Tag: blogging

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Steps had to be taken to protect the art in Union Square from the rain.

Some folks on my frlist have been migrating to dreamscape or dreamworks or whatever it is. Which is all well and good, they seem like a nice company and all, but I’m the owner of a permanent membership here at LJ (silly of me, I know) so it will be a while before I totally jump ship.

As a precaution during the “LJ is dying” scare of the early part of this year, I did start mirroring this blog over on WordPress.com, (of course if you’re reading this on WordPress you already know all this) and in the subsequent months I’ve started to learn more about how to use that site, so much so that I’m using it to resurrect some of the functions of my supposed official site, naylandblake.net. The formatting is boring, but I am happy about getting some more content up there

All of this is to say that I’ve updated a couple of the pages on that site: the upcoming exhibitions page, the upcoming lectures page, and the selected works page. Because I have stuff coming up y’all. In particular, you Seattle folks might want to check out the group show at Lawrimore.

Closer to home, on Monday May 11, I’m one of the honorees at this benefit. Please, if you have the cash to do it, come and dance and bowl!

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Today has had just the kind of weather I hate, the kind that results in two foot wide puddles of soupy slush at every New York corner, the kind that makes all forward motion on the street a series of twists and flinches to avoid the chill wind, the kind that makes you feel ungracious about any and all things between yourself and the next sheltering doorway, including all your fellow pedestrians.

I got into work feeling dazed and generally unhealthy. Something is paining me in my shoulder, my nose and throat have been packed with phlegm, I’ve got low level aches and acid reflux. (Note to my body: OK, I get it: next week you begin your 49th year on the planet. Is there something you want to tell me about my warranty?) Alka-Seltzer, my secret lover banished some of my symptoms, so that I could go and be a curmudgeon in class, mushroom-barley soup helped with some of the others. It also helped that I made contact with some of the organizations I’ve owed contact to and straightened out some financial matters.

My interest in poetry podcasts has led me to sampling a bunch of other podcasts on iTunes. They’ve been giving me some ideas for what to do with the WordPress version of this blog, namely to make it more bloglike: more linking, more informational in general. We’ll see how that plays out.

There is a crazy-making aspect to WordPress though: because so few people comment, it’s a little hard to be a comment-whore in the way one can be on LJ; instead, there is the ultratantalizing “blog stats” page which provides you with a running tally of how many people are looking at your blog, and lays those figures out on a day to day graph that looks like your own little popularity roller coaster. It’s really hard not to just hit the refresh button one more time to check out if any more people have come by. Utterly addictive evil.

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Here’s a nice thing that’s happening with the current show: more people are finding the blog and connecting it with the work. There’s a lovely post about Gorge here. It’ll be interesting to see how these new types of access change what we think of as a viewing public, and what that public’s experiences and expectations of encountering art turns into. We’re used to having gatekeepers, i.e. critics, articulating what the experience of the work is, with the assumption that “average people” can only ever formulate an evanescent “thumbs up or thumbs down” response. But now there is the possibility or a public that is neither inarticulate nor professional critics. That’s exciting.

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I’m scattered in many things, and much of what I do, I do unevenly. My projects get done bit by bit with gaps in between. Thus with my website. I put it up a couple of years ago using the BlueHost’s proprietary site building software, so when my hosting agreement with them expired unexpectedly, all of the architecture of the pages vanished also. I got a new host for my domain and somehow figured out how to put up a place holder page. Time passed, which is always my problem.. I can generally figure out how to do something like this, but unless I do it regularly i forget all the various passwords and steps involved. It doesn’t help that the hosts I use have bizarre, contraintuative interfaces. So in the midst of all the LJ kerfluffle, and my attempts to clean up and unify my online presence, I turned my attention to that placeholder page which had a link to a WordPress blog that I had installed on the site, but couldn’t remember how to access. Could I figure out a way to point the link to my recently revived WordPress-hosted blog?

The answer is no, but I did figure out how to build a new re-direct page with a proper link and, after much fumbling got it up live. This involved me figuring out some things in Dreamweaver and a couple of failed FTP attempts. I probably ended up doing it the hard way all in all, and I have hired someone to do a total redesign and relaunch of my site, so I don’t think I’ll be doing much more tinkering, but I still feel a little bump of acomplishment.

Here’s something else of interest: WordPress has taken note of the lj situation by posting special instructions for importing your lj entries over to WP account. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like an intriguing possibility.

Here’s something else that makes me happy: a Japanese ink brush pen. So nice to draw with.