...endurablegoods...

The Audience Is Right On Cue

I recently had a chance to watch The Late Late Show featuring a guy named Craig Ferguson. At risk of sounding a tad out-of-touch I must admit that not only am I not familiar with the show, I have never heard of this Craig Ferguson fellow.

I don't watch any TV and it's been awhile since I've seen this kind of of programming. Perhaps I was in a sensitive mood - sensitive to inanity and meaningless entertainment - but I found myself horribly annoyed.  Is this a popular show?

I think it was the laugh track that was the primary thorn. (The secondary thorn being Ferguson's atrociously annoying, wacky and over-the-top delivery style). This show has the deepest, most finely tuned laugh track/audience noise machine I have ever heard.

The laughter is a bit too crisp, the cheering a tad too perfectly metered. The CBS folks must have gigs and gigs covering the entire scope of audience noises on hard drives ready to build the perfect audience response to any situation. The audience feedback, hoots and hollers and overall hum is too orderly and well-timed to be even remotely natural. I'm not naive enough to think that there isn't some manipulation going on in these instances in general, but I'd venture that the The Late Late Show has bumped the supplemental noise production values up considerably. (I'm going to poke around and see if I can't find out the  true story - Lesley? A little help?)

Or perhaps audiences have seen this kind of entertainment for long enough to be trained to react perfectly. Either way, the show is horrible.

Call of Duty 4 - Solo LARPing in Ohio

The last time I was driving up I-75 toward Dayton I noticed a cool-looking pile of rubble just off the highway that all but begged to be explored. So last weekend I spent some time goofing around in that mound of destruction - an abandoned, half-destroyed textile plant.

It is important to note that I have been immersing myself in the LSD bath that is Call of Duty 4. The game is appallingly crisp with a nearly inescapable gravity that all but sinks digital meat hooks into your brain stem and yanks you into another reality. (Kind of like that crazy evil hole in Poltergeist, but without the slime. And with guns).I mistakenly started the game on the 'Veteran' settings and have been getting the shit shot out of me like in no game I have ever played. And the game is freakin' hard - as in, it is FUCKING hard. So, it takes an even stronger focus and degree of mental and imaginational (new word) dedication to succeed. I've been seeing trails in my sleep.

Anyone that played any kind of first-person shooters is familiar with the 'destroyed city' map. Uh. Look familiar? When I jumped the fence and made it over the first crumbling brick wall, I was all but zapped into Call of Duty 4. I don't know if it was the coffee or a few stray mescaline molecules that got jarred loose, but things got really silent and far too, sharp.

I haven't really been doing a lot of trespassing lately so I had my guard up to begin with. Not so much for the 'breaking the law' part, of course, but just the likelihood of an encounter with a bored local cop that feels like giving someone a hard time wrapped in Red Tape and Bureaucratic Ribbon.

Overall, the place was pretty, uh, ruined. Much of the infrastructure was torn down and things were actually in decent piles. Bricks on one side, lumber on the other. But it was still cool to see the guts of what was once the heart of a Company Town. They build things to last back then - the place was built in the late 1800's. The brick walls were three-brick deep and support pillars were wooden and actually hand-made.

When I wasn't taking artsy photos I let my mind wander and wonder. More than a few times I snapped briefly into COD4 game play and became all but certain that I saw a sniper in some musty, dark corner or was going to turn a corner into an ambush. Laughing at myself, I even played a bit - acted as if I were really wielding an M5. What was that noise? I'd duck behind a crumbled wall and let a scene play out in my head. I was really hoping someone wasn't watching.

Sadly, my camera battery died and I had to split. I only explored half of the place and plan on returning sometime soon. The next batch of buildings are still intact - and dark. Night-vision goggles, baby.

Flash-bang, spray the room, take photos, move on.

The Andrew Krucoff Beacon

I guess I could just email him. I mean, his email addresses are strewn across the internet like used condoms along South Van Ness, but I'd rather take a more circular (dare I say 'meta'?) approach to engaging the Young Manhattanite.

Knowing that the uber-dialed Krucoff will undoubtedly have some high tech sniffers out there scanning the Tubez I figure I can contact him through a post here on endurablegoods. I will pull the trigger on a Krucoff Flare that will cast brilliance into the darkest corners of the Gawker Commune...etc, etc...

I'm guessing that I'll get a a snappy email sometime before the end of the day...perhaps a snarky send-up of the Writer's Strike steeped in deep references to semi-obscure Manhattan Cool Kids and Sub Pop one-off's.

Hi, Andy! Watcha doin!?!?!?!

Quote of the Day

"News is what someone wants to suppress.
Everything else is advertising".
- Rubin Frank, Former NBC News President

Shine Over Babylon

Why am I listening to this song so much?

Oh.
Because it is good.

Art, In Cincinnati, Contemporary

I took an hour or so to walk around Contemporary Arts Center in downtown this weekend. I was a little disappointed because over half of the space was closed due to maintenance and installation change-overs. So I got Floor 2 and 6 - and the lobby.

The second floor was mostly graphic design/Op Art stuff that, honestly, looked a bit dated. The sixth floor - the UnMuseum - is dedicated to kids.

The Contemporary Arts Center's Sara M. & Patricia A. Vance Education Center: The UnMuseum® represents a groundbreaking new concept in museum education for children, schools and families. Occupying the entire sixth floor of the new Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center, the UnMuseum is a gallery of participatory art designed to offer children and parents an enjoyable experience with the most innovative art of our time.

And it was here that I saw a couple pieces of work that actually resonated with me. Click on the two images in this post and chew on them for a bit.