INTERNET WORK

Oh, it's a marvelous thing.

Did you know that I was once an unknown artist? -- and then I met the Internet! Hah!! After all this time, I'm still unknown (and awash in strange art objects ). It also seems like I haven't done a lick of meaningful physical work since! This just ain't right. (And the scale in the doctor's office doesn't lie.)

Surely I've done some sort of actual work. I wash both vehicles twice a year. I burn "nice" trash (no old tires or hospital waste) when the wind's right. I clean the house sporadically. I even wash the dishes and make the bed. Oh, I'm a dynamo, all right. I sit in this genuine fake leather "executive's chair" (it tilts!) to surf and write every damn morning until my knees ache and my legs go to sleep. That's when I know I've done enough! This is definitely work, satisfying too, but it doesn't burn off the 2:00 A.M. raisin bran. Aw, poop.

No, back when I was an unknown sculptor, in the not-too-distant past when there might have been an Internet but who the hell cared, I would actually go outside to the porch of my studio to cut, bend, and weld scrap metal. There are only two times a year here in Maryland when this kind of thing is even possible, of course, and those would be a few weeks in May-June and October-November. The rest of the year is either too hot and humid or too cold and gray. (What, you work when it's gray??) Sometimes I would put on several layers of old sweatsuits and do this even in the winter, if the sun was shining.

The process involved a lot of physical exertion: wresting big, heavy, dirty pieces of steel, yanking hoses and tanks every which way, burning myself, running back to the house for bandages, all that good stuff. Always on my feet. Then there was beating, filing, grinding, sanding, and painting. And cleaning up! All in all a very physically and spiritually satisfying experience, when it worked. Like the day I completed my best all-metal kinetic sculpture ever: a magnificent 14-foot long "wind dragon" with jagged counter-rotating metal propeller blades! A gloriously dangerous thing in a high wind, let me tell you. The sculpture ended up with friends of ours who live on a north-facing bluff on the river, where the winter storms spun the props so fast, the blades kept breaking and flying off. Very scary! Welding is not an exact science, is it? Anyway, that's art for you.

Yes, friends and neighbors, I was unknown, but I was skinnier. My wife was a hard-working college professor and I was a sculptor who made little money but burned those calories, that's for sure. There is definitely something to be said for manipulating materials in the physical world. Just try making something on your computer that can break your hand or gash your leg like a big, heavy, whirling kinetic sculpture! For that matter, try creating something out of ones and zeros and putting it in the front yard. No one can see your digital creation without a mess o' megahertz, but I was able to stick that big red thing in the ground out near the road and make traffic slow down!

Unfortunately none of this was moving us closer to the Day of Liberation. I decided I needed to make smaller, more expensive things, so I signed up for courses in moldmaking and bronze casting at the Maryland Institute over in Baltimore. The Internet was still on hardly anybody's lips or computer monitors, but I soon became a maker of mysterious lost-wax bronzes. I mastered the intricacies of making flexible rubber molds of delicate, complicated objects like a kittycat skull I found under a bush. (Yes, I did too find it!) I also found a roadkill feral kitty on one of my walks, and -- uh, you know. That skull came out nice and clean after sitting under an overturned bucket in a corner of the yard for 6 months. Ants are wonderful bone cleaners! Too bad they don't do hard drives -- if I could just set the 8600 under an old washtub for a few months and let the ants eat all the files and programs I haven't used in the past year. Aladdin is probably breeding them now. . .

But back to the bronzes: once I had a mold for making wax cat skulls, I could make as many bronze ones as I wanted. Not as easily as option-dragging on grouped pixels, but do-able.The lost wax method is very cool and lots of fun, because you get to melt metal! This was even more dangerous than welding, especially since I was using a home-made melting furnace with an old piece of pipe for a burner nozzle: turn on the propane, fire up the blower motor, toss a burning rag or chunk of cardboard into the thing and stand back! BOOM roar there we go, and after about 20 minutes of ear-splitting racket and poisonous fumes, I could do a "pour." I made lots of bronze cat skulls. I made sculptures out of the skulls and other invented body parts. I was a freaking genius! And about the time I had finally accumulated a critical mass of bizarre bronzes, along came the Internet. What ho, I thought. I'll just build a Web site and sell these suckers!

That was the beginning of one kind of work and the end of another. I found that I loved shoving pixels around as much as I liked casting bronze, maybe more. There was certainly less to clean up! I had substituted gamma rays for poison gas, which meant any physical penalty wouldn't be obvious for another 15 or 20 years, so I was happy. I loved working on my Web site! I loved being online and learning about cyberspace. I stopped making sculptures and spent all day creating animated GIF epics on our 16MHz LC II. The site became an end in itself, and Johnny Internet was born -- with a 14.4 kpbs Internet connection! The ZOO ZONE, as I called it, began as an online gallery of sorts and was eventually expanded to showcase all kinds of things.* But guess what? I was still unknown. And cat-skull bronzes have not exactly taken the world by storm, you may have noticed. (Most people have no taste at all!)

Around this time, strange things began to happen. Whenever someone took a picture of me, the image would be altered before I got to see it: a clever, sadistic fiend would substitute a double-chinned doughnut lover's likeness in my place! I didn't think the ladies at the drug store were that sophisticated, but I was wrong. Behind the "will that be all, hon?" lurks a hard, cruel heart, that's all I know.

So I stand (with effort) before you now, a mere caricature of my former self. The "Internet dude" has gained nearly 20 pounds in a year and a half of editing the news! This will not do, and I have begun starving myself so that I can buy a new pair of pants to wear to Macworld. (When the jeans I have on now fall down without a belt, I'll be ready.) Internet work is the essence of cool, but it isn't the same as working out! This has all got to change soon, while things are still manageable. At least I'm not alone. My brother the webmaster down in Austin, Texas recently sent us a package and wrote his name for the return address as "Rob-Is-Fat.com," but he's lying, of course. Have you ever been to Austin? That's one of those towns where the police herd all the out-of-shape people off the streets. You can't exercise in public unless you're already firm, and I know he loves to run and ride his bike.

Meanwhile that Day of Liberation is at hand! -- I think. My sweetie has closed out a fabulous career at the local college, one of the first to go whole-hog for Macs way back in the '80's, I might add. (I think she'd want you to know that she's not retired but just shifting gears!) But we're off! If I feel like a turtle crossing the Interstate, it's only natural. To get the other side requires courage, good will, love of life, and money!

So I sit here, almost every day, bathed in the gamma glow until my legs fall off, because it's tremendous fun and because it pays more than melting metal ever did. I'm squeezing just enough dough out of this Internet work to give me hope. And I'm learning just enough to shudder and shout at the same time! Do you realize you could aim a webcam at your crotch and sell subscriptions? And that you could get RICH from that?? Aaaghhh!!! And then there's this item from the Sunday Washington Post:

Last December a guy over in McLean, Virginia, about a hundred miles from here, set up a business in his basement. You may have heard of "NetFloppy.com," a virtual floppy disk service for storing data. Well, right after the business opened (with the owner as sole full-time employee), an outfit named Xoom.com started nosing around. Five months later Xoom.com bought the company for $1.65 million in cash and stock! The happy owner says, "We didn't even have time to print up NetFloppy business cards."

Internet work! (I wonder if he gained any weight?)

John H. Farr has up to this point led a colorful life many would envy and most would fear. He also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and would most likely answer your email. If you missed it in the column above, here's your ZOO ZONE link. (Watch out, it's loud!)

The Farr Site Forum is an excellent idea in search of manifestation. Oh, and you can leave messages there! The Archives have links and synopses of all previous Farr Site columns, 77 in all.

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* Regrettably, this is not a functioning online store. Oh, the big stuff is for sale! But the trinkets are mostly all gone.

OFFICIAL FARR SITE REMINDER: Yours truly is looking for a publisher for several astoundingly lucrative proposals I have in mind. Beyond that and much closer to the bone, my wife and I are selling a fine house on 2.57 acres. If you moved in by August, you'd be very happy, and so would we. And the piano! Can you use a nice grand? Everything must go! Inquire within. . .

February 09, 2012