general

from an email exchange last year that continues to haunt me:

Me: When you are on the receiving end of sustained personal attacks your choices are: (i) rise above them or (ii) respond and try to undo the damage. If [names omitted] questioned your basic honesty and intellectual integrity I would say (i) punch'em in the nose and (ii) how can I help?

Supposedly well-meaning friend: Geez, I should invite you a meeting with my thesis supervisor! Some days I could really use a posse. But unfortunately nose-punching and ganging up out of personal loyalty don't work as strategies in intellectual debate, even (maybe especially) when the stakes are high.

Eventually tommoody.us acquired a substantial readership; suddenly I was not just a solitary blogger telling truth as I surmised it but an Institution.
The next step was to apply for (and win) a Meddlesome Capitalism grant, which required me to make certain changes to the blog. The site morphed from a string of rants into a magazine format, with teaser headlines forcing readers to click through to longer essays, thus increasing traffic counts for advertisers.
Whereas before I had championed blogs as a "pull" technology luring readers with content they couldn't find elsewhere, I was forced to return to the "push" of sending spam emails announcing each new blog post, and the many, many fundraisers I now needed for my upkeep.
I was forced to cover extensively events I formerly despised, such as art fairs.
And I acquired a staff of interns, mostly recent art graduates whose own agendas mainly consisted of stepping over me to gain connections and influence, and whose general cluelessness was matched only by their ruthless ambition.
Slowly, inexorably, I became the thing I hated and my blog became a duty rather than a pleasure for myself and readers.
And then I woke up.

On Tuesday Nov 27 I'll be performing music at Apex Art in Tribeca in connection with the Rob Walker-curated exhibit "As Real As It Gets." Marc Weidenbaum organized the sound art component of the show, which runs until December 22, including the concert on the 27th.

Walker's show deals with branding and commercialism, including fictional precedents and fake products. Inspired by Emile Zola's description of a bustling 19th Century department store, Weidenbaum asked musicans to make and then modify field recordings of actual retail spaces in the present-day world.
My performance will include a music piece based on some of these recordings, as well as one other recent work.

More details will be posted later. The event starts at 6:30 pm at 291 Church Street, New York, NY.

Mitt Romney’s Campaign Cancels Staffers’ Credit Cards In The Middle Of The Night
(via Naked Capitalism)

The relevant excerpt from the NBC News story:

From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself.

Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked.

DC Establishment types got very huffy and offended when Moveon.org took out an ad calling Gen. Petraeus "Gen. Betray-Us" for "cooking the books" on the so-called Iraq surge strategy. Now he's out of his current job as intelligence meister for the high crime of getting some on the side. The man's greatest accomplishments were prolonging two wars that shouldn't have been fought in the first place, woo, what a hero.
(Moveon scrubbed the ad from its website after Pres. Obama put Betrayus in charge of the Afghanistan "surge" [i.e., escalation of violence]. The message seemed to be "yeah he was a book cooker but now he's our book cooker.")