about that "riot"

Who defiles the sacred Capitol more, red state tourists allowed by police to roam the halls, yelling uncouthly, or Schumer, Pelosi, McConnell, et al, who sell their offices every day to the highest corporate bidders? (It's a rhetorical question.)

Update: Of course putting riot in scare quotes makes light of what we will be hearing described as an insurrection or coup for the rest of our natural lives.

No, sorry, violent insurrection, according to Wall Street on Parade, a left-leaning finance site, which heats up the rhetoric even further by declaring it "the worst battle in the U.S. Capitol building since the British attempted to burn the place down in 1814 (during the War of 1812)."

C.J. Hopkins has given up trying to cool down the rhetoric and joins his progressive friends in a full-throated 30 Minutes Hate against Trump and all the small town moms and pops who voted for him:

Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of bison-hat wearing half-naked actors have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap [Global Capitalism], and now, by God, you will atone! No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a building without permission! The building where America simulates democracy! You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into the Chamber, into people’s offices! One of you actually put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi’s desk … ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand!

Update 2: The Grayzone offers some background on Capitol invader John Sullivan, who videotaped the Ashli Babbit shooting and can be seen on the tape running around the building yelling encouragement to the Trumpists. Was he a Trumpist himself? A BLM activist? (BLM says no.) A police plant? Answering such questions might be helpful, rather than immediately demonizing small town Trump supporters as domestic terrorists (which the DC elite are busy doing).

Update 3: Bernard, Moon of Alabama: "The anti-Trump campaign, from Russiagate to Ukrainegate to this "insurrection" nonsense, has likely done more damage to the U.S. than Trump managed to do during his four years in office. The hostility the Democrats have shown will create a huge backlash. Do they really believe that can suppress 74 million Trump voters?"

Update 4: In 1967 the Black Panther Party entered the State Assembly Chamber in Sacramento, CA, carrying guns. No one was injured but the protest stirred up a similar panic among the haute bourgeois. The difference is, now, the people freaking out and heating up the rhetoric are the wealthy DC elite rather than California Republicans. Hat tip to PR for fact-checking me on which public building got invaded. It wasn't the US Capitol, as I had written, duh.

Music for Piano (new Bandcamp release)

Am pleased to announce my 37th Bandcamp release, Music for Piano.

[Note: embedded players -- which I basically hate -- are replaced with links when they move off the blog front page]

Three main methods of making piano music were employed:
• actual keyboard playing, recorded as midi and edited
• entering notes in midi piano roll
• creating chord, melody and arpeggio patterns with Tracktion Waveform 11' s "pattern generator," then manually editing them.

The first six songs were created in 2020, the remainder in 2009-2016.

Released December 22, 2020

If you'd like to support this blog (now entering its 20th, ad-free year) buying the occasional Bandcamp song or LP is a great way to do that.

"squad" votes for the heinous pelosi

Yves Smith didn't say if a specific topic caused her to turn off comments on her blog Naked Capitalism (which has a lively and informative comments section).
"I am tired of adjudicating extended off topic discussions (aka 'thread-jacking'), regular Making Shit Up, conspiracy theories, and threats of bodily harm," was all she said.
Possibly it was arguments about political comedian Jimmy Dore's #ForceTheVote initiative. He's been demanding from his YouTube pulpit that so-called progressive House Democrats withhold their vote from the odious Nancy Pelosi in her race for House Speaker. That should be a given; she's one of the most hated politicians in America. Dore wanted AOC and the rest of the squad to use their speakership vote to force a House-wide floor vote on Medicare for All. This would have the effect bringing the issue to the fore in the midst of The Pandemic, to make representatives affirmatively declare yes or no on the issue, rather than offer vague promises and postpone consideration. The idea isn't to actually win, but to start making moves in that direction, as opposed to doing nothing.
Dore was much discussed on Naked Capitalism's last big commentfest before the shutoff. Yves Smith intervened a couple of times to declare Dore a "troll" and a political "latecomer." She's wrong about both; he's a refreshing voice on the left, and has been courageous in critizing Bernie and AOC for their spinelessness in the face of "corporate Democrat" control. Sadly the moment has passed -- the Squad voted for Pelosi this week. Maybe NC comments can come back on now.

Update, Jan 11, 2021: Naked Capitalism is re-enabling comments. Yves Smith mentioned only one issue as a cause for the holiday (there were doubtless others):

An example of the sort of discussion that has degraded the comments section: the bizarre talking point that Sanders was a “sheepdog,” which was repeatedly injected into the comments section despite the lack of news hooks in Links or current articles. Technically, this was a classic example of yet another Policies violation called “thread jacking.” We should have expunged those comments and moderated or blacklisted offenders.

You can legitimately criticize Sanders for how he conducted his campaign, and in particular, his decision to suspend it after the weekend of the long knives. But the notion that Sanders was campaigning to do Team Dem a big favor never had any factual foundation, consistent with the inability of proponents to provide one.

These discussion were not only a rancorous waste of space, they sucked attention and energy away from productive post mortem analysis. Understanding why Sanders failed and assessing what if anything he could have been done to change the outcome would be helpful to future campaigns. But instead we witnessed repetitive, seemingly unending, unsubstantiated accusations. And this argument could never go anywhere because the charge presumed that Sanders had been consciously operating in bad faith from the very outset. Strong claims require strong evidence, yet there was none.

John Pomara, "Digital Debris" exhibit at Barry Whistler, Dallas, TX, Oct-Nov 2020

pomara1_650w

Eric Shaw writes about painter John Pomara in Glasstire, the Texas online art magazine. An excerpt from his essay:

The artist had a revelatory moment in 2011 when he discovered a website spazzing out, creating picture mash-ups that captured his imagination. He screen-saved like mad for two days before the resident web-master stuck a savvy thumb in the download dike.

That spurred Pomara to learn just enough coding to frack his own on-screen picture streams. He now captures these pastiche beasts, and reconfigures them still more by layering and, occasionally — for the love of white — by pouring on bleach. This wipes out structured sections of his fragmented pictures, reclaiming drip-technique appearances we naturally attribute to Neo Ex and Ab Ex exemplaries.

Ever since Lascaux, artists have exploited the misshapen aspects of undersurfaces to inspire figure, line, and shape. Pomara couldn’t be looking at anything less dense than a cave wall, but his strategy’s the same: use the rich diaspora of Lady Chance to guide one’s hand. Make nice with your “mistakes.” Give the glitch a brush and make it paint a wall.

He still roves the rabid lands we see on laptops for found objects — instances of mistaken juxtaposition, errant cropping, or bad coding. His reports on encountering this stuff is uncanny. I’ve never seen it. (Have you?) Pomara sees it all the time. The fates are going to bat for this man it seems.

As Rauschenberg adopted a scavenger’s aesthetic in the ‘50s, utilizing the detritus of city streets and pop culture to create rummage-strewn compositions, Pomara is a Rauschenberg of electron viewscapes. He builds an aesthetic from that world’s flotsam and puts it in canvases and prints — ones that are made through mechanical processes themselves.

I responded with a comment:

Thanks for this in-depth look at Pomara’s work; in all the extensive writing that’s been done on him in the past (catalog essays, newspaper articles, online journalism), his “glitch” processes and the reasons behind them are rarely if ever explained with such detail or passion.
One comment of the author’s surprised me -- that he hadn’t himself seen “instances of mistaken juxtaposition, errant cropping, or bad coding” while surfing the web.
The sellers of smartphones and social media interfaces certainly aim for a “seamless” experience and anyone who actually has one is to be congratulated. My own experience of the web, on a range of devices, with even the fastest connections, is one of half-rendered pages, mistakenly sized fonts, and blinking dropdown menus. There are actually websites and entire communities devoted to the unseamless experience in all its humor and horror. “Annoying.technology,” “The Website Obesity Crisis,” “The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic” and “In Defense of the Poor Image” are just a few examples.

pomara2_650w

I took the photos in this post in the gallery, while the show was up. It's hard to get across the physical presence of the work. Below is a detail (unfortunately grainy) showing the honeycomb aluminum panel and some of the glitch patterning converted from internet to paint.