general

From Paddy Johnson's notes on the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum:

Group surf clubs are discussed at length – communication about what’s art and what’s not on these sites isn’t deemed to be an issue for the artists though Tom Moody admits the issue is confusing. Surf clubs demonstrate that artists use their “art head” when surfing. Moody asks, How do you stand out? Do I care? Do I stop people from putting it into contexts I didn’t intend?

Something I posted two days before the panel:

Some 20th Century writers complained that reality (in a hypercharged mediated environment) was outstripping their ability to spin fiction.

Artists, too, have to compete with real world content far more captivating than anything they could come up with, which the Internet effectively gathers all in one place (sneezing Pandas, etc). Two possible responses are (1) to continually rise above it through aesthetic and conceptual framing and posturing or (2) to disappear into it and trust the viewer to ultimately sort out what's going on. The Web is a consumer's medium, not a producer's, so the artist is inexorably led to consumption as a "practice." The degree of criticality can only be inferred, not implied.

At the end of the panel Q&A, an art dealer who specializes in computer-based and new media art, who was sitting in the audience, made this comment to the "surf club" artists who had been showing our work for the preceding hour or so:

"I haven't seen anything new here--it's just things we already know like the 'the found object' and 'the collage.'"

So much for inferred criticality. We are off to a bad start here.

1. I do not believe this cute puppy is "yelping for Elmo" [video]. I believe he is practicing avant garde Sprechgesang for an upcoming Stockhausen recital. The videography also "breaks rules," at one point overshooting its subject to light briefly on a resting, much quieter animal.

2. Steve Ballmer egg attack. Some people in Hungary are mad about the government's Microsoft contract. [YouTube] (Read the comments, too.)

3. Frank Zappa debates Novacula (Robert Novak) and other conservatives on Crossfire, 1986. The topic is "dirty rock lyrics" and free speech. [YouTube]. The articulate musician mops the floor with all of them, particularly John Lofton, who at the time was writing for the Moonie-owned Washington Times but scoffs when Zappa says the biggest threat to America is "fascist theocracy." Lofton has since "recovered from" the Republican party (because it is not Christian enough). In 2004 he was writing against Bush's Iraq war and was as appalled by the bullying of Fox TV thug Sean Hannity as the rest of us.

[all video links from Singe's Journal]

Maureen Dowd, a national columnist of amazing emptiness, believes that Obama should have more of a sense of humor about the right's attempts to swift boat him using race. From her column of July 16 about the New Yorker cover:

John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.

This is what the New York Times and Dowd think are important enough to devote Op Ed space to:

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

“There’s a weird reverse racism going on,” Jimmy Kimmel said.

Let's not forget that Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry (and before them Carter and Mondale) were all brought low by the endless lampooning of millionaire media/entertainment people, ostensible liberals in bed with Reagan and the Bushes. When they didn't have any comedic hooks they just made them up. They haven't found the way to destroy Obama yet (Dowd's frustration is palpable) but they are trying, trying.

Miss using my twitter account because it was a place to dump media references that I don't have the energy to explain here. (I also miss the weird real time passive interaction with friends.) But since Twitter Central can't store more than 10 pages of posts, fuck'em.

Traversers in Brian Aldiss's Hothouse:

Millions of years in the future. The moon slows the earth's rotation to a stop. The moon also stops rotating. Earth continues to revolve around the sun. The moon leaves earth's orbit and trails earth at a "trojan point" in its solar orbit.
Only one side of earth and moon face the sun. Plant life dominates the daylit earth. Also descendants of wasps, termites, and humans.
Traversers are giant free-floating spider-like plants that went higher and higher in the atmosphere to escape wasps.
Eventually they adapted to space and live on radiation.
They use their webs as space elevators to climb out of earth's gravity well, then eject oxygen*, grow considerably in size and "traverse" space between earth and the moon, using their web ejection as propulsion.
Earth and moon have a permanent network of silky cables connecting them, and the traversers go back and forth.
On earth, traversers descend because they still need soil to live.
On the moon, they have brought plant life with them and the moon's day side acquires soil (from the decaying corpses of the giant spiders, initially) and an atmosphere.
Humans (much smaller, greener, and more primitive than us) also go back between the worlds using the traversers as space ships.

*in "globes" attached to the cables that are used later for descent to earth.

My condolences to Aron Namenwirth for the loss of his mother, Cynthia Bloom Namenwirth. She was a prolific painter and Aron has written a tribute to her on his blog. Some of her work can be seen on the walls of artMovingProjects, the gallery Aron runs in Brooklyn with Nancy Horowitz, at a recent musical event there. My thoughts are with Aron and Nancy.