And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture by Bill Wasik

Author:Bill Wasik [Wasik, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101057704
Google: cLCHP91oR_MC
Amazon: 0143117610
Published: 2009-06-11T07:44:22.985000+00:00

The Accidental Oracle, as it happened, lived in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few subway stops across the river from my office. His real name was Kurt Strahm, and he made his home in a pristinely kept building in the Polish part of town. He had once been an abstract artist of considerable promise, a fact that became evident as soon as I walked into his apartment and saw the work hanging throughout. Ghostly strands swam, on one canvas, in a sublime acrylic murk; down another, a cibachrome print, bands of color slid to dissolve, at bottom right, into a chemical scar, as if the developing reagents had rebelled partway through. In the painting above his computer desk, a wistful pattern ran like droplets across a rusty, translucent pane. Strahm is a fastidious man, probably in his early fifties (he declined to give his exact age), tall and slender with wavy gray hair combed back, a salt-and-pepper goatee, silver oval glasses. He dressed simply: a gray pocket-T, jeans, Teva sandals. His apartment was dustless and spare, the sort of immaculate, uncluttered space that most New Yorkers inhabit only in dreams, from which they awake heartbroken into their cramped real-life hovels.

“I started painting,” said Strahm, who speaks in an even, caustic tone, “and then I lost interest, because there wasn’t much to think about. I like my paintings just fine, but there really wasn’t much to think about.” He had grown up in California, in the Bay Area, and had gone to art school there. “I had a few solo shows in San Francisco, and that felt kind of empty; and then I got here and I met all these artists—I didn’t really know any artists at all till I got here. And then I knew so many artists that I didn’t want to know any more artists.” The prestigious Brooklyn gallery Pierogi had given him a solo show in 2001, and the capsule review in the Times, which I looked up later, called it “flinty and ingenious.” But today, aside from the occasional small computer-or video-based piece, Strahm was devoting himself to his work on the web. In addition to his own personal blog, called Restless, he kept up another recurring blog as the Accidental Oracle, which was devoted mostly to waging meme war against the right wing. (“You have to use entertainment, and satire and ridicule, and just, you know, let the fuckers on the right have it directly,” he told me.) His August entry into the Festival was his third in as many months, all of them in the Accidental Oracle format. He previously had begun the title of each entry with the greeting “Dear Oracle.”

“I thought if they liked one, they might like a series of them—they would recognize the name and come back,” Strahm said. “But they don’t do that.” This is a common meme-maker’s lament: viral projects spread through decontextualized blog links and e-mail forwards, and so viewers tend to pay no attention

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