Domainiac

    I’ve named two important things in my life: one I fumbled away years ago and I’m still haunted by the consequences; the other I nailed and life bounced on happily ever after.

Steven Wolf Fine Arts was born in the fall of 2003. Because I’m contrary, I fought the urge to name it something cool, an obscure form of measurement, or a phrase that ends with project or productions. Even as I embarked on selling art by young people, after years of selling historical works, I thought of the new as mostly a marketing fiction. Not only did I open my gallery with a show of appropriation art, new copies of old things, I saddled it with Fine Arts, a tedious anachronism that sounds more like a sheet music store than the vaudevillian moebius strip of intellectual pratfalls, which is how I like to think of it.

As I began this blog, which will be largely devoted to San Francisco visual art culture, I determined to make up for that big whiff. My first urge was to co-opt a phrase I’d always loved from a play whose title I’ve long since forgotten. The main character was a hapless woman in her thirties competing for the title Miss Worthwhile. Lowered expectations and the idea of writing in drag were the attractions there. As I ran the name by friends, however, they were confused by it and didn’t share my enthusiasm. Like the time I called my wife from a thrift store excited by the discovery that I look better in butch clothes for women than in clothes designed for men. Her short response ended on an up note: “uh, huh.”

It also seemed wrong to run with the first idea so I made a list starting with a chestnut from my personal archive of things I know well, The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allen Poe. This tale describes with uncanny accuracy my life as an art scout, the job I had before founding Steven Wolf Fine Arts. It’s an occupation where you look for art hidden in plain sight: warehouse auctions, garage sales, flea markets, semi-abandoned porches, half-open doorways, trash cans, dumpsters. I’m too germ-phobic to drag-pile, as my friend calls dumpster diving, but I loved the idea of seeing the thing that was invisible to others and meeting the characters along the way.

         My better half, a seasoned blogger, convinced me that for simplicity’s sake my blog title should also have a corresponding domain name. I discovered that while thepurloinedletter.com is taken, purloinedletters.com is not. I could have stopped there, content for a while, but much as I love The Purloined Letter, its steam punk Victoriana seems as dated as Steven Wolf Fine Arts. Moving on. 472 Fantastic Flavors was inspired by a teenage friend’s kitchen on Long Island where I and the other neighborhood stoners gobbled up junk food from candy colored cabinets that resembled the inside of a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop. Domain definitely available. The craze on EBay for vintage tee shirts advertising cigarettes with the phrase Alive with Pleasure drove me back to the Internet. While it and another tobacco-inspired gem called flavorcountry.com were taken, welcometoflavorcountry.com was not. Put it on the list.

         Then things turned maudlin. I recently made contact with a friend from high school whose self-portrait on Facebook is the international sign for choking—a line drawing of a man with his hands around his throat. This led to turningblue.com (available), which then led to the L7 song Whenwepretendthatweredead.com (also available). This line of inquiry was cut short by a wince from better half, just back from a big night out, who asked, “Just how deeply do you plan to wallow in teenage angst?”

         A sculpture by a student at CCA called Operation Ivy League led to Operation Ultra Knowledge, mercifully rejected by better half, who now sensed the need to monitor her email from a seat next to me on the couch. Thus Operation Ultra Knowledge improved to Operation After Thought. Cute, but hauntingly recherché.

I cast about for lighter, sillier, more alliterative terrain. I searched through corporate team building web sites, a well-known repository of unselfconscious irony, and came up with School for Spies (domain taken). This turned into School for Saps and The Lamest Generation, both taken as domains but also rejected by better half as being too cruel. When I realized coffee's for closers, a line from the movie version of David Mamet’s American Buffalo was taken, I demanded to know what exactly these websites were doing with the names I needed to disseminate my unique and special vision of the world.

Not much as it turns out. Most of my fantasy domains including Stevenwolf.com are being warehoused. If my virtual downtown were real it would be a ghost town of half-open stores with half-empty shelves run by absentee landlords.  Thepurloinedletter.com provides some half-assed links to publishing sites and a Poe-inspired video game. Alivewithpleasure.com links to a few internet-building sites. My flavorcountry.com is a vicious landscape of aesthetic one-upmanship, barely disguised gossip and over-the-top philosophical put-downs. The real one is a directory of links to tasty foods and dieting info. Well, I guess that’s funny. When Alex Baldwin intones Coffee’s for closers, he conjures up America the heartless, a place of ceaseless change where only the corrupt survive. Coffee’sforclosers.com sells freaking coffee! On the Internet where a felony is committed every nanosecond, being literal might be the worst crime of all. Not even literally.com does that. They sell travel information.

I switched gears from this drain-circling exercise in negativity and came up with the chirpy fireside sing-along, which better half loved, but I knew needed work, so I colored it Japanese and it became happy lucky sing-along and then, after some indescribable, seriously opaque mental activity, purloined puppy sing-along. Game over, you say? Not quite. Better half took one look at that verbal cartoon and said it’s always best to sleep on things before deciding, and so just before giving myself over to happy dreams of Poe and puppies and a purple prose blog I suddenly remembered a fragment from The Wire where one street dealer says to another, “shut up you off-brand muthuhfuckah!”

To the Internet! Offbrand.com, as you would imagine, is run by a bunch of literalists anemically trying to sell clothes. Offbrandmutherfuckah.com and its misspelled variants were still available. The problem, however, with a big four-letter word in the title is that it promises so much. Graffiti tags and rap songs pledge radical things they never seem to deliver. I concluded, better to dress like a bourgeois and think like a radical, to paraphrase Flaubert.

Theoffbrand.com was available. According to the urban dictionary, off-brand refers to “generic, cheap, shit, a brand of inferior quality.” When I read the illustrating sentence, “That dude’s offbrand bullshit really made me want to kick his ass,” I knew I’d found the one, a name to launch a thousand rhetorical flourishes that look good on computer then curdle badly out in the world but can’t be taken back because servers never die. It’s a special feeling, the one. You know it in your stomach. I felt it once on vacation with better half in Kauai. She was pregnant at the time. I was driving north on the island where we had rented a house. It came to me, so swift, so clear, that I had to pull over to the side of the road and whip out my cell phone even though I was just a minute or two away. “I know what to name junior,” I said. That’s what I called him before he was born, even though I didn’t know it was a he yet. “Yes,” she said, skepticism diluted with mild curiosity as she awaited yet another stab at ironic grandeur. “Ernest.” She paused and said, “That’s good. I like that.”