Monday 10 September 2012

Tumbling Into Darkness*.

Hey, I've been around (does one eyebrow lift, looks straight down lens, and gives knowing wink to imaginary audience).
I'm a man of the world (well, I've got to the age where I could, if I so choose, sing that Fleetwood Mac song with some amount of genuine feeling.)
It'd take a lot to shock me I can tell you (actually, that's true!)
I've lived in the fast lane (but have since moved over to a more pedestrian lane).
I've taken more of everything than anyone and walked home afterwards (do not ask me about specific examples as most of it is a bit of a jumble nowadays).

I opened a tumblr microblog some time ago.
I don't (or can't) remember why.
Like many things, like so many many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Oh, hang on, I do remember why I opened it.
I wanted a home for odd bits and bobs that didn't seem to fit in the general scheme of this blog.
Still, I haven't really bothered with it.
I found the layout clunky and all the posts I made were just duplications of posts on this blog or pics from my Flickr site.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to try and get a handle on the place and find out if it was worth continuing with.
I changed the layout format which made it more entertaining to look at.
I followed a few links from people who had 'liked' or 'reblogged' some of the (very few) posts I'd made.

I minded here to re-use the Milton quote from the Robert Hughes posting:
"And in the lowest depth, a lower depth"
Could have been written about Tumblr.

Now here's my problem.
Having waded through the various mires I encountered I found I wasn't really shocked by any of it, just an overwhelming sensation of boredom.
There seems to be a great many posts by, what I assume are, teenaged females who are obsessed by pictures of each others pants, cutting themselves, kittens, and venerating the Columbine shootists.
I did see a short video that could be described as "octopus abuse" but I don't really want to think to much about that.
I suppose I'm disappointed by, octopuses excepted, the lack of imagination, the background noise of p0rn, the endless repeating gifs of gory deaths culled from horror movies.
Banal, banal, banal.

On the plus side I've seen some beautiful art and this is just a preliminary report.
Maybe in the lowest depth there might be something that glistens.

*I notice, since spending 15.5 hours in a cloak-room, I've become a little depressed and pessimistic so this post should be read against that background.

6 comments:

Le Sanglier said...

Remember making all that jelly? That was fun. I never did figure out what buttering was in my toast world. I guess I need to drink more metaphor juice. Maybe I should go ask Alice if she has any. I gave up on tumblr, too. I did find some of the posts on genderqueer to be poignant, the ones from teens trying to understand why the world is playing such a horribly mean gender trick on them. I found out about tumblr from having random, anonymous chats on omegle. 20 attempts might get you a good chat but, more often than not, the 19 bad ones are vomitatious nightmare-makers. I guess tumblr is the same way.

OutaSpaceMan said...

I think it's the old staring long enough into the void for it to start staring back situation.
I probably need to get out in the fresh air.

Le Sanglier said...

Weren't you just at the beach 2 days ago? That's pretty fresh, right? Maybe you have exceptional fresh air needs. Some of us do, like me. I liked it when Thoreau said that a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

OutaSpaceMan said...

Yep, I'm with Thoreau on that one (even though I've never been in the position to employ a housekeeper).

Le Sanglier said...

Well, I heard that he used to take his laundry over to his mother's, so I guess there was no housekeeper over at Walden either. Maybe he was referring to a metaphorical housekeeper.

OutaSpaceMan said...

I think the 'metaphorical housekeeper' should be delivered to Hooting Yard immediately!