tom moody

Crisis or no crisis:

Mr. Gross, a lanky 64-year-old who practices yoga and who sometimes speaks so softly that co-workers lean toward him, as if on an E. F. Hutton commercial, drifts around the room, an unknotted pale blue Hermès tie draped around his neck like a scarf, his gray and brown hair extending down over his ears, a style reminiscent more of the 1970s than today.

Calculated Risk

The Big Picture

echoing the "saving child with vortex," here is the "untempted hipster child assailed by large hands" (hat tip js)

A CBS News article from March 2008, "Keating Scandal Still Haunts McCain," talks about earlier instances where candidate John McCain attempted to influence federal regulators on behalf of campaign contributors. One involved the FCC: McCain urged "quick consideration" of a proposed TV station purchase while an FCC commissioner's formal nomination was pending before a McCain committee. The other, rooted in the savings & loan crisis of the late '80s/early '90s, has direct relevance to the current financial meltdown:

In his early days as a freshman senator, McCain was known for accepting contributions from Charles Keating Jr., flying to the banker's home in the Bahamas on company planes and taking up Keating's cause with U.S. financial regulators as they investigated him...

Keating and his associates raised $1.3 million combined for the campaigns and political causes of all five. McCain's campaigns received $112,000. The investigation ended in early 1991 with a rebuke that McCain 'exercised poor judgment in intervening with the regulators.'...

Keating went to prison for more than four years after a federal fraud conviction. The conviction was reversed on appeal after he argued that jurors improperly had knowledge of a prior state conviction on related charges. He was to be retried in federal court but instead pleaded guilty to four federal fraud counts. Keating admitted he siphoned nearly $1 million from his S&L's insolvent parent company. He was sentenced to time he already had served.

After prison, Keating moved to his daughter's home in the wealthy Phoenix enclave of Paradise Valley. In 2006, he quietly began work as a business consultant in Phoenix. A spokesman for Keating, reached at his office, said Keating did not want to discuss the banking scandal or McCain's presidential campaign.

Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan sold worthless, high-risk junk bonds. Many of the 23,000 investors were elderly customers who didn't realize their investments were not federally insured. Many were left destitute while Keating maintained a lavish lifestyle. Keating also participated in the risky investments that led to the collapse of S&L's across the country.

The U.S. government seized Lincoln in 1989, sticking taxpayers with a bailout cost of $2.8 billion. Many other thrifts collapsed, with taxpayers footing nearly $124 billion of the $152.9 billion bailout cost, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Depositors and politicians searched for culprits and turned up the five senators.

Keating sought a quid pro quo from the five. He wanted government regulators, who were investigating Lincoln, off his back. And he demanded reversal of a new rule limiting an S&L's direct investment in risky ventures to 10 percent of assets.

The banker's attitude was summed up the day a reporter asked whether his political donations to the senators encouraged their intervention.

"I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I certainly hope so," Keating replied.

According to Lev Manovich's Wikipedia entry, new media has the following attributes (illustrations supplied by the present blog):

1. Numerical representation: new media objects exist as data

2. Modularity: the different elements of new media exist independently

3. Automation: new media objects can be created and modified automatically

4. Variability: new media objects exist in multiple versions

Kurt Ralske, MOMA display screens

5. Transcoding: a new media object can be converted into another format

Have been reading the Timothy Alan Liu book Rob Myers recommended, The Laws of Cool. Especially liked the discussion of the history of typefaces and design as they made the jump from print to the web. The book features a good, if matter-of-fact, discussion of JODI, as well.

This blog confesses it has a hard time finding its place in Liu's scheme for some of the reasons Rob mentioned in his post on the artwork here (thanks--much appreciated): "...it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0."

Alan Liu assumes everything is about "cool" and eventually even the "uncool" gets absorbed into the "cool." That is, the computerized workplace and playplace is an all-encompassing seductive experience measured in "cool," whether it's the Ars Electronica avant garde or designers creating Facebook apps.

I'm interested in seeing software and web tools made problematic through the investment of time and labor all out of proportion to their intended function. Examples would be hand-shading a gradient instead of just writing parameters for it, or hand-rendering animation frames without any use of onion-skinning or digitally generated transition frames. This is an artist stance of "doing the difficult thing" which does not make an easy jump to the web.

The labor and use of "historical" art techniques is not always conspicuous in the finished product (that is, my artwork), so Rob's vouching for it is appreciated.

A post on Rob a few years ago and some examples of his online artwork are here. We have an ongoing disagreement over whether the surf clubs "add anything" to the images they recycle.

Update: Don't know where that "Timothy" came from. Most uncool.

the typography was removed but this has it all: loretta lux-like child, baby blue vortex, jar of money. spirit surfers might give this a religious spin but this blog prefers the secular: the impossible ideal of savings in a world of $700 billion bailouts.

"Riff Valley" [4.5 MB .mp3]

3/4 time; 160 bpm. Mostly made with the Linplug Alpha and RMIV softsynths. There is an e-piano midsection that is fairly unapologetically MIDIish. Apropos of nothing, am haunted by a Wire review of Thomas Brinkmann that complimented him on building up clicks-and-cuts atmosphere but then said he ruined it with "major 7th Latinate foolishness."

(revised)

It's hard to know if John McCain is stupid, a liar, or both. Regarding his call for firing the Chairman of the SEC, TAPPED says it well:

MCCAIN PROPOSES FIRING CHRIS COX.
In his latest attempt at a total makeover, John McCain said today that if he were president, he'd fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC, for keeping in place "trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino." But whatever its flaws, and they are abundant, the SEC still is constrained by federal laws -- and a number of the laws that prohibit SEC regulation of casino behavior were written by McCain's chief economic guru, former Sen. Phil Gramm, who exempted the very credit default swaps that dragged AIG down from any federal oversight.

So who does McCain want to replace Cox with? Gramm?

That's change you can grow queasy about if you think it over.

--Harold Meyerson

And as ABC notes, "while the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president."

And as for Cox being lax, as Salon's Andrew Leonard points out (prob. subscription only):

[I]t might be worth remembering that this former Reagan administration lawyer and congressional House representative from Orange County, Calif., has been doing exactly what his party has always wanted him to do. George Bush did not appoint him commissioner in 2005 to crack down on Wall Street. The prevailing ideology of the Republican Party -- and this is one area where the historical evidence, by his own admission, does not justify calling John McCain a "maverick" -- has been to loosen control of Wall Street, not to tighten it. If our markets were turned into casinos, the majority of the blame has to go to the Republican Party, with some assistance from the Clinton administration.