, really are a pretty neat idea. As we progress toward cloning and hydro-electric interactive bullriding, we have to consider the relevancy of an analog watch. As every PDA clipped to the waist of every rayon-shirted tech-head will attest, [...]
Fragment #1
We are angry at the snow. Answer: Much tongue-swallowing, frost on the eyelids is a button purse for many mouths.
Fragment #2
Ginger, I saw you naked, and now I am scared for you. I am also scared that you are a young woman saying, “I believe it is wrong to expose your private parts.” I remember at 12 you [...]
Since the bulk of my work involves teaching freshman composition, I’m frequently confronted with the prototypical disaffected late-adolescent who finds everything boring. He is bored by politics, bored by peculiar social practices, bored by gastronomy, astronomy, theology and beer.
Yes, that’s right: today’s college freshman is even bored by beer, or claims to be anyway.
This makes [...]
As it turned out, Orwell was only off by about 10 years. 1994, the year of the Republican Revolution in Congress, ushered in an age of newspeak beyond which the “political correctness” of the 1980s could never gather the testicular fortitude to go. It began with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract on America” (I use the parodic [...]
What was broken about animation that now we think we have to do it with sophisticated computer programs? What was incomplete about reality that we feel we have to mine it digitally?
In the case of animation, the supreme irony is that computer-generated images are now being modified to try to enhance their expressiveness, not [...]
Here is an excerpt from “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialisation of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” by art theorist Rosalind Krauss talking about Eisenman’s attempt to link formalism and linguistics into the architectural arena.
“What we have learned from Saussure,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and [...]