general

Two 100-year storms in the last three years - Global warming deniers, please kiss our asses.
Power was out for two days, internet for three. After that tree fell the floodwaters showed up. Am dry here on a higher floor but others in the neighborhood had it bad.
Listening to the transistor radio was nauseating. "If it bleeds it leads" stories alternating with treacly sanctimony and stiff-upper-lip messaging. Mayor Bloomberg was incredibly smarmy with his announcement that we didn't need Pres. Obama to come to NYC. Easy to say when you have multiple homes and a private police army - others could probably use some of that Federal assistance.
Gov. Chris Christie is a right wing talk show host masquerading as a politician. He's quick with the soundbites and cutting off reporters to sound decisive but basically a self-satisfied windbag.
The real heroes aren't these towering egos but the crews chainsawing trees to get them out of the road, sanitation workers picking up waterlogged debris in the dead of night, and cops deterring looters (much more useful than cracking heads of peaceful protestors in the off-season).

Update: Two days after Mayor Bloomberg requested that -- no offense! -- Pres. Obama not come to NYC because we were too busy here right now to accommodate him (paraphrasing, but that's what I heard him say on the radio) he, Bloomberg, had time to garner some headlines by endorsing Obama for president. Apparently he now thinks the President is the global warming prevention candidate.

The cruddy, sick old tree in front of my apartment fell down 20 minutes ago, right in the middle of the street. The city crews are on it -- I heard the chainsaw but not the falling tree (loud music in studio). It just missed hitting that car.

Update: Looking around the web it seems almost all the Hurricane Sandy photos are arty, soft-focus, and hand-tinted-looking. This might be the first all-Instagram documented disaster. Future generations will hate us for our present conceits (photo above made with a Sony™ camera).

JL emailed about the Brad Troemel essay mentioned earlier:

Part 1 confuses the terms "remix" and "mashup"...

Troemel enjoys his sneer at "mid-2000s bloghouse mashup bands like Girl Talk, Danger Mouse, Justice, Digitalism, and 2 Many DJs" without explaining that mashups were a particular type of digital mix where two or more tracks could be pitch-shifted and beat-synched to sound like one. That was certainly a gimmick that dated quickly whereas if you are just shuffling tracks around or doing general studio editing a track could be completely remade and better than the original. That was true in the '90s and it's true now -- there's always a certain amount of crap overstating the claims for editing. Troemel's equation of remixing with exhaustion of content echoes Simon Reynolds' young fogeyish "there's nothing new under the sun" arguments in the book Retromania.

Part 2 pretends there is no longer a mainstream culture (I guess the rest of middle America has caught up to NYC and is finally "down" with multiculturalism) or vast problems with copyright.

Right, Troemel says "Today’s DMCA warnings sent to dorm rooms pale in comparison to the aggressive lawsuits previously brought forth for taking without asking." Megaupload, anyone?

His point about the vapidity of "open source" gets dangerously close to a point I read elsewhere ... about the term "open government" -- how it used to mean transparency but now means machine-readable XML files from the Department of Agriculture... "Open source" is a corporatist term popularized in the late 90s as an alternative to "free software," because cloaked in that term's ambiguities was Richard Stallman's political statement about human rights.

"Free" confused people because Stallman meant free as in free of repression and censorship and Silicon Valley said "hey we can't just give stuff away." Troemel turns this confusion into another opportunity to smirk: "The Open Source logo is, for the digital generation, what the Coexist bumper sticker is for baby boomers — a harmless if meaningless display of one’s standing as a good liberal." The dig about the Coexist bumper sticker is pure Rush Limbaugh and again, could use a fact-check as to whether it's distinctly "baby boomer" or just a-generational new-age sentiment.

The point of Troemel's article seems to be "the remix is dead, long live the remix" along with taxonomical analysis of various types of remixes. Fine, whatever, am not sure we needed this. What upsets people about Troemel's writing isn't its outrageous controversy but its peculiar combination of theoretical convolution and factual error.

Recommended: Interview with Mike Cockrill in Whitehot magazine. Saw Cockrill's work at Kim Foster years ago and thought the subject matter was brave in a Balthus-like way that we weren't seeing in the then-hot Yalies who were flirting with sexual subject matter. Didn't know the collaborative work he did with Judge Hughes in the '80s -- the reproduction in the interview shines, with glints of Peter Saul and John Wesley. Seen as jpegs, Cockrill's newest work in the studio ventures into the terrain of George Condo's East Village Cubism but possibly bests what Condo's doing now for sheer straight-into-the-Id commitment.

While you're at Whitehot, be sure to gawk at the people photos from Richard Phillips' Gagosian opening. If you are an artist not living in New York, the eerie combination of glamour and extreme social awkwardness might give you serious pause about ever wanting to move here. Haven't seen the paintings yet but they don't look good. Am doing a bit of a mea culpa for writing about Phillips in the mid-'90s - in self defense his work didn't have the polish it has now: he had just started copying the dated fashion photos and the slight clumsiness read as a critique rather than a path to standing next to Sasha Grey.