I went to see the Soft Boys last night. I've always been a cockhead-- one who loves Robyn Hitchcock. I dig the music and I adore the surreal lyrics.

I was pondering his weirder stuff-- music that, upon reading the lyrics made no damn sense, yet when you took it in uncritically you know what he's singing about, even if you can't articulate it very well.

Some of my favorite lines from his songs:

"some things go in, some things go out, next time 'round I'll be a trout"

"a radio is playing in the darkness of a hall, there is someone standing near you who just isn't there at all"

"sleeping with your devil mask is all I want to do, and when I stop it means I'm through with you"

Some lines are easier to understand--

"In agony of pleasure, I crumble to my knees, I lick your frozen treasure, You cup my furry bees"

and some are just plain impossible--

"She uncorked herself, teeth spilling from her nostrils"

He's the John Ashbery of rock and roll, a man who strings together disparate images to create a genuine emotion-- conflicting and peculiar as those juxtopositions may seem to be.

It seems to me that this style of art-- I hesitate to call it surrealism-- is not confined by the medium it is executed in: it doesn't matter if the maker is a musicians or a painter or a writer, what matters is these works are created by smashing together strongly flavored disparate images. Roschenberg did it with his collages. Ashbery does it in What Is Poetry. Heck, San Francisco chef Elka did it with every menu she made at oodles: "chawan mushi with scallops, duck confit, gingko nuts, and shiso leaf " indeed!

A Degas sculpture isn't that different from a Degas pastel... I think of Picasso painting with light, with ceramics, with paint, with torn up magazines-- didn't matter much to him.

When I first got involved with the web, everyone around me felt they had to invent from scratch everything they did. There was no learning from past disciplines-- the baby was tossed out with the bathwater. While it was very very true that many rules of print did not apply and there were many bad sites built by scanning a brocure and uploading it, we ended up going too far, and forgetting the basics of human communication. We chose to unlearn lessons about understanding the market (the users, the audience), lessons on taking the time to design the composition of the work, to create visual hierachies that lead the eye, to use language that engages and seduces. We need to relearn those rules while still understanding that the way people view and digest material online is fundamentally different--I suppose I'm trying to talk about how the medium is and is not important.

I have no idea why I'm haunted this sunday afternoon to try to get down this elusive notion. But I am... it's overly simplistic to say: it's nothing like print. or, it's just another tool. It conforting to say, it's business as usual, the revolution is over. It was exhilerating to say "throw out the old! we're doing something completely different" Both statements are false. Both statements are true. Humans are the same, it's the paper that has changed.

Anyhow, I'm interested in finding examples of artisits (or anyone) trying to use the web the same way as Hitchcock and Ashbery and Roschenberg.

And if you want a taste of Robyn Hitchcock, buy one of his "perfect" albums, either the Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight or one of his exquisite solo albums, eye or I often dream of trains Or you can fire up napster and try mispelling glass hotel.

p.s. ralph sent me the underwater moonlight site. cool.

Was reading the Sunday paper this morning and got pissed off.

I don't I ever get to read the Sunday morning paper without getting pissed off about something. This morning my eye was caught by the headline San Francisco's painted ladies have never looked so good, thanks to dot-com cash infusion. Reading the article it seems everyone agrees the city is looking better than ever, with tons of once-dilapidated buildings restored lovingly, but not everyone agrees on why they've finally got the treatment they deserve. The author of the book Painted Ladies says "I don't think the dot-com people give a damn about anything except money, so why would they care how their house or their neighborhood looks?"

I don't even know where to start with this sentence. Of course people with money care about how their house and neighborhood looks. Every drive through pacific heights or seaview or <insert your posh neighborhood here>? People with money care a whole hell of a lot. People with new money often like to look like they have old moneyand restoring houses is one way to achieve that. The dot-com people in San Francisco were often young media hipsters, and restoring a funky old house was much better than building some sprawling south-bay monster. So that's the easy part of the sentence to dismantle.

The harder one is the first part: "I don't think the dot-com people give a damn about anything except money" I don't know about your dot-com, but at Egreetings getting rich was considered about as possible as winning the lottery, at least by the folks in the trenches. The engineers routinely told stories of losing money with their options during the first tech-craze, tainting us new-to-the biz folk's green-eyed ways. So why did we work 70 hour weeks?

I think it was the nifty-factor. We were building something new, something that hadn't happened before. We were changing lives in tiny ways. Yes, we really did buy into it-- I didn't say we weren't ridiculous optimists, or silly idealists, I just said we weren't in it just for the money.

I remember Tony --co-founder of Egreetings and chief evangelist-- often sitting on the edge of someone's desk, telling one of our favorite speeches like a dad retelling a kid's favorite fairy tale at bed time: Email was soulless, email failed to carry emotions, it let folks down again and aging promoting misunderstandings and not caring the weight of our powerful human sentiments. And how an Egreeting was a rich medium, with pictures and sound, and could create a tool to allow people to express the full tone of their message." We all knew it was kinda goofy, and we all kind of believed it anyway. And you know, sending ecards is the second most common task people do online. We did touch people's lives in a small but nice way.

Ask Peter Merholtz about Epinions and he'll go on and on about the possibilities of self-defining systems and community as decision making tool. Ask John Shiple about Big Step and he'll talk about helping small businesses get online. Susan Gorbet at Snapfish will talk about how important people's photos are to them, and how sharing those pictures online is magical for families sprawled across America. They won't whine about lost stock gains, and they won't talk about dot-coms with a sneer. Yes, it was a mad time, but it let strange new ideas see the light of day.

When we look at this time, I think we'll see both the wackiness of a store devoted to selling panty-hose online, but we'll also see that the crazy investing allowed some very good and useful ideas to see the light of day. I'm embarrassed to admit that before the web, I had sent my grandfather about two presents, total. Now he gets Christmas and birthday gifts thanks to Red Envelope and we have quadrupled our correspondence thanks to email and egreetings. Heck, I bought a stranger a book the other day, just because I was reading their blog and saw they had a terrific novel on their Amazon wishlist.

Even after the craziness of tulip-madness the tulip fields of Holland continue to be beautiful. In San Francisco the newly restored Painted Ladies continue to make the city lovely. But for me the real gain is the invisible one-- the millions of ways my daily life got better, from the kozmo delivery that brings you ice cream in the middle of a hard day to my husband, who I met on yahoo personals.