general

The Chicago reverend and "how the candidate deals with it" is a manufactured controversy. If the US media focused on the Bush administrations's machinations for the upcoming attack on Iran with the same laser intensity it has focused on the Chicago reverend non-issue a bloody debacle might be preventable. The US media has already decided who it wants for a next president--a warped 71 year old warmonger white dude married to a woman worth $100 million. The Chicago reverend is the firing shot. It's not important in and of itself. If everyone spent the same amount of brain cells concentrating on Juan Cole's blog and the reality of what's happening in the Middle East right now that they are spending on "having an opinion" on the Chicago reverend and the all important "character" issue of "how the candidate deals with it" there might be hope for the US. As it is the media still sets the agenda and everyone, including the blogosphere, follows it.

(apologies to the late Kurt Vonnegut for the latter part of the name)

Idea for a TV series: 15 year old female pop star lives large, graces the world's stages, and is managed by loving parents, both former country singers. Massive corporation has a line of toys based on her and millions of girls buy her records and dolls and read about her in the gossip mags. She has a secret identity, however, as an online Goth and troll, who makes extremely difficult techno "art" music and goes on "tech art" websites and debates with geek artists from all over the world. As the troll she rejects corporate values, "family values," and conspicuous consumption, and is a hero to a large number of alienated boys and girls and even adults who do not suspect her true age. Her online fans are not as great in number as her "push media" fans but the former are more intellectually influential. In the first year of the series she starts a viral campaign on the Net to ridicule and "weaken the brand" of her media self. Will her parents and company bosses find out who is behind the campaign?

Hannah Montana Wildhack: Catch the Buzz

Had a Borgesian dream this morning. My day job was sitting around a table with a group of co-workers writing one sentence descriptions of every present and past employee of the company that had hired us. In addition to the descriptions we had to draw an accurate portrait of each employee's face. Working from photos was OK, and we had piles of those at our elbows. We were expected to produce about six text-and-picture combos a day, so it was kind of a sweatshop. Except no one was caught up on their quota; people were constantly getting up from the table and goofing off. During one such "break" I perused several of the file cabinets in the room (the cabinets stretched to infinity, natch). The cabinets were jammed with folders of past employee dossiers such as the ones we were producing. I was admiring the drawing styles, going back further and further in time from the present, with the styles becoming more and more archaic. Some looked like 1920s newspaper sketches, and before that, engravings. I felt I was learning something by looking at how the earlier faces were drawn.

letter to Salon today, upon learning that director Guillermo Del Toro's four year commitment to hobbit movies was keeping him away from a planned Lovecraft project:

no del toro lovecraft--thank the Old Ones

Here's hoping Guillermo Del Toro stays tied up with The Hobbit and away from "At the Mountains of Madness," a great unfilmable Lovecraft story--that's possibly four years' reprieve for our imaginations to savor this wonderful, scary, melancholic yarn without having it wrecked with CGI slime.

copied and pasted:

cartoony ironic logos for mid-'90s New York art galleries
screen-filling lines of Flash text about "sex in North Korea"
found videos of police beating rioters/demonstrators declared to be artists' actionist art
speaker suspended over water plays glitchy electronic music; speaker-bedecked table football game emits amplified sounds and sound effects
videos of falling icicles popping balloons
peruvian carpet and plugged-in native instruments; aboriginal style guitar picks
amplified bag of live snails
conversion of ordinary car covers into portable tents
two-channel Quicktimes scroll lists of loved, hated things
map-based visualization translates current network ping times into geographical distances (supposedly)
trees planted in order of height
1. artist travels to corporate headquarters to photograph them, then cuts the headquarters out of the photo; 2. sculptures based on cutouts
different colored windbreaker jackets hang from branches of upside down tree
film extras wear reflective clothing and hold up reflective signs to highlight their plight as invisible people of the film world
photo series documents shop signs pointing to "internet access"
network of speakers in bus stop creates "washes" of sound
artist photoshops his face onto the bodies of acrobats, martial arts masters, etc. in series of videos
2001 Net installation shows news pictures most viewed (ranked from 1 to 10) on different national Yahoo portals, in real time
post confuses two pieces--one involving recycled glass and one involving cardboard boxes that crash to gallery floor
bob marley flag, unidentifiable flag on roped-together bamboo poles
gold plaintain chain
image of Ojeda Ríos (Puerto Rican independence militant slain during controversial FBI arrest) printed on Nikes
8-bit music video with icons as pixels
sacred moment of baptism documented in scores of amateur videos (diptych juxtaposes dunking with re-emerging)
photo of shoe prints in sand, soles have text and pictograms inscribed in them
trumpet (musical instrument) attached to motorcycle tailpipe
United Nations symbol in acrylic glass or acrylic & glass (not sure which)
people listen to amplified ice melting (Allan Kaprow idea adapted for sound art)
tiny man paints the White House on the US$20 bill solid white using a paint roller (special effects video)
artist paints ruins white in Kabul, Afghanistan
online performance where viewers' clicks move cardboard box in small increments across a shelf until it tips over
plastic Oh God thought bubble hovers in museum-like space
Every word in the Bible arranged in alphabetical order and printed
collage in wooden box made of cut-up Economist mag
"erasure in photoshop" genre, no. 2367: remove all the birds from Hitchcock's The Birds
chocolate disco ball; simple photoshop gradient added to bridge collapse photo
Flag showing photos of Canvey Island Casino, Victoria Pier Folkestone, Spanish City Whitley Bay and West Pier Brighton
bags of concrete, dribbling inert dust, function as a historical hourglass between an unclear 'then' and a problematic 'now'
quirky transgressive solo performances with masks, blood, etc on personal YouTube channel