Mr. Flak Jacket Resurgent

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Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker on John McCain's goals for Iraq:

McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.

Thought McCain was done after that picture of him appeared wearing the flak jacket in the Baghdad market. Apparently he stands a chance again in the primaries as the establishment's anti-Huckabee candidate. This is not too good. The man loves war.

Update: Have been reading that folks in New Hampshire thought McCain was the peace candidate. Compared to mouth-foamer Giuliani maybe so. Evidently less people saw the "stooge in the flak jacket" photo than was commonly thought.

Sad SID Wave

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SID Wave

SID Wave 2

I wrote a lugubrious melody for the Sidstation synthesizer and the digital recorder drew this rather pleasingly proportioned wave (it's the LFO sweeping the cutoff filter, I think, that makes it so fat--the actual notes are buried in the zigzag). Captured in a couple of .wav-editors and got the black and blue images.

The sound it's making is here: [1 MB monaural .mp3]

By the way, note to PS and JP: I was wrong about editing patches in the Sidstation, you can hear the changes as you're making them. This one is a preset, though ("tel-lead").

Take That Down, You...Fan

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Found this interchange on a blog that closed on Christmas day. A prog rock fan blog. I don't know the band in question but think this exchange is of broader interest. Some of us may feel the need to police our copyrights from time to time and it makes sense if it's, say, someone using our art or music for commercial purposes. If a fan blog is offering an entire album of ours that's for sale elsewhere, any cease and desist letters should at least be polite, because going after fan blogs is basically moronic. These people like you--who else does? I know this sounds naive when bottom feeders, whoops, I mean corporate rights organizations, whoops, sorry, defenders of lowly musicians, are suing innocent people for hundreds of thousands of dollars just for downloading, but someone needs to start setting a better example.

Dear reader,
[As] you can see, lot of posts were deleted.
I received today this mail:

"We ask you to remove the downloadable files of [band's album] from the [blog] or measures will be taken against you.
We will check again in one week.

[righteous complainer]
for [band]"

My immediate answer:

"Dont need to be rude, threatening me.
Only ask me and I remove your album with no problems.
Despite of your sad message, I love the [band's] work.

In this exact moment your album already was removed.

[signed by threatened blogger]"

After this, tons of my posts were deleted.

Ok, Mr. [righteous complainer], your album will not be shared here nevermore, because I'm closing my blog.
But ..... certainly you will find your [band's] album in tons of other blogs, Forums and other uncounted P2P softwares. How can you imagine to fight against this? I'm only a grain of sand in the internet. But I wish you good luck in your insane journey.
I already had removed your album from my blog. You didn't need to do it.
Poor Mr. [righteous complainer].

GIF of Giovanni Garcia-Fenech Paintings

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Giovanni Garcia-Fenech

Took a selection of paintings from the artist's website and made them into an (unauthorized) animated GIF.
A higher res version is here, without the slightly corroded patina.
The patterns remind me of Chris Ashley's work (new blog here). But Garcia-Fenech has been doing pictographic-style paintings since the early '90s. I knew the work in Texas--he moved to New York from there slightly before I did.
Garcia-Fenech calls the series "Swastikas."

Protocol Notes

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Am reading Alex Galloway's book Protocol (2004) and taking a few notes. Those below are from the introductory chapter.

[I]t is not my goal to examine the social or culturo-historical characteristics of informatization, artificial intelligence, or virtual anything, but rather to study computers as Andre Bazin studied film or Roland Barthes studied the striptease: to look at a material technology and analyze its specific formal functions or dysfunctions. (p. 18)

Deleuze: "Each kind of society corresponds to a particular type of machine--with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies." (p. 22)

Jameson: "There have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial but what might better be termed multinational capital," or to use [Ernst] Mandel's terminology, late capitalism. (23-24)

My book [maps] out certain details of the third, "control society" phase, specifically the diagram of the distributed network, the technology of the computer, and the management style of protocol. (27)

Skipping ahead to the other chapters I haven't posted notes on yet: my short reading is that we are still in a Foucauldian "disciplinary society" and the Net only promises the illusion of freedom. The abuse of the Domain Name System to silence corporate critics, described in the book, and the inability to remove certain famous crooks from high office, suggest this. I am reading for Galloway's analysis of how Net protocols shape discourse (and art) but am not willing to agree that these are anything other than playground rules while adults continue to manage the home, office, and various killing grounds. --tm