Site number 3

http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/horizontal_1.htm

I'm sure this isn't a revelation, but Banksy is pretty cool. This is his web site (or perhaps a fan site?) with a great deal of his work there. What's so great about him is the way he uses context. So much of the joke in these pieces is based on either the environment (a sign or building around it) or some other piece of graffiti, most of which amount to vandalism.

Graffiti is often an ugly tag or quickly rendered dirty picture, and Banksy is most fun when he uses that rather ugly stuff as a punchline for something far more interesting (like the painter and the penis). He takes what's a pretty static, boring image and builds it into something smart.

Great stuff.

Second Site!

http://www.doctorhugo.org/bodylanguagesequences/series5/index.html

I stumbled upon this site with the aid of "stumbleupon"--a nifty little add-on that my friend had plugged into Firefox. I'm pretty certain this Dr. Hugo Heyrman is the kind of guy you'd like to meet, but under really controlled conditions. I can see a dinner conversation spinning wildly in all directions with no end in sight!

(And what's with the "Dr. first name" like I know you and am introducing you to my kid?)

In any event, the work here is worth the minute or five it takes to browse through these body language "experiments." The idea here is that he sets up a series of clips that you can click through. Each click is a second or two long and looped, and focuses on a particular, quick, probably unconscious, gesture. The results are fairly interesting. There's a lot in this work about narrative choices--the story is in where one chooses to begin and end, not as much about the middle. That's why the persistence of consciousness can be such a bugaboo for some of us--it doesn't resolve well into something digestible that can be analyzed, played with, punched in the gut, whatever. It's always moving, until, like in Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings," "John and Mary die."

What's so compelling about Dr. Hugo's little clips is they play with some of that need for making sense of what we do and say by chopping it into pieces and then hacking that into almost incompressible bits. So we get something less than human--a flurry of bizarre tics that, if you let them, can be downright hypnotic.

First Site

http://www.scottmccloud.com/makingcomics/tour.html

This is Scott McCloud's web site--mostly dedicated to his latest book Making Comics. I've read his previous "comics on comics" (the classic Understanding Comics and now somewhat quaint Reinventing Comics) but I'm not as interested in as many "craft" issues, so haven't gotten around to the new one. Plus I already have a ton to read...

In any event, this particular part of the site deals with his fifty state tour and the link to his blog is what I'm most interested in for the "narrative elements" assignment. This is, perhaps, a gimmie, since the blog deals with a straightforward journey and is organized chronologically, but the other bloggers (especially his daughter, who updates us on her grades!) act as characters that weave their own pieces into the larger tale. The occasionally updated maps are fun too (all blue states, of course). It reminds me of long drives to Florida we used to endure in my childhood. A few times I can recall passing campers or RVs with maps posted in a rear window with the visited states colored in. I always wanted to fill up such a map and visit all the states too...

This is my first post...

we'll call it a test.