tom moody

My comment to Paddy Johnson's blog post about that photo-painting and sculpture series:

Koons spoke in Dallas years ago right after Made in Heaven--I was living there at the time and likened the performance to a combination of art historian, zen master, and Ronald Reagan. Koons had constructed a retroactive narrative--essentially the "story of banality" that he told and retold--to explain each phase of his career, leading up to the Made in Heaven images. Like Reagan, who generally said nothing but was very congenial, Koons walked us, with calm, slightly psychotic certainty, through wacky explanations of how earlier pieces laid the foundations for the current work, for example, "this is a porcelain pig ushering in banality, the herald of my future perfect love for Illona." It was all so measured and plausible-sounding that by the time he got to showing enormous, projected slides of his skanky porn (in one of the most conservative cities on the planet!), the images seemed logical, inevitable and normal. [AFC c]ommenter Sven (and from what it sounds like, Roberta Smith) aren't accounting enough for the irony in Koons' schtick; porn is not "perfect love" or, jeezus, "emotional vulnerability" any more than his "wholehearted embrace of capitalism" uh, wholeheartedly embraces capitalism.

To the person who thinks animated GIFs are a '90s bulletin board avatar dead end and defends a certain social media platform that won't play them, please note two recent essays, one on Paddy Johnson's blog and one on Slate, on the topic of "the return of animated GIFs."

Interesting that Slate mentions none of the sites Johnson notes and seems not to be aware of the art uses of animated GIFs and previously-made connections to Paul Pfeiffer. The author, Jonah Weiner, mostly covers the lame-o GIF mills such as SenorGIF and 4GIFs, sources of a million looped movie clips and porno money shots.

According to a Washington Post headline, the "Reston-based company MERS [is] in the middle of [the current] foreclosure chaos."

I wrote about MERS a year ago in two posts. It took that long for the stink to rise to national news level, I guess. As Atrios neatly encapsulates it, banks "established their own land title system without any legal authority to do so." Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz explains all the steps that are supposed to be taken for real estate title to pass. These are mundane procedures of state law. No national system can be put in place to override them. This is a continuation of the 2008 meltdown, stuff that never really got fixed--mortgage mills on the upside, foreclosure mills on the down. Maybe if someone like Elizabeth Warren had been given actual power sooner, people wouldn't be surprised by this now....

Update: This essay by an anonymous ranter sent to a correspondent on the Big Picture blog (and scrubbed clean of swear words) describes the situation well.