« Ax me no questions, I'll tell you no lies | Main | Away »

7.9.4

Not talking about art, honest

At work there is such beautiful, rhythmic, evenly spaced code laid out like a painting on a plate -- and then there are the beautiful hacks. I love certain hacks because they express emotion (frustration) and the rescue of a process from failure by means of deliberately compounding the error.

I used to look through random badly assembled zines - Spare Change-type stuff - looking for pieces of writing that would be chaotic, awkward, meaningless, deliberately broken in such a way as to produce a particular music. But almost never found it there.

From Ashbery's "The Double Dream of Spring":

And one keeps walking down to the shore
Footsteps searching it
Yet they can't have it not have the tune that way.

That last line there, now that's what I'm talking about. Try saying it out loud. Yet they can't have it not have the tune that way.

Lately it seems like people invoke wabi-sabi to describe any kind of process by which imperfection is framed in such a way that it can be seen as attractive. But that is absolutely off the mark. I'm trying to describe something that is active where wabi-sabi is passive, unnatural where wabi-sabi is natural. Formal and inorganic, like Björk, or corsets. Not like a decaying leaf at all.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://gaw.dreamhost.com/mmt/mt-tb.cgi/27

Comments