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"Its a political fantasy world and unless you're in the Tolkien family, those worlds end and end badly."
From Steve Gilliard:
You know, I sit back, watching the news media and consultants shit their pants over Kos and I have to laugh. They're worried if Warner has too much influence, why they don't like Hillary Clinton, why does he have such influence. They're dragging the party to the Bush-hating far left.Update: Speaking of Counterpunch, co-editor Alexander Cockburn has a few choice words about lefty bloggers.
They just don't get it.
Bush-hating? I can introduce you to some widows and Gold Star Mothers who hate Bush with a white hot flame, who are not from the Sheehan and Berg families.
Far left? Uh, Counterpunch is that way.
That's not the issue here. Those are just cheap terms by scared people.
If they had a clue, they would realize that Kos is just the pointman for a lot of extremly unhappy people, and that efforts to diminish him is well, pointless. Because he's not the issue, it's his site, and his site can be replaced. But what's behind that site can't be.
The right and the media were just fucking jealous at Yearly Kos, looking to pull it apart because the peasants have entered the room. How dare they have big parties, they aren't consultants.
No, they're average people who are no longer apathetic and don't like what they see in politics No more bitching to friends, no more whining to the spouse. They can get involved and make a difference. And that's a gift to this democracy. It may not seem it on K Street, but Bush is a petty, Oedipal man, driven to succeed over the bodies of the dead. He will fail, and when he fails, the odds of the 25th Amendment coming into play increases exponentially.
We cannot continue with politics as usual, because it's the politics of denial. We deny the truth about everything around us and act shocked when it doesn't work out. Health care, no problem, Iraq, no problems, dependent on immigrant labor, no we aren't, ship them back. Sex tell them no.
Its a political fantasy world and unless you're in the Tolkien family, those worlds end and end badly. We will be coming to account and it won't be pretty.
So what happens, you have the whiny-ass titty babies like Jake Tapper whining about Media Matters, and the breck girl of the right, Byron York wondering if Kos is on the pad.
Let me send this message to the consultant class right now, the right will miss it. You do not have to worry about Kos, Atrios, Matt Stoller or anyone else, certainly not me. We are not your problem. It's enough to control what's posted to our blogs on a daily basis.
Our readers, otoh, are a different story. They hate you, they would like nothing better than to drive you from business and into penury. They would hunt you down like dogs and seize your homes. They blame you for ruining America. Bloggers are just conduits for the feelings of lots of people. You confuse the two at your peril. Anyone who thinks our readers are docile slaves, well, they're nuts. They can challenge us like it was a sport. Parse our words like lawyers. And you can never tell what will drive someone nuts.
Piss them off and you've got a problem. We know, we've all done it. Kos has been the scene of nasty fights, same with most sites. Our readers hold us accountable in a way which would make Jake Tapper cry.
It was the readers who propelled the Lamont bid, not the blogs. At best, we're pointmen for a lot of ordinary people. People forget that at their peril.
Cory Arcangel: "In collaboration with Galerie Lisa Ruyter and the museum in progress, I have placed a horizontal rule of gif smilies onto the Wein & Co building in Vienna..."
From the museum in progress website: "Cory Arcangel's stripe is based on 'horizontal rules,' horizontal lines of images which were common for early webpage designers to divide their webpages horizontally."
That's the front story and the back story. How many people walking down the street in Vienna will recognize that line of smileys as kitsch from the early vernacular web, to use Olia Lialina's phrase? I don't care--I like the utter banality of this piece whatever the viewer gets from it. I'm guessing it's invisible to the passerby, and there's something really beautiful about that. On the other hand, maybe it has a slightly alien quality that makes it pop (that's a verb) out there on the street. That's the curse of reacting to work from secondhand sources: we just don't know.
Update: For the Lisa Ruyter referred to in this post see Francis Ruyter.
Young art consumers viewing the collaboration I did in Toronto with John Parker. The exhibition is "Mods & Rockers." The videos are documented here and the audio is here.
"Suite 6 (Almost Live)" [mp3 removed]. An older tune I had adapted for a live playing situation when I did my lecture/performance on May 19. It's "rougher" in that the Sidstation gets glitchy when you change patches and turn knobs aggressively. In doing a studio version of the live version (of the studio version) I did some overdubbing, but it still has more of a live feel of egotistical musicians stepping on each other.
An important factoid omitted from my talk (because I just learned it)--the company that makes the drum machine (Vermona/HDB) used to be the state synthesizer company of the former East Germany.
The interview Paddy Johnson did with Michael Bell-Smith and me has concluded, but I want to address one point Mike raised at the end, so I'm carrying the discussion over to my page. The other participants have blogs and can do the same.
MBS: [...] The work in the [Foxy Production] show was created with a gallery in mind and I wanted it to feel that way. Rather than playing off the tensions of bringing new media into the gallery - as I feel Tom has with his show – I wanted it to feel like a natural fit, again, like maybe this is just how we make art these days.
I don’t think flat screens in a gallery feel especially high tech. For me they’re less loaded than traditional TVs/monitors (which feel consciously lo-tech), high end CRT NTSC monitors (which tie into a history of video art in the gallery) or large projections (which feel cinematic or as Tom pointed out, aggressive).
For me, the containment of wall-mounted flat screen monitors is about putting the work on a physical and spatial par with painting, drawing or photography. I think creating that kind of familiar physical relationship between the viewer and the work may serve to combat the tech gap: at the very least the viewer knows how to deal with the piece on a physical level. [...]
TM: These are good points. I want to add that, although I recently did a blog post called "Showing new media work in a gallery: what's at stake," that isn't the main content of my show, any more than Mike's content was his delivery system. The gear I used is to deliver the strongest statement--which is to say, to get the most out of the pulsing abstractions, repurposing of a Star Trek sensor as a "simulacratracker" (as one commenter described it), and the embarassing acting out (or faux acting out) of Guitar Solo (which actually is on a tiny flat screen). I've argued with a couple of people about my use of tube TVs instead of LCDs for three of the pieces. I chose the tubes because they deliver a punchy image, punchier to me than what I'm seeing on flats these days. Tubes aren't that "retro"--J&R Music and Video still has a wall of CRTs for sale as an alternative to the wall of LCDs. I know, it won't last, but we're talking about the present. Translating animated GIFs from a computer to a single dedicated image on a TV adds an element of the unexpected, and a gritty texture I like. These choices aren't just to emphasize "new media in the gallery"--although that's definitely an aspect of the content.
One of my recent "out and about" pics is the Photo of the Week on NewMusicBox, the website of the American Music Center. Thanks to Molly Sheridan for the linkage.
"It's a number."
Here was the interchange with the White House press secretary after the number of Americans who died fighting the Cheney Administration's war of choice, against a country that did not theaten us, passed the 2,500 mark:
Q Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?There really aren't words for how monstrous these people are. Not "the troops"--the people who needlessly put them in harm's way and justify their continued slaughter with this weak BS. To say nothing of the Iraqi civilian casualties, which the most conservative estimates put at an insane 38,000 to 42,000.
MR. SNOW: It's a number, and every time there's one of these 500 benchmarks people want something. The President would like the war to be over now. Everybody would like the war to be over now. And the one thing that we saw in Iraq this week is further testimony to the quality of the men and the women who are doing that, and the dedication and determination to try to ensure that the people of Iraq really do live in a free, effective democracy of their own creation and design.
Photos taken last night at Analogos, a program of all analog, abstract synth music at Diapason, on 6th Avenue. The program was billed as "a night of 'vintage' (and other) analog synthesis." Above, left to right: Michael J. Schumacher (Steiner-Parker Synthacon); Ed Tomney (EMS VCS3 "Putney," various), and David Galbraith (selfbuilt electronics). Performing but not pictured: Tom Hamilton (Sherman Filterbank). The piece they're playing conjured electronic jungle birds morphing into synthetic clattering traffic sounds; the perfomers listened attentively to each other as these moods changed, or so it seemed from where I was sitting. Also nice was a duet between Galbraith and Hamilton where the output from the former's homemade synth circuitry was fed live through the latter's filtering apparatus--a subtle, somewhat lyrical piece. A later trio between Tomney, Schumacher, and James Fei on Buchla synth was like being inside a tornado, with airborne Geiger counters zizzing around. (If I'm not mistaken it was the VCS3 producing those sublime hypnotic swooshing sounds.) And finally, a duet between Barry Weisblat (pictured below with homemade electronics) and Kato Hideki on Octave "Cat" synth and pedals provided the evening's rock and roll skronk notes, as Hideki "got down." This was a great evening, some beautiful, dense textures and not a MIDI clock to be heard--it was all voltages providing the rhythms.
