alright. so things at work have slowed down a tiny bit, and i can present you with some of the selected photos from my sunday evening. but first, may i direct you over to shesbitter.com, where they have got some really great photos of the show in flickr format. check 'em out.

ps: in addition to the reviews trackbacked at my DCist.com arcade fire post, the ghost of gordon sumner has a good review that echoes my feelings about the two new songs played right in a row: they slowed down the night unnecessarily. but only for a little bit.

pps: look also at these great concert photos i found via the 9:30 club forum.

big day in the blogging world - along with the five new blogs launched by mediabistro.com today, we've got the newest foray from the denton empire: gridskipper, "the urban travel guide." i'll definitely be reading.

I'll fess up: I like talk radio. I start most days listening to the Tony Kornheiser Show, then Don and Mike in the afternoon. NPR fills the lunchtime gap. Occasionally I'll even drag out Charles' XM receiver and turn on Al Franken's show. I know it's not good for me, but it's easier than picking out music.

It's a shame that I mostly listen on weekdays, though -- in the DC area, Saturdays are when things get really good. I'm thinking in particular of This American Life and Studio 360. I usually prefer TAL, but this week's Studio 360 was all about videogames -- so naturally I was intrigued. You can find the "this week's show" page here; it looks like eventually the videogame episode will move to the archives here.

The episode was quite good, providing listeners with a quick background summary before launching into a piece on how games affect people and a segment on the military's use of game-like simulators for training. All of this was tied together by insightful banter between Kurt Andersen and Clive Thompson, Slate's videogame critic.

But the most interesting segment focused on an guy named Cory Arcangel, an artist who uses old NES cartridges as his medium. Arcangel's been shown at the Whitney Biennial, where, among other things, he displayed what seems to be his most heralded work: a piece called Super Mario Clouds. SMC is an installation of three projectors showing a looping animation of clouds coming from a hacked Super Mario cartridge. It looks like this (taken from Arcangel's site):

This may seem a bit silly and frivolous. I think that's normal; it's pop art, after all. Irritating though these NES references may be, we're only going to see more of them. The MiniBosses are enjoying considerable success doing rock covers of songs from classic videogames; and apparel pushing 8-bit nostalgia is keeping our nation's unemployed musicians warm. It makes perfect sense: loving videogames is as close to a universal boyhood experience as anything. It's a touchstone, and both marketers and artists are going to use that to their advantage.

But which is Arcangel? I can't say that I'm sure. Looking at a sampling of his work confronts the tech-savvy viewer with a chicken and egg problem. Much of his art can have conceptual significance ascribed to it -- but did Arcangel himself know the piece's meaning prior to its completion? Customized Nintendo games will no doubt seem novel and impressive to the normal, non-geeky art-lover. But people have been hacking cartridges for a while without demanding artistic kudos. Making Tetris insanely slow only requires the alteration of a few bytes of the game's code. So Arcangel isn't inventing a new type of canvas, or even pushing the boundaries of an established one. It therefore seems critically important to know whether he's coming up with new ideas, or just a new way of marketing a dorky hobby.

The case for Arcangel as a serious artist trying to communicate his ideas isn't helped by stupid, jokey pieces like NIpod -- a hacked cartridge with an iPod-like interface that can play the likes of Weezer and Lil John; or I Shot Andy Warhol, a modification of the light-gun game Hogan's Alley that turns the bad guys into pixellated Warhols; or, most despicably, Doogle, a version of Google that only returns results related to the show Doogie Howser, M.D.. These last three works all seem pretty lousy to me, but they're also considerably more complex technical achievements than the relatively pleasing Super Mario Clouds, adding to the possibility of SMC and Arcangel's other best pieces being merely the good bits culled from mountains of thoughtless technical noodling.

I think this opens up a more fundamental question about artists and the materials they use. Arcangel seems beholden to his medium. Did he conceive of Super Mario Clouds and then decide to implement it? Or was he fucking around with ROM hacking and realized he could market a sub-par tech demo as art? I don't know the answer to that, but I think the line between those processes marks the delineation between "art" and "arts & crafts". I suppose this puts me in the unpleasantly complicated camp of believing a piece of art can't be divorced from its creator's intent and personal history. But for all the pretension and subjectivity such a stance introduces, it still seems preferable to getting suckered by endless medium-specific variations on solarized photos: engaging tricks with meaning ascribed only after their fabrication.

Unfortunately it also means I won't really know what I think about Arcangel's work until I know exactly how he makes it.

i'm sure tommy's probably working on an epic review about the arcade fire show, but for now, all i can say is GODDAMN. my DCist review is up over here. i'm too tired to put up pics, but you can browse a directory of the show (and the pre-show bbq at kriston and matt's) here.

other news: that mediabistro d.c. gossip blog launched today. apparently, the guy who's now writing it found out about the job because of my totally random (and non-spiers-forced) posting on DCist. for now i won't comment about the content, but simply point you towards the always-fabulous DCeiver. what he said.