general

dear fellini's ghost, endless starkly-lit closeups of strange-looking people is not surrealist

dear fellini's ghost, La Dolce Vita is a great movie but 8 1/2 is a self-indulgent rehash, with a pointlessly maudlin ending

Dark Shadows and Total Recall failed at the box office - *whistles happy tune*

the wachowskis were notoriously publicity-shy...until this week's 5000 word fluffy-puffed marshmallow in the New Yorker

just learned (from the NYT) that Conde Nast's parent co. Advance Publications owns Reddit

we're supposed to believe that Conde not micromanaging Reddit is by design rather than just neglect or incomprehension

The art world (academically vetted system of gallery and museum spaces) will be said to have evolved only when it stops looking back to 1968 and Paris kids running wild in the streets for its touchstones and models. Here it is 2012 and the Vvork website is displaying a "society of the spectacle brickbat" with the bookcover of Debord's classic wrapped around a brick.
There was briefly a possibility of revolution! Art seemed about to change to something de-materialized and free of rotten capitalism!
We know all this, already, but can't escape the moment.

Duncan Alexander has an informative post on screen and print resolution and the uncertainties of scale for art and/or images in the digital arena.
One wonders who his intended audience is for this, since only five of us really care and we already know. Dragan Espenschied has covered it, I've covered it, Nullsleep has covered it, Jon Williams has covered it, and now Duncan. The computer-literate world just follows where Apple and Google lead and the art world is like "resolution? isn't that something a corporate board passes?" No one ultimately gives a shit about how art looks on a computer screen, is my cynical conclusion after preaching about it for several years.
The issue just reared its head in the real world. Recall that Nullsleep posted some CSS a few months back that you could put in your web pages to defeat the ubiquitous involuntary pixel-smoothing of modern browsers. Well, Google recently changed its Chrome specs in such a way as to override anti-anti-aliasing.
Resistance is futile: your experience of the web WILL be like smooth jazz even if they have to beat you to death with Kenny G's sax.

Missed Clint Eastwood's Republican National Convention speech where he spoke to an empty chair representing Pres. Obama. People ridiculed it but as blogger Lambert Strether notes, Eastwood mentioned two topics that won't otherwise be raised by either Republicans or Democrats (boldface mine, footnotes omitted):

[STRETHER} So, leaving the famous chair aside — and though it’s not a bad riff, it’s a riff that only the Ron Paul types Romney purged from the party would be likely to run with — what are some of the things Eastwood actually says? Here’s one of the many interesting questions Eastwood raises:

[EASTWOOD:] So, Mr. President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them? I mean, what do you say to people? … I know even people in your own party were very disappointed when you didn’t close Gitmo …

[STRETHER] Somehow, I doubt we’re going to hear Gitmo mentioned in Charlotte, or by Romney, for that matter, showing again, if it needs to be shown, how close Obama and Romney really are. Apparently, only an “old mumbly guy … hearing voices in his head,” as Lord Kos gracefully puts it, would be so gauche as to raise such a topic. (Of course, when our guy does whatever, name it, it’s OK, so everything’s jake!) Here’s more from Eastwood:

[EASTWOOD:] [Y]ou thought the war in Afghanistan was OK. You know, I mean — you thought that was something worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to see how did it — they did there for 10 years. But we did it, and it is something to be thought about, and I think that, when we get to maybe — I think you’ve mentioned something about having a target date for bringing everybody home. You gave that target date, and I think Mr. Romney asked the only sensible question, you know, he says, “Why are you giving the date out now? Why don’t you just bring them home tomorrow morning?”

[STRETHER] Not scripted, ad libbed, ums and ahs, yadda yadda yadda, and so what? Once again, it takes a loveable old coot like Eastwood — which is how this flap would be playing if Eastwood had given the same speech at the DNCon to an empty chair named Romney — to raise a question that neither candidate and neither legacy party will raise. I mean, if we won Iraq, where was the victory parade? And if there’s a reason to stay in Afghanistan, what is it? Afghanistan, graveyard of empires, and that. Bottom line for me is that both legacy parties now hate the guy, although for different reasons, which to me implies he’s worth taking seriously.

It's refreshing to hear statements such as these coming from the political right:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

And

Almost all conservatives who care to vote congregate in the Republican Party. But Republican ideology celebrates outsourcing, globalization, and takeovers as the glorious fruits of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” As a former Republican congressional staff member, I saw for myself how GOP proponents of globalized vulture capitalism, such as Grover Norquist, Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, and Lawrence Kudlow, extolled the offshoring and financialization process as an unalloyed benefit. They were quick to denounce as socialism any attempt to mitigate its impact on society. Yet their ideology is nothing more than an upside-down utopianism, an absolutist twin of Marxism. If millions of people’s interests get damaged in the process of implementing their ideology, it is a necessary outcome of scientific laws of economics that must never be tampered with, just as Lenin believed that his version of materialist laws were final and inexorable.

The American Conservative, where this article by Mike Lofgren appeared, is a "paleocon" magazine: it also opposes U.S. imperial adventuring, earning the epithet "isolationist" from the intervention-minded left. Empire-building, U.S.-style, isn't so much about acquiring treasure by force -- if it were the Iraqis wouldn't still be controlling their own oil reserves -- as it is maintaining a "permanent war" infrastructure to bleed taxpayers. It's part of the same pathology Lofgren describes, "whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot." Fracking is another example: the barons who are profiting from this treat the U.S. heartland as a third world country to be drained and poisoned. What the hell, they aren't going to live in these regions.