Cowboy Who?

I first met Michael Galbreth sometime in 2013. I was fresh on the scene, but somehow (I honestly couldn’t tell you how; probably simply because I lived in Houston), I was hip to The Art Guys’ work. It struck me in a way that other art hadn’t yet, because it was so funny. Surprisingly and gut-bustingly funny.

I never knew art could be funny. Growing up, I was only familiar with art in the history books — Rubens, Monet, Dürer — and it was art that struck a blow, carried weight, and may, only occasionally, have a sly bit of wit peeking through. The Art Guys were different. They combined a deadpan delivery with conceptual and absurdist underpinnings, and so theirs was the first artwork that ever made me laugh out loud. I found solace in this, not only because I was beginning to realize I was an absurdist at heart, but also because it presented an inroad to other kinds of art. And even if I didn’t understand every nuance of an Art Guys piece, I got the joke. And the joke was good.

The Art Guys, Never Not Funny, 2013.

I know many others felt that way and continue to feel this way about The Art Guys and their work. A current of incisive humor ran through everything they did, even if the humor wasn’t foregrounded. One of my most memorable Art Guys experiences was their 2013 performance Never Not Funny, for which they each took turns telling “a guy walks into a bar” jokes for eight hours straight. As expected, the performance devolved into rambling nonsense, with Michael wearing a lampshade on his head. To this day, it is one of the most memorable and surreal artworks I have ever encountered. It wasn’t just humor in art. It was comedy in art.

I think a lot of artists shy away from humor and comedy for a couple of reasons. First, there’s a perception that if something is funny it can’t be serious (while gravity and humor are, in fact, natural partners); and second is that successful comedy, like successful art, requires a wholly unique view of the world. So to couple comedy and art together in a way that really works requires a very special type of person.

Cue Michael.

The reason Michael was such a remarkable artist (and beloved by a great many people in Texas and beyond), is because he had a way of looking at his surroundings with truly open eyes. He wasn’t simply observant or discriminating — though he was those things. But there’s a simpler way to describe how his mind worked: He paid attention. And if you ever heard him speak or conversed with him, he urged you to pay attention, too.

‘Nap,’ an image from Michael Galbreth’s Instagram. Source: @michaelgalbreth

There’s a lot you can learn about the world and yourself by simply observing (really focusing on) what you surround yourself with. I took a course Michael taught at the University of Houston in 2015; on the first day of class he lead us on a loose tour around campus, asking us if we knew the difference between whisky and bourbon; he held up the leaves of red and white oak trees to note their differences, and pointed out the oppressive beauty of the brutalist buildings that the students walked into every day but never thought to consider.

Bruce Nauman, Pay Attention, 1973.

In the same course (and in future courses too) Michael began every class with an image of Bruce Nauman’s 1973 lithograph Pay Attention, which (not so politely) emphasizes what seemed to be Michael’s life’s motto. (Michael would occasionally also note that he wasn’t much of a teacher — a claim that was undermined anytime he opened his mouth, as he was always imparting wisdom, solicited or otherwise.)

The concept of paying attention extended to every aspect of Michael’s life. He was an incessant driver of places, and would often just get in his truck and cruise the city for hours, looking for something, anything under-observed. Because of this, he (I think) knew Houston’s backstreets and roadside gems better than any of us.

‘Relativity,’ the last image from Michael Galbreth’s Instagram. Source: @michaelgalbreth

This hyper-awareness extended to his travels outside of Houston. When I was green, before I went to New York for the first time, I asked Michael for recommendations, thinking he would suggest an oddball activity that wasn’t on my list. Instead, he told me to just walk around, look, and listen — don’t take a cab, and God forbid don’t go underground and take the subway. Instead, he said, walk around the city with your eyes and ears open. (His other recommendation was to get a drink at Grand Central Station, because if you’re sipping a cocktail you have an excuse for an extended spying session over the vast hall of people coming and going.)

A photograph by Michael Galbreth, 1978-1980.

Importantly, Michael was a payer of attention to everything — nothing was too low or banal to pique his curiosity. Most of us keep our sights on the things we’re told are important — the news, politics, popular culture, sports — and these only change as our own interests shift. While Michael had a few blindspots, he paid attention to the kinds of details many of us block out: pipe storage yards, the patterns of hat displays in a truck stop, garbage and hidden things — countless situations up for an absurdist interpretation, but only if you’re paying attention.

An image from Michael Galbreth’s Instagram. Source: @michaelgalbreth

I feel that to fully pay attention is to appreciate life. I owe to Michael a lion’s share of this enhanced model for living;  through his art and life, Michael encouraged me to revel in the contradictions, the humor, and the blunders that I encounter daily. And I know I’m not alone in learning this from Michael. Many of us, consciously or not, picked up this way of going about life from him, which is why his death sent shockwaves throughout our community.

What we can do now, collectively, to remember and honor him, is to pay attention. And laugh. It’s what he’d have done.

The post Pay Attention: What I Learned from Michael Galbreth appeared first on Glasstire.

The higher the rise, the better.

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One day, I need to release a whole book of comics about humans winning by being gross.

The life and death of Anakin Skywalker, in four panels.

Tonight's comic contains one (1) Bat and one (1) Wizard.

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The alternative view is that we should stop faking so many achievements in space and start faking care of the people down here.

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Yes Virginia, the Hamburglar is real.

PS: It's scorpio season!

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Failure is not an option because we no longer have a rocket large enough to attempt something we could fail at.

The rule this year is that all costumes must be pajamas.

Pippin Barr is what happens when you hand a philosopher a video game controller. He received a Ph.D in Computer Science in 2008 with a thesis titled, Video Game Values: Play as Human-Computer Interaction. He's built a tongue-in-cheek series of games based on Greek mythology where players are handed impossible tasks, such as pushing a boulder up a hill as Sisyphus, or struggling against chains while a pixelated eagle pecks out your liver as Prometheus.

In 2011, Barr created The Artist is Present, a digital version of artist Marina Abramović's famed MoMA performance piece. In it, players pay to enter the museum and wait in line for hours, in real-time, for the chance to sit and stare into Abramović's eyes for as long as they wish. Well, at least until the museum closes.

Barr is currently an assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal. He's also on Twitter.

GAME IDEA

THE JUMP SCARES

ARE EMAILS

YOU HAVE NOT ANSWERED

FOR WEEKS

— P░pp░n B░rr (@pippinbarr) September 27, 2019

Barr tweets at least once per day in a clear, repeated format that's hard to miss in Twitter's flood of standard text, images and emojis. It's all caps, with thoughts double-spaced and stacked on top of each other, always starting with, "GAME IDEA." Barr finishes the thought with phrases like,

RAPIDLY PRESS X

TO PROVE

YOUR PARENT WAS WRONG

ABOUT YOU

And,

THE FINAL BOSS

IS YOUR INABILITY

TO ASK FOR HELP.

The way he composes these tweets, broken up and screaming at the viewer, makes them read like miniature poems about game design and consumption. Many of them are funny, highlighting ironies and inconsistencies about gameplay in general, and poking holes in the industry's accepted wisdoms.

"I don't know how I gave myself permission to do that, but I wanted them to come across as separate from the normal flow of Twitter, which is super ostentatious," Barr said.

The hope is that the GAME IDEA tweets feel like "these weird, out of context missives from a strange idea-generation machine, rather than a human person that you could get any real sense of," Barr told Engadget. "Which is naive, because of course you can get some sort of sense about what kind of person I am by the kinds of things that I write. Even what kind of mood I'm in. They get pretty dark sometimes, although often that means I'm in a good mood."

Barr has a tweet routine. Around 10 each morning, he opens Twitter and writes, "GAME IDEA." Then he waits for inspiration to strike. He sits and thinks about holding a controller, looking down at the buttons, twiddling the thumbsticks, and what it all means. Or, what it doesn't mean. Eventually, he hits "Tweet."

GAME IDEA

USE THE RIGHT THUMBSTICK

JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT

DOESN'T IT FEEL NICE

JUST TO KIND OF MOVE IT AROUND?

— P░pp░n B░rr (@pippinbarr) October 9, 2019

"It's definitely not meant to be a big message about how games are or how they should be, but more that the whole thing of games and the ideas that we have for games are super, super limited," Barr said. "I like trying to make fun of that, including my own limitations."

Take Red Dead Redemption 2, for example. Video game fans extol the massive, open-world map, lauding all of the tasks they can accomplish with their digital avatar, praising the sense of scope and choice that the game provides. But of course, Red Dead Redemption 2 is naturally restricted by its input methods, utilizing a set number of buttons with specific actions attached to them. Rather than allowing individual interpretation, the game forces players to act in certain ways. It simply provides a large map for them to repeat those options in an endless, positive feedback loop.

"That's a very specific kind of person that only does those things."

"You see Red Dead Redemption and it seems incredibly liberating, like there's so much you can do and it's so beautiful," Barr said. "But if you look at just the buttons that you've got, it's like, move around the world and shoot your gun, and that's about it. That's a very specific kind of person that only does those things."

For video game fans, it feels blasphemous and ungrateful to claim Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't offer enough choice, but this lack of digital agency is obvious to people who don't regularly play. The limitations of video games -- even huge, AAA experiences -- are often what turn new players off when they pick up a controller. This isn't exactly scientifically proven, but anecdotal evidence abounds.

The clearest example comes from YouTube gamer Razbuten, who published a video in September titled, "What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games." In it, his wife, who has no experience with video games, plays through a handful of prominent titles while he silently watches and analyzes her reactions. It's hilarious, but also informative.

Here's how Razbuten breaks it down near the end of the video:

"Throughout the various games, a pretty common question she asked was, 'Why can't I do it this way?' And my response was, 'Because.' The deeper answer is that limitations exist in games because there are only so many potential inputs a title can have, meaning there are a finite number of ways a player can interact with things."

The lack of choice frustrated his wife, while Razbuten himself expected the limitations and even found the design choices made around those restrictions beautiful.

Barr had a similar experience with his wife, who tried to play Grand Theft Auto V, but gave up after crashing a car into a wall. She was unable to get out of the car or back away from the wall, the only two options in that scenario. She wanted to try something else, but the software wouldn't let her, so she stopped playing.

GAME IDEA

YOU WILL NEVER BE FULFILLED

BUT PRESS START TO BEGIN ANYWAY

— P░pp░n B░rr (@pippinbarr) September 19, 2019

Barr also showed his parents Red Dead Redemption 2, and they all marveled at the graphics and animations, and how gorgeous the environments were. And then, the gameplay started.

"My parents were just stunned by the limitations on what the game was really interested in me doing, which was the usual, get told what to do and shoot somebody or punch them," Barr said. "They were mesmerized by that because they don't come from that world at all."

Barr's tweets are a pause button for the video game industry. They're an invitation to stop and think, just for a moment, about what video games actually are, why we enjoy them, and how they could be different than the shoot, loot, win cycle dominating the industry. His GAME IDEAs are lighthearted and witty, but the best ones are also poignant. People chime in with weird games that fit into the oddly shaped boxes Barr has built, like Undertale, Untitled Goose Game and Noita. The tweets start conversations. For a philosopher, few outcomes could be better.

Between classes, Barr is building The Artist is Present 2, a sequel that puts players in the iconic red dress of Marina Abramović. It's the same scenario as the first game, but this time around, you're the artist herself, and it's your duty to stare into the eyes of every person who sits in front of you, for as long as they wish. The game starts in her apartment and has players walk through the steps of preparing for the day, putting on the dress, walking to the museum, and then sitting for hours on end. Barr actually told Abramović about this idea, briefly, when he met her.

GAME IDEA

USE THE LEFT ANALOG STICK

TO WALK AWAY

USE THE RIGHT ANALOG STICK

TO LOOK BACK OVER YOUR SHOULDER

TO SEE IF THEY'RE WATCHING

— P░pp░n B░rr (@pippinbarr) September 25, 2019

"She said it sounded really boring, which I thought was pretty funny," Barr said.

It's a ridiculous idea for a game, but much like the tweets, there's a larger point hiding behind the cheek. Eventually, that stillness and staring turns into human connection, even with characters that look like they spawned directly out of MS Paint.

"You're subsuming your needs and any selfish desires you have for these little computer-generated people, who aren't real, but they need you to see them," Barr said. "That's kind of the feeling that I'm interested in trying to generate, that you feel this responsibility towards these fake people who desperately want you to look at them, and look into their eyes and make them feel seen."

On October 10th, Barr tweeted the following:

GAME IDEA

YOU ARE IN A STARING CONTEST

WITH THE GOD OF STARING

AND IT'S NOT LOOKING GOOD

It reads like a sly plug for The Artist is Present 2, snuck in between hundreds of authentic philosophical musings. However, its true nature is much less conniving.

"I didn't even think of it," Barr said. "The point that I'm at, working on the game right now, I'm not thinking about staring. It wasn't on my mind at all. I was thinking actually that I've done one a while ago about the classic line about gazing into the abyss and how it also looks into you. ...I was trying to come up with a different spin on that."

In the end, it's just a game idea.

How To Make A Mystery Smell Balloon
Shores
2011

I came across this title while I was browsing the catalog. Since the title was weird, I had to see what this was all about. Smelly balloons, really? This is actually a science book and is quite fun. I can see why kids would really find this fun. (As a parent, maybe not so much.) When my kids were young, they would have been all over this book.  Maybe it wouldn’t be on their radar unless maybe they filed it under jokes/pranks.

As a youth librarian, I could even see this as a program. What could possibly go wrong?

Mary

The post Smelly fun for the kids appeared first on Awful Library Books.

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If you can convince your spouse that Data is a fun offbeat middle name, and that Theodore is a beautiful first name, you might actually get away with this.

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If we can have just one more generation of increased irony, we can have a Taco Bell that straight up tells you the food is bad and they don't care, because you'll be back. You know you will.

I've still got pajamas on the mind.

Are they still pajamas when you're awake?

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This is, of course, just a bid to get Taco Bell to pay me for product placement.

And that's perfectly fine.