those who were seen dancing

Piko (the car) periodically reminds me that I mean to write about design as expressed in the Cube audio system. These reminders come in the form of soaring music of various sorts; most of the time she gets to pick what the iPod plays.

It's not touted as an amazing stereo. It has, you know, 6 speakers. Whatever. It'll play your iPod! This was a big marketing thing, and a strong selling point for me. But not a lot of talk about the sound.

Compared to the Scion I used to drive, which has this Super Special Scion Audio Shenanigans Spectacular (SSSASS), the Cube is surprisingly superior sound-wise. See, a big part of the SSSASS was its ability to make the car vibrate. The interior walls and dash, specifically. This was a Huge Big Deal from Scion when they rolled out the car. It probably has a lot to do with the 14 year old boys who stopped and stared at the car: it was a sound system designed for someone who'd think it was exciting to make the car vibrate. Pioneer speakers and a decent subwoofer, all built at angles that amounted largely to extra wall vibration.

You know what doesn't contribute to your aural or emotional experience of music? EXTRA WALL VIBRATION. It can obscure some music, even. Mostly it's irrelevant.

The Cube does not play that. The first time I played Peter Murphy's I'll Fall with Your Knife (which is soaringly dark - it's a really affecting piece of pop music), I nearly cried. These simple, unvaunted speakers are arranged in a way that points music right at the driver's heart. With the right music, it's like my own personal concert hall - not live music, but pretty effing amazing.

And someone designed that. How much time does a design team spend on a car's audio system? This one was well worth the time, with no explicit marketing credit to the team who built it or the product they created. The marketing literature talks about the bulldog exterior, the waves-planet-cocktail-lounge interior [Here, someone got a little carried away with metaphors - like each team had their own, and the copy writers just wrote all of them down. The interior is physically coherent and pleasant, but its explanation is like a Cat Power song.], and not the good work of the audio system.

It got me thinking about the design can be talked about - as a feature list rather than an experience. I thought at first that this was a difference between 14-year-old-boy design and design for grownups, and that's still partly what I believe - but I think it's a more complex set of demographics. In a Lexus, where the brand image is more about driving comfort, an audio system like this might have gotten marketing play as a feature; in a lower-end car that's mostly about appearance, overwrought visual metaphors get most of the copy. And if you're going for cute visuals (possibly "feminine" design) over an aggressive driving=power thing (stereotypical "masculine" design), there's no need to have a throbbing subwoofer complete with extra wall vibration.

But. If that's true, then I'm perplexed: why did they design such an affecting stereo set up at all? I don't think it's an accident.

Hey! Apparently I'm painting again [See user icon on this post. My style continues in a primary-school expressionist wanky self-portrait vein, as you'll see. It's the next big thing.].

I haven't painted in at least a year. Or, well... six months if you count the painting of the art that is now my tattoo.

Also, one person in the entire world believes that I can be butch. Which is related to this because I? Am rocking the paint-covered overalls and flannel shirt look tonight. TOTALLY BUTCH. I swear. STOP LAUGHING. I'm tough and arty, dammit.

Pomegranate flowers are gorgeous!

About halfway through the belly pomegranate, I started to visualize tattoo number two: simple swirls of leaves, bitty fruits and flowers horizontally below & sorta bearing up the fruit already there (and thank $DEITY not on my ribcage) eventually swooping around to something on my back (that'd be tattoo number three, yet to be defined).

At the time, I had no idea what pomegranate flowers actually look like (hey, I was still one up on my tattoo artist, who had never seen the inside of a pomegranate). Now that I know - the white/red shaded ones particularly with the purple and green already in number one? Yummy.

And it's only 9 am! Puppets are the strongest tool in expressing one’s hatred for capitalism and what it has done to the people of this world.

Puppets are also tools in the revolution against the fascist rule of grammar. Or so it would seem.

I need a Muppet icon, like, STAT. [ETA: done!]

It seems like 'professionalism' in a lot of dancers' equates to "being paid fairly" - at least based on a lot of the reading I've done of dance stuff online. In my mind, there's a big difference between being a professional (being paid) and being professional (committed and invested in your art). And there also seems to be a notion that one is either a student or a paid, 'professional' dancer.

But that's not necessarily the case with pretty much any other art. Artists participate in plenty of community events without getting paid - independent theatre and dance does this without compromising professionalism or the performers' ability to get paid in other venues.

So, a question for the dancers on my f-list - does getting paid matter to you? Is it truly a problem for dancers or tribes to perform for a community without being paid?

I've been thinking that, except for the ability to do things like rent space and buy costume stuff, I don't really like the idea of getting paid. Yet people tend to equate what they pay for something with the value of it.

Have y'all been to the Smithsonian's Native American museum?

You should, really. You could even just eat there. But what would be cooler is if you actually went through some portion of the strangely disjointed but interconnected design of the exhibit/collection/whatever. It's based on concepts. It's a physically manifested series of concepts! It doesn't seem to aim for a narrative of any sort, and yet things tie together.

And all the ideas of the universe presented therein tie together, too. Strong argument for some sort of Jung/Joseph Campbell/whoever idea of collective truth at whatever level of consciousness.

Although, really, all of my weekend of vacation (a whole week ago) was all about the interconnectedness of things. And plantains. And ceviche. Which just makes me feel alright with the whole world thing (both the interconnection and the plantains; ceviche, when bad, can be really really bad).

Other things that are good: Amy Ray's newer solo venture, "Prom", Everything Bad is Good for You (a book about how pop culture doesn't suck, duh) and Art and Fear (a book about art and the fear that keeps people from making it).

Is there a global, universal definition of art in your mind?

Is that definition somehow apart from Art or high art or whatever one might call it?

NPR was talking to some guys yesterday morning. Some relatively random New Yorker and some other dude who was an art professional of some sort (historian? critic? professor?). The random guy was very certain that the Christo thing in Central Park wasn't Art (and you could tell he capitalized it in his head) and the professional art dude was very much of the opinion that there is no such thing as Art v. art.

I tend to agree with the latter. Art (no special caps) is pretty much anything that is created to move you. And anything created to move you pretty much does, in some way, if you actually pay attention to it. Christo's work, while pretentiously described, is arresting. End of story, I think.

I thought there was a weird class aspect to this at first, that the Man On The Street was all "that's not Art!" and the professor wasn't. But I think it was more a reactionary v. not reactionary thing, now that I've seen the Today Show (which is basically a media stand-in for the MOTS) getting all "yay, art" about the installation.