tom moody

You probably read about the scanner humiliation beating.
Airport cops try out new full-body snooping apparatus; one sees that another's genitals are "tiny."
(Ostensible) big-package taunts (verified) little-package for weeks thereafter, day in, day out.
Tiny-package finally blows, beats crap out of big-package.
And guess who has a photo of his face plastered on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo magazine?
Day after day?
(Hint: it isn't the sexual harasser.)
Talking Points Memo used to be a blog. Mostly pretty good, except Josh Marshall supported Bush's Iraq invasion.*
Now it is an online "magazine" and it's bad. It covers all the same topics the mainstream media does, in almost exactly the same way.

*You can buy a copy very cheap now of Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (the tome that convinced Marshall and other liberal dupes).

From the first long comment thread on Amy Sillman's painting show, over at Paddy Johnson's blog. Names removed to protect the posturing:

Okay one last thing here, then I have a life to get back to.

There is so much misunderstanding and basic confusion in the above arguments... especially from the “experts,” that it would take years to straighten out this debate. [So let me tell you about my painting career... ]

At [MY LINK HERE - PLEASE COME VISIT] we’re always happy to see painting discussions on other blogs, but the subject seems a little shopworn. Yawn.

Amy Sillman aside, I mean I don’t give a shit about Amy Sillman…

Ultimately this level of heated response just continues to add to my feeling that [my pet topic] is still vital.

Bonus, not really posturing, but funny:

Moody’s Law will permit no displays of ambition on the part of anyone, just sit in front of your computer all day and shut up.

...reducing our carbon footprint...

Anyone compared to one of the seminal figures of post-war art is likely to come up a bit short.

Bonus 2, from the second Amy Sillman thread, the extraterrestrial perspective:

All this is to say that if you take these theories back far enough, and remove the explicit aesthetic element, then really, of course, everything is a node in a network, all objects are relating to one another to produce everything. When you reduce it to that point then value really emerges from the number of connections any art object creates. Which is to say, it all comes down to discourse and the action resulting from that discourse. Which is to say, this thread and the last seem to suggest Sillman has done pretty good, at least [here]. (Good painting or no)

The web compilation I composed a tune for, organized by Disquiet as a response to The Atlantic's beef about filesharing "freeloaders," is getting some attention: boingboing/Doctorow, Arts Journal, etc. Disquiet recaps the press.

Update: post from We All Make Music

Update 2: Sorry for the naked self-pluggage but it's probably better to do that kind of thing on your own blog than elsewhere.