A blog of interest and unrest

http://thebarbeque.blogspot.com/2007/05/sanjaya-bill-vendall-and-golfwidow.html

The trouble with anonymity. I think I know who Yum Yum is. Lord of Yum Yum may be Paul Velat, but my wife tells me that Yum Yum is Chris Holmes. The last time I spoke with Chris was maybe 4 years ago, and rumors were the topic of the conversation. He had researched rumorology in school, and at the time I was making weird parallels between conceptual art and rumors. But anyway that was 4 years ago. Today my friend Julie Rudder is a contestant in a competition to be the next NPR talk show host. Her last entry talked about a rumor that the American Idol contestant Sanjaya is actually the invented persona of an art student at RISD. I hope its true. I also hope Julie gets her own talk show. Is their still time to vote? We need to get some buzz going, rally the troops. Maybe a good tag line like “I’d Rudder be listening to NPR”. She needs a rumorologist, (Chris are you reading this? Is it true that you were once detained at an airport for trying to carry-on your grandmother’s brass knuckles?) I’m familiar with Julie’s work as we were in grad school together and she has consistently questioned power structures, big ones like religious institutions. It seems inevitable for Julie’s work to move into the public realm, like talk radio. Lane makes some excellent points in his comments to her blog entry; the importance of anonymity and the importance of weak social ties to the economy being that they support creativity and innovation. Now that I consider Julie’s NPR project and her blog entries I think of her videos differently. "The Greater Sense" (2007), and "I Have so Many Things I Just Don't Know" (2007) In the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern, she has two videos in which the audio is her voice manipulated and multiplied in a way that confuses the integrity of the narrator. Now I see the character in the videos as anonymous and shifty as the blogger or chat room alias. Vote for Julie, lets get her on the air and maybe we’ll find out who she really is.