Facebook Trailers

I'm on a message board for Avion trailers. I have posted there once or twice about Alice and her adventures, but otherwise use it as a voyeuristic site into other people's trailers and their obsessions with their windows/black water tanks/electric systems. Riveting stuff indeed. I think I am more often horrified by the tear-down images in efforts to repair water damage; since I have several leaks (I don't know if they increased last summer, or I just hadn't found those ones), I am particularly frightened of those.

Anyway, this week, the group decided to start a Facebook page. Or one person did. And the group message board lit up with protests about how Facebook installs copious amounts of spyware onto computers, how hackers can "get in" to your machines, how unsafe it is, and how "kids these days" are addicted to it. These messages quickly reminded me of two things. 1) I am a younger person on this message board, and 2) I originally started this blog thinking about merging these cultures (vintage trailer with modern technology).

Many of my favorite blogs are "theme-based". Are they art blogs? Photo blogs? Mommy blogs (I would never like a mommy blog, but in the time I have been reading a blog about a post-web designer who moved to Utah, suffered from depression, and makes a living from her blog-work, she has become categorized as a mommy-blogger)? Eco-blogs? Typewriter blogs? Education blogs? Feminist blogs? So naturally, I assumed my blog should have a theme, though I couldn't help noticing many of the above topics would overlap, and eventually, my audience would become so finite, it would consist of only myself, and my supportive parents. So I have floundered with the posts here, occasionally going so far as to digress into personal rants, as the one a few weeks ago. (There is something cathartic about airing all your dirty laundry. Even if no one reads it, I have "told" them the worst I might ever say, and will not have to repeat it in person. If they never read it, it will be no different.)

Getting back to Facebook. I use it as a procrastination tool, better than others because in a way, it is finite. I read it once or twice a day, then quickly run out of content or interesting links, leading me back to my project. Things like newspapers usually lead me to googling histories and facts, which lead me to looking up eclectic arrays of useless information, such as which kinds of dinosaurs were native to this or that area. And looking at an Avion FB page would add to this data. I have been recently looking for local vintage trailer rallies; these are very fun to the viewer, and would give me incentive to get my Alice in show-girl shape. But the links to future rallies are hard to find. The Avion FB might centralize such information, or it could be another site, (such as certain large NY museums) that uses the interface to rain post-after-post in spam-like rage upon my Newsfeed.

This becomes a post about nothing, in the end. Exactly the kind of post I hate to read. But it does become a kind of public announcement of a resolution to think about technology, the trailer, and vintage showmanship. I know I had other thoughts I wanted to include in here, such as a response to the article on the disappearing studio-space as artists move to the computer, and how that made me wonder what the point of artist residencies are if you are simply bringing your computer somewhere else (I still think Alice is the best artist residency). But I forgot how I planned to work it in when I sat down and started writing. It seems that as much as blogs read as trains of thought, they really need to be outlined and planned to be the best reads. Something I should think about, since I often lament that my students don't.