I’ve been on vacation. Hence, no writie this past week.
That’s a shame, as the small moments I’ve had to check feeds have not yielded posts. But my time hasn’t been wasted: I’ve written a lot. I’ve been to Boston and NYC. I’ve seen friends, had drinks, talked a ton.
I saw the Biennial at the Whitney. And I’m here to tell you that it was beyond weak. After reading decent reviews of the show, I expected something decent. But no. Most of the art centered around homes and personal space. Most of the pieces were craft-based — that is, the pieces focused more on how they were made than the actual output. My favorite example of this was the black and white geometric paintings made by sewing together black and white canvases. What? Really? There was a ton of sub-par video installations, but 0 interactive pieces. All-in-all, terribly short-sighted.
Skip it; it’s not worth 4 floors of uninspired art to see the 3 or 4 standouts. (Storm Tharp’s paintings were the highlight for me, with 3 or 4 ‘second-place’ pieces by George Condo, Aurel Schmidt and the Bruce High Quality Foundation.)
I just caught this though — digg has announced plans to curate links. This is so up my alley — something I’ve been thinking about for what seems like years. And ties so neatly into this site. I saw both Chris and Andrea earlier this week and both brought the site up. We all seem at a loss with exactly what to do with this site.
It’s obvious (and stated) that facebook has all but killed mog. We had a great run — a decade. But the drag I’ve felt for the last 8 months on here is real. I’ve got 1000 plans for the site that I haven’t followed through on. It’s not the best excuse, but finishing writing my most recent novel has taken precedence. My free time is not infinite and I’ve picked that path instead of this one at the moment.
The history of this site is important, but there is also some intrinsic to here, to this, that I need to massage and explore. I have a feeling that the entire experience needs to shift, but I need a little time to figure out what it should become.
But it’s more clear than ever that curating, link-sharing, filtering and discovery are all critical to the next phase of learning and entertainment. Now to marry those to the mog codebase.


