thomyorick-blog

[thomyorick-blog]

I had a dream last night where I was an old-timey mob enforcer in hiding. We had just put a successful hit out and we were worried about reprisals. Get a knock at the door, its five guys through the peephole. Go upstairs to warn the boss that there’s too many out there and walk in on him in HBO sex scene. We escape over the fences of some suburban backyards where I had hid a cache of hunting rifles---I have lots of dreams about being chased over fences. 

[thomyorick-blog]

[thomyorick-blog]

[thomyorick-blog]

retrofuturism became retro once that Neuromancer-Tron grid was filled in. But internet-landscapes have always retained the feeling of having absolutely no end and no difference between points. This extends to actual landscape photographs associated with the internet.

innernet landscape photography is what you get when you take an exhausted medium (landscape,) record it in another exhausted medium (photography) and uploaded it onto yet another exhausted medium (internet). Lots of 4k attempts to reintroduce “nature” and dimensionality back into desktop screens, focal points drawing the eye down endless valleys or mirror lakes. These landscapes should never be too busy since this would negate their function as wallpapers.

Oftentimes also they reference places or landmarks, notably the Mojave or El Capitan, the titles and wallpapers of OSX, which in Jobsian fashion attempt to reattach our banal awe of landscape to banal awe of product. You can see signs of a supreme being here, latent in EL CAPITAN, named by the Mariposa Battalion who in the 1850′s fought their way up the valley through indian blood to stand finally, agape at the base of something bigger than themselves. The Captain dominates all market competition baby

[thomyorick-blog]

Late nineties. Limp-blue curtains, white walls, houseplant in clay pot, tan wood, like the color of my crib.

The catherine wheel of 90′s nostalgia culture tries not to turn back this far. You can find this, what, “look” by websearching “nineties livingroom makeover,” but “nineties livingroom” returns a sitcom-looking busy and “lived-in” household. 

This look tried very hard to efface itself, but not with the self-consciously quote-unquote ‘moral’ excess of minimalism. If white-walls was the ideal gallery space--- the supposedly non-ideological environment of hanging paintings, this look was the ideal environment of hanging family portraits. It was free-floating but also grounded in neutered references to “earth” (pottery, and the baby blues of sea and sky) and “nature” (wood, potted-plants)---inside lived in gentle, inoffensive harmony with cordoned-off patches of outside---here you had a “home,,,” not a shelter which attempts to efface all of its outside, not a gallery, which signals so desperately to efface itself and the outside, but inevitably calls attention to itself on the highest horse. This look was happy to try its best and ground itself in “place,” and then to fade into purely domestic memories. 

It was a look that lived and died in living rooms, I never saw it anywhere else except in the background of pictures of first birthday parties, new years eve + the sleepy faces of relatives now laying in plots by the coastline, old pets, and potential before known outcome (kids who became addicts and estranged siblings all sitting at a hardwood table in a white room with limp-blue curtains).

Photos of this look are always taken with the flash on. They were developed at the pharmacy and digitized, what five years later. Sometimes you can see them on your screen with the watermark of a second flash taken when a relative photographed the original with their phone. The flash will obliterate the “look” I’ve been writing about, but not the event or the face pictured, or else it would have been deleted before being sent or posted. Let’s call this “look” the environment of the red-eye, the background to a subset of cursed images that are all personal. 

[thomyorick-blog]

[thomyorick-blog]

3 minute standing ovation tears and shenzhen nongke orchid thrown onstage for youtubers whose speeches Ive been capping for a long time,,  bodies waste but diamonds are forever