general

Have been noting postpunk, psychedelic, or other countercultural-type songs appropriated for bourgeois advertising. Not very many so far -- I need to watch more TV -- but it's always startling to hear how shamelessly these sentiments are repurposed.

bow wow wow's "i want candy" used in verizon cell phone network commercial

beatles' "All You Need Is Love" used in Blackberry commercial

human league's "don't you want me" used in mop commercial

moody blues' "tuesday afternoon" used in Visa card commercial

beatles' "a little help from my friends" used in Hampton Inn commercial

gang of four's "natural's not in it" used in X-box commercial (previously discussed)

Update: mashedpo sent these:

iggy pop's "Lust for Life" used in Carnival Cruise lines commercial

Gary Numan's "Cars" used in Cisco Systems commercial

Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" used in Volkswagen commercial ("Particularly unholy use of that great deceased young folkster's song")

The political blogosphere has shifted much since the Bush II era. DailyKos teems with kneejerk Obama apologists, OpenLeft's Matt Stoller became a DC insider, and even Atrios, the left's master of light irony (as one blogger called him) seems stuck in a loop, complaining about the same old Slate and NYT sellouts.

By contrast, The Exiled's Mark Ames has emerged as a go-to, no-BS voice of the current landscape, pounding on labor and class issues too awkward for neoliberal Obama-ites. His S.H.A.M.E. project with Yasha Levine doesn't just vent about establishment suckups in the media, it gathers hard facts about their conflicts of interest and shaky pasts. For example, did you know this about Malcolm Gladwell?

During college, Gladwell received journalism training at the National Journalism Center, an outfit that worked with the tobacco industry “to train budding journalists . . . to get across our side of the story," according to an internal Philip Morris document.

Or that

After college, Gladwell worked at the right-wing American Spectator, the Moonie-owned Insight on the News and a neocon-Christian fundamentalist thinktank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which was “established by neoconservatives to promote an increased role of religion in public policy and turn back the influence of secularism.”

This background makes you question how much Gladwell's pro-corporate New Yorker writing is "contrarianism" and how much is stealth propaganda.

Earlier we talked about Ames' book Going Postal, which sees school and workplace shootings as a kind of unspoken revolt against the tough-talking, post-Reagan environment where "winning" is worshipped and the social safety net is shredded. In [a NSFW Corp. essay]* about this month's Empire State Building workplace revenge killing (initially reported incorrectly by the media as a terrorist event), Ames ties together the themes of postal-style running amuck with media shilling for the permanent war establishment, drawing an analogy between the shooter and hack publicist Joshua Foust, who recently sought to minimize state murders in Kazakhstan (but also had a background of angry confessional writing, Ames discovered). Speculating whether the hack is just another form of revenge-seeking nerd isn't "responsible" opinionmongering -- it's more of an impassioned poetic connection of the Hunter Thompson variety. Also recommended is his post Tracy Lawrence: The Foreclosure Suicide America Forgot, which considers the political and economic repercussions of a single person's agony, experienced in the face of overwhelming social pressure.

*Update: I de-linked Ames' essay after his publisher, NSFW Corporation, put all their content behind a paywall. The old bait and switcheroo. Around the time I wrote this post Ames was doing more writing for NSFW and less for Exiled. As of March 2013, Exiled is dormant and NSFW is subscription-only (including formerly available content).

Alex Wilson reports on the appearance of Blue Grosbeaks in Calvert Vaux Park in Brooklyn this summer: "There appears to be some localized nesting on the east end of Long Island, but this southern species remains a rare breeder in this region, perhaps unprecedented in Brooklyn."

Photos and text tell the story of a mating pair and the sad end to their nest.

The Atlantic has a slippery essay about what Obama's "you didn't build that" speech means. Andrew Cline claims that with or without the out-of-context quote, the speech is a controversy-worthy "philosophical rewriting of the American story."

Here's what Obama said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn't -- look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That's how we funded the G.I. Bill. That's how we created the middle class. That's how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That's how we invented the Internet. That's how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that's the reason I'm running for President -- because I still believe in that idea. You're not on your own, we're in this together.

Cline claims Obama is saying in this speech that "government is not a tool for the people's use, but the very foundation upon which all of American prosperity is built. Government is not dependent upon the people; the people are dependent upon the government." Cline (evidently a Romney supporter) claims that his candidate isn't fully exploiting this outrageous revision of the Founding Fathers, who said the government rules by the consent of the people.

Cline thus turns a minor corrective to the usual Ayn Randian narrative about rugged individualism into a full-throated encomium to the power of the State. It's a stretch. Clearly Obama is going back and forth between "us" and "the government" in this passage. When he says "us" he means the citizenry, a collection of individuals working together, building on previous efforts -- the same citizenry that consents to be governed and delegates certain powers such as bridge-building and tax collection to officialdom. Cline claims Obama is saying "You succeeded because a greater power -- the state -- bestowed its favor upon you." That's paranoid projection, typical right wing nonsense about Obama the Kenyan socialist. Obama clearly holds no enmity for the private sector, as seen in his bank-friendly handling of the financial crisis and gifts to the insurance industry in his health care legislation. If he believed in ultimate state power he would have fought to nationalize those industries.

A summer project has been revamping archives. I have a new "about" page with documentation of shows I've been in and an artwork page which tries to make coherent sense of a lifetime of "output."
Also an artist cv and a writing cv.
On twitter Emilie Gervais asked "are you a drawer, a painter, a pixer or all of these answers?"
After the ever-sympathetic Frederick Heydt volunteered "he's a troll" I replied: "painter who switched to pixer @Emilie_Gervais but some prefer 'internet provocateur.'"
(Internet provocateur is what you say when you choke on artist and writer.)