My Life and Thoughts

Today I will tell you the story of my bittersweet first experiences on MySpace.  Sometime last fall I got an email with the subject line “Secret MySpace Project,” from Sam Frank: former n+1 copyeditor and current editor of Triple Canopy.   Sam sent out a number of  photographs of “defaced faces” by the multimedia artist Jon Kessler.  The faces were exhibited in a Drawing Center show called: You Have 43 Friends.  Sam, who had copyedited the catalogue of Kessler’s The Palace at 4 A.M. (the text of which includes ”a fictionalized interview between Jon, a four-star general, and the general’s youngest son, a Bard curatorial student“), decided it would be cool if he could get 33 of his friends to make MySpace profiles for 33 of the defaced faces. 

You Have 43 Friends	dissidentguy15

By disposition I am naturally quite sympathetic to secret art projects, and I was particularly happy to be assigned my ”first-choice” defaced face, for whom I set up a profile under the name of dissidentguy15. 

I had never used MySpace before, and it took some time to figure out.  But I am proud to report that today dissidentguy15 has 37 friends, and is in fact the Number One friend of the musical entity Sakharov.  He has enjoyed a brief correspondence with Fyodor Dostoevsky (who sent his best regards to dissidentguy15’s liver), and with Leo Tolstoy, who replied as follows to dissidentguy15’s compliment on The Living Corpse: “indeed, that was a very fun story/play to write. nothing like love, fear, loathing, and suicide. all the makings of a good tolstoy novel, eh?”

Things, I suppose, were going well… except that, at a certain point, one started asking oneself difficult questions.  Was Art really being served, one wondered, by the tenuous bonds of friendship linking dissidentguy15 with Gentleman Loser and the Cognitive Dissidents, Mikhail Bakunin, and The Museum of Beards? 

I thought things were maybe looking up when, a few months into the covert artistic operation, dissidentguy15 was befriended by the Global Village Idiot, apparently a recurring character in Jon Kessler’s work, whose profile was almost certainly the work of, if not Kessler himself, then at least his assistant.

Kessler’s Global Village Idiot

Alas, whatever illumination I had hoped to receive from the “GVI,” it was not forthcoming.  The Idiot simply advised dissidentguy15 to “rock on,” confiding, on another occasion, that he was “Learning some new shit from leaflets that were given to me by a guy on the street.”  This struck me as a rather poignant illustration of the parable of the blind.

When the blind lead the blind, everyone falls into a ditch.

So when the troika rushed on, as it inevitably does, I gradually forgot about dissidentguy15 and his social problems… until the recent appearance in Triple Canopy of an essay called “You Have 33 Friends,” which finally brought to light Sam’s perspective upon the origins and development of the MySpace project.  “I rounded up thirty-odd friends and friends of friends,” Sam recalled,  

and asked them to make something of the MySpace medium—whatever that something might be. A visual object. A kind of fiction. A social sculpture. My vagueness didn’t help. A handful bailed. Others floundered. The project lies fallow. At least the faces have the solace of friendship, whatever that means, or might.

Well I put it to you, impartial readers: did I “bail” on this project?  Did I “flounder”?  Or is this just cold ingratitude: “a lump of soot,” as a great man once put it, “which, falling into the dish of friendship, destroys its scent and flavor”? At least dissidentguy15 now has the “solace” of knowing who his real friends are (thanks, Sakharov!).

Arguably more disturbing than Sam’s evaluation is his interview with Jon Kessler himself, who remarks, apropos of the MySpace “social sculpture”: 

Does this project need one more push, you ask? How about you give me the names and addresses of all my so-called friends, and I go and mow ‘em down with assault weapons?

It’s the last time I do any favors for the art community, that’s for sure.

Tags: beards, comparative literature, monuments, music, n+1, Russian literature, Tolstoy

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.