general

Steve Clemons writes:

The rape of a 12 year-old girl by three American servicemen in Okinawa, Japan in September 1995 and the statement by a US military commander that they should have just picked up a prostitute became the pivot moving Johnson who had once been a supporter of the Vietnam War and railed against UC Berkeley's anti-Vietnam protesters into a powerful critic of US foreign policy and US empire.

Johnson argued that there was no logic that existed any longer for the US to maintain a global network of bases and to continue the occupation of other countries like Japan. Johnson noted that there were over 39 US military installations on Okinawa alone. The military industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned against had become a fixed reality in Johnson's mind and essays after the Cold War ended.

In four powerful books, all written not in the corridors of power in New York or Washington -- but in his small home office at Cardiff-by-the-Sea in California, Johnson became one of the most successful chroniclers and critics of America's foreign policy designs around the world.

Before 9/11, Johnson wrote the book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. After the terrorist attacks in 2001 in New York and Washington, Blowback became the hottest book in the market. The publishers could not keep up with demand and it became the most difficult to get, most wanted book among those in national security topics.

He then wrote Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, and most recently Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope. Johnson, who used to be a net assessments adviser to the CIA's Allen Dulles, had become such a critic of Washington and the national security establishment that this hard-right conservative had become adopted as one of the political left's greatest icons.

Johnson was one of the few writers saying that the US's 700 military bases around the world no longer serve a purpose. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that we need them, apparently to stop a few guys with boxcutters.

Raisinets, "Stay Limp" (1979) [YouTube]

possibly the first true feminist punk song (with up-to-date YouTube-era visuals). From Washington DC. Let's see if we can get the page views for this classic up above 45.

(cue dramatic music)

Net art bloviator Brad Troemel has written an essay about the BYOB NY show, on the new blog of ex-AFC intern Karen Archey.
Duncan Alexander wrote a good reply that I wanted to give props to. Unfortunately Karen won't approve my comment. Here is a screenshot showing that the darn thing has been in moderation since early this morning, and many comments have been approved since.
Here's what I wrote:

Good reply, Duncan Alexander, and thanks to Rafaël Rozendaal for being willing to put together a group of artists who wouldn't have selected to show with each [other] in a million years (as is clear from the omissions in Troemel's essay). I avoided "critiquing" the show on my blog because I was one of the "beamers" but this didn't deter Troemel, who feigns objectivity in this essay but neglects to mention that he participated in the show under his faux crowdsourcing alias "Joyce Jordan." I actually liked the Jordan piece pretty much (if it was the ceiling piece I think it was) but can confirm that Brad stuck to his clique during the brief time I saw him in the space. It was a fun evening, with much great work but Troemel once again manages to suck all the joy out of the proceedings with his tired Marxist complaints about the gallery system.

Update: Exactly six minutes after I posted this whine my comment magically popped up on the Troemel thread accompanied by a prophylactic statement from Karen Archey ("Brad didn't critique BYOB," etc.--ri-i-ight). Archey has elsewhere questioned my not having comments turned on--it's interesting to see how she's using them now that she's in the fray herself. Is it better to have comments disabled or to have them on but manipulate the timeline of who posted when? Or to have a comment sit in a moderation queue until someone complains that it's being deep-sixed? One comment that (fortunately) seems to have gone through rather quickly is Paddy Johnson's: "Troemel has produced an essay responding to the gallery system with very little experience within it and it shows. This garbage about the two tiered system is a ridiculous simplification of the motivations of artists and anyone who’s been out of art school for more than a minute knows it. "

Some writing about dump.fm:

Lalblog on dump altars, a script that auto-curates all symmetrically arranged dump posts (repeated images configured ABA, AABAA, AABBCBBAA, etc)

Erik Stinson writing on the Thought Catalog website: "The Internet Art Community and Dump.fm."