general

Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker on John McCain's goals for Iraq:

McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.

Thought McCain was done after that picture of him appeared wearing the flak jacket in the Baghdad market. Apparently he stands a chance again in the primaries as the establishment's anti-Huckabee candidate. This is not too good. The man loves war.

Update: Have been reading that folks in New Hampshire thought McCain was the peace candidate. Compared to mouth-foamer Giuliani maybe so. Evidently less people saw the "stooge in the flak jacket" photo than was commonly thought.

Found this interchange on a blog that closed on Christmas day. A prog rock fan blog. I don't know the band in question but think this exchange is of broader interest. Some of us may feel the need to police our copyrights from time to time and it makes sense if it's, say, someone using our art or music for commercial purposes. If a fan blog is offering an entire album of ours that's for sale elsewhere, any cease and desist letters should at least be polite, because going after fan blogs is basically moronic. These people like you--who else does? I know this sounds naive when bottom feeders, whoops, I mean corporate rights organizations, whoops, sorry, defenders of lowly musicians, are suing innocent people for hundreds of thousands of dollars just for downloading, but someone needs to start setting a better example.

Dear reader,
[As] you can see, lot of posts were deleted.
I received today this mail:

"We ask you to remove the downloadable files of [band's album] from the [blog] or measures will be taken against you.
We will check again in one week.

[righteous complainer]
for [band]"

My immediate answer:

"Dont need to be rude, threatening me.
Only ask me and I remove your album with no problems.
Despite of your sad message, I love the [band's] work.

In this exact moment your album already was removed.

[signed by threatened blogger]"

After this, tons of my posts were deleted.

Ok, Mr. [righteous complainer], your album will not be shared here nevermore, because I'm closing my blog.
But ..... certainly you will find your [band's] album in tons of other blogs, Forums and other uncounted P2P softwares. How can you imagine to fight against this? I'm only a grain of sand in the internet. But I wish you good luck in your insane journey.
I already had removed your album from my blog. You didn't need to do it.
Poor Mr. [righteous complainer].

T.Whid of the artist duo MTAA raises some valid objections to Roberta Smith's call for jihad against the word "practice" in art. (NY Times sign-in probably required for the Smith editorial.)

Here's Smith's beef:

Another lamentable creeping usage is not only pretentious, but it distorts and narrows what artists do. I refer to ... the word practice, as in "Duchamp's practice," "Picasso's studio practice" and worst of all, especially from the mouths of graduate students, "my practice."

She is attempting to take a perfectly serviceable art word out of commission here. It's like saying we shouldn't use red to describe that warm color next to orange on the spectrum. Or the Castro-esque dictator in Woody Allen's Bananas declaring the official language of San Marcos to be Swedish.

Let's take her examples. A historian might use "Duchamp's practice" to distinguish something the artist did from something he thought or wrote, e.g.: "It is a matter of scholarly debate whether chess merely informed Duchamp's theory or could be considered part of his practice." Ditto the Picasso example--you could use "studio practice" innocuously if you wanted to differentiate the artist's studio work from, say, his mural-painting.

As for a grad student saying "My practice"--yes, it sounds pretentious as a description of two years' worth of work and is probably the phrase that set Smith off. But one wonders why a Times critic is hearing that. Could it be because hot grad students are considered the only viable players in the current art market? Maybe that's what she's really mad about. Professionally, she *has* to listen to these people.