Signifying nothing

Merry Xmas!

IAIN BAXTER&: TV Works Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

You have another year of Signifying nothing to look forward to. Cheery chimbah. Cheery chimbah.

Apparently I was traveling then, and concerned about web design. Go figure. ¡Feliz diez! Funny thing is, I'm still rabies: Which Horrible Affliction are you? A Rum and Monkey disease.

Gulls a video by Clint Gardner on Flickr.

Dear customer, You are being sent this message because you are a contact for the domain signifyingnothing.com. This domain will expire at the Registry in 30 days, on 2011-12-10 18:13. If you would like to keep this domain, you must renew it before this date. The domain will be renewable at the normal price until 2012-01-09 08:13 If, on however, you do not want to keep it, there is nothing more that you need to do. If you do nothing, then signifyingnothing.com will go back on the open market on or around 2012-02-13 18:13 (the exact date may very slightly depending on the registry and the time zone differences). Thank you for choosing Gandi! Best Regards, 10th anniversary, yo!

Signifying nothing reader Eric Anderson has pointed out that the new "dynamic views" that our esteemed blog was experimenting with for a few weeks was not readable on his electronic communications device. So fuck that fancy-pants shit.  We're back to basics. Here is a picture of a cat: So much for that.

iPad note poem number 9: Arab spring The city turned cold Unexpectedly Men and women have found Their lost coats Hiding from the wind In spidered closets "God damn, it is cold," They say stamping booted feet And clapping mittened hands "Think it will snow?" There is no appropriate Response so they ask Again, breath wafting From their mouth like the Demon seed of hope Floating higher and higher Above the city where Finally, it crystallizes And falls too gently On the oil slick Streets Sent from my iPad

Narwhal.

How's this for messing with you?

There is no dream In the disease of sleep Meatloaf please Here you go There is no sleep In the disease of dreams I'm sorry, I was only kidding Are you visiting someone? You're a patient? You don't look like a patient. I don't? Did you choose this place? Why? Where else is there? And somehow we wake up Each day, a simple mantra Of self-loathing on our lips Give me a Rob Roy On the rocks. My mother doesn't think So. I receive medication For what Stored up like your Father That's what I hear That's what I didn't want to do I didn't want to tell you I didn't want to tell you You know you made me love You. It was nice talking to you Too. Take me away from this Place. How's it going? How's it going? My son has disappeared. That's how I feel. Hi. That's really nice. He'd die without me. Hello. Hello.  I need to talk to You. Hello. Are you all right? Yeah. The s...

IPad Note Poem no 8: the psoriatic It starts on the calves The skin reddens Swells and itches It is only later that The scales come If they come at all And then the shame Follows Of course, it is known That it is not one's Fault. No pecuniary Damage can be assessed But tell that to the In-born savage who Sees patterns in the Cracking skin: the Mark of the Devil The hooves of the beast Kicked hard into the Shins So one applies ancient Balm that smells of Pitch and sulfur, Muttering two word Prayers to a god Too angry to remove The curse Oh God Oh God Oh God And one believes And one repeats And one remains The itching of the Skin subsides An abiding God Resides Recalling the cold Past where we Swam deep in Tropical waters And our skins Were hardened For a purpose Not beyond Reckoning Where the only God was to swim On to the next day With no feeling In our flinty Hides Our past Hides beneath Supple skin, waiting For the winter Morning when it Will break forth To protect us From some...

iPad Note Poem Number 5: the good things The good thing about having children Is that they understand the necessity to move On, immediately Move on Move along Move on keep on moving on You, once again, know how it is You always did, now, didn't you? You and your fancy college degrees. Bet you didn't think this one was going this way, Did you Fancy that Sent from my iPad

iPad note poem 6: blinders The riders on the bus were not aware of the explosion They road along in bumping silence, kept company only By their thoughts, their fears, the hunger, or by podcasts They hurtled forward towards an interstate they would Never merge with, eyeing the stop cord suspiciously As their stops approached. Down through the valley Wending toward a quiet doom that they just avoided. Five minutes earlier and they would have all been burned Alive in a gas tanker explosion that God had planned to Destroy them. Of course no one would say that aloud But as they crept closer to the site of their fate, the Thought flitted across their faces as they leaned into Their windows to get a better view of e roiling black Smoke. Sent from my iPad

iPad note poem no. 4: high desert The wind started in the morning rattling Windows to wake the family from sleep. It was going to be a bad one, they knew So they talked about it over coffee and melted Cheese It was just fifty years before that her father First scratched out life from the alkali clay Baked hard by the high mountain sun But she remembered his stories of sheets of Roiling dust, choking even the tall grass with White So they worried over their coffee and cheese About the coming of the storm, the choking Wind, the failing of the spirits, the strength of Fathers She watched the west all day, intermittently, From her kitchen window while she went about Keeping her father's house, now hers, waiting For the family to return, and for the coming of The storm Sent from my iPad

iPad note poem no. 3 He does not leave her until she gets on the bus They are newly married, you see, and we all know The longing look he gives her as she mounts the First step. He stares at the bus for a moment too long While it pulls away and we know and he knows And she knows he is smitten; he is hers; he is Gone. He turns to walk back to their shag carpet Where he will lay half of the day killing his Friends who whisper murder in his ear, not once Thinking of her And he is there on the shag when she returns And he barely notices her in between fragging A friend from Wyoming. Soon the child will Be born A child of lust and longing and desire and hand Grenades. He won't notice it much either As it cries for milk in one hand, controller in the Other Sent from my iPad

iPad Poem Number 2: September Morning She wakes and suddenly she is divorced Married in February, separated by May Divorced by August, alone in September The marriage, she knew, was just kidding A means of making this guy happy That something more might exist that Would make sense of his mindfulness But no, she knew better but drove Ahead with him, even though they Were clearly on different freeways He on the interstate, she on the Belt route And soon they were miles apart Not even texting would keep the Bond that was only a joke in the First place And suddenly it is September And in the back yard there Is a rat, climbing the tree to Get to the bird feeder he put Up It has no food in it, of course But the rat checks it all the Same Sent from my iPad

IPad Notes Poem 1: Public transit The bus smelled of urine that morning The odor hanging on hard from some Unwashed vagrant whose days and Nights were spent in a whiskey bottle The bus riders tried to ignore it Absorbed in their text messaging Or books or music or staring blank Into the fetid air But on occasion you could note The slight grimace cross a brow The scrunching of noses The down-turned lips And even then someone would Wonder how they were the Unwashed. They were the Vagrants going from here to There Sent from my iPad

tomato no soup Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner

I give you vacation action days: Disc golf.  Disc golf.  Disc golf . Heart, Heart, Heavy Heart. Captain Phoenix Visits the Sun Ok, that last one needs some more clarification:  my friend Jason Jones volunteers to work with developmentally disabled young adults at Art Access here in SLC .  A result of this work is a show where the assisting artist and the artist student display their work.  The title of one of Jason's student's pieces as the aforementioned Captain Phoenix .   Still, seems appropriate.

I was listening to Jackson Browne's "Your Bright Baby Blues" and  I swear I heard one of the lines in the first verse was "Run as fast as you can rhyme."  I played it back immediately because couplings of words like that don't come along that often.  The line turns out to be more in line with the story the song is telling of the isolated observer watching people self-assuredly going places while the lonely singer-songwriter is pining either lost love, lost direction, or both: Everybody's going somewhere Riding just as fast as they can ride I guess they've got a lot to do Before they can rest assured Their lives are justified Pray to God for me baby He can let me slide  As it is, the song is an interesting enough exploration of purpose and direction in one's life, but I am still intrigued by the misheard lyric: running as fast as you can rhyme.  It is the sense/nonsense notion that appeals to me in the line.   The juxtaposition of two dispe...

Woke up at two today. That is all.

Last night a thunderstorm rolled across the valley at midnight.  I watched it swell up across the valley, tendrils of lightning marking its path.  After each thunderclap, I swear I could hear people cheering from down the hill.  No doubt it was probably just me cheering the storm on.  It is the first real lightning we've had this summer.  It was nice just to watch the storm from the front porch.  I tried to go to sleep, but it kept on for hours.  To lay awake and listen to the storm is a rare gift.

Upper Provo River Valley, Uinta Mountains, Utah This has been a peaceful, mind-clearing vacation so far.  I pre-determined (aside from a rather rigorous hiking trip to the Uintas) that I was going to completely relax as much as possible and, more importantly, do not much of anything that really isn't just about basic living or taking care of emergencies--and even those I've managed to calm my way through.  I came upon the idea of just relaxing and letting my life flow along a river while hiking along a river in the previously-mentioned Uintas.  It was a pretty freeing thought to just let myself wander down that river a bit, sloshing through shallow and deep mountain water, not worrying, but following the river and a friend who has the good sense to know when to break the easy trail and head into the dark forest for no reason. That was week one of the vacation, and it was freeing and opening and, without being incredibly maudlin:  life sustaining. This week ...

Rocks were easy when they were Elements combined to be hard Unstoppable But breakable Sheer on any rock Will snap it clean Bonds mean nothing It is only force Hammered down And then split But it is not clean No matter how hard Or how sharp Nothing will split The bonds That tie The rock lays open On a river beach Ready To be broken Again.

It would have been simple I want to type "she said" next And I know why (And she knows why) So I switch screens Click over there The other screen Where the song is That I want to hear All full of remind A simple song Two chords and the Drums Guitar beaten Such wandering beauty Such almost But I am back here You never left, did you? Screens are masks where Images of past remind Us that we don't ever I am back here But I am over there And I am under there Where the music slides Almost imperceptibly Together You won't get it Will you? It is just summer. Hate to bring reality into it But I've got to figure out how That works. You're still there. Almost

One of the reasons I started this blog was to understand how the web can define the self, in case you forgot. I think I have forgotten that over time, which is not necessarily a bad thing as the purpose of the blog is still there, I suppose, but by forgetting that it is about how one's person is formed by such a text becomes even more salient.

via Modern Mechanix

Main(Street)Spring Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner

The bluth banana stand of europe. Originally uploaded by matt and kim

Yup. Just Google News Utah Legislature HB 477. It is amazing how many of these people suddenly become so ardently supportive of repealing a bill that they passed party-line unanimously, or, as governor, signed with glee.  (And it was glee.  Just go look.)

You've all forgotten the Bowling Syndicate , haven't you?

It will never get old.

"

1: Santaphile When I was 10, I fervently held onto my belief in Santa Claus.  Of course I had my suspicions, as every child does, but I was ready and willing to rationalize those doubts for the sake of needing (yes needing) the fat man who doled out copious and extravagant gifts.  Yeah, my desire to believe in Santa was about the gifts and only the gifts—not about his self-effacing goodness or his desire to spread peace and love around the world. My belief in Santa, however, was smashed to bits the Christmas of my tenth year by, of all things, air hockey.  You see my oldest brother was 18 then and fervently wanted an air hockey table for Christmas.  This was the height of the air hockey craze in the 70s, that Eric D. Anderson touches upon to provide important in his excellent documentary Way of the Puck: A Documentary about Professional Air Hockey…Really .  In the mid 70s everyone wanted an air hockey table in the house…or so my brother convincingly argued e...

I walked past a dead deer today She lay bloated, back leg snapped, Near the busy collector route That takes commuters home to bed Her snout pointed skyward And her bulging black eyes Watched the endless flow Of traffic that took her Life

It is Burns Night. I chose a Burns poem that didn't require me to try to emulate (and therefore slaughter) a Scot's accent. On a side note:  my great great grandmother apparently didn't speak a word of English when she met my great great grandfather in Canada cerca 1840.  She was born in Argyll.

Carrie is Bigbrownhouse on flickr. You too can contribute to the Mobile Poetry collective....call the number over there -->.

So I have a new toy...a Bamboo tablet thinger.  I bought it on a whim as a self-given birthday gift, but I've been inspired to do it by Hightouch and Snyder, who have (apparently) made excellent use of similar (or the same) devices. After taking in the tutorial, I dived right into a program that has baffled me for years:  Adobe Illustrator.  While listening to the Jazz trounce the Nicks, I came to realize that Illustrator really is meant for devices like my new tablet.  I also realized that it really isn't all that different from many other Adobe programs I've used:  you just need to find what works for you and ignore everything else. Being that my drawing skills are suspect, at best, I decided to start with some word art: If you don't recognize it, this is a haiku by Basho--and a rather nice one at that.  I've never been a fan of my handwriting, but I actually wasn't bothered by this rendition. Still--with a program like Illustrator, I felt compell...

After many, many years ado, I finally can announce the world premier of The Mummy's Revenge , and epic filum of woe and intrigue developed over days in 2005.

all the cool kids play accordians Originally uploaded by bigbrownhouse From world traveler and flickr friend, Big Brown House (aka Carrie de Azevado-Poulson).

They Call It Haze Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner While the pollution that besets the Salt Lake valley every year creates some spectacular sunsets, it is still pollution non-the less. Because of the nature of the valley and our temperature inversions, we regularly get "Red Air Quality Days" and people are encouraged not to drive. The local TV media often tries to gussy up the problem by calling the pollution "haze." Ultimately we all bear responsibility for the problem and should act accordingly to lessen the impact of the smog days.

Look at me, getting all political! See this is why I am not allowed to take vacation time normally.

New Year Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner