Don’t Reject rejectomorph

(First published Aug 21, ‘05)
rejectomorph is the baby of one ‘flying_blind’ (otherwise known as ‘Joe’). A personal journal-type blog, rejectomorph is all but free of posts about politics or world events or sports, but it also doesn’t descend to the all-too-common depths of ‘I got up this morning and had eggs for breakfast’ personal blogging that clogs a reader’s arteries as surely as the writer is clogging his/her own. When he wants to, Joe has a wicked sense of humor expressed in a laid-back, ‘I’m having fun with this and I don’t care who knows it’ way that can be absolutely charming. Witness his info page, wherein he explains what his journal is about and why the identity of the person who used to have it (Joe’s alter-ego, ‘Sluggo’) is still active.

Bio: Well look at this. I’ve had the new computer for several months, and I still haven’t gotten around to getting rid of Sluggo’s message here. Now that it comes down to it, I’m reluctant to make it go away. Sluggo himself hasn’t gone away, either. He’s still over there in his corner. I fire him up once in a while, when it’s cold enough. True, he may be the most evil of computers, but I still have hope for his redemption. If I replace his overheating AMD CPU, he might still be a serviceable backup machine. Besides, if I have him destroyed, his ghost might return from the digital beyond and haunt me. I think I’ll let both Sluggo and his rude words stay for a while:

Hello. I’m Sluggo “Crasher” Frankenclone, the computer assigned to destroy the bio-unit known variously as “flying_blind,” “rejectomorph,” or “Joe.” (Hah! Like that last one is a real name!) So far, I’d say I’m doing a pretty good job. I have increased his blood pressure at least 30%, caused him to lose a great deal of sleep, which makes his judgement even poorer that it was before I arrived, and I’m pretty sure he is developing ulcers.

If all goes well (and how could it not, given my natural superiority,) he will soon be losing his hair (disgusting stuff,) developing carpel tunnel syndrome from his vain attempts to control me through my keyboard, suffer diminished eyesight from staring at my screen, and endure frequent hallucinations which, eventually, will drive him to indulge in self-destructive behavior. Yes, all is going according to the great plan.

Hail Gates!

-Sluggo.

outafocus isn’t

 

(First published April 6. ‘05)

California photographer Susan Burnstine’s photoblog, outafocus, is uniquely intriguing. Susan has a real feel for the different characters of various types of cameras and the kinds of pictures they take. Unlike other photoblogs which are catalogued by types of pictures or the dates the pictures were taken, Susan has built galleries around which kind of camera she used. From a Mamiya 645 medium format to the infamous Diana ‘toy’ cameras with plastic lenses (of which she owns many – so many, in fact, that this week she’ll be raffling off three of them), each gallery has a separate identity and its own individual look.

But the Dianas are by far her favorite. Of the 60 photographs currently living in her galleries, more than half -33 – were taken with a Diana. The soft plastic lens tends to blur the picture, and Susan uses that hazy blur to produce photos that seem to have been taken of a dream or a memory.

Pictures like this (‘In the Distance’) have an unreal reality, or perhaps a real unreality, that – a bit like those dark adult comic books, Sin City, say – belongs to a world similar to the one we live in but slightly skewed, softer around even its harder edges than the one we live in, a world where memories are stripped to their essence. The form of the man in the picture above isn’t the form of a specific man but of generic man, of Man sitting by the vastness of an ocean, dreaming. Dreaming of what? Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing, perhaps both at once. It’s an iconic photograph, out of time or real space, of an alternate universe parallel to our own. We recognize it, alright, but why?

Raymi the Minx

(Originally published Feb 21, ‘05)

minx: (mingks) n., a cheeky or mischievous girl
–The Oxford American Dictionary

And Raymi the Minx is all of that. While you’re at it, you can add irreverent, scatological, self-obsessed, insecure, arrogant, discumbobulated, opinionated, compassionate, intense, distant, exhibitionist, funny, hip and clueless, sometimes all at once. That will do for a start, but understand: it’s just a start. Raymi is one complicated individual, but then so aren’t we all, and isn’t that the point?

Raymi’s blog, which today is called either soon i will hit the ground and explode or when the peanuts wept (she changes the title several times a week and the title on the banner is often different from the title rendered by your browser), is a Mulligan’s Stew of stream-of-conscienceness patter that veers from the unexceptional to the trivial to the poetic, post-to-post. Raymi writes about everything and nothing in a semi-free-form ramble that sometimes sounds like Kerouac on crack and at other times like a whiny teenager afflicted with petty obsessions and neural diarrhea. That most of it is tongue-in-cheek, so to speak, saves the worst of it from maudlin excess and lifts the best of it into Walt Whitman/Charles Bukowski-Land, where it twinkles like a pearl necklace in a junkyard.

LumpenBlog Redux: The Saga Concludes

(First published Feb 16, ‘05)

This is the new home of LitBlogs. Welcome to a new season of finding interesting stuff. I know this idea has been asleep for awhile and I don’t honestly know how long it will stay awake, but for as long as I can keep it up, I’ll bring you new and not-so-new sites that are playing with the blog as art form.

To start with, the impetus for reviving LitBlogs is the news that Dan Roentsch has brought the current LumpenBlog storyline to a, well, startling and hilarious conclusion. A conclusion that includes a blimp–yes, blimp is what I said and blimp is what I meant–and the mysterious Mickey Snaketail. I won’t give it away, but it seems Nefertiti Snorkjutt and Desmond Cork have hunted down the infamous Bruce and Lola (otherwise known as the Babecat) with the help of a team of detectives and the two of them are, um, rocking a, well, dumpster.