tom moody

Daily Howler on Josh Marshall's decline:

...Our Own Josh Marshall sat himself down; thought long and hard; and began to philosophize for young liberal readers. Josh had given a great deal of thought to an important topic:

MARSHALL (7/1/09): JUST GO BE WITH HER!

In part two of his leave-no-rock-unturned interview with the Associated Press, Mark Sanford says that at least he will "be able to die knowing I had met my soul mate," as David [Kurtz] noted below. And if that’s not enough, he says that for all the grief his affair has caused, that if the affair means he can never run for president (think the ship's sort of sailed on that one), that it will have been worth it.

I know there are a lot of people who are genuinely questioning Sanford's sanity at this point—when you put together the furtive trips and the endless new revelations. But am I the only one who thinks that he appears to be deeply in love with this woman and should just go be with her?

[...]

Josh’s very thoughtful pensées continued along from there. To be fully enlightened, just click this. Or you could just go rent Candy (click here).

Josh rarely presents his own thoughts any more, except for the occasional haiku assembled from snark (click this). When he did to decide to expound on a topic, this was the topic he chose.

Marshall was good on the Bush Social Security fight, goading legislators with daily counts on where everyone stood, so it became harder for them to vote against their constituents "under the radar." Now instead of a similar focus on the national health care we're about to not get, it's Sanford, followed by Palin and today, Ensign (who the hell is he? must be another affair). As the Howler says, "we are all Gail Collins now."

[YouTube]

Charles Westerman's Applesoft BASIC program generating random triangles on his Apple IIgs, sound from 2 Mario Paints and step sequenced MIDI through Roland MT-32, opening at Brian Blomerth's gallery in Richmond, VA on 2/1/09

nice understated use of YouTube for low-maintenance music/video object

thanks to my brother brad for this photo of my studio in my art student days

The New Museum's show "Younger Than Jesus," closing July 12, offends not so much for its air of faux-transgressive silliness, as captured in this Gawker post (hat tip AFC), as its patronizing premise: essentially that an institution run by old farts is going to tell us what the "younger generation" (artists born after 1976) "thinks." (Of the three curators, only one is younger than the exhibition's cut off age; all are serving at the pleasure of museum employees and backers older than Jesus [was when he died].)

This is Margaret Mead anthropology, or colonialism based on age. ("Our curators went into the colleges, the clubs, to find out what these krazy kids are up to.") The results are slightly zany but not too upsetting--almost a textbook example of what an old person would think a young person thinks like.

What if a trio of under-30 curators decided to focus on peers who wanted to "bring back painting and sculpture"? Or shock the system with racial epithets a la Lenny Bruce (or Rush Limbaugh)? We'll never know, because the museum inherently taints the subject matter with its own, aging perspectives based on the conceptual/performance tradition circa 1968, identity politics circa the mid'90s, and limousine liberal humanism.

Let's take one example: Guthrie Lonergan's curated selection of random people's MySpace intros. This piece was altered beyond recognition for "YTJ." Originally it appeared as a YouTube favorites list where "you kind of had to know about it" or maybe stumbled across it while clicking around YouTube. Its intelligence and melancholy perspective stood out from the morass of baby and cat videos and terrible musical gear demos.

In the New Museum the intros are plucked from their original banal context and made into a series of slick stand-alone videos, running on two monitors with no web trappings in sight. Seen as standard video art rather than something new in the Web 2.0 context, it is documentary/performance business as usual: a sexy or unsexy "other" talking confessionally into a video camera. There's even a wall label telling us about how these anonymous others are "constructing their identities."

This blog's hypothetical young artist would think the above was "not too rad."