general

Continuing with our "cool skulls" series, here's the cover of Forcefield's CD Lord of the Rings Modulator, 2001.*
The music is mostly analog synth debris, ranging from quiet chittering to full blown buzz saw. I liked the Providence RI erstwhile collective's music and videos--it's a shame they broke up. Or whatever happened. I met a couple of them once and asked them about it but they were super-evasive. Weighty, weighty matters, these art world careers, best not probed by nosy strangers. With blogs.

*recorded in '01 but released in '03.

Paddy Johnson's complaint about skulls (as in, there's too many of them in the art world and especially at Derek Eller) reminded me to post this image of Tony Oursler's work from a 1998 Metro Pictures show. It's especially germane to the "hot" art world skull, that expensive Damien Hirst confection we all felt compelled to weigh in on. Long before that skull-o-diamonds was a gemlike gleam in the lad's eye, Oursler was there, blazing a trail that...oh, who honestly gives a crap.

An early invention by American social scientist Gerald DeGroot, demonstrated in Norway to obtain the backing from the Hanso Foundation for what eventually became the DHARMA Initiative. DeGroot's Skinneresque mind control experiments of the 1970s, a series of purposeless devices designed to test the subject's theological belief in technological principles, seem quaint and dated today. (Such as the abacus-like device above that controls the switches of a standard television.) Yet with Hanso's backing DeGroot built a series of test stations on a remote Pacific island, staffed by a small, quasi-Utopian community that was eventually wiped out by the island's Pitcairn-like indigenous inhabitants, whose existence did not turn up in Hanso's research. [via]

Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma

Worth reading: "it can happen here."

Greg Djerejian notes this scary passage from a recent Dick Cheney speech:

As time passed, the terrorists believed they'd exposed a certain weakness and lack of confidence in the West, particularly in America. Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists' reasoning this way: "During the Cold War," Dr. Lewis wrote, "two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: 'What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'" End quote.

To which Djerejian responds:

It's really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)--openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union--our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn't it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC. Put differently, he is very proud of his world-view, indeed eager to share it with Beltway 'elites'. Who will clear this dangerous rot out of Washington and help us restore our good name? The stakes are high, that is, the preservation of the American democratic model as a leading force for moderation and rule of law on the world stage.

Throughout the speech Cheney refers to militants from different countries, with different religions, and different reasons for fighting as "the terrorists," as if they were one enemy working in concert. This is glib propaganda, meant to manipulate you and separate you from your money, in taxes for the benefit of his war contractor friends.