A little mid-week link blogging

Just a few odds and ends in no particular order:

• I'm usually not a fan of "clever" art, but these are just cool.
  
  
• Considering how much I dislike J-Lo, this track really is strangely addictive (though not as much as this). I suppose any thing gets better when you add Stevie Wonder.
  
  
• I'm giving serious consideration to taking a few art history classes next semester over at the U. Not really in love with the idea of Art in the Dark, but there are some definite gaps in my knowledge that could stand filling.
  
  
• Soma FM is already streaming Christmas music. A few minutes ago, as i was about to get up, they started playing Jimmy McGriff's version of "Santa Claus is Coming/White Christmas" and I suddenly found that I couldn't get up until it was over.
  
  
• In answer to Dwayne: Rope, Top Hat, My Man Godfrey, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, It's a Wonderful Life, Duck Soup, Adams Rib, Double Indemnity, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
  
  
• For anyone who's interested, don't forget that the Leonids peak on Saturday night.
  
  

[edit] Looks like the Leonids might not happen here after all... damnit.[/edit]

We are all Tasadays.

On our second stop of the night, a show at Material that hadn’t drawn anywhere near the crowd it deserved, I heard someone who shall remain nameless remark that they tended to like the artists that showed at the Power House if not always the shows themselves. I hate to admit it publicly (partly for fear of offending my friends who work for the organization and partly for fear of castigation), but I tend to be of much the same mind upon leaving a show there. Even great artists are sometimes presented with the space and then seem to freeze. It’s such a formidable space that it tends to demand a formidable response, which some people are either unwilling or unable to provide. With her show opening tonight, “sleeping heads lie”, Wangechi Mutu proves she is capable of just such a formidable response.

Mutu begins by transforming the white walled modernist north gallery into a muted and pockmarked expanse for her mixed media collages to reside in. The walls themselves are a pale blue and pitted with small rust colored craters which seem to convey a past of violence or perhaps just the neglectful ravages of time; even outside of the art world it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.

Each of the eight collages is an enthralling assemblage of fashion, nature, pornography, chrome and a smattering of distinctly African images compiled into menaced human forms (mostly heads), many of whom seem to be imploring something of their viewers. It is the nature of this kind of collage to dehumanize its subject (think De Kooning), but in the hands of Mutu the technique does exactly the opposite. The figures in these collages, for all their disfigurations, seem almost more human than any straight rendering of form could be.

The cavernous south gallery contains an installation called “Muddy Water.” It consists primarily of a dozen or so clotheslines lighted from above, holding a wide range of mostly dark colored, worn clothing. Viewed from the balcony looking down into the space, the highest row of clothing was on the far wall, at about eye level. From the lower floor, however, the clothes provids a fascinatingly textured visual ceiling. Sharing the space with the viewer are ten hot plates scattered around the burnt orange floor, bearing pots of water and wine of various colors and stages of boiling. This gave the room a certain musk, which seemed to lay claim to the environment that the artist has created for her viewers.

Critically I find this work to be an invigorating struggle that I’ve still not fully resolved. I found myself trying to make sense of what my eyes were telling me and I kept running into frameworks I know to be false. Any construct I have of femininity or Africanity (a term I’m borrowing from Olu Oguibe) is based on Colonial notions contrived to support the ideas of people the likes of which I’m trying very hard not to become. I found myself staring into these faces and wrestling not with their Otherness, but my own.

****

The artist is giving a gallery talk tomorrow afternoon at 3pm and I hope anyone who happens to read this will seriously consider going. And since you'll be in the neighborhood, you could always hang out and go the Lantana Show afterward (nudge nudge, wink wink).

A little plug

As a rule, I try not to stump for Amber’s shows here (and I never review them), but I’m making an exception in this case. Next Saturday, November 11, from 7 to 11pm the Lantana Projects are presenting their Class of 06 show at 387 South Main. Amber and I have spent a sizable chunk of the last two days up there and it’s shaping up to be a really fantastic show.

Yesterday started out a little rough for Amber. She still hadn’t fully recovered from her food poisoning. We threw in the towel about an hour into the installation in search of something, anything that Amber could eat. Given that there was something of a deadline for getting this work up, the folks putting on the show were really good about us bailing.

Today went considerably better. Amber woke up craving pancakes and set upon chowing down before I got out of bed. For anyone who’s ever been through food poisoning, you know this is a pretty good sign.

We got to the space a little later than we’d hoped, but the installation went pretty quickly. Somewhere around three in the afternoon, Amber started channeling Gabriel Orozco. It wasn’t part of the original design for the piece, but ultimately I think the antiphonal approach worked out well. I put up a little Flickr set of Amber’s installation for anybody who’d like to take a peek.

Oh Dear... I've Trodden In Monsieur's Bucket

Today was supposed to be spent working on Amber's Lantana installation followed by a quick trip down to my grandmother's for the evening. Instead, I was on bucket duty. After the Michelle Citron lecture (which I still intend to write up), Amber and I stopped by McAlister's on Poplar at Highland. Apparently there was something wrong with her soup; she doesn't remember it tasting funny and dinner was nice (we ran into a couple of friends who had been at the Chris Uphues lecture), but about two o'clock this morning the fun began. I got Amber an appointment for two this afternoon and we're just now getting home.

They gave her a phenergan shot, so she's finally getting a little sleep.

Weekend Stuff (yes, I know it's Tuesday)

So my Friday podcasting class didn’t make. Or rather, it made but only two people showed up. Since it was just the three of us, it seemed silly to go through my whole formal spiel, so we rescheduled the technical part of the training and we just sat and brainstormed ways to fit the technology into their existing professional practice. Once I got them past a few basic concepts, it was fascinating to see two professionals teaching in two vastly different disciplines bouncing ideas off of each other. As the conversation went on, I found it better to referee less and less, and just let them work out bits of it on their own. I honestly believe they learned more that way, but I’m struggling with how to incorporate that into trainings with ten or more people in them (which is my usual class size). It’s easy to steer two people back from the brink of technical improbability, but not so much when it’s a dozen people having half a dozen conversations.

Mary was in town and stayed with us for the weekend. She got in late Friday afternoon and headed straight over to her storage unit to start sorting through stuff to take back (after checking to make sure I really hadn’t killed her cats, of course). Mary being an artist and all, as soon as she got back to the house she wanted to do the opening circuit. Three months teaching 6-12 year olds in some Appalachian valley somewhere had apparently left her a little culture starved.

First stop was the Nia opening at Marshall Arts. I forgot to bring my PDA so I wasn’t able to take notes (and my memory is too swiss cheesed to remember names right now), but I can say as a general statement that it was one of the best shows I’ve seen in that space. There were an incredible series of black on black prints with the word “Grillz” embossed across the top of various pop-cultural images, some unsettling and some subversively funny. Not to say that there wasn’t a fair amount of very serious and considered work, but subversive humor seemed to be a current in the show that carried a lot more successfully than in other work I’ve seen recently. It is an unfortunate tendency of socially conscious art to leave its sense of humor behind. Artists who are capable of, or even known for, making astoundingly funny and simultaneously poignant art suddenly forget how powerful that can be when they start to tackle their favorite cause. Humor can drive home important messages so much easier than a lot the maudlin pap that gets so often foisted up in the name of “the cause” and it was nice to see that the artist in Nia took that lesson to heart.

Interestingly the crowd I’m used to seeing at Marshall Arts openings was nowhere to be found. I’m sure that the fact that both the big college art programs were having openings elsewhere in town probably had something to do with it, but it was disheartening none the less to not see a bigger crowd turn out for such a good show. I admit that I was only there for a little under an hour, but I’d love for someone to explain to me why it is only when a black artist is showing that the makeup of a gallery crowd comes anywhere near reflecting the racial makeup of the city.

I have come to expect good things of the MCA “On the street” gallery in recent months, which made our next stop something of a disappointment. I’m all for salon style shows, when the work and space will support it, but this show just seemed like too much work in not enough gallery. Unlike the mini-comics show or the sculptural show with all of the interchangeable body parts (to pick examples more or less at random), it was impossible to get a sense of space with the work in this show, because you were always in danger of walking into another piece of art. There were a few really solid pieces capable of overcoming the unfortunate arrangements of the show; most notably a series of dyed cotton vignettes on the south wall depicting scenes of the artists touching, fairytale like rememberings of her father. I admit that when it comes to work like this, I don’t trust my ability to view it objectively the way I used to, but both Mary and Amber commenting on them as we were leaving the gallery makes me think I couldn’t have been too far off. They could have been works of fiction for all I know, but they were fantastic none the less.

Down the street was a more consciously salon style show, the fundraising auction for the University of Memphis ARTS group. I’ve picked up work at the last two of these auctions and I didn’t see any reason to stop that trend this year. It’s a little weird for me making the transition from critical viewer to artistic consumer, but that didn’t stop me from picking up four new Scott Fulmar prints. I’m an unabashed fan of his work; this brings my total collection to an even dozen purchased over the last three years. There was some other really good work there but sales were unfortunately not as brisk as I remember seeing them in years past. I wonder how the other auctions have been fairing this fall?

After my little foray into conspicuous consumption, we met up with the movie night crew down at the Arcade for a late dinner. It was good food and great fun to have the gang assembled again, but I just want to sound a quiet note of warning to the handful of you who read this. If someone from Alabama brings up Jimmy Buffet, just pretend to be a fan even if you’ve only ever heard Margaritaville. When it came out that I’d never heard the song “Cheesburger in Paradise” (and that Amber didn’t like it), Chandler looked at us like we’d just stepped off of a spaceship. I gathered from reading what she had to say later that, songs about foodstuffs not withstanding, Buffet’s music has a certain power for people living in places that have beaches and waves (like the blues does for those in the delta or zydeco in Louisanna), but considering I’m not a big fan of sand or saltwater, it’s probably not something I’ll may never be able to really get no matter how hard I try.

The next night, at a Halloween party graciously hosted by someone named Kate whom I’d never met before but who kindly let me occupy her couch for a few hours, Chandler offered to make me a CD. I’m looking forward to it; hopefully it will help...

The gangs all here...

I’ve been seeing a fair amount of good art but a fair amount of it was only fair; I really still don’t have much of a drive to write about any of it. It’s a damned good thing this isn’t how I make my living. I’m not sure if it’s that what I’m seeing just isn’t compelling or that I’m just not in a frame of mind to be compelled right now.

I’ve been teaching all week; Copyright yesterday and the first of two podcasting classes today. I sucked. Copyright went ok (not my best performance), but the network was crawling slow and the instructor computer crashed three times while I was trying to teach the podcasting class… hard to teach an internet class when you can’t get to the !@#$ing internet. This is when I discovered I suck at vamping. I don’t think I was always this bad at it, but entertaining a room full of faculty while troubleshooting computer problems is apparently a trick I’ve forgotten how to perform. I hope to hell that Friday’s podcasting class goes smoother.

In other news, I was down at my grandmother’s place for the Orionids Saturday night. I saw a little over 50 meteors for the hour I managed to keep myself awake… no where near the best show I’ve seen, but not bad. For anyone interested, the Leonids peak on Saturday, November 19. I’m not sure we live far enough east to get the best part of the show, but it should be worth turning out for.

When we got back in town, Amber and I went over to Chandler and Daniel’s for the highlight of the weekend, a pumpkin carving party. After dark, we went in to watch "Art School Confidential." I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a party film, but if you're into quirky or have ever been to art shcool, it's very defenitely worth your time. I know party stories are supposed to be “over” so I’ll leave it at that and just let you check out the pictures if you’re so inclined…


[edit]I've been trying to make this post from the Flickr XML-RPC service for a little over half an hour... I finally gave in and logged into Blogger. I guess that Flickr and the new Blogger Beta don't play well together[/edit]

Astronomy Note: Orionids 2006

Tomorrow night, October 21, will be the peak of the Orionid Meteor shower this year. The radiant is a little to the left of the constellation Orion (hence "Orionid"). The Orion will rise about midnight, with best viewing being about 1am. Everything I've read says that they may tend toward being a little dim, so city viewing may not be particularly good, but it is a new moon and that will help.

If you look right there, you can see the face of Jesus in the Hot Dog

I've seen some decent art in the last two weeks (Tad's show was amazing), but things have largely been so crummy that I haven't had the creative energy to write about any of it. Amber quit her new job (and rightly so) and the damned car broke down again. Blessedly, someone was nice enough to keep me engaged in the comments section or else I probably wouldn't have written a damned thing.

Anyway, I just logged in so that I could share this.

The Institutional Critique

I attended a fantastic lecture last night over at AMUM about something called the Semiotic Nonagon. I don't have my notes with me so I'm not going to try to write it up just at the moment. But I did want to say, to the three of you that read this, that the same speaker is giving an all day workshop tomorrow at AMUM starting around 8:30am. Anyone interested in critical analysis of art or design would do well to attend. Unfortunately, I'll be in my office preparing to interview graphic designers instead.

Also, my heart felt congratulations to Spike. He was kind enough to talk shop with me for the better part of an hour at his wife's opening at the Medicine Factory (a fantastic show, which I reviewed here). Hell of a nice guy and I really wish him all the best.

As to the title of this post, I give you the best thing I read today.

Greatest Danger Redux

Can moderates write manifestos? It strikes me that so much of our discourse these days is nothing more than shrill extremists shrieking at each other while laying claim to vast majorities that really don’t belong to them. And I’m not just talking politics here. I see it everywhere… music, science, philosophy, religion, and, especially recently, in art; it’s all the same dialectic. But then I look around and it seems that if you put all the pieces together you can assemble a reasonable, if difficult to articulate, third way.

Without getting terribly preachy, I just have to get this thought off my chest: un-self-critical work in service of the dominant ideology, whether that ideology is supply side economics or abstract oil painting, is nothing more than propaganda. If you’re going to work in the dominant framework, you had better be aware of the power structure that props it up or you’re really nothing more than a shill and we know, deep down, that’s not where you want to be.

The flip side is, of course, the dominant structure is most likely not in place because it completely sucks. There must be (or have been) some value there or it would never have existed in the first place. I’m not saying you must rebel gently, but insurgents needn’t throw out the baby with the bath water; tyranny begins, after all, with the will of the people.

So today, just as I’m getting the urge to say “screw it all, other people have said this better” the good people at Lantana are kind enough to link to this. It’s not exactly Critical or even revelatory, but at least it mostly seems thoughtful. I particularly liked Hari Kunzru and Jeanette Winterson and not so much Matthew Collings. Note to Matthew: water is no less important to the individual because there is lots of it. (Better writers than him have made this same mistake, of course.)

Regardless, I’m going to have to grab a copy of the book.

*****

Also, from the I’m-not-just-some-pontificating-asshead department: I found while blog surfing today a nifty DIY project for anybody into photography. I wish I’d had one of these while shooting slides for Amber.

Memphis OPML Update

I put up the new version of the Memphis OPML this morning. I doubt I'll post about every update from here on in, but since I added about a dozen blogs and changed up the Optimal page, I figured it was worth mentioning.

In other news, I've been on heavy doses of allergy medicine since Monday of last week, Amber quit her job, got safer one, and didn't make it into Indie Memphis. I'm a little grumpy about that last one, but not for the reasons you might think. I'm also working on a very long, research heavy post about the system of gallery and festival calls, but we'll see if I ever let it see the light of day. I'm not sure how much I can say about the suck fest that is a $30 entry fees for every f@#$ing thing under the sun without it just sounding like so much sour grapes.

And when he had opened the Seventh Seal...

...Thomas Kinkade descended upon Memphis, and the resulting vortex of kitch did swallow the city whole...

The Greatest Danger

Friday night Amber and I were beyond beat; this has been one hell of a week. We actually had to psych each other up for doing the opening circuit. We did this by bribing ourselves with Sushi first. Ryu on Summer has an early bird special that can get us stuffed on Sushi for under $30 and it proved a very effective way of getting us out of the house. If you go, and aren’t in the mood for Nigiri, I recommend the "Spicy crunchy" roll.

After dinner, the first stop was Jana Travis’ "Inside-Out" at DCI. I didn’t know it at the time, but this show introduced me to what was to be my theme for the night: "I have no idea how to look at this." We were in the gallery for right at half an hour and the only even remotely useful phrase that wandered through my head was "this is the domesticity of a highly ordered mind." I’m not even sure what I meant by that, but I wrote it down anyway in hopes that it would shed some light on the experience later. It didn’t. I just get the impression of someone that has flowers in her house but doesn’t like them very much.

Now it’s time for a little confession: I was actively dreading our next stop, Bobby Spillman’s "Vacate Now!!!" at L. Ross. I’ve actually been dreading it since I first started on the idea of writing these reviews because I knew that I couldn’t go see art in Memphis and not eventually see a Bobby Spillman show. And I should say up front, that I have nothing against Bobby (I like him, insofar as I know him), I’ve just never been able to come to grips with his paintings.

It’s embarrassing actually, because a great many people that I like and respect, like and respect his work and if they ask me what I think, I have to tell them that I haven’t the faintest clue what I’m looking at. Abstraction I can generally do, but the frenetic energy of these paintings usually just leaves me feeling defeated and confused.

This is exactly how I was feeling as I was leaving the gallery on Friday, when I turned for one last look and something in the painting “I can See clearly Now” caught my attention. I chuckled quietly to myself as for a moment I seemed to catch a glimpse of Terry Gilliam. Then I realized that this gave me something to hang onto. I looked around the gallery for something else... There was Hokusai... and across from it was Phillip Guston accosting a tree... Christ! The tree is Chuck Jones (and so is that tornado over there)! Am I looking at metaphorical collage? I still don’t know, but at least I have something to hang on to.

We left that show around 8 and came to the unfortunate realization that we’d missed Carolyn Bomar’s show at Material (a fact that bums me out on a lot of levels), so we make a b-line for Larry Edwards at Marshall Arts. Again I was confronted by something inexplicable to me. I could take ten pages of copy and explain to you in excruciating detail exactly what I saw, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do any good.

I’ve been told by people who knew his work from before that this show is pretty much indicative of his work. Apparently he’s something of a perennial figure in Memphis art, which does me no good seeing as I’m not from Memphis. What I saw was a beautiful and exquisitely crafted train wreck. I walked in the door and saw an image so bluntly horrifying and yet inescapably beautiful that I had to physically extricate myself from it.

It was like watching the Masterpiece Theatre version of Jerry Springer.

***

My fortune cookie at lunch today said, "The greatest danger could be your stupidity."

My Chinese word for the day was Green Bean.

One for the Record Books

I’m not sure what I’m going to do if things don’t settle down soon. This week has been an disaster (excepting for about four blissful hours spent at the Brooks Museum last night). Let me give you the disaster countdown:

First Amber’s car dies in traffic. I don’t mean dies as in “stalls quietly sitting at a red light.” No, I mean “all power and most of the brakes go out at 55MPH in heavy rush hour traffic.” I managed to coast to a very lucky stop at Highland and Summer. The wonder that are Daniel and Chandler were nice enough to come rescue us. Two days and $500 later, we should be getting the car back tonight. For future reference, a dead alternator in a Hyundai will cause the car to shift from 4th to 1st in the space of about a quarter mile.

I get home after going back to the car to leave a note begging the cops to not impound our abandoned vehicle before the wrecker can get there to a message from my dad asking me to call him. The tone in his voice tells me that this isn’t going to be good. I get him on the phone and it turns out that sometime late that afternoon my grandmother had been bitten on the hand by a snake. Oh but wait, it gets better: it later transpires that she’s allergic to anti-venom. Pardon my acronym, but OMGWTF?!?!? Last I heard (which was late last night), she was responding well to allergy treatments and was going to be moved out of ICU onto a ward floor. I want to go see her, but at this point that would leave Amber without any means of transportation to get to work.

Speaking of Amber and her work, now on to disaster number three. Most anybody who reads this would know that Amber took a teaching job with the city schools. Specifically, she took a teaching job with the school that has been on the news so much because of the 26 arrests that kept the school in a three hour lockdown less than two weeks ago. I’m here to tell you that the security situation in said school has gotten no better.

One of her students yesterday brought her a letter from the schools administration excusing his absence from class due to detention. It turns out that he was in detention because of a gang fight. I’ll give you a second to process that…

That’s right: he got an excused absence because of a gang fight.

We should be mad as hell that our children are being daily thrust into the middle of violent, gang ridden schools with laughable security. I know the city schools spokesperson has been on the news every night this week talking about hiring more security personnel, and I realize that the bureaucracy involved in this task must make it incredibly time consuming (we don’t want just anyone watching after our children), but it must be emphasized that this cannot happen fast enough.

On Wednesday, Amber began her morning witnessing the absolute beating of one of her Female students by one of her Male students. She rang for a school official to come down and help, but nobody every showed up. She was instructed to “retain the students.” I’d love for someone to explain to me how my wife was supposed to “retain” an adrenaline pumped 18 year old boy who, on his worst day, could still have pounded the living shit out of her? He obviously had no problem hitting women. Was she supposed to take a beating too?

She’s at home today; we’ll see if she goes in tomorrow. Honestly, I kinda hope not.

Apparently I wasn’t meant to see this show

I was exhausted after work and a late Thursday night of sorting (Amber’s) school papers, so I wound up falling asleep while Amber was playing Nintendo this afternoon. She rousted me off the couch about 7pm to go check out the Amy Pleasant show, but I unfortunately didn’t actually wake up until half way through a plate of Madrasi Chicken around 9:30. The downside of this is that the art I saw tonight is pretty much just a sublime blur. Hopefully I can get in there next week and get a clear headed look at it because I get the sense that, were I awake, I'd really quite like it.

Blow out

Amber and I had every intention of making over to see Amy Pleasant speak at Rhodes last night, but the front passenger tire of our car blew out in the middle of Frasier. We were running a little behind anyway and it was almost 8 by the time I managed to get the tire changed. I really hated missing the talk because the Rhodes series is pretty much unique in Memphis. Usually we only get the chance to see work or hear the artist, almost never both.

The little New Historicist voice in the back of my head says that it doesn’t really matter what the artist says; that the meaning of a work is a product of the social milieu in which it was created. But, the rest of me is fairly old fashioned in thinking that intent is at least part (perhaps a big part) of teasing meaning out of anything. Besides, I actually enjoy hearing people talk about art... I'm funny that way.

At any rate, Rhodes lecture and exhibition schedule for the year can be found here. The opening for Amy's show is at the Clough-Hanson Gallery tonight from 6-8 pm.

***

And for future reference, does anybody know where I can get a tire changed in Memphis after 7pm?

A quick plug for a fun sounding event

As part of their Architecture Month, Memphis’ chapter of the AIA is holding a Downtown Chalk Art Festival on September 9th (or 23rd if it rains). This seems like a really fun idea. I’d never heard of such a thing, but a quick Google search confirms that apparently they go on in other places as well.

I so need to get a team together.

(via Paul Ryburn)

[edit: Here's a Daily News article about architecture month...]

I really need to post more often...

I’m hoping that things will settle down here in the next week or two and I can get down to some serious writing (and by extension, blogging) but there are a few notes that I want to take the time to get out now before anyone shows up with more work for me to do or another conference for me to attend.

• First and foremost, many thanks to Serrabee for being so good as to organize the Blogger Bash last Thursday. It was a pretty easy going crowd, which made the socializing thing easier seeing as I only knew one other person there and he didn’t know anybody either.
  
  
• We did make it out of town for the Perseids on Saturday but the observation conditions were horrible. It was mostly overcast and the moon was darn near full, making for a bright hazy sky to look for meteors in. That said, the ones we did see were fantastic. The conditions for the Leonids and Geminids this year look to be much better.
  
  
• I just switched to the new Blogger Beta. If this thing breaks, it's not my fault!
  
  
• For those of you who’ve been trying to get in touch with my wife over the last two weeks, she’s not dodging you. She took a job teaching art for Memphis City Schools that has kept her busy beyond belief. I’m sure things will settle into a routine after a while, but for now things at home are often just a small step away from chaos.
  
  
• Speaking of Amber, she installed the latest in her Population series as part of a group show over at AMUM’s Caseworks last night. I don’t think that there’s going to be a formal opening, but stop by and see it if you get a chance. And while I’m flat out stumping for my wife, she’s also going to be performing at the Brooks Museum’s First Wednesday next month.
  
  
• I got sent to a conference this week to review a piece of software that we’ll be using at work. The conference wraps up tomorrow. Purchasing rules being what they are in the state, I can’t say too much about it so I’ll just offer a general piece of advice to anybody who ever wants to sell anything. If your customer ever asks you a question, the best thing in all the world you can do is to listen to them. They may not even care what the answer is; it’s often just a test to see if you give a damn.
  
  

Memphis OPML Icon

Problem is, I can never tell if he's joking....


(I never claimed to be a graphic designer)


[edit: now with 100% more Blogger Template Code!]

Feed reader complaints and the new and improved Memphis OPML

So I've been fighting with Sage (my favorite feed reader) for the last half hour or so and I decided to compile a quick list of what I'd like to see in a feed reader. Since the chances are pretty slim that A) any other developer ever actually reading this and B) he or she caring, I suppose I'll just have to code it myself eventually.

Anyway, here's the list:

• Fault Tollerant (can recover from a bad parse).
  
  
• Gives the option to ignore markup inside the plain text elements of an RSS feed (title, description, comments).
  
  
• Doesn't keep trying to sell me yet another web service.
  
  
• Gives me the option to Read and Write my collection of feeds to a live OPML file on a webhost of my choosing.
  
  
• Doesn't collapse the organizational structure whenever I import a new OPML file.
  
  
• Allows a manual OMPL export of a selected subset of RSS feeds in my catalog.
  
  
• Gives me the number of new posts beside each blog when I update.
  
  
• Gives me a "new posts" view that is an aggregate of the content that is new since I last updated.
  
  
• Integrates into my browsing environment (Firefox).
  

And in other news, my Memphis OPML list topped 100 feeds this afternoon (it's at 101 to be exact). It also got a slight reorganization. If you'd like to check it out, it's behind the little grapic over there on the right; the text link takes you to a web friendly version. You can read it using Sage, or you can easily add OPML support to Firefox or Safari.