About nothing

Tom Miller, an American artist who created a sculpture called ‘Nothing’, consisting of nothing, is suing an Italian who’s done something – or, indeed, nothing – similar. “If you Google ‘Tom Miller Nothing’,” he claims, “you can easily see I had this whole paradigm sorted out before before Salvatore Garau ever even thought of doing a sculpture of nothing.”

In fact, if you Google ‘Tom Miller Nothing’, the first thing that comes up is a news story about his law suit.

About self-Googling (one more time)

I’ve written before (here and here) about the strange back alleys into which self-Googling can take you. The problem seems to be that whole sites are based on data parsed from other sites, without a flesh-and-blood bullshit detector in the middle. I have no idea whether anyone but me has seen the page claiming that I was born in Chicago, and died in 2007, but it is there. (If a lie appears in the the digital forest and nobody reads it except its subject, might it just as well be true?)

Anyway, here’s a new one. Nobody knows what I weigh, which is a relief; but they have managed to calculate how rich I am, which comes as a pleasant surprise. It’s just a pity that I’m too dead to enjoy it.

About self-Googling (again)

I wrote a few months ago about the perils of looking for yourself on the magical interwebnets. And now I find a site which has not only replicated the previous “fact” (that I died in 2007) but also wants to retitle my books for me.

About self-Googling

In a word, don’t.

About Google+

And so it comes, the e-mail telling me that Google+ will breathe its last at the beginning of April, and that I ought to archive my content before it’s too late. I joined G+ but never quite saw the point of it; what exactly did it do that wasn’t covered by another social media product? In the end, I mostly used it to post things that I’d already put on Facebook, or Twitter, or here on my blog. I linked to things, rather than writing anything original; and inevitably, over the years, many of those links are as dead as G+ will soon be. Not that anyone knew or cared; it usually felt like yelling into a void, with no echo. And it appears that plenty of others had the same reaction, which explains the mournful e-mail.

But it did force me to look back on what I had posted, and has allowed me to curate (ugh) a sort of retrospective of the few years I spent with this ungainly add-on to my digital life, an acquaintance rather than a friend. And of course, when I get the e-mail advising me that Blogger is about to be taken away to the glue factory, I’ll have to do it all over again. (But at least I got the warning, unlike poor old Dennis Cooper, whose story I’d completely forgotten until I looked back at my account, so there’s that. And I also found this wry squib about the invisibility of G+ itself, which I posted on G+ and nobody noticed so it was clearly the truth; this also applied to more serious analyses, also here.)

Anyway, here are the choicest morsels:

• Clair Dederer in The Paris Review on good art made by bad men.
• The dull, middle-aged Scandinavians who create modern pop music.
• Bari Weiss in praise of cultural appropriation.
• Cool Tokyoites in the bath.
• How big business bought “alternative” pop music and a related conspiracy theory about how Britpop was a neoliberal plot. (And this is along the same lines – I think I may have been having a Situationist moment or two.)
• Nick Cohen on the genius of bad books.
• The most profane artists in music.
• Gamifying obedience to the Chinese state.
• The people who hate Renoir.
• Dissertations as graphic novels.
• A book about poo.
• DeepDream and showing porn to AI. (See, not everything Google does is rubbish).
• Baudrillard goes to Starbucks.
• F Scott Fitzgerald draws a dinner party.
• The beautiful cubes of food.
• Drone porn.
• Scary playgrounds.
• Conservatives vs nerds.
• Mark Greif in the LRB on The Velvet Underground.
• Faking cultural literacy.
• The Murakami video game, plus Murakami reviewing the Top 20.
• Doing a Myers-Briggs on Tube lines.
• How to title every book you ever write.
• And, inevitably, the fundamental dumbness of Donald Trump.

And some nice pictures. Because you’re worth it, even if G+ wasn’t.

About Pompidou

I was vaguely listening to a radio play about the Paris événements and Googled “Pompidou” to clarify some nugget or another; inevitably, the first thing that comes up is the art centre, rather than de Gaulle’s sidekick. “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” as Guy Debord said. Nice to see the old sod finally being validated.

Every day I edit the book

I’m quite fond of Twitter, but every now and then I think of a delightful yet useless task that could be perfect for the medium, were it not for the pesky 140-word limit. What fun we might have with “Elvis Costello songs and/or albums that would make good titles for those Bret Easton Ellis books that aren’t already named after Elvis Costello songs/albums” if it could be squeezed into a hashtag and still leave room for replies.

That said, do you know what comes up first when you Google “Less Than Zero”? Not the Ellis book, nor the Costello song that provided its title, but the film. Which Ellis, in his most recent novel (named after a Costello album, give or take a consonant), describes as “...a beautiful lie... very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn’t recoup its cost when released that November.” And if Costello hasn’t written a song called ‘Beautiful Lie’, or even ‘Busy But Grim’, he really should have done.